I'm back from Zagreb and as you can hear in my voice, I am not fully recovered.
The seminar, however, has been a success. We all had a grand old time, great fun. There were a few hundred clinicians from all over Europe. And, my, your humble servant, emphasis on humble.
I'll be releasing the full recordings of the seminar online, free of charge, and you'll be able to watch them in a dedicated playlist.
Today's topic is narcissistic rage.
Anyone who has spent more than a week with a narcissist came across this phenomenon. These infantile, grotesque, and sometimes, honestly, comic, temper tantrums that the narcissist throws when he or she doesn't get his or her way when things don't go exactly according to schedule they don't conform to a fantasy they don't uphold the counterfactual self-concept of the narcissists.
Today I'm going to delve into the 10 reasons that the narcissist goes haywire. The 10 reasons for narcissistic rage. And apropos for narcissistic rage.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. And I'm also a professor of clinical psychology. I give seminars and lectures free of charge. So make good use of it. I cover all my expenses, I travel, and I give seminars and lectures. So if you want to organize something, get in touch and we'll see what can be done about.
Now, to narcissistic rage.
Why do narcissists lose it? Why do they go completely out of control? Break objects, attack people, verbally abuse, sometimes become even physically violent, especially the malignant ones, the anti-social psychopathic narcissists.
Why all this? I mean, presumably, losing your temper, being unable to control your impulses is the exact opposite of being godlike. It's the exact opposite of the grandiose, inflated, fantastic self-image that the narcissists try to cultivate.
The narcissist in the throes of a babyish temper tantrum looks very, very unimpressive.
And so why do narcissists do that? Can't they just, you know, avoid being seen as clownish bullies and demented thugs?
It seems that they cannot.
And there are 10 occasions, 10, like 1-0 occasions, where the narcissist cannot absolutely inhibit himself, master his impulses, and take a step back, take a deep breath, and somehow reduce the anxiety that is behind the externalized aggression.
And this is the topic of today's video.
We'll start with mirroring.
The narcissist projects onto you attributes to you parts of himself his traits his qualities his failures, he attributes all these, all this baggage. He hands it over to you.
So if the narcissist is weak, he would say that you're weak. If the narcissist is stingy, he attributes stinginess to you, and he claims to be generous. If the narcissist is not particularly intelligent, he would say that you are too stupid to understand him.
This is called projection, and it's a primitive infantile defense mechanism.
And sometimes you behave in ways that remind the narcissists of the parts of himself that he resents, suppresses, denies, and rejects.
For example, if you're weak, it reminds the narcissist how weak he is. If you are vulnerable, it triggers the narcissist. It provokes the narcissist to recall his own vulnerability.
And when I say he's, and him and he, that's just a literary convention. Half of all narcissists are women. And everything I say applies to them.
So sometimes who you are, your traits, your behaviors, your facial expressions, your choices, your decisions, even your friends and family members, your personal history, something in you, reminds the narcissist of those things in himself that he would rather forget.
And then he loses it. His aggression wells up and he directs this aggression at you.
Generally narcissistic rage is a form of displacement when an emotion is redirected from its logical, rational place to another venue and another target.
So, for example, if your boss has mistreated you, humiliated you, and you're unable to backlash, you're unable to punish your boss, obviously, because you would lose your job. You come back home and you take it out on your wife or your children or your best friend.
This is called displacement.
With the emotion of anger, emotion of frustration and humiliation, are redirected from one target, which is legitimate, the humiliating boss, the misbehaving boss, to another target which has done nothing to deserve the maltreatment and the abuse.
And so when the narcissist is reminded of his own projected parts, he then takes it out on you. He is actually angry at himself.
If you are weak and vulnerable, the narcissist is reminded of his own weakness, fragility and vulnerability that makes him very angry at himself, but he redirects the anger at you.
So this is cause number one.
Cause number two, when you challenge the narcissist self-concept, a typical self-concept of a narcissist, whether overt or covert, a typical self-concept includes the idea that the narcissist is somehow a kind of genius, a towering intellect, original, creative, unprecedented, amazing. There is omnipotence involved, omniscience.
