There is click bait and there is victim bait.
Victim bait are videos like this one which encourage, no, revise this, compel, force victims to click on the video and watch it to their hearts content.
Today's video, today's topic is narcissists are infuriated when they are forced to face the music, pay the price, endure the karma of their own misconduct.
And who am I to talk about this?
My name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm a current professor of clinical psychology and business management in CIAPS in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and a former visiting professor of psychology, personality psychology, in Southern Federal University, in Rostov-on-Don, in the Russian Federation, in Europe, on this planet, on the Milky Way galaxy. Okay, I hope that I succeeded to locate myself sufficiently accurately.
You see them on YouTube. The wounded healers, saviors, the eternalprofessionalcompetitive victims, the ones who can do no wrong and have done no wrong, they just keep bumping into abusers.
Not their fault, they're not responsible, they've contributed nothing, they've never ever misbehaved, they're morally upright, they're sanctimonious, they're virtuous. It's just that people keep abusing them.
Abusive girlfriends, abusive business partners, abusive spouses, abusive friends, everyone around them takes advantage of them, humiliates them, attacks them.
And they're angelic, they're virginal.
It's a vomitory orgy of self-pity.
Many of these are YouTubers, actually. And I'm sure you can identify a few of them in my words.
Nothing is more pathetic. Nothing is more revolting than a covert narcissist claiming the high moral ground.
Nothing is more pathetic, nothing is more revolting than an overt, grandiose narcissist claiming victimhood.
Nothing.
Narcissists are infuriated when they are finally made to pay for their misbehavior, crimes, abuse, bad choices, and wicked comport or behavior.
They hate it. They hate the fact that their actions have consequences, that their choices have adverse outcomes, that punishment is coming, that karma is ineluctible.
They hate this.
They live in La La Land, a fantasy within which their actions have no consequences. They can make choices and decisions that affect other people, destroy their lives, damage them, break them apart, and remain insulated, immune, firewalled from any backlash and payback.
So when the narcissist is forced to face the music and pay the price, the narcissist denies everything.
Narcissist reframes his or her choices and actions. He is or her. Half of all narcissists are women.
The narcissist would say, I had no choice, or they would say, they made me do it. Or they would say, I'm being punished because I've acted morally, because I've been boundaried, because I've exposed the other party as a narcissist.
So they shift the blame. This is called alloplastic defense.
They blame everyone and everything for the way they have mismanaged their lives, for the enormous nuclear impact they have had on everyone around them, for the black hole that they have become.
They blame everything and everyone with one exception, themselves, of course.
They are the victims. They claim victimhood is a kind of badge of honor, an organizing principle which explains their lives, imbues their existence with meaning and sense and direction and goals. They are victims.
And by virtue of being victims, they are entitled to special treatment. They have special rights. By virtue of being victims, they're unique. By virtue of being victims, they are experts on victimhood, on abuse, on narcissistic abuse, on everything.
Never mind that they keep falling time and again into the traps of their own dysfunction and mental illness. They would still claim to be above it all, exonerated by some cosmic force.
They're not to blame, ever. They're not responsible, ever. They're not sorry. Never.
And whenit's half-hearted, backhanded and subterranean. It's not an apology.
They're never to blame. They're always to be pitied.
They seek pity because they leverage pity to manipulate you.
They invade your empathy and turn it against you. They compromise your affection, your compassion, your positive emotions, your essential nobility of mind. They compromise this, they corrupt it, and they use it against you.
They turn yourselves against yourselves and they break you apart.
And then they invade your mind through the chinks in your armor in a process known as entraining. They brainwash you. They install themselves within your mind and they never let go.
And this kind of narcissists lash out at their tormentors.
They claim to be tortured, abused, mistreated, maltreated. They're on camera whining and moaning and complaining all the time, all the time, all the time.
It's a modus operandi. That's the way they operate. They're moaning, they're whining, they're despicable and repulsive complaining.
These are the bridgeheads on the way to invading your mind, compromising your essence, your being and your identity, regressing you into an infantile state, coercing you to fulfill maternal roles, doing whatever they want with you, within an ever-shifting shared fantasy.
This is the bridgehead.
The pity they provoke you. The empathy that resonates with their false narrative.
This is the bridgehead.
Be careful. It's always D-Day with a narcissist.
