Of course, it never works.

And this leads to the question, why? Why does the narcissist keep repeating these cycles?

And if the whole idea is to separate and individually, once he had separated from you, discarded you, devalued you, replaced you, why does he hoover you? Why does it come back for you? What does it want you back in his life?

And even more interestingly, why does he keep trying the same thing with other women? Why had the separation? Why do the separation individuation attempts keep failing all the time? Why can’t the narcissist get it right?

Finally, he found an intimate partner who stands in for his mother. He idealized her. He made her addicted to him or actually to her idealized image in his eyes. And then he devalues her.

He abused her to test her. She proved herself to be a good enough mother.

Then he devalues and discards her to accomplish separation and divideration and then it fails. He cannot accomplish separation and divideration.

Why? What’s happening?

And to understand that, we need to go a bit back into the entraining phase.

I told you that the narcissist entrains you as an intimate partner. He uses the cadences and tones, tonalities and rhythms and harmonies of verbalized, narcissistic abuse, kind of rap music. And this is musical and he creates entraining.

Entraining is the synchronization of brainwaves of two brains or more.

So your brains become one. They become enmeshed. You share the same brain.

Narcissistic abuse, verbal abuse accomplishes this.

And he induces in you a dream state, a dream state. It’s surrealistic.

By entraining you, he takes away your self-awareness because there’s no self there anymore. He controls critical psychological structures in your mind. He takes over your unconscious.

He mirrors you as a loving mother would and he inserts himself as an intractable introject into your mind the same way your mother did. He becomes a voice in your mind, which is as powerful as, for example, the voice of your mother, sometimes more so.

And as opposed to your mother, whose voice is dormant until needed, his voice is ever present, ever talking, ever active, providing a rolling commentary on everything you do and don’t do. Directing you, preventing you, suppressing you, encouraging you, pushing you, pulling you.

The narcissist’s introject is hyperactive because he needs to keep you in control. He needs you for the process of separation and individuation. He needs you to play the good enough mother and to never abandon him, never mind what he does to you.

So he needs to own your mind. There’s no other way to accomplish your subservience and subjugation to his whims and misbehavior, except by controlling your mind.

Unbeknownst to you, you don’t realize it, but you’ve become a mind slave. You’ve been brainwashed. It’s a form of mind control. You’ve been enslaved.

And so when you cry for help, no one gives you help because the narcissist is nobody. It’s an absence.

And so if you shout, nobody is killing me, like the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops, you know, nobody is killing me. No one will come to your help.

You do, at the beginning, in the lock bombing and grooming phase, you’re deceived into believing that the narcissist is an entity, that he exists. But as you get closer to him, as you get more intimate with him, you realize that there’s nobody there. There’s nobody there.

This is the most shocking thing. There are two things that victims suffer mightily about and way after the relationship is over with the narcissist.

The first thing is the realization that the narcissist had never existed.

It was a piece of fiction. It was a story, a narrative. It was a drama, a theater play. You were co-opted into a shared fantasy which bears little resemblance to reality and has no contact points with reality. So you’ve been transported into a nightmarish dreamscape.

That’s the first shocking realization of the victims.

And the second shocking realization is that it’s not about you. You’re totally interchangeable. You’re a commodity. You’re like raw material.

The narcissist needs someone like you, a figure, an emblem, an icon, an avatar, not you. The narcissist is totally immersed in his mind. It’s a form of virtual reality.

It’s no wonder that narcissists are so interested in the metaverse and many, many leaders of tech companies are actually highly narcissistic. The narcissist has a metaverse inside his mind. He has a form of extended reality inside his mind.

And so he invites you into this metaverse never to exit. It’s a feeling of being trapped and a feeling of not being seen for who and what you are and feeling of being abused and used.

And when you cry for help, there’s no one there to listen to you because you don’t exist anymore.

The narcissist has taken away your existence, had rendered you two dimensional, a cartoon figure, an animated icon in his mind. You inhabit the netherlands of his mind.

The narcissist ironically regards himself as a dream come true. And he becomes your dream. He regards himself as God’s gift to you.

And initially you agree with him. He’s perfection, reified, the ideal intimate partner.

