How Narcissist Falls Apart (Compilation)

My name is Sam Vaknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

What happens when the narcissist fails to secure or to obtain sufficient narcissistic supply?

Well, the narcissist then reacts very much as a drag addict would react to the absence of his or her particular drug of choice.

You see, the narcissist constantly consumes or, one could say, trades upon adoration, admiration, approval, applause, attention and other forms of narcissistic supply.

When lacking or deficient, the narcissistic deficiency dysphoria sets in kind of depression.

The narcissist then appears to be down, depressed. His movements slow down. His sleep patterns are disordered. He either sleeps too much or becomes insomniac. His eating patterns change. He begins to gorge and fowl down, avoids it altogether.

When narcissistic supply is insufficient or deficient, the narcissist is constantly dysphoric. He is said, he is unhedonic, he finds no pleasure in anything, including these fall episodes of his interests. He is subjected to violent mood swings, mainly rage attacks, and all his visible and painful efforts at self-control discernibly fail.

Narcissists may compulsively or ritually resort to an alternative addiction. Alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, pathological gambling or showmanship. His own substitutes for love and substitutes for narcissistic supply.

And this gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort both to escape his predicament, the lack of narcissistic supply, and to sublimate his aggressive urges.

His whole behavior seems constrained, artificial and effortful.

The narcissist gradually turns more and more mechanical, robotic, detached and unreal. His thoughts constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive. His speech may falter or become slurred. He appears to be far away in a world of his own making of his narcissistic fantasies, where narcissistic supply is aplenty.

When he cannot secure supply in the real world, the narcissist retreats into a fantasy world. He withdraws from his painful existence, where others fail to appreciate his greatness, his special skills, his talents, his potential, his achievements.

The narcissist thus ceases to bestow himself upon a cruel universe, punishing the universe for its shortcomings, its inability to realize how unique the narcissist is.

The narcissist thus fails as a defense mechanism.

The narcissist develops paranoid, persecutory delusions, self-directed confabulations which place him at the centers of other people's allegedly maligned attention.

The narcissist becomes his own audience, self-sufficient as his own, sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.

And so, the narcissist withdraws from the world, becomes a hermit, goes into a schizoid mode. He isolates himself, a monk in the kingdom of his own pain, agony and hurt. He minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers and couriers to communicate with the outside. He voids of energy.

The narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions. His former compliance gives way to open withdrawal, a rebellion of sorts, although no defiance.

Smiles are transformed to frowns. Courtesy becomes rudeness. Emphasized etiquette is used as a weapon, an outlet of aggression and act for violence.

The narcissist, blinded by pain, seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic nectar that is narcissistic supply.

And in this quest, the narcissist turns both to and upon those nearest to him. His real attitude emerges.

For him, his nearest and dearest are nothing but instruments, tools, one-dimensional venues of gratification, sources of supply, pimps of such supply, catering to his narcissistic lust.

Having faith to procure for him his drug, narcissistic supply, the narcissist regards friends, colleagues and even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating objects.

In his drive and rage, he tries to mend them by forcing them to perform again, to function, to obtain for him narcissistic supply.

It rarely works, because this is coupled with merciless self-flagellation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment.

Also, at least, the narcissist fails.

In extreme cases of deprivation, when the narcissist has absolutely no access to any form of narcissistic supply, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts and ideation.

And this is how deeply he loathes himself and his dependence on narcissistic supply.

Throughout this extremely agonizing anguish process, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, harking back to a past which never existed of course, except in the narcissist's thwarted fantastic grandiosity.

But he harks back to a past where narcissistic supply was everywhere.

The longer the lack of narcissistic supply, the more the narcissist glorifies, rewrites, misses and mourns this absolutely imaginary past.

This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, amounting to clinical depression.

The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia. He concocts a prosecuting and persecuting world, incorporating in it his life's events and his social billiards.

And this gives meaning, this paranoia, this conspiracy theory gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to non-supply.

These theories of conspiracy account for the decrease in narcissistic supply.

The narcissist says, "I'm not getting supply because people are against me."

The narcissist then, frightened, in pain, in despair, embarks upon an orgy of self-destruction, intended to generate alternative supply sources.

Attention, with any cause, the cause of being feared, the cause of becoming infamous, notorious, and the cause of ruining himself.

The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction, in the service of self-aggrandizement.

When deprived of narcissistic supply, both primary and secondary, the narcissist feels annulled, hollowed out, mentally disemboweled, disintegrating like a cloud of molecules.

This is an overpowering sense of self-evaporation. These atoms of terrified anguish, helplessly, inexorably melting into the big room, becoming invisible.

Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles like the zombies of the vampires one sees in horror movies.

It is a terrifying sight to behold, and the narcissist will do anything to avoid it.

Think about the narcissist as a drug addict.

His withdrawal symptoms are identical. Delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional liability.

In the absence of regular narcissistic supply, narcissists often experience grief, decompensatory psychotic episodes. It's that bad.

This also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis accompanied by a major narcissistic injury.

These psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism - magical thinking.

Nastasists are like children in this sense.

Many, for instance, fully believed in two things - that whatever happens, they will prevail and that good things will always happen to them.

It's kind of magical cloak in unity. It is more than mere belief in the case of the narcissist.

Narcissists just know it to be true. The same way one knows about gravity, directly, immediately, assuredly.

The narcissist believes that no matter what it is, it will always be forgiven, always prevail and triumph, always come on top.

The narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and callously insane.

He attributes to himself divine and cosmic immunity. He cloaks himself in it, renders him invisible to his enemies and to the powers of evil.

Of course it's a childish, fantastic story, but to the narcissist it's 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 his good fortune time and again.

And that's a painful experience, best avoided.

So no matter what serendipity or fortuity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, he always strives with blind fury to deflect them, to deform them and to ruin his own chances.

The narcissist is his own biggest enemy and that is the cosmic joke, the irony of it all, by looking outside in a feat of paranoia, the real danger lurks inside.

Okay, Bubot and Bubim. I'm 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'm glad she's here. She's 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.

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.

Narcissist was a phrase first coined in 1957, four years before he 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 alternatives to the vanishing supply.

Narcissist 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's 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's manipulation, machinations, and skimming, and cunning, when too many people are onto the narcissist's or when they're simply tired with the narcissist's and his insatiable demands for narcissistic supply, then the pathological narcissistic space becomes dysfunctional and uninhabitable and the narcissist's 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's personality for whatever it's worth, holds it together.

It's anyhow disorganized.

Some people say, some scholars say that narcissistic personality is more disorganized than even borderline personality. Canberg was of this opinion, and so it's anyhow chaotic and disorganized.

Narcissistic supply holds everything together, this precarious house of cards.

When supply is absent, everything threatens to crumble and fall apart.

These hysterical endeavors 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 analyzing 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, behaviors, 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 mortification, 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.

Grandiosity bubble is an imagined self-aggrandizing narrative involving the narcissist and elements from the narcissist's real life.

People around him places he frequents, conversations he's 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 behavior.

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.

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 core idealization.

He idealizes the environment. Everything is ideal and fantastic.

Narcissist tries to control and manipulate his milieu into buttressing his false notions and perceptions.

Faced with an inevitable grandiosity gapthe 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. He 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, assuring 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 at 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.

Contrary and 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, 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 solution.

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 experienced narcissistic mortification and then unable to cope with the life threatening mortification.

Narcissist 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 Sambhakni.

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, 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 a 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.

Many 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 dissolution to his mind.

Those who pure selenimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, innate superiority, overarching brilliance, benevolent nature, entitlement, cosmically important mission, perfection, etc.

Those who are too low-brow 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, his lack of cosmically important mission, his deficient social skills, his disregard for social mores and morons 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. He's unable to extract narcissistic supply from his environment.

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.

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. Translated 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 persecutory delusions. He perceives slides and insults where none are or were 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 a 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.

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 diatribes 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 kind, as 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 apathetic 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 of 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 actions, 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 possibly 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 pronounce 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 mustersome 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 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 are 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, 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, shopaholism, 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.

Gantrich 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 etiquette, a bit affected, 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 nod.

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.

Barking 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, refrains, misses and mourns this ostensible past.

This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, amounting to clinical depression.

The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia.

It concocts a prosecuting, persecuting world, incorporating this worldview into his life's events and social milieu.

It becomes an organizing, an interpretative principle.

It gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to non-supply.

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. He's falling apart. He's disintegrating. He's experiencing his own emptiness, this void, the howling void inside him, this hall 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, Demü, 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, hollowed 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 behold 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 effects, irritability, emotional lowness.

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 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 conviction.

Narcissists just know that these things are true. The same way one knows about gravity, directly, admittedly and assuredly.

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, on top, and never pay the price.

Narcissists 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 he's endowed with, he 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 good becomes a choice, a choice that restores the inner generation of narcissistic supply, self-supply.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and a series of other books and e-books about personality disorders and other topics. I'm also a professor of psychology and a professor of finance in several universities.

In October of this year, I'm going to publish a very long paper in a prestigious academic journal in the field of psychology and in this paper, I'm going to make a claim which is bound to be controversial because I never make claims that are not controversial. It's not fun.

So this controversial claim is that all narcissists are both overt and covert. There's no type of constancy. Narcissists oscillate between being overt and covert. And they do so in reaction to changing life circumstances and especially to incidents of extreme narcissistic injury leading, usually, to a mortification.

And so that's the first claim.

And the second claim I'm going to make has to do with the behaviors of covert who are predominantly classic.

In other words, when the classic narcissist or overt narcissist becomes covert, he is not fully covert. There's a kind of sub-variant of covert, which I call collapsed covert narcissist.

Every personality disorder has a collapsed state. There's a collapsed narcissist. I have a video on this channel which deals with collapsed histrionics. There is a collapsed borderline. I will dedicate a video to this a bit later this week. And there is a collapsed covert narcissist.

Now this gives me the opportunity to teach you a useful tool.

If anyone confuses failed narcissist with collapsed narcissist, they are not the experts they claim to be. And I don't know the first thing about narcissism.

Failed narcissism is a phase in the development of borderline personality disorder. It was first discovered, suggested and described by a scholar of great importance. His name was Grotstein.

Grotstein said that borderlines are actually failed narcissists. As children, they had tried to develop narcissistic defenses in the face of extreme abuse and trauma, but they had failed. And instead they remain exposed. They remain without a skin. They remain vulnerable to their own emotions and to pain emanating from the outside.

Consequently, they become hypervigilant. They anticipate rejection and humiliation and abandonment and they react with decompensation. They lose it and they act out. They misbehave recklessly defiantly if they are antisocial.

So today we are trying to unify the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder in secondary psychopathy. But that's a topic that I've dealt with in at least three separate videos on this channel.

Failed narcissist.

Failed narcissism is a stage in development of borderline.

When we talk about a narcissist who fails, a narcissist who does not succeed to obtain narcissistic supply on a regular, predictable and repetitive basis, a narcissist with deficient narcissistic supply, that's not a failed narcissist. That's a collapsed narcissist.

And any self-styled expert with or without the title doctor who confuses the two simply never read the literature and is exactly that, a self-proclaimed wannabe expert.

Be very careful. There are a lot of fakes out there, out for your money and nothing else. So the collapsed narcissist hitherto we thought that the collapsed narcissist simply goes through a phase of withdrawal, a schizoid phase, or becomes antisocial, becomes a bit psychopathic or delusional, reframes situations in a grandiose way and so on and so forth.

I'm suggesting that one of the main strategies of the collapsed classic narcissist is to become for a while a covert narcissist. He becomes a covert narcissist and he in this way copes with his collapse.

Now this would mean that there is no type constancy, that every overt or classic narcissist can be covert and essentially every covert can be overt.

To test this hypothesis, I conducted two studies, and this is the paper that will be published in October. It's being peer reviewed right now. I conducted two studies to remind you I have the world's largest database of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. This database comprises 1,800 people.

The first one in my database dates back to 1997. So it's a longitudinal database. It's very long. I've also interviewed an average of five family members, colleagues and so on of each of these narcissists. So the database in totality has something like 15,000 people.

Each of these people had responded to a questionnaire comprised of 683 questions modeled roughly on the MMPI-2.

And so it's a database with a gigantic number of data points and allows me to data mine at my leisure using tools that are off the shelf, so statistical tools.

So I conducted two studies.

The first study I simply data mined the database and found out the patterns, the patterns of conversion from collapse to covert and back.

And then I administered a questionnaire to close to 3,000 family members who had agreed to participate, about 70% of them women, 30% of them men. And I asked them a series of questions about how they had experienced this switching between overt or classic and covert.

And I'm using the word switching very judiciously because switching is how we describe the word that we use to refer to a change in personalities in multiple personality disorder, shifting from one personality to another, from one alter alternative personality to another in multiple personality disorder, today known as dissociative identity disorder. This shifting is called switching.

And I think the narcissist switching from classic to covert is exactly a dissociative state. It's a self state, exactly like borderline.

In general, the picture emerging is that all these personality disorders are forms of multiple personalities. They all involve multiple self states which approximate and are asymptotic to full fledged personalities. And they all involve switching.

So I was with this majority of the 3,000 to my good surprise responded.

And now I had a complete picture of how people experience the narcissist when he switches from overt to covert and I incorporated it in the paper.

Now in this particular video, I don't want to be too academic or too dry. Maybe it's too late for this and so on.

And what I want to what I did instead, I had rewritten the paper with with a first person pronoun.

It's like I've rewritten the paper as though it were a personal testimony.

Now I am a classic overt malignant psychopathic narcissist. So I am 99% of the time I'm not covert.

So the majority of what you're about to hear has nothing to do with me.

Even though I will be using I my mind, most of it doesn't have to do anything to do with me, but it is a composite, a collage and agglomeration and aggregation of all the information provided in the two separate studies.

Bear that in mind before you bombard me with comments about my personal life and so on and so on and so forth.

Some of it applies to me, of course. I have gone through covert states.

I now realize, but the bulk of it describes hundreds of narcissists and their family and thousands of their family members.

So it's a valuable, I think, contribution to interpersonal dynamics in the within the experience of switching from overt to covert.

First of all, when the overt becomes covert, he develops, immediately, conflict aversion.

Conflict aversion is in every possible situation in business, at work, with family members in romantic or interpersonal relationships.

Such narcissists would suddenly lose boundaries, not enforce boundaries. They will not fight for their rights. They will allow other people to prefer their ideas. They will never protest. They will never take action. They will never fight back. They don't stand up for themselves, not because they're cowards, but because of other reasons.

So I asked these people, why don't you stand up for yourself when you become covert? What happens to you when you become covert?

Sort of a question of shyness or vulnerability or fragility, does none of these have to do with not fighting back?

It's a question of, it seemed to involve other psychodynamic processes and motivations.

And this is what these people told me.

I don't fight back. I don't protest or stand up for myself, not because I'm coward, but because I am just or because I'm practical or because I'm indifferent or because I'm grandiose.

And I broke it down this way.

Just.

Many narcissists said, I cannot satisfy the emotional, sexual or business needs or whatever. I cannot satisfy needs.

In the case of interpersonal relationships, I cannot satisfy the emotional and sexual needs of my women.

So I have no right to set boundaries. I have no right to make demands or to enforce rules of conduct. I encourage women in my life to look after themselves and to outsource their needs. That's in interpersonal relationships.

Same in the workplace or in business.

I cannot provide the goods.

So I encourage outsourcing.

The second reason covert narcissists gave to becoming doormats, to becoming submissive, to becoming reticent, to withdrawing, to not fighting, to not standing up for themselves, to not enforcing their rights.

The second reason was practical.

Many covert, many narcissists said there is no point in fighting back.

Some of them said my reputation is so short that no one will ever believe any of my claims or intentions, not even my so-called nearest, dearest, intimate friends and significant others.

So for practical reasons, I'm not fighting back.

And then there was a very big group, which we will focus on today, of narcissists who had switched from classic to covert.

And they said that their character had changed.

They became indifferent.

They say I easily switch off. I tune out. I repress. I dissociate. I reframe. I move on. I sometimes mind some things, but I never care about them. Everything and everyone becomes meaningless to me, imbued with no emotions.

They were describing the process called dicafexes, imbued with no emotions.

They admitted that I'm quoting, "This confuses people, especially women, and drives them to test me and to test my boundaries in an attempt to ascertain the extent of my involvement, but it doesn't work. I remain indifferent."

And finally, some of them admitted that one of the reasons they're not fighting back is because they are grandiose.

Fighting back means that I care.

Caring is vulnerability. I don't want people to say that I care. Not caring is the ultimate form of personal strength. It enhances my feeling of omnipotence.

So they're not fighting back. They're not imposing rules. They're not enforcing boundaries because they're grandiose.

That's for the lesser mortgage.

So for them.

So the only times switched covert narcissists, collapse covert narcissists, engage in conflict is when they are afforded the opportunity to statistically humiliate other people, preferably in public.

Caught narcissists are very insidious, very pernicious, very subterranean, very passive-aggressive.

And if they can't humiliate the public, they will give them a statistic supply.

So it is only then that they may suddenly come alive and erupt in conflict.

And I focused in my study, I focused on the issue of sexual exclusivity.

And the reason I chose the issue of sexual exclusivity in a dyad, in a couple, in an intimate interpersonal relationship, is that sexual exclusivity provokes our most primordial defensive instincts.

Like if someone homes in or zeros in on the woman with me, I would become an animal. I would be romantically jealous. I would act out. I may even become violent.

Nothing provokes more basic reflexes, instincts, drives, urges and reactions. Nothing absolutely nothing provokes more aggression than breach of sexual exclusivity.

