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1. 00:03 The narcissist suffers from abandonment anxiety. How to weaponize this anxiety in order to manage narcissistic abuse within your toxic relationship with the narcissist? How to leverage the narcissist abandonment anxiety against the most egregious manifestations of the
2. 00:22 narcissist abusive maltreatment of you. This is the topic of today’s video. My name is Sam Vaknin. I’m the author of Malignant Self- Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. Before we go there, two um announcements. Number one, I’m in Paris. You want to
3. 00:44 talk to me, a paid consultation, or you want to organize a free lecture, contact me, svaknmail.com. there’s uh I will I’ll place the email address in the description. Second thing has to do with Wikipedia with which I’ve have I have a very long history. I was actually
4. 01:07 uh among the first uh participants and in a way founders of Nupedia Nupedia Larry Sanger’s project was the predecessor of Wikipedia and then a few years later when I witnessed firsthand that what Wikipedia had become I have written the viral article um the six
5. 01:27 sins of the Wikipedia of Wikipedia which made me an enemy of the whole enterprise. I was banned. My entry on Wikipedia was deleted. Don’t ask. Decades later, despite its best efforts, and despite major improvements, Wikipedia is still much closer to Reddit
6. 01:46 and Quora than it is to Encyclopedia Britannica. It is not an encyclopedia. Alas, controversial hate figures such as myself um are subject to flame wars between so-called self-styled editors. Articles which deal with figures like myself are constantly eviscerated and
7. 02:10 vandalized. Why am I telling you all this? Because last night I’ve been informed. I don’t visit Wikipedia anymore. It’s too painful to be to to be frank. But last night I’ve been informed by a user of of Wikipedia that the entry for Sam Vaknin on Wikipedia has been
8. 02:29 massively vandalized by a self-styled rabid female um editor quote unquote SLP1. I’m posting a link to her page in the description. She’s taken a hatchet and a wrecking ball uh to my article, judging by her talk page to many others. And what I’ve done is I preserved a a screenshot
9. 02:56 um a PDF file of the article prior to SLP1’s vandalism. And those of you who would like to see the article before it has been completely demolished, um, I will place a link to the PDF file in the description and you can download and and read what Wikipedia had to say
10. 03:16 about me, good and bad, by the way. Some some really bad things as well. Anyhow, these are the two service announcements and let’s get to work. I’ve received the following uh comment or message actually. I think was it was on Instagram. Sam, yep, that’s me. I love starting my
11. 03:37 day with your videos. All kinds of mental illness. Although I have commented on quite a few regarding a big question I have. If the narcissist has fear of abandonment but needs to discard and devalue, why or how is the abandonment issue there?
12. 03:58 Please do a whole video on this. I think many viewers would love it. It seems contradictory and unclear how this works. Thanks. Love your work. So, let’s distill the question. I think what she’s asking or what he is asking is the following. If the narcissist has
13. 04:17 abandonment anxiety, why does he push people away? Why does the narcissist go through the phases of devaluation and discard if he’s so terrified of being abandoned and and rejected? Uh, I’m saying he half of all narcissists are women. Why am I using
14. 04:34 the male gender pronoun? Because it’s good literature, a Victorian maxim, a Victorian convention. Okay. Not only am I going to answer the question and discuss the narcissist twin anxieties, but I’m also going to show you or teach you how to leverage the narcissist
15. 04:54 anxiety within your your relationship with a narcissist. so as to minimize and mitigate um narcissistic abuse, at least the more egregious expressions of it, and somehow reach a level playing field with a with a narcissist, a modus vivventi, a way to
16. 05:15 coexist. Of course, my main advice remains the same. No contact, cut your losses, get away. But if you can’t objectively or subjectively, you can’t. You simply can’t emotionally, financially, whatever the reason may be, then you need to make use of all the
17. 05:37 tools and weapons at your disposal or lest you do not survive or you will not survive. Okay, let’s start with the psychology or psychopathology of the narcissist. Now, there’s a plain list on this channel. It’s titled From Child to Narcissist. It explains the convoluted
18. 06:00 relationships between the narcissist and his or her parental figures, especially the maternal figure. To be clear, when I use the word mother in these videos, I do not mean the biological mother. I mean the maternal figure, the caregiver, the person who played, who acted as a
19. 06:21 mother, could have been the father, could have been the grandmother, could have been the grandfather, could have been um good neighbor. So the maternal figure now the narcissist as a child has a complicated relationship with a maternal figure. Maternal figure won’t
20. 06:38 won’t allow the child to separate from her and become an individual. There’s a lot of strife. The child retreats into fantasy. Don’t ask. It’s a long story. There are a few dozen videos dedicated to it in the aforementioned playlist from child to narcissist. But the end
21. 06:55 result of all this is that the narcissist is terrified of abandonment. Does this sound familiar? Yes. It’s a clinical feature not only of narcissism but of borderline personality organization. both narcissists and border lines, fear and dread, abandonment and rejection.
