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1. 00:00 to non-narcissists who realize they are either partnered or married to partnered with or married to narcissists. They have been going through the discard phase and they want to stick it out. They want to justify to themselves that this is a cyclical thing that they can
2. 00:16 somehow bear. The powers of self-d delusion are enormous, especially especially if the fantasy caters to deep set real psychological needs that have never been met before. For example, the need to self love, the need to feel safe, the need to feel understood and accepted,
3. 00:37 the need to feel that you’re superior because you are somewhat narcissistic and it caters to your grandiosity when the narcissist tells you you are, you know, perfect being or a perfect entity, there’s also that. So if these deep set fundamental needs are being met in the
4. 00:54 fantasy, there’s little incentive to abandon ship. And so then uh the partner would create counterfactual narratives, would create justifications of the narcissist behaviors. One possible such narrative is it’s all my fault. Had I only behaved
5. 01:14 differently, if I only done that or said that or only refrained from saying this or doing this, I would have been treated well, so it’s all my fault. That’s one, we call it the autolastic narrative. Mhm. Another type of narrative, he’s going through through a difficult period.
6. 01:31 It’s a passing phase. Another narrative is well, that’s the way he is, you know, he starts some when he’s when he’s loving, his love is like nothing else. And when is abusive, you know, we it’s it’s worth it’s worth the price. The prize is worth the price.
7. 01:47 And so there are many such selfdeceiving narratives. They’re selfdeceiving because none of them is true. None of them is real. What is the only the only narrative that’s real is the clinical narrative. The narcissist is inexurably drawn into a fantasy and the fantasy
8. 02:06 dominates the narcissist. Narcissist has no control over the fantasy. And as I just said, the fantasy is inexurable in the sense that narcissist cannot stop the fantasy, rechan the fantasy, refrain the fantasy. The the fantasy is in full control and mastery. The narcissist is
9. 02:23 its slave. And the fantasy has well-defined phases. Idealization, devaluation, and ultimately discard. There are inevitable phases. Nothing to be done. Even the narcissist cannot do anything about it. Sam, is there a difference between selfishness and narcissism?
10. 02:44 Well, egotism or or selfishness um are derogatory terms. Um narcissism is a clinical term. And one could even say that in certain types of circumstances, selfishness is healthy. Mhm. Putting yourself first is a healthy thing. Mhm. Um not putting yourself first is
11. 03:12 actually an indication of pathology. So we say for example that people pleasers are it’s a pathological state pathological set of behaviors. You know mazukis it’s a pathology. I mean I can I can name 10 pathologies. Codependency. I can name 10 types of pathologies where
12. 03:30 the individual um puts himself or herself their needs last. That also applies in certain societal cultural context. For example, mothers are supposed to put themselves last. Yes. Um in many societies, wives are supposed to put themselves last.
13. 03:52 Yes. in in I would I would even say that universally children have to put themselves last like if you if you have an aging mother or yes you have to cater to their needs you have to take care of them you have to sacrifice yourself your family your
14. 04:09 money your time your resources to take care of them none of this is healthy agreed none of this is healthy and none of this can be justified either psychologically or philosophically even ethically None of it. So self I would say that selfishness.
15. 04:27 Unfortunately, we don’t have a word in English which is the the antonym or the opposite of selflessness. Yeah. But okay, let’s let’s say that selfishness is the opposite of selflessness. And I would say that selfishness is healthy whereas narcissism is not.
16. 04:43 You’re so right. We need a middle word that is that summarizes, you know, because what you’re describing, I’ve seen people I love do it and it’s it’s never a bill that’s fully paid, right? In terms of it’s, you know, situationally putting an aging parent
17. 05:01 first for a moment or a day or this, that bill never gets paid. And once you get locked in that cycle, I see it’s so difficult for people to get out of it. Yes. because it’s um it’s a clinging needy form of emotional blackmail. We call it clinically we call it control
18. 05:20 from the bottom. Interesting. Yes. You control people by rendering yourself helpless and needy. And this creates an ambiance of extortion like if you don’t take care of me, I’m going to die. or if you don’t do this for me, I don’t know how to do it by myself and
19. 05:38 I’m incapable of learning how to do it and and so on so forth. These are all forms of of blackmail. I would suggest the word uh the word selffulness. Self. Selffulness. Selffulness. Interesting. Selffulness is healthy whereas perhaps selfishness is is frowned upon socially.
20. 06:00 All be albeit it’s not pathological and narcissism is pathological. But selffulness selfness like mindfulness. Yeah. Selffulness is I think very very healthy. It is the self that defines boundaries. It is the self that informs us where we stop and the world begins
21. 06:18 and vice versa. It is the self that fulfills very critical functions. For example, um reality testing. What is reality testing, Sam? Reality testing is the ability to tell what’s real and what’s not. What the narcissist does to you, it the narcissist impairs your reality testing.
