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1. 00:02 Any grief counselor would tell you the following. When women grieve, they change their appearance and their sexuality. They become promiscuous or on the very contrary celibate. They cut their hair. They begin to dress differently. They emphasize the outward
2. 00:21 appearances and other directed behaviors. When men grieve, they change their location. they move away or their vocation they adopt a new profession. This is a maxim in grief counseling. It’s well known and nothing involves more grief and more multi-layered multifaceted grief than
3. 00:45 narcissistic abuse. I have whole videos dedicated to the grieving process, the mourning of the relationship in the wake of narcissistic abuse. You can find all of them in the narcissistic abuse healing and recovery playlist. You can find the link in the description. But
4. 01:01 today we are not going to discuss grief. We are going to discuss uh guilt survival guilt. Even when you are discarded by the narcissist cruy, even when you are thrown away as so much trash, even when you are disavowed by the narcissist, even when you are erased
5. 01:26 from your common history, deleted as though you have never existed, even when your very being is denied, even then you somehow feel guilty. You have survived the relationship but at what cost? You have abandoned the narcissist whom you loved. You have
6. 01:50 abandoned your child that the narcissist had become. You have survived by sacrificing the narcissist. That is a narrative that keeps playing in your mind. Survival guilt. What is survivor guilt? Let’s read the definition from the American Psychological Association’s dictionary.
7. 02:14 Survival guilt is the remorse remorse or guilt for having survived catastrophic events when others did not or for not suffering the ills that others have to have to endure. It is a common reaction stemming in part from a feeling of having failed to do
8. 02:35 enough to prevent the event or to save those who did not survive. Survivor guilt is also experienced by family members who are found not to carry deletterious genetic mutations that have led to disease and often death in other family members or by family
9. 02:56 friends who feel that they did not do enough to suck their loved ones prior to death. In other words, survivor guilt is about what we call autolastic defens defenses. The tendency to blame yourself, to assume responsibility for everyone around you.
10. 03:16 For some reason, you think that you are in charge of the well-being and happiness and contentment and functioning of everyone around you, which is a bit grandiose. Of course, it is an integral feature, clinical feature in people pleasing, in codependency, and even in borderline
11. 03:36 personality disorder. This belief that you’re in charge of making other people smile, that you can withhold somehow their happiness or endow them with happiness. That for some in some way you are the engineer whose job it is to create to engender to foster to put together an
12. 04:01 environment within which people can thrive and flourish and reach their maximum potential. This is your job description. This is what what you were born to do. And if you fail in this, you feel guilty. Evidently, having been discarded by the
13. 04:21 narcissist means that you failed to make the narcissist happy. Having discarded the narcissist, on the other hand, means that you’re a traitor. You have betrayed the narcissist. We’re not talking about guilt. We are talking about a sense of failure or a sense of
14. 04:38 betrayal depending on who did the discarding. What is it that we feel guilty about as survivors? What does the survivor feel guilty about? Well, first of all, there was a common narrative. There was a fantasy and both parties, the survivor and the narcissist were committed to the
15. 05:04 fantasy, invested in it. They regarded the fantasy as an organizing principle, the narrative that rules their lives, endows life with meaning, direction, and purpose, a hermeneutic explanatory principle as well. And so having walked away or having been discarded from this
16. 05:26 paradise, having been expelled creates a sense of guilt. The betrayal of the of the fantasy, the betrayal of the narrative, the betrayal of this um cult, of this commonality.
17. 05:45 And that’s only a small part of it. The narcissist is a child truly is. It’s not a pretention. It’s not an act. The narcissist’s mental age, psychological age is about 2, three years old. The narcissist’s episodic memory is compromised. His autobiographical
18. 06:07 memory. Narcissist is discontinuous and disjointed and kaleidoscopic. There’s identity diffusion, identity disturbance. It’s a child. When you’re with a narcissist, the feeling is that you’re with a child. The narcissist gives off gives off a child vibe.