22. 07:16 The difference perhaps between narcissist and and borderline is that in borderline the abandonment anxiety, the clinical term is separation insecurity. The separation insecurity in borderline is proactive. It’s an active, it’s a dynamic element. The borderline for
23. 07:35 example imagines and anticipates abandonment and then reacts to it as though as if it had happened. So she catastrophizes the borderline catastrophizes abandonment and and rejection and the attendant loneliness and humiliation which she cannot
24. 07:51 withstand because she is overwhelmed by emotions. She has emotion dysregulation. All this is missing in the narcissist. With the narcissist, there is a general ambient uh fear of being left alone because when the narcissist is alone, the narcissist
25. 08:11 is unable to maintain and propagate the shared fantasy and the shared fantasy is the living space of the narcissist. It is a paracos. It is through the shared fantasy that the narcissist exercises a variety of regulatory functions, external regulation such as narcissistic
26. 08:30 supply and to some extent internal regulation. In the absence of a shared fantasy, the narcissist collapses and there is no way to maintain the shared fantasy without a participant in the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy as the name implied must be shared. So the
27. 08:47 abandonment anxiety in narcissism is a form of catastrophizing. But it’s not catastrophizing about any specific individuals. Oh my god, she’s going to abandon me. Oh my god, he’s going to abandon me. No, not that kind of catastrophizing. It It’s catastrophizing
28. 09:05 about the shared fantasy. Oh my god, soon I’m going to be left alone, unable to provide myself with self-upply in the long term, unable to to regulate myself, I’m going to fall apart. So abandonment in the case of of the narcissist has echoes of what we
29. 09:29 call narcissistic motification. It’s on the border between narcissistic injury and narcissistic motification. And it is a major feature uh major major effective feature of the process or the state of narcissistic collapse. The narcissist dreads it. It dreads
30. 09:49 abandonment because abandonment is like fever. It is an indicator of an underlying malaise of an of a of a foundational pathology. the abandonment, the the the process of being abandoned, the state of postabandonment. They all remind the narcissist how fragile and brittle his
31. 10:12 existence is, how fantastic and delusional his universe, his world is, and how divorced he is from reality. And narcissism dreads abandonment. Therefore, but then coming back um to
32. 10:28 the question, if the narcissist dreads abandonment, why does he push people away? Why does he devi Why does he devalue them? Why does he discard them? Second reminder, half of all narcissists are women. So why does he do all these things? Because the narcissist idealizes
33. 10:45 the maternal object. Because a narcissist uh dreads abandonment only by the idealized maternal object. You remember that the shared fantasy goes through phases and the initial phase has to do or involves idealization. The narcissist idealizes the intimate partner, the best friend,
34. 11:08 co-workers, you name it. Narcissist idealizes other people as maternal figures. Narcissist converts them to mothers. And so when the narcissist does this in the process of idealization, the narcissist affects them. The narcissist gets attached to them
35. 11:27 emotionally, not in a healthy way, but there is like investment. Narcissist regards them as investment projects and then the narcissist is terrified of abandonment by the idealized object. But that does not apply to the devalued object. Whereas a narcissist dreads abandonment
36. 11:48 and rejection by the idealized object, he craves abandonment and rejection by the devalued object. Because the narcissist perceives the devalued object as persary as a kind of internal enemy. The narcissist dreads annihilation by the devalued per secondary object. The
37. 12:13 devalued per secondary object is the bed mother, the rejecting mother, the sadistic harsh inner mother, the internal object that is the narcissist’s worse mo non-mortal immortal enemy. The internal object that is out to dissolve the narcissist to destroy the
