A few points and pointers before you embark on today's video.
Narcissists are made, they are not born. They may be a genetic predisposition to develop cluster B personality disorders, but it takes a very coercive, traumatic and abusive environment, childhood environment, adverse childhood experiences to create a narcissist, a lifelong narcissist.
One of the main problems, one of the main issues that results in narcissism in later life is the love "that the narcissist receives from his mother or later in life from his father".
In his childhood, the love of the narcissist mother or father was conditioned on the child's performance. It was a reward for fulfilling the parents' expectations and wishes. You be a good boy and I'm going to love you. You act as my spouse or my parent and I'm going to love you. You excel in school and make me proud. I'm going to love you. You fulfill my unrealized wishes and dreams. I'm going to love you.
My love for you as a child is conditioned on your performance, on meeting my expectations, fulfilling my dreams and catering to my needs and psychological needs.
So the narcissist learns early on in life to connect love with performance.
Now in intimate settings, when I say intimate settings, it doesn't have to be a romantic couple or a dyad. It can be a friendship, for example.
In intimate settings, the narcissist counterparts could be again an intimate partner, a spouse, a girlfriend, boyfriend or friend.
The narcissist counterparts are substitute mothers. They are maternal figures.
And to gain the love of these substitute mothers, of these surrogate mothers, to be rendered lovable, the narcissist feels compelled again to perform.
It's as if the narcissist says, "My friend is not going to love me. My wife is not going to love me. My girlfriend is not going to love me. My boyfriend is not going to love me. They're not going to care for me unless and until I meet their expectations, cater to their needs and perform.
It's very much like people pleasing, but with a hard edge because the narcissist not only tries to please these counterparts, he tries to service them in many ways.
So the shared fantasy is the narcissist's way of organizing this matrix.
The shared fantasy is performative.
Within the shared fantasy, the narcissist performs and expects to be loved in return as long as he performs.
Love within the shared fantasy or perceived love within the shared fantasy is conditioned on performance, performance could be money, could be access, could be power, could be fame, could be celebrity, could be sex, could be anything.
The narcissist, it's a quick pro quo.
The narcissist's shared fantasy is highly transactional. It's like a theater production, like a movie. You buy a ticket and you expect two hours of entertainment.
The performative shared fantasy inevitably includes an element of self-aggrandizement.
The narcissist within the shared fantasy wishes to perceive himself, and when I say himself, it's also herself, of course, half of all narcissists are women.
The narcissist wishes to perceive himself as lovable, as irresistible.
And so he needs to overcome his internal bad object.
Remember that each and every narcissist has a bad object, a voice or a constellation of voices inside the narcissist that tell him that he's unworthy, bad, inadequate, a failure, a loser, ugly, stupid, and so on.
Narcissism is a compensation for these voices. It's a compensatory defense against these voices.
So within the shared fantasy, the narcissist needs to be perfect, godlike, omnipotent, omniscient, and so on.
Grandiosity within the shared fantasy is a hallmark of the fantasy.
There is no shared fantasy without grandiosity.
But grandiosity by its definition is inflated, fantastic, counterfactual, divorced from reality.
So the shared fantasy being a fantasy which is founded on grandiosity is as removed from reality as is humanly possible. It supersedes reality. It substitutes for reality.
And of course, reality fights back.
Reality intrudes. The narcissist is exposed to countervailing information, to challenges, to criticism, to disagreements. He's mocked, he's ridiculed, he's shamed, he's humiliated, he's fired, he's in numerous life circumstances and interpersonal relationships and interactions with other people challenge and undermine, sabotage constantly.
The grandiosity which is embedded in or reified by the shared fantasy.
The narcissist's hidden belief is that he needs to be perfect in order to perform.
The parental expectations in the narcissist's early childhood were of perfection.
The child needed to be perfect to deserve love.
So when the narcissist recreates early childhood in the shared fantasy with a maternal substitute, with an intimate partner who is now his new mother, he again is catapulted, regressed back to an early stage of childhood where he had to be perfect.
And there's no perfection without grandiosity.
Grandiosity is a cognitive distortion that misinforms the narcissist that he's perfect.
It's the ultimate form of self-deception. It's totally delusional, kind of delusional disorder in my view.
So here we are.
The narcissist has learned as a small child that receiving love is dependent upon performance and meeting other people's expectations.
He then recreates a shared fantasy within which he has a mother figure, a substitute surrogate mother.
He then tries to please her and appease her to perform in order to deserve her love and to be rendered lovable within the shared fantasy.
