I know that if you had the chance, you would have poisoned my coffee. And yet, I drink it.
And I drink it because I'm mentally healthy and I can tell the difference between reality and paranoid ideation, which is the topic of today's video.
Narcissists and psychopaths are paranoid. They are delusional. They don't have full-fledged paranoia or full-fledged paranoid personality disorder, but they are highly paranoid.
And as a result of this and other features of narcissism and psychopathy, paranoid ideation destroys intimacy, destroys relationships, because it leads to behaviors which are very problematic and they are the opposite of intimacy, the privation, withholding, withdrawal, avoidance, and absence.
These are the delectable topics of today's lecture.
My name, for those of you who are fortunate enough to not know, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, last time I looked. And I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and currently a professor of clinical psychology and business management in CIAPS, SIAS-CIAPS, Cambridge United Kingdom, Ontario, Canada and Lagos, Nigeria.
Paranoid ideation is a thought process. It's a form of cognition. It involves persistent suspiciousness and the belief that one is persecuted, harassed or treated unfairly by others.
Now, notice the important, the key features. It's persistent. It involves thinking. It involves suspicion and what we call in psychology conspiracyism. The belief that one is the but or the target of conspiracies.
So there's a belief, it's a belief, that one is persecuted, harassed or treated unfairly, and because it's a belief, it's an item of faith.
Paranoid ideation is the clinical equivalent of a religion. When one is paranoid, it involves anxiety and delusionality.
Paranoid ideation is divorced from reality. And because it is divorced from reality, it is not a reaction to real threats in the environment. It is an anxiety reaction.
You know the difference between anxiety and fear? You fear a realistic menace, a threat that is true and factual. You're anxious about imagined, usually, imagined scenarios, you catastrophes, you anticipate.
So anxiety is a reaction to internal cognitive processes, while fear is a reaction to environmental cues and information.
Similarly, a delusion is a belief that is persistent and immune to information from the outside. It's totally self-contained.
And so when you combine anxiety and delusion, and if the delusion is persecutory, if the delusion involves being persecuted, being harassed, being the target of conspiracies, and malevolence and malice, being treated unfairly, and being abused. If you have this conglomerate of reactions to your internal processes, then you suffer from paranoid ideation.
But wait a minute, Vaknin, those of you who are still awake, say, how can you tell the difference between paranoid ideation, which is a reaction to an imaginary threat or an imaginary conspiracy, and a proper reaction to real threats in the environment. In other words, justified paranoia. How can you tell the difference?
First of all, there's no such thing as justified paranoia. All paranoia is delusional and has a foundation of anxiety. So there's no form of paranoia that is real.
But how can you tell the difference between imagined threats and real threats?
Well, we use, in psychology, as we do in law, by the way, in legal studies, we use the reasonable person standard. It's a standard that is used to judge the appropriateness of a person's beliefs when comparing them against the actions or beliefs of a hypothetical, reasonable person in the same situation and in the same culture.
So we have this ideal person who is hypothetical, but is very reasonable. This kind of reasonable person, of course, is embedded in his own culture or her own culture. They are reactant to cultural mores and beliefs and so on and so forth.
So, for example, religion is not a delusion because of the cultural background. Because so many people believe in God and angels and whatever, unfortunately we cannot diagnose all of them with delusional disorder, as we should have done had we been strict with the criteria.
Culture, the cultural background is very critical.
So, when you have a paranoid ideation, when you become hyper suspicious, hyper vigilant, when you insist that there's a conspiracy to take you down, to destroy you, people hate you, people are after you, people are spying on you, people are kind of overlooking your accomplishments, people treat you unfairly, you haven't been promoted as you should have been, etc.
When you have this set of beliefs about yourself and the environment you're in, in order to determine whether your appraisal of yourself and the environment is realistic, we compare you to a reasonable person. Would a reasonable person have believed the very same things?
So if you say that there is a cabal of enemies who are spying on you through your refrigerator, it's very likely that most reasonable people would disagree with you. And that would render this perception, render this belief, delusional and probably reflective of some underlying anxiety.
Now, paranoid ideation, as I said, involves anxiety and delusion, but it involves multiple other pathological processes.
For example, attribution error. Attribution error is saying, my enemies can't help who they are. This is who they are. They're malevolent. They're malicious. They're vindictive. They're vengeful. They're hateful. And so they're liable to act in a way that would compromise my safety and my, even my life, my longevity. So this is attribution error.
There's also referential ideation. People go about their business and you attribute their actions, their choices to yourself. You say, they've been behaving this way because of me. They've been making these choices because I exist. Everything revolves around me. Whatever they've been doing, they've been doing in order to harm me, to hurt me, to take me down, to vanquish me.
So you become the focal point around which everyone else revolves, and this is known as referential ideation, and of course it's a form of grandiosity, and come to it in a minute.
Paranoid ideation involves primitive defenses, infantile defenses, defense mechanisms, such as projection and splitting. These psychological defense mechanisms are conducive to paranoia and conspiracism, the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.
Projection is when you attribute to other people elements in yourself that you reject, attributes of yourself, traits of yourself, that you resent, that you hate, and you attribute them to other people. If you are weak, for example, you would say that other people are weak. If you are the one who is vindictive, vengeful, malicious, and malevolent, you would tend to attribute these traits to other people, and this is known as projection.