19. 06:24 And so walking away from the narcissist or being discarded by the narcissist feels feels like having abandoned a child in need, having betrayed a child, having backstabbed a child. What kind of child? A traumatized child, a child in pain, a crying child,
20. 06:42 an infant in in dire need for sakur and help. And here you are walking away selfishly, egotistically, thoughtlessly. And this of course is a source of enormous shame and guilt. But you keep forgetting. Yes, the narcissist is a child, but it’s a child trapped in an adult’s body.
21. 07:14 Children by nature are cruel. They’re egotistical. They’re disempathic. And here you are with a child who has weaponized an adult body. This combination can become ominously life-threatening. You’re not abandoning a child. You’re abandoning a child with a lethal weapon.
22. 07:41 You’re abandoning a child hellbent on your destruction. You’re abandoning a child of the corn. You’re abandoning an Henry James child. So, this is the child you’re abandoning. And yet something maternal in you, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a
23. 08:01 woman, something maternal in you, something protective, something that is triggered by the presence of an infant or a toddler wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t leave you in peace. This constant message, this constant monologue inside your head that keeps saying, “You walked
24. 08:23 away on a child in need. you walked away on a destitute, devastated, crying um child, a child who possibly cannot survive without you. And of course, this is part of the shared psychosis for in the shared fantasy, the mass psychoggenic illness,
25. 08:48 the narcissist convinces convinces you that he cannot survive without you as his maternal figure. In this way, narcissism is highly codependent. And so you walk away from the child and you feel the same way a mother would when she abandons her children for her own
26. 09:09 gratification and selfish needs. Survival is not a price worth paying for abandoning your children. And yet you must remember it is not a child. Not in any sense we mean when we use the word it’s not a child. There is a childish infantile engine engine there some kernel some
27. 09:40 some nucleus that is infantile and childish but it is surrounded and wrapped with an adult body adult machinations adult strategens the shared fantasy and numerous other uh contraptions and traps into which you fall and from which you need to
28. 10:00 extricate yourself in order to survive. We hurt people mostly when we interpret the situation or the relationship as a battle for survival. It is then that we lose our scruples, our inhibitions, our norms and values and conventions and mores. We lose
29. 10:24 everything out. every script we’ve learned, every behavior we have adopted, every value uh system, every value in the value system, every belief we’ve held, every faith when you’re fighting for your survival, it’s no holds barred. Nothing is disallowed in love and war.
30. 10:46 So we hurt people most when we have come to believe that the situation or the relationship is threatening our survival. Life in this situ in these circumstances life is reduced to a zero sum game. It’s you or the narcissist never the both of
31. 11:06 you. With the narcissist it’s never been a win-win situation. It’s never been a give and take. With the narcissist, it’s always been your gradual eradication, your incremental annihilation, your stage bystage evaporation and dissipation as you were consumed by the narcissist.
32. 11:33 And here you are telling yourself, this man I love, this woman I love, the narcissist, they were there. They were charming. They were amazing. They were innovative. They were creative. They were sparkling. They were there. I felt their presence.
33. 11:53 It’s not true that there’s nobody there. But you’re wrong. What you have felt is a simulation, the simulacum, the false self. The narcissist is a non- entity. It’s an absence masquerading as a presence. It’s a black hole. And as such, the narcissist is incapable of
34. 12:14 being truly profoundly hurt. Narcissists do not experience hurt and pain. So why do they react to abandonment? Why do they appear to be so devastated and ruined and beyond repair and reconstruction, having been abandoned? Because they are enraged. They’re consumed by rage. They’re
35. 12:40 enraged by the violation of the fantasy, by the betrayal of the narrative. They can’t let go. They are they are completely digested and consumed by the by your absence because your absence then resonates with their absence and it becomes one big void, one
36. 13:06 big one big howling deep space, one big black hole into which they are sucked never to be seen again. A process known as injury or motification. So don’t confuse, don’t conflate the narcissist experience of abandonment with your experience of abandonment. You
37. 13:25 are truly impacted. You are truly affected profoundly. So every cell on a cellular level, the abandonment hurts and bites like so much acid. You’re reduced to smoke and mirrors. Whereas a narcissist experiences his abandonment, the hurt which he which he
38. 13:48 dreads. Don’t misunderstand me. Narcissists have a lot of abandonment anxiety. The clinical term is separation insecurity. Narcissists dread it. They’re terrified of being abandoned, but not for for the same reasons as you are. Narcissists are terrified of being
39. 14:04 abandoned because it unravels the fantasy. It destroys the cognitive distortions. It destroys it. It eliminates the firewalls that separate the narcissist from reality. Your abandonment is reality pushing back. Your abandonment is reality intruding. Your abandonment
40. 14:26 does not allow the narcissist to continue the pretense, the theater play, the movie that he has constructed. Your abandonment also um makes clear to the narcissist that you’re an external object, not an internal one, endowed with autonomy, personal autonomy,
41. 14:45 independence. You make choices, decisions, and so on. Even when the narcissist discards you, you still walk away, which is an independent action. So everything falls apart. the whole house of cards. And the narcissist feels terrified beyond words, horrified
42. 15:06 by the need for the direct experience of reality without the mediation of defense mechanisms, without the mediation of fantasies and and narratives that are protective in nature. Fantasies and narratives that patress the fantastic counterfactual um self-concept of the narcissist.