And to be rendered lovable, the narcissist has to compensate for or weigh the bad object inside him.
He has to prove to his new mother, the substitute mother, the maternal figure in the shared fantasy, he has to prove to her that he is perfect, that he's flawless, that he is impeccable, that he's blemishless, that he's godlike.
And this is the grandiosity.
It's a way of broadcasting, signaling to the partner, I am perfect so I'm deserving of your love. And I can't be perfect except in fantasy.
Because no one is perfect in reality, with the exception perhaps of God and even this is debatable.
So only in fantasy can you be perfect.
But then reality intrudes and conflicts with the fantasy, cracks it open, wide open, undermines it.
And this is called the grandiosity gap.
And this creates a lot of frustration in the narcissist.
He attempts to render himself perfect and therefore deserving of love and he keeps failing.
And he begins to blame his partner for his failures.
He says, you are the one who doesn't recognize my grandeur, grandeur. You are the one who doesn't realize how amazingly genius and perfect I am. You are the one who wouldn't contemplate or accept my divinity.
And so he begins to blame his partner for the constant frustration of the inability, the inbuilt inability to maintain a shared fantasy in the face of reality.
And this frustration leads to aggression against the partner, also known as devaluation and little discard.
So what's going on here?
The shared fantasy is constructed in a way that will produce frustration and then aggression.
The aim of the shared fantasy, the end game of the shared fantasy is frustration, aggression, dollars, famous hypothesis.
The shared fantasy is intended to push the narcissist away from his intimate partner because the intimate partner is perceived as a mother.
And so the narcissist needs to separate from this new mother and become an individual.
And the only way to accomplish this is to reconceive of the maternal figure as a persecutory object or an inferior being or entity.
So the shared fantasy is built on impossible targets.
The shared fantasy is so counterfactual, so unrealistic, so outlandish and inane and deranged that it can never ever be sustained.
This creates a lot of frustration and then aggression.
And the aggression is directed at the partner because there's no one else there, nobody else.
So the shared fantasy is constructed as a generator of frustration and aggression against the partner, which would allow the narcissist in good conscience to devalue the partner and discard her as a symbolic reenactment of separation and individuation with his original mother, separation and individuation that had failed.
The narcissist wants to find a new mother, he then wants to reestablish the fantasy that he has had with his original mother, but this time he wants to separate from this new mother and become an individual.
And to do that, he needs to cast his new mother in a bad light. He needs to transfer to her his bad object. I am worthy, you are unworthy.
The narcissist engages in splitting. Suddenly, he is the all good object and his partner is the all bad object. He demonizes and vilifies her, devalues her and then discards her.
The shared fantasy is constructed on two pillars.
The first pillar, the mother figure, the maternal figure, and the second pillar, unrealizable, impossible goals of perfection and divinity.
The second pillar generates frustration and aggression because the narcissist keeps failing at being perfect. The narcissist keeps being confronted with evidence to the contrary that he is imperfect, a failure, a loser or not as great as he thinks he is.
Grandiosity gap. This frustration creates aggression and this aggression is directed at the first pillar of the fantasy, the intimate partner who has been recast as a maternal figure.
And this is the performance of the shared fantasy. This is why it's performative.
Now, narcissists are children. Their mental age is between two and perhaps six, very rare cases, nine.
Most of them are around age two, prior two or three, prior to separation, individuation. It's a case of arrested or stunted development, a phrase we no longer use in clinical literature, by the way.
So the narcissist is age inappropriate. He always behaves in a way which doesn't sit well with his age. He is always childlike or, shall I say, infantile.
Now, the narcissist adopts two compensatory strategies.
Owing to his age inappropriateness, the narcissist's self-efficacy is much reduced.
Let me translate this into English.
Because the narcissist is a child, he doesn't act well in his changing environments and on his changing environments. As the environments change, there's a workplace, there's a family, there's a church. The narcissist is not equipped to perform well in these environments because he's a child.
Having realized this deficiency, this discrepancy, this abyss between his psychological age and his chronological age, between his psychological age and the requirements of society as far as functioning and so on, having realized these deficits, the narcissist compensates, he has compensatory strategies.
One of them is by becoming antisocial and defiant. And the other one is by conforming and producing a facade of normalcy, pseudo-normalcy, a mask of sanity. These are the two strategies.
Now, the strategies are not fixed for life. The narcissist alternates and vacillates between these two strategies.