Splitting is even worse. Splitting says, I'm all good. Everyone else is all bad, and because they're all bad, they would want to eliminate me, to eradicate me, because I'm a constant reminder of how bad they are, or because I'm going to stand in their way, or because they're going to misinterpret my behavior as abusive or whatever.
So these infantile defense mechanisms regress you to early, when the world essentially was a menacing and hostile place, and the only protection, the only defense was mummy or parental figures. They are known as secure bases.
All these feed into paranoid ideation. And this is exacerbatedwhen you're focused on winning, on hierarchy, on being, on coming out on top, and when you are suffused with negative affects, fury, envy, hatred, you put all this package together, and you're bound or liable to consider everyone around you a potential or actual enemy and to misinterpret their behaviors and choices and decisions and comport and conduct and everything they do in light of this assumption that they are yourand everything they do in light of this assumption that they are your enemies.
Paranoid ideation, therefore, has two components.
Number one, self-punitive. It is the unconscious belief. I'm a bad person. I'm evil. I did something wrong and I deserve to be punished. And because I deserve to be punished, I will be punished. And I anticipate punishment. This punishment is going to be horrendous and catastrophic and I need to defend against it. I need to become hypervigilant. I need to be on my toes.
So this is one strand of paranoid ideation, and the other type of paranoid ideation is grandiose.
I am so important, not maybe generally, but I'm so important to that person or to this group of people, that I've become the potential or actual victim of malign intentions and malevolent conspiracies.
So there's an element of self-elevation, self-aggrandizement, an element or a delusion of grandeur, a belief that everyone around you revolves around you, that you're the pivot, that you're the axis, that you're the focal point of everyone's intentions and attentions.
So there's grandiosity in paranoid ideation.
Paranoid ideation within relationships, intimate relationships, friendships, even in the workplace, paranoid ideation leads inexorably and always and ineluctably to a series of behaviors which are very, very destructive to the fabric of their relationship. They involve deprivation, withholding, withdrawal, avoidance, and absence.
Deprivation is intentional. It's, in a minute, we'll define all these, but it's intentional. It is usually the outcome of withholding.
And withholding could be either aggressive, I'm withholding something from you, in order to punish you, or it could be aversive. I'm withholding some things, some behaviors, I'm withholding them because I'm afraid of your reaction, or because the whole experience is unpleasant and I have an aversion to it.
Withholding withdrawal is also either aversive or aggressive.
Avoidance, on the other hand, is mostly aversive. We avoid unpleasant people, unpleasant situation, uncomfortable decisions, and so on so forth. We stay away. This is the pleasure principle. We stay away from anything that is likely to prove unpleasurable.
And finally, absence is usually unintentional or aversive.
Let's start with deprivation. Deprivation is the removal, the denial, or the unavailability of something that is needed or desired.
When you deprive someone of something they really want or they really need or they really crave or they really desire when you make sure that they have no access, no access to this that they want or desire and so on so forth, you condition them.
So deprivation is usually an element in conditioning, a reduction of access to intake of a reinforcer if you want to use a clinical description.
When you deprive someone repeatedly on a regular basis, that person is conditioned to react in highly specific ways, for example, to please you.
Now, deprivation is not always intentional. It could be the outcome of one's personality or one's circumstances in life.
For example, if you're not available, mentally and emotionally, if you're depressed, if you are aggressive by nature, if you're narcissistic, selfish, if you're psychopathy.
So, deprivation would be the outcome of who you are.
It could be a decision, could be the outcome of a decision, it could be intentional, it could be cruel and even sadistic, but very often deprivation is simply who you are. You are a depriving person.
We talk about, for example, maternal deprivation. It's the lack of adequate nurturing for a young child due to the absence or premature loss of a mother figure, or neglect and abandonment by such a mother or a primary caregiver.
And this affects the individual's early behavioral, physical, social, and emotional development negatively.
Whenthe mother takes herself out of the equation, this has cataclysmic effects on the development of the child. And this is known as the dead mother theorem by Andrea Green in 1970s.
The people keep saying, why do you, why mother? Why do you keep blaming mothers? What about the father?
When we say mother or maternal figure or primary caregiver in psychology, this is nothing to do with genitalia. It has to do with a person. Could be a man, could be a woman. Could be the father, could be the mother. Could be the grandmother or the grandfather. could be a total stranger. The person who fulfilled critical psychodynamic and psychological functions in the first 36 months of life, that person would be the primary caregiver and shorthand the mother, the maternal figure.
I hope you got that.
So, maternal deprivation usually is the outcome of who the mother is, personality-wise, character-wise, temperament-wise, and or circumstances that inhibit the mother, don't allow the mother to function.
But deprivation is much more common than you think. Whole cultures could be based on deprivation. And sometimes we build deprivation into cultural norms and mores and rituals.
So for example, monasteries, nuns and monks, this whole thing is constructed on deprivation.
Now, cultural deprivation is when you don't have the opportunity to participate in the cultural offerings of a society.
