I am back, and I have a surprise for you. Minnie is back. I don't know where she has been and what she has been up to, but we have a don't ask, don't tell policy.
So, I am glad she is here. She is always so warm and soothing.
Okay, Shoshanim, today we are going to discuss collapse.
What happens to the narcissist when he is utterly unable to obtain supply? No matter what he does, no matter what he tries, no matter where he goes, no matter who he communicates with, he fails to obtain supply.
What happens then? How does the narcissist experience his inability to obtain supply?
What are the internal dynamics?
We know that the narcissist disintegrates, a process known as narcissistic collapse, but what is the subjective experience of this collapse? Does the narcissist feel bad? Is he capable of remorse? Are there any long-term changes in the narcissist's personality, traits, behaviors and interpersonal interactions?
Stay tuned and you will have the answers to all these questions and many more besides.
But how can I start any video without a diatribe?
Again, my target is the self-styled experts online with and without academic degrees. Most of them misuse the term failed narcissist.
Failed narcissism is a stage in childhood development. It was coined by Grotstein, who was a psychoanalyst.
Grotstein used the term failed narcissism to describe the child's failure to attain a narcissistic personality structure.
The abused and traumatized child, the instrumentalized and parentified child, tries to become a narcissist in order to fend off shame and hurt.
And when the child fails, he becomes a failed narcissist.
Also known as emotionally dysregulated borderline. Grotstein said that borderlines are failed narcissists.
So when the narcissist, when the adult narcissist fails to obtain supply, is defeated, is exposed, is shamed and humiliated and excommunicated, etc., or imprisoned and so on, that's not a failed narcissist. That's a collapsed narcissist.
The correct term is collapsed narcissist.
Second thing, there is no type constancy in narcissism.
A cerebral can become a somatic. A somatic can become a cerebral, an overt, often becomes covert and a covert becomes overt.
Narcissists would do anything to secure narcissistic supply, including changing types, type inconstancy.
So it's very important to understand that narcissism is not a stable personality structure and that narcissist transition via collapse to other types.
So when the overt narcissist collapses, cannot obtain supply, he may try to become a covert narcissist.
When the cerebral narcissist fails to obtain supply, for example, he doesn't have enough use. He doesn't have enough use on his YouTube channel. He may become somatic in order to garner supply from sexual conquests, type inconstancy.
This process is known as type reversion.
So narcissists oscillate and vacillate between types and when type reversion fails, it leads to narcissistic mortification, decompensation and the emergence of a borderline like personality with emotional dysregulation and mood lability.
I encourage all of you to watch my videos on narcissistic mortification. This was a phrase first coined in 1957, four years before I was born, but it's more relevant than ever.
Narcissistic mortification. As one source of narcissistic supply dwindles, the narcissist finds himself trapped in a frantic, though at times unconscious, but in a frantic effort to secure all time alternatives to the vanishing supply.
As one pathological narcissistic space is rendered uninhabitable, the narcissist wanders off to find or to establish another pathological narcissistic space.
Again, I encourage you to watch my videos on pathological narcissistic space.
The pathological narcissistic space is the narcissist stomping grounds, his haunts, his dives, where he goes to obtain supply. It's usually a physical location, but when too many people see through the narcissist manipulation and machinations and scheming and cunning, when too many people are onto the narcissist or when they're simply tired with the narcissist and his insatiable demands for narcissistic supply, then the pathological narcissistic space becomes dysfunctional and uninhabitable and the narcissist moves on.
These are all cataclysmic and traumatic events in the life of the narcissist because narcissistic supply is the glue that holds the narcissist personality for whatever it's worth, holds it together. It's anyhow disorganised.
Some people say, some scholars say that narcissistic personality is more disorganised than even borderline personality.
Kanberg was of disopinion.
And so it's anyhow chaotic and disorganised.
Narcissistic supply holds everything together, this precarious house of cards. When supply is absent, everything threatens to crumble and fall apart.