The narcissists is all-knowing and all-powerful. He is godlike. He is the reification of perfection and uniqueness.
And this is the self-concept of the narcissist.
And because it is so outlandish, so inane, so fantastic, so divorce from reality and so counterfactual, the narcissist needs to defend this self-concept continuously from attacks.
The self-concept is challenged by harsh realities. The self-concept is challenged by harsh realities. The self-concept is challenged by other people who are triggered by this kind of obnoxious display of ostentatious superiority.
So the narcissist is constantly bombarded with antagonistic signals and he's fighting them off all the time. He's very hypervigilant, very protective of his grandiosity.
But when his grandiose inflated fantastic self-image is challenged head-on directly when the self-concept is ridiculed or exposed or undermined somehow its own the narcissist erupts with enormous aggression, there's a temper tantrum. There's narcissistic rage.
And the aim of this rage is to silence you. To silence the critics. To silence those who disagree. To suppress dissidents.
It's a little like in a dictatorship.
The narcissist doesn't want to hear opposing voices. He doesn't want to contemplate evidence to the contrary. He wants to live in a world of fools. He wants to surround himself with the cotton balls of fantasy.
And when you penetrate through this, you invade this sacred space the narcissists becomes furious.
The third reason or the third etiology in other words the third type of causation of narcissistic rage, is when you undermine or obstruct, the narcissist attempts to self-enhance.
Self-enhancement is a set of strategies used by narcissists to self-supply, essentially to somehow convince themselves that the false self is not false, that the grandiose claims are factual, that the fantasy is real.
And so the narcissist constantly spins narratives and tries to somehow coerce and shoehorn reality somehow reframe it, modify it in a way that buttresses and enhances and amplifies and magnifies the utterly delusional claims that the narcissists makes about himself.
This is a constant effort, this is a full-time job and if you interfere if you challenge it if you undermine it if you obstruct it if you prevent the narcissists from accomplishing self-enhancement he's going to go with you he's going to attack you he's going to try to eliminate you.
The idea in narcissistic rage is to eliminate the source of frustration, the fount of challenge, and the way to do this is to invoke fear, to intimidate, and to silence the opposition.
The worst thing you can do which invariably triggers narcissistic rage is when you deflate the fantasy.
The narcissist presents to you a story, a script, a movie script about himself. He's a director, he's a scriptwriter, and he's of course the mega star. Everything and everyone revolves around him.
And the movie script and that this theater production is totally divorced from reality, as I've mentioned. It actually defies reality. It's an anti from reality, as I've mentioned. It actually defies reality. It's an anti-social act of defiance.
And the narcissist presents the fantasy to you and expects you to conform, expect you to approve of the fantasy, expect you to tell him the fantasy is real, that all its elements are veritable, that there's no question, for example, that he's a genius, or drop-dead gorgeous, or whatever it is that the narcissist feels grandiose about.
For example, maybe that he's very moral or very just or whatever it is.
If you confront the fantasy, if you dare to hint that the fantasy is unreal, counterfactual, that the fantasy is ridiculous, that the fantasy is going nowhere, that the fantasy contains mutually exclusive, contradictory elements, that the fantasy doesn't sit well with previous fantasies or the narcissist's episodic memory or personal history. If you dare somehow to burst the bubble, to pierce this hot air balloon, the narcissist will be at your throat before you know it.
And this is possibly the only case when the narcissist could actually become physically violent.
In all these cases, the narcissist perceives you as a threat. He fears you. He's terrified of you because you have the capacity. You have the capacity to wake him up. You have the capacity to mortify the narcissist by shaming the narcissist, humiliating the narcissist, exposing the narcissist, mocking the narcissist. You have power over the narcissist, exposing the narcissists, mocking the narcissists, you have power over the narcissists.
And the narcissist resents and is terrified of this power asymmetry.
It is an existential type of terror because if you take away the narcissist's fantasy, you dispense with the narcissist's false self, which is another kind of fantasy. If you get rid of all these elements, nothing is left behind.