Sometimes he's defiant, contumacious is antisocial and reckless. Yet other times he's conforming, he's normal, he belongs, he acts lawfully and he sublimates, becomes socially acceptable. These are the two strategies.
And the narcissist alternates between them, depending on his age and depending on events in his life.
When the narcissist collapses, when he is, for example, no longer able to secure a regular flow of high quality narcissistic supply, he would very often alternate between types. He would become covert rather than overt, cerebral rather than somatic, somatic rather than cerebral.
So there is no type consistency. The reaction to narcissistic collapse is by switching between types of narcissism.
But also another reaction to collapse is switching between these two strategies.
The conforming, socially con-condoned and acceptable narcissist.
The narcissist who presents a facade of pseudo-normalcy.
The narcissist with a family and with a job and goes to church and plays baseball with the children.
This kind of narcissist suddenly erupts, goes bananas, goes crazy, becomes antisocial, defined, goes postal and I don't know, shoots the whole city.
So there is a pendulum, a pendulum movement between types and compensatory strategies.
Narcissists are intended to compensate for the narcissist's retarded development, developmental challenges, the fact that the narcissist is a child psychologically.
So at various stages in the lifespan, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age and senescence, old age, various stages in the lifespan, you could find the narcissist adopting one compensatory strategy over the other.
For example, in adulthood, typically the narcissist would be conforming and pseudo-normal.
In adolescence, the narcissist typically would be defiant and contumacious, rejecting of authority and reckless and so on and so forth.
So in various periods of life, the narcissist is either one strategy or the other.
And there is also a specific type that alternates according to collapse.
So collapse triggers, collapse triggers transitions between types, transitions from overt to covert, from somatic to cerebral, from cerebral to somatic and so on.
In age triggers, transitions between compensatory strategies in a desperate attempt to present a facade of adulthood and object relations, when actually in reality, the narcissist is not an adult, but a very problematic child and can never engage in object relations because of the shared fantasy.
He doesn't interact with objects. He keeps repeatedly interacting with maternal substitutes, with mothers, one mother after the other.
And this is known as repetition compulsion.
Okay, there was a very long introduction to a very short video. And I hope you would be able to follow the narcissist's life path.
There's a concept of karma. Of course, I consider ideas such as reincarnation and so on and so forth as forms of mental illness or stupidity or both.
But there is payback within the individual's lifetime. And you will be able to follow this process of payback when I describe the narcissist's typical trajectory of a tortured, hopeless, hopeless life.
You remember that narcissists are actually kids, they're children, anywhere between two years of age and nine years of age in mental terms.
There is discrepancy between the narcissist's chronological age and his psychological or psycho-emotive age. And this discrepancy characterizes, defines and constricts the narcissist's life.
The narcissist is always age inappropriate.
How to cope with this situation? How do you deal with life? How do you go through life as a where I tell news and eternal adolescent? How do you manage to function? How do you cope with challenges? How do you face threats, changing circumstances, environments? How do you survive in short?
Well, narcissists adopt two solutions pretty early on, usually during adolescence.
The first solution is the antisocial defined solution.
And the second solution is the conforming pseudonormal solution.
I want to make clear these are compensatory strategies.
In other words, these are not full-fledged solutions. They don't really reverse or resolve the age inappropriateness, the deficiencies, the lacks and the inadequacies of the narcissist owing to his arrested, stunted development.
The narcissist is a toddler coping or trying to cope in an adult world. It is never easy and never, ever successful.
But these strategies, these compensatory strategies somehow ameliorate or kind of modify certain of the narcissist's behaviors in a way that can fool people into thinking that the narcissist is actually an adult.
It is a facade. It is a camouflage. It is borrowing elements of adult behavior in a way that would deceive people. It's a minimal investment, the path of least resistance.
Deceive people into believing that the narcissist is capable of proper normal functioning.
So the antisocial defined solution or compensatory strategy versus the conforming pseudonormal compensatory strategy, they're not lifelong.
There is no strategy constancy or solution constancy exactly as there is no type constancy.
Most overt narcissists, grandiose narcissist, in-your-face narcissist are antisocial and defined and many other things, consummations, reckless, they're a bit psychopathic.
And most covert narcissists are conforming. They pretend to be normal.
It's very important for them to be perceived as normal. That's why they get married and have families and hold jobs. They act normal.
It is what Cletley called the mask of sanity.
So most converts are pseudo, conforming pseudonormal people.
And most overt are antisocial defined.
But because there is no type constancy, when the narcissist collapses, when he experiences narcissist collapse, he transitions from overt to covert.
