What is "future faking"? (Glossary of Narcissistic Relationships)

hi everyone its dr. Romani welcome back to this series that it's really meant to be sort of a dictionary or glossary of all the words that we use when we're talking about narcissism and narcissistically nasty relationships and one thing that often comes up is people don't either know all these terms or they see these terms they don't know what they mean but frankly it's just important that you understand them because if you can understand this you may very well understand what's happening to you in a narcissistic relationship and why do these things happen and how they affect you and what to do about them today we're going to take on the term future faking but before we get to that please hit the bell please subscribe to this channel because it's going to get you plugged into our content get notifications about not only this series but all of the videos we regularly post so let's go on and take on this idea a future faking when someone says they will call you later you expect that they will maybe a few times they may not follow up with the call but perhaps for perfectly good reasons they might say something like I fell asleep or I got distracted with work how many times though does it need to happen before you recognize that they simply are kind of messing with you that they probably aren't going to call you back future faking is often much more sinister than not calling you back later it's actually a form of manipulation and if keeping you hooked in by making the kinds of future promises you want to hear for example this may include wanting to have a family with you someday and perhaps they might say things about wanting to get married someday and buy a house together someday and travel the world together someday and maybe that they're gonna support you in starting a business together someday they set the tone for the life you want for the life you envision and for the things that you hope for and they use future faking though for very different and much more manipulative purposes future fakers reassure you they tell you about the income potential that they're gonna have one day or that they're making more than enough money to take care of both of you in that way future fakers can often coax a partner to leave a job or move to another place even in another country just to be with the narcissist and then they tell you they'll take care of everything financially and take care of you so you can pursue your dreams if we know only one thing it's that one of the main things that can often keep people stuck in narcissistic relationships is financial dependency and once that narcissist renders you financially dependent on him or her they are able to exert far more psychological control and that's even going to be more pronounced if you move to a part of the country you're not from or to another country the future faking idea that they will take care of everything financially can get you stuck into a prison and this can happen in family situations too when family members promise you more opportunities in the future for example if you join a family business or they'll promise you money for something like a down payment for a house or for tuition or for a wedding they promise all of that someday if you just continue to live near them and not move away for a new job or something else that gives them on going control of you sometimes it may just be the debt now one function a future faking is simply to distract you just when you may be having a growing sense of discontent about the relationship or maybe even starting to express some unease or even slowly drawing away well maybe you just have your own dreams and aspirations that this relationship doesn't fall into future faking is a perfect manipulation to draw you back in they'll focus on talking about future things that really really matter to you and that doing this this future faking can make you doubt yourself and make you think twice about transitioning out of the relationship you're like ooh am i leaving before they serve the cake because what they'll often do is it will often employ future faking at very strategic times to keep you hooked in to the relationship just when may be a significant decision needs to be made about work or school that's when they'll exert it now future faking is often a way for them to get what they want now by making a promise to you that's down the road one day when we have kids one day when we buy a house and so on and so forth in that way it's sort of like a psychological Ponzi scheme in which you buy in now and never get paid down the road they ask you to make a sacrifice now make a compromise now give them money or support something else now because someday they will do whatever that thing you want is now what they're astute at is really kind of figuring out what matters to you in the future and promising you exactly that thing now it's not because they're magical but it's often part of the mirroring process where they listen to you and they figure out what makes you tick which gives them a perfect tool to future fake from future faking often does build off of that idea of mirroring which is another video in the series now narcissists devote a lot of time to mirroring and to getting the data about you as a result they you know what to future fake about because they've learned so much about you so if you never mentioned kids or any interesting kids they're not gonna say hey one day we're gonna have kids cuz that's not gonna be a good future fake that draws you in it preys upon that most vulnerable part of you your hope and as we already know hope is already what often gets people stuck in narcissistic relationships because you think or you hope that things will get better or you hope that things will change but future faking is also something else they can harness your hope leaving you convinced that if you just stick it out you will get the thing you want and that oh my gosh if I walk away from this now it's just one more time of me self sabotaging now anybody who comes from a narcissistic family