Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Many Faces of Narcissist’s Discard

1. 00:02 The narcissist discards you or you discard the narcissist or better still you engage in a thrilling discard game where you call each other’s bluff and discard each other joyfully. [laughter] But when we say the word discard, what comes to mind is the banging of a door.
2. 00:27 Poor door. Everyone is banging it in each and every one of the scenarios that I’ve mentioned. You pack your suitcases if you have any. You leave and you bang the door behind you. That is the typical image of a discard. But discard, the act of discarding can
3. 00:49 be much more subtle, much more pernicious, much more under the radar, much less visible and ostentatious, and much more difficult to interpret. Today we’re going to discuss the many faces of the discard phase. My name is Sambaknim. I’m the author of Malignant Self-Love,
4. 01:11 Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. I suggest to distinguish between external discard and internal discard. External discard happens in real life. It is visible. It is observable. It is ostentatious. It is unambiguous. It is unequivocal. It is clear. Everyone has
5. 01:37 the same understanding of the chain of events. Someone has left someone. Someone has abandoned someone, that is a discard. So when you break up with someone, that’s a discard. When you abandon someone, that’s a discard. When you are constantly physically absent,
6. 02:00 traveling a lot, working incessantly, workaholic, in all these situations, you absent yourself physically from the scene. And that is a form of discard. A divorce of course is a discard. Even separation is triangulation not to mention infidelity. All these behaviors
7. 02:25 involve real life actions with commenurate real life outcomes and real life consequences. The emphasis is on reality. These are actions that unfold and take place in reality. A reality which is not subject to anyone’s fantasy or interpretation or meaning or no a
8. 02:50 reality that is universally accepted and acknowledged by everyone involved and by bystanders and observers. This is the external form of discard. But there is another class another category of discards and that is the internal discard. The internal discard is when the two parties
9. 03:15 remain in the relationship from the outside. People may even believe that they are having a functional for example marriage or a happy one. They share a life. They pull resources. They make common decisions. They postulate and promulgate goals and they pursue them jointly and
10. 03:40 there is a sense of commonality and a sense of cooperation and collaboration. And yet this is all a facade. This is for example very common in in pseudo mutual and pseudo hostile families. I’ve dedicated a video to this. So internal discard is when there is a contradiction between
11. 04:05 the public facing information, the explicit data available to all observers, bystanders, the authorities, family members, neighbors. So there’s a discrepancy between this kind of stimuli and data that emanate from the couple and what is really
12. 04:31 happening behind the scenes. There is a gap. There is an abyss. What you see is not what you get. What you observe has nothing to do with reality. It is a theater production. It is a movie put on to the benefit of others. Internal discard simply means that there
13. 04:55 is some kind of rot at the foundation and the basis of the relationship. It’s like a dead a dead a dead tree. From the outside it looks like a tree but inside it’s hollow and full of termites and crumbling to dust. So this discrepancy between implicit and
14. 05:16 explicit is the engine and at the core of the internal discard. In the internal discard, one of the parties or both have given up on the relationship and on each other and this manifests in a variety of ways. For example, emotional absence. When one of the parties or both are not
15. 05:42 emotionally present, not affected, not psychically or emotionally invested in the relationship, no longer bother to even argue and fight, have completely lost interest, regard the relationship as a burden, something to dispense with with minimal investment and minimal resources.
16. 06:05 Emotional absence is a key indicator of the death of a diad or a couple. And of course, it is a form of discard. Another example is indifference when one or two one or both of the parties are completely indifferent to what the other party is doing. Completely don’t care
17. 06:32 about what’s happening. They couldn’t care less. They’re occupied with their own world, with other people, and they share perhaps a habitation and some resources, money in the back or god knows what. And at the same time, they don’t really care about the other other
18. 06:53 party’s health, other parties mental health, other parties goals, hopes, dreams, fantasies, wishes, expectations. None of this matters. Indifference may masquerade as freedom. So the parties may say we are giving each other space. We are allowing each other a lot of freedom.