Either because you're economically deprived, you don't have enough money, for example, to study at a university or a college or because your living standards are low substandard living conditions or because you are discriminated against as a member of a minority or whatever in any case access is denied exactly as you can deny access on the individual level or on the maternal level.
You can deny, and very often we do deny access on the cultural and societal level.
And this leads to alienation and estrangement, a loss of identification with one's culture, heritage, society, there's no possibility for assimilation in the dominant culture.
So when a culture withholds itself, when it's a dead culture similar to a dead mother, we have deprivation.
Now, we measure deprivation. There's a deprivation index. It's a measure of the degree or of inadequacy in a child's intellectual environment, with respect to such variables as achievement expectations, incentives to explore and understand the environment, a provision for general learning, an emphasis on language development and communication, interaction with significant adultrole models, and so forth.
All these parameters put together, they yield some kind of deprivation index.
The thing is, when you are the captive, the hostage of paranoid ideation, any approach, any intimacy, any interaction with other people is perceived as threatening. And so you withdraw yourself.
The paranoid person withdraws, avoids, walks away, isolates himself, protects himself in a way that renders access impossible or undesirable. And in this situation, the other person, the intimate partner of the paranoid person, feels deprived, experiences deprivation.
Now, deprivation, as I said, involves an avoidance response.
An avoidance response is a response in which an organism anticipates an aversive stimulus, something which is unpleasant, something which is threatening, something which should be avoided.
And when there's an experience of an aversive stimulus, when there is the anticipation of an aversive stimulus, when there is catastrophizing, when you have scenarios of multiple aversive stimuli attacking you, submerging you, destroying you, in this kind of mental landscape, it's impossible to have any meaningful interaction with other people.
Because, for example, sharing information is perceived as a threat. Intimacy is perceived as dangerous access.
The paranoid person feels insecure and unsafe all the time. And so they try to prevent contact with the stimulus.
But the stimulus in the case of the paranoid person is every other person.
The avoidance response is a form of abient behavior. It's also called an avoidance reaction.
And abience, abience is a response or behavior that results in movement away from a stimulus, either by physical withdrawal from the stimulus or by an action designed to avoid the stimulus entirely, or by mentally absenting yourself from the stimulus, pretending to be there but actually not being there, or in extreme cases, by trying to destroy the stimulus.
When you're paranoid, everyone is an enemy, and one way is to avoid them, another way is to disconnect, detach, and the third way is to destroy them.
And this leads, as we shall see momentarily, to externalized aggression, aggression, and so on so forth.
Most people, healthy people, do not engage in abience, but in adience.
Adience is a response or behavior that results in movement towards a stimulus because of curiosity, curiosity, because of infatuation, because of multitude of emotional needs and so on so forth.
Usually people are attracted to other people or to social frameworks and environments. They physically approach, or they engage in an action that increases contact with the stimulus.
But paranoid, people with paranoid ideation, they don't engage in adients, they engage in abience.
And this is very common behavior or set of dysfunctional behaviors in what we call avoidant attachment.
Avoidant attachment emerges in very early childhood actually during the formative years and we see children with avoidant attachment when they are placed in a strange situation, strange environment with strangers, children, kids like two-year-old, and they are just thrown into a world which is unfamiliar to them.
Now, the overwhelming vast majority of children would run back to mommy. If you take a child, especially a two-year-old child, a three-year-old child, a four-year-old child, and you place them in another room which is unfamiliar and strange, and minacious, with strangers, adults that the child doesn't know, he's not acquainted with, has never had any contact with, this kind of child would run back to mummy, the secure base, would seek safety in mummy's presence, and this is known as secure attachment.
But when you place a child with avoidant attachment in a strange situation, they do not seek proximity to their mother or parent after separation.
Instead, the infant does not appear to be distressed or frightened or terrified by the separation. The child actually avoids the returning parent.
Children with avoidant attachment develop later in life into adults with some kind of insecure attachment who are also usually paranoid. They have paranoid ideation and they are hyper-vigilant on a constant basis. It's very, very common in narcissism and psychopathy.
Now, I mentioned insecure attachment and I encourage you to watch the videos on this channel regarding attachment. Attachment styles, flat attachment, so and so forth.
And I mentioned that sometimes there are experiments where we place children, very young children, in what is called a strange situation.
Strange situation is an experimental technique. We assess the quality of attachment in infants and young children up to the age of two.
And the procedure subjects the child to increasing amounts of stress induced by a strange setting, the entrance of an unfamiliar person, and two brief separations from the parent.
The reaction of the child to each of these situations is used to evaluate the security or insecurity of their attachment to the parent.
Now, a narcissist, especially a narcissist, but to some extent a psychopath, in their minds, they are always in a strange situation.
Because narcissists have impaired reality testing. Do not grasp reality appropriately, similar to psychotics.
And because psychopaths are unable to conceptualize of other people except as instruments or tools, and the narcissist is unable to perceive the externality and separateness of other people, because they don't have these basic tools of coping with human stimuli, with other people.
Both narcissists and to a large extent psychopaths are all the time embedded in a strange situation. Everyone is a stranger. Even in an intimate relationship, everyone is a stranger. The world is a stranger, even in an intimate relationship. Everyone is a stranger.