All victims of narcissists describe the narcissist in the love bombing and grooming stages as ideal, perfect partner. Someone they believe is their soulmate could cater to their deepest needs and would always accept them as they are and love them and idealize them. I mean, this is irresistible.

The narcissist first idealizes you, but again, it’s not about you. It‘s about him.

If you are ideal and you had chosen him, then he must be ideal too. The narcissist idealizes himself by idealizing you, a process known as co-idealization.

You remember that when you deviate from this internal representation of yourself, from your avatar, from your snapshot, from the interjected internal object that represents you in his mind and with which he exclusively interacts. When you deviate from this, he has to devalue you. He has to devalue you in order to explain the discontent and disillusionment and disenchantment and the discord and the fighting and the arguments and the betrayal and your wish to break up ultimately and so on.

In his mind, he is the ideal partner after all. So something, someone must be having a bad influence on you. Your girlfriends are influencing you badly or you’re crazy and stupid or probably a narcissist or that’s projection, or you’re going through a phase or a crisis and you will get back to your senses soon enough, the erotomaniac defense.

But you on the other hand, you wake up, you increasingly regard the narcissist as your worst nightmare. You cannot believe that he is so divorced from reality. Yet he is totally so.

You begin to realize that he has been having deleterious and pernicious effects on your mind. You begin to hear his voice in your mind. You’re beginning to be able to tell the difference. You’re beginning to unshackle yourself, disentangle yourself, disentwine yourself. You’re beginning to break free, emancipate yourself and you convince yourself that all it takes is to walk away, no contact.

And to some extent it is so, but the narcissist is embedded in your mind. And if you don’t do something about it, it’s going to be embedded, remain embedded in your mind forever.

And so this leads to the second part.

This discrepancy that opens up between you and your narcissist in partner.

You regard yourself as a victim and he considers you a winner of life’s lottery. He considers being in your life a privilege for you. You’re privileged to have him in your life. You’re the luckiest girl on earth and he resents what he perceives to be your constant carping and complaining. And you resent his callousness and indifference to your suffering as well as his unwillingness to change. And so you react to his nightmare aspects while he fully expects you to react to him as you would to a dream come true.

And this mismatch in perceptions and expectations generates another type of narcissistic abuse, which is intended to annihilate you as a constant source of frustration and leads seamlessly and directly to devaluation and discard and separation and individuation from an external, now persecutory, object, from you.

Now this is a crucial observation.

To recap, let’s see, we have another half an hour.

To recap, the narcissist needs you to be his good enough mother. He tests you. He needs you to give him unconditional love so that he’s ultimately able to separate from you and to become an adult, an individual, something he had failed to do with his original mother.

So he abuses you to test you and then and so on, ultimately you reach a stage that he is ready to separate from you.

You are unhappy in the relationship. He is unhappy that you are unhappy because he thinks you’re crazy, you should be happy and privileged. He is very unhappy with the way you deviate from the snapshot, from the avatar.

And this unsettling threatens the balance of his mind, which is anyhow precarious, the equilibrium, or mere stasis. They are not the strong points of the narcissist’s psychology.

So you become a threat. He begins to regard you as an enemy, persecutory object, begins to devalue you, wants to get rid of you, wants to get rid of you.

But then, and then he does. He discards you and he finds someone else, a replacement.

And this raises again two questions.

Ostensibly by discarding you, he had completed successfully the separation individuation. So why does he repeat the very same behaviors, the very same cycle with the next partner?

And the second question, he had separated from you. He had individuated. Why does he come back? Why does he try to hoover you?

And the answer is very simple. The narcissist separates and individuates from an external object, from you, really out there. It’s the first time and the only time that he sees you as separate from him because you had become an enemy, a persecutory object.

So he can’t regard you as an internal object. It’s too threatening. He begins to see you as an external object and then he separates from you, discards you, etc.

And he feels relieved and happy and safe, finally.

But the same way you cannot get rid of the narcissist’s voice in your head, the entrained internal object, the abusively entrained internal object. The narcissist is in your mind and you can’t get rid of this voice, talking to you. It influences your behavior and so on.

