Serial idealizers, Anxious People-pleasers, Addicts: NOT Narcissists
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- Some behaviors and psychodynamic processes appear to be artifacts of pathological narcissism - but are not. Consider, for example, serial idealizers and anxious people-pleasers.
Serial idealizers go through brief sexual episodes or micro-relationships at a dizzying speed. They instantly and counterfactually idealize a date or a random stranger - or even a group of them! - as potential mates or friends.
Sometimes within minutes from a chance encounter, they construct a one-sided fantastic narrative and act as though it were true.
The fantasy has three functions:
1. To legitimize ego dystonic or socially unacceptable sex acts or sexual choices, or sex with strangers which is more typically associated with intimate partners;
2. To make the serial idealizer feel good: loved, accepted, wanted, and liked;
3. To facilitate bonding and attachment should the fiction be reciprocated and become a shared fantasy.
The serial idealizer may attempt to compulsively recreate the experiences, hoping for better outcomes with the same partners or with different ones.
Like the narcissist, the serial idealizer is interacting with an internal object, not with the real sex partner or date. This way, she avoids the emotional costs of rejection (“I couldn’t care less what a stranger I will never see again thinks about me”).
Inevitably and almost invariably, reality painfully diverges from the fantastic yarn. This justifies moving on with minimal heartbreak to the next target - or cheating, if in a committed relationship.
People pleasing is sometimes a life strategy intended to ameliorate extreme generalized anxiety. The world is perceived as hostile or frustrating and the only defense is to be “liked”, “loved”, or “accepted” by others, whether individuals or collectives.
Anxiety-driven people pleasers have no personal boundaries. They would do anything and agree to everything in order to belong: be treated as an objectified sex slave in one-on-one or in group settings; be verbally, emotionally and physically abused; and let themselves be taken advantage of and exploited.
In fact, these people pleasers interpret sexual and other forms of abuse as “initiation rites”: proof positive of having been inducted into a relationship or a fraternity/sorority.
Anxious people pleasers place emphasis on material objects or money: objective measures of affection, sharing, and goodwill.
Gifts are understood as signs of affiliation. They are devastated when they are taken financial advantage of or stolen from by the very people whose favor they seek to curry.
Addicts (alcoholics, junkies, gamblers, all sorts) share several important clinical features with both psychopaths and narcissists:
1. Grandiosity which is partly the outcome of disinhibition (“alcohol myopia” for example) and a sense of immunity to the consequences of one’s actions;
2. Low threshold of boredom and reduced tolerance for routines. This leads to novelty seeking and recklessness;
3. Defiance and contumaciousness (disdain for social mores, propriety, and authority);
4. Mendaciousness: ubiquitous lying, disloyalty, sexual and romantic cheating, and attempts to cover up antisocial activities and misconduct or to resolve cognitive dissonances. Addicts lead double or parallel lives;
5. Deficient impulse control and impaired ability to delay gratification.
Addicts deceive themselves that they are in full control of their addictions and can pull out any time.
Addiction is often a dysfunctional attempt to reassert control over the addict’s life by maintaining the illusion of choice or free will (“I choose to drink”, “I want the sex”, “I love to gamble or shop”).
The same psychodynamic characterizes eating disorders (though body dysmorphia is rarely an integral part of the addiction itself).
Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) suffer from two core issues:
1. They feel much safer with strangers, even when these new acquaintances are unpleasant, than with their intimate partners, especially when these mates are loving.
Being loved provokes in the Borderline a cascade of negative consequences:
1. Pain aversion: a catastrophized fear of ultimate heartbreak, abandonment, and rejection;
2. Paranoid ideation regarding the manipulative hidden agenda of the loving partner;
3. Avoidant behaviors;
4. Passive-aggression;
5. Fear of engulfment, of being consumed by the mate.
Faced with such stressors, Borderlines often act out violently or recklessly.
Some Borderlines cheat in order to preempt intolerable abandonment and undermine intimacy.
Cheating also upholds their view of themselves as “bad, corrupt, hopeless” or “whore”.
Such misbehavior is often coupled with substance abuse.
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This year I painfully had to learn that I am an anxious people pleaser. I have covered my eyes from this truth for 45 years until the beginning of 2021. Now, at the end of 2021, I have put myself into big trouble because I was too afraid to say NO to certain people (including my wife and family). I just begin my recovery process, and it will take some time, I think.
I wish you a good recovery
Sam this is one of your best lecture on Personality Disorder, narcissistic fantasy and defensive idealisation from series of your videos. Very evocative lecture on a v.pertinent topic.