And they have full intent to change the regime. It's a regime change operation.
Your old executive functions are out and they take over. It's a hostile takeover.
They lash out at people because they claim to be on the right side, on the right side of history, on the right side of morality, on the right side of decision making, making the right choices, acting the right way, they have never transgressed, they have never regretted anything, they are impeccable, they are immaculate, they are also immutable.
This denial of who they truly are, this denial, this repression of their wicked impulses, this compounds their troubles because they externalize aggression. They act out. They lose it. They become clinically psychotic. You can see it in their eyes. Their eyes are shining bright, glassy, not human almost.
So this fury, this furnace, this volcano inside them that is erupting with a lava of indignation, this compromises them. This destroys them. This pushes them to act in ways which they regret for having been caught. This places them very often in institutions, mental institutions or penitentiaries, incarceration.
They pay the price. They escalate because they think by escalating and by lying through their teeth about who they are by claiming to be victims when actually they are covert narcissists by claiming the high moral ground when actually they are overt grandioseists, and even psychopathic narcissists, they think that by pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, by deceiving everyone, they can get away with it.
And the problem is they often do. People are gullible. People assume the best about other people. People want to believe in a universe of justice, order, structure and the narcissist caters to these needs by pretending that he is on your side, on the right side, where you belong as well. He resonates with his requirements of justice and approbation.
So, now, says, get away with it all the time, most of the time.
Ultimately, they end up self-destructive, being self-destructive. Ultimately, they bring their own calamity and catastrophe and punishment on their heads.
They are the engineers of their karma. They are the scientists who put in motion their own demise, their own payback. They are responsible for everything that has ever happened to them.
Never mind the lies they're telling you. They've never been on the receiving end. They made it happen.
But they get away with it most of the time, until the final curtain.
They get away with it because of superficial charm, which is a main characteristic of psychopathy, by the way.
They're charming. They charming the nice the kind the smiling they're compassionate their understanding and it's all fake totally fake and they're persistent with a facade.
They have thespian skills. They play the wounded healer and the wounded child.
They cater to your maternal instincts, even if you're a male, to your parental instincts. They trigger you to protect them, to understand them, to coddle them, to cuddle them, to hug them, to afford them comfort and absolution ultimately.
This superficial charm is a huge power. and absolution ultimately.
This superficial charm is a huge power, force of nature, and they deploy it without any trepidation or hesitation or inhibition.
They conquer you, they swamp you and inundate you with this charm, and you find them irresistible.
Handsome, gorgeous, super intelligent, incredible, educated, mysterious, it's part of the charm.
And this allows for plausible deniability.
Whatever they do, they can disown, they can misattribute to someone else.
They can project, they can split, they can lie through their teeth, they can misattribute to someone else. They can project, they can split, they can lie through the teeth, they can do anything they want, they can be as Machiavellian and manipulative as they wish, because they are charming.
They sell you on exculpating narratives.
I'm not guilty. I haven't done anything. I'm an innocent, innocuous baby in the woods. I'm an eternal victim. I'm always being victimized. And I don't know why. I don't know why I'm being targeted so persistently by so many dozens of people from dozens of countries and cultures and civilizations and societies across decades. I don't know why this is happening to me, poor me, poor me.
And the narcissist floods you with details. The more, the better.
Recent studies have shown that when someone is too detailed, they're lying.
And the narcissist is nothing, if not a detailed person.
In the case of the narcissist, he believes his own lies. She believes their own fantasies. They're committed and invested emotionally in the fantasy.
So they confabulate, actually.
But the confabulation is a close cousin of lying, and so it is full of details.
And they inundate you with these details, not allowing you to stand back, not letting you exercise critical thinking.
They nitpick, their hair split, they analyze semantics and symbiotics, they argue on the meaning of words, they distort and mutilate and rape language itself.
And they use flying monkeys, delay tactics, an intimidating aura, outlandish charges and counterclaims, crazy making, acting out, it's all disorienting. You feel as if you were trapped in some kind of dream scape a nightmare which you cannot wake up from and the only guide through this dystopian universe is the narcissist.
The narcissist induces chaos in your mind, and then he remains as the only stable point, the only Archimedean point in your world.
And so you become dependent on the narcissist.
Impunity and immunity to the consequences of their actions. They are parts of grandiosity.