19. 07:18 But this is just a disguise. It’s camouflage. This is not freedom. This is closer to anarchy. The indifference at the core of the relationship is a form of signaling. You’re no longer in my life. And since you’re no longer in my life, who cares
20. 07:38 what’s happening to you? Indifference is a form of discard. The couple goes on in both emotional absence and indifference. The couple continues to function, continues to perform. it becomes a performative couple not a functional one. Another example of internal discard
21. 08:00 is when one of the parties converts the other into a pseudary object. Regards the other party as an enemy, as hostile, loses trust in the other party, believes that the other party doesn’t have his or her best interest in mind. does not regard the other party to the couple as
22. 08:21 a friend. And so converting the other party, the other member of the diet or the other member of the couple into a secondary object is a form of discard. And of course it goes hand in hand with devaluation in narcissistic in the narcissistic shared fantasy. So
23. 08:42 it could be that one of the parties will develops paranoid ideiation and then embeds the other party the other the partner embeds the intimate partner in the paranoid narrative and it could be that both of them have lost trust in each other and have become paranoid.
24. 09:03 Another example of this card is setting up your partner for failure, making impossible demands and expectations, acting in ways that cannot be matched, um providing the couple with an impetus or thrust that can never be consummated. acting within the couple so as to
25. 09:29 frustrate or shame or [clears throat] humiliate the partner. In all these situations, the aim is to render the partner inefficacious, a failure, a loser, or not good enough, inferior. And of course, it’s a form of discard when you place impossible standards,
26. 09:54 standards which are impossible to meet. Then of course your partner would fail. And when your partner fails, you gain or regain the upper moral ground. You become superior and your partner becomes inferior. It’s a form of discard. It’s behavioral devaluation.
27. 10:16 In all these situations, a discard is taking place internally and in reality actually but is not observable from the outside. People from the outside are unable to tell that a discard is occurring or happening. Even when people from the outside witness some kind of tension,
28. 10:38 conflict, arguments, disagreements, or even violence, they are still not quite sure whether the partners have given up on each other. And so the external discard, as I said, is unequivocal and unambiguous. One of the party, one of the parties walks off
29. 10:59 or they both walk away in mutual agreement and understanding. no uh kind of consent decree. An internal uh discard is much more difficult to dis decode and decipher, much more difficult to fathom, much more difficult to ascertain. And so an internal discard is very misleading.
30. 11:22 It’s a form of uh subversion and sabotage. It’s highly passive aggressive and it takes into account considerations which should never be introduced should never impact the inner dynamic of a couple. For example, what would people say? So internal discourage something
31. 11:45 sometimes happens because the two parties are wary of an external one. They do not want to appear to have broken up because they’re afraid of the judgment of society and the opinion of other people. It’s an example of an extraneous argument that should never be
32. 12:03 part of the deliberations within a couple. Couple is an organism. It’s an entity and um should not be subject to external pressures and expectations and demands. So when I say that the narcissist always discards the partner, it doesn’t mean that the narcissist always packs up his
33. 12:30 things and walks away banging the door behind him or her. Not at all. In the vast majority of the cases, the narcissist engages in a a form of internal discard. A discard that cannot be validated and observed from the outside. A discard that is surreptitious
34. 12:52 and subtle. A discard that is underhanded and under the radar. The kind of discards that I’ve mentioned, he becomes the narcissist becomes emotionally absent or indifferent. devalues the partner, makes impossible demands, imposes standards and
35. 13:11 expectations that cannot be met, and in a variety of ways undermines the relationship from the outside, dismantle it, dismantles it brick by brick. And it’s all very very um difficult to to see, very difficult to to ascertain and observe. And this subtlety
36. 13:38 is at the core of pathological narcissism because pathological narcissism is about falsity. The false self is about confabulation. Is about fantasy. It’s not about reality. The external discard is very real. The internal discard exactly like everything else in the narcissist life
37. 14:00 is a simulacum. >> [sighs]