The world is hostile, how to get you. Things change mysteriously and incomprehensibly. It's like being trapped in a nightmare. It's not lucid dreaming. It's a nightmare that you cannot wake up from.
And if you do wake from this nightmare, it's not lucid dreaming, it's a nightmare that you cannot wake up from. And if you do wake from this nightmare, it's only to find yourself in another nightmare.
So, they're all the time in a strange situation in their minds as adults.
Because, as I keep saying, narcissists are very young children, mentally speaking, emotionally speaking, psychologically speaking, narcissists are children, very young, I would even say two years old.
So they find themselves in these strange situations, but they don't have a maternal figure that they could trust. They don't have a secure base because narcissists have grown up in families which were abusive or traumatizing or instrumentalizing or parentifying or wrong kinds of families, pseudo-hostiles, pseudo-mutual.
So they don't have this background of it's okay. It may be a strange situation, but I can run back to mommy, real mummy or the mummy inside my head.
They don't have this. They have no one to run back to, no one to resort to, not safe or secure base.
So they become very paranoid, very hostile, very aggressive.
And all narcissists and psychopaths have an insecure attachment.
In the strange situations that they find themselves, they have a pattern of generally negative inner parent, inner child relationship.
It's as if they don't have a secure base, not only out there in reality, but they don't have a secure base internally.
They have not introjected. They have not internalized. And they have not incorporated a secure mother. A mother, they can trust, a maternal figure, they can trust.
So they have no respite and no refuge, and no sanctuary, outside or inside.
They need to be on their toes all the time because the world is out to get them and to take them down and to destroy them.
Everyone hates them. Everyone conspires against them they are doomed unless they fight back unless they're alert unless they spy on others unless they walk on eggshells anticipating catastrophe at any minute.
This is known as catastrophizing.
So in a strange situation, there's this negative internal relationship between mother and parent and child, a process known as identification.
It's a maladaptation where the child fails to display confidence when the parent is actually present and sometimes even shows distress when the parent is there.
Reacts by avoiding the parent when the parent returns, or being ambivalent about the parent is there, reacts by avoiding the parent when the parent returns, being ambivalent about the parent, and discontinues into adulthood, because the narcissist converts his intimate or her intimate partners, friends, into maternal figures, the narcissist carries this insecure attachment style into his relationships, superimposes this insecure base approach, this I don't trust you, this I can't be safe around you, it superimposes this attitude on their relationship.
And then, of course, naturally, he becomes paranoid.
Because if you can trust someone, if you don't feel safe around someone, it's because you anticipate some malevolent action, some conspiracy against you, some attempt to undermine you and hurt you and punish you in some way.
And this carries into adult relationship.
We even have a concept known as avoidant marriage. It's a long-lasting marriage in which the partners seldom argue because they have agreed to disagree and they accept their differences of opinion with no apparent rancor or emotional investment. They are no longer interested in each other. They are no longer invested in the dyad, in the pair. They are no longer committed to each other.
So in couple therapy, one of the first things the therapist observes is whether the couple communicates, even if the communication is negative, even if it's fighting. A fighting couple is still emotionally invested in each other. A couple that is quiet all the time, don't exchange a single word, that's a doomed couple.
And that's an avoidant marriage or an avoidant dyad. And it's an indication because of paranoid ideation, because each of the members of the avoidant marriage of the avoidant dyad does not trust the good intentions of the other.
There is an assumption that the other person is either a potential or an actual enemy or at best indifferent.
And so there is avoidance and withdrawal because of anticipated negative outcomes.
Avoidance of intimacy is the tendency of some individuals to shun closeness in interpersonal relations.
They regard closeness and intimacy not as promises, not as a wonderful thing, not as an adventure, not as an exploration, but as a threatening landscape.
People who avoid intimacy are reluctant and often fearful to become physically or emotionally close to another person. They tend to have superficial relationships, and they often report feeling lonely.
In attachment theory, avoidance of intimacy is considered a defining characteristic of an avoidant attachment style in adulthood.
And if this goes too far, for example, if you as a narcissist or a psychopath have been avoiding habitually for decades, and your avoidance is coupled with an ideology or a conspiracy theory that the world is out to get you and that other people are enemies or could be enemies and so forth.
If this became who you are, then you developed an avoidant personality. It's a personality that is characterized by feeling uncomfortable when psychologically close to other people.
There's a tendency to not form intimate relationships because of the extreme egodystony, extreme discomfort of being vulnerable.
Intimacy is perceived as a weakness, as a chink in the armor, as a vulnerability, as a vector of access. Someone can abuse intimacy, abuse the information, for example, that you share with them to attack you, to destroy you, to undermine you.
So better not. Better stay away. Better be alone.
Avoidant personality disorder is a personality disorder characterized by hypersensitivity to rejection and criticism and a desire for uncritical acceptance in an individual.
It is very reminiscent in this sense to narcissism.
As narcissists react extremely badly to criticism, narcissists' greatest desire and craving is to be accepted ironically.
On the other hand, it is coupled with an insecure attachment style, which is the outcome of really bad experiences with parental figures.
Now, many, many scholars and thinkers throughout the ages have observed this phenomenon. There's nothing new in anything I've said.