These hysterical endeavours to try to find substitute supply sometimes lead to boom-bust cycles, a little like Wall Street. These cycles involve in the first stage the formation of what I call a grandiosity bubble.
Grandiosity bubble is a self-contained space. I will discuss it in a minute.
Within this space, within this bubble, the narcissist supplies himself. He is unable to obtain supply from other people. His sources of supply had abandoned him. He is alone.
And so his only source of supply is himself. And this is called self-supply.
I have several videos analysing the process of self-supply.
Long-term self-supply can lead to what I call binary narcissism, the emergence of covert and overt structures, processes, behaviours, traits, cognitions and emotions, overt and covert in the same person.
And of course, this creates enormous conflict and enormous dissonance.
I have a few videos dedicated to binary narcissism.
Just go to the search function on my YouTube channel. It's designated by the magnifying glass. Click on the magnifying glass and type binary narcissism, narcissistic modification, self-supply and you will be instantly gratified in the best Vaknin tradition.
Back to a grandiosity bubble.
When the narcissist fails to obtain supply, as I said, he creates a grandiosity bubble.
A grandiosity bubble is an imagined, self-aggrandising narrative involving the narcissist and elements from the narcissist's real life.
People around him places his frequencies, conversations he is having. The narcissist weaves a story, incorporating these facts, inflating them in the process and endowing them with bogus internal meaning and consistency.
In other words, the narcissist confabulates and he believes his own confabulations. That's why I keep saying narcissists never lie. They believe, they believe their pre-variations.
But this time the confabulation is loosely based on reality.
In the process of inflating the grandiosity bubble, the narcissist reinvents himself and his life to fit the newfangled tale. He recasts himself in newly adopted roles. He suddenly fancies himself, I don't know, an actor, an author, a guru, a political activist, a narcissism expert, an entrepreneur or an irresistible hunk, just like me.
He modifies his behaviour.
The narcissist tries to conform to these new storytelling elements, to this new script and to his new functions.
He gradually morphs in shapeshifts into the fabricated character and he becomes the fictitious protagonist that he had just created, has just created.
All the mechanisms of pathological narcissism are at work during the bubble inflation phase.
The narcissist idealizes the situation. He idealizes the other actors in the play, a process known as co-idealization. He idealizes the environment. Everything is ideal and fantastic.
The narcissist tries to control and manipulate his milieu into buttressing his false notions and perceptions.
Faced with an inevitable grandiosity gap, the gap between his imagination, his fantasy and reality, faced with this gap, the narcissist becomes disillusioned, bitter. He devalues and discards people, places and circumstances involved in the bubble and the bubble deflates.
Inflation, deflation is the narcissist equivalent of idealization devaluation.
The narcissist self-supplies within the bubble, inflates the bubble, that's the idealization phase, then the bubble deflates, faced with the onslaught of reality, the bubble doesn't hold, it breaks apart, which is the equivalent process to devaluation.
And still, grandiosity bubbles are not a part of the normal narcissistic mini cycle.
Grandiosity bubbles are rare events. They are much like trying on a new outfit for size and comfort.
Grandiosity bubbles fizzle out rapidly and the narcissist reverts to his regular pattern, idealizing new sources of supply, devaluing and discarding these sources, pursuing the next victims to be drained of all life.
Actually, the deflation of a grandiosity bubble is met with relief by the narcissist. It does not involve a narcissistic injury.
The narcissist views the bubble as merely an experiment, it being someone else for a while. It is a safety valve, allowing the narcissist to effectively cope with negative emotions and frustration.
And so cleanse cathartically, the narcissist can go back to doing what he does best, projecting a false self and garnering attention from others.
Narcissists are addicts, the junkies, they're addicted to narcissistic supply and they react with depression, paranoia and schizoid withdrawal to the absence or deficiency of supply.
Narcissists decompensate, act out, experience brief psychotic episodes when they're deprived of narcissistic supply in the long term.
And many narcissists resort to self-delusion and able to completely ignore reality, contrarian opinions, countervailing information and data. The narcissist transmutes these things, unable to face the dismal failure that he is.