The narcissist is an absence masquerading as a presence and the presence is utterly concocted and nonsensical.
And if you point the finger and say the emperor is naked, this is crazy, this is stupid.
You leave the narcissist with nothing. You leave the narcissist with nothing. You devastate and demolish his internal world, which is precariously balanced on a series of internal objects, all performing their pre-assigned roles within narrative.
So this makes you a mortal enemy.
And the narcissist fears you, and we know that fear engenders aggression. We are aggressive, mostly, when we are in panic or we are afraid.
And so this is the fight response. Narcissists don't do flight and they definitely don't do form, but they do fight.
And their way to fight is to demonstrate to you how aggressive and violent they can become to give you a preview or a trailer of what might happen to you if you persist.
And this preview and trailer is known as narcissistic rage.
Narcissists also rage when you frustrate their wishes, ignore or decline their demands, disobey, refuse to act submissive, insist on maintaining your independence, personal autonomy and agency, make your own decisions and choices, have your own friends, travel, alone, whatever the case may be, whenever you remind the narcissist that you are not, not a manipulable internal object, not a piece of fiction or a figment of his imagination, that you're real, that you are three-dimensional, that you have a life independent of him, unrelated to him.
This is terrifying. This is terrifying to the narcissist.
And so he needs to put you down, like a rabid dog. He needs to denude you and deny you any hint of independent action and thought. He needs to de-animate you, to take away your vitality, and do bar all access to others, to isolate you, and to control all your resources.
Today this is known, this coercive control.
But it always starts with a display of unbridled vitriol and rage and fury. It is a form of signaling.
If you do not immediately succumb, if you do not immediately, instantaneously submit, I am going to eradicate you and obliterate you and vaporize you and pulverize you and if you don't believe I can do this have a look, watch me as I become this monstrous animal uninhibited and unconstrained by any social mores or norms.
Another way to trigger the narcissists' rage is to compare the narcissist unfavorably to other people, to hint, to imply or to outright say that the narcissist is inferior to others in some way, less handsome, less accomplished, less knowledgeable, less something.
Whenever you make such a comparison, you're bound to bring upon your head the wrath of the narcissist, because his entire existence, his entire ability to regulate internally, depend crucially on the misperception of his own superiority and supremacy.
Shaming the narcissist, humiliating the narcissist, exposing the narcissist, inflicting on the narcissistic injuries and narcissistic mortifications, especially if done in public, will create a chain reaction of narcissistic fury and rage, which are never ending in effect.
It is the only case, mortification and injury, extreme injury or repeated injury, that's the only case where the narcissist remains locked into an aggressive stance, locked into a state of mind of externalized aggression, becomes essentially a primary psychopath, very angry and bitter and unforgiving and truculent and hateful person.
When you act or think independently, when you operate unexpectedly, when you bring on change into the narcissist's life, what you're doing in effect is you're informing the narcissist or you're signaling to the narcissist that his entire theory about other people, theory of mind, and his working models are all wrong.
Because the narcissist believes that he can convert you into an internal object that is fully controllable and can be fully manipulated.
And when you demonstrate to the narcissists, that its basic assumption, his hypothesis about you and people in general is nonsensical, he cannot tolerate it.
Surprises are a great way of triggering narcissistic rage.
Amazingly, even if you organize a good surprise, like a birthday party, or a cruise around the world, or I don't know, the Nobel Prize, even a great surprise is perceived by the narcissist as a slight, as an insult, as a challenge, because it is outside the remit and the ambit of his control.
That's why narcissists spoil holidays. The frequency of narcissistic rage during birthdays, holidays, special occasions is much heightened.
The narcissist is much more likely to rage and go insane in these periods of time because he is not the reason for what's happening, because he is subjected to ceremonies and rituals and practices that he was not the one to determine.
When you participate in a birthday, when you are part of a holiday, when you are in a family gathering during Christmas or Thanksgiving or what have you, you are not in charge. You're just one of many. You're average. You don't have special rights. You're not entitled to any special treatment.