That's why people react to cheating, for example, with extreme trauma.

So I decided to choose this because it combines the intellect, primordial, basic, primitive drives, the body, body and the mind. So it's like a package deal.

And I focused on this and I tried to see how the behavior of the overt or classic narcissist would change if he were to become a collapsed covert narcissist.

So I'm going to use the first person singular, although I remind you that this is not about me. This is a composite or a collage of hundreds of testimonies by narcissists and thousands by their family members.

As long as the sex continues, I enforce strict exclusivity, sexual exclusivity. When the sex ceases or sexual attraction between us wanes or is absent, including owing to physical separation, she is not my woman any longer. Though she can be present in my life in other functions, she is not a woman to me. And I do not care. I'm not romantically jealous. I'm not possessive about sexual exclusivity any longer.

I sometimes even encourage the woman in my life to be with other men in order to get rid of the relationship altogether or to transform it into a sexless, sexless companionship.

Women interpret it.

So now I'm drawing on the study of the family members.

Women interpret it as proof that I do not care about them.

They want to test me and my boundaries and to see if I would mind when they misbehave with other men, if I would impose and enforce rules and boundaries.

Children do the same with their parents. We recreate our childhood with each other, of course.

So the first sign of switching from classic narcissism to collapsed, covert narcissist is losing interest, losing interest in difference. This indifference, I have described indifference within sexual, romantic, interpersonal relationship, but this indifference extends to all ram of life.

And so I'm continuing with the collapse covert narcissist.

I have a feeling that I don't know how to be a man.

I switch between hero macho, all women be damned and zero resistance is futile.

Any passing male is more men than I am and is going to beg and bed the woman in my life.

And here I took experiences described by hundreds of narcissists, I amalgamated them, I put them together as a first person testimony.

Men just walk to women who are with me, lovers, girlfriends, wives, and they pick them up in my presence.

This is because when we are in public, I show zero interest in the woman with me and I give no hint of intimacy of any kind with her.

I ignore the woman completely, or if I pay any attention to the woman at all, it is briefly just to mock and to berate her painfully.

And this sometimes arouses the other man's saviour, protective damsel or princess in distress instincts.

I've been told by men, you don't protect your women.

Men talk to me about my women, disrespectfully. Men don't respect me. They disrespect me. They misbehave with the woman who is with me and they know it.

But they think that I do not mind. They think I do not care.

So they see an opportunity to take advantage of my sad and mad partners and of my blatant indifference.

Showing an utter lack of interest is tantamount to communicating a license to proceed.

It's like saying to the other men, you're not disrespecting or offending me by absconding with my woman.

Go ahead. Go with her. Do with her whatever you want.

When I make clear that their behavior bothers me, they explain, they apologize, they minimise and they all stop immediately.

And of course, this is a collapse covert narcissist describing his behavior when he becomes a classic overt narcissist again.

So the same narcissist can go through periods of total indifference, encouraging, actually, his woman or giving her license or giving other men license to misbehave, to slip around, to cheat.

And then suddenly, having switched back from collapsed covert narcissist to overt narcissist to classic narcissist, he regains his sense of possessiveness, ownership, romantic jealousy and he demands sexual exclusivity.

It can be extremely disoriented. It's like two personalities. One could even argue these are two personalities. One of them doesn't care about sexual exclusivity at all, doesn't care about the intimate partner at all, is unable actually to have any kind of intimacy.

And the other one is very possessive, very jealous. It's the same person.

We are not talking about two people. We are talking about an overt classic narcissist who goes through a phase of collapse and becomes covert narcissist.

These men don't take the woman away from me. They don't do anything against my will. They don't do anything against her will.

I give up on the woman. I discard her publicly and she wants the other men.

There's no underhandedness. There's no coercion or expropriation. It's all out in the open with full knowledge and consent, consent of everyone involved.

And so I cannot really claim innocence. I cannot say I didn't know that they're going to have sex. I didn't know he was going to have sex with her.

It is I who actually foretell, I foresee the sex and I give them my assent and my assurance that I don't mind. I know that they're going to spend the night together. I know they're going to dream together. I know they're going on a vacation together. And I realize that when they get drunk or when they are isolated on an island into vacation when she flirts with him shamelessly in my presence, I realize what's going to happen.

I decline to force myself on them. I don't insist to join them. I don't insist even when I'm invited. I withdraw. I withdraw and give them full freedom.

I have only myself to so-called blame.

Men don't abscond with my woman property.

I give my woman to the men because I'm not interested in her in any way.

This is how this is the inner experience of a collapse covert narcissist.

He experiences indifference, whether it's real indifference or feigned indifference.

It's an open question because when the collapse covert narcissist reverts to classic form, he experiences horrible pain, horrible agony over what had happened.

So it's like he's leading himself to mortification.

It's like in a classic narcissist, mortification leads to enlightenment and self-awareness.

But in a covert narcissist, mortification leads to classic narcissism.

Mortification is the way the covert narcissist awakens himself and becomes a full fledged overt classic narcissist.

And the classic narcissist, when he experiences mortification, he experiences self-awareness and then a covert face.

Mortification therefore is the bridge between overt and covert and back.

That is the mechanism we've been missing.

We've been racking our brains for the last at least 30 years, asking ourselves, how is it possible that an overt narcissist can become covert?

They are such diametrically opposed types.

How can a single individual be both?

Well, through the process of mortification, which shuts down the false self for a while and allows the covert, indifferent, withdrawn, schizoid, self-effacing, passive aggressive mode to emerge.

Classic narcissist said, I'm immersed in interacting with a male company, trying to impress her.

I usually meet in groups.

So the role of the woman by my side is very unclear.

Is she a hanger or is she an admirer, a student, a guest, and a strange wife and ex?

Did we have a lover's quarrel?

I leave that hanging in the air.

I never protest when a man flirts with the woman next to me, when he picks her up.

I give the impression that I couldn't care less, that I'm not bothered at all, that I have better, more important things to do than to get involved.

In truth, I'm kind of afraid of confrontation.

I feel weaker, much less of a man than the other man.

I'm also certain that the woman will mock me and humiliate me in front of the other man and still abscond with him, still go with him.

I don't have the power, I don't have the right to stop her.

And that's already a classic narcissist.

Really he's not aware, but he's describing a covert mindset.

I never stand up for my woman.

I never protect the woman in my life, even when I know that she is vulnerable, very drunk, unhappy, sad, depressed, or sick.

Even when I know that the man she had picked up to spend the night with or to have an affair with is a dangerous man, a low life scum, an alcoholic, a criminal, a junkie, a loser, a philosopher.

I let the woman go with him.

I let her get hurt.

I don't care if my intimate partner is mocked, physically attacked, falls ill, is depressed, sexually assaulted, or needs me in any way.

Except if helping her generates narcissistic supply as a guru, a psychologist, an advisor, a wise man, a father figure.

So this is a description of the transition back from covert to overt.

We have the two sides.

We are dealing with sexual exclusivity and interpersonal relationships to remind you, because they evoke and provoke the most intense emotions.

And these emotions are partly primitive, reptilian if you wish, and partly civilized, and partly intellectual, and partly bodily.

There's no other realm of life which provokes this concoction.

So that's why I decided to study this.

And so many, many narcissists used a phrase that I invented, virtual single.

They say, my women behave like virtual singles. In my presence, they always prefer to communicate with other menaggressively pick them up, flirt with them, spend long stretches of time with them. Days, sometimes whole nights, go to bars, go to nightclubs alone, and pick up men there.

They have emotional affairs. They cheat repeatedly. They become so desperate that they signal to men, in my presence, they give them their phone numbers, they flirt with them, even when they are having an evening out with me. They feel nor ill-bought with me. They're starved for sex and intimacy, to be wanted, to be cherished. They feel used and abused by me. They want out by any means. They feel exploited. Cheating and ostentatious infidelity is their exit strategy, as you have said in your videos, writes one.

By the way, this puts paid to the myth that narcissists are not self-aware.

Had narcissists been totally not self-aware, processes like narcissistic injury and mortification would not have been possible. It would not have been possible to penetrate the narcissist's mind.

It requires a modicum of standing outside yourself and looking at yourself, of introspection.

The narcissist continues, "When asked directly, the woman with me lets the other men know that I don't care, that I don't mind her misbehavior, and that I have no interest in her. I don't care about her whereabouts, or who they're spending the time with, or when and if they will return to me and how she chooses to act.

The woman in my life is likely to say, "He's busy with his work," or, "He rejects and abuses me. He's very sick. He has mother issues. He told me I can sleep with others."

I mean, they would use a variety, a monopoly of excuses and explanations.

Some of the narcissists feel this, experience the covert phase, following the collapse, experience the covert phase as deeply humiliating.

Men disrespect me completely into my face for letting them have my women, in whom, presumably, I'm invested as my property.

So they imply that I'm a doormat. Some of them say that I'm not involved in my intimate partner's life, and I don't involve her in mine, that I'm not human.

Even men who admire and value what I have to give, intellect, or contributions to business, or pity and mock me as a pompous fool, a deranged freak, a doormat, non-men in other realms of life.

Okay, so this was an example of the collapse, covert experience of indifference in a field, an area of life, where we would have thought indifference is impossible, and that is interpersonal sexual exclusivity with his intimate partner.

Even there, he's rendered totally indifferent.

But this is an aspect and dimension of a larger phenomenon, which is a form of people pleasing.

And we must contrast people pleasing with primary psychology.

So many of the narcissists say men have been taking away what's rightfully mine all my life, my time, my ideas, my money, my reputation, my history, my women, my contacts.

Based on my indifference and collusion in this plunder, all men have reached two conclusions.

One, as a people pleaser, I have no boundaries, no dignity, no self-respect, and no sanity. I'm defenseless.

What they can do to me and to mine is limited only by their own pity, compassion, morality, and sense that there is nothing more to take or that the maintenance cost is becoming too high.

And this makes people in my life feel unsafe and unprotected and makes my partner feel disillusioned.

And the second conclusion that people reach when they observe the covert phase, the collapse covert phase, is that the person who is undergoing this switch is very mentally ill, utterly dysfunctional, incapable of maintaining even the rudiments of a relationship or capable of having sex, gauge reality, or act in reality self-efficaciously, even if only to the extent of holding on to what and who is his.

So many narcissists describe the moment of loss, the moment where they had lost their spouse, their family, their money, their business, their freedom. They describe the moment of loss as intimately connected to a phase of mortification followed by collapsed covert narcissism.

It is then having been observed from the outside that people got alarmed, got frightened and walked away because it is then that the underbelly of the narcissist, the hidden black hole like deep space, void and darkness, the totally empty hole of mirrors, it is then that the non-existence, the absence of the narcissist in his own life and in his own mind became glaringly apparent and it's a terrifying sight.

It's like confronting an alien.

And so most people are just, they are deterred, they walk back, they don't want anything to do with this kind of person.

As long as the overt or the classic narcissist maintains the show, as long as the show goes on, there will be people charmed by him, succumb to his charisma, play along with his stratagems, their load often collaborate with his plans, etc. As long as he keeps it together.

But when he disintegrates and switches and transitions via the mortification breach to a collapsed covert state, it is then that they see the true face of the narcissist, the nothingness, the absence. They see that there's no one there.

It's the most terrifying experience.

And so narcissists say, "Gradually everyone comes to regard me the same way with a mixture of weariness, pity, revulsion and contempt."

Some are envious of my gifts and project their envy and their sense of guilt and shame for having abused me by becoming even more aggressive. They compensate. I mean, they feel guilty and ashamed.

When they see the narcissist disintegrating, there's an immediate and empathic reaction.

Like you feel bad. I mean, some people feel guilty and ashamed. They feel that they had caused the disintegration. They pushed a narcissist over the edge.

And even though it's a narcissist and even though, you know, some monster, they said that they still feel bad.

But some people, if they're immature, if they're narcissistic themselves, they would react to their own discomfort, to their own shame and guilt with extended and enhanced aggression. The majority would just walk away having squeezed the narcissist dry of any usefulness.

Nastasists say, "From time to time, I try to fight back."

But when I asked the narcissist in the sample to tell me how do they fight back? How do they extricate themselves?

Like the Baron Munchausen lifting themselves by their own hair? How do they extricate themselves from the pit, the cesspool of covert narcissism? How do they restore themselves back into an overt or classic state?

I found out that they do it by conning people, cheating people, deceiving, making false promises, lying or engendering a fantasy and then drawing people into the fantasy.

For example, drawing women into the fantasy via the process of grooming.

There's a series of videos I made about this shared fantasy. So they con people, they cheat people out of money, out of love, out of compassion, out of...

They simply pretend to be who they are not. They assert themselves by taking instead of giving.

And at that point, gradually they regain their classic narcissism, their overt narcissism.

And suddenly, suddenly with the same intimate path, they would make a new list of demands, boundaries and rules, which include, for example, sexual exclusivity.

Some narcissists said, "Even when I failed, even when I failed, I still tried to call people. But even there, as a con artist, I failed time and again. People saw right through me. People walked away. They cheated on me repeatedly, their needs unmet.

And the hope that I will set these people free, let them go once they make me aware of their betrayals, that is the force that drove all of them."

In other words, what this narcissist is saying is that when people discovered that he is conning them, that he's lying to them, that he's deceiving and cheating, they transgressed against him. They betrayed him. They were sentitiously, openly, so that he would let them go.

Calling people, said this narcissist, was setting boundaries for and asserting, not myself, but the fictitious character that I had created for the con.

So again, it defeated the purpose.

Again, I ended up giving everything of myself freely to another entity, or be it an entity that I myself had conjured up.

It's a very, very fascinating observation.

This narcissist says that when he felt himself transitioning from classic through mortification to collapse and from collapse to covert narcissism, he wanted to go back. He wanted to be classic again.

And he felt that the only way he could do this is by calling people, cheating, deceiving, taking for them.

So he tried to do this.

But in order to do this, he had to come up with a fictitious figure, with a false self, with an act.

And then he suddenly realized that whatever he's taking from other people, it's not he who does the taking. It's the false self. It's the invented character. It's the conjured up entity. It's again not him. Whatever is calling other people, deceiving them, cheating them, stealing from them, taking from them, it's not him. It's the character he had invented.

Again, he has been usurped. Again, he has been replaced, displeased and substituted for.

And similarly, I make women fall in love with a false apparition, an emanation, a thespian project, a role play, never with the real me.

The grooming phase over upon entering the shared fantasy, all my women discovered to their dismay that I'd con them into a relationship with a complete abusive and mentally disabled stranger, which is the real me.

Of course, the most fervent wish of these women is to up and walk away by any and all means necessary, including by having casual sex with strangers ostentatiously.

So grooming is like making women fall in love, not with the narcissist or the psychopath, but with another person.

He had created a facade, a potent Kim person, fictitious entity.

So they fall in love with this and then they discover the real, the real thing, the real McCoy and they walk away again by luring women into my lair.

I am giving myself abundantly to another man. That other man is a fictitious character.

In my case, for example, it's the irresistible genius.

I am doing the dirty work of this fictitious man. I'm doing his dirty work for him. I'm satisfying his grandiose and sadistic needs to uphold and prove his irresistible and then to taunt, frustrate, humiliate and despoil the women he captivates.

Those are his needs, not mine.

I dedicate all my resources to catering to these needs on his behalf.

Again, there's a situation of exploitation and gallibility.

In the real narcissist is not catered to, is not satisfied.

Women in committed primary diets often complain to casual sex partners, to their days, to their lovers with whom they cheat. They often complain about their relationship and how its dysfunction is brought on the adultery.

So in a typical classic relationship, women complain about their relationship and they say, well, the relationship is not working well. That's why I'm fornicating. That's why I'm cheating.

But the intimate partners of the narcissist don't describe the relationship as the problem. They describe the narcissist as the problem.

They actually like many elements in the relationship. They miss these elements, but there's no way they could countenance the narcissist himself.

It's a mirror image of normal reality.

In normal reality, you love the person you're with, but you're having difficulties in the relationship.

When you're with a narcissist, you love some elements of the relationship. It's exciting, it's thrilling, it's adventurous, but you have serious problems with the person you're with.

Something is seriously all right with the narcissist, which makes even the greatest rewards and gifts he can offer, and incommendable compensation.

And so these are the only two modes the narcissist has, the doormat and the psychopath.

The narcissist either goes through a notification and becomes a co-lux covert, or he becomes a total antisocial psychopath. One of them is comatose, one of them is recessive, one of them is dominant at any given time.

At some points, the narcissist becomes avoidant, celibate, and a colonist. At other points, he becomes a psychopath.

At some points, and the psychopath micromanages a shared fantasy, at some points the doormat is the one who is modified.

You remember that modification leads from overt to covert, from covert to overt.

And so sometimes the doormat is modified. It's when we force two alternative self-states to encounter each other and to communicate.

But even as the doormat continues to process the modification, the psychopath continues a pace with his exploits, forcefully dissociating the doormat in order to function.

So when the overt transitions via collapse and modification to the covert, when the covert transitions via collapse and modification to the overt, there is a short period of dissociation where the dominant personality at that moment is fighting back, doesn't want to go away.

So if you're covert, you're modified, you're about to become overt, the covert will reassert himself. And if you're overt or psychopathic and you're modified and you're about to become covert, you will become even more psychopathic and you will dissociate the covert.

This is part of, again, a bigger problem of delusionality.

One of the main management problems in narcissism, both in therapeutic setting and for the narcissist himself when he tries to manage his life, his cognitions, his emotions, is this delusionality.