The narcissist's cognitive distortion is rejection of reality. He abjures and he abdicates reality. He adopts fantasy.
Within this fantasy, he is Godlike. He's omniscient. He is irresistibly lovable. He's omnipotent. He's omnipresent. He's God. He's a God. He's a God and it's a private religion.
And so like God himself, the narcissist is immune to the consequences of his actions because he knows best more than you, definitely.
This impunity is part of his grandiosity.
The assumption that nothing bad will ever happen to him, no matter what he does, that no one will catch up to him.
Catch me if you can. No one will catch up to him. He will never pay the price. He's a happy-go-lucky. He cruises through life, traverses life, and nothing touches him. He's a teflon, a teflon don, if you wish.
This is part of the grandiosity.
So when the narcissist is exposed, when the narcissist is penalized, his grandiosity crumbles, is challenged, is undermined. He can no longer maintain the inflated, fantastic self-image and self-perception that is his only defense against the reservoir of shame, life-threatening shame inside himself.
The narcissist first and foremost deceives himself, lies to himself. He needs to convince himself that he is not the shameful, unlovable, inadequate, stupid, ugly person that he has been led to believe that he is early on in his childhood.
This shame, this self-rejection, this self-loathing, this self-hatred, implanted in the narcissists by his parents usually, peers, role models. This is there. Contained, barely contained.
And the narcissist compensates for this with the pretension of being God, the false self, grandiosity.
And when he's exposed, when he is punished, when he's taken down, when he is mocked and ridiculed, when he is criticized, when he's taken down, when he is mocked and ridiculed, when he is criticized, and he feels that his grandiosity is gone, deactivated, and there it is in full view, his shame, his disgrace, his guilt, his remorse, his self-rejection and self-loathing and self-hatred, and self-destruction and self-trashing, and he feels annihilated.
If he's about to die, it's a suicidal experience, and it is a narcissistic injury or even mortification.
When faced with this, the narcissist's initial reaction is what we call negative affect.
Enormous rage, enormous, all-consuming rage, followed with hatred on the close heels of envy.
Narcissus cannot control these negative affects. He is overwhelmed by them. He develops a borderline dynamic. All his defenses are down. He decompensates.
And so he becomes clinically for a while, a borderline.
In order to restore himself, the narcissist resorts to one of two solutions, according to Libby, who has studied narcissistic mortification.
There's the external solution.
People are evil. They are out to get me. They conspire against me. They envy me. I am the bot and the target of malign intent and malign planning, maliciousness, wickedness. I am the lamb, the sacrificial lamb. I'm the scapegoat, I'm the innocent, I'm the babe in the woods, and I'm surrounded by the forces of evil and darkness, Sif and Kingwise.
That's the external solution.
Thereby, self-aggrandizing as a victim. Self-aggrandizing as a pro-social moral being.
Everyone around the narcissist is morally decrepit and corrupt. And the narcissist is actually the reification and embodiment of good, saintly, angelic.
That's one solution, the external solution.
And the other solution is the internal solution.
Everything that has happened to me, says the narcissist to himself, I made it happen. It was my choice, my design, my plan. I just implemented it. And everyone around were my pawns on the chessboard of my life.
This restores the narcissists' sense of omnipotence and omniscience, godlike qualities.
But the narcissist goes through an enormous period of tumult and torture, self-inflicted, when he faces the inevitable outcomes of his actions, choices and decisions. When he is forced to face the music, to pay the price, to pay the piper, to descend down the path of punitive measures and countermeasures.
And then he babifies, he infantilizes, and he appears on camera, looks you in the eye and says pity me, look what people have been doing to me. I'm so good. I'm so innocent. I'm so moral. And I'm such a healer. I'm such an angel. And these people keep abusing me, keep hurting me. And I don't deserve it because I'm perfectioned and body. I don't deserve it because I don't do anything bad to anyone. Never, ever. I'm innocent. As white as the driven snow.
And he or she looks you in the face and says these things and believes them. They believe these things.
Because they believe these things, their conviction, coupled with their charm, passes through, infects you, is communicated to you in an irresistible manner, and you fall prey to their pathetic, revolting, self-pitying narratives, which have nothing to do with reality.
Because these are creatures of the dark. They are the ones to create the mainstream, the black hole that has consumed everyone around them and ultimately themselves.