Now, same behaviors, same behaviors, narcissistic abuse, classic, everything, the whole repertoire, the whole spectrum of behaviors, happens again in another phase of the relationship known as the interstitial or bargaining phase.

But this time, the reason for the behaviors is completely different. It is instrumental. It is goal-focused.

So in this shared fantasy, the behaviors are compulsive. They’re unconscious and they tend to, I mean, the reason for abusing you, the reason for subjecting you to narcissistic abuse is to test your maternity, to test whether you can be a good enough mother.

During the bargaining phase, you are again subjected to all these behaviors, but for another reason entirely.

And the reason is he wants you gone. He wants you out of his life.

Now, once the mask had slipped and the narcissist’s true face and intentions are exposed, both men and women feel bemused, deceived, angry, mad, furious, disappointed, heartbroken. People feel that they were made fools of, that they were cheated. And they start to mourn the relationship and they go through the classic stages of grief described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

They go through denial, they go through anger, they go through bargaining, depression and acceptance.

During the bargaining phase, people pose demands and the narcissist pushes them away and upsents himself. That is followed by depression. And it is during this phase that women, for example, the spouses cheat, cheating occurs in this stage, deceitful cheating, discreet cheating. And then there’s acceptance.

Acceptance is when the partner gives up on the narcissist, walks away from the narcissist and some partners retaliate. Women retaliate by cheating egregiously and ostentatiously or by, you know, absconding with the family, with the family finances.

Men retaliate by smearing the narcissist, replacing the narcissist with others, absconding with his ideas or intellectual property.

But there’s some kind of retaliation in some of the cases.

So there’s a shared fantasy.

In the shared fantasy, there is narcissistic abuse intended to test the parental credentials of the partners, intimate partners or business partners or friends.

So there’s a lot of abuse, but this is compulsive abuse, unconscious abuse, and the narcissist cannot modify his behavior or control it.

People begin to give up. They say, what the hell? That’s not the man I fell in love with. That’s not the man I wanted to do business with. That’s not the colleague I know I’ve met the first time.

So they begin to give up.

At first, they deny. Then they get angry. And then they bargain. They post demands. They say, you know, shape up, shape up or ship out, change your behavior. Do this, do that. Don’t do that. There’s a lot of bargaining going on.

And during this bargaining phase, interstitial one phase, again, the narcissist engages in narcissistic abuse. But this time, he becomes abusive, consciously, knowingly, in a premeditated, intentional, deliberate manner.

He uses abuse because he wants to get rid of men and women in the bargaining phase. He abuses and undermines the intimacy, the business, the collaboration, because he wants to push people to replace him and then to abandon him. And he doesn’t care if they cheat on him, like a woman, if a woman cheats on him. He doesn’t care that he’s pushing them away. He wants them gone.

The minute people exit the shared fantasy mentally and begin to pose terms and conditions, begin to make demands, begin to demand changes and alterations, the narcissist wants nothing to do with them. They become a nuisance. They become irritating. They get on his nerves and he wants them gone because he wants to move on, find the next target, the next intimate partner, the next business partner, which he could then try to identify and push into a new shared fantasy.

That’s what I’m describing now is the discard phase.

Unlike the shared fantasy phase, narcissistic abuse in the bargaining phase is a repelling behavior. It’s not repetition compartments. It doesn’t involve any early life trauma, any conflict with the mother, any conflict with the father. It is an MO, some method of operation and the narcissist uses, applies narcissistic abuse to men, to women, to collectives, to authority figures and to the authorities.

The narcissist can apply narcissistic abuse to a whole school, to the army, to workplaces and depending on his position, even to countries.

A clear distinction must be made between the behaviors that constitute narcissistic abuse during the shared fantasy and the same identical behaviors during the bargaining phase.

In the shared fantasy, these are compulsive behaviors, which are intended to parentify the opposite, the counterparty, parentify the intimate partner, the spouse, the lover, the friend, the business partner.

Narcissistic abuse at this stage in the shared fantasy is intended to parentify and to test, to check, to verify, to prove, to prove the bona fide of the target. Narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy is intended to establish that you are really a good mother, that you will never abandon, that you will never cheat on him or betray him, that you will always be there like a safe base, like a rock, that you will accept him and love him unconditioned, etc.

Narcissistic abuse during the bargaining phase is the exact opposite, logic and aim and target and purpose to drive you away, to never see you again, to get rid of you.

