It's time to devalue and discard Trump before he does the same to us

Exiting the doom loop of narcissistic abuse

If past is prologue, and it most certainly is with a narcissist, the cycle of abuse through a shared fantasy is ineluctably set in stone with at first idealization, then followed by devaluation, then discard whether in a relational dyad or mass psychosis. While at face value it may sound great to many of us to be discarded by a prospective President Trump (good riddance!), the American public does not want a grievance filled president who would wreak havoc on us in animus-filled devalue/discard phases. One grudge of many that he could possibly hold over our collective heads is our failure to observe how he, not Biden, won the last election or so he claims in the "Big Lie”. It's imperative that some 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020, shake this fantasy-based addiction to this tyrant, than withstand in reality his slings and arrows another four years.

In order to exit the doom loop that is the narcissistic cycle of abuse, it's advisable to look at the pathological underpinnings of its structure.

Before, us Americans are collectively discarded like yesterday's trash, let's consider what's coming down the pike should Donald Trump win the United States presidency in 2024. The two minute video below illustrates his chronic history of flip-flopping (idealizing, devaluing and discarding) on his own staff, let alone the American public.

Transcript of the above video:

The people of the United States, and that is exactly what he will do and do better than anybody else can. Jeff Sessions was a disaster as Attorney General should have never been Attorney General, He is not qualified. He's not mentally qualified to be Attorney General.

We hope Bill Barr is going to be as good as we think, because Bill is a good. He is a great gentleman, a great man. And by the way, when Bill Barr who's, you know, a coward Bill Barr was coward. Bill Barr didn't do what he was supposed to do. I fired him. And he has great hatred.

In his new role as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley will serve as my top military adviser. I have absolute confidence that he will fulfill his duty with the same brilliance and fortitude he has shown throughout his long and very distinguished career. Milley, frankly, was incompetent. The last one I'd want to attack with as my leader would be Milley.

John Kelly will do a fantastic job. General Kelly has been a star, done an incredible job thus far, respected by everybody, a great, great American. I know John Kelly. He was with me. Didn't do a good job, had no temperament, and ultimately he was petered out. He was exhausted. This man was totally exhausted. He wasn't even able to function.

I am confident that Jay has the wisdom and leadership to guide our economy through any challenges that our great economy may face. And I had my own situation with Powell, and I beat the hell out of him. I was not a big fan of Powell. He was recommended by some people. I didn't like him.

Mika Brzezinski: A brief look back at Donald Trump claiming to have hired the best people only to trash them after they left his administration. It's something.

How Narcissist Betrays YOU to Become Himself

As adapted from my teacher on narcissism, Prof. Sam Vaknin, edited for length and clarity. Please note masculine and feminine pronouns are interchangeable.

What explains the narcissist pendulating from idealization to devaluation?

F. M. Sander first proposed the concept of shared fantasy in 1989. Shared fantasy is a fantastic space where the narcissist can re-experience his childhood trauma safely. It's divorced from reality because reality hurts. Reality is unpredictable, dangerous, and uncontrollable.

The narcissist constructs the shared fantasy which is a paracosm (fantasy world) and invites you in.

What are the stages of the shared fantasy?

1. Co-idealization

The first phase is idealization, love bombing. The narcissist love bombs you, idealizes you by telling you that you're perfect, that you're brilliant, that you're drop dead gorgeous, that you're super intelligent, that he has never had such an experience before you.

This process of idealizing you gets you addicted to your own idealized image as a perfect being via the narcissist gaze through a process called mirroring. The narcissist invites you to a mirror when you see yourself multiplied in an idealized form. It's addictive.

By photoshopping/idealizing your introject, the snapshot that the narcissist has taken of you, the narcissist actually claims to own you because you're an internal object. This snapshot is called the introject. The narcissist then internalizes the introject.

By idealizing you, the narcissist is actually idealizing himself. It's in his mind and he owns it. It becomes an extension of him. He merges/fuses with it. The introject becomes an integral part of the narcissist's brain. And so the narcissist owns a totally good object, a totally perfect object, your snapshot, your avatar.

Now your avatar or snapshot have nothing to do with you and increasingly less and less to do with you actually.

But in the narcissist's mind, the only reality is your snapshot. The only real thing is your avatar with which he interacts, never with you, always with your representation in his mind.