system knows that future faking is a standard part of the narcissistic families operating manual whether it is day-to-day promises or spending time with your catch they will make those promises yeah I'll play catch with you and get home yeah well definitely well we'll take we'll go to the park this weekend oh absolutely next week we'll go back-to-school shopping or they go into the bigger-ticket promise is the bigger future faking that perhaps someday they will support you and give you financial support for a tuition or something like that as long as you just help them right now many of you can recall how a narcissistic family member fleeced you you helped them at exactly the time they needed might have given up your time even something you wanted to do but you did it on the basis of not only being a nice person but if some future promise and that future never materialized this can feel awful regardless of who the family member is but it can feel particularly atrocious when it's your parent a parent that's in essence dangling a carrot they didn't when you're a kid they do it when you're an adult but it turns into nothing future faking is also often a big part working with a narcissist do you may for example work with an important mentor in your field or a teacher or a supervisor or boss who might promise you all kinds of opportunities or book you would write or other advantages or open doors for you and you end up being nothing more then that person's glorified assistant and never ever get any of the recognition either publicly or even to other things like money a boss may suck you in by promising you a valuable options in the company down the line and sell you all kinds of grandiose lines about profit sharing and promotions and then they demand you work tirelessly for less than you are worth now on the basis of those future promises it can be pretty devastating to put the time in and never having it materialize future faking lies are particularly clever lies because they link in to our hope for the future it's not a lie in the present time because they're promising something down the future it's a lot easier to call out a lie that's happening right in front of us it's a little bit harder to call someone out on something that they're promising down the line it may take months years or even decades to uncover a future fake and by then you may have lost a lot of life you wait and you wait and you wait you take out the student loans you think they're gonna come bail me out on that tuition before you know it you got $80,000 in student debt the money never comes a personal example of mine actually comes from a job I once had was a tyrannical boss it was a prestigious working situation long story short she promised me all kinds of great things she promised me great opportunities and a tremendous likelihood of advancement and pretty much my name in lights that I could work independently and I would be a hotshot in the field of psychology I worked on a team and she worked us to the bone and pretty much kept us on lockdown the norm in our kind of a job was that you could really work from home or work in a library or work anywhere you needed to get the job done and it was really only measured on results most of us work far more than the eight hours that the job required but she expected us locked down we would have gotten so much more done if we weren't in the midst of all that chaos but all the promises she was making didn't seem to be materializing and I could see that the future indeed seemed fake and I was quite young at the time so I went on the secret job search and I ended up leaving interestingly ten years later I had the opportunity I ran into someone who actually stayed in that job holding out for the big bright future that this tyrant was promising what was so compelling to me was this woman very lovely told me she stayed for the another ten years not only had she not been advanced not one thing that had been promised had been achieved ten years later for me it was a living lesson on future faking that the best bought this particular tyrannical boss kept everyone in line with promises of a bright future instead taking every opportunity for herself and since it happened to be in a field in which things do happen slowly in academic and scholarly fields things do happen slowly you want it to believe it you want it to believe that someone who is a mentor would help you achieve your dreams it was definitely a rude awakening and one heck of a compelling way to learn about future faking future faking represents a very cruel hybrid of manipulation lying and mirroring for the narcissist it is a way of buying time a way of keeping you in without actually having to expend the effort of creating a meaningful future together or a meaningful future that has opportunities for you that work for you they're going to be very quick to say oh if you'll only move to New York with me I promise me you will move back to Chicago trust me you better eat one last deep-dish pizza cuz you won't see in Chicago so why do narcissists future fake well as always it's a way for them to keep their steady source of validation and approval just nearby without having to do that much work it's also a way of exerting their grandiosity because so much of what they sort of future fake about is really quite grandiose Oh someday we're gonna live in a house that big and you'll drive by all the big houses in your town or we're gonna buy a retirement house on a lake or we're gonna move to Hawaii we're gonna travel around the world we're gonna have four kids and we're gonna move to a place with wonderful schools or we're one day going to make you the head of this company or I'm gonna one day take care of your family because of all they've done for us or I'm gonna make your creative dreams come true and support you while you pursuit your pursue your dreams from a probability standpoint at the time the narcissist makes the promise you can see how far away that hope is but we're all just little kids who want to believe in the dream we want to believe much like every little child out