And the outcomes of this ineluctable process in the bargaining phase is that the narcissist finds himself again, alone, abandoned by everyone.

So the bargaining phase is the stage in the relationship where the narcissist tells himself that had been a wrong choice. She can’t really be a good enough mother. He can’t really be a good enough father. I need to find a new mother. I need to find a new father.

And in order to find a new mother and father, I need to get rid of these people. I need to clean my life. I need to cleanse my life, you know, relationship cleansing. I need to get rid of my wife, my lover, my girlfriend. She’s not a good enough mother. I need to get rid of my business, all my friends. They’re not good parental figures. They’re not good fathers.

And I need to start from zero, from scratch. Clean slate, it’s a favorable phrase of the narcissist.

Narcissists are itinerant. They always start with a clean slate from zero. It’s like a chess game.

So the outcome of the bargaining phase, a hundred percent of the time, is that the narcissist finds himself alone.

But women and men react differently to the narcissistic abuse in the bargaining phase. Women hurt the narcissist somehow. They can cheat on him, for example, and they do it in a way which is ostentatious or public, humiliating, clear to him, or sometimes in his presence with him as a witness. So that’s one way.

I mean, not all women cheat, of course, at this stage, but they will seek to hurt him somehow. It’s not revenge. Revenge is an attempt to reestablish balance, to restore cosmic justice. That’s not the aim, the psychodynamic aim here.

Women retaliate via cheating, via, you know, they can engage in a smear campaign, they can destroy the narcissist’s business, they can inform the authorities about crimes the narcissist is committing, they can alienate his children. I mean, whatever they do, it’s not exactly revenge. There’s an element of vengeance and spitefulness in the retaliation. And there is an element of self-empowerment and restoration of justice. All these elements exist, but it’s not the main motivation.

The main motivation is to hurt, to inform the narcissist, to force the narcissist to experience the pain that he had caused the partner, to give him a taste of his own medication, but not in the eventual sense. It’s an act of sharing, actually. It’s like you caused me so much pain, you hurt me so much, and for no good reason. I loved you, or I wanted to work with you, or I wanted to be your friend, and you know, you simply wounded me to the quick, I’m bleeding, I’m dying. What did you do it for? Do you know how it feels? Do you know how it feels? Let me show you how it feels.

And then women would engage in these retaliatory activities. And ironically, this just proves to him that all women, unlike his mother, it recreates a trauma with his mother. And it recreates a trauma with his mother, this time when he’s alone. The partner is no longer with him to serve as a buffer, and a resonance, and a firewall. He’s all alone.

And here is this female figure. And she is vengeful. She’s retaliating. She’s hurting him. She’s causing him enormous pain. She’s humiliating him in public.

And so he re-experiences all the old wounds and conflicts with his mother, but he has no one by his side to share it with and to support him. And so he disintegrates completely.

And this is the process known as narcissistic mortification, which I advise you to, again, to search for videos that I’ve made on this topic.

Only women have this power. Only women have the power to cause mortification to narcissistic men, and vice versa. Only narcissistic, only men have the power to cause mortification to narcissistic women.

Back to the example of the male narcissist.

Once they are discarded via the bargaining phase, narcissistic abuse, men can only cause the narcissist extreme narcissistic injury, but never mortification.

They can act aggressively. They can punish him. They can deprive him of something. They can take away something from you.

I mean, as men do, testosterone laden and aggression infused. And this causes injury, of course, in humiliation and vindictiveness in the narcissist and so on and so forth.

And he externalizes his reaction and then he becomes psychopathic in effect, or he interiorizes the pain and the hurt and so on. And then he becomes depressed. He’s humiliated. Men humiliate the narcissist and then walk away and team up with other people in full sight of the narcissist.

But only women have the power to cause him mortification. Men and women alike, people are a burden and a drain on the narcissist energy for two reasons.

One, he regards people as inferior. He holds people in contempt.

And two, he resents his total dependence on the very people that he holds in contempt. He needs from people, narcissistic supply. He can’t live without it. He falls apart without it.

And yet he holds the sources of supply in total disdain. He hates them.

To summarize, women cheat on the narcissist or deceive the narcissist or betray the narcissist. And then they abandon the narcissist only because and only when the narcissist had first abused them, abused them by lying to them, making false promises, giving them false hopes and false dreams and refusing to commit, in a daze, so there’s this.