And as he does, he also transitions from the antisocial defined solution to the conforming pseudonormal solution.
But it's never for long.
The narcissist constantly influcks, constantly vacillates among types and among solutions.
Narcissists don't have a core. They don't have a stable nucleus. They don't have a continuous, contiguous identity because they have severe problems with memory. Gaps and discontinuities. They are disjointed. They are more like a kaleidoscope than like a human being. They don't have, in my view, anything like a self personality, let alone ego.
So they're not really there. They're shimmering imitations and simulations of a human being.
And as such, they feel free to transition from this style to that style, from that behaviour to this way.
They have, in short, identity disturbance or maybe identity diffusion, the more adolescent.
So these compensatory strategies that are intended to allow the narcissist to function in adult, ever changing, ever shifting environments, they are not cast in stone.
You could observe the same narcissist, you know, on Monday behaving one way and the next week behaving another in another way.
Pseudonormals is a critical element. It is very important to narcissists of all types to be perceived as normal, not abnormal, not crazy, not mentally ill, not sick, because this is narcissistically injurious, even mortifying. To be perceived as a nutcase or a whacko is mortifying its modification because it's a public label. It involves public shaming and public humiliation.
So narcissists invest in ordinary amounts of effort and time and resources and energy to create elaborate, potent keen lives, masks, personas in youngsters that are so intricate, so elaborate that they're very difficult to piece through. It's difficult to see behind the mask or behind the pretension or behind the scenery because there is nothing behind. There's no one there.
And so the compensatory strategies that I've mentioned are theatrical productions that thespium, they don't involve self-actualization. They don't reflect the narcissist essence or quiddity. They are acting, they're forms of play acting. These are pretty rigid scripts, actually, that the narcissist adopts in order to be perceived as functional and normal.
Now, of course, these solutions change in character, in implementation, in manifestation, in expression and in outcomes in various periods through the lifespan.
In childhood, for example, the budding nascent narcissist, the child who is about to become a narcissist, emphasizes mimicry. He imitates adults around him or her, of course, half of all narcissists are women. So he imitates adults around him in an effort to fit in, to belong, to be accepted, to elicit love and care.
That's the narcissist's way of saying, "I'm like you. I'm one of you. I belong to the club. I'm a club member."
So the narcissist's childhood involves intentional, premeditated, forceful mimicry, whereas the vast majority of children imitate naturally, in flux, in a streamlined manner, as part of social learning.
The parents of the child provide models.
This process of modeling, the child imitates the model.
The narcissistic child or the child about to become a narcissist, the mimicry is effortful.
You can see the effort. It's visible. It's also the imitation, the social learning is actually manipulative, Machiavellian.
The child, even at this early stage, seeks to control his environment because he perceives the environment as hostile, dangerous, threatening.
So the simulation or the mimicry or the imitation in the narcissist's early childhood has to do with creating structures of control.
Whereas the narcissist as a child has severe problems, already there's severe problems with memory. There's a post-traumatic response which involves extreme dissociation and so on and so forth.
It's the same with borderline, by the way. There's a problem with identity formation.
The narcissistic child usually engages in negative identity formation. Narcissistic child defines himself as everything that he is not.
In short, the narcissistic child has a bad object. I am bad, I am unworthy, I am inadequate, I am a loser, I am ugly, I am stupid. That's the bad object embedded in the narcissist and which the narcissist comes to reify.
So to avoid the discomfort, egodystonic and pain and hurtattendant upon the bad object, the narcissistic child defines himself, forms an identity which is the exact, the diametrical opposite, the polar opposite of the bad object.
The narcissistic child's identity, budding, emerging identity is everything the bad object is not.
And of course, this is what we call the false self.
The narcissistic child's identity formation is negative and is fallacious, is false.
At some point, the narcissistic child combines both strategies, the antisocial defiant strategy and the conforming pseudo normal strategy.
And this is during the process of separation and divisuation. Both strategies are combined, but only when the mother is perceived as a secure base.
The secure base allows the child to defy the mother, to break up with the mother, to abandon the mother and to venture out grandiosely into the world, to explore the world, to take over the world.
So a secure base separation, individuation, separation, individuation from a good enough mother who is a secure base involves both processes.
Antisocial defiance, antisocial grandiose defiance on the one end, and "Mommy, I love you", conforming, holding on to the mother.
But the narcissist does not have, or the narcissistic child does not have a secure base.
