Love Insanity: True Love, Folie à Deux or Twinflame

Have you ever had a connection with someone you thought was so different, unique, magnetic, consuming yet unexplainable or perhaps each one of these characteristics can be considered to be part of your individual experience.  Maybe you felt as if you were losing your mind to where eventually confusion came up and you asked yourself as to whether or not the person you’ve met, is either your soulmate, a karmic or even a twinflame. But what if it’s not any of those labels at all and you’re actually dealing with something far more insidious; truth be told: sometimes reality is much stranger than fiction. Imagine that you’ve been sold a fantasy; not just one that you’ve bought into and are living out on your own but one that you’re sharing with someone else: a shared fantasy, a “folie à deux”.

The majority of the human population will most likely agree with the fact that love has the ability to make us feel all type of “crazy”. You will most likely know and agree on that if you’ve ever been in love especially more than once. The truth is that everyone deep down wants to be loved but the danger comes in when the reality of it is unclear, makes you doubt or question yourself and keeps you stuck wondering if your perception of anything is real at all and you’re not being blindsided by someone else or your own mind. Sometimes we ourselves are our own worst enemy; in fact, in many cases we actually gaslight ourselves because we so much want to believe in a reality that we want to benefit us but is actually harmful. We ignore and look beyond red flags, warning signs that tell us: “don’t go there”, “don’t engage with that person” etc... and yet, we don’t listen to our own gut instincts. We desire to give that person the benefit of the doubt, then later act surprised when they hurt us, manipulate, neglect, devalue and finally discard us, as if we mean nothing to them; which often turns out to be the case all along yet we ourselves were too stubborn to open our eyes, ears and minds and face reality. Instead we chose to accept a fantasy, an illusion because we don’t want to deal with our inner demons or don’t recognize we even have them. All the while, these demons are tearing us apart and as long as we don’t release them, we’ll keep attracting the same people but with different faces, who will confront us with all of our believed deficits, shortcomings, fears, wrongful delusions etc. That is, if we don’t heal our broken parts (and hearts), every experience in our life must reflect that, including the people we meet and they themselves will meet us on the same level we have unhealed trauma or "work" left to do.

So is it true love, a folie à deux or a twinflame? I believe that a twinflame can be characterized by the concept of true or unconditional love, as they are said to be one soul split into two separate human bodies. In any case, when two people are genuinely in a healthy love relationship, they come together and love each other for who they are when they are with the other person ánd they also love the other person for who they are themselves, not just what the other person can do for them. This statement is very important when it comes to explaining what it means to love truly and in a healthy manner. True love is a commitment; it is self-sacrificial and therefore involves caring for the other person’s well-being just as much or even more than your own. This means that the relationship is experienced for the purpose of benefiting both individuals equally, adding to both people’s personal growth and wellfare. However within a relationship dynamic that shows narcissistic traits, which is the opposite of healthy love, the purpose of the relationship becomes singular and selfish, only existing to benefit the narcissistic person. Such a relationship can thus never be healthy and can neither demonstrate signs of love because the narcissist or person with NPD objectifies the other individual, internalizes the whole relationship and in turn projects a literal shared fantasy in 3D reality where the other individual has become nothing more but an extension of himself, a figment of his own imagination. The other person in the relationship is nót their own person with their own thoughts, feelings and emotions to the narcissist; the narcissistic person literally has objectified and has created an idealized snapchot of them instead and then proceeds to experience reality from his own illusionary world like he usually does, which includes the shared fantasy with the other, newly objectified person. The problem then starts when that person acts and responds in ways that clash with the version the narcissist has created of them in his mind; he then often becomes aggitated, resentful, angry, neglectful, deceitful and sometimes even dangerous. The narcissist of course in a way acts involuntarily or rather automatically and often subconsciously out of trauma but he never acts out of love because he has a wrong perception of what love means, due to the abuse he experienced in his childhood upbringing.

The reason why I brought up the narcissistic relationship dynamic, is because this type of connection can be a folie à deux type of relationship. The definition of a “folie à deux“ relationship means according to Oxford dictionary: “delusion or mental illness shared by two people in close association.” The delusion comes in where the narcissist as per usual believes in his own grandiosity and shared fantasy with the other person. However in many cases, the person who shares this fantasy with him, likewise falls victim to this fantasy and also believes that the narcissist loves and adores her, especially in the beginning stages of the relationship, while sadly nothing could be further from the truth. The narcissist in reality only loves himself; not his real, true self (which died a long time ago when he was still a child) but his false self and he only may actually believe he loves his idealized fantasy partner because she represents an artificial symbol of what he deems himself to be. In other words, the connection is completely self-focused and he validates his false self persona through her; the whole shared fantasy has nothing to do with the other person but has everything to do with the illusionary reality of the narcissist.

There are of course many different types of “folie à deux” types of relationships. Some of these relationships may be between two individuals who are severely mentally unwell and they can be or are in fact diagnosed with a mental illness. Some examples are Bonnie and Clyde, The Joker and Harley, Chucky and Tiffany (the animated movie), Jeffrey Eppstein and Ghislaine Maxwell etc (although not all "FAD" relationships necessarily consist of criminals. If you wonder if you've found yourself in such a relationship with someone, analyze carefully what's going on and whether there are any cautionary signs, such as any form of abuse, codependency etc; if the answer is yes, seek professional help. Especially in a relationship dynamic with a narcissist, it is easy to almost become delirious and delusional since the narcissist literally is a master at hijacking your mind to the point where you no longer can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Long-term this can cause co-dependency issues where it often becomes much harder to separate physically and emotionally from these people because as the relationship continues, the functioning of both of your brains literally becomes synchronized (brainwaves synchronization). Hence, partners of narcissistic people tend to start thinking and acting like the narcissist himself slowly overtime; first they start showing signs of BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), due to the emotional dysregulation caused by the narcissist, to where eventually they will start showing narcissistic traits.