Transcription
Death, death, life, God. These are three groups of voices. They're pretty representative of the clinical reality, but we don't use these words in in clinical literature. I'm doing this for you to for you to grasp what's happening.
Now, I'm going to read to you definitions of the three voices. The death voice: you're not lovable, you're unworthy, you're inadequate, you're a failure, you're better off dead, you should die. That's the death voice. It's the equivalent of the bad object. Yes. So this is the death voice.
The God voice. The God voice is grandiose, magical thinking and unrealistic. So, "I'm God. I'm perfect. I'm omniscient. I'm all knowing. I'm all powerful." That's the the God voice. "I'm godlike." Yes.
And the life voice is creativity, cooperation, you know, all the positive things. Elan vital in French, the the force of life or libido, libido, libido in in Freud's word. Okay, these are the voices.
Now, here is a summary of all possible interactions between you and the narcissist. When the narcissist tries to impose on you a death voice, you react with a life voice. In other words, when the narcissist tells you, "You're better off dead, you're a loser, you're ugly, you're stupid, you're inadequate, you're a failure," and so on so forth, your natural reaction is to counter these claims with a life voice to say, "I'm not. I'm creative. Or I'm trying to be happy. I will I will fend for myself. I'll protect myself. I will fight back. I'm resilient. I'm strong." So the death voice triggers in you the life voice. Okay.
When the narcissist uses the God voice on you, it tells you, "I'm superior. I'm amazing. I'm unique." This triggers your narcissistic defenses, and you also become grandiose. You also react in the same way. You also become a bit inflated, a bit you exaggerate your talents and your accomplishments. You fight back with grandiosity. He's grandiose, you are grandiose. And there's a grandiose grandiosity context. You know the famous uh grandiose song, "Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you." That's this. This is G&G. That's Annie Oakley. Yeah. Nice voice, right? G&G.
And the final permutation is that he uses the life voice, and you use the death voice. So he attempts to impose on you a certain type of existence which he thinks is wonderful. He thinks is superior. He thinks is actualization of your potential. He idealizes you. He says, "This is the life you deserve. This is your this is what you're capable of." So it's a life voice. But you realize that is a life voice that emanates from the fantasy, is not real. So you react with the death voice. You deny the narcissist's life voice, and you become, for example, depressed. Depression is a death voice. You internalize aggression. You you withdraw, and you you activate the bad object. So if a narcissist tells you, "You're amazingly talented," you would say, "I'm not that talented. Come on." That's a death voice. If the narcissist says, uh, uh, you know, "If you only put your mind to it, you could be a super supermodel." I say, "Well, you know, that's completely wrong. I I don't think I can ever be a supermodel." Your use of the death voice is an attempt to restore reality testing, basically, but you do that by self-negation. That's why it's a death voice. Okay, these are the three possible interactions in in narcissism.
Now, what happens gradually? What happens gradually is that the death voice of the narcissist is entrained. It is so relentless, enters your mind, becomes entrenched, the malware impact that I mentioned, and overpowers your life voice. So we have a death voice here. You become more and more grandiose, more and more aggressive, less and less empathic, more and more inflated. You escalate, you escalate the grandiosity in an attempt to counter the narcissist's grandiosity. The narcissist's grandiosity is relative positioning, is comparative. The narcissist would say, "I am superior to you. I am more clever than you." This voice is always in comparison, always what we call in psychology, relative positioning. So you need to defend yourself by saying, "That's not true. That's not true." And then you become grandiose.
So ultimately, the death voice, the grandiosity. And here, the life voice of the narcissist doesn't doesn't last long because the life voice is only during the idealization phase. In the devaluation phase, it becomes the death voice. So the life voice never survives, and you adopt the death voice. Ultimately, you end up with a very powerful death voice coupled with grandiosity. And anyone who has studied victims of narcissistic abuse would tell you that this is true. They develop very powerful narcissistic defenses, and they resemble more and more the narcissist. The longer they're exposed to the narcissist, the more narcissistic they become. The more they have a death voice, and the more they have grandiosity, and they have a much very strongly developed, um, intricate bad object. And this, if you put all of this together, this is what is known as complex trauma or CPTSD, basically. Okay.
Next session, we will discuss the structure of the shared fantasy.