The narcissist partially withdraws from reality.
To soothe and solve the pain of disillusionment and disenchantment, the narcissist administers to himself a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths and outlandish interpretations of events around him.
And then he goes on to believe all these things.
The narcissist, when he is faced with dwindling vanishing narcissistic supply, adopts one of several solutions.
And I'm going to describe these solutions to you.
One of the main problems in narcissism is that it is an extremely variegated phenomenon. It's very difficult to put all narcissists in one basket.
Narcissists, for example, when they are faced with a lack of supply, choose different solutions. And these solutions are diametrically opposed to each other. They're mutually exclusive.
So it looks as if some people are narcissists and some people are not, even when they are.
And here are the solutions.
The first one is the delusional narrative.
Remember, these are the solutions the narcissist adopts.
Having tried to obtain supply in a classical way from sources of supply and failed a process known as collapse, having tried the grandiosity bubble and failed, having attempted self-supply and failed, having experienced notification, narcissistic notification, and then unable to cope with the motive with the life threatening mortification.
Narcissists withdraws from reality. He develops solutions.
One of them is the delusional narrative solution.
The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as the hero and the protagonist. In this narrative, he is brilliant, perfect, irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, powerful, wealthy, the center of attention. In short, he is Sam Vaknin.
The bigger the strain on this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies.
Finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, you know, a long time, the delusion replaces reality and the narcissist's reality tests deteriorate to the point of delusional disorder or even psychotic disorder.
The narcissist withdraws his bridges and becomes schizotypal, even catatonic or schizoid.
Swedish had described the post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome very similar to this.
Now the next solution is the antisocial solution.
Again, I'm reminding you these are solutions to collapse, an inability to obtain supply, never mind what the narcissist tries to do.
Maybe people around the narcissist are no longer available to provide him a supply. Maybe they are too angry at him, disillusioned with him, whatever the case may be, he cannot obtain supply.
So the first solution is to become delusional, but the second solution is to become antisocial. The narcissist renounces reality in this solution to his mind.
Those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, innate superiority, overarching brilliance, benevolent nature, entitlement, cosmically important mission, perfection, etc. Those who are too low-bro and too inferior to grasp his superiority. They don't deserve consideration. They are subhuman. He holds them in contempt.
The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal and with the psychopath, his lack of empathy and compassion, his deficient social skills, his disregard for social mores and mores and laws and rules, his defiance, his reactance, they now erupt and blossom. The narcissist becomes a full-fledged antisocial psychopath in effect, a primary psychopath.
He ignores the wishes and needs of other people. He breaks the law. He violates all rights and boundaries, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt and disdain. He derides and decries society and its codes. He punishes the ignorant ingrates who refuse to provide him with supply, and that these people, to his mind, drove him to this state. They are responsible. They deserve what's coming. He acts criminally. He jeopardizes the safety, lives and property of these people because they deserve every conceivable punishment for having pushed him to this particular corner.
That's the antisocial solution.
Another solution is the paranoid schizoid solution.
Again, when the narcissist collapses, everything failed. Grandiosity bubbles, self-supply, other people supply, pathological narcissistic space. All the devices and mechanisms and stratagems don't work anymore. For some reason, the narcissist becomes much less self efficacious, is unable to extract narcissistic supply from his environment, and the grandiosity gap has grown to the point of intolerability. It's unbearable.
At that point, the narcissist adopts solutions.
One of them is a delusional solution. The other solution is to become essentially criminalized.
The third solution is the paranoid schizoid solution.
When narcissism fails, there's a defense mechanism. The narcissist develops paranoid narratives, self-directed confabulations which place the narcissist at the center of other people's allegedly malign attention and intention. People or institutions are persecuting him.
The narcissist becomes his own audience and he is self-sufficient as his own, sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.
The tales he's telling himself, the tales of persecution, the tales of abnegation, the tales of pursuit and chase by malevolent malicious institutions and individuals who are envious of him or afraid of him, these tales are actually his narcissistic supply.