The same way the narcissist cannot get rid of your snapshot. He cannot get rid of your avatar. He cannot get rid of the internal object, the introject that represents you in his mind. He cannot get rid of your representation in his mind.

He can get rid of you as an external object because you are the enemy now. He can get rid of you and good riddance, but he cannot get rid of your presence in his mind because he still idealizes you as a mother figure.

Remember that the narcissist separates from a mother. So even when he separates from you, even when he devalues you and discards you, he does this as he would from a mother. You remain a mother figure and the narcissist is unable to devalue a mother figure.

So he devalues the external object, which is you, but never the maternal internal object, which represents you in his mind. He is still enmeshed with this internal object in a shared fantasy and he doesn’t know what to do because no child separation and individuation is an infantile process.

No child would devalue his mother. It feels unsafe. It feels dangerous. It feels wrong. No child would do that.

So the narcissist remains stuck with an all good idealized, wonderful Madonna like maternal internal figure, which represents you. Even though externally you had left him or he had dumped you or abandoned you and externally you had become an enemy.

And this discrepancy, this dissonance between the external object, the discarded, devalued, hated, resented, loathed external object, which is you, former intimate partner, and the internal object, which is also you. It’s much more you than you than the external object. This internal object is cathected, invested with the narcissist emotions, including love, and he can get rid of this internal object.

He can’t devalue it. He can’t discard it. He can’t separate from it. So separation, individuation fails because of this internal object.

The entire relationship with the narcissist is intended to recreate the dynamics of the conflict with the narcissist mother during the formative years, but this time around with a different outcome and different power matrix, remember?

So successful separation individuation is accomplished via the twin acts of devaluation and discard from an empowered position.

So the question is having failed to separate from the idealized internal object that represents you. The narcissist is forced actually to remain attached to you, to remain connected to you somehow.

And this explains hoovering. I’ll come to it in a minute.

Narcissism, remember, is a missionary religion. It’s replete with the deity, the false self rituals, obsessive compulsive rituals and addiction.

The shared fantasy is similarly populated with idealized images in the narcissist mind. These are Olympian gods. One of them is you.

The shared fantasy is the mystical experience of the narcissism religion.

Shared fantasy is a regression to an infantile phase prior to separation and individuation from the mother.

There’s a merger, there’s a fusion, an oceanic feeling, enmeshment and government.

And there are no initially resentment and hatred, which come much later as prerequisites for the devaluation and the discard.

So when the narcissist got rid of you as an external object and remains attached to you as an internal object, this brings on the hoovering behaviors later on.

When he tries with another partner, he goes through the same thing because he hadn’t separated. He failed to accomplish separation, individuation with you because you’re still in his mind as an idealized, demanding mother, a good enough mother.

Why would he let go of a good enough mother? He’s attached to you. He’s bonded. So he fails to accomplish separation, individuation with you and he moves on to the next intimate partner and he fails with her as well. And he moves on and he fails with her, etc.

He never succeeds because separation, individuation is not only with an external object, but also with an introject, the internal object.

And the narcissist idealizes the internal object and renders it immutable, renders it perfect, unchangeable.

So any attempt to get rid of the internal object would generate a normal separation in security, enormous abandonment anxiety because a narcissist doesn’t have object constancy. He is unable to relate to external objects.

And so his only object constancy is with internal objects. Internal objects are not going to abandon him. They’re not going to hurt him. He controls them.

So any attempt to discard an internal object would bring about terrifying and paralyzing abandonment anxiety. Narcissist doesn’t dare to venture there. He doesn’t even even try.

So he‘s stuck. He’s stuck with your idealized internal representation. He’s emotionally invested in this. He cannot get rid of it. And so he cannot separate from you and he needs to return to you in the future, hoovering.

And when he tries with someone else, he goes through the same process exactly.

His attempt to separate individuate is doomed because he never tries to separate individuate from the real object. And he cannot separate individuate from the internal object, which is to him his only reality.

The only exception to all this is mortification. And I will discuss mortification as a strategy in the next part.

Now let me make a note where we start and I will be open to any questions if there are any survivors out there.