And this is something the narcissist cannot tolerate. It's likely to react with rage too.
Envy, of course, is a major source of narcissistic anger or narcissistic rage when you succeed, when you accomplish, the narcissist regards this as your way of humiliating him.
As an in-your-face defiant smirking challenge, you are laughing at him, you are denigrating him, you are demeaning and debasing and degrading him. Your success, the only reason you have become successful, the only reason you have accomplished anything is to remind him how unsuccessfully is, relatively speaking.
Narcissists are very big on relative positioning. They constantly measure themselves in comparison to others, because such comparisons in the vast majority of cases are unfavorable.
Narcissists compensate for this by imposing fantasy or fantastical narratives of the situation, by reframing reality in a way which is counterfactual and delusional.
Delusion is an escape from an intolerable, unbearable reality.
If you're together with a narcissist, as his intimate partner, as his child, as his colleague, as his best friend, and you're successful, and you're accomplished, and you go places, and you're recognized, and you are credited or credited for your work, that surely will sour the relationship and you will have become the narcissist's worst enemy, a constant reminder of his delinquencies and deficiencies, on the one end, and of the fact that you're not a true friend. You're a fake friend, you're a fake intimate partner, and you are an ungrateful child for having surpassed the narcissist.
Now, the amazing thing is and the irony is that even when your success is minimal and your accomplishment is standard or average, the narcissist would regard this as a direct menace to be utterly demolished, obliterated, eradicated, and every other dated.
He cannot tolerate.
He wants you to be in a constant state of failure. He wants you to be sick. He wants you to be needy. He wants you to be dependent. He wants you to be submissive. He wants you to be a failure. He wants you to be submissive. He wants you to be a failure. He wants you to be defeated repeatedly so that you will look up to him and you will never leave him. You'll never abandon him except on his own terms.
So when you volunteer unsolicited advice, you're implying that you are superior to the narcissist. He's in need. He's in need of your advice.
When you're offering to help the narcissist, it implies that he's less than Godlike, not as powerful as he believes himself to be, not omnipotent.
When you offer help, you're actually saying, I'm in the position to give you something that you do not possess. I'm superior to you.
Narcissists interpret advice and help as messages, as signals. And these are challenges.
Because the narcissist knows everything. There's nothing he could learn. He doesn't need help. He doesn't need advice. Who are you to give him help and advice?
So when you do this, you provoke him mightily. And you're shocked that your well-meaning gesture, your attempt to improve the well-being and life of the narcissists is met with extreme verbalized, externalized and sometimes physicalized, hostility, as if you did something that is typical of an enemy, not of a friend.
Now I've used a few times that I'd like to disambiguate them.
Narcissistic injury is an occasional or circumstantial threat, real or imagined, to the narcissist grandiose and fantastic self-perception, his false self.
Narcissist believes himself to be perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to special treatment and recognition, regardless of his actual accomplishments or lack thereof. And any disagreement with this is a narcissistic injury.
Narcissistic wound is a repeated or recurrent identical or similar threat, real or imagined.
So when the threat repeats itself, time and again, for example, you behave in a certain way, time and again, or you keep succeeding, or you keep disagreeing, or you keep criticizing, or you keep pointing out all kinds of mistake or deficiencies or whatever the case may be, this creates a narcissistic wound.
Because it's a threat to the narcissists grandiose and fantastic self-perception, the false self, it's perfect omnipotent omniscient etc.
Narcissistic scaris a repeated or scar, S-C-A-R, is a repeated or recurrent psychological defense against a narcissistic wound. Such a narcissistic defense is intended to sustain and preserve the aforementioned cognitive distortion of grandiosity, the fantastic, inflated, delusional self-perception, collectively known as the false self.
Now, narcissists often vent their anger at insignificant people. They yell at a waitress, they berate a taxi driver, they publicly chide and chastise and underling. Alternatively, they sulk, they feel unhedonic, pathologically bored, they drink, they do drugs, all these are forms of self-directed aggression.
