I habitually receive the following query.
How do I get my narcissist to go to therapy?
First of all, I love the possessive, my narcissist, like my dog or my cat or my goldfish.
How do I get my narcissist, my pet to go to therapy?
And today I'm going to teach you how.
I have no idea why you would like to get your narcissist to therapy rather than, for example, going no contact.
But you know, to each his own and there's no accounting for taste.
So those of you who are masochistic and enjoy being abused and tortured by a narcissist, I'm going to teach you today how to get him to therapy.
And to do so, I consulted the second leading expert on narcissism globally. Her name is Franny Granny, Franny Chris.
Granny Chris.
Yes, it's a mnemonic.
Granny Grandiosity.
Fanny Fantasy.
Chris Crisis.
These are the three reasons that narcissists attend therapy.
Grandiosity Granny Fantasy.
Fanny Crisis.
Chris.
So stay tuned and listen to what Granny Fanny Chris has to teach you about narcissist because if she forgot it, you still have to learn it.
There's nothing she doesn't know about narcissist.
And so I learned a lot from her over the years and I intend to impart this knowledge, being the altruist and charitable and nice person that I am.
I'm also Sam Vaknin, the author of Malignant Self-Love and Narcissism Revisited and a former visiting professor of psychology.
Let's delve right in.
How do you get this stubborn mule into therapy?
How do you convince him that something is wrong with him, that he needs fixing and healing?
Well, here's the first hint.
Don't ever imply that something is wrong with your narcissist because he's perfect.
Nothing is ever wrong with him. Everything is wrong with you.
This is called alloplastic defense.
You are the one to blame.
Things got a gun or eye in the relationship is because you are imperfect in some way.
You are maybe mentally ill. Maybe you are too aggressive. Maybe you're too quiet and shy. Maybe you don't know how to manage him like his ex.
Maybe and maybe and maybe it's always you.
The blame, the guilt, the shame, the responsibility belong 100% to you.
He is perfection, reified. He is godlike.
Therefore, not amenable to criticism, not open to disagreement and should never be subjected to scrutiny.
So it's a very bad gambit, a proper chess.
It's a very big bad gambit to come to the narcissist and say, listen, my narcissist, something is wrong with you.
We need to get you some help.
So narcissists don't need help. They don't need advice. They don't need anything and anyone, because as the song says, we are the world.
They are the world. They are not helpless. They're not hopeless. They're never clueless. They know everything.
And if they don't know exactly like Chad GPT, they confabulate. They invent.
So that's going this way of trying to mirror the narcissist, trying to convince him rationally, reasonably that something may be wrong with him would lead you nowhere except to conflict and disagreements and arguments.
And if the narcissist is violent and aggressive, even worse, don't go there.
I'll teach you three alternative ways which are far more efficient in obtaining this goal.
Let's start with the first one.
You remember Granny Fanny, Chris?
Granny grandiosity co-opt the narcissist's grandiosity.
Nancet, amplify it.
Agram dies him, support his self-inflated, imputed self-image, make him believe that you believe what he believes about himself and then use it against him, leverage it to motivate him to go to therapy.
It's like in martial arts, use the opponent's momentum against him.
So challenge the narcissist somehow, tell him, I'm sure you can do this. I mean, surely you can do this.
Surely you can attend therapy. Surely you are much more clever, much more well-informed, much smarter, much more erudite and much more perspicacious than any therapist alive and any therapist dead for that matter.
So challenge him, render the therapy sort of challenge as if you are 99% of the narcissist's capacities, but you need this extra 1% bit and he can provide it by putting himself to the test because narcissists are grandiose and at least overt narcissists are convinced of their invincibility, of their perfection, of their brilliance, etc, etc.
Few narcissists would turn down such a challenge. They would venture forth to prove to you how all-encompassing they are, how insightful and how amazingly, amazingly IQ endowed.
I haven't met a narcissist who has less than 190 IQ.
Okay, so co-opt his grandiosity, just use his grandiosity in ways which would convince him to regard therapy as proof of his divine status.