38. 12:34 narcissist. Of course, a narcissist craves wishes fervently to be abandoned by this internal corrosive uh object. So the shared fantasy goes through phases. The initial phase, love bombing, idealization, co idealization and so on. The narcissist gets attached. He
39. 12:59 misinterprets it as love. He gets attached and he’s terrified of abandonment. And in that particular period of time, the narcissist resembles a borderline. The borderline does exactly the same. She idealizes and her attachment is to the idealized
40. 13:16 object, not to the real person, not to the external object. And then the narcissist goes through devaluation and discard. At that point the internal object is transmogrified under under goes a transformation from an idealized unconditionally loving object to a
41. 13:35 persary uh object immersed in enmity and hostility. And at that point the narcissist regards abandonment as a wonderful solution. A purging a purging of the internal space a cleansing an act of cleansing. Twin anxieties are typical of cluster B personality disorders.
42. 13:58 Those of you who have watched my videos on borderline personality disorder realize that border lines suffer from a from twin anxieties as well. The borderline has an abandonment anxiety. But then when the partner becomes too intimate, she develops engulfment
43. 14:16 anxiety and she runs away. approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion. I will not go into it. You can head over to the BPD, borderline personality disorder playlist, and you will find a few videos dedicated to this dynamic. Similarly, the narcissist
44. 14:36 has twin anxieties, is in possession of twin anxieties, the abandonment anxiety in the idealization phase, and the dread of annihilation. the dread, the annihilation anxiety in the devaluation phase. These are the narcissist twin anxieties. But whereas
45. 14:58 these anxiet the twin anxieties drive the borderline behavior, they’re the cause of the borderline behaviors. They are not the cause of the narcissist behaviors. The narcissist behaviors are inexurably dictated by a by a paradigm by a by a procedure by an algorithm that
46. 15:21 takes over the narcissist. The narcissist is as much a puppet of the algorithm as is as are the people in the narcissist life. This algorithm is known as a shared fantasy and as I said it’s inexurable, unstoppable, uncontrollable and immutable.
47. 15:39 So the behaviors of the narcissist are dictated by the algorithm. But these behaviors bring on the aforementioned twin anxieties, the abandonment anxiety and the annihilation anxiety. Whereas in borderline personality disorder, these twin anxieties drive their behaviors. They
48. 16:00 are the cause of their behaviors. So that’s a major uh psychonamic difference between pathological narcissism in the pure form, unadulterated form and borderline personality organization. Okay. So the narcissist idealizes you and he’s terrified that you might
49. 16:20 abandon you. And then the narcissist can’t help himself is in the throws of and a slave to the shared fantasy and he devalues you and he discards you at which point you become the enemy. He develops a dread or anxiety of annihilation and he just wants you out
50. 16:42 away. He wants to eradicate you, obliterate you, erase you, you name it. Then it’s the opposite of abandonment anxiety. He he wants to be so-called abandoned by you. He wants you gone. How can you make use of this new gained knowledge during the idealization phase? You can
51. 17:06 use abandonment as a tool, as an instrument to modify the narcissist’s behaviors, to uh strike compromises with the narcissist, to level the the playing field, to negotiate with the narcissist, to establish boundaries and enforce them, all under the cloud and threat of
52. 17:33 imminent abandonment or else. In other words, blackmail. It’s a kind of blackmail. You inform the narcissist in a variety of ways, verbally, body language, behaviorally, that should the narcissist transgress, breach your boundaries, cross all laws and regulations,