It's not only a lack of self-awareness, it's taking the information available and then reframing it in a way that supports grandiosity, grandiosity or other misconceptions.

It's delusionality in the sense that the reality testing is impaired.

The narcissist is divorced from reality at any time.

And so, for example, in the vast majority of cases of narcissists, everyone who comes in contact with the narcissist shuns him and ultimately flees, runs away.

I mean, look at, for example, Donald Trump. He's a president of the United States, but look how many hundreds of people have abandoned him already in the last three years.

Men do it one way and women do it another, but all of them flee, all of them run away, all of them scatter, all of them don't want anything further to do with narcissists. They shun him.

Men don't mind or even relish being seen as assertive and decisive, so they just vanish or they tell the narcissist off.

Women prefer to be thought over sluts rather than heartless traitorous bitches, so they cheat ostentatiously to get rid of the narcissist.

Each gender has its own coping mechanisms and so on and so forth.

If you're online, people will avoid the narcissist, like the virus of the mind, which can cause systemic infection.

Even when people recover from exposure to the narcissist, there's always multiple organ long-term damage like the COVID-19.

But the narcissist doesn't see all this. Even if he's the greatest analyst who ever lived, he's still totally blind to his own life and to interactions and people in his life.

His compensatory grandiosity compels him to reframe everything counterfactually, counterfactually and delusionally.

Let's take a few examples.

Narcissis might tell you, "Everyone is addicted to me. Everyone misses me horribly and it is their loss that I'm out of their lives."

The reality is people, especially women, can't wait to get away from the narcissist. They do anything. They do everything. They even go to extremes to set themselves free, to immediately go no contact with the narcissist unless and until the narcissist can be of use.

They proceed with their lives happily after the narcissist and profitably. They decline the narcissist's attempts to over or renew contact. Sometimes they do this aggressively and hatefully. Yet all of this doesn't affect the narcissist's perception that people are addicted to him, that they miss him, that they want him with their lives.

Narcissis doesn't realize that it's 100% his loss that people flee in a boring, having crossed paths with him. He doesn't realize.

I think it's their loss.

He's very traumatized.

The reason for mortifications is that he's traumatized.

When he realizes that he can be humiliated, he can be made unsafe even by non-core issues, not important issues, even by useless people.

When the narcissist goes through a mortification, he feels unsafe, disoriented. The whole situation looks nightmarish and surrealistic because his grandiosity impairs his reality testing.

He is inside the delusion. He has selective attention. He filters out things. This renders him dangerously unaware of his environment, scalable to a frightening extent.

Narcissis is delusionally, for example, considers himself witty or funny, fascinating, authoritative, omniscient, transformative, addictive, irresistible, hyper-intelligent or hyper-sexual.

Actually, the overwhelming majority of narcissists come across as loathsome, arrogant, fraudulent, foolish, buffoonish, pompous, gullible, sadistic, hurtful, pathetic, creepy, inhuman and sarcastic.

And yet very few narcissists would use these terms to describe themselves.

On the other end of grandiosity, there's paranoia, persecutory delusions.

Everyone, especially women, try to deceive me, to manipulate me, to lie to me and to get away with abusive misbehavior.

I am such a treasure. I have so much to give. Everyone wants a piece of me.

But actually people perceive the narcissists as histrionic, as provocative. They don't respect him. They don't admire him. They are not owed by him. They're not afraid of him. None of this is true.

Actually they loathe the narcissists. They pity him. They deride him. They're exasperated. They ignore the narcissist on many occasions. They often conspire to hurt the narcissist.

But they do so in extremes when the narcissist is sadistic or bullying or threatening. And even then when there is a real conspiracy, a real collusion to hurt the narcissist, the narcissist will fail to notice it because of his grandiosity, cognitive deficit.

The thing is that it's all based on cognitive dissonance.

When the overt or classic narcissist fails, he rejects reality. He rejects life. And he refuses to accept his responsibility for his own life.

He becomes therefore covert in the shadows, hiding a reflection.

So it's rejection which is intended to settle the dissonance, to resolve the dissonance and to ameliorate the anxiety that comes with dissonance.

The narcissist deludes himself that he provides value added.

I don't know what analysis, money, insight, healing, support, sacord. He convinces himself that he's so unique that people will never give up on him.

Never mind how negativistic, passive-aggressive, sadistic, frustrating, withholding and hurtful he is. They will never give up on him.

Because what he has to give is unique, can't be found anywhere else. And invaluable, has no price. Worth every price.

Priceless.

In reality, the narcissist provides value added that sometimes is a bit unique, but it's not indispensable. It's not irreplaceable. It's definitely not worth the emotional price that people have to pay for his abuse.

So people, men and women give up on the narcissist with a lack of credit. They go no contact, post-haste.

People may respect the narcissist for some accomplishments or for his intelligence.

But this is also very misleading. It's false advertising because intelligent, charming, magnetic, charismatic narcissist would, it implies that he's wise or mature and narcissists are not wise or mature.

When people get to know the narcissist up close, they lose all respect for him.

And coupled with their envy and revolt at his obnoxious and pompous personality, it sometimes leads, if they are narcissists, if they are psychopaths, if they are victims of abuse or vindictive and vengeful, sometimes this confluence of disrespect, envy and revolt, revulsion leads them to virulent displays of public humiliation, shaming, narcissist shaming and passive aggressive, or punitive acts, which in turn lead to mortification and collapsed covert state.

Such disrespect is also communicable, contagious. People catch it from each other, you know, and this contagion is exacerbated by the narcissist's own behaviors.

Ironically, when he feigns indifference in a covert state, it increases the incentive and the motivation to hurt him even more, to get through his firewall of apathy.

And when he is reactant, when there's reactance and defiance, when he's antisocial or psychopathic, of course you want to put him down like a rabid dog.

The apathy of the narcissist in the collapsed covert state is not perceived as a sign of strength. On the contrary, it's perceived as a doormat, cowardice, weakness, absence of enforceable boundaries.

The narcissist opens himself up to contempt, abuse and derision exactly by becoming covert.

When alternatively, people perceive the narcissist feigned an ostentatious disinterest as passive aggression.

The narcissist disrespects for an ostentatious disinterest in his intimate partners is interpreted by extension as a lack of dignity, lack of strength, lack of resilience and lack of self-respect.

Who doesn't care for his property, for his intimate partners? Who doesn't protect people he loves?

Only a non-entity, zero nobody, a wretch.

So similarly, if the narcissist switches from collapsed covert stage to a psychopathic, antisocial, defiant, overt, narcissistic stage, if he then pendulates, if he swings, if he presses from covert to malignant, his reactance, his defiance, his aggression, they are not perceived as credible. He is about as intimidating and deterring as a spoiled brat and equally repulsive and antagonized.

It's one of the few points where I fully agree with Jordan Peterson, nothing more repulsive than a spoiled brat.

And the narcissist's conspicuous attempts to man up, to deter, to intimidate, they provoke the offended parties to escalate into egregious territory.

Narcissist induces escalation in a war he can never win.

For example, men and much more so perhaps women, they have very little to, very few strategic options in such cases. They have to become aggressive and they have to hurt the narcissist. In a way, they have to mortify him. He's like in a daze, in a trance, they have to wake him up. They have to bring him back to reality, screaming and kicking. There's no other way. He can go into deep space. He can, he's in a trip. He's high on his own grandiosity. Even as a covert, he's high on his own grandiosity because the covert feigned indifference is a form of grandiosity. I mean, different, I don't care. See if I care, I don't mind. You can do anything. Who are you? You can't touch me. It's grandiosity. So this is the dynamic that the switching from overt to covert provoke. In the inner dialogue of the narcissist, both classic and covert, they share a single template. It's a little like Microsoft Word. With the same software, you can write this novel or that novel. You can write a novel or a poem with the same template. You get overt classic narcissist and covert. So the dialogue goes like this. People says the narcissist to himself, men and much more so women. They have very little to offer me. Compared to alternatives like books or films, people are bore me to death. They can teach me nothing, of course, nothing relevant or useful. I know everything. They are wasteful. They're inefficient. They're entitled. They're inflated. In other words, the narcissist projects.

He says, everyone is a narcissist. Everyone is grandiose.

To maximize return on investment because narcissists like to think in objective terms. They consider themselves optimizing machines, optimizing devices, all wise, all knowing robots. And everything is like dictated by ultimate supreme rationality.

Unless they play the spiritual guru or the public intellectual philosopher, psychologist who has all the answers. Unless they play this game, majority of narcissists would pretend to be optimizing machines.

So to maximize return on investment, the bottom line in the balance sheet, the narcissist says to himself, I need people to adhere to strict standards and rules and to obey me. It is my way or the highway. Take it or leave it. He's not flexible.

And so this insistence on following the narcissist rules of conduct, this has the added bonus of gratifying the last statistic impulses because it frustrates and hurts other people.

And that's fun. Frustrating and hurting other people is fun. It's even more fun than sex.

But of course, the reality is other people are not inferior to the narcissist. I would even say as a general rule, the overwhelming vast majority of people are way superior to the narcissist in almost every conceivable way, perhaps with the exception of intelligence or intellect in some isolated cases.

Narcissist is deficient, cognitively deficient, emotionally non-existent, is as clueless in social situations and in sex as the most autistic person.

Women cheat on the narcissist because as he is, he is not lovable.

This creates in them a frustrating and infuriating, tantalizing dissonance.

They love an unlovable person.

Additionally, the shared fantasy of the narcissist is an extension of his creepy and sick mind.

And so men equally reject the narcissist because of this incongruence, lack of cohesion and coherence between what he promises and what he shows, the appearance and the substance or actually the lack of substance.

There's nobody there. It's a zero in the fullest sense of the word, not as a value judgment, but as a mathematical description. The narcissist is a zero.

This is nobody there.

And when a woman cheats on the narcissist, the narcissist tells him, so how could she have chosen? How could she have opted for such an inferior man?

Look at me. I'm intelligent, I'm irresistible, handsome, I'm rich, I'm powerful. How could she have ended up with him?

They don't understand that other men, regardless of how they look or behave by comparison, are a breath of fresh air. They bring normalcy into the life of the narcissist's intimate partner.

His abuse creates claustrophobic, suffocating, hypervigilant bubble with no atmosphere. He sucks the oxygen out of every environment.

Women don't perceive the narcissist's absence in their lives after the breakup as a punishment or a loss. They perceive it as wonderful liberation, as a relief, as a reward.

Of course, his intimate partners miss some aspects. Some narcissists are very insightful. So they miss maybe the psychological insights. Other narcissists are reasonably good lovers. They miss the sex.

You always miss something in someone.

So generally, most intimate partners would miss something.

But largely and overwhelmingly, they are relieved. They are relieved, they are liberated, they are happy. They are happy to have gotten rid of the narcissist and his sick shared fantasy. They are much happier. They are much happier when the narcissist is awake. Even when they are together, ostensibly, they try to avoid the narcissist.

And all women, if the narcissist allows them closure or closure dialogue, they compile this long and exhaustive list of the narcissist's shortcomings, deficiencies, disadvantages, etc., etc. And these lists are very, very, very long, almost internal, almost endless.

So this by itself proves that all other men, alternatives are vastly superior to the narcissist and way more attractive to his intimate partners.

See, what the narcissist fails to understand is that women first connect to a man as a person. And they want a person who loves to be with people, or more specifically, loves women. They want someone who is kind, who is interesting, who is passionate, who is horny. They want openness, gregariousness. They want safe acceptance, a core, a good time.

So they end up being with other men.

And what I'm saying here applies to business as well, applies to the workplace, applies to organizations the narcissist belongs to. I don't know, church, political party. People want people, people want human beings. People want persons to be with.

They don't want to be with pale and dysfunctional and the glitchy imitation of humans like the narcissist. Other people allow for intimacy to develop patiently and attentively.

And so when the narcissist intimate partner betrays him, cheats on him with another man, it's because they see in that other men, the man, the person.

And this is the foundation of sexual attraction.

Women are attracted to other men because of the person, personality, the sex is a derivative.

Many narcissists are functional schizoids. In other words, even if they socialize a lot, they don't really socialize. They are averse to people. They hate men. They hate women. They hate children. They hate humanity, except when and for as long as other people are of some use to the narcissist.

I don't know, give him supply, money, access, sex, services. In this sense, all narcissists are very psychopathic. They are out to get narcissistic supply and it's a goal and they will instrumentally use other people to obtain this goal.

But otherwise they're very averse to humanity. And this applies to people of the opposite sex.

Sex is not a sufficient compensation as far as the narcissist is concerned.

Anyhow, wenarcissists never have sex.

Women are no exception. They are useful to the narcissist as to, in his pursuit of sadism, to despoil them, to degrade them, to humiliate them. Useful to provide them with services.

The three S's, supply, services, statistic sex. He's willing to invest in order to extract benefits, but only when there is an immediate specific and high return on his investment.

It's not gratification, entitlement, or one of the other goals that I mentioned.

And with women, the investment horizon is longer. Women demand reciprocity in some respects, sexually, emotionally, time-wise.

And so women also tend to taper off their sex, their supply and even services.

So it's a bargain. And if the bargain is not kept, women end up being with other men.

They cheat and deceive.

When the investment tap is, the force that is closed or when there is asymmetry or imbalance.

And women could, the narcissist intimate partner could even end up with other men who are as abusive, grandiose, entitled or sadistic as the narcissist is.

But these men give them something. Attention, succor, money, children, stability, reliability, goals, sex, good time, social life, something.

The narcissist only takes.

Even the narcissist sex is autoerotic, sadistic, using the woman's body. There's no reciprocity there. Nasties can give insights. Nasties can be entertaining. But even these can be overbearing, meandering, compulsive, pompous, wrong, aggressive, sadistic.

And ultimately he degenerates into unwanted ramblings. He's too much. The narcissist is a caricature of a human being. He's too much, too emphasized.

And so when the woman has to make the comparison between the narcissist and any other man, I mean, narcissist usually end up losing, end up losing the game.

And I'm again mentioning sexual exclusivity and interpersonal relationships because this is the most intense domain of human life. It's where everything is revealed. There's maximum intimacy, maximum emotions, primordial and contemporary civilized bodily and mental intellectual and emotional, cognitive and feelings. I mean, everything is there. It's a microcosm and a microcosm. It's the cosmos itself.

The workplace has a subset of these features. And she has another subset of these features, but only an intimate relationship with an intimate partner, an interpersonal, prolonged interaction, only there the true face of everyone involved gets revealed. And only then the narcissist can transition via mortification from one state, self state to another from overt to covert, from covert to overt.

And now to round it up, to sum it up, I want to discuss the issue of whether anyone is preferable to the narcissist because this seems to be the behavior of the narcissist in the main partners, the narcissist business partners, the narcissist friends. They all seem to give up on the narcissist and then proceed to develop relationships, sometimes instant relationships, sometimes one night relationships, but perfect strangers.

Does it make sense?

If you have known the narcissist for years, does it make sense for you to replace him with a total stranger overnight? If you have worked with the narcissist for years, does it make sense for you to dump the narcissist and start something with someone totally new?

The answer is yes.

It's a rational choice.

Consider for example, dating a perfect stranger.

When you're dating a perfect stranger, there is a one to 3% chance of ending up with a narcissist or a psychopath, one to 3% of a population, a narcissist and psychopath.

So when you are with a stranger, these are your chances.

But when you are with a narcissist or a psychopath, you are 100% guaranteed to be with a narcissist or a psychopath.

So it's much better to take the odds of 3% than to take the odds of 100%.

It is rational to trust and to take chances with strangers and not with a narcissist or the psychopath.

And it's wrong to think that spending time with a narcissist, having a relationship with a narcissist, having a previous acquaintance with a narcissist, regardless of length and intensity should change the sky-cos.

Because it doesn't.

First of all, the psychopathic narcissist is a pathological liar. So he's self-reporting. He's very suspect. Can't learn much by spending time with him.

And second thing, from the very first moment, he abuses, lies, tortures, manipulates, openly throughout any relationship, business, personal. So you gain nothing by spending time with a narcissist. You gain nothing.

Narcissism is a guarantee of ultimate loss and abuse.

Why take the chances?

So this is what I wanted to tell you, that there is no type of consistency.

Narcissists switch from classic to covert when they go through collapse and mortification. They switch back from covert to overt when they go again through collapse and mortification.

And I wanted to reassure you as victims of narcissists, survivors of narcissistic abuse, or people who contemplate being in relationship with narcissists or exposed to people who suspect a narcissist.

It's very rational to walk away. And it's very rational to prefer even relationships, even one night stands, even dating, even with perfect strangers than with the narcissist you know.

Because you don't know. There's no such thing as knowing the narcissist.

I just demonstrated to you that narcissists have self-states exactly like minos, exactly like people with dissociative identity disorder. There's nobody there.

Because there's nobody there, anyone can be there and everyone is there.

The narcissist you think you know can suddenly experience narcissistic injury, mortification, a collapse and he becomes covert. And that's a narcissist you don't know.

Surreptitious, undermining, underground, passive aggressive, maliciously dangerous. And then it goes back to being overt via another collapse, another mortification and you have a grandiose abuser with sadistic overtones.

Why do you need this? Why do you need any of this?

No contact. In 1995 I suggested a coherent strategy of no contact in a series of papers. The no contact strategy is not simply going no contact. It has dozens of steps of what you should do to ascertain that you are in a real no contact state. And I encourage you to watch the videos on my channel which deal with no contact.

These transitions, it's a new way of looking at the narcissistic dynamic.