Let him view therapy as a way to convince you and everyone around you that, for example, he is open to new experiences, he is a rational person, he is a reasonable human being, etc, so challenge him to show himself in a good light as a pro-social, communal, helpful person, caring, loving and compassionate, for example, tell him nothing is wrong with you. I am the one who needs help. Please help me by attending therapy with me. I know that I am to blame and I am responsible for everything that has gone bad in our relationship. I know that something is wrong with me, but I can't help myself. Only you can help me.
Please, will you be my companion in therapy? Will you attend therapy with me? I am sure that your involvement in the therapy would render it so much more relevant, so much more insightful, so amazingly transformative, so please do it for me.
Appeal to his self-conception as your guru, your teacher, your father figure, your leader and your guide and present the therapy as something you need.
He doesn't need therapy, of course, but you do.
Because he loves you, he cares about you and because he is a good person, yes, there are narcissists who believe themselves to be good people, believe it or not.
The powers of self-deception and self-delusion in narcissism are enormous and the majority of narcissists would actually tell you that they are very nice people. They may abuse from time to time, they may be abrasive, but this is only tough love, they mean well, they are charitable, they are altruistic.
Narcissists compensate for the internal bad object by creating an external good object, so they are perfectly good people.
Narcissist believes himself to be a good person.
Appeal to this ostensible, fictitious strand of compassion and empathy in the narcissist, tells him, "You are amazing, you are so supportive, you are so loving and helpful and caring, you are so compassionate and affectionate and attentive.
Take this extra step for me. Make it happen. Come with me to therapy." And they will.
Try it at home and let me know.
This is Granny. Her name is Fanny, the fantasy.
The narcissist interacts with you, his intimate partner and even a business partner via a shared fantasy.
Shared fantasy is the exclusive interface between a narcissist and other human beings.
If you move, if you talk, if you walk, the narcissist will create a shared fantasy with you or will have nothing to do with you.
Narcissist's experience is mediated via the shared fantasy.
Shared fantasy could be a very helpful instrument.
If the narcissist's shared fantasy, again, is a fantasy of himself as a good person, guiding you, teaching you, helping you to grow, enhancing your path for personal development, endowing you and bestowing upon you happiness.
So this kind of narcissist would attend therapy just in order to buttress the shared fantasy.
Attending therapy would actually become a figment of the fantasy, something you both do within the fantastic space and his fantastic dimensions.
The narcissist would render the therapeutic experience, the therapy sessions, would render them fantastic as if this were some kind of movie.
And his involvement in the therapy would deepen the more it gets integrated into the fantasy, the more it upholds the fantasy, the less it challenges the fantasy.
So collaborate with the narcissist, collude in his fantasy, make him believe that therapy would make the fantasy even more fantastic, would make the fantasy stable and safe and irreversible and irrevocable and would keep you in the fantasy.
Let him believe that by attending therapy, he could reduce his own separation insecurity, abandonment anxiety.
In short, inform him that if he were to attend therapy, you would consider this as a form of investment or commitment in your relationship, also known as shared fantasy.
And therefore, you're likely or much likelier to stay, not to stray, not to cheat on him, not to betray him, not to abandon him.
Narcissist is a very goal oriented when it comes to narcissistic supply in the shared fantasy.
In this sense, they're a big psychopath.
So if what it takes is to attend therapy, the narcissist will just have to get him through the door.
The therapist similarly has to collude to some extent in the shared fantasy, a head on attack on the narcissist grandiosity of the narcissist shared fantasy is a seriously bad idea.
And the advice afforded by experts such as Erich Fromm, Otto Kernberg and many others, the advice regarding narcissists in therapy is indeed to not confront them, to not try to introduce reality testing confrontationally in your face.
I'm going to quote from an article written by Ronnigstam and Vaknin.
There are a number of common mistakes, they say, in treatment of NPD patients.
Number one, directly confronting or criticizing their grandiosity.
Number two, over attending to the patient's grandiosity by ignoring insecurity, vulnerability and failures, as well as real personal capabilities and assets.
Number three, engaging in competitive, controlling relationship with a patient.
Number four, taking a passive approach, expecting the patient will generate necessary solutions and progress without external help.
These are the pitfalls in the therapy itself, but these are also the pitfalls in convincing the narcissist to attend therapy.