Erich Fromm, who was a psychoanalyst and a brilliant, insightful observer of human affairs, mainly in the 1960s, he came up with the concept of withdrawal destructiveness.
In the psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm, withdrawal destructiveness is a style of relating to other people, based on withdrawal and isolation from others, destructive behavior directed towards others, or a combination of this?
Fromm said that this style of relating to other people was motivated by a need to establish an emotional distance arising from a fear of dependency and vulnerability.
If I'm dependent, if I'm vulnerable, if I'm weak, people will take advantage of it. They will abuse it. They will leverage it to somehow take what's mine or destroy me altogether.
Anxious avoidant attachment is at the core of this.
And when we see anxious avoidant children, they explore the world only minimally, and they tend to avoid or be indifferent to the parent.
In adulthood, these people are characterized by a discomfort when they are with other people, a tendency to avoid intimate relationships.
The avoidant attachment style is either dismissive or fearful.
In the dismissive attachment style, there is a positive internal working model of attachment of oneself, characterized by a view of oneself as competent and worthy of love, and a negative internal working model of attachment to others, characterized by one's view that other people are untrustworthy, undependable, dangerous. It's risky.
So in the dismissive attachment style, you have an inflated view of yourself, a grandiose view of yourself, on the one hand, and coupled with a very negative view of other people, a very devaluing view of other people.
Now, the vast majority of narcissists actually are dismissive, but at the same time, their view of themselves, the internal working model of attachment, is compromised by the internalized bad object.
The internal working model of attachment is positive. The person perceives himself or herself as competent, lovable, worthy, etc.
And with the narcissists, this is the message of the false self.
But the false self is false.
So with the narcissists, the internal working model of attachment is positive only on the surface, only when it's public facing.
Internally, there is a bad object that has been internalized, a set of voices that keep disparaging the narcissists, undermining the narcissists, doubting the narcissists.
So with a narcissist, there's a unique form of dismissive attachment.
On the surface, the narcissist is very positive about himself or herself, very grandiose even.
He is perfect. His perfection reified and embodied, very grandiose even. He is perfect. He is perfection reified and embodied. He is godlike.
And so all other people are inferior. Because they are inferior, they are likely to envy him.
Because people are likely to envy him, the narcissist anticipatesrejection, malice, malevolence, conspiracies. The narcissist believes that people envy him and they would want to take him down.
This is on the surface.
In reality, deep inside, the narcissist perceives himself as a bad object, unworthy, unlovable, failure, inadequate, and therefore deserving of punishment. The punishment about to be inflicted by others is just desert. The narcissist believes that he deserves it somehow.
And he defends against this belief by becoming paranoid.
It's as if the narcissist says, I'm perfect. Everyone envies my perfection, so they're likely to try to take me down.
But actually, I'm deceiving them. I'm not really perfect. I am in reality, unlovable, inadequate, zero, loser, etc. I'm an imposter.
So, their punishment, punishment inflicted on me by others is justified, but it's very painful and hurtful and dangerous, so I should avoid it, and to avoid it, I need to become a paranoid.
Individuals with dismissive attachment are presumed to discount the importance of close relationships and to maintain rigid self-sufficiency.
So this is very common in psychopathy where there is no conflict with a bad object. Psychopaths are pure dismissive attachment characters.
The narcissists dismissive attachment is compromised by the bad object.
This may lead some narcissists to what is known as fearful attachment.
The fearful attachment is an attachment style that is again insecure and very problematic and very dysfunctional in relationships and it's a huge problem for intimate partners, for co-workers, for friends, and so on and so forth, because this is an attachment style characterized by a negative internal working model of attachment of oneself as well as a negative working model of others.
And this is much closer to narcissism.
I would generalize and say that the narcissist has an unconscious negative view of himself and a conscious negative view of others. While the psychopath has a conscious positive view of himself and a conscious negative view of others. Psychopath, therefore, would have a dismissive style, another sip from the poison. Psychopath would have a dismissive, dismissive attachment style and a narcissists would have a fearful attachment style. Individuals with fearful attachment doubt internally and unconsciously, their own competence and other people's competence, efficacy, loveability, and so on so forth. And so they don't seek help from other people when they are distressed. They don't approach other people. They don't become intimate with other people, etc., etc. This phenomena are observed even in children. And this is where the first years of life are super critical. That's why all of us in psychology, professionals, scholars in psychology, we focus on the mother or the maternal figure, whoever fulfills the maternal figure, maternal role.
These years are critical. It's a fact that we can observe all these behaviors, all these disorders, all these dysfunction, all these problems in early childhood.
We have something called, for example, the withdrawn, rejected child. When we measure peer acceptance, it's a child who displays fearful or anxious behavior, and is often perceived by his peers as socially awkward. And such children are at risk for victimization, they're bullied, and so and so forth.
Many of these children develop narcissistic defenses which later coalesce into full-fledged narcissistic style or even narcissistic personality disorder.