But it doesn't really add any meaningful insight to the question, doesn't really provide a new answer to the question.

Should I be with him or not?

Not.

To be a narcissist is a full time job.

The narcissist needs to secure narcissistic supply on an ongoing basis, exactly like a junkie has to secure his next fix.

Without narcissistic supply the narcissist crumbles.

It's a full time job, it's energy depleting and many narcissists do not have the skills, talents or qualifications to obtain supply.

They are the collapsed narcissists.

And today I would like to discuss the collapsed narcissist and a new concept I have come up with, the collapsed histrionic.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of "Ballignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited". Pathological narcissism is thought to be the result of a prolonged period of severe abuse by primary caregivers or by peers or authority figures.

In this sense, pathological narcissism is a reaction to trauma. It's a post-traumatic condition.

Narcissism is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder that got ossified and fixated and mutated into a personality disorder.

All narcissists are traumatized. All narcissists suffer from a variety of post-traumatic syndromes such as abandonment anxiety, reckless behaviors and other anxiety disorders, mood disorders, somatoform disorders or the image problems and so on.

But the presenting signs of narcissism rarely indicate post trauma.

This is because pathological narcissism is an efficient coping defense mechanism. It's adaptive.

The narcissist presents to the world a facade of invincibility, equanimity, superiority, skillfulness, cool-headedness, invulnerability, nonchalance and in short, indifference.

This front that the narcissist presents to the world is penetrated in times of great crisis that threatens the narcissist's ability to obtain narcissistic supply.

It is also breached and collapses when narcissistic supply is spurious, fake or low grade, negative or static.

And then the narcissist becomes a collapsed narcissist.

Many self-help online experts online use the term "failed narcissist" but it's a failed term. It's a mistake.

Failed narcissist is a term that was invented by Grotstein, a scholar, to describe one of the phases in the development of borderline personalities.

The correct term is collapsed narcissist. Collapsed narcissist is very much like the collapsed histrionic.

The collapsed histrionic is usually a woman with body image, somato formations and a low sense of self-worth.

Yet she still needs men and she uses men to regulate her flagging self-esteem and efficient self-confidence.

This creates a permanent dissonance and anti-secretory anxiety as such a woman expects fully to be rejected and humiliated by men.

Low self-esteem often leads to an impaired reality test.

The collapsed histrionic misreads environmental, social and sexual cues.

She often ends up being mocked, shunned, abused or sexually assaulted by men.

She compensates for her insecurities with brazen defiance and grandiosity as well as with substance abuse, alcoholism, all of which compound her ability to properly gauge reality.

The collapsed histrionics' feelings of inferiority and inadequacy lead the collapsed histrionic to social withdrawal and to reclusiveness.

She rarely dates men and when she does she aggresses against, pushes away and abuses alpha males, winners, accomplishment even when they are genuinely interested in her.

She engages in preemptive abandonment, she dumps them before they dump her.

Instead the collapsed histrionic picks up safe betta babies, weak ugly losers who are very unlikely to painfully reject them.

Both histrionics and narcissists require a form of narcissistic supply and when the narcissistic supply is deficient when it is missing, they resort to several adaptive solutions.

The first solution is the delusional narrative solution.

The narcissist or the histrionic construct a narrative in which he figures as the hero, brilliant, perfect, irresistibly handsome or beautiful, destined for great things, entitled powerful, wealthy, the center of attention etc.

The bigger the strain of this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the grandiosity gap, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies.

Finally, if the delusion is sufficiently protracted in time it replaces reality and the collapse, histrionic and narcissist reality test deteriorates considerably.

He or she withdraw the bridges, may become schizotypal, catatonic or schizoid.

Another solution is the antisocial solution.

The narcissist or histrionic renounce reality.

To the narcissist or histrionic's mind those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his benevolent nature, hair, stunning beauty, entitlement, cosmically important mission, affection etc. Anyone who fails to recognize the real foundations of the narcissist or histrionic grandiosity, they don't deserve consideration.

The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal, the lack of empathy and compassion, efficient social skills, disregard for social laws and morals, they are also common to the histrionic.

Both narcissists and histrionics have a psychopathic overlay.

Actually many scholars claim that histrionic personality disorder is the female variant of psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder.

All this antisocial defiant brew erupts and blossoms.

The rejected narcissist, the rejected histrionic becomes a full-fledged antisocial psychopath.

He or she ignores the wishes and needs of others, breaks the law, violates all rights, natural and legal, holds people in contempt and disdain, derives in the Christ society and its codes, punishes the ignorant in grace and transgresses on the emotions and rights of even loved ones that to his or her mind these people drove him over to this state.

They are guilty, they are responsible for her or his acts.

By acting criminally and by jeopardizing their safety, lives and property, the narcissist, the collapsed narcissist of the colossus, the exact vengeance, reciprocates, restores balance and justice.

It's a power play within a power matrix.

A variant of this pattern of conduct is the passive-aggressive solution.

Passive aggressiveness wears a multitude of guises, procrastination, malingering, perfectionism, forgetfulness, neglect, truancy, intentional inefficiency, stubbornness and outright sabotage.

This repeated inadvertent misconduct has far-reaching effects.

Consider the negativists in the workplace.

He or she invests time and efforts in obstructing their own chores and in undermining relationships.

But these self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors wreak havoc throughout the workshop of the office, same in romantic relationships.

Despite the obstructive role of their play, passive aggressives feel unappreciated, bored, cheated and misunderstood, left out.

They chronically complain, whine, cough and criticize.

They blame their failures and defeats on others, posing as martyrs and victims of a corrupt, inefficient and heartless system or corrupt, inefficient and heartless people.

In other words, they have alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control.

Passive aggressives sulk and give the silent treatment in reaction to real or imaginary slights.

They suffer from ideas of reference, referential ideation.

They believe that they are the part of the persecutory ideation.

Their mildly paramount, the world is out to get them, which explains their personal misfortune, or they are being purposefully left out and cut out.

In the words of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they may be sullen, irritable, impatient, argumentative, cynical, skeptical and contrary.

They are hateful and spiteful, they are also hostile, explosive, they lack impulse control and they are sometimes reckless.

The next solution to deficient narcissistic supply, the next solution commonly adopted by collapsed narcissists in histrionics is the paranoid schizoid solution.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives, that directed confabulations, which place him at the center of others, allegedly malign intention.

Attention, meaning intention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.

The narcissist develops persecutory delusions.

The safe slights and insults when none were intended. Collapsed narcissists and collapsed histrionics are hyper-vigilant.

The narcissist or histrionic becomes subject to referential ideation. People are gossiping about her, mocking him, trying into his affairs, cracking her emails, etc. The narcissist and histrionic become convinced that he or she is the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate her, punish him, abscond with his property, delude her, impoverish him, confine her physically or intellectually, censor him, impose on her time, force him to action or to inaction, frighten her, coerce him, surround and besiege her, change his mind, part with her values, victimize or even murder her, ignore her, cut her out, leave her aside, etc.

Some narcissists withdraw completely from the world, populated with such malicious and nominal subjects. They are really projections of internal objects and processes, the persecutory objects.

These collapsed narcissists and histrionics avoid all social contact except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people, from falling in love, from having sex, from encouraging intimacy, from talking to others or even from corresponding with them.

In short, they become schizoids, not out of social shyness or social anxiety, but out of what they feel to be their choice.

This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, goes the inner refrain, and I shall waste none of my time and resources on it.

The next solution is the paranoid, aggressive or explosive solution.

Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions, histrionics with the same, resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict.

They become verbally, psychologically, situationally and very rarely physically abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean and derive, their nearest and dearest, often vanishes, often loved ones.

These narcissists and histrionics explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, spite, condemnation and blame.

Theirs is the exegetic bedlam.

They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment, as designed to provoke and humiliate them. They so fear, revulsion, hate and malignant envy. They flame against the windmills of reality, apathetic for law and side for sure.

But often they cause really, a lusting damage. They hurt people and sometimes they hurt themselves.

The next solution is the masochistic avoidance solution.

The collapsed narcissist and collapsed histrionic are angered, is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply or attention or admiration or being desired. The collapsed narcissist and collapsed histrionic direct some of his or her fury inwards, punishing himself or herself for his or her failure.

This masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist or histrionics closest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or persecutors, and thus either way to pay him the attention that he craves.

So he forces people around him to observe what's happening and to pity him or to persecute him or her.

Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism, a narcissistic or histrionic copout.

By undermining his work, her relationship and his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist and histrionic avoids additional criticism and censure, negative supply.

Self-inflicted failure is the narcissist or histrionic doing and thus proves that he or she is the master of his or her own fate.

Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances which render success impossible and an objective assessment of their performance improbable.

To quote Theodor Millemy, they act carelessly, withdraw in mid-effort, are constantly fatigued, bored or disaffected and thus passive-aggressively sabotage their lives. Their suffering is defiant and by deciding to abort, they reassert their own liberties.

The collapsed narcissist and histrionic from knowledge and public misery, self-pity, are compensatory.

Again, Theodor Millemy says, they are intended to reinforce his or her self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

The collapsed narcissist and histrionic tribulations of anguish render him or her in his or her eyes unique, saintly, virtuous, righteous, resilient and significant.

They are, in other words, self-generated narcissistic supply.

Thus paradoxically, the worse the anguish and unhappiness of the collapsed narcissist or the collapsed histrionic, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist or histrionic feels.

It feels good to feel bad.

In extremists, when all these default behaviors and solutions fail or when only negative, fake, elaborate and static narcissistic supplies to be had, the collapsed narcissist or histrionic falls apart in a process of disintegration known as decompensation.

It's the inability to maintain psychological defenses in the face of overwhelming and mounting stress.

And this is accompanied by the next stage, which is acting out.

It's when an inner conflict, most often frustration, translates into aggression.

It involves acting with little or no insight or reflection, and in order to attract attention and disrupt other people's cozy lives.

The dynamic forces which render the narcissist and the histrionic paralyzed and fake, his or her vulnerabilities, weaknesses and fears, these are starkly exposed as his or her defenses crumble and become dysfunctional.

The narcissist or histrionic's extreme dependence on his or her social milieu for the regulation of his or her sense of support is painfully and pitifully evident as he or she is reduced to begging and cajole or to threatening.

At such times, the collapsed narcissist or the collapsed histrionic acts self-destructively and antisocially.

The mask of superior equanimity is pierced by displays of impotent rage, self-loathing, self-pity, passive aggressiveness, and crass attempts at manipulation of friends, family, loved ones and colleagues.

The narcissist, collapsed narcissist or collapsed histrionic's ostensible benevolence and caring evaporate suddenly and shockingly.

The mask falls, evilly erupts and emanates or maliciousness.

The collapsed narcissist and collapsed histrionic seek to destroy the source of frustration, to punish it, to punish loved ones, to ruin other people's lives, to cause enormous emotional havoc and anguish and pain.

The collapsed narcissist and collapsed histrionic feel caged and threatened and they react with as any animal would do by striking back at their perceived tormentors, at their hitherto nearest and dearest.

There is no sight, no sight on God's given earth more unsettling than this transition from caring and loving, tender person, from acting to acting out the vicious cornered, malicious animal that strikes out at anyone and everyone around her and causes the maximum possible damage, pain and blood.

Both figurative and literal.

Thank you.

Today, I'm having a Donald Duck moment.

Or is it a Donald Trump moment?

Lately, I and the rest of the world am not so sure.

At any rate, today we have a Cornucopia.

Many interesting and fascinating things from all corners of cyberspace plus a central theme, a central topic.

And then this will be followed by quotes from books as had become a tradition.

My new Instagram channel is called Narcissism with Vaknin.

One word narcissism with Vaknin.

That's my new channel because my old channel has been blocked by Facebook.

And I've been asked on this channel, I've been asked by one of my followers, why did you delete your Jerry Springer video?

I thought it was honest and ballsy.

First of all, I did not delete it. I had moved it to the playlist section.

All the videos you think, well, most of the videos you think had disappeared because YouTube had deleted a few of my videos.

Haters complained about hate speech and other things and YouTube had deleted a few of my videos.

But all those who survived and you can't find them on the main screen, they are in the playlist.

There are seven or eight, I don't remember, nine playlists on my YouTube channel. Just go there and you will find the missing videos.

Okay. Scan the page, you will find it. Playlists are mentioned in a variety of places.

Okay.

But what struck my interest in her comment was the use of the word ballsy.

She connected honesty with courage.

And I wrote back to her, ballsy is a peculiar choice of words to describe an infantile non-man.

And she responded, well, it takes courage to be that honest with strangers and with yourself, also known as ballsy.

And my response was, you're confusing courage with impulsive recklessness.

And infantile narcissist is never courageous. He's just oblivious. He's indifferent to the consequences of his actions.

Sometimes if he's antisocial, he's defiant. Also if you hold people in contempt, if you don't care what they think about you, it takes no courage to be honest and open.

The potential consequences, the court of public opinion, don't matter.

Finally, negative supply is preferable to no supply. The narcissist will go to any length and distance, even self-degradation, even self-humiliation, even self-destruction, self-shaming and self-trashing in public in order to secure supply.

You can see this on The Jerry Springer Show in Dolomse.

The C word here is not courage, it's compulsion.

The narcissist can't help it.

Okay.

Today, later, the second half of the video, I'm going to read to you book excerpts from three books.

One of the excerpts will provide a very unusual view of empathy.

The second excerpt, that's Martin Luther King Jr. about love, what he had to say about love.

The third excerpt is about fear.

Now we had become a culture of fear, risk averse, danger averse, thrill averse, novelty averse, how we cocoon ourselves and how we socially distance long before the age of the pandemic. Fear had become the defining motivating factor in our civilization.

But before we go all there, I want to read to you a quote, a surprising quote.

It's from a book called Cattle Kingdom. Cattle Kingdom, the hidden history of the cowboy west. It was written by Christopher Knowlton and it was published in 2017.

And there's a sentence there caught my eye.

The long-born bull was notoriously ornery, sullen, morose, solitary and pugnacious. As one cattleman put it, the longer he lived, the meaner he became.

I thought this applies to the long-born bull as well to one of our acquaintances, the narcissist.

I've been asked, aren't you ashamed to not be a man? Aren't you ashamed to admit in public that you're not a man?

And to this I responded, aren't you ashamed to not be an astrophysicist? Aren't you devastated by the fact that you're not a psychologist?

I am both. I learned to be both. I acquired the skill set of an astrophysicist and the skill set of a psychologist.

You didn't. Aren't you ashamed of it?

I didn't learn to be a man. You did. Should I be ashamed of it?

To be a man is to play a role known as gender role. It's to act in a highly specific manner according to a script provided by society and the culture embedded in.

So they teach you in college or university to be a physicist, to be a medical doctor, to be a psychologist. And at home, much earlier, they teach you to be a man if you're lucky or unlucky.

I'm not sure anymore.

I had been taught from age four to read, to write. I finished devouring my first encyclopedia at age seven, thirty volumes almost.

So I didn't have time to learn how to be a man. And I don't play this role well.

I also, I have another shameful, disgraceful disclosure.

I don't play football. I don't play baseball.

And you know why?

Because no one taught me how.

I don't drive. I don't do many things.

I'm not a father. I don't have children.

Why should I be ashamed of any of this?

On the other hand, you can only dream, can only dream of to do what I'm doing.

I have so many skills that you can only dream to possess.

And yet I don't shame you for not being a physicist, for not being a psychologist, for not being a medical doctor.

Why are you shaming me, trying to shame you, for not being a man?

Response to another missive.

I want to explain to that eternal professional victim.

She was very proud of the fact that she's a victim, that she had been purely victimized, and she can't find any fault in herself, any fault in her behavior. She is the utter, perfect, unadulterated victim.

So I want to tell you something.

To refuse to victimize is also to victimize.

Some victims are so invested in their victimhood, it had become a determinant of their identity.

And if you refuse to victimize them, they resent it. They consider it abusive.

To refuse to victimize them is to victimize them.

So they sublimate it, they convert it somehow, they tell you, you don't pay me any attention.

Some victims consider even negative attention, like physical abuse, verbal abuse, as a form of caring, as a form of sharing, as a tenuous connection.

And when it's absent, they regard themselves as having been rejected, having been abandoned.

Abuse is what assures them and reassures them that they have a place in their intimate partner's lives.

They complain that the partner doesn't read, doesn't read, she complains, that the partner didn't read her mind, didn't foresee her needs, was not sensitive enough. She complains that they didn't pay her any attention.

And when you go through the letter, the email, you realize she's talking about negative attention.

She complains of gaslighting because she refused to accept her version of reality.

Projective identification and introjective identification are techniques used by perpetual, professional, proud victims to force other people to abuse and victimize them.

Why?

Because they love to be victimized. They feel good only when they feel bad.

Victimhood abuse is their comfort zone. They had been conditioned from early childhood to identify abuse with love, to identify victimhood with care, to identify battering with attention.

So pay attention. Search your souls.

Are you this type of victim?

Okay.

Lydia Rangelovska in one of our endless exchanges suggested a new concept which I found very, very fascinating.

She said the same way a narcissist collapses and the same way a histrionic collapses, the same way perhaps a borderline collapses.

Sources of narcissistic supply can also collapse. Sources of narcissistic supply can suddenly stop providing narcissistic supply. They can turn off the faucet. They can go away. They can break up. They can upset themselves emotionally or physically or both.

And at that moment, they stop providing the narcissist with what he needs most, secondary supply. They can go out in a minute and they become collapsed sources of narcissistic supply.