If you confront and criticize his grandiosity, head on, forget about it. If you over attend to his grandiosity and pretend that, you know, he's never vulnerable, he never fails, he's never insecure.
Also, it would be difficult to bring him to therapy.
Now, of course, you should not verbalize this. You should not come to the therapist and say, you're vulnerable, you're a failure, you have problems, you need help, you should never do this, as I said at the beginning, but you should realize it, you should accept it.
Because within the shared fantasy, it's very easy to buy into the narcissist stories and grandiosity.
Narcissists are very convincing, very charming, great confabulators. And so very often, their intimate partners, their business partners fall for their stories, believe in them, support their grandiosity, because they believe the grandiosity to reflect reality. They think it's not grandiosity, it's reality in some way.
You need to stay cool-headed.
Narcissists like everyone else have strong points, assets, capabilities, skills, you need to be aware of these, of course. Narcissists can stand out intellectually, athletically and otherwise.
On the other hand, you need to realize that narcissism is a severe pathology, which renders the narcissist susceptible, gullible, vulnerable, impressionable, naive, a failure, and so on and so forth.
You need to maintain a balanced view of your narcissist.
If you try to engage in competition, try to compete with him, if you try to control him, it's not going to work. If you try to take a passive approach, hope for the best, pray at night and in the morning, nothing's going to happen.
You need to be proactive, but you need to know how to do this.
Co-opt his grandiosity, ask him for help, tell him that you need the therapy, and then use the shared fantasy, introduce the therapy as an element of the fantasy, which is required to keep the fantasy going and together, the gloom that holds the fantasy together.
Narcissists are amenable to all these strategies, as you're going to discover to your surprise.
This was Granny, her name was Fanny, grandiosity and fantasy.
Now we come to Chris.
Chris is short for crisis.
It's a term of endearment.
There are five types of crisis that drive the narcissist to therapy.
Now, you should not pray for crisis because narcissists can decompose it. They can act out, they can do stupid and crazy things. They can destroy their lives and yours in the process.
So crisis is the last result.
Narcissists maintain poor reality testing. They don't know what they're doing. They're crazy, make, and they're very dangerous to themselves and to others.
They're like two years old, essentially.
Anything from temper tantrums to seriously bad decisions with seriously bad people. Throughout this spectrum, the narcissist is likely to drag you with him into the depths of his abyss and his stupidity and inanity.
You don't want this to happen.
But if it does happen, the narcissist is in crisis, that's a golden opportunity to drag him to therapy or to motivate him to attend there.
I mentioned mortification in many previous videos, five or six of them.
Mortification is such a window of opportunity for therapy.
But mortification is rare.
The narcissist faces other types of life crisis which lead to therapy.
In the majority of cases, actually.
And these are the five types that are likely to resolve in attending therapy.
Number one, an ultimatum.
An ultimatum or a requirement from family, employers or the courts.
Narcissists are cowards. They react to ultimatums with capitulation.
That's a rule of thumb, a heuristic, a golden rule. There's no exception. Narcissists are bullies and all bullies are cowards.
This is as distinct from psychopaths.
Psychopaths are actually fearless and reckless and exceedingly dangerous, especially when they are silent.
So make the distinction between narcissists and psychopaths.
Narcissists, classic narcissists, are cowards. They're faced with ultimatums. They capitulate and they obey.
Now the narcissist presenting in therapy as an outcome of an ultimatum or a court order and so on is likely to complain of very minor fringe issues.
First of all, such a narcissist would deny a lack of self-awareness. He would say, "I'm fully aware. I'm actually the most self-aware person I know. I know everything about myself."
And when he went in this process, when involved in this process of protestation, when trying to convince the therapist that he's fully insightful, utterly aware of what he's doing and not doing and who he is, then and there emerges the essence of the narcissist.
He's unassuming, naive, childlike. His childlike features.
When the narcissist tries to act or to emulate an adult, it is then that it is most evident how childlike he is.
And it is heartbreaking. It is heartrending to see the narcissist flailing about attempting to act as an adult would without the most basic skills and capabilities of an adult.
