Narcissist’s Two Rejections: Giving, Love, and Abuse
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2020-10-06

The narcissist equates love with giving and giving goes hand with hand with an entitlement and license to abuse.

Why, when women replace the narcissist as a man (lover, husband), does it cause him mortification? Only women possess this power.

1. The narcissist interacts with women in two roles: child and father. Their rejection recreates the family dynamics (dead mother maternal abandonment). 

When women reject the narcissist and betray him, they are also doing it as a mother would reject her child, as his mother had rejected and abandoned him. 

When women prefer another man to the narcissist, he perceives it as adopting another child to take his place. This is life-threatening, it is about survival. 

It also reaffirms and confirms his essential unlovability as a defective, inadequate, unworthy, bad, and failing object. 

When women swap him for a substitute man ostentatiously or inform the narcissist about their cheating in detail, it is impossible to interpret their misconduct in any other way. 

2.And why do the narcissist feel that he is the rejected party if he is the one who is doing all the rejecting at first?

There is a qualitative difference between his rejection and theirs: the narcissist’s rejection is a mere test, posturing, "not serious", a bluff, and a facade. 

The etiology is different as is the motivation: his rejection is tentative, intermittent, targeted, and prospective ("Will my needs be met? Am I too crippled to be worthy of their investment, commitment, and unconditional love? "), their rejection is final, total, and retroactive ("my needs are not met ... he is not worth wasting time on").

In short, there is no equivalency or symmetry between his rejection of his intimate partners and their rejection of him: 

He rejects his women as a child would reject his mother: harmless though unpleasant temper tantrums coupled with understandable sexlessness. The cerebral never cheats on them (replaces them with other women or harm them).

The narcissist’s women reject him as a mother would reject her son: life threatening, harrowing, hurtful, coupled with understandable sexlessness. They cheat on him and betray him (replace him with other men and harm him).

Their response is the nuclear option, totally disproportionate to his provocations. They are reacting to the breakdown and the dysfunction of the idealized version of him, not to the real him: to their broken dreams, frustrated fantasies, and thwarted wishes. The narcissist bears the brunt of their dissonance.

He ends up being mortified because, during the grooming/lovebombing/honeymoon phase, he colludes in conjuring up the idealized him. He comes to believe in it as they both enter the shared fantasy. The women's abrupt and cruel exits force the narcissist to "wake up" and contrast the idealized, embraced, beloved him and the real, rejected, abandoned him.

The narcissist feels deceived and bitter because early on in the shared fantasy he had exposed the women to the child who served as a lure (to establish object constancy and forestall abandonment). They chose to ignore it at their peril. The narcissist thought it was an integral and essential part of the deal they had struck. When they cheated on the child and betrayed it, he felt that they had breached a contract. He doesn't deserve it. Plus, the child is narcissistic, sick, which renders the abandonment and betrayal even more egregious and heartless.

During the grooming phase, the narcissist trots out the Father. The woman has daddy issues and constructs her idealized version of him around it. He colludes in this process in order to transition as smoothly and seamlessly as possible to the shared fantasy.

Once in the shared fantasy, the narcissist reveal the child. It is a shocking revelation which causes resentment: the woman feels that she had been deceived. The child's narcissistic abuse type 1 and sexlessness is interpreted as humiliating rejection, withholding and abandonment. She withdraws and cheats or tries to bargain the child away and replace him with the idealized version. This results in narcissistic abuse type 2. 

Narcissistic abuse type 2 is adult and carried out by the Father, the core of the idealized version of me. This confluence renders it traumatic and hurtful. 

Yet, it is the narcissist’s self-assumed dual role that makes it easier and safer for his intimate partners to cheat in the first place:

The father role makes it feel safe for them to misbehave: they expected unconditional acceptance from the narcissists, regardless of their misconduct. 

They also did not perceive their actions as cheating or betrayal. One cannot cheat on a child or a father, both wouldn't mind or care. It is also common and accepted practice to carp regarding one's son or "old man". It does not constitute a betrayal. 

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