And it occurred to me that Rangelovska's innovation, because it's a totally new concept to the best of my ability, Rangelovska's innovation fits well with the collapse of other elements in the narcissist's eternal quest for the holy grail of narcissistic supply.

The source of supply can collapse, as Rangelovska had suggested, but also the pathological narcissistic space can collapse. Sources of primary supply can collapse.

Intimate partners are sources of secondary supply, never primary supply. So sources of primary supply can collapse.

And how does the narcissist cope with this?

He copes with this via something called auto supply or self supply.

He uses auto supply or self supply to create an equilibrium.

Let me give you a simile or in some ways a metaphor.

Those of you who remember your school days, if you had studied physics, I don't know, in Europe physics is mandatory, I don't know, in the United States with what's left of the education system, it's physics, physics is mandatory.

But we were taught about communicating vessels. Communicating vessels are containers, containers which are interconnected with pipes. And when you fill one of them with fluid, the fluid goes through the pipes to the other containers and the level of the fluid in all the containers is the same.

This is known as Steven's law, Steven's law of communicating vessels.

Steven was a fascinating character, Simon Steven. He was Dutch, which already makes him interesting. In Latin his name was Stevenus. He was actually Flemish, to be more precise. He was mathematician, physicist, military engineer. He did amazing things. For example, he created a yacht, a land yacht, kind of a yacht with sails, but on land.

He was a bizarre character. He translated many texts and so on. He said his famous quote is, "A man in anger is not clever dissembler."

So Steven Simon, Stevenus was the guy who came up with the idea of the communicating vessels.

And it's a perfect simile to narcissistic supply because you pour narcissistic supply into the first container, into the first vessel. Jar, jug, glass, doesn't matter. You pour narcissistic supply and it spreads equally across the various emotional and psychological needs of the narcissist.

If you pour an insufficient amount of supply, the level will be very low in all these areas of psychodynamic functioning.

The narcissist needs a constant infusion of supply to maintain the level across all communicating vessels, high and the same.

When there's not enough supply, when the supply is missing, the narcissist administers supply to himself or asks his intimate partner to administer supply to him. When the intimate partner administers supply to the narcissist, that's secondary narcissistic supply.

And when the narcissist does it to himself, when he fulfills these vessels with narcissistic supply by himself, it's called auto supply or self supply.

To refresh your memory, there are two categories of narcissistic supply and consequently two categories of narcissistic supply sources.

Primary narcissistic supply is attention, both in publicforms like fame, notoriety, infamy, celebrity, and in a private interpersonal form, adoration, adulation, applause, fear, fear, repulsion.

It is important to understand that attention of any kind, positive or negative, constitutes primary narcissistic supply.

Infamy is as sought after as fame being notorious is as good as being renowned.

To the narcissist, his accomplishments can be imaginary, can be fictitious or only apparent as long as others believe that he is an achiever.

Narcissists count more as far as the narcissist is concerned, count more than substance.

What matters is not the truth, but the perception of the truth. It is impression management on steroids.

Narcissistic supply comes in two forms, animate, animate, direct, and inanimate, indirect.

Inanimate supply is composed and composed of all expressions of attention which are communicated in personally, not personally.

For example, in written form, via third parties or as views on a YouTube video. Inanimate supply also includes aggregate measures of popularity and fame, number of friends and likes on Facebook, as I said, number of comments on YouTube, numbers of readers in the blog, statistics, bets inanimate supply, is more face, is faceless.

Animate supply requires an interpersonal interaction with the source of the narcissistic supply, usually in the flesh.

To sustain his sense of self-worth, the narcissist requires both types of supply, inanimate and inanimate, but especially the animate variety.

He needs to witness first hand the impact his false self has had on living, breathing, flesh of large human sources and on his immediate environment.

That's why isolation, quarantine, and social distancing are very, very difficult on narcissists.

Now triggers of primary narcissistic supply include being famous, being a celebrity, having notoriety, fame, infamy, I mentioned that, or having an air of mystique when the narcissist is considered to be mysterious, inaccessible, or having sex and deriving from it a sense of masculinity, virility, or femininity, or being close or connected to political, financial, military, spiritual movers and shakers, power, authority, or yielding and wielding this power.

All these are triggers of primary supply.

But who provides a supply?

Sources of primary narcissistic supply are all those who provide the narcissist with narcissistic supply on a casual, random basis, not so secondary narcissistic supply sources.

Primary narcissistic supply includes living a normal life, normalcy, just being able to present yourself to appear to be normal is a source of great pride for the narcissist, having a secure existence, economic safety, social acceptability, upward mobility, and obtaining companionship.

And so having a mate, having an intimate partner, possessing conspicuous wealth, being creative, owning a business, and of course, the business is transformed into a pathological narcissistic space, possessing a sense of anarchic freedom, being a member of a group or a collective, having a professional or other reputation, being successful, owning property, flaunting one's status symbols, they are all secondary narcissistic supply.

But this source of secondary narcissistic supply is the narcissist intimate partner.

She has a very important function. She records his moments of glory.

And when he's down, when he cannot obtain supply, when he supplies deficient, she reminds him of these moments of glory.

She's like an external hard disk, external memory. And she stores supply, she witnesses the supply and she stores it.

And then when the narcissist needs it, she releases, it's like a slow release bill. She releases the supply.

This way, she regulates the supply. That's her main function.

The main function of the narcissist intimate partner is regulatory, to regulate the flow of supply.

When there is a collapsed source of narcissistic supply, again, suggested originally by Lydia Agnoloska, when there's a collapsed source of narcissistic supply, the narcissist will try to compensate for this.

So when the source of secondary supply had collapsed, the narcissist will try to obtain more additional primary supply.

The narcissist will also try to provide himself with supply, auto supply, self supply, which we're going to discuss in a minute.

When there is a collapsed source of primary supply, primary narcissistic supply, when sources of primary supply vanish, disappear, mock the narcissist when they create external mortification and so on, when the narcissist remains bereft, bereft of all sources of primary supply, he's going to put the onus and the pressure on the source of secondary supply to regulate the deficiency, to cover up for the deficiency, to release memories of past moments of glory, past moments, past accomplishments, so as to compensate for the deficiency.

And again, he's going to use auto supply.

Self supply is a regulatory tool.

And finally, when the entire pathological narcissistic space collapses, to remind you, pathological narcissistic space is the physical places narcissists go to in order to obtain supply.

The local pub, the library, the church, the narcissist family is a pathological narcissistic space usually.

So when the pathological narcissistic space collapses, the narcissist tries to compensate by obtaining more primary supply.

What's the role of auto supply or self supply in all this?

Again, it has a regulatory role and in this sense, it's the exact equivalent of an intimate partner.

Again, we see auto eroticism, libidinal investment in the self.

Auto supply, self supply are as good as having an intimate partner. They're interchangeable.

Don't have an intimate partner, supply yourself as a narcissist.

You can't supply yourself as a narcissist, you look for an intimate partner.

It's all investment in the self.

You can supply yourself in really dire straits when, you know, when as a last resort.

So it's a regulatory mechanism.

It is tied to schizoid states where the narcissist is isolated, withdrawn.

I refer you to the previous video that I made.

And so he has no access to people. He has no access in and to an intimate partner. He may have divorced. She may have abandoned him, cheated on him, betrayed him or whatever.

So he's in a schizo-instate, isolated, withdrawn, rigged, reclused, lone wolf.

And so at that moment, he will try to compensate via self supply or auto supply.

Now, what is self supply?

What is auto supply?

It's anything, anything that grants the narcissist narcissistic supply, but is not dependent on any input or feedback from other people.

In other words, you remember that in narcissism, there is a God awful confusion between internal objects and external objects.

The narcissist misconstrues and considers external objects as totally internal.

So worst comes to worst, rock bottom.

What the narcissist does, he begins to relate to some of his internal objects as actually external.

And he derives from these internal objects narcissistic supply as though and as if they were external.

He may uplift himself with positive automatic thoughts. He may tell himself that he's great, that he's a genius, misunderstood, but still a genius.

So he will give himself pet talks and so on, not in a healthy way.

Most of us, almost everyone does that from time to time, but in a sick compulsive way, repetitive and something that occupies the bulk of his time.

So he's going to have a dialogue, he's going to establish a dialogue with his internal objects, thereby estranging himself from his internal objects to the point of psychosis almost, almost to the point that he mistakes his internal objects as external objects.

He still maintains a measure of reality testing, and he knows that he's talking to himself. He knows that these objects don't exist out there, but he tends to identify them with external objects that had existed in his life from his past. And he tends to kind of in a process that I call twinning, he tends to twin in a current contemporary internal objects with a past external objects.

So he would identify, for example, an internal object with his ex, with his ex-wife. He would identify an internal object with his teacher who admired him, etc. So he would kind of twin the past with the future, with the present.

And so this leads to several types of auto supply.

The most prominent by far is paranoid or persecutory ideation.

Think about it.

Palliative ideation, the belief that you are at the center of some kind of collusion or conspiracy theory, aggrandizes you, makes you appear important, at least to yourself.

If you believe yourself to be at the core or at the crux or to be the pivot and the axis of processes around you, that is the kind of magical thinking that elevates you, that renders you the center and the focus of attention.

So paranoid and persecutory ideation are highly narcissistic and they are a form of auto supply, self supply, because you don't need anything and anyone to buttress, prove, substantiate your paranoid and persecutory ideation on the very contrary.

Paranoia is a very solitary, very solitary kind of state of mind.

The second type of auto supply or self supply is delusionality.

You can simply develop a delusion or a series of delusions.

Some people develop a delusion that God himself is interested in their lives. To the minutest details, he micromanages their lives.

Others believe, others develop a delusion that, yeah, my wife had left me 46 years ago, but she will be back one day. I mean, there's no end. There's no way to specify all possible content of delusionality.

But delusions are a very crucial, important mechanism for self supply and auto supply.

There is even a therapeutic technique, it's called anchoring, like the anchor of a ship. And it is when we reorient the narcissist towards self supply, we push the narcissist to sort of win himself off narcissistic supply and to substitute for it, to replace it with self supply.

Rather than resort to fickle and ephemeral external sources of narcissistic supply, the narcissist is taught in the anchoring technique, is encouraged to resort to himself for supply, to look forward with excited anticipation to the structured pursuit of, let's say, hobbies, vocations, to develop certain traits and skills and reward eliciting behaviors.

And this self mastery is a major source of supply.

This approach leverages the narcissist's grandiose solipsism and his fantasy defense mechanism, especially fantasies of omnipotence. And it renders the narcissist emotionally self sufficient and proud of healthy progress.

So here's an example of a therapeutic technique that uses knowingly, consciously, mechanisms of self supply and auto supply.

But let's elaborate a bit on delusions, because delusions, delusional to delusions, that's the family of coping strategies that the narcissist had his most acquainted with.

When the narcissist is a child subjected to trauma and abuse, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape, he's being instrumentalized, torrentified, objectified, beaten, sexually molested, what to do?

Well, the narcissist as a child escapesto delusionality.

He develops a delusion, which is essentially the fourth self, a godlike entity, totally delusional, an imaginary friend, a comfort object that is delusional.

So the narcissist default, when there isn't enough supply, the narcissist default is delusion, unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion and data from reality. He transmutes them, unable to face the dismal failure that he is.

The narcissist partially withdraws from reality altogether, it loses reality testing to soothe and to solve the pain of disillusionment.

The narcissist administers to himself a mixture of lies, confabulations, distortions, half-truths, and outlandish interpretations of events around him.

And these solutions, these delusional solutions, we can classify them into groups.

Let's start with the delusional narrative solution.

The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as a hero, he's brilliant, he's perfect, he is irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, kindhearted, wealthy, the center of attention, etc.

He is the protagonist of his own novel of fiction, the biggest strain of this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies, they see irony.

Delusion is a defense against reality.

The more reality challenges the narcissist, the more delusional he becomes.

That's why it's very wrong in therapy to challenge the narcissist delusions, to introduce him, to force him to accept reality.

Because when you do this, it entrenches him, it becomes even more traculent, obstinate, resistant to treatment.

And finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, this delusion replaces reality altogether.

And the narcissist's reality testing deteriorates.

He withdraws, he draws, he draws bridges and may become schizotypal, catatonic, or schizoid.

And I refer you to the previous video I made.

Then there is the antisocial solution.

The narcissist, all these solutions to remind you are in case the narcissist is unable to obtain supply.

So here's a second family of solutions, the antisocial solution.

The narcissist renounces reality to his mind, those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his perfection, his benevolent nature, his entitlement, his cosmically important mission.

These people do not deserve consideration. They are, you know what, they are intermentioned. They are not human, they are subhuman. Anyone who can gaze at the face of the narcissist, he's the sun. You can't look at his face because he's glowing. There's an aura. He's saintly and godlike. And he's an amazing genius and he's unprecedented in the annals of humanity.

If you can't grasp this, if you disagree with this, if you're stupid enough to not realize it instantly, then something's wrong with you.

What's wrong with you?

You're not fully human. You're indistinguishable from monkeys and apes.

So you don't deserve, you have no rights. You don't deserve any consideration.

And the narcissist has no obligation towards you.

The narcissist's natural affinity with a criminal, his lack of empathy, lack of compassion, deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws, social mores and mores.

Now this affinity with a criminal erupts. It blossoms. It flourishes.

Nastasist becomes a full fledged antisocial psychopath.

He ignores the wishes and needs of others. He breaks the law. He violates all rights, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt of disdain. He derides and decries society in its codes. He punishes the ignorant ingrates. He becomes contumacious.

And that is because these people, to his mind, drove himstate of deficient supply.

They acted criminal. They are the criminals. They had acted criminally.

And so he's just reciprocating. He's jeopardizing their safety, their lives, their property, their happiness, their mental health, because they've done it to him first.

Defiance. Tit for tat. Quit pro quo.

There's a second family.

The third family, I mentioned before, the paranoid schizoid solution.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives, self-directed confabulations, which place him at the center of others allegedly malign attention.

The narcissist's intention and attention. The narcissist becomes his own audience, self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.

The narcissist develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slights and insults where none were intended. This is known as hypervigilance.

He becomes subject to ideas of reference, referential ideation. He believes that people are gossiping about him, mocking him behind his back, prying into his affairs, cracking his email.

That reminds me of Donald Trump so much that I'm going to take another sip from the Donald Duck mug.

The narcissist is convinced that he is the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, to punish him, to restrict him, to obscure his property, to prevent him from realizing his potential and self-actualizing, to delude him, to impoverish him, to confine him physically, to dwarf him intellectually, to censor him, to impose on his time, to force him to action, to force him to inaction, to frighten him, to coerce him, to surround him, to besiege him, to change his mind, to part with his values, to victimize, to murder him, and so on.

Escalation to the end.

And all this, the narcissist is the center of this universe, of collusion, conspiracism, and inanity.

Some narcissists withdraw completely from a world, from a universe populated with such minacious and ominous objects.

But these objects are really projections of internal objects and processes, as you realize.

And these narcissists avoid all social contact, except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, talking to others, or even corresponding with others.

In short, these narcissists become schizoid, not out of social shyness, but out of what they feel to be their choice.

The schizoid doesn't have a choice, the real schizoid.

The schizoid simply dislikes people, doesn't need sex, and is utterly asocial, not antisocial, asocial.

Here, the narcissist makes choices to let go, to give up certain proclivities and predilections that he has, certain tendencies and inclinations. He gives them up knowingly.

But he gives them up in his view, in his distorted mind, in self-defense.

The evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, they say to themselves. I should waste none of my time and resources on it.

Granted, exit left.

Now, the next family is the paranoid aggressive explosive solution.

The previous family was the paranoid schizoid solution.

There's another variant, the paranoid explosive solution.

Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict.

They become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and very rarely physically abusive.

The insults castigate, humiliate, chastise, berate, demean and deride their nearest and dears, often their well wishes and loved ones. They explode in unprovoked displays of rage, indignation, righteousness, condemnation and blame.

Theirs is an exegetit bedlam.

They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment. It's designed to provoke and humiliate.

They sow fear, revulsion, hatred and malignant envy.

They flail against the windmills of reality, a pathetic, forlorn sight.

But often they cause real and lasting damage. Fortunately, mainly to themselves.

And there's a middle ground version between the paranoid schizoid and the paranoid aggressive.

And that's the paranoid passive aggressive.

I refer you to videos of this channel which deal with passive aggression or negativistic personality disorder.

Another family is the masochistic action, masochistic, self-harming, avoidant solution.

Some narcissists, when they cannot secure supply, they are angered by the lack of narcissistic supply.

Such a narcissist directs some of this fury inwards, punishing himself for his failure to secure supply.

And this is masochistic behavior and it has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist closest and nearest and dearest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors.

And so either way, to pay him the attention that he craves, it's like he's shouting from the rooftops, "I'm about to be suicide. I'm about to harm myself. I'm about to hurt myself." It's a cry not for him. It's a cry for attention.

Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism, a narcissistic copout.

By undermining his work, his relationships, his efforts, the increasingly fragile and vulnerable narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, avoids negative supply.

Even failure is a narcissist doing and so proves that he is the master of his own fate. He is in control.

This is a technique very often used by covert narcissists.

Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating, self-destructive circumstances which render success impossible. Millon wrote in 2000 that masochist narcissists do this, they sabotage everything, they undermine everything. They do this to prevent an objective assessment of their performance to render it improbable. They act carelessly. They withdraw in mid-effort. They are constantly fatigued, bored, sick, disaffected, and so passive aggressively they sabotage their own lives. Their suffering is defiant in your face suffering, conspicuous victimhood, ostentatious self-reication. They get drunk. They do drugs. They overspend. They over it.