Peer rejection is a major engine of narcissism, of the formation of pathological narcissism, is a compensatory defensive mechanism. That's why children with autism spectrum disorder, children who have other mental health issues, dyslexia, whatever, these children very often become highly narcissistic later in life as adults and at the minimum have narcissistic style, lack of empathy or deficient empathy, and so on so forth, because they're rejected by peers. The withdrawing response in behavioral psychology is any behavior designed to sever contact with stimulus that is found to be noxious, not to say obnoxious. Stimulus that is really unsettling, ill it is unpleasant. You want to avoid such a stimulus. It's an escape behavior. It's any response designed to move away from or to eliminate an already present aversive stimulus. Escape behavior could be mental, through fantasy, or daydreaming. It could be behavioral, physical withdrawal from such a stimulus, or a conditioned response, such as when you do something in order to somehow change the stimulus, or to terminate it, or you do something symbolically, like in obsession compulsion. So, like a ritual. So all these, the escape behaviors and so on so forth, in narcissism and psychopathy, the aversive stimulus is other people. The narcissist finds other people aversive because he considered them contemptuously as inferior and potentially envious and how to get him and how to take him down and how to destroy him. People are dangerous because of envy, mainly. This is a narcissist mind. The mediator, the transmission mechanism is envy. The psychopath has the same mindset. The psychopath believes that other people are out to get him because dog eats dog. You know, this is a hostile jungle world. There are no rules. There are no laws. Everyone tries to maximize their benefits and their profits. There's no inhibition. Everyone is disinhibited given the right circumstances. So psychopaths expect the worse of other people. Narcissists also expect the worst from other people because other people are inferior. Psychopats actually expect the worse from other people because sometimes they assume these people to be their equals. And sometimes they consider other people as natural victims, gullible, stupid. But the psychopath is capable of perceiving other people as his or her equals, while the narcissists is not. And avoidance is a learned, acquired behavior. And there is an avoidance gradient. Avoidance gradient is the variation in the strength of a drive as a function of the organism's proximity to an aversive stimulus.
The closer the narcissist gets to you, the more intimate he is with you.
So the closer and more intimate, the aversive stimulus.
The narcissist's discomfort mounts and finally explodes in direct proportion to the intimacy.
Whereas other people fear healthy people, normal people, feel more and more comfortable as they become more and more intimate.
The narcissist and the psychopath feel less and less comfortable as they become more and more intimate.
They are like mirror images of normal healthy people.
And this is known as the aversion or the avoidance gradient.
So, withdrawal behavior of the narcissists and psychopath increases in intensity as they get nearer to the person, as they become more dependent on the person, even as they derive pleasure from another person and they become dependent on this pleasure.
Narcissists and psychopaths push people away, push them away, hurt them, damage them, ruin them, simply as a recoil mechanism, a don't get too close to me, stay away. It's dangerous. Your knowledge of me, your intimacy with me, the fact that I crave your presence, that I love you, this is bad, this is a weakness, this is a vulnerability, I need to stay away because they're going to hurt me.
Narcissists, of course, and many psychopaths learn to associate positive emotions such as love with inevitable outcomes of pain and hurt, having been traumatized, abused and rejected and abandoned by maternal figures.
So love triggers in them the anticipation of hurt, pain and self-destruction.
So the avoidance gradient is of course the opposite of the approach gradient, the variation in the strength of a drive as a function of the organism's proximity to its stimulus or goal or pleasure.
Healthy normal people, they aspire to proximity and to intimacy with another person who is helpful, pleasurable, fulfills some goals, meets some expectations, they aspire for an ever closer union with such a person.
Of course, up to a point. Beyond a certain point, we are talking about pathological merger and fusion, a symbiosis, which is common in narcissism.
So, narcissists have problems with the approach gradient and with the avoidance gradient because they misidentifystimuli, in other words, they misidentify the presence of other people, and what other people can bring to the relationship as threats.
Relationships are perceived as threats, and yet the narcissist are driven to have relationships and intimacy and fantasy, and because of his need to reenact early childhood conflicts.
I recommend that you watch the shared fantasy playlist on this channel.
Avoidance is dysfunctional, avoidness is problematic, avoid avoidance is painful, because it's frustrating.
If you crave someone, if you love someone, if you desire someone, if you are dependent on someone, and then by your own design, you can't approach them, you have to avoid them, you're compelled, it's a compulsion, you can't help it, it's frustrating.
It's frustrating, it produces a lot of anger and aggression, a lot of it's self-directed. You hate yourself for being like that.
And you develop avoidance coping strategies.
These are strategies for managing stressful situations in which a person does not address a problem directly, but instead disengages from the situation and avert attention from it.
So, the narcissist would tend to deny his dependence on other people. He would tend to deny his need for intimacy, his cravings, for love and affection and compassion and empathy. He would tend to deny all this. He would present himself as godlike and therefore self-sufficient, self-contained.
Narcissists even self-supply when they can't obtain narcissistic supply from other people.
They develop these mechanisms of being able to solipsistically exist as the only object in the universe.
They don't recognize the externality and separateness of other people.
Other people don't exist except as figments, internal objects in their imagination, in the mind, and imagination of the narcissists.
So, narcissists deny the frustration and the pain of avoidance by pretending to be everything they need. I don't need anyone. I have everything inside my mind that I would ever need. I can survive on an island all by myself even without Friday.
The individual turns away from the processing of threatening information.
So escapism is an example of such avoidance strategy. Wishful thinking, self-isolation, constricted life, undue emotional restraint, some forms of introversion, and using drugs or alcohol.