43. 15:28 In other words, when you walk away because you’ve been discarded or because you’ve abandoned the narcissist, what the narcissist experiences is not pain, is not hurt. The narcissist experience experiences imminent disintegration, falling apart, being reduced to shards.
44. 15:53 You have abandoned the narcissist, but you have not abandoned a human being. Not in the full sense of the word. You have not abandoned a lover. Definitely, you have never been loved. You have not abandoned a child. You have not abandoned the mother figure who has
45. 16:11 loved you, who had loved you unconditionally. It’s never been true. You have not abandoned a partner. You have abandoned a delusional delirium, a story in which you were a mere character, a movie which has come to an end. You walked away from a narrative, a
46. 16:36 cult within which you were the human sacrifice. You have survived but you could have done nothing for the narcissist. You could have you could have done nothing for the fantasy. Fantasy has its own inexurable rhythm and progression. It’s not dependent on you or the narcissist.
47. 17:04 You were trapped in a situation which was inelectable, inevitable. Walking away was not even your decision. It was the the very end of the shared fantasy. The thing the narcissist sought when he imposed on you the shared fantasy. He wanted you to walk away.
48. 17:28 So in a way you have fulfilled the narcissist’s expectations to the letter by abandoning him something he had expected and wanted all along. and and there’s no way you could have helped him. You could not have grown the child into an adult. You could not have
49. 17:46 and bestowed on the child love that is healing and fixing. You could not have saved the child. You could not have had u a lover because you could not have taught the narcissist to love. Love is not a subject in a univers. No amount of empathy, no amount of
50. 18:08 effort and investment and love and and positive emotions would have made the tiniest difference. You’ve never had a partner. You have had a director. You have you have had an author. You have you’ve had a script writer. You were a participant in a video game.
51. 18:29 He was your mother figure. He acted as your mother figure. He he showered you with with what appeared to be unconditional love in order to get you addicted. He wanted you to get intoxicated and lose your sense of judgment and your reality testing. He took away your core identity
52. 18:50 and he converted you into an internal object utterly manipulable. And so what is it that you have discarded? What is it that you have abandoned? The answer is nobody and nothing. At least nothing real.
53. 19:16 Above all, remember you have never been special or unique. You’ve never been seen. You’re utterly replaceable, interchangeable, funible. The narcissist is invested in the fantasy and he’s going to move on and he’s going to find another participant, another
54. 19:39 character and he won’t be able to tell the difference between you and the new participant, the new character because both of you have never existed except as figments in the narcissist’s mind, demented mind and moribond imagination. All of you, the narcissist and you and
55. 20:03 future victims and past victims, all of you are mere actors in a drama set in motion decades before you have met the narcissist. Walk away for your own good because you are not walking away from the narcissist and you are not walking away from the
56. 20:25 fantasy. You are walking away from who you have become in the narcissist fantasy. And who you have become in the narcissist fantasy is the true and only betrayal. The betrayal of yourself.