Narcissist’s Betrayal Fantasy: Painful Mommy Separation
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2023-01-10

Narcissistic supply, even sex are anxiolytic. So is betrayal. Narcissist has been betrayed by his mother in early childhood. He seeks to recreate this betrayal throughout life. He chooses fake friends who badmouth him, steal from him, poach his mates, and betray him. He behaves obnoxiously to make people hate him and hurt him. And he pushes his intimate partners to betray him in a variety of ways, including by cheating on him.

Narcissists convert intimate partner to a substitute mother in order to accomplish separation-individuation. 

One way to make this happen is by insistently and persistently pushing the partner to betray the narcissist for example by being with another man. This way, separation is coupled with debilitating pain to guarantee its irreversibility and finality. The narcissist always mourns the mother fantasy, not the actual departed intimate partner.

The narcissist is not a masochistic cuckold. He does not get sexually aroused by the betrayal. On the contrary, his subsequent suffering causes depression and a decrease in libido. 

Mate poaching is not met with mate guarding or sexual gatekeeping but with projective identification with the partner and mate sharing with the man she would cheat with (often chosen by the narcissist himself). 

Having idealized his partner, the narcissist's self-idealization (grandiosity) depends on his ownership of her. Relinquishing her to another man, handing her over to another man undermines the narcissist's sense of self-worth and results in self-devaluation so extreme that the bad object takes over and its dual messages are amplified: you are not lovable and you do not deserve happiness. 

The narcissist is also extremely envious of the other man who now comes to possess the good, idealized object. He feels like a self-destructive fool for having handed her over to a man who envied him for possessing her, desired her, and will now replace him in her heart and mind, likely badmouthing the narcissist as a predator or a monster. He feels that his repetition compulsion renders him defenseless, disrespected by everyone involved, weak, and pathetic. He consoles himself by clinging to the fact that he made it all happen, he was in control, the others being merely puppets. 

The narcissist perceives the man the partner cheats with as superior to him in some ways. The narcissist is a child and mother is cheating on him with a real man, a grown up. These are the preconditions for separation: a devalued mother and a painful breakup in a reenacted childhood. It involved splitting as a precondition for individuation: child all good, mother all bad.

The narcissist engineers the whole situation of betrayal. He is fully in control of it. He selects mates who are more likely to collaborate in realizing it: promiscuous, unboundaried, and mentally ill. Such women are anyhow prone to fantasy and they collude with the narcissist to the point of complying with his wishes even when his demands of them are ego dystonic (for example: that they cheat on him). 

The narcissist then abuses them, prompts them to betray him, and sets the stage even to the point of choosing the other man. 

But his fantasy is that of having fallen victim to an evil partner (reminiscent of his real mother). His fantasy is mostly counterfactual and delusional (persecutory), but he defends it fiercely in order to accomplish separation-individuation from both a bad mother and her sadistic, tormenting introject. 

But this attempt is doomed to failure owing to its inherent contradictions.

The narcissist distorts and reframes reality, deceives himself into accepting a version of the events which is largely untrue but excruciatingly agonizing and, therefore, conducive to separation-individuation: a confabulated fable of rejection and humiliation. But such a confabulation only buttresses and magnifies the twin messages of the bad object (you are no good and therefore deserve no happiness and you are not lovable).  So, the cycle has to be restarted with a new partner.

Narcissist’s self-harming is a form of emotional disinvestment (decathexis). Separation requires it. Watch Narcissist's Emotional Involvement Preventive Measures (EIPMs) 

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