Wholy shit, this was me. Without the healing I've experienced, I don't think I would have ever understood it. I look at how I used to be as pathetic. Ive stopped half way through the video, and am hopeful you will explain how a child into adult manifest into this. Was it that we never felt loved so looked for it elsewhere? Makes me cry to think I was like this. This video was really good and very insightful. Can't thank you enough Prof. Vaknin. Awareness is sooo important. (edit: the last point of group sex was not me.)
Science is descriptive not predictive. While it would be awesome to make sure these mistakes never occur to anyone else, the truth is psychology and our understanding of these mental diseases are misunderstood and it's a field that's still relatively new. Maybe when we understand more about neuroscience the answers will be more obvious, but how and why the mind works the way it does is still a human mystery.
Children naturally idolize their parents. And we all must idolize an other being, in order to love them. I think Narcissist take advantage of this, and subvert it by withholding it for punishment.
Caro you are not alone ;)
Thank you so much Professor. This has been the most eye opening video of yours that I’ve seen. I’m truly coming to comprehend my own maladaptive traits. Thank you for not leading the people astray. Bare in mind I’m a serial idealizer but you sir are like Moses leading the people through the desert! God bless you 🙏🏻
But then how do you tell the difference? I listen to you and sometimes I feel there are not even one single person who is healthy in the face of the earth.
There is no-one on this earth that is perfect. We are all damaged in one way or another......some more than others.
"We are all a little cracked about the head" Melville
Healthy? What is healthy? Let’s be careful judging people and jumping to conclusions. Maybe, support one another the best we can. Everyone is doing their best with the tools they have.
If you ask “what is healthy”, you are not healthy.
Watching too many videos like this might not always be a good thing. It's two-sided. We can learn a lot from them but we can also become cynical or paranoïde or too much focused on abnormalities everywhere. While these things take place on a spectrum from totally unhealthy to totally healthy and these two extremes don't even exist. Many people have doubtful or unhealthy traits or dispositions. Good to recognize them but not good to clinicalize them in general. Besides it can be a heroic lifetime work to see our flaws and see how it goes together with flaws from others, like a puzzle, and see how predestined it was, already from childhood. Trying to change the dynamics while everybody is trying to keep us in the game. Everybody is " crazy" or dark to a point, more or less. We must navigate - if we became conscious- to that end of the " less" ... It's about percentages and grey area's and protecting our sanity.
You nailed it. My mother is BPD in every way you have articulated
My longtime girlfriend, who I loved very much, became a pill addict and started acting in very traditional narcissistic ways for the last three years and she was always a bit selfish and a bit of a bully but I was able to brush it aside through strength of character and trying to be understanding but she’s now gotten so out of hand that I can’t deal with it anymore. I pulled the plug but she seems to not care at all and I truly don’t know if she’s a narcissist or just mirroring the tendencies from the addiction but the underlying selfishness and bullying makes me think she’s always been a narcissist and it’s just more prominent now
@@fooled_twice4668 I now have a wonderful woman that isn’t narcissistic or selfish at all and I didn’t even think that existed in the world
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with the rest of us. It’s always so informative. I truly wish you could dive a little deeper into the issue of addiction to substances (drugs or alcohol) and narcissism. For example, a narcissist who abuses substances vs. an addict who displays so many traits of a narcissist. I think a lot of people incorrectly give a person a “diagnosis” of narcissism, when that person’s behavior is due to addiction to drugs or alcohol. I don’t have any background in medicine or psychology, and most of us don’t. Many of the impacts of narcissistic abuse can be very similar to those the families of someone with severe addiction to drugs/ alcohol experience. It would help a lot of people understand the situation around substance abuse a lot better.
🤣🤣👌Sam I will watch this later you have put me off laughing in the start
I have a friend at the moment locked in this dynamic, he is the anxious people pleaser. He is financially exploited and indicated menticide early in the relationship. This makes sense following his childhood where he was forced to swap authenticity for attachment in the face of parents who resented his existence (both living someone else's life); as it makes sense following knowledge that his girlfriend's upbringing saw her exist mainly as a projection of her parents (had toys but wasn't allowed to play with them/exist as object in and extension of parent's mind). Despite this, my friend is still with her, always saying (X=girlfriend) "Me and X, me and X, me and X" as if scared to have his own thoughts. When you said that to the anxious people pleaser the menticide might be interpreted as an initiation rite to relationship and belonging, a light went on.