And then there are active behaviors, humiliating them, rejecting them, beating them up, insulting them, undermining them, undervaluing them, passive aggressively, otherwise, narcissistic abuse.

Women, intimate partners cheat, deceive and betray because the narcissist drove them to cheat, deceive and betray.

No one starts a relationship saying to herself, well, great, I’m in this in order to cheat, betray and abandon. No one.

Narcissist drives, pushes away his partner.

But narcissistic abuse has two phases.

The first phase, the narcissist can’t help it. He uses narcissistic abuse to convert his partner into a mother or father figure and then test whether the conversion process had been successful or to what extent it had been successful.

And then in the bargaining phase, he uses narcissistic abuse to get rid of these people.

Abuse during shared fantasy always leads to deceitful behavior and to betrayal. But this betrayal is usually hidden, discrete. So there’s a lot of deceit introduced into the relationship.

Cheating is one form of deceit. Some women attempt, some intimate partners attempt to keep their deceitful behavior, conduct. And I’m saying again, cheating is one form of deceitful behavior than many others.

So intimate partners try to keep their deceitful, plausible deniability. They construct the deceit or they engage in a deceit in a way that they can deny it and the denial will sound plausible. Other intimate partners try to convert deceitful actions like deceitful cheating into ostentatious actions because they can’t take it anymore or because they have reached the bargaining phase.

They presented a list of 65 theses like Martin Luther at the beginning of Protestantism. They nailed the list of 65 theses to the door and they said to the analysis, here are the 65 things you must do if you want us to stay together.

And then the analysis answer is, invariably, well, if this is what I have to do, I don’t want to stay together.

Many women, many intimate partners cheat, others deceive in other ways, and they usually do it with other people. If it’s cheating, it’s usually casual partners.

All this takes place in the shared fantasy.

But all of them still strive to maintain their relationship after the deceit, after the cheating. They do it for self-interested reasons and they do it because they’re emotionally invested in the relationship. It’s known as the sunk cost fallacy.

The cheating, if it’s cheating or the deceit, they’re intended to satisfy the range of profoundly unmet emotional and physical needs of the partner. But the partner keeps on keeping on. The partner futilely soothes and hopes for commitment and for investment of the narcissist part.

Partners, intimate partners, business partners, friends, rarely give up on the nauseous that easily because most narcissists are actually interesting, entertaining, useful. So it’s hard to give up on the narcissist.

On the other hand, the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy phase is so horrible, so outlandish, so inhuman that everyone around the narcissist is driven to establish an alternative outside the remake of the relationship, away from the gaze of the narcissist.

In other words, everyone is driven to deceive the narcissist because they have needs which are not met by the narcissist. They have other needs which are cruelly frustrated by the narcissist and they must team up with other people to make up for it, to compensate for it, or they will die, at least internally die, mentally die.

As the abuse continues unabated also during the failed bargaining phase, it leads to ostentatious cheating, ostentatious betrayal, ostentatious deception. And this time it’s usually with intimate partners, with intimate friends, I’m sorry, with family members. This time at the end of the bargaining phase, it’s clear that everything is breaking up, that there is no future and no hope.

And now usually the partner introduces people she or he can trust into the mix. And if, for example, if the intimate partner cheats on the narcissist in the bargaining phase, she’s very unlikely to cheat with casual strangers, but she would cheat with a best friend.

Again, you see the reactions to narcissistic abuse are very different. Statistically, women who cheat on their narcissistic spouses during the shared fantasy, within the shared fantasy, do it with strangers or casual acquaintances as a form of, you know, one might stand because they still have hope and they’re still committed. They’re still trying to salvage whatever is possible.

Women who cheat, the same women, same women exposed to the same narcissistic abuse, but it is during the bargaining phase where everything clearly is lost.

They again cheat, but they cheat with intimate partners, with friends. When I say cheat, it’s an example of deceptive behavior. There are many others.

A business partner during the shared fantasy would collaborate with other firms, other businessmen, competitors even, against the narcissist. But he would try to make it during the shared fantasy, he would try to make it, you know, a puzzled, incidental, one-time thing.

But then in the bargaining phase, when the business partner is exposed to the same mistreatment, the business partner will be looking for new partners, long-term, stable new partners, same with friends, same. It’s the same principle applied to all the narcissists, all the relationships of the narcissist.