Paranoia or paranoid ideation is actually a form of narcissism because it places the paranoid at the center of attention. It's a form of grandiosity.
The narcissist develops the secondary delusions. He perceives slides and insults where none are aware intended. He becomes hypervigilant. He becomes subject to ideas of reference, referential ideation. He believes that people are gossiping about him, mocking him, prying into his affairs, violating his privacy, cracking his email, hacking his accounts.
The narcissist is convinced that he is the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, abscond with his property or ideas, delude him, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor his speech, impose on his time, force him to action or to inaction, frighten him, coerce him, surround and besiege him, change his mind, part with his values, victimize him or even murder, assassinate him.
These delusions are self-generated. They don't require any support and any evidence. They're not evidentiary and so this self-generation of delusions, persecutory delusions, paranoid ideation, that's the supply. It's a form of malignant cancerous self-supply.
Paranoid narcissists who had chosen the paranoid settled on the paranoid schizoid solution, refrain from meeting people, from falling in love, from having sex, from talking to others or even from corresponding with others. Their lives are constricted. They limit themselves more and more to a single physical space in a single type of interaction which is minimal.
In short, these narcissists become schizoids, not out of social shyness and not because of the general motivation of the schizoid, a lack of interest in people, but out of what they feel to be their choice.
This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, goes the inner refrain of this kind of narcissist. I shall waste none of my time and resources on this ungrateful environment.
And the narcissist convinces himself that his survival depends on withdrawing from the world.
This is the paranoid schizoid solution, but there's another type of paranoid solution.
Again, these are solutions to deficient narcissistic supply.
The other type of paranoid solution is the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution.
Some narcissists who have developed persecutory delusions, they are already paranoid. They have paranoid ideation. They resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict.
These kinds of narcissists become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and rarely physically abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, hector, berate, demean and deride, they decry their nearest and dearest, and often other people who are well-wishers and loved ones.
In extreme cases, they even direct these vitriol and dire tribunals at total strangers. These narcissists explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, condemnation and blame.
Theirs is an exegetic bedlam. They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment is designed to provoke and humiliate them.
Their hypervigilance leads directly to paranoia, aggression and violence.
These narcissists sow fear, revulsion, hate and malignant envy in everyone around them. They flail against the windmills of reality. They are pathetic for law and sight, but often they cause real and lasting damage. Fortunately, mainly to themselves, unfortunately, very frequently, also to others.
Then there is a masochistic avoidance solution.
A narcissist who chooses this solution, who selects for it, is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply. He directs some of this fury and frustration, aggression, inwards, punishing himself for his failure and defeat.
This masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist's closest, nearest and dearest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or persecutors, either way to pay him the attention that he craves.
By molesting himself, by punishing himself visibly, by hurting himself, this kind of narcissist forces everyone around him to cater to his needs, to walk on eggshells, to become enablers, to collaborate with him.
And this constant ambience of anxiety and fear and attention is the narcissistic supply. Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism. It's a narcissistic cop-out.
By undermining his work, his relationships, his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, negative supply. He transitions from overt to covert. Self-inflicted failure is the narcissist's doing. It is self-inflicted. The narcissist is in control of this process. It proves that he is the master of his own fate. I may have failed, but I made it happen. She may have cheated on me, but I pushed her to do that.
Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances, which render success impossible. Millon had written that this is a way to avoid an objective assessment of their performance to render it improbable.
These narcissists act carelessly. They withdraw in mid-effort. They are constantly fatigued, bored, or disaffected, and they passively, aggressively sabotage their own lives. Their suffering is defiant in your face, visible, and by deciding to abort, they reassert their omnipotence because I have decided to abort.
The narcissist's pronouns and public misery, self-pity, sanctimonious self-righteousness, they are compensatory.
Again, Millon wrote that these reinforce the narcissist's self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness, and Masterson added shame.
