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 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, too many preponderance of symbols, hypotheses, assumptions, labels, diagnoses 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.
And 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're 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.
And these are internal objects.
And 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.
And 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 external imagery, these external external imagery, he perceives it as external, actually comes from the inside. These are 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 and 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. The psychotic externalizes internal objects.
And so if this is the case, we can easily show that if we use this as a unified principle, we can easily show that all personality disorders and a majority of mental health disorders are actually a clinical, 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 could 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. 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 overt 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.
And 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.
In 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 them. She would drown in her emotions.
So this is the gap.
And the second reason for these frequent transitions between states and overlays is narcissistic modification.
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 in caricature, when it's imbued with cognitive deficits, such as grandiosity.
Only then do we talk about a disorder, but otherwise everyone has narcissism.
So narcissistic modification 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 modification 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 collapsed. And would also push him from one overlay to another.
Motification can cause the narcissist to become borderline and the borderline to become psychopath, as we will discuss a bit later.
So 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 summary.
So a few things about the covert state. Remember the three states overt, classic, collapsed and covert.
Let's dedicate 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.
The grandiose narcissist.
So 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 states, 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 a stage of gap and mortification.
I hope you got the picture.
Now let's home in zero in on some of the types.
Covert narcissist. There are like two million videos on covert narcissist and about half a video of this, 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, inferiority, morose self-doubts, marked propensity toward feeling ashamed, fragility, relentless search for glory and power, marked sensitivity to criticism and realistic setbacks.
What about the covert interpersonal relationships?
Inability to genuinely depend on others and trust them, chronic envy of others' talents, positions 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 taste 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, it's psychopathic.
Pathological lying, materialistic lifestyle, delinquent tendencies, inordinate moral relativism, irreverence towards authority, contumacious.
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 used 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 Hornei. 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 Hornei 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, delayed 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.
And this kind of child, Peter Pan, Puerperadolescent, when he turns adult, he sees no reason, 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, you know, in the previous centuries.
They felt entitled not by virtue of any merit or accomplishment, but as the inevitable foreordained outcome of some 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, you know, both kinds of narcissists, they feel inadequate. They feel phony, the imposter syndrome. They feel fake, inferior and deserving of punishment.
And this is where I beg to differ with Milan.
Milan 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 Milan, 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 Milan 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 of an overwhelming sensation of fakeness. That's why narcissists, 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 grandiosity gap between a fantastically grandiose and unlimited self-image and the actual limited accomplishments and achievements of the narcissist, this grandiosity 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.
Pathological 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.
The narcissist's 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, he's brilliant, he's 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 may become schizotipo, 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 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's 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 pusillanimously 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 morals 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, in-ter-mission.
I love German. No such language to express unbridled psychopathic narcissism. Sometimes I suspect they invented the mental condition.
The narcissist's natural affinity with the 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, lives 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 choose 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 bed, 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 minacious and ominous objects. This is of course a prime example of confusing internal objects with external objects. These persecutory 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 this kind of narcissist avoids 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, often 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, innocentcomment.
Good morning. It's designed to provoke and humiliate them somehow.
What do you think? I don't know. It's morning. You think I need 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 saw 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, unfortunately, mainly to themselves, but sometimes to others.
And then the final type of covert narcissist is the masochistic avoidant solution, masochistic avoidant 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 Dowlatt 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.
And 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 the 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. I mean, this is cry for hell 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 is in control.
You know, to fail is an art form. If you are very, very good at failing, if all that you have 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.
I even wrote in 20 years ago that this kind of narcissist, the masochistic narcissist, they try to avoid an objective assessment of their performance to make it improbable. 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 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 Millen, 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. You know, the saints walking among us, some of whom get peace, noble prizes. They're actually covert narcissists. They're saintly, professionally saintly or professional victims. They're 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.
And 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. Who do 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.
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. Yesterday'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, you know, it's difficult to collate, to create a composite that is coherent because people, you know, mismatch.
But I want to pinpoint a home in on a few points.
First of all, the collapse covert narcissist.
It starts with a collapse, then there is modification. You remember what modification does? There are five videos dedicated to modification on my channel.
Narcissistic modification disables the false self. So there's an overt, classic narcissist.
There's a problem with reality, something, some failure, some humiliation, public or otherwise, some defeat. He cannot cope with it, collapses. 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 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 find back.
And this is intended to reduce dissonant anxiety. The collapse creates enormous anxiety, overwhelming anxiety. And to reduce it, the narcissist actually switches himself off. He doesn't exist because he stops to exist. He has these diseases 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. He kind 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 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. You don't know who Caruso is. Never mind that. Just shows you my age.
Collapsed histrionic personality disorder. It's the collapsed state of the histrionic.
The collapsed 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 collapsed histrionic. Collapsed histrionic is usually a woman, because for a simple reason, most people diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder are women. So the collapsed 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 receives 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 are 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 say irony. The histrionic, who supposedly conquers everyone, seduces everyone. She's the femme fatale or the ingenue.
The histrionic is actually at the mercy of men. Low self-esteem often leads to an impaired reality testing, 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 is kind of preemptive abandonment.
This is the irony. She usually ends up with wizzles and losers and better males because she rejects ab initio, sight unseen, 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 are the histrionic supply.
And similarly, when resoundingly rejected, humiliated by rejection, abandoned, neglected, ignored, collapsed histrionics react with histrionic rage.
In other words, we see a mirror image of narcissism here. Mirror image, histrionic supply, histrionic rage.
The histrionic, the collapsed histrionic resorts to, in your face, defiance, often by triangulating with a third man, third party, in order to provoke jealousy or to grievously hurt the frustrating and rejecting object man.
The histrionic's aggression is focused on restoring his or her grandiosity via a new and ostentatious sexual conquest. He can and does wear, 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 collapsed histrionic personalities.
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 and overt 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 don't know how to be a woman. You're stupid. You're repulsive. You're whorish. 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.
And 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 is transmogrifying into a slut. Or she can suddenly stop being a woman, eliminate all her feminine dimensions and behaviors, or 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 feminine, 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. They're physically inert, obese, neglect their duties, including in business, child rearing, childbearing, etc.
This is their way of defying their mean and nasty part. 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 path.
And all this is the package of collapsed history only when 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 at others. She internalizes. She directs 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.
And 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 that 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 narcissists and narcissists 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 grandiose. He has internal locus of control, seeming self-sufficiency, modalability, emotional dysregulation and rationalization or reactance and defiance. He acts against authority, contumaciousness. 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 is very psychopathic.
What about interpersonal relationships?
The covert borderline has paranoid 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 is 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 it'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, the covert borderline, a man usually, is idiosyncratically and unevenly moral. He has caricatured modesty. He is an activist very often.
There are 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 turned psychologists, psychologists turned philosophers. They are likely covert narcissists or covert borderlines 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 dichotomous thinking, black and white and splitting primitive defense mechanism. You're all good or you're all bad. Something is all evil or all good. All, all, you know. He is impressively knowledgeable. He has egocentric perception of reality. He has a fondness for shortcuts to acquisition of knowledge. He is 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. 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, 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, 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 psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors, they develop an overlay. 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.
Impulsivity, 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 the borderline adds a twist to this cocktail, dissociation. 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, outcomes, outcomes, 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 MediaKit. So you go to my website, mediakit.html. And on the MediaKit, 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 pass peer 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 Minnie is 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.