22. 06:38 The narcissist challenges your perception of reality. The narcissist does it unintentionally. Not deliberately as the psychopath does. Psychopath gaslights you. Mhm. The narcissist gaslights you unintentionally. So within the fantasy, the narcissist
23. 06:54 tells you everything you think you know about reality is wrong. You you perceive other people wrongly. For example, maybe maybe you’re too weak or you’re too submissive and people are taking advantage of you or you shouldn’t love your friend because she’s she’s
24. 07:11 backstabbing you and betraying you or whatever you think you know about the government is wrong. So there’s a lot of conspiracism involved and so on. This is this is when your reality testing collapses or becomes impaired and you begin to rely on the narcissist as your
25. 07:28 sole exclusive gauge of reality. So you’re going to come to the narcissist and say uh tell me is this real? Do you think it’s real? Do you believe it? Is it believable? As if you have no mind of your own. You you have outsourced your mind. The the shared fantasy is when you
26. 07:47 outsource your mind and your ego functions, that’s a clinical term to the narcissist and he becomes your external mind like an external hard drive. You know, it becomes your external mind. I love that analogy and what you mentioned too about the um the sort of isolating
27. 08:05 of the non-narcissist to keep them from I mean I think we can see many examples of this in our popular culture today to keep the victim from the others in their lives who actually would serve as reality enforcers right whether it’s a family of origin or
28. 08:25 long-standing friends that If they’re going to counter the narcissist version of events, they have to go. Yes. There are two reasons for that. The narcissist superimposes, we call it projection. The narcissist projects, superimposes his own distorted and
29. 08:45 thwarted mind on others and on reality. So he says they’re doing the same thing. They have their own fantasies. I have my own fantasies. They have their own fantasies. Friendship, it’s a fantasy. Love, that’s a fantasy. Empathy, BS, it’s a fantasy. It’s all fantasy because
30. 09:04 it’s the only thing the narcissist knows. It’s the only kind of experience the narcissist has. And so the narcissist superimposes this conceptual framework or fantasy on others. And then if you have a friend, if you have the narcissist partner and you have a
31. 09:19 friend, so that these are two competing fantasies. your friendship which is a fantasy in the narcissist’s mind. It’s not real. Your friendship competes with his fantasy. So he needs to eliminate the competition. So that’s one reason. Second reason, friends, family, co-workers,
32. 09:40 institutions such as the church or I don’t know, you know, the your therapist, they a royal family perhaps, the royal family perhaps on some occasions they offer you um sustenance, vigor, sakur, strength,
33. 09:58 resilience. They render you more. They render you immune to the narcissist fantasy. That is something the narcissist cannot countenance or accept. He needs to convert you into a susceptible entity. If we use immunology like COVID 19, he needs to take away your immune system
34. 10:21 because I love that because his fantasy is a v is a mind virus. It needs to infect you with a fantasy. As long as you have an imunological system which is comprised of people around you and their inputs, that’s not going to work. So when you’re isolated,
35. 10:38 your mind plays tricks on you. We know this. That’s a clinical fact. When you’re isolated, your mind plays tricks on you and then it it appears as if the narcissist is the only stable presence, the only thing the only person you can trust, right?
36. 10:54 The only gauge and measure of reality. and you latch onto the narcissist as if you’re a drift in the ocean and you kind of latch onto a piece of drifting wood, driftwood, you know. So that’s what he does to you. He removes from your life all certainty, all determinacy, all
37. 11:13 stability, all reality and then he renders you dependent by doing this. You become you become addicted to the self aggrandizing idealizing aspects. on the one hand and you become addicted to your newly found self-love on the one hand but on the other hand you are rendered so weak
38. 11:35 so mentally emassiated that the narcissist becomes your only lifeline maintain maintains exclusivity so this is what is this what would be um termed the file zoo where the non-narcissist then becomes sort of fully psychologically emotionally dependent
39. 11:55 And in order to survive has to has to mesh themselves into that delusion into that noxious fantasy. Yes, absolutely. The shared fantasy which is a term coined by Sander in 1989 was just another rendition of what we used to be known as Fiadur and today is
40. 12:15 known as mass mass psychoggenic illness. That’s a clinical term, the updated clinical term. Mhm. So yeah, these are two people where one of them is a leader, one of them is a narrative generator, one of them is the one of them is the author and the other one is a character.
41. 12:32 So it’s exactly like a video game or a movie where there’s a director and a producer and a screenwriter and then there are actresses and actors and you are an actress in the narcissist fantasy. Again, let me clarify half of all narcissists are women. I’m using he
42. 12:48 because it’s a Victorian literary convention and I’m very victorious. I love the way your mind works. I love these descriptors and allegorories and metaphors you come up with. Um you just bring it all so vividly to life. Do you love olive oil? If so, have you ever
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