And so by deciding to abort their lives, to reject their lives as Clegg Lee put it, they reassert actually their omnipotence. Not only am I in control of myself, I'm in control of your emotions because I make you sorry for me. I make you sad. I make you depressed. I'm going to induce a state of mind in you. I'm going to play with your emotions. I'm going to sacrifice myself to eff up your mind.

The narcissist pronounced in public misery and self-pity. They are compensatory.

And again, as Milan said, they are intended to reinforce his self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

The narcissist tribulations and anguish render him in his eyes unique. I am suffering. So I never heard anyone of anyone that suffered like me. I mean, what he did to me?

I think no one else had ever experienced this. It makes him saintly.

This suffering, this victimhood is virtuous. It's righteous. It's resilient and significant.

He becomes an empath. Then he graduates and he becomes a super empath. Then he graduates and he becomes a supernova empath. This empath label is grandiose. It's highly narcissistic.

These are narcissists who had chosen the masochistic solution. These narcissists are, in other words, self-generating.

What they do, they replace narcissistic supply from the outside or they react to narcissistic injuries and mortifications by generating supply from the inside.

Self-generated narcissistic supply.

And they generate the supply by playing the victim, by becoming the victim, by identifying with victimhood, not only as a state of mind, but as an identity.

And so paradoxically, the worse is anguish. The more horrible is unhappiness, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels.

He feels good. He feels really good. He feels really, really bad.

So a narcissist reacts to a deficient narcissistic supply very much as a drug addict reacts to the absence of a particular drug.

The dwindling or absence of supply is a trauma and the narcissist experience post-traumatic stress.

The narcissist constantly consumes, praiseable, adoration, admiration, approval, applause, attention.

There are other forms of narcissistic supply when lacking, when they're deficient.

A narcissistic deficiency dysphoria sets in.

The narcissist then appears to be depressed. His movements slow down. His sleep patterns are disordered. He becomes insomniac or sleeps too much. His eating patterns change. He gorgeous on food or avoids it altogether.

The narcissist is constantly dysphoric when he doesn't have supply. He is unhedonic.

So he's sad and he finds no pleasure in anything, including his former pursuits, hobbies, professions and interests.

The narcissist is subjected to violent mood swings. He becomes mood-lebile.

Mainly he has rage attacks and he has visible and painful kind of emotional dysregulation.

So in a way, deficient supply pushes the narcissist to become a borderline.

The scholar Grotstein suggested the borderline personality disorder is failed narcissism.

When the child fails to develop narcissistic personality disorder, the child ends up being in a midway house and that is borderline personality disorder.

It's a failed narcissist.

So when the narcissist fails, when he collapses, he reverts to a borderline state.

When you see these extremely anguishing efforts at self-control and they fail, he compulsively and ritually resorts to some addiction, alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, shop-keepers.

He develops obsessive-compulsive rituals.

This gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort both to escape his predicament and to sublimate the aggressive urges that he has.

He's frustrated.

Daland in 1939 suggested the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

He said frustration becomes aggression.

So the narcissist is frustrated. He cannot obtain supply. He becomes aggressive. His whole behavior seems constrained, artificial and effortful.

The narcissist gradually turns more and more mechanical, detached and unreal. His thoughts constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive. His speech may falter. He appears to be far away in a world of his narcissistic fantasies where narcissistic supply is aplenty.

So the narcissist withdraws from his painful existence where others fail to appreciate his greatness, his special skills, his talents, his potential, his achievements.

The narcissist ceases to bestow himself upon a cruel, indifferent universe. He is punishing humanity for its shortcoming, its inability to realize how unique he is and what a gift he is.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranormal illusions, as we said, self-directed confabulations, which place him in the center of others' allegedly malicious intentions.

The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes-exclusive source of supply.

And again, to remind you, some narcissists go into a schizoid mode.

I refer you to the previous video I made.

Narcissistic or schizoid withdrawal.

This kind of narcissist isolates himself. A hermit in the kingdom of his hurt.

He minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers, flying monkeys, to communicate with the outside.

Devoid of energy. The narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions. His former compliance gives way to open withdrawal.

It's a rebellion of sorts. Smiles are transformed to frowns. Courtesy becomes rudeness. Emphasized etiquette is used as a weapon.

An outlet of aggression. An act of self-righteous, sanctimonious violence.

The narcissist, blinded by his pain, seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic supply.

And in this compulsive quest, out of his control, the narcissist turns both to and upon those nearest to him. His real attitude emerges.

For him, his nearest and dearest are nothing. Nothing but tools. One-dimensional instruments of gratification. Functions. Sources of supply. Extensions. Pimps of supply. Catering to his narcissistic lust. Having failed to procure for him his drug, narcissistic supply, the narcissist regards friends, colleagues, and even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating, potentially hostile objects. He develops what we call the secretary objects.

In his wrath and fury and unmitigated rage, he tries to mend these people, to fix them by forcing them to perform a game, to function a game.

He's very adamant about it.

Relentless, callous, reckless. This is coupled with merciless self-legilation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment, the narcissist feels.

In extreme cases of deprivation, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation. This is how deeply he loathes his self and his dependence on others.

Throughout this mess, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, harking back to a past which never existed, make America great again, accepting the thwarted fantastic radiosity of the narcissist.

The longer the lack of supply, the longer supply is missing, the more the narcissist glorifies, rewrites, refrains, misses, and mourns, a totally invented past.

This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, mounting to clinical depression.

The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia, he concocts a persecutory world, a persecutory world, I'm sorry, a prosecuting world, incorporating in this world his life's events and his social milieu. He creates a giant game of thrones and gives everyone a role, every place, every person, every event, all his personal history. This gives meaning, this online virtual game, this MMOG multiplayer game, this gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to no supply.

In this imaginary paranoid universe, there's a reason he's not getting supply. It's a conspiracy. It's a collusion. There's no other explanation.

He's so self-evidently superior. He's so much to offer. He's so much to offer. He's such a gift. He's such an endowment. He's so perfect. He's so brilliant. He's so handsome. He's so smart. All narcissists have a hundred and ninety-eight cute. Didn't you know?

And yet he's rejected. He's ignored. He's mocked. He's ridiculed. He's abandoned. He's disrespected. And it grates.

And in extremes, it mortifies, creates mortification.

And so he needs to cope, to create external mortification. He builds a paranoid theory. A paranoid theory of the world.

It's everyone against him. It's malicious, malevolent intent working behind the scenes to deprive him, to discriminate against. It's injustice writ large. It's institutional. It's individual. It's individuals.

It's individuals acting within institutions.

Everyone everywhere is against him.

Otherwise, he would have received much more supply.

Proof that this paranoid ideation is not a delusion is that he's not getting supply.

Does it stand to reason?

Of course, he should have received supply.

Plenty.

Those, these theories of conspiracy account for the decrease in narcissistic supply.

The narcissist then frightened in pain, in despair, embarks upon an orgy of self-destruction intended to generate alternative supply sources.

Alternative attention at any cost.

The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction in the service of self-aggrandizement.

When he's deprived of supply, both primary and secondary, the narcissist feels a narcissist world, non-existent, hollowed out, mentally disemboweled.

This is an overpowering sense of evaporation, disintegration into molecules of terrified anguish. Dissolution, helpless and inexorable.

Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles. Crumbles to dust like the zombies or the vampires one sees in horror movies.

The only sustenance is not blood, it's supply.

It is terrifying.

The narcissist will do anything to avoid this fate.

Think about the narcissist considering him as a drug addict. His withdrawal symptoms, his cold turkey, are the same like a drug addict, like a junkie.

Delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional ability.

In the absence of regular supply, narcissists often experience brief, decompensatory psychotic episodes. This also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis accompanied by a major narcissistic injury.

And these psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism, magical thinking.

Narcissists are like children in this sense.

I keep saying it in all my videos.

Many narcissists, for instance, fully believe in two things, that whatever happens, they will prevail and that good things will always happen to them.

It is more than mere belief. It's magical thinking that is experienced as reality.

Narcissists just know it the same way one knows about air or gravity directly, immediately, assuredly, unthinkingly, automatically.

The narcissist believes that no matter what he does, no matter what he does, he will always be forgiven, always prevail in triumph, always come on top. I call it narcissistic immunity.

The narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and insane.

The narcissist attributes to himself divine and cosmic immunity. He cloaks himself in this immunity. It renders him invisible to his enemies and to the power of evil.

The narcissist is a comic strip. It's a Marvel movie, not marvelous. Marvel is a childish, fan of the magoria, but to the narcissist is very real.

The narcissist knows with religious certainty that good things will always happen to him. With equal certainty, the more self-aware narcissist, and there are quite a few of them, this kind of narcissist self-aware knows that he will squander this good fortune time and again. It's a painful experience best avoided.

He knows that.

So no matter what serendipity or futurity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, he always strives with blind fury to deflect them, to deform them, and to ruin his chances.

And this is his only success, self-destruction.

Now, the next video, I'm going to read three excerpts from three books, a very surprising excerpt about empathy, Martin Luther King's words on love, which should resonate through the ages, and an excerpt about the cultural fear.

Are we on?

Oh my God! Wait a minute. I don't believe in God.

Okay, let's get it straight.

My name is Minnie Vaknin and I'm the author of Sam Vaknin. I think I got that one wrong. Let's try again.

My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism, Meaning, Revisited, and a host of other books and e-books about personality disorders and other topics. I'm also a professor of psychology and you're lucky not to be my students. Trust you, me.

Today we are going to make some order, finally.

In science, we have something called Occam's razor. It's also known as the law of parsimony.

If there is a proliferation of theoretical entities, if there's a proliferation too many preponderance of symbols, hypotheses, assumptions, labels, diagnoises and so on, something is wrong. Nature is simple. Nature is aesthetic. Nature works with a minimum number of variables to produce the maximum number of phenomena.

So here we are with covert NPD, covert HPD, covert borderline, collapse narcissists, collapse borderline who wants to be a narcissist, collapse narcissists who wants to be anti-social, collapse anti-social who wants to be Jordan Peterson. Something is wrong. Something is wrong because there are too many entities and we need to reduce them to the minimum number.

Actually, this is not my first attempt at doing this. I tried it 25 years ago for the first time.

At that time, I suggested that all cluster B personality disorders are actually a single phenomenon, a single clinical entity.

Then I expanded and I said that most mental health problems emanate from disturbances in narcissism and in the constellation and formation of the self.

At that time, there wasn't much evidence to support this and people were busy, I mean scholars and psychologists were busy making lists.

It was a primitive stage of diagnostic psychology, diagnostic clinical psychology. It was similar to the 18th century in botany when someone like Carl Linnaeus was walking the fields and cataloging plants.

So psychologists were doing the same. They were making lists and then they put all the lists together and they called it the diagnostic and statistical manual, which was nothing but a compilation of lists of criteria, each criterion corresponding to a symptom.

But these were still lists. They were dead, they were inert.

What was missing was the motion, the life, the dynamics.

People are not dead, they are not inert. Even mentally ill people are not dead, vast majority of them.

So there are things going on inside them. There are dynamics, there are processes and these of course were not captured by the DSM's categorical lists.

Another problem the DSM had, it was polythetic. In other words, two people with the same diagnosis could share very little in common.

And so the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 5 published in 2013 tried to cope with this by becoming a bit more dimension, a bit more descriptive, a bit more dynamic and by introducing and proposing alternative models, diagnostic models for at least a few personality disorders such as narcissistic and borderline.

But it's a far cry from what I will be talking about today, a very far cry.

What I want to propose is that all personality disorders and actually the majority of mental health disorders have to do with a confusion between external and internal objects.

When people confuse internal objects with external objects, there's mental illness.

Now internal objects can be for example voices of your parents or role models or peers or teachers or caregivers, grandpa, grandma. These voices were internalized and became your voices. They talk to you from time to time. These are called introjects.

Your conscience is an example of an amalgamation of these voices. Your superego as Freud put it. Other constructs, they are internal.

For example, we keep talking about the true self in narcissism. That's an internal construct.

So within the apartment, within the house, that is your mind, that is your soul. I would have said soul, I believe in soul, but your mind.

Within this space, there are many pieces of furniture. Some of them are mobile and active and reactive. Some of them are just there, inert. They provide the background and the scenery. These are internal objects.

Then there's of course external objects. For example, I am an external object, believe it or not. I know most of you have internalized me already and I appear in your nightmares, but I'm still an external object.

So when people confuse internal and external objects, there's mental illness.

Let's take two examples.

Psychosis and narcissism.

In psychosis, the person with psychotic disorder considers his internal objects to be external. He hears voices. These voices are actually internal voices, but he perceives them as coming from the outside. He sees things. He's hallucinating.

And these images, this external imagery, he perceives it as external, actually comes from the inside. He sees the figments of his own imagination and memories.

So this is psychosis when the internal becomes external.

Narcissism is exactly the opposite. It's when the external becomes internal.

The narcissist does not recognize the autonomous, in the independent existence of other people. He immediately takes a snapshot. He internalizes them as inner representations. He converts other people in his life, especially if they are significant. For example, sources of narcissistic supply. He converts them into internal objects that he can then manipulate and control safely without the risk of abandonment and pain, hurt.

So these are two examples.

Diametrically opposed.

The narcissist internalizes external objects.

And so if this is the case, we can easily show that all personality disorders and a majority of mental health disorders are actually a single clinical entity.

Let's focus on cluster B.

That's my expertise. And that's also the topic, the main topic of this channel.

All cluster B disorders, the erratic or dramatic personality disorders, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic and antisocial, all of them could be easily described as a single personality disorder, a single clinical entity with overlays. So you would have a single personality disorder with a narcissistic overlay and then the same personality disorder, but this time with a borderline overlay or antisocial overlay or histrionic overlay.

And even more people would transition between these overlays.

Today you could be narcissistic, but tomorrow you can definitely be borderline. And the next day, if you are provoked, if you are under big stress, if you anticipate abandonment, if you are anxious, you could become a psychopath.

In other words, patients with this single personality disorder would display all the traits and all the behaviors of all the overlays, all of them, and they would switch. They would move between these overlays.

Every narcissist is also to some extent antisocial.

Ask any spouse of a narcissist. Every borderline is psychopathic. Every histrionic is psychopathic and narcissistic, of course.

I mean, these distinctions are artificial, but the artificial doesn't bother me. What bothers me, they're wrong.

So every single overlay, so you remember there's an underlying personality disorder and it has overlays. And every single overlay in my theory has three states, overt or classic, collapsed and covert.

So every single one of these overlays, narcissistic, borderline, psychopathic, histrionic, would have an overt state, overt narcissist, a collapsed state, collapsed narcissist, and a covert state, covert narcissist, each and every one of them.

And people would transition between these states.

There is no, it's not a type. There's no type constancy, but every classic narcissist is sometimes covert and sometimes collapsed of course.

If he fails repeatedly to obtain supply, he becomes collapsed.

So people transition between overt and collapse and covert and covert and covert and covert and covert and covert and covert and collapse and covert.

Did I do it fast enough? I can do it even faster. I will show you in another video.

So this transition is the outcome of two external stressors.

In other words, patients or people with personality disorder, this single personality disorder would transition between overlays and between the states in each overlay because of two reasons and these reasons are stressors.

They create anxiety and stress.

The first reason is what I call the gap.

Narcissism for example, it would be the grandiosity gap. It's when the reality intrudes, when reality challenges the narrative that underlies the overlay, when reality doesn't let you anymore use your defense mechanisms to fend it off, to reframe it, to rewrite it, to regard it differently, when it's too much, when it's too strong, when it overwhelms you.

Reality could be external, but it could be internal. For example, in the case of the borderline, the reality would mostly be the borderline's emotions. Her emotions are dysregulated so they would take over her. They would overwhelm her. She would drown in her emotions.

So this is the gap.

The second reason for these frequent transitions between states and overlays is narcissistic mortification.

Now everyone has narcissistic defenses and traits. Everyone has healthy narcissism. Narcissism is a universal human phenomenon. It's only when it goes out of whack, when it's exaggerated and caricatured, when it's imbued with cognitive deficits such as grandiosity, only then do we talk about disorder.

But otherwise everyone has narcissism.

So narcissistic mortification can happen to anyone, anyone and everyone, even a healthy person.

But if the person is not healthy, if the person has this underlying personality disorder, the mortification would deliver a blow, a blunt false blow and would push him from one state to another, from, I don't know, collapse to covert, from overt to collapse and would also push him from one overlay to another.

Mortification can cause the narcissist to become borderline and the borderline to become psychopath, as we will discuss a bit later.

So to today's video, what I want to do is I want to provide you with a map.

I want to provide you with checklists.

Each and every overlay and state we will discuss today has separate videos on this channel. I dedicated separate videos to each and every one of us.

So please go to the search box.

It is signified by magnifying glass.

Go to the search box on my YouTube channel and type in, type in, it's like when you use your finger to generate letters on the screen.

It's called typing. It's an old art form now long forgotten.

Type in the keywords and lo and behold, you will get an avalanche of relevant videos.

Use this avalanche to your benefit.

Click on the videos and watch them.

Today is just a summer.

So a few things about the covert state.

Remember there are three states, overt, classic, collapsed and covert.

Let's delegate a few words to the covert state.

The covert state, the covert, aspires to be overt.

The covert state is the state of aspiration, the wish to become classic or overt.