There's a projection of blame and problems onto others. These are the alloplastic defenses, but even this is done in a kind of temper tantrum, a kind of sulking that is very typical of very young children around the age of two.
So the narcissist caught in the crossfire in the cognitive dissonance of being forced into therapy by ultimatum's circumstances, consistently tries to self enhance.
He emphasizes the narcissistically sustained functioning of his disintegrating precariously balanced disorganized personality.
Narcissist in therapy is typically more narcissistic, more grandiose, more in your face, I would say even psychopathic than outside the therapy setting, outside the clinic.
There are fluctuations in vocational and professional performance in collaborative or interpersonal and intimate functioning. These are all the areas that require tackling in therapy.
And yet the narcissist obstructs and resists and fights back because to admit any of this is to drive himself knowingly into mortification.
A skilled therapist, the therapist who knows what he's doing, unfortunately has to enhance the pathologies of the narcissist before he's able to make any difference. He has to collude and collaborate with the narcissist's grandiosity and with his fantasy defense. Otherwise, he will get nowhere.
So it's a bit like a Gaussian distribution.
The narcissist starts therapy at a low point, having hit rock bottom, coerced into the therapy by family, the courts.
So he starts low, but then he reasserts his grandiosity. He reasserts his narcissism. He becomes defiant and reactant and contumacious and even reckless. He goes to a peak of narcissism.
And then if the therapist knows what he's doing, if the therapist, I'm sorry, knows what many therapists are narcissists. If the therapist knows what he's doing, he would bring down the narcissist from the apex to a low point, which is now benign, beneficial, self efficacious, helpful, eco-syntonic, feels good.
Starts by feeling bad, narcissistic defenses, and then coming down to a plateau of reasonable contentment and functioning.
This is when the narcissist is forced into therapy.
But in the following four crises, the narcissist attends therapy willingly.
We call this hitting rock bottom.
Narcissist hits rock bottom and devoid of all his defenses, denuded of all his strategies, nothing works. He results with therapy.
However, the motivation to attend therapy is very wrong.
The narcissist wants the therapist to fix him, to make him a better functioning narcissist.
Comes to the therapist, he says, "These strategies used to work. Can you teach me how to apply them and implement them more efficiently?"
He wants the therapist to put him back together as he used to be and to restore his self-efficacy by teaching him a few tricks on how to be a more efficient narcissist.
Maybe fly under the radar, maybe to be more deceitful, maybe to be more manipulative. He wants to conspire with the therapist, to collude with the therapist against the rest of the world.
It's as if the therapist is his personal advisor on how to obtain results and outcomes from other people by manipulating them better.
Of course, it's a wrong motivation and no conscionable therapist would collaborate with any of this.
But this is the motivation.
This is the presentation of the narcissist in therapy.
The narcissist denies having any major external problems. He refuses to acknowledge his inner emptiness, meaninglessness, dysphoria, inability to form or maintain close relationships, social isolation, limitations, inability to reach goals in personal or professional life.
None of this.
Narcissists would have none of this.
If he doesn't admit to any of this, he attributes these problems to a temporary hiatus or temporary crisis or a change in circumstances or a new environment.
And he usually would tend to blame others, alloplastic defenses.
So even a narcissist who comes to therapy and says, "You know, I feel empty. My life is meaningless. I'm depressed. I can't work. I can't maintain close relationships. I keep getting abandoned and betrayed by my intimate partners. I'm socially isolated. I can't reach goals recently. I'm not self efficacious. My professional life sucks. My personal life, don't ask."
Even a narcissist who admits to this list of shortcomings, flaws, problems, hindrances, obstacles, issues, even such a narcissist would tend to embed this list of complaints in a context which would exculpate the narcissist, exonerate him, remove him from the scene, so to speak.
These are things that happen to the narcissist, not things that he makes happen. He is never guilty or responsible.
Having an internal locus of control and a sense of responsibility, guilt, and even shame, these are the primary tasks in therapy with a narcissist.
A narcissist has a consistent kind of self-regulation which is pretty high functioning in interpersonal and vocational settings he has when he is able to obtain supply.