The narcissist's tribulations and anguish render the narcissist in his own eyes, unique, saintly, virtuous, righteous, resilient, significant, and holy. This is a form of self-generated narcissistic supply. It's a form of self-supply.
All these solutions are forms of self-supply.
And so paradoxically, the worse the anguish and the unhappiness, the more egregious the defeat and the failure, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels. He feels good only when he feels bad.
So these are the solutions that narcissists opt for and select when they're faced with a dearth, with a lack, or deficiency of narcissistic supply, and they have exhausted all the means to obtain supply.
The narcissist reacts to his failure to obtain enough narcissistic supply very much as a drug addict reacts to the absence of his particular drug.
The dwindling or absence of supply is a trauma. The narcissist experiences a kind of post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic reaction.
The narcissist constantly consumes, he actually prays upon, adoration, admiration, adulation, approval, applause, attention, other forms of narcissistic supply, including negative forms of supply, notoriety, being feared. When lacking, when deficient, a narcissistic deficiency dysphoria sets in. It's a kind of mild depression, a little like dysthymia.
The narcissist appears to be depressed. His movements slow down. His sleep patterns become disordered. He either sleeps too much or he becomes an insomniac. His eating patterns change as well. He gorges on food or he avoids it altogether.
Some narcissists develop eating disorders. The narcissist is constantly dysphoric, sad, unhedonic, he finds no pleasure in anything, including his former pursuits, hobbies, and interests.
The narcissist is subjected to violent mood swings, mainly rage attacks, and all his visible and painful efforts as self-control fail.
Such a narcissist faced with the catastrophic certainty of lack of supply, he catastrophizes, he anticipates, he anticipates never ever getting supply again.
So he may compulsively and ritually resort to an alternative addiction. Alcohol, drugs, love, reckless driving, shop alcoholism, they all substitutes for narcissistic supply.
The gradual disintegration, this gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort both to escape his predicament and to sublimate his aggressive urges to render them socially acceptable.
The whole behavior of the narcissist seems constrained, artificial, effortful.
As the period of lack of narcissistic supply continues, as time goes on and he's unable to obtain supply, the narcissist gradually becomes more and more mechanical, detached, robotic, unreal, begins to resemble a schizoid in many ways.
The thoughts of the narcissist constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive. His speech may falter, he becomes a lot more dissociative, amnesiac. He appears to be far away in a world of his narcissistic fantasies where narcissistic supply is aplenty and abundant.
The narcissist withdraws from his painful existence where other people fail to appreciate his greatness, special skills and talents, potential or accomplishments. The narcissist ceases to bestow himself upon a cruel rejecting universe, punishing the world for its shortcomings, its inability to realize how unique the narcissist is.
Gantrip described it in the 60s as an interaction with an internalized bad object.
When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid delusions, as I've mentioned, self-directed confabulations, which place the narcissist at the center of other people's alleged malign intentions.
The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.
And again, many narcissists go into a schizoid mode, narcissistic or schizoid withdrawal. Many narcissists isolate themselves, hermits, in a kingdom of hurt and pain.
This kind of narcissist minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers, go-betweens, to communicate with the outside. It's a vicarious form of existence by proxy, devoid of energy, depleted.
The narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions. His former compliance, his mask falls, and it gives way to open avoidance, a rebellion of sorts. Smiles are transformed into frowns. Courtesy becomes rudeness.
Emphasize a ticket. A beat-attacked is used as a weapon, as an outlet of aggression, as an act of social violence.
The narcissist becomes a spectacle. Blinded by pain, he seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic nectar.
In this quest, the narcissist turns both to and upon people around him. His real attitude emerges.
As far as the narcissist is concerned, his so-called nearest and dearest are nothing but tools, two-dimensional instruments of gratification, sources of supply, pimps of such supply, catering to his narcissistic lusts.
I call these insignificant others.
Having failed to procure for the narcissist his drug, having failed to garner for him narcissistic supply and sources of supply, the narcissist regards friends, colleagues, even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating objects.
