Love

Thank you Akuma. I am actually going to try and stick with the therapy BTW.

I think it difficult to separate the things that I'm protecting onto people from what they actually are. I do see people as an extention of myself though. The biggest example of this is my daughter. When she was young I can even remember saying it to her that what she does reflects directly on me. I learned this wasn't a good thing to do if I wanted her to become her own person.

I can see now how I do this with other people as well.

I like the idea of love.

When I was young I used to be casually involved with quite a few men. Some married, some single and some in relationships and it was fun to just have one night affairs with them every now and then and then just walk away the next day. I think that was the closest thing to love that I've felt for another person. We'd have sex, chat all night, make plans that we both knew would come to nothing, we'd share a cigarette, tell each other our secrets and dreams and it was really good.

I loved the situation, I think I loved them for that short amount of time and it also made me feel good as a person and those occasions are some of the fondest of my life.

I could never imagine something like that on aong term basis though.

Love is a feeling. Its works owards a specific person, but It varies in the intensity of the fall. The feeling drives certain thought and behaviors, to name a few: you have to do anything for this person, to be together. Your heart races when they are near. In certain moments when they feel your love its a comforting warmth, very energetic and sexual. Hurting them hurts you (that is if you have empathy).
If you are rejected you cry and grieve (similar to death of someone close), It makes your heart hurt.
You are jealous of this person, it feels realy realy bad, somewhat like fear. Jealousy makes you strive for their attention. You cant let any other romantic partners get close to them.
Yes its possible to learn to love someone, and everyone has to learn it, you can only learn by falling in love with someone and being in love, and connecting, empathising. And how it ties in to the narcissistic predicament. I post about the experience in the thread "Learning empathy from the heartbreak continued"

Esmoke wrote:I’ve read this dynamic and I’m trying to completely understand it. Do you think the person with the PD is aware of this dynamic, do they actually see the other person as an extension of themselves and idealized parts of themselves or is it more of an unconscious thing similar to projecting where you may hate another person for showing the same traits that you actually hate in yourself but are unaware that is why you don’t like them?

That has a lot of layers so I can just randomly grab stuff and hope it sheds light somehow.
First of all, the mechanism of projection actually - from a psychodynamic POV - is directly connected with this sort of perception. The idea is that there is a hierarchy of defense mechanisms, some of which are very primitive and are used very early on by infants already, others are used much later and require certain more complex internal mechanics / neurological networks if you so want, to even be used. Projection and especially projective identification are part of those early ones. This also means that the barrier between subject and object is not clearly defined, the ability to distinguish between a clear, three-dimensional "me" and "other" arent there. So when certain regressive phenomena occur or certain areas of the mind need to work on stuff that didnt have the opportunity to develop, projective [or interpersonal] defenses will be used, as a means to compensate for the inability to tolerate certain things, or to defend against them with purely "intrapsychic" means, thereby underlining the [unconscious] delusion that the otheris part of me, or has parts of me, or is in me, or i am on him, or he is on me etc... there can be lots of variants. All of that will have effects in my interactions in some way of course, but most of them might be hard to see. And the defense itself, yes, that will - not always but most of the time - remain unseen.
On the topic of fragments, what I've seen a lot and which I start to see in myself here and there is that reality of certain - I would say missing psychological parts - which make it hard to understand certain concepts. I remember I've told many borderline/narcissist people on here in the past about their "relationships", that they werent actual relationships for example. Those people were basiaclly only fighting, then getting together again idealizing each other, then breaking up... on a weekly basis. So I told them that what they had was actually not a relationship at all, did not hold love or intimacy at all, but a personality crisis and an addiction to intensity... and I explained why. Naturally this never brought that reality into their awareness. Or there is a lot of people who should be working on themselves, who could develop into something different, but when you look closely it seems not only dont they have the motivation, ot the strength, or even on a lower level the ability to "keep with the thing", but even deeper they lack the ability to comprehend "progress" or "development", for them its not a thing at all. If you ask them about it they will tell you they do of course and they will be convinced about it. But in the same way like a bordeliner will fail to give a detailed [normal-level] description of their loved ones for example, while being completely obliviosu to the fact that they dont have a intimate relationship with that [whole] person - if you ask a bit, you quickly see that there is lots of holes there and there is no real understanding at all. Even writing this it might be that some readers will fail tos ee how this even connects to fragmentation or projective or splitting processes, so even from the outside it can be quite hard.
The ability to perceive those things in oneself depends in turn on something for which I think theres only a German word, namely "therapeutische Ich-Spaltung", so that ability to look at yourself as an observer with a certain curiosity, which in turn is a foundation for therapy. But that ability again of course can become hampered if your ego becomes split, or if you are shifting into states that make access to certain areas impossible. There can be obvious occurances of such shifts of course where you see yourself for periods being in a totally different internal conainer, where everything is suddenly dark and meaningless... or you sit in therapy and there is not a single thought in your mind for a long time. So you can perceiv that, but you cant perceive what it means or what causes it.
Lastly more specifically on the topic of pathological narcissism, I think its interesting to look at the DSM criteria for "interpersonal exploitativeness". If you read what the DSM says about it, it becomes much clearer what they mean is totalyl different from the conning and manipulation of the ASPD diagnosis. They describe it more as a sideeffect of grandiosity and entitlement, so you will use other people because you expect them to be parts of your reality, you expect them to make way for you, to behave like you want, the king arrives and everyboy naturally bows clears a path. So in some way such people will of course be aware that the other people are in a way extensions of their inner world, they must be aware of that, else there would be a field of darkness extending around then that might be much more dangerous than the extension of grandiosity. But at the same time they are not aware of it, because its so normal and theres no abiliyt to imagine it differently.

Akuma: Great post thanks

Esmoke wrote:Akuma: Great post thanks

Indeed. Straight to the jugular that.

Esmoke wrote:Akuma: Great post thanks

It was a good post.

I can remember being in a relationship where that's all it was. Just fighting and making up.

It was the only long term relationship I've ever been in and I woke up one day and realised that it wasn't actually a relationship. I walked away and didn't turn back.

I promised myself to neveret that happen again.