Avoidance coping strategies are very self-sabotaging because they are self-perpetuating. It's a vicious circle.
The more you are into avoidance strategies, the more comfortable you feel in the avoidance space. And it prevents using approach coping strategies.
Avoidance strategies reduce stress and anxiety. They are anxiolytic. They prevent emotional dysregulation and mood lability.
In emotional dysregulation, the individual is overwhelmed by negative, usually negative, but not only by emotions. Overwhelmed by emotions.
Avoidance coping strategies are intended to prevent this.
And Susan Roth was the first to describe the connection between regulation, internal regulation and avoidance strategies in 1986. She wrote about personality psychology involving avoidance coping strategies.
Lawrence Cohen was another psychologist who has written extensively, on these issues.
Avoidance behavior is any act or series of actions that enables an individual to avoid or to anticipate unpleasant or painful situations, especially with other people. Stimuli, events, circumstances, environments that pose the potential for threat, danger, risk, criticism, mortification, narcissistic injury, aggression.
Narcissists avoid all these. And the only way to avoid all these, this panoply, of typically human interactions, is by avoiding humans altogether.
And this leads to avoidance conditioning, self-administered avoidance conditioning, the establishment of behaviors that prevent or postpone aversive stimulation.
The narcissist says, if I go there, I'm going to be criticized, exposed, humiliated, and shamed, I'm not going to go there. If I engage in intimate relationships, I'm going to be vulnerable, and my partner would use it against me in due time. If I become a friend with someone, they're going to take advantage of me and exploit me. Everyone is envious of me, and so my boss is going to demote me or not promote me, and so forth.
Better avoid all this. Better avoid people all together. Stay at home. Work from home. I'm self-sufficient. I don't need anyone. I'm happy with my own company.
So this is known as avoidance conditioning. Gradually the person self-conditions and becomes used to avoidance as an automatic, reflexive reaction.
Whenever confronted with the situation involving another person, the avoidance conditioning will kick in, and the person will avoid somehow, sometimes by sabotaging the situation, undermining, being passive-aggressive.
Now we don't, I connected in this lecture avoidance to paranoid ideation.
There are other theoretical perspectives.
Some psychologists think that avoidance is a means of coping, as I mentioned. That it is anxiolytic, reduces stress, prevents being overwhelmed by emotions.
Some believe that avoidance is a response to fear and innate shame, which is also my view when it comes to narcissism. Narcissism is a reaction to shame, compensatory reaction to shame.
And when you're triggered by other people in situations and environments, this could lead to the re-emergence or re-eruption of the shame, a process known as narcissistic mortification.
Some psychologists believe that avoidance is a personality style or predisposition, maybe even genetic predisposition.
And some believe that it ispredisposition, maybe even genetic predisposition. And some believe that it is merely a component in anxiety disorders.
What is very clear is that people need to approach and only some people then need to avoid.
Everyone needs to approach, even psychopaths, even narcissists, even psychotics. Human contact is built into the hardware and the software of who we are.
So approach is universal. Avoidance is not.
We have approach avoidancerepetitioncompulsions, first described by who else, Sigmund Freud, where people approach because they crave intimacy or they seek external regulation, and then they are terrified by the intimacy and the engulfment and they're being consumed and they feel suffocated and they run away.
This is typical of borderlines, people with borderline personality disorder or borderline personality organization.
But approach avoidance conflicts are pretty common because it's very difficult for us to calibrate, to get it right.
Sometimes intimacy is too much. Sometimes we are being too detached and cold and distance. Sometimes we try to compensate or overcompensate. We never get it right. It's always a work in progress.
And when we talk about approach avoidance conflict, it's a situation that involves a single goal or option that has both desirable and undesirable aspects or consequences.
So in this sense, these conflicts, these repetition compulsions, are forms of dissonance. And because avoidance is a cognitive function, we're talking about cognitive dissonance.
The closer an individual comes to the goal, to the desired person, to the circumstances or environment that he was seeking, the closer, the accomplishment is, the greater the anxiety.
Because everything, people, events, places, circumstances, environments, goals, accomplishment, everything. It's negative and positive elements, traits, attributes. You can't get only the positive without the negative.
And this creates sometimes the tendency to run away, to push people away, to avoid, to withdraw in order to avoid the negative aspects of the situation.
But then when you avoid the negative aspects, by distancing yourself, by pushing people away, by withdrawing, by avoiding, this increases the desire and the craving and the wish.
So it's an endless loop, a conflict, an inner conflict, a compulsion. Approach, avoid, avoid approach.
This is a classical thing. It's been described in literature for well over 120 years.
But there are other types of conflicts. For example, approach-approach conflict. It's a situation involving a choice between two equally desirable but incompatible alternatives.
I want to do A and I want to do B, but they're incompatible. They're mutually exclusive. If I do A, I will destroy B. If I do B, I will destroy A. If I have a lover, I will lose my marriage. For example, that's an approach, approach, a double approach conflict.
We have an avoidance-avoidance conflict as well. It's a situation involving a choice between two equally undesirable, objectionable alternatives. For example, when you must choose between unemployment or a cut in your salary. That's a double avoidance conflict.