It's a shame to see his self-lessness because I understand what a cancer or MS profile is, but it's impossible to impart on unwilling ears, of course. I hope he finds a way to overcome. I'll continue to be a presence and hope that he does, before it's too late.
P.S. He is now on anxiety meds, he's been for two massages in his life and both said he had the most tension they'd ever felt and his two gfs have came as a result of ONE swipe on Tinder. The one previous died. This might be an instructive profile for a people pleaser. Very intelligent, doctor in his field.
@@m-bronte My narcissistic & addicted parents created an alcoholic daughter, a covert, hoarding and dangerous Narc daughter, a dysfunctional son, and a people pleaser daughter who ended up taking care of everyone else. Nailed it Dr Sam. This People pleaser is now FREE!
Damn, this makes so much sense...
Wow!! Thank you so much
That pretty much describes the victims of Narcissists.
Idealization is a major codependent trait, & it keeps that toxic dynamic flowing til it doesn’t.
@@zensurf2709 Specially if the idealized person is your parent.
Malignant narcissists often target borderlines for food, while borderline uses narc for love. The two go hand in hand. Narc plays with borderline like a pull toy- and is extremely addicted to the intense emotional reactions he/she can trigger in the borderline, makes them feel like a God. Intermittent reinforcement keeps borderline addicted but it actually goes much deeper than that. Narc 'loves' the borderline because the borderline makes them feel 'whole' or 'complete'. The narc also uses the borderline to project all the things they don't like about him/herself onto the borderline but also builds the borderline back up during the idealization phase.
The borderline has an unstable identity and this cognitive dissonance from the narc is destructive and insanely addictive.
It's insidious isn't it? Who wouldn't like being treated the best you have ever been treated before? It feels too good to be real, all that and only 1 minute in? Hard to resist, and addictive. But soon, you will have to pay for that. With much more than anybody can possibly do for anybody. Having this happen to you, does not necessarily make you borderline.
@@mandaloolux9216
Amazing video. Hurtfuly helpful (hopefully in the future to come).
Is there a video on your chanel on how to stop the behaviours of serial idealization, anxious people pleasing and de-asociation?
Practice nothingness, deconstruction and reconstruction?
Search the healing and recovery playlist.
I wish someone could make a video about people pleasers versus narcissists about parents. They are all about sex and ewe when it’s your mom you are trying to figure out if she is a narcissist or codependent people pleaser. Gift giving can get confusing
Codependent people pleaser. You said it.
And the author of many other books
and novels to numerous to mention
2:10 thank you
The Voidians. Their Void must be filled. But clones are a mess
Grandiosity in borderlines…during periods of seemingly self-loathing, when borderlines experience strong urges to self mutilate or sabotage or trash…how does grandiosity contribute? Is grandiosity still present in those moments? I feel I need to study the definition of grandiosity especially in relation to depression and the self loathing periods in borderlines.
When they act out, Borderlines become secondary psychopaths. Watch my vids on this switching of self-states.
Is it still serial idealizing if one is making up the fantasy before a target is even met? Like moving into a new place and creating a story with people who don't even exists? Or going to a new class and creating a story of meeting someone who again isn't even real. Would this be included? Asking for a friend....... >.>
Only if the preconceived fantasy is then applied to someone new.
Tricky stuff, I suppose that talks to "love at first sight"; which we idealize in romance stories. Are we all "serial idealizers" or just simply people looking for love, and hopping to meet someone suitable to share this with? I just recently watched a video about research on how smell affects the brain. It was found in a double blind study, that people can differentiate the smell of a loved one, and show increased endorphins from it. So, for all we know, intense arousal, which I prefer to call love, prevaricates on how good someone smells to you. Good thing we have a mind, and can tell, when someone is not reciprocating.
@@kdelka81 Is daydreaming "maladaptive" ?
@@kdelka81 same. And I feel like I still do this today.
Ok.i would like to share what has popped in to the picture .in my thoughts as i listen .are these not what several years ago when artist .an creators .referd to as esintricks.(an yes i have dislexia an you can make fun .but dont underestimate what i am understanding ). Is it possible van gogh.and poe ?of whom now are consierd fantastic not exactly social addapted .people .an now ?(thier a warning sign ) an then the thoughts about the comunal religous sect, of the world .an diynamictly ...over last 1.000 years .just wow .i mabe way off .if so what exactly does this thought mean while i am listening at this lecture?
Insightful. You may be on to something there.
@@brielleanyez7113 😉
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