So as long as the stream of supply is uninterrupted, the narcissist regulates pretty efficiently and he can remain and does remain high functioning even in interpersonal settings and in the workplace.
All narcissists have areas of success, all of them are recognized for this or that.
So internal doubts, self-criticism, distancing, detachment, they are reactive to circumstances, they are circumstantial, they are environmental.
What I am trying to say in short is that the narcissist's main problem usually is a lack of supply.
Internal mortification is about the abrupt withdrawal of positive supply and its replacement with negative supply.
These are all supply driven issues and topics and problems.
The focus should be on supply, how to reduce or diminish the need for supply and how to regulate it more efficiently.
When the narcissist faces an acute crisis, getting fired, a vocational crisis, financial crisis, personal failures, personal losses, he reacts with outbursts of rage, sexual dysfunction, situational anxiety, insecurity, inferiority, fear and above all he gets in touch with his reservoir of life threatening shame.
This is a reaction to gradual corrosive life circumstances. This is actually what we call narcissistic mortification. Narcissistic mortification is a life threat, it leads to suicide litigation, to the other hand it's an amazing opportunity.
Some would even say that it's worthwhile to mortify the narcissist intentionally in order to induce healing later.
This is one of the philosophical pillars of cold therapy, the treatment modality that I've developed.
Now, the next type of crisis which drives a narcissist to therapy is a mental disorder, acute or gradual onset of some problem, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, some catastrophic event, substance abuse.
When the mental functioning of the narcissist deteriorates considerably, he reacts with depression, anxiety, rage, moodlability, growing dependency on alcohol or drugs, sudden memory flashbacks, intrusive thoughts and obsession compulsion.
The narcissist tries to self-regulate, he uses a self-enhancing function of mood elevation, often via substances, so he would drink or he would do coke to feel omnipotent and grandiose in some invincible.
There is a reoccurrence of narcissistic trauma in a way, a sudden or gradual functional decline when the narcissist develops a comorbid, severe mental health issue. It's traumatizing and it usually drives him to therapy.
When he goes to therapy, he would usually place an emphasis on the secondary mental health issue.
So he would place emphasis, for example, on substance abuse or mood disorder, his depression, but he would refuse to acknowledge his narcissism.
Narcissism is a fortress and the only two ways to penetrate these forces, the only two roads leading to the force, only draw bridges, are grandiosity and fantasy.
Therapists must accept this.
Narcissism may be the only case in therapy where the therapist should actually encourage the pathology of the patient in order to be of any help at all.
And finally, suicidality, suicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, acute serious suicidal preoccupation or having survived a lethally intended suicidal effort, all these drive the narcissist to therapy.
Recently I've made a video about why narcissists try to commit suicide, this internal despair, fear of overwhelming shame and humiliation, sense of worthlessness, and of course, the inevitable rage.
Narcissists try to commit suicide when they are confronted with an external life crisis that threatens their fantastic inflated self-image, a job loss, financial crisis, failed promotion, loss of significant sustaining attachment, crumbling or collapse of self-regulatory support, narcissistic supply, which is deficient or vanishing, mortification, some subjective, traumatic or severely humiliating experience that's known as mortification.
So all these may lead to suicidality.
Now when you as the intimate partner of a narcissist, when you notice any of the crisis that I've described, that's your opportunity.
He will be much weaker now, his defenses are down, his decompensating.
And you can convince him that therapy is the right way to go about it, it's a kind of acting out.
Therapy would prove his mettle, therapy would make him a man, therapy would enhance his grandiosity.
It takes courage to attend therapy and confront yourself.
You must rebuild his grandiosity and generate a fantasy where both of you attend therapy or even he alone attends therapy as a way back to his godlike status.
Therapists would make sure this never happens, but the narcissist has to be convinced that he is not entering therapy in order to be mortified, to be changed, to be prevailed upon, to be rendered a conformist, to be forced to conform.
The narcissist cherishes his freedom and independence to the point of counterdependency.
There's a hint, just a hint that someone is going to play with his mind, tinker with his brain or shrink it, forget about it.
The narcissist would become very psychopathic and walk away.
You need to convince the narcissist that he is doing it for you, that it's good for the fantasy and it's going to make him great again.