there does that one day our hope our dream will come true and when someone is sitting there and promising it to us that we don't want to question the future faking so the narcissus gets to use their grandiosity as a tool of manipulation and narcissus do manipulate so you don't see how insecure they are or how really ineffectual they are the fact is they cannot make the things they promised happen in the moment it's just not possible can't snap your fingers and make the big house come or magically make four kids come into existence but by promising they'll make it happen down the road it allows them to soothe their insecurities about their in fact that they're not really Superman or superwoman and keep you around remember narcissists are actually quite fragile in the face of abandonment because abandonment does activate their insecurities future faking in a way becomes a way to avoid that reality and avoid that abandonment as well as a threat to their inner insecurity so what does future faking do to you I can promise you it's not very good it messes with your head because it actually harnesses your hopes and uses them against you by mirroring you the narcissist taps into what matters to you and then promises it to you it's like falling prey to a very very clever mind reader it is really a particularly compelling form of manipulation because enough of us are realistic enough to recognize that not everything can happen right in this moment so obviously someone may very well promise you your dream a dream house and dream life one day but we have to be realistic and we have to be circumspect enough to recognize that it cannot happen right now so in that way we're being the realists we then recognize that it's going to take time for these so-called promises or to get the money to build the family all of those things that would make this so-called promised future happen however in doing that we a fix that dream to the narcissist and now the narcissist flaws the narcissist in validation and their emotional abuse can actually get overlooked because they are conflated or linked to that dream you may very well stay in whatever kind of relationship you have with them not because it feels good not because it's healthy but because you really do because of the future faking truly believe that it's the pathway to the future you want I'm gonna be honest with you if I had a dime for every person who saw the red flags but stayed in the narcissistic relationship because the narcissist offered the dream offered the things they wanted from life which often ended up as and it often ended up manifesting as more of a nightmare than a dream I would be a very wealthy woman again our dreams are almost used against us future faking honestly in my estimation is one of the more cruel forms of narcissistic abuse because it plays on such a childlike vulnerable part of all of us our dreams and our hopes and our wishes and frankly our fantasies for the future and they don't have to be grandiose it may be just a picket fence and a kid and a golden retriever but ultimately narcissists are the greatest illusionists and magicians and masters of disguise and deception future faking is a hell of a trick hocus-pocus I'm gonna make you look over there I'm gonna take your dreams and wishes and promise them to you and you will believe me and then they will never happen you know what is so so hard about it is that we think it will happen so how do we best avoid future faking one thing is don't fully link your wishes and your aspirations to another person owning that stuff pay attention to other examples in your life of the narcissist making more short-term promises that never come true so for example the original simple future faking example when they don't return calls when they say they will when they don't pick up the groceries they said they would on the way home when they don't show up when they say they would pick you up and take you somewhere those small future fakes are usually the Canaries and the proverbial coal mine that leave a trail that lead to the larger future fakes that can not only leave you devastated but can leave you to really fake a life and missile I should that actually lead you to waste the life and fill you with a gret regret and make bigger mistakes the smaller fakes always lead to larger ones honestly the only way to truly avoid future faking is to put yourself in charge of your own dreams and always keep in mind that so many people after they go through an experience of future faking they often blame themselves they say this is my fault I wanted X Y & Z so badly that I got blinded by my own dreams I got blinded by my own hopes I got blinded by the things I wanted and I wanted them so bad and again they may not be grandiose things that I believed that moving to this other country moving to this other place giving up my career leaving school early supporting their education and so on and so on and so forth was going to be what was right for me and I got so lost in that that they'll get mad at them and say I let this happen mm-hmm I wouldn't be that hard on yourself the fact of the matter is is that even though it's incredibly important that you become the advocate for your own dreams every one of us every one of us is vulnerable to the idea of wanting to share hopes and dreams and wanting to attach ourselves to people who share those hopes and dreams hoping we can achieve them together it feels like it's so much more of a joyous journey when we share it with someone and it can be just make sure that you hitch your wagon to someone who's respectful compassionate kind and sees through those day-to-day promises it's a good sign that they may also follow up on the bigger ones thanks again and I hope that makes sense of future faking to you and please as always please hit the bell subscribe to this channel and then you'll get notifications as more content more videos and more YouTube lives happen thanks again

Channel: DoctorRamani

Views: 330,560

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Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020