Let’s talk about intimate relationships because this seems to be the most triggering for people who are watching these videos.

The idea that you would embark upon an intimate relationship with somebody who’s a narcissistic abuser, you may not know it and all of a sudden you’re knee deep in it.

Would the narcissistic person have difficulty, say pair bonding, for example, or would they just be like the rest of us?

As I said earlier, narcissists are incapable of perceiving other people as external or as separate.

So the only form of relationship and the only form of intimacy a narcissist can have is with not even with himself because he has no self, but with structures, voices, objects inside himself.

It’s the only kind of intimate relationship he can have.

What he does in order to have an intimate relationship with you, he converts you into one of those objects or constructs or whatever you want to call inside his mind.

He introduces you into his mind, insinuates you into his mind, and then he continues to interact with your representation in his mind.

And so the narcissist defines himself and regulates himself through you.

And in this, the narcissist is similar to someone with borderline personality disorder.

He uses external regulation.

So for example, if the narcissist wants to feel great about himself, he wants to idealize himself.

He will first idealize you because if you are ideal and the narcissist owns you as an internal object that makes him ideal.

For example, a narcissist would date a woman and he would say she’s drop dead gorgeous.

She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

By insisting on this, by idealizing, what is he saying?

He’s saying I’m the owner of a drop dead gorgeous object.

I’m the owner of the most beautiful thing the world has ever seen.

And that makes me special.

That makes me unique.

So even this, even the process of idealization is about the narcissist, not about you.

It’s like owning a car, a flashy car, or you know, it’s a status symbol kind of.

So narcissists interact only with themselves through you.

Narcissists also need your gaze.

They need to see themselves through your eyes.

So they use your gaze to regulate themselves.

But this is not a safe method.

So what they do, they falsify your gaze.

They attribute to you cognitions, thoughts, emotions, and so on that you may not have at all.

So they would say, for example, Oh, he admires me.

He thinks I’m a genius.

Maybe you think I’m an idiot.

Maybe what you truly think is that I’m a blowhard idiot.

But I would as a narcissist, I would attribute to you certain emotions and thoughts and beliefs and so on that are conducive to my own idealization and brandiosity.

And there was no evidence to indicate that the person had those feelings in the first place.

You know, it’s your placeholder.

You’re just a placeholder.

It’s this massive processes of projection.

The narcissist projects onto you parts of himself that he cannot tolerate, that he rejects.

So you become a repository of the narcissist, better motions, better object, self-castigation, self-criticism, self-rejection, self-loathing.

They are all projected onto you.

So if the narcissist is weak, he’s not weak.

You’re weak.

He attributes this to you.

So this is called projection.

Narcissism splits you.

One day you can do no wrong.

The next day you are.

You can do no right.

Or bad or good.

Black and white.

This is called splitting.

You are subjected to a roller coaster of totally infantile defenses.

Defenses which are typical of infants.

Or babies.

And the narcissist instrumentalizes you to the maximum.

You have a job.

It’s a job description.

It’s not an intimate relationship.

You have a series of jobs.

For example, you should recall the narcissist’s moments of glory.

And by recording these moments of glory, you regulate the narcissist’s flow of narcissistic supply.

It’s a job.

Another job you should confirm to the narcissist that his false self is not false and that his fantasy, the shared fantasy, is not fantasy.

It’s another job you have.

And there are many others.

And you’re busy all the time.

And it’s exhausting.

It’s depleting.

Because essentially you become a maintenance worker.

And your maintenance job is to make sure that the fragile, brittle, breakable, vulnerable thing that is the narcissist, because it’s not a self, it’s a thing, is never impacted by reality.

You’re a buffer.

You’re a firewall.

And if you don’t do your job correctly, you penalize very heavily.

You devalue.

You know, so it’s a transactional thing because as you recall, the child who later becomes a narcissistic adult is exposed to transactional love.

The only kind of love he knows, he associates love with performance and he associates love with pain.

Pain or as a punitive thing.

So this is the way he constructs the shared fantasy.

And the base requirement from you is to not be, to suspend yourself and to reappear as a fictional character within a narrative that is self-aggrandizing and over-protecting.

A narrative whose main role is to prevent narcissistic injury or God forbid narcissistic modification.

And you are the guardian of the narcissist.

That’s why I have this principle of dual mothership where the narcissist actually tells you, you’re going to be my mother and I’m going to be your mother.

You’re the mother.