In his rage and wrath, the narcissist tries to fix these people by forcing them to perform again, to function.
And this is coupled with a merciless self-flagellation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment.
The narcissist feels that he had failed, especially himself, his idealized self-image. He renders him a perfectionist. His standards can never be met. He sets himself up for failure.
In extreme cases of deprivation, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts, and this is how deeply he loathes himself and his dependence on narcissistic supply.
Throughout, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, harking back to the past, actually to an imaginary past, to a fantastic past which had never existed, except in the thwarted, fantastic grandiosity of the narcissist.
The longer the lack of narcissistic supply, the more the narcissist glorifies, rewrites, reframes, misses and mourns this ostensible past.
This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, amounting to clinical depression.
The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia. He concocts a persecuting, persecuting world, incorporating this worldview into his life's events and social milieu. It becomes an organizing and interpretative principle. It gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to nosupply.
And these conspiracy theories account for the decrease in narcissistic supply.
He says, people envy me, people hate me, people avoid me because I'm superior.
The narcissist is frightened, is in pain, is in despair. He can't hold himself together, is falling apart, is disintegrating, is experiencing his own emptiness.
This void, the howling void inside him, this hole of mirrors where no one is reflected.
And so, he embarks on an orgy of self-destruction intended to generate alternative supply sources, attention at any cost.
The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction as a spectacle, self-annihilation and self-defeat in the service of self-aggrandizement.
Goethe, The Twilight of the Gods. Hitler in the bunker is a prime example of this.
When deprived of narcissistic supply, both primary and secondary, the narcissist feels annulled, followed out, mentally disemboweled. It's an overpowering sense of evaporation, disintegration into molecules of terrified anguish, helplessly, inexorably, ineluctably.
There's nothing the narcissist can do about it. It's the ultimate, the consummate form of helplessness.
Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles, not like a cookie, but like the zombies or the vampires one sees in horror movies.
It is a terrifying process to be old and even more terrifying to endure and experience. The narcissist will do anything to avoid it. Mortification leads to this.
Consider the narcissist. Think about the narcissist as a drug addict. His withdrawal symptoms are identical. It's the cold turkey of no supply.
Delusions, physiological In the absence of regular narcissistic supply, narcissists often experience brief, decompensatory psychotic episodes. And this also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis accompanied by a major narcissistic injury. The psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism, magical thinking.
Narcissists are like children in this sense and not only in this sense.
Narcissism, pathological narcissism, in adulthood, as Freud had observed 110 years ago, is a form of infantile regression.
Many, for instance, fully believe in two things. Many narcissists fully believe in two things. Then whatever happens, they will prevail. In other words, they're immune to the consequences of their actions.
And it's a kind of law of attraction. The universe is at their beck and call and that good things will always happen to them.
It is more than mere belief, actually. It's a conviction.
Narcissists just know that these things are true. The same way one knows about gravity, directly, immediately and assuredly.
And of course, this is very conducive to psychosis, to a divorce from reality.
Impaired reality testing sometimes become no reality testing.
The narcissist believes that no matter what he does, he will always be forgiven, always prevail in triumph, always come on top and never pay the price.
Narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and insanely reckless.
The narcissist attributes to himself divine and cosmic immunity. He cloaks himself in it like an invisibility cloak. It renders him invisible to his enemies and to the powers of evil conspiring against him.
It is a childish phantasmagoria, but to the narcissist is very real.
The narcissist knows with religious certainty that good things will always happen to him. With equal certitude, the more self-aware narcissist knows that he will squander this good fortune time and again.
And it's a painful experience and it's best avoided, but it's inevitable.
So no matter what serendipity or what fortuity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, what gifts is endowed with, always strives with blind fury to undermine them, to deflect them, to deform and to ruin his chances, just in order to deceive himself that he is the master of his own fate, the engineer of his life, utterly and totally in control.
The inevitable then becomes a choice, a choice that restores the inner generation of narcissistic supply, self-supply.