The narcissist has a dialogue with the object in his mind, the internal object that stands in for you. You're no longer relevant. Only how you appear in the narcissist's mind is relevant.

And because this representation, this avatar is all good and perfect and brilliant and amazing and the narcissist owns it, it makes him equally good and brilliant and perfect and amazing.

By owning it, the narcissist imbues himself with the attributes of the object.

2. Dual Mothership

In the dual mothership phase, the narcissist gradually converts you into a maternal figure, a stand-in for his original mother, in other words, the introject of his mother in his mind.

In a dual mothership, you mother the narcissist, and the narcissist mothers you. He's trying to convert you into a competing introject to displace his original mother.

He forces you to become his mother and tests you with narcissistic abuse to see if you will provide unconditional love. Are you going to idealize him the way mothers idealize his children? It's a recreation of childhood with you in the mother role.

At the same time, the narcissist offers you mothership. He becomes your mother, your parental figure and offers you unconditional love through idealization.

This process is extremely addictive. It's very difficult to let go of this psychodynamic process, because it's a second chance at having a proper childhood with a good enough mother. It's the first time you can love yourself through the narcissist's maternal gaze. The narcissist offers you a second chance to love yourself through a maternal gaze.

Why would the narcissist want you to be his mother?

His original experience with his mother has been abject, obnoxious and horrible.

The narcissist had never separated from his mother.

Why would the narcissist want to go through it again? Because he never got a chance to separate from his original mother.

The narcissist’s original mother was what André Green called a dead mother. Dead not in the physical sense, dead in the emotional sense, an absent, selfish, narcissistic, demanding, smothering, abusive, instrumentalizing, parentifying mother. A bad mother, a not “good enough mother” in the language of Donald Winnicott.

This kind of mother doesn't allow the child to separate from her. She annexes the child. She treats the child as an integral part of her. She merges and fuses with the child and leverages the child as an extension, so the child never gets the chance to separate. Because he cannot separate, the narcissist never gets the chance to individuate, to become an individual with his own developed ego.

The narcissist was unable to separate from his mother as a child because he had been abused or traumatized. The mother wouldn't let him go for various reasons. She could have been possibly selfish, narcissistic, depressed, dependent on the child, parentified the child or maybe just found the child to be a satisfactory source of sadistic supply, tortured the child in various ways. Whatever the reason may be, the narcissist mother refused to let him go, refused to allow him to set firm boundaries to become an individual divided from her.

The narcissist is then stuck and cannot develop and cannot become an adult. He is stuck in a perpetual loop known as repetition compulsion with his mother of origin trying desperately to separate from her in his mind and failing consistently.

Here you come along and you become the narcissist's new mother. And with you, the narcissist stands a chance to separate.

Finally, he can complete the incomplete process of childhood. He can move into the world a bit grandiosely, take on reality and perhaps grow up, realize his potential, self-actualize, become an adult.

He needs to separate from you the way he didn't do with his mother of origin. He needs to reenact the separation.

How can he separate from you? He needs to discard you.

The only way to separate from you is to get rid of you, so he does this in his mind.

3. Mental Discard

The narcissist begins the separation from you in his mind. But the minute he starts to discard you in his mind, this has two adverse effects.

It creates two problems, two very difficult psychological processes. The first one, abandonment, anxiety, separation and security. The narcissist is afraid to lose you. And the second one is narcissistic injury.

Because if the narcissist is compelled to discard you, if he feels the need to get rid of you, it means that his judgment of you was wrong. It means you were not ideal. It means he misjudged you. It means that he's not omniscient. He's not all-knowing. He's not god-like.

The very fact that he is compelled, forced to separate from you, owing to his internal processes, to his incomplete business with mother, the fact that he needs to get rid of you, to exit the shared fantasy, to leave you behind, this fact implies that he has made an error of judgment with you, that he was less than perfect, that he is fallible, and that he can commit and did commit a mistake. That's a major narcissistic injury.

How to overcome this narcissistic injury? Narcissistic injury is very painful. It's intolerable for the narcissist.

How to overcome the abandonment anxiety, which also threatens the narcissist's precarious internal balance?

The answer, devaluation.

The narcissist needs to devalue you, but he needs to devalue you as an external object.