And then there is a double approach avoidance conflict. It's a complex conflict situation arising when a person is confronted with two goals or options that each have a significant attractive and a significant unattractive feature.
So you see, this is much more complex than we think. Approach and avoidance are coping strategies.
With a narcissist, though, avoidance has overwhelmed approach. A narcissist sacrifices his wishes, desires, dreams, hopes, and his shared fantasies. Sacrifices everything. Cleness, proximity, intimacy, love received. Sacrifice everything just to avoid the inevitable in his mind, the inevitable, painful, hurtful, mortification or injury or rejection or abandonment.
And this is typical of borderlines as well.
We live in a civilization that is highly narcissistic, highly borderline and increasingly more psychopathic.
So it's not a surprise that we are developing a culture and a society that reflects avoidant dynamics and absence.
It's a norm of entitlement, that I will do the minimum. I will do the minimum and take the maximum. I will avoid life and other people and situations, the circumstances, environments, and challenges, and even goals because avoidance has its own value, is a goal in itself.
I will strive to become self-sufficient, minimize my interaction surface with other people, do the minimum in my job, it has a name, I forgot, do the minimum in my job, and so this is a culture of absence, a culture of avoidance. And absenteeism is becoming more and more common, truancy, abs absenteism, and so on and so forth.
And it's no longer linked to job satisfaction, organizational culture, or even the culture of absence. It's become normative as a coping strategy.
And so we introduce the absenting of ourselves as a way to cope with all challenges. We absent ourselves.
So we even have a new phenomenon which is known as absent grief. It's a form of complicated grief in which a person shows no or only few signs of distress about the death of a loved one.
And this pattern of grief is an impaired response resulting from denial or avoidance of emotional realities, the emotional reality of the loss, first and foremost.
Absent-mindedness is another form of avoidance and withdrawal, although absent-mindedness is also a form of passive aggression. It's a state of apparent inattention, marked by a tendency to be preoccupied with one's own thoughts and not with external conditions or demands.
But as I said, there's a lot of passive aggression here. Covert narcissists are usually absent-minded. Mind wondering.
It's a condition where thoughts do not remain focused on the task at hand, but they range widely and spontaneously across other topics. It's not attention deficit. It's much more complicated than that. It's a rejection of the outside world and its requirements and its expectations.
I will do what I want. I will focus on my internal work and my day dreams and my thoughts and my fantasies.
This kind of inattentive aggression or attentional aggression. It's becoming more and more common and it's a major, becoming a major strategy of avoidance and withdrawal, which is ostensibly and ostentatiously justified by technology.
So the incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and adults is exploding exponentially, and there's a linkage to technology. Technology made me like that.
But of course it's not, I link it not to technology, but to the rise in narcissism.
To be absent-minded, to allow your mind to wonder when you talk to another person, or when you interact with another person, it's simply put, aggression. It's a form of aggression. It's passive aggression, but it's aggression all the same.
I tried to give you an overview of the ways in which narcissists and psychopaths avoid potential risks and dangers in the environment by avoiding the environment altogether, especially human environment.
And this leads to extreme dysfunction in relationships, these functions which I mentioned.
It is linked in the case of the narcissist actually to early childhood pain and hurt when the narcissist tried as a kid, as an infant, to experience and express positive emotions.
To the internalization of a bad object, a constellation of voices and introjects, informed the narcissist how unworthy, inadequate and unlovable is.
And the desperate attempt to compensate for all this by presenting a false facade by becoming an impostor in a faith.
And then the anticipation of exposure and pain and hurt and injury, humiliation, shame and mortification.
And this anticipation leads to hypervigilance and to paranoid ideation. Paranoid ideation leads to putting distance, pushing people away, withdrawing and avoiding.
In the schizoid defenses of the narcissist, the situation is a lot simpler. The psychopath avoids other people as a form of projection. He attributes to other people his own lack of empathy, ruthlessness, callousness, envy, hatred, and externalized aggression. He fully anticipates other people, the psychopath, fully anticipates that other people will treat him the way he wishes to treat them or the way he treats them.
And then, of course, it's very frightening and dangerous and he keeps away.
Psychopaths, as I keep saying, are much healthier than narcissists, mentally speaking, psychologically speaking. They're much closer to healthy and normal human beings. They're socially problematic, shall we say, but they're much more recognizable as human beings, exaggerated human beings.
Narcissism, on the other hand, is such a convoluted, distorted, malformed and mutilatedinner landscape. Lack of self and ego, no coordination, kaleidoscopic change that is unpredictable, that narcissism presents a much, much bigger therapeutic challenge than psychopathy.
Psychopathy, there is a big debate whether it's a mental illness to start with or a mental disorder to start with and whether therapy is relevant at all. Psychopathy looks more like a choice or personality style or a character or a temperament.
While narcissism clearly is a severe, extremely severe mental illness, and we have just scraped the tip of the iceberg in the last hundred and something years.
I believe that narcissism will unravel the core of mental illness, all mental illness. Narcism is at the core of all mental illness. I've been saying it for 30 years now.
And avoidance and withdrawal, these are two examples of the way narcissism informs the narcissistic's behaviors, to render them utterly dysfunctional and the opposite of self-affection.