Somerosis can rage at themselves. Sometimes they even verbalize it. They talk to themselves as if they were a third party and they attack themselves they are furious at themselves, and they let everyone around know it. So this kind of aggression, which is a highly specific type of externalized aggression, can be self-directed from time to time, no longer able to pretend and to suppress their rage. Narcissists have it out with the real source of their anger. Then they lose all vestiges of self-control. They rave like lunatics. They shout incoherently. They make absurd accusations. They distort facts. And they air long-suppressed grievances and allegations and suspicions. These episodes are followed by periods of regret. It's the only case actually when narcissists feel remorse or regret, not for having hurt other people, but for having damaged their own image, for having failed to manage impressions, for having cracked, for having somehow compromised the integrity, the structural integrity of the false self.
So they regret this. They angry at themselves for having been angry, for having raged. And then the rage is followed by a period of saccharine sentimentality, sugary sentimentality, excessive, flattering, even displays of submissiveness towards the victim of the latest rage attack. Driven by the mortal fear of being abandoned or ignored or mocked and ridiculed or criticized or even mortified, the narcissist repulsively debases himself, demeans himself and submits himself. It's a temporary transition from an overt state, a grandiose state to a covert state. Most narcissists are prone to be angry. Anger is a core feature of narcissism, exactly like shame, and they're angry because of the shame. The narcissistic anger is always sudden, raging, frightening, like a snow avalanche, and without an apparent provocation by an outside agent, or at least not the kind of provocation that health in all my people regard this provocation. It would seem that narcissists are in a constant state of rage, which is effectively controlled most of the time, but not always. The rage manifests itself only when the narcissist's defenses are down. In other words, when the narcissists decompensate, decompensates. When these defenses are down, incapacitated, or adversely affected by circumstances internal and external, the narcissists emotionally dysregulates.
And the visible, the visible version, visible aspect of this emotional, this regulation is what we call narcissistic rage. Generally speaking, pathological anger is neither coherent nor externally induced. It emanates from the inside. It is diffuse. It is directed at the world and at injustice in general.
The narcissist is capable of identifying the immediate cause of his or her fury. However unacceptable, the cause may be, however bizarre the cause may be. Still, upon closer scrutiny, the cause is likely to be found lacking. And the anger is disproportionate, excessive, and incoherent, diffuse. It might be more accurate to say that the narcissist is expressing and experiencing two layers of anger. Simultaneously and always. The first layer is kind of superficial ire, cantankerousness. It's indeed directed at an identifiable or identified or a targeted individual, the alleged cause of the eruption, the person who has wronged the Narcissus in the Narciss's eyes in his convoluted mind. But it's still there even when there's no cause for irritation and agitation the narcissus is in this constant state
the second type of anger, the second layer incorporates the narcissist's self-aimed, self-directed rage.
So narcissistic rage has two forms.
Explosive, the narcissist flares up, attacks everyone in his immediate vicinity, causes damage to objects, objects of people, and he's verbally and psychologically abusive and sometimes physically abusive. That's the explosive variant. It's a kind of intermittent explosive disorder.
And there's another variant, the pernicious passive-aggressive narcissistic rage.
The narcissist sulks, gives the silent treatment, and is plotting how to punish the transgressor and put her in her proper place.
These narcissists are vindictive, and they often become stalkers or worse. They harass, they haunt the objects of their frustration. They sabotage and damage the work in positions of people whom they regard to have been the sources of their mounting fury.
In 1939, American psychologistsJohn Dollard and four of his colleagues put forward the famous frustration- aggression hypothesis.
With minor modifications, it fits well the phenomenon of narcissistic rage.
Stage 1, the narcissist is frustrated in his pursuit of narcissistic supply. He is ignored, ridiculed, doubted, criticized, etc.
Stage 2, frustration causes narcissistic injury.
Stage 3, the narcissist projects the internalized bad object onto the source of his frustration. He devalues her, or he attributes to her malice and other negative traits and behaviors.
And the final stage, this attribution or misattribution, this projection causes the narcissist to rage against the perceived malevolent entity, evil entity that had so injured and frustrated him so unjustly.