The minute he devalues you as an external object, he restores his sense of grandiosity. He wipes clean the narcissistic injury, and he has no more abandonment anxiety.

What does it mean to devalue you as an external object?

It means to look at you in a new way. It means to say, for example, she has changed. I wasn't wrong about her. I'm never wrong, but she has changed or she is manipulative, malevolent, and deceitful. She hid information from me. That's why I misjudged her. Or she is no good. I have evolved. I have grown up. I have developed. And she was left behind. We have diverged, etc. These are all forms of devaluing the external object.

Now, the minute the external object is devalued, it's worthless. The minute the external object is no longer idealized, no longer good, this allows the narcissist to restore his grandiosity. There's no narcissistic injury. He wasn't wrong, after all. You may have deceived him, or you have changed, or he has changed. So he wasn't wrong, after all.

So there's no narcissistic injury and grandiosity restored. And there's no abandonment anxiety, because why have abandonment anxiety with a devalued object?

I mean, it's a good thing to lose a devalued object.

This creates an ego-congruent sense of discard, of a formerly idealized object.

In other words, now, the narcissist feels comfortable, egosyntonic, comfortable with his internal mental decision, to discard you.

When the narcissist devalues the external object as a way to overcome the narcissistic injury, restore grandiosity, and ameliorate abandonment anxiety, the minute he does this, on the way to separating from you, which is the overriding goal, but the minute he does this, there is an abyss, there is a gap, which opens between you as a devalued object and the snapshot of you, which is still idealized.

The introject of you, the avatar of you, the internal representation of you, this internal object is still idealized.

But you, out there, you have been devalued, so there is a discrepancy. There is divergence between the snapshot and you as an external object.

And this creates anxiety, because the narcissist feels that something is wrong, something has gone awry.

How can it be that you are so devalued and your snapshot is so idealized?

He needs to resolve this.

And the way he resolves this is the way every two-year-old resolves similar conflicts with his mother.

He splits you, in other words, he adopts black and white dichotomous thinking.

Splitting defense is a primitive, infantile defense mechanism that asserts “Mother is all good, I'm all bad. Or mother is all bad, I'm all good.”

And now that the narcissist needs to discard you. He needs to make peace between the devalued external object (you) and his idealized internal object, your inner representation.

There's a discrepancy, you have been devalued, the internal object is idealized and he splits. He now says that the introject is all bad. He devalues the introject.

The minute he devalues the introject, the minute he kind of mutilates the snapshot, the minute he attributes to the snapshot everything that's bad, everything that's evil, everything that's imperfect, the minute he does this, he himself becomes grandiosely all good.

And now he is ready to discard you.

He is virtuous. He is all good. He is perfect. He is again godlike. He is grandiose.

And you are the opposite of all this. You're all bad. You're all defective and deformed. You're all dysfunctional. You're all stupid and ugly.

So he's ready to discard you.

And there's an actual discard.

He never sees you again.

But your snapshot, your introject remains in his mind.

But having discarded you, he was left with an introject.

And there is a process of co-devaluation.

You remember co-idealization?

If I have a good, perfect introject in my mind, then I'm good and perfect.

But what if I have a bad, worthless, worthless, imperfect, evil introject in my mind?

Then I'm the same.

Evil, imperfect, etc.

This is co-devaluation.

It's utterly intolerable.

So what the narcissist tries to do when he discards you, he tries to hand over the introject to you, because now the introject is defaced, is mutilated, is a reminder, a constant reminder of bad things, imperfect things, evil things, dangerous things.

The narcissist doesn't want this inside his mind. He wants to get rid of it. He wants to hand it over to you. And he wants to convince you, he tries to coerce you and convince you to agree with his devaluation of you. He wants you to say to him, "Yes, I'm all bad. Yes, I'm imperfect. Yes, I provoked you. Yes, I made mistakes all the time. Yes, I ruined everything. Yes, it's my fault, etc."

When you do this, he can hand the devalued introject to you so that you can own the devalued introject. It's like he gets rid of you externally and internally only if you agree with his assessment of you as a bad and worthy object.

But of course, very few people do.

The narcissist remains stuck with the introject that is now a source of extreme dissonance and discomfort because it devalues the narcissist from inside.

If a narcissist owns an internal object which is less than perfect, which is dysfunctional, which is malevolent, then the narcissist is this internal object.