The covert narcissist wants to become classic narcissist.

The covert narcissist, when he grows up, he wants to emulate his role model and his role model is Donald Trump.

The grandiose overt, classic in your face, my way or the highway, take it or leave it. That's the way it is, baby.

Grandiose narcissist.

Covert aspires to be overt.

Second point, covert are not self efficacious. They fail. They are the result of failure.

Remember overt, collapse, covert.

Covert is the inevitable outcome of collapse and collapse is a failure.

If you're a narcissist, the failure is to obtain narcissistic supply.

If you're a psychopath, the failure is to realize your goals.

If you are histrionic, the failure is to sexually conquer someone or to tease someone.

If you are a borderline, the failure is to ensure the continuous, unmitigated, uninterrupted presence of your intimate partner in a functioning relationship.

These are all failures and they create collapse.

And then once the collapse is in, there's a transition to a covert, covert state.

So they are always transitions, always because reality is merciless, absolutely merciless and pushes you out of your comfort zone repeatedly.

So there's always transition from overt to covert, back to overt, back to covert, back to overt.

And these are always done via stage of collapse, which follows the stage of gap and mortification.

I hope you got the picture.

Now let's hone in zero in on some of the types.

Covert narcissist.

There are like two million videos on covert narcissist and about half of one video is accurate.

The rest you can safely hit the delete button.

Covert narcissist has been first described by two scholars, the late Cooper, he died three weeks ago and Akhtar in 1989.

And here's what they had to say.

And what they had to say about covert narcissist is the only thing you should listen to.

The rest is rubbish, especially online.

So they said the following, the self-concept of the covert narcissist in fear or it, morose self doubts, mark propensity toward feeling ashamed, fragility, relentless search for glory and power, marked sensitivity to criticism and realistic setbacks.

What about the covert interpersonal relationships?

The inability to genuinely depend on others and trust them.

Like envy of others, talents, possessions and capacity for deep object relations, capacity to love, lack of regard for generational boundaries, disregard for other people's time, refusal to communicate, passive aggression.

What about social adaptation?

Nagging aimlessness, shallow vocational commitment, dilettante like attitude, multiple but superficial interests, chronic boredom, aesthetic tastes that is ill-informed and imitative.

I don't like this list.

The more I read it, the more I think it's me.

I hope Minnie is not listening.

Ethics, standards and ideals, the covert narcissist, readiness to shift values to gain favor.

It's not like the borderline, by the way. The borderline shifts values, but she shifts values, she changes her values from day to day literally because she doesn't have an identity, a coherent, cohesive core identity. She has something called identity disturbance or identity diffusion.

The covert narcissist shifts values because it's expedient.

He wants to gain something.

In this sense, he's psychopathic.

Online, materialistic lifestyle, delinquent tendencies, inordinate moral relativism, irreverence towards authority, contumaciousness.

What about love and sexuality?

Perish the thought.

Covert narcissist, inability to remain in love, impaired capacity for viewing the romantic partner as a separate individual with his or her own interests, rights and values, inability to genuinely comprehend the incest taboo, occasional sexual perversions. Sounds delicious, I must say.

Cognitive style. I'm off to find a covert narcissist after this video, of the right sex.

Cognitive style.

Knowledge often limited to trivia. It's called headline intelligence, by the way.

Forgetful of details, especially names, impaired in the capacity for learning new skills, tendency to change meanings of reality when facing a threat to self-esteem.

Language and speaking use for regulating self-esteem.

That's it. That's the covert narcissist.

That's the only clinical definition that we teach in universities.

Ignore and forget the heap of trash that passes for knowledge online.

What about the collapsed narcissist?

I would like to talk a bit about the collapsed narcissist in much more detail.

That's a topic that is much neglected, even online.

Let's start with the psychological development background in childhood.

There was a famous psychoanalyst in the 40s and 50s. Her name was Karen Hauni.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. By far my favorite psychologist of all time.

I keep reading her, I keep making a point of reading all the books once a decade and the time is coming now.

Karen Hauni, Hauni is H-O-R-N-E-Y.

Karen Hauni pointed out that the child is dehumanized and instrumentalized in abusive families.

His parents love him, not for what he really is, but for what they wish and imagine him to be.

The fulfillment of their dreams and frustrated wishes.

The child becomes the vessel of his parents' discontented lives. A tool, a magic brush with which they can transform their failures into successes, their humiliation into victory, their frustrations into happiness.

The child is taught to ignore reality and to occupy the parental fantastic space. I mockingly, jokingly, I usually say that it's a family where the child is not put on a pedestal, but the pedestal is put on the child.

Such an unfortunate child, I'm continuing, feels omnipotent and omniscient, perfect and brilliant, worthy of adoration and entitled to special treatment.

The faculties that are honed by constantly brushing against bruising reality, faculties like empathy, compassion, realistic assessment of one's abilities and limitations, realistic expectations of oneself, of others, personal boundaries, teamwork, social skills, perseverance, goal orientation, not to mention the ability to postpone gratification, delay gratification and to work hard to achieve things.

All these are the outcomes of brushing against reality, of the friction of life.

They're all lacking or missing in such a child.

When this kind of child, Peter Pan, Pouéra d'Alessent, when he turns adult, he sees no reason to grow up, no reason to invest in his skills and education.

He's convinced that his inherent genius should suffice. He's a wunderkind.

He feels entitled for merely being rather than for actually doing.

It reminds me of the nobility in the previous centuries.

They felt entitled not by virtue of any merit or accomplishment, but as the inevitable foreordained outcome of the fact that they were born of their birthright.

So it's like this kind of children, they belong to a new aristocracy, a new nobility, and we should all serve them in a kind of mental feudalism.

In other words, the child is not meritocratic, but aristocratic.

Why am I talking so much?

This is the epitome and quintessence of narcissism.

It's a narcissist.

But such a mental structure is brittle, fragile, vulnerable, susceptible to criticism and disagreement, open to the incessant encounter with a harsh and intolerant world.

Deep inside, narcissists of both kinds, narcissists that were fashioned by classic abuse and narcissists yielded by being idolized, both kinds of narcissists, they feel inadequate. They feel phony, the imposter syndrome. They feel fake, inferior, and deserving of punishment.

This is where I beg to differ with Millon.

Millon makes a distinction between several types of narcissists, and he wrongly, in my view, assumes that the classic narcissist is the outcome of overvaluation, idolization, spoiling.

And so he's possessed of supreme unchallenged self-confidence and is devoid of any self-doubt.

According to Millon, it is the compensatory narcissist, another type, who falls prey to nagging self-doubts, feelings of inferiority, and a masochistic desire for self-punishment.

But this distinction is unnecessary because it's wrong.

There is only one type of narcissist. There are two developmental paths and two ways to express narcissism.

Trump's way of expressing narcissism is not the way that, for example, someone who is more covert would do it, but all narcissists are besieged by deeply ingrained, though at times not conscious, I will grant Millon that.

Deeply ingrained feelings of inadequacy, fears of failure, masochistic desires to be caught and penalized, a fluctuating sense of self-worth regulated by narcissistic supply, and an overwhelming sensation of fakeness.

This one narcissist, all narcissists, are hypervigilant. That's why they react to even the most innocuous comment as though it were an attack or a slight.

They become very aggressive if they think they've been offended.

The grandiose gap between a fantastically grandiose and unlimited self-image and the actual limited accomplishments and achievements of the narcissist, this grandiose gap is grating.

Its recurrence, because it happens all the time, threatens the precariously balanced house of cards that is a narcissistic personality.

The narcissist finds to his chagrin that people out there are much less admiring, much less accommodating, much less accepting than his adulating parents.

As the narcissist grows old, he often becomes the target of constant derision and mockery.

It's a sorry sight indeed, he's a buffoon.

Buffoon, pompous, full of himself full.

The narcissist's claims of superiority appear less plausible and substantial the more and the longer he makes them or insists on them.

The narcissism, originally a defense mechanism intended to shield the narcissist from an injurious world becomes the main source of hurt.

It's the narcissism that generates the injuries.

It's counterproductive, it's dangerous.

Overwhelmed by negative or absent narcissistic supply, the narcissist is forced to let go of his narcissistic defenses and that's when collapse happens.

The narcissist then has to compensate for the collapse and he does this by becoming covert.

So overt challenges by reality, very painful, very mortifying, narcissistic injuries aplenty, narcissist cannot stand it anymore, he falls apart, he collapses, he's mortified and he becomes covert.

But the covert narcissistic phase is a delusional phase and there are variants of covert narcissism, it's not a single thing.

Narcissist results to self-delusion, unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion and data, the narcissist refrains them, he transmutes them.

Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially withdraws from reality to soothe and to solve the pain of disillusionment, the narcissist administers to himself a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths and outlandish interpretations of events around him.

And these are the covert states.

Now there are several types of covert narcissism depending on the delusional solution.

Let's start one by one.

First there is the delusional narrative solution.

It's a delusional covert narcissism.

The narcissist constructs a narrative, story, piece of fiction, a confabulation in which he figures as a hero, a protagonist in this newly invented piece of fiction or story is brilliant, is again brilliant, perfect.

Irresistibly handsome, like me for example, destined for great things, entitled powerful, wealthy, center of attention, etc.

The bigger, the strain on this delusional charade, the greater the gap between his fantasies and reality, the more the delusion is entrenched, coalesces and solidifies.

Finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, the delusion replaces reality and the narcissist's reality testing deteriorates.

He withdraws his bridges and maybe comes kizotippo, catatonic or schizoid.

The second type of solution is the antisocial solution and these are the antisocial covert narcissists.

We all know them.

They are covert, they have pseudo humility, they have false modesty, but they are passive aggressive and they are vicious, malevolent and malicious.

The narcissist who adopts this solution to the grandiosity gap.

You remember what these solutions are?

They are attempts to reconcile painful reality with grandiose fantastic self-image.

There is a gap.

Reality doesn't support the grandiose image.

So these are the solutions.

The solution is to become covert, but you can become delusionally covert or as I'm about to explain, psychopathically covert.

This kind of narcissist renounces reality to his mind.

Those who fusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his benevolent nature, entitlement, his cosmically important mission, his perfection, the idiots, the morons who can't grasp his divinity, they don't deserve him. They don't deserve him and they don't deserve consideration because they are less than human or as a German would say, "intervention".

Oh, I love German. No such language to express unbridled psychopathic narcissism.

Sometimes I suspect they invented the mental condition.

Anyway, the narcissist's natural affinity with a criminal, with the antisocial, his lack of empathy, lack of compassion, deficient social skills, disregard for social laws and mores and morons.

Now when the grandiosity gap is big, there's a lot of stress and he chooses a covert solution.

Now his psychopathy erupts and blossoms. He becomes a full fledged antisocial psychopath.

Or if you want to use media hype, sociopath, he ignores the wishes and needs of other people. He breaks the law. He violates everyone's rights, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt and disdain. He derides and decries society and its codes. He's vengeful. He punishes the ignorant ingrates that to his mind drove him to this state and he would do anything to demolish them. He acts criminally. He jeopardizes safety, lies and property in extreme cases. He might become a mass shooter or a serial killer.

The third type of covert solution is the paranoid schizoid solution.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid persecutory narratives, self-directed confabulations, which place the narcissist at the center of other people's allegedly malign intention.

This is what most conspiracy theories do. They usually choose this solution.

Majority of conspiracy theories are collapsed covert narcissists who chose this solution.

The narcissist becomes his own audience. He is self-sufficient in some way, has his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply. This is called self-supply.

The narcissist develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slides and insults where none were intended. Hypervigilance. He becomes subject to referential ideation, ideas of reference. He thinks that people are gossiping about him, mocking him behind his back, prying into his affairs, cracking his email, I don't know, analyzing and dissecting everything he does or doesn't do. He's convinced that he's the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, abscond with his property, delude him, cheat with his wife, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor him, impose on his time, force him to action, prevent him from action, frighten him, coerce him, surround and beseech him, change his mind, part with his values, victimize or even in extreme cases murder him, out to get him, if they could.

Some narcissists withdraw completely from a world populated with such menacious and ominous objects. These are of course a prime example of confusing internal objects with external objects. These persecatory objects are internal. This is the narcissist's self-hatred. He hates himself for having failed. He wants to kill himself, he wants to destroy himself, he wants to eradicate himself, he wants to punish himself.

But then he externalizes these internal voices and these internal objects and they become external, they become I don't know, the CIA.

So these kind of narcissists avoid all social contact except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, talking to others or even corresponding with others.

In short, they become schizoids.

Not out of social shyness but out of what they feel to be their choice and a preponderance of weariness, of caution.

This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, goes the inner refrain and I shall waste none of my time and resources on these ingrates.

The next solution inside the covert spectrum.

So we're talking about covert narcissists.

The next covert solution is the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution.

Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict.

These kind of narcissists are dangerous.

They become verbally, psychologically, situationally and sometimes physically abusive. They become bullies, they insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean, deride, despoil, degrade their nearest and dearest.

Even well-wishers, loved ones, they explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, condemnation and blame. Their world is an exegetic, hermeneutic bedlam.

A madman, a madhouse.

They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent, innocent, comment, good morning. It's designed to provoke and humiliate them somehow.

What do you think?

I don't know. It's morning. Are you to tell me it's morning and who are you to decide that it's going to be good? Are you God or do you want to control me and dictate to me that I should feel good, etc.

This kind of narcissist, so fear, revulsion, hate and malignant envy, wherever they go, they flail against the windmills of reality. They are pathetic for no one's sight, but they are very, very, very perilous, dangerous.

Often they cause long and lasting damage. Fortunately mainly to themselves, but sometimes to others.

And then the final type of covert narcissist is the masochistic avoidance solution.

Masochistic avoidance narcissist.

When narcissist has deficient supply, he disintegrates. He decompensates. His defense mechanisms stop working.

The false self no longer protects him from the world.

So he's angered.

It frustrates him, of course, and frustration breeds aggression. That's not me. That's Dallat in 1939.

Frustration, aggression, hypothesis.

Use your finger.

So the narcissist is angered by lack of supply, of narcissistic supply.

And he directs some of these fury inwards, punishing himself for his failure.

And this masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist closest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors.

So either way to pay him the attention that he craves.

It's a little like a child, you know, child who throws a temper tantrum.

He does this to attract attention.

The same with a narcissist.

I'm going to hurt myself. I'm going to commit suicide. I'm going to die. I don't want to live anymore.

This is cry for help on the one hand.

But actually an attempt to attract attention. Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism, a narcissistic copout.

But by undermining his work, his relationships and his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, negative supply.

Self-inflicted failure is the narcissist doing.

And so proves that he is a master of his own fate, that he is in control.

You know, to fail is an art form. If you are very, very good at failing, if you all that you have done, all that you've been doing in your life is failing.

If you're an expert at failing, you will go on failing because that's what you do best.

Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances, which render success impossible.

Willan wrote in the year, 20 years ago, that this kind of narcissist, the masochistic narcissist, they're covert, of course, they try to avoid an objective assessment of their performance, to make it a problem. They act carelessly. They withdraw in mid-effort. They're constantly fatigued, bored or disaffected.

And so they're passive aggressively sabotaging, undermining their lives, their work, their accomplishments, projects they're involved with, their suffering. Their suffering is ostentatious. It's conspicuous. It's defiant.

And by deciding to abort, they reassert their omnipotence.

I destroyed this project. I ruined that company. I pushed my wife to cheat on me.

The narcissist's pronouns and public misery and self-pity, they are compensatory and they reinforce, according to Willan, the narcissist's self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

The narcissist's tribulations and anguish render the narcissist in his own eyes unique.

This kind of narcissist, this kind of covert narcissist, they are the saints. The saints walking among us, some of whom get peace, noble prizes, they're actually covert narcissists. They are saintly, professionally saintly, or professional victims. They are virtuous, they're righteous, they're resilient, they're significant.

Many of them become empaths, super empaths and supernova empaths.

It reminds me of the Freemasonry. There's a Freemasonry of empaths.

These are all very grandiose narcissistic people.

The term empath is a self-aggrandizing term, often used by covert narcissists. These kind of narcissists, in other words, generate their own supply by attaining the high moral ground. They are God. They are the ones who punish.

Would they punish themselves?

But it's a pain. They still maintain the function. I mean, they still own punishment. They do the punishment. The worse the anguish and unhappiness of these eternal victims, the more relieved and elated they feel. It's a comfort zone.

Okay.

Now let's talk about the collapsed face, the face that leads to covert narcissism.

The collapse covert narcissist.

I made a video about it yesterday for those of you who survived it.

And so I mentioned, I want to summarize yesterday's video.

Today's video was an amalgamation or aggregation of testimonials by dozens of people. So it was a bit messy, a bit chaotic. And I really, really apologize for the...

It's difficult to collate, to create a composite that is coherent because people mismatch.

But I want to pinpoint a few points.

First of all, the collapse covert narcissist.

It starts with a collapse, then there is mortification.

You remember what mortification does?

There are five videos dedicated to mortification on my channel.

Narcissistic mortification disables the false self.

So there's an overt classic narcissist. There's a problem with reality, something, some failures, some humiliation, public or otherwise some defeat. He cannot cope with it. Collapses.

And when he collapses, he's mortified because he comes face to face with his true self. There's no protection of the false self because the false self is disabled.

The minute this happens, this kind of narcissist who went through a collapse and is about to become a covert in one of the five variants that I mentioned before, before he becomes a covert, he develops indifference.

He becomes a doormat.

