The Future Fakes – No. 2

“I will pay you back.”

One of The Prime Aims is attaining residual benefits from our victims. These are vast and numerous and might range from assisting in creating and maintaining a facade of respectability or family values, access to particular people, the use of a motor vehicle or someone who will provide care for an infirm narcissist. One of the most common residual benefits concerns money. It might be the victim supporting the narcissist using his or her income, since the narcissist does not work or does work, but earns little. It could be obtaining credit for the narcissist since he or she has a poor credit score. More usually it is as simple as lending money to the narcissist with the oft-said, but rarely done – “I will pay you back.”

There are various different routes which all ultimately lead to the victim realising that this evinced intention is just a form of future faking. The narcissist has no intention of making repayment and indeed never had. Why does the narcissist find it so easy to make a request to borrow money?

1. The sense of entitlement. What is yours belongs also to us. We connect you to us and you become part of us and thus so must your assets and income.
2. Poor boundary recognition. The narcissist sees nothing untoward in commandeering such an asset so readily.
3. Lack of accountability. With no embarrassment in making such a request to begin with, indeed the narcissist may be most bold about the request or demand for money and there is no sense of remorse or conscience concerning failing to make repayment. It is easy to make this promise with no regard for ability or intention to fulfil it.
4. Magical thinking. You now belong to us so you should do what we want, since such compliance should automatically follow now that you are ours.
5. Grandiosity. We need money to maintain certain appearances with others – family, friends, colleagues.

Why does the narcissist make this request?

1. At its most obvious it is of course to make use of this money. Settle debts, buy things, set-up that brilliant new tech company the narcissist is convinced will become his route to riches, to play the baller he thinks he is, to draw fuel from other admiring appliances, to fund a particular addiction and so on and so forth.

2. To bind you to us. This happens in three ways :-

a. There is a supposed debt which means you will want to recover it at some point and therefore continue to engage with us;

b. You trust us to repay and therefore you become more invested in your relationship with us; and

c. You feel good about helping us and our fuelled response to your loaning us this money  causes you to want to continue to help us in some way.

3. The empathic nature of our victims, as people who help and assist, means they are more likely than normal people to provide the money to us.

4. Certain narcissists who borrow money/take money often have haphazard financial situations because of their narcissism and the issue of money is a pressing one.

5. Certain narcissists who borrow money/take money especially those who are of the lower echelons of Mid Range and of the Victim Cadre will have a ready sob story and will use the financial mechanism as part of their seduction. Whilst sex is a major weapon of seduction,  money is not too far behind (and of course flows in both directions from the flamboyant narcissist with his largesse to the needy narcissist with his impoverished pleas for assistance).

Given the nature of money as a form of seduction and binding, then in the instance where the narcissist is borrowing, he will issue this future faking comment in order to establish his apparent bona fides, to demonstrate he can be trusted and that he can be relied on.

The narcissist may borrow little and often, applying our tried and trusted salami-slicing incursions but this time in a financial method. The narcissist may operate a ‘long firm fraud’ technique of borrowing small sums and actually repaying them to create the image of trustworthiness and then make a request for a much larger sum. The victim agrees, after all, previous loans have been repaid in full and on time. The narcissist again pledges the future fake to make repayment but this much larger sum is taken and not repaid. A bold narcissist who is especially persuasive and convincing may even seek a significant sum at the outset and issue the empty promise of repayment.

You will be reassured that it can be repaid from the salary increase which happens next month, or the debt that friend is repaying to us, or the bonus we are due or we have a tax rebate due to us. None of these will be true but they are layered onto the promise to repay to convince you.

Such requests from those narcissists which operate in this method (as it is not applicable to all of us) are often made early in their interaction with you. The narcissist is greedy for the money and the lack of awareness and poor boundary recognition means he or she sees nothing wrong in making the request at an early juncture. Indeed, the narcissist sees it as the obligation of the victim, now that they are in the clutches of the narcissist. Any early request to borrow money, no matter what size the amount should be regarded as a clear red flag. The future faking of “I will repay you” will accompany this and there is a further “tell” you should look for. Again, in tandem with our thinking in absolutes, you will either be given no date repayment or a fake reference to “in a few weeks time” or there will be a zealous explanation of a date, time, method and source for repayment as the narcissist throws plenty of detail at the victim in order to create the image of complete trustworthiness.

When that set date arrives or if there is not one and you make a polite enquiry about repayment, unless the narcissist is operating the long firm fraud as described above, you can expect fawning false apologies, long involved explanations about why payment cannot yet be made and a request for forbearance. This will happen repeatedly, but if still in the golden period it will be done in a polite way, a self-pitying way with tears and victim performance or a display of anger at someone else who has let us down who should have paid us etc. Should the request for payment be made or due payment is due during devaluation expect it to be thrown back in your face, denied it is owed, that you in fact owe us and a hundred other deflections and denials to avoid culpability.

This future faking is rampant but once again society misses it. You may be familiar with those stories of mature ladies who have sent money to younger men in less-developed countries thinking they are helping the young fellow and why not, since she and he are in love and will soon be living together. The money is taken again and again, for tickets, for a passport application, for new clothes for the new life together and then suddenly Mr Exotic has vanished. The mobile number no longer rings, the Skype name has disappeared and the dreams of love and romance lie shattered.

Pictures of these ladies with the suitable “press sad face’ and the amount they have been taken for,appear in newspaper articles. The readers shake their heads and wonder how could  they have been so stupid to fall for these men yet all concerned do not realise they have just had an encounter with some of our kind.

The retired couple who have sunk their life savings into the property scheme which promised returns of 65% within two weeks and have been sucked into a Ponzi scheme have just met our kind. They are encourage to invest and told they will be “paid back in the future” and more besides. I know of a couple who invested £ 180 000 in such a scheme. They were concerned when no payments were being made and actually found the fraudster concerned and sat down with him. He was so persuasive, so reassuring that not only did he convince them they would be repaid “in the future” they invested another £ 40 000. Needless to say, they did not get their money back.

The promise to repay will be used by our kind in romantic entanglements, social entanglements and business entanglements. Suckered by a financial fraudster? One of our kind. Conned into coughing up on the basis of some young turk joining you at Ponderosa? One of our kind. Bailed out a friend time and time again who loves the horses but never pays up? One of our kind. Each one will always use the future fake to gain more and fleece the trusting victim.

This apparent firm intention to make repayment is a future fake and is part of the seduction manipulation where the narcissist is using money as part of the seduction technique. It is highly unlikely you will be repaid and when you disentangle yourself form the narcissist and realise it is indeed a future fake you must consider either writing the sum off as part of maintaining no contact (balancing the amount versus avoiding the narcissist), making one request of the narcissist for repayment ( see How To Make A Request of a Narcissist ) or using an external mechanism to secure payment, namely take the matter to court.

The promise to pay you back is a future fake.

The cheque is in the post by the way.