You’re the guardian.

You’re the custodian of the narcissist’s dangerous, life-threatening shame.

It is your job to feed the narcissist with so much misinformation and fake news that will prevent him from ever getting in touch with his internal shame, which could destroy him and kill him.

That would be narcissist.

That’s what they call narcissistic supply, right?

Yes, that’s narcissistic supply.

And you would be a source of narcissistic supply.

And the narcissist would use the narcissist with a plan to regulate his internal environment and to buttress the fortress that he has constructed around the shame, isolating it somehow.

It’s mainly shame.

There are other negative effects and other negative emotions.

Is a running some mentioned them like anger, envy, and so on.

These are not capable of positive at all, not even one of them, not love, not forget about all this.

They’re capable only of negative.

Well, that’s quite interesting because that would intimate then that if somebody is experiencing love for another human being, that they couldn’t possibly be.

Unfortunately, we’re heavily dependent on self-reporting.

How would you verify that what this person is experiencing is love?

There’s no objective test or anything.

But one of the funny things you see online doing any research on narcissism is that people are always wondering, are they themselves narcissistic or clinically narcissist?

And one way to offer yourself comfort would be to remember the times that you did experience a deep sense of love or you are if you are perhaps you are in love with somebody.

How do you know that it was love?

How do you know that you did not mislabel something else?

For example, dependence.

Yeah, it’s often mistaken for love.

It’s a problem with the emotions because we utterly depend on self-reporting.

The thing is that narcissists firmly believe that they experience highly intense love.

If you talk to the narcissist, I’m going to tell you, I love the way no one else can love.

I love so deeply and intensely and profoundly that I doubt anyone else is capable of this.

So they insist that they are capable of loving and that they’ve experienced love and that they are offering love and that they are creatures of love and everything.

They masquerade as borderlines, actually.

But what the narcissist labels love is nothing whatsoever to do with love.

Not even it’s like not a Venn diagram where there’s something in common.

It’s like two circles.

It’s nothing whatsoever.

What the narcissist labels as love is love is a process known as narcissistic elation.

It’s an oceanic feeling of merging and fusing with a mother figure who then affirms the narcissist’s grandiosity, the narcissist’s perfection, the narcissist’s loveability.

So this is called narcissistic elation.

It’s the merger of fusion, symbiotic with a mother figure or with a real mother, by the way, when the infant reacts to a real mother, there’s a narcissist’s elation.

And narcissist’s misidentify this as love.

And when you dig deeper with narcissist, which I’ve been doing for 30 years, when you dig deeper with narcissist, you come up across paradoxes of thinking and so on.

So they would tell you, I know I’m in love because of the way it makes me feel.

You ask the narcissist, how do you know you’re in love?

Or because I’ve never felt this way.

But wait a minute, love is not about you.

Love is about the other person.

True love is about the other person.

It’s more about how you make the other person feel, not yourself.

Narcissists are takers, they measure everything in terms of give and take or take and take and performance.

So when the narcissist chooses what you might call erroneously an internet partner, I call them insignificant others.

When the narcissist chooses an insignificant other, it’s not because of who she is.

There is this lore, self-aggrandizing lore among the victim communities, the empath, so-called empath communities, that they’re special.

That’s why the narcissist chose them.

They were chosen because they’re hyper and nothing and they’re amazingly kind and they’re nice and that’s what she does.

Narcissist does not choose the partner on the basis of who she is.

Narcissist don’t do empathy.

They wouldn’t identify empathy if it fell on their head.

So narcissist chooses you because of what you can give him.

Narcissists are looking for sex, supply, sadistic and narcissistic, safety, object constancy, your constant presence, even addiction, I would say, to the narcissist.

So safety and services.

If you give the narcissist two of these four, sex and services, services and safety, any two, you qualify. You could be tall or short, dark or blonde.

You could even be a psychopath.

You could even be another narcissist.

It’s meaningless.

They don’t care who you are.

They care you’re a service provider.

Like I don’t care who owns my internet service provider.

I just want internet flowing through my computer.

So it’s a highly performative and or performance oriented, goal oriented approach.

But the victims feel so commoditized.

They feel so marginalized.

They feel that they’ve been so interchangeable and dispensable that they react with a narcissistic defense.

They say it’s not true.

I was very special to him.

I was empathic.

I was nice.

I loved him.

I saw through.

I saw his inner child.

They try to make sense of what has happened to them and what has happened to them.

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