He has no boundaries. He's open to exploitation and abuse. He is conflict averse. He avoids conflicts. He doesn't protest. He doesn't stand up for himself. He doesn't fight back.

And this is intended to reduce dissonant anxiety.

The collapse creates a normal anxiety, overwhelming anxiety.

And to reduce it, the narcissist actually switches himself off. He doesn't exist.

Because he stops to exist, he ceases to exist, no one can do anything to him. So he's immune to pain, immune to hurt.

He reaches a state of equilibrium and homeostasis, these kinds of freezes. It's a freeze response in effect. It gives him time. Gives him time to do what? Gives him time to reconstruct the false self, to put the bricks back together.

But he does this by becoming antisocial.

So he becomes a con artist. He steals and cheats and lies. He does horrible things.

It is via antisocial activities, immoral activities, defiant activities, lack of impulse control, and sometimes criminal activities that he regains his sense of omnipotence and mastery, which allows him to reconstruct the false self.

Following the collapse and the mortification and the phase of indifference, the false self is restored and that kind of narcissist switches back to overt narcissism.

But again, once the false self is restored, there is a process of collapse of the covert state.

Suddenly, all the tools of the covert state are no longer applicable and they conflict with reality.

So there's a collapse technically.

And there is mortification, this time, mortification of the true self or the other self or whatever it is that is functioning there, the covert state, the covert solution, there's a mortification of that and a restoration of the overt.

So overt, classiccollapse, mortification, indifference, doormat phase, covert and back, covertcollapse, mortification, overt.

That's the sequence.

So you ask me, why did you need 76 minutes yesterday to say what you have just said in five minutes?

Because I like to hear my voice. I love my voice. It's resonant. It's amazing.

Caruso has nothing on me. You don't know who Caruso is. Never mind that. It just shows you my age.

Collapsed histrionic personality disorder. The collapse state of the histrionic.

The collapse histrionic is usually, and there's a video, remember, there's a video about each of these topics, much longer video, where you can hear my voice interminably and fall asleep. My advice, fall asleep before you start to hear my voice.

But that's up to you. Some of you are masochists, I'm sure.

So the collapse histrionic. Collapse histrionic is usually a woman because for a simple reason, most people diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder are women.

So the collapse histrionic is usually a woman with a body image issue, a somatoform problem or a body dysmorphia, body dysmorphic disorder.

And so she has an issue with her body. She's not happy with her body. She misperceived her body. She has the wrong perception of specific parts of her body or the totality of her body.

And consequently, she has a low sense of self-esteem, self-confidence and self-worth.

But the histrionic still needs the opposite sex, men in this case. And she still uses men to regulate her flagging self-esteem and deficient self-confidence.

I'm talking, of course, about heterosexual histrionic because they're homosexual histrionic, lesbians and gays.

But let's take to the heterosexual histrionic.

It's much more prevalent and common.

So she needs men and she medicates. She self-medicates with men. Men are her medicine. She reduces anxiety with men. She teases them. She floods with them. She seduces them. She conquers them. She's not related into sex, but she's into the conquest. She regulates her self-esteem this way.

And this creates a permanent dissonance, anticipatory anxiety, because such a woman expects fully to be rejected and humiliated by men.

In other words, her need for men makes her dependent on men. She hands over power to men.

Let's see irony.

The histrionic, who supposedly conquers everyone, seduces everyone. She's the femme fatale or the ingenue.

The histrionic is actually a mercy of men. Low self-esteem often leads to an impaired reality testing, a collapsed histrionic, misreads environmental, social and sexual cues, and often ends up being mocked, shunned, abused or sexually assaulted by men, especially if she's drunk or abused substances.

And she compensates for her insecurities with brazen defiance and grandiosity, as well as substance abuse, all of which compound her ability to properly gauge reality. Her inability, of course.

The collapsed histrionics feelings of inferiority and inadequacy lead her to social withdrawal and recursiveness.

So usually collapsed histrionics would just stay at home. They wouldn't dare expose themselves to potential rejection and humiliation.

She rarely dates men, this kind of war.

And when she does, she aggresses against, pushes away and abuses males that she perceived to be alpha males, dominant males, jerks.

Even when they are genuinely interested in her, this kind of preemptive abandonment.

This is the irony.

She usually ends up with wizzles and losers and better males because she rejects ab initio, tight and seen, more dominant than accomplishment were interested in her, because their rejection would hurt much more.

Collapsed histrionic picks up safe men, weak, ugly, losers, junkies, men who are unlikely to painfully reject her or if they reject her, it won't be painful.

Histrionic personality disorder combines traits of both narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.

Actually, there are many advocates, many scholars who suggest that histrionic personality disorder is a subspecies of variant of psychopathy.

It therefore stands to reason that these three cluster B dramatic stalwart personality disorders they share in the same etiology, same psychodynamics, which leads us back to the opening argument.

Many histrionics, attention whores, use the opposite sex, the attention, the infatuation, the arousal to regulate their emotions, moods, affect, and as well as sense of self worth, self esteem and self confidence.

Potential mates of the histrionic supply.

And similarly, when resolutely rejected, humiliated by rejection, abandoned, in neglected, ignored, collapsed histrionics react with histrionic rage.

In other words, we see a mirror image of narcissism here.

Here image, histrionic, narcissistic supply, histrionic supply, narcissistic rage, histrionic rage.

The histrionic, the collapsed histrionic resorts to in your face defiance, often by triangulating with the third, third man, third party in order to provoke jealousy or to grievously hurt the frustrating and rejecting object, man.

The histrionic separation is focused on restoring his or her grandiosity via a new and ostentatious sexual conquest.

But it can and does where have many other mostly passive aggressive or reckless forms of behavior, compulsive shopping, shopholders, gambling, lying, sabotaging, procrastinating, substance abuse, verbal abuse, brutal honesty, offensive humor and mockery and so on.

These are all expressions of collapse, collapse histrionic personality.

So when a woman, a woman with mental health issues is sexually or otherwise rejected by her intimate partner, she acts out in one of two typical ways.

And this is especially true if the partner also justifies his sadistic cruelty by adding abuse or virtually humiliation to injury.

So such women, if they're exposed to husbands who torture them, taunt them and torment them, tell them you're ugly. You do not turn me on. You're fat. You're not allowed to be a woman. You're stupid. You're repulsing. You're horrid.

No other man would be interested in you. You don't understand my sexual and psychological needs. You turn me off.

Many, many so-called intimate partners do this on a regular basis, sadistic torture.

And the union in such a case, devolves into a power match, power play.

The personality disorder, woman, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, seeks to obtain two goals to redress her grievances and her sense of offended justice.

The first goal is to disprove her partner's evaluation of her and restore her self-esteem and self-confidence by proving mainly to herself how other men desire her.

And this is accomplished by becoming a flirtatious, promiscuous and seductive teaser.

The second goal is to punish her non-intimate partner, by her non-intimate, so-called intimate.

When she does this, she punishes him by rendering his property herself.

He regards her as his property and she regards herself as his property by devaluing his property.

So when she becomes a slut, when she becomes promiscuous, when she gives her body indiscriminately to strangers in a bar, she's punishing her intimate partner by devaluing his property.

She's transmogrifying into a slut.

Or she can suddenly stop being a woman, eliminate all her feminine dimensions and behaviors, become morbidly obese.

So by sexually, egregiously misbehaving with multiple men, the rejected woman transforms herself into a whore.

And this is her way to penalize her abuser by devaluing and debasing herself by self-trashing, by trashing his property.

But some women choose the exact opposite solution.

They passive aggressively stop being women altogether.

In a way, they unconsciously adopt the abuser's point of view.

He regards them as not-family, as repellent.

And so they agree with him. They validate it. They neglect their appearance. They abandon their personal hygiene. They dress in tattered and shabby garb. They put on a makeup. Their physically inert, obese, neglect their duties, including in business, child-rearing, child-bearing, etc.

This is their way of defying their mean and nasty partner.

You say that I'm not a woman?

Well, here you are. I stop being one.

These women eradicate their femininity and womanhood as a way of getting back at their mistreating, abusive partner.

And all this is the package of collapsed history only.

Then she becomes covert history only.

Every single overlay, narcissistic, borderline, antisocial, history only, every single personality disorder has two, three states overt, collapsed, overt.

We just covered the history only, and we move on to the covert borderline.

The shy or the quiet borderline is a very controversial suggested diagnosis, which has not been adopted and is not accepted and is not taught anywhere.

And to my mind, at least, is a grievous error.

Every borderline is sometimes shy and internalizing and sometimes psychopathic and externalizing.

So I don't think it's a separate diagnosis. I think it's one of the self-states of every borderline.

But there is such a state, no question. There's a state where the borderline is fragile, shy, vulnerable.

And this kind of borderline internalizes her struggles and impulses, including aggressive impulses.

She does not externalize. She does not direct them with others. She internalizes. She dares them at herself. She becomes the exclusive target of her own chaos and turmoil. She doesn't act out. She acts in both the classic and the covert borderline act out and acting.

We both have these states of acting out and acting.

I would now like to read to you the list of traits of the covert borderline.

It is based on this schematic which Arnold M. Cooper and S. Akhtar put up in 1989 when they described the covert narcissist.

I've taken it and I've adopted it to describe the covert borderline.

So the covert borderline, self-concept and emotional regulation, he has a false self, like the classic borderline.

Both the classic and the covert states have the false self is intact.

This is grandiosity. Preoccupation with fantasies of outstanding love and due sense of uniqueness, feelings of entitlement, alloplastic defenses. This is something that very often confuses diagnosticians, therapists, mental health practitioners.

The grandiosity of the borderline. They often misdiagnose borderline as narcissist and narcissist as borderline. They both share grandiosity exactly like the psychopath. It's another psychodynamic or theoretical reason to unify this allegedly, ostensibly separate disorders.

The separation is artificial. Grandiosity is a seriously dominant feature of this and a very important psychodynamic precursor.

So the covert borderline is this is grandi-, covert borderline is grandiose. He has internal locus of control, seeming self-sufficiency, modal ability, emotional dysregulation and rationalization or reactance and defiance. He acts against authority, contumations. He has a low boredom threshold and tolerance. He externalizes and internalizes. He has no suicidal ideation and all his aggression is other directed. He aggresses against others. He does not self-mutilate. We're talking about covert borderline.

Yes.

Most covert borderlines are men. He does not self-mutilate. He has hypochondriasis and addictive behaviors. He's dissociative. As many dissociative self-states, mainly selective attention, contribulation, repression or denial.

And he has a primary psychopathic protector. He has a primary self-state that kind of protects him and he's very psychopathic.

What about interpersonal relationships?

The covert borderline has paranoid or persecutory ideation, numerous but shallow relationships, intense need for love from other people. He's a people pleaser sometimes. Lack of real empathy in the primary psychopathic phase, valuing of children of a spouse in family life. He has inability to genuinely participate in group activities, he's passive aggressive, sullen, surly, self-denying and these are also his behaviors. He's cunning, premeditated and malevolent. He engages in intermittent reinforcement and therefore generates trauma bonding. He has scorn for others, often masked by pseudo humility.

So he holds everyone in contempt but he pretends to be a nice kind guy. He has histrionic attention seeking, recklessness aimed at hurting or affecting others. He's sadistic punitive and goal oriented especially when he triangulates. So he will triangulate in a sadistic way and in order to punish his partner.

And his triangulation would always be goal oriented, not impulsive.

He has objecting constancy and goes through cycles which are very reminiscent of narcissism, idealizes devalues, discards, reverts or replaces.

What about social adaptation?

He's socially charming and he's charismatic. He engages in consistent hard work but he's done mainly to seek admiration. This is known as pseudo sublimation.

He has intense ambition, he's often successful and he's preoccupied with appearances. Is he ethical? Does he have any standards and ideals, moral or otherwise?

Well, he is idiosyncratic, the covert borderline, a man usually. He's idiosyncratically and unevenly moral. He has caricature of modesty. He's an activist very often.

The new studies published in the University of British Columbia linking virtue signaling and political activism to extreme psychopathy and narcissism. So he is an activist and he has enthusiasm, fake enthusiasm, never mind but enthusiasm for socio-political affairs. So many, many anti-racist activists. I wouldn't be completely shocked to discover that they are actually raging narcissists and psychopaths.

He has inordinate ethnic and moral relativism, pretended contempt for money in real life, feigned spirituality and guru status. So many of the gurus, coaches, mystics, yogis, public intellectuals, philosophers, and psychologists, psychologists and philosophers, they are likely covert narcissist or covert borderline and he has irreverence towards authority.

What about love and sexuality?

He has marital instability, likely to have divorced and married several times. He has called it greedy, called it greedy seductiveness, extramarital affairs and promiscuity, uninhibited sex life.

His cognitive style is decautious thinking, black and white, and splitting primitive defense mechanisms. You're all good or you're all bad. Something is all evil or all good. All, all, you know. He's impressively knowledgeable. He has egocentric perception of reality. He has a fondness for shortcuts to acquisition of knowledge. He's decisive and opinionated. He has a love of language and he's often strikingly articulate.

I'll finish by proposing that there is a covert state of psychopathy as well. That there will be a covert, covert antisocial personality disorder.

And I think the covert antisocial is a combination of the covert narcissist plus the classic borderline. In other words, if you take a covert narcissist, you can rewind and listen to the criteria and you add to that the criteria of classic borderline, classic, not covert. Put them together, you get the covert, the person with covert antisocial personality disorder.

And if we do this, we come up with something which is actually secondary psychopathy.

So the covert, what we call today secondary psychopathy is not a secondary state, another state of psychopathy. It's not like there are two types of psychopathy, primary and secondary. No. There's only one type of psychopathy, the overt classical type of psychopathy.

And then there is a covert type of psychopathy, the covert state of that type.

So remember, every overlay has overt, collapsed, covert.

So when we have overt or classic psychopathy, then we have a collapsed psychopath, psychopath that fails to realize his goals.

And then he goes into covert state.

The covert state of his disorder is what we call today secondary psychopathy.

And it merges well with classic borderline.

And that's why today we think we are reconceiving of classic borderline personality disorder as secondary psychopathy in women.

So covert, what we call secondary psychopathy, it's a mistake.

It's not another type of psychopathy.

It's simply another state of psychopathy.

It's classic psychopathy which had become covert, owing to collapse and via modification.

Borderline and histrionic personality disorders may be manifestations in women of secondary type psychopathy as measured by fact or two of the PCLR test.

In other words, borderline and histrionic women may actually be psychopaths.

A growing body of recent studies supports this startling conclusion.

Survivors of complex post-traumatic stress disorder also manifest.

Both psychopathy and narcissistic behaviors, they develop an overlay.

Intimate part, and there is a video, unfortunately with very few views to my total surprise.

There's a video that I made that clarifies the differences between CPTSD and borderline and explains how people exposed to complex post-traumatic stress disorder, narcissistic abuse for example, actually end up developing narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors.

And there's another video warning victims not to become narcissists and psychopaths.

Intimate partners will not be surprised by this observation that borderlines are psychopaths.

Palsivity, defined grandiosity, antisocial and interpersonal aggression, manipulativeness, violence, dysregulated negative emotionality, lack of object constancy, object impermanence, attachment dysfunctions, hostility, splitting or dichotomous thinking, high levels of distress, anxiety, depression, substance abuse.

These are all typical and common among borderline personality disordered women and psychopaths, secondary psychopaths, covert psychopaths.

And these women also defy gender roles and behavioral norms.

They act masculine when they are stressed, when they anticipate rejection and humiliation or are subjected to neglect and are ignored, when there's withholding, when there's abuse, they become men, masculine behaviors, psychopathic masculine behaviors.

But borderline adds a twist to discocked disassociation.

Whenever stress levels and inner dissonance become intolerable, she hands over control to her inner psychopath.

She depersonalizes, derealizes, disappears or develops dissociative amnesia.

She doesn't remember it.

And instead out comes a psychopathic self state.

It raises the possibility that antisocial personality disorder is not actually a diagnosis or a clinical entity but a culture bound composite, a collated derivative.

It is simply when people have simultaneously, when they have gone through a narcissistic collapse and became covert and they have an overlay, a borderline overlay.

This situation happens more often among women than among men.

No wonder it's been first described and diagnosed in women.

So this is it for today.

I hope I gave you a map with checklists.

You've had your fun with Minnie. Don't ask what I'm going to do to her after the video is over.

I am quite sure it's not legal.

And if you have any intelligent questions, which would be a refreshing change, please feel free to post them and I promise to answer.

If you don't suffer from any physical disability, try to use at least one of your fingers to search my channel and to search Google Scholar.

There's a website of Google managed run by Google called Google Scholar.

And in Google Scholar you have only papers and articles published in academic journals, peer reviewed academic journals.

There the literature is much safer, much more reliable.

People ask me about my paper.

They asked to know in which journal is going to be published.

It's unethical, I cannot say.

But if you go to my website, there's a page called Media Kit.

So you go to my website, mediakit.html and on the Media Kit you can see that I'm the editor in chief actually of three academic journals in psychology and mental health and I'm a member of the editorial board of another 60, that's 6-0, academic journals in psychology, mental health, psychiatry and neuroscience.

And my paper is going to be published in one of them.

At this stage it did not possibly review, it was just handed over to reviewers and it's considered unethical to release the name, so my apologies.

The minute it's published of course I'll make a big bro out of it because it would be a perfect opportunity to obtain supply and that's what I'm here for.

That's what minis here for.

Both of us are looking for supply.

I mean coffee, I have as much as I want.

Lately tea.

But supply is in short supply.

Bye.