After all, it's an internal object. It's part of who the narcissist is.

When the narcissist fails to hand over the introject to you, this has serious psychological consequences. It's kind of internal mortification.

But sometimes, even when the partner accepts her newfound role as the evil, deformed, malevolent, stupid, mentally ill person, even when the partner concurs with the devaluation, even then the narcissist fails to hand over the introject. The narcissist always fails to hand over the devalued introject to the discarded partner.

Always. There's no exception.

Either because the partner would not comply and would not collude in devaluing herself or because of what is called introject constancy.

The narcissist has no relationships with real people. He has no relationships with objects out there. He has no object constancy, because he doesn't interact and relate to objects.

Instead, he interacts and relates with internal objects, not objects out there, objects inside. These objects are called introjects.

He has introject constancy. He derives a sense of safety and comfort, and he's able to function because he has very good relationships with objects inside his mind, introject constancy.

So when he tries to get rid of one of these objects, when he tries to hand over an introject to someone, he experiences severe, abundant anxiety. It's like his real relationship is with the introject. He's emotionally invested. He's cathected in the introject, not in you.

So when he discards you and he wants to hand over the introject to put his hand inside his brain and to pluck the introject and give it to you, this creates enormous anxiety because it's like being abandoned by the introject.

And so he can't cope with this.

The process of getting rid of your devalued introject in his mind never works. Either you don't collaborate with your new devalued image or the narcissist experiences overwhelming, abundant anxiety when he tries to hand over the introject to you because he is bonded with the introject. He's attached to an introject. You could say that he loves in his own way the introject.

How can you hand over someone you love?

He fails.

The devalued, the split, the all bad introject remains stuck in his mind as an internal object and he can't get rid of it.

And this creates enormous anxiety.

The clinical term for this is bad object internalization introjection.

That's what happens to him.

In his desperate attempt to separate from you as a maternal figure, he needed to discard you mentally, then devalue you and discard you externally, then devalue your introject and then get rid of the introject.

And this is where he fails.

All the other phases are successful, but he fails in getting rid of the introject and it remains like an ulcer, like a wound inside his mind tormenting and torturing him by reminding him that there is a part of him, this introject, which is not perfect, which is not god-like, a part of him, which is a failure, part of him, which is bad and unworthy and perhaps evil.

He is tormented by the fact that one of his internal objects is a cause and an engine of narcissistic injury, constant narcissistic injury.

It's like having a child who is disabled or intellectually challenged.

Narcissists can't cope with this because it's a constant reminder of failure and of the fact that they are not god-like and not perfect.

So there's this introject inside his mind. The introject, which has been devalued, keeps telling the narcissist, you see, there's a part of you that is devalued, a part of you that is not god-like and not perfect.

This creates anxiety.

What to do about it?

Hoovering. (sucking you back into the shared fantasy like the eponymous vacuum cleaner)

The only way to reintegrate this corrupted and devalued internal object with an external object, the only way to reduce anxiety is by re-idealizing you as an external object and then the narcissist can re-idealize the internal object.

So when the narcissist gets rid of you, there's a discard. He gets stuck with your representation in his mind. He has devalued you and he has devalued this representation. He has devalued your introject, your avatar in his mind.

But this causes him a lot of discomfort and anxiety because it means that he is less than perfect by virtue of owning such an object, by virtue of being this object, being a part of him.

So he needs to re-idealize you and this allows him to re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety, ameliorate, mitigate the anxiety.

Now everyone, every single internal object in his mind is perfect because every single object in his mind is perfect. He is perfect.

But he can't accomplish this unless you are perfect too.

So he needs to reverse the process of devaluation, the process that has failed. The process of devaluation has failed because he couldn't get rid of the devalued introject.

So he needs to reverse this and re-idealize you.

But then if he re-idealizes you, the separation has failed and this is exactly what happens.

The narcissist never succeeds to separate from you.

And even if you never see him again, he's going to re-enact, replay the same dynamic with his new intimate partner and his next intimate partner.

And intimate partner number 40. This is called repetition compulsion.

The narcissist’s wishes to separate conflicts irredeemably and irretractably and conflicts in a way that cannot be resolved with his grandiosity.

In order to separate from the maternal figure, who is you, the mother that is his intimate partner, he needs to devalue her.