53. 17:57 refuse to reach a consensus or negotiate a modus vendi and modus of Randi between you. If the narcissist becomes defiant, my way or the the highway, overbearing, doineering, and not to mention aggressive or in rare cases violent. In all these situations,
54. 18:20 you have the ultimate tool. You can abandon him or threaten to abandon him. This in the idealization phase would have an immediate impact. You won’t believe the speed with which the narcissist would change and modify his behavior. Just the mere mention of abandonment
55. 18:42 would be enough to completely transform the narcissist into someone unrecognizable to you. However, this weapon is not available to you in the devaluation phase. In the devaluation phase, the narcissist wants you gun. Threatening the narcissist to
56. 18:59 abandon him in the devaluation phase would make him very happy and euphoric and elated, which is not what you want. It would threatening abandonment during the devaluation phase would just uphold the narcissist’s view of you as the enemy, the secretary object, and the
57. 19:17 narcissist would feel validated, empowered, right, just, and it would it would afford the narcissist added energy. would energize the narcissist and the narcissist would become even more defiant and more reckless and more aggressive and more demanding and more
58. 19:40 threatening and more everything more narcissistic more entitled more risk-taking and so on. In other words, in the devaluation phase, should you threaten the narcissist with abandonment is likely to become psychopathic. Whereas in the idealization phase,
59. 19:58 should you threaten the narcissist with abandonment is likely to become codependent. So what can you do in the devaluation phase? You can use the other anxiety. The second anxiety, the twin anxiety is annihilation anxiety. You see, during the devaluation phase, ironically,
60. 20:18 the narcissist goes to the opposite of idealization. It’s like a pendulum. The devaluation is as as potent as powerful as the idealization. Whereas in the idealization, you’re angelic and godlike and can do no wrong and perfection raified. In the devaluation phase, you’re demonic,
61. 20:40 you are devilish, you’re evil, you’re malevolent, you’re conspire, you’re con conspiratorial and so on. So devaluation is also an unrealistic perception of you. And both in both situations in idealization and in devaluation as an idealized version of yourself and a
62. 21:01 devalued version of yourself the narcissist endows you bestows upon you incredible supernatural powers and you need to make use of these imputed powers. You don’t possess these powers. These powers are totally fictional. But the narcissist believes
63. 21:22 that you possess them. The narcissist believes that that you have the capacity or the energy or thewittle or the access or the knowledge to destroy him. During the devaluation phase, you’re not just any enemy because the narcissist needs to aggrandise himself. He needs to
64. 21:44 aggrandise you as an enemy because the narcissist needs to aggrandise himself in the idealization phase. He aggrandizes you as perfection raified. Similarly, in the devaluation phase, the narcissist aggrandises you as the ultimate enemy, as the ultimate foe, as the ultimate
65. 22:08 diabolical menacing morality. And you can make use of this. What I’m trying to say, I think in too many words as usual in my videos, what I’m trying to say is that during the devaluation phase, the narcissist is afraid of you. You terrorize him not because you’re
66. 22:26 doing anything, not because of who you are, but because of his imagination. He catastrophizes your qualities and capacities and traits and intentions. He attributes to you all kinds of malice and you can make use of this. Whereas in the idealization phase it is
67. 22:46 enough to threaten the narcissist with abandonment for the narcissist to change his ways. In the devaluation phase it is enough to hint that you can and will damage the narcissist considerably, expose the narcissist, harm the narcissist. Of course, don’t cross the
68. 23:05 legal border. Do not threaten, but just imply. Just, you know, a wink and a nod. It’s enough. The narcissist would recoil, change his behavior, stay away from you, let you be, and definitely stop abusing you. Try it. It’s as simple as that.