But if he devalues her, he devalues himself via the introject, via the devalued introject, co-idealization, co-devaluation.

And so this conflicts with his grandiosity. He cannot separate from you because this constitutes narcissistic injury.

Separating from you leaves him stuck with a part of him, a representation of you, which is corrupt, which is dysfunctional, which is less than perfect.

So he has to choose. He can devalue you and discard you by devaluing your introject in his mind, but that would leave him less than god-like, less than perfect, because then he would have an introject which is less than god-like and less than perfect in his mind as part of him.

So he has to give up on his grandiosity if he wants to separate.

And if he insists on maintaining his grandiosity, he needs everything and everyone around him to be ideal, including you.

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Devaluation is a departure from narcissism. It's the narcissist's attempt to become normal, to grow up, to become an adult.

And the narcissist much prefers to idealize you because by idealizing you, he's idealizing himself.

He's forced to devalue you. He doesn't want to do it, but he's forced to devalue you because he desperately is attempting to become, to separate, to individuate, to self-actualize.

The only way for him to do that is to get rid of his grandiosity, to get rid of his narcissism, to separate from the source of all this pathology.

His mother and now you as a stand-in for his mother, as a substitute for his mother.

Ironically, devaluation is perhaps a healthy act, an act of mental health of the narcissist because he's devaluing a figure which has damaged him.

He's devaluing his mother, who was really a monster in many ways. So it's a healthy thing to do.

But then he clashes with his grandiosity, clashes with his pathology, and his pathology is much stronger than any feeble attempts at mental health.

And he takes over and he's forced to re-idealize everyone and everything around him and inside him, you included.

He tries to win over you and if he doesn't win over you, he goes on to the next intimate partner and he does exactly the same.

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Recap: The shared fantasy is the space within which narcissists interact with intimate partners. The shared fantasy has multiple stages, including co-idealization, dual mothership, mental discard, and devaluation.

It starts with co-idealization.

The narcissist idealizes you and by doing so, he's idealizing himself.

It also allows him to get you addicted to him because you see your idealized image through his gaze and that is very addictive.

The next stage is dual mothership.

The narcissist becomes your mother, gives you unconditional love and acceptance and idealizes you and you become his mother.

But you become his mother in order to allow him to separate from you.

He has unfinished business with his mother of origin and he wants you to play a role so that he can finish the business with you this time.

He needs to separate from you.

But the very need to separate from you causes narcissistic injury because it means that he misjudged you. It means that he is not all-knowing as a god should be.

So what he does, he devalues you, the external object.

By devaluing you, he restores his grandiosity, he erases the narcissistic injury and he reduces his abandonment anxiety.

At that point, he splits. He has devalued you but there is an introject of you, a representation of you in his mind which is still idealized.

So what he does, he splits you.

He makes the introject your inner representation in his mind. He makes it all bad and so he becomes all good and now he is ready to discard you in real life.

He has you as a devalued object, he has your introject as a devalued object, he is ready to get rid of you.

But he wants to get rid of your introject also.

He is trying to hand it over to you. He wants you to own this devalued corrupted internal representation of you, your introject.

And he wants you to acknowledge that you are bad, that you are imperfect, that you destroyed everything, that you are to blame, that you should be guilty and ashamed of it.

If you don't collude with this game, he has a problem because he is stuck with your introject that has now been devalued.

This creates a process known as co-devaluation which is the opposite of co-idealization.

When the internal object is all good and idealized, the narcissist is all good and idealized.

When your internal object in his mind is corrupted and all bad and unworthy, the narcissist is corrupted and all bad and unworthy. It's co-devaluation.

But he cannot get rid of this introject in any other way.

If you refuse to own it and collaborate, he cannot get rid of it in any other way because he has introject constancy. He is emotionally invested in introjects, not in people.

So he's invested in your introject. He's invested in your avatar, emotionally.

And when he tries to get rid of it unilaterally, without your collaboration, he feels anxiety because this generates introject inconstancy.

So he is stuck with devalued, split, all bad introject as an internal object, and this creates enormous anxiety.

To resolve this anxiety, the narcissist approaches you, hoovering, and tries to re-idealize.

Having re-idealized you, he can then re-idealize the internal object and remove the source of anxiety. 

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And the cycle of abuse through the shared fantasy begins again…unless the insignificant other wisens up and goes no contact.