The mother of the narcissistic child is a dead mother, absent, depressed, self-centered, and generally detached and cold, or intermittent reinforcer, hot and cold.
"I love you, I hate you", ambivalent and so on.
The narcissistic child never feels safe and secure with his mother.
On the very contrary, he's terrorized by her.
So the narcissistic child, when he combines the compensatory strategies, he fails.
When he tries to defy mother in order to explore the world, and at the same time conform with mother, love mother, stay with mother, belong to mother, be accepted by mother, the second part fails.
So the narcissistic child remains stuck on the first solution, on the first compensatory solution, because the mother is not a secure base and does not allow him to conform, to belong, and to act normally.
In short, the mother of the narcissistic child undermines, sabotages, thwarts, scuppers the narcissistic child's ability to become a normal, separate individual.
So the narcissistic child remains abnormal, he remains defiant, he remains reckless, he remains antisocial, he becomes gradually an overt narcissist.
The developmental path of the covert narcissist is pretty similar when it comes to separation and individuation.
There's a dead, dysfunctional, absent mother, who does not allow the child to separate from her safely. She is not a secure base.
The child then becomes defiant and reckless and grandiose and so on and so forth.
But then with the covert narcissist, the mother is intermittent. I call it not a dead mother, but an intermittent mother.
With the overt narcissist, the mother is permanently dead in the metaphorical sense. She's all the time absent, all the time depressed, all the time rejecting, all the time hurtful and so on.
With the covert narcissist, the child who is about to become a covert narcissist, the mother is intermittent, maybe borderline. She loves, she hates, she's there, she's absent, she's hot, she's cold.
So the covert, the covert narcissist remains stuck with both strategies and both of them fail.
That's why the covert narcissist is a collapsed narcissist.
So let me summarize the childhood part.
Initially the child who is about to become a narcissist mimics adults in his environment via social learning, but in a manipulative Machiavellian way.
This kind of child, because of memory gaps, post-traumatic memory gaps, memory dysfunctions, fails to develop identity and so suffers from identity disturbance or diffusion.
This leads to negative identity formation. The child rejects himself as a bad object. Chances are bad, I'm unworthy.
And then the child forms an identity which is everything the child is not. It's a form of self-rejection, self-rejection and self-betrayal. I'm going to form an identity which has nothing to do with me. It's out there, the false self.
And then when the child comes between the ages of 18 months and 36 months to the stage of separation and individuation from the mother, the mother is either permanently rejecting and painful, unable to provide love and care. And then the child becomes an overt narcissist, which is essentially cathartic emotionally invested in the antisocial defiant solution.
And if the mother is intermittent, sometimes loving, sometimes not, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting, sometimes what? Sometimes called the child becomes a covert narcissist.
The covert narcissist is a child who still engages in both solutions, the defiant antisocial solution and the conforming pseudonormal solution, but both of them keeps failing all the time because the parent is not a constant figure.
This is the childhood situation.
When it comes to adolescence, adolescents are influenced by peers and role models.
In the case of adolescence, there is a coalescence of the two compensatory solutions because for an adolescent to rebel is to conform. The adolescent conforms, for example, to his peer group when he rebels, when he's defiant, when he's antisocial.
So in the case of adolescence, there is a convergence or a merger between the two compensatory solutions, the antisocial defiant one and the conforming pseudonormal one.
Consequently, both overt narcissists and covert narcissists in adolescence engage in both behaviors, but only opposite peers and role models.
In this sense, they are normal.
Adolescence is characterized by narcissism.
There's primary narcissism between the ages of zero and two, and there's a second round of narcissism in adolescence.
So if in adolescence you're narcissistic, you're actually normal.
Next is adulthood.
Interpersonal involves life plan, goal attainment, and so on, and object relations, the ability to have interpersonal maintain, interpersonal initiate and maintain interpersonal relationships with other people, especially romantic and intimate relationships.
The narcissist, of course, is a failure in all these. He is incapable of maintaining a life plan. He's very desultory and itinerant. He fails to obtain the vast majority of his goals with the exception of narcissistic supply. And he does, narcissist does not have object relations. He has a shared fantasy. Shared fantasy has nothing to do with an object relation, relations with object, because he doesn't involve an object. The narcissist cannot perceive other people as separate and external.
So the narcissist never have external object relations. They have only internal object relations.
And so they have a shared fantasy. It's a fantasy between the narcissist and an idealized internal object between the narcissist and himself. It's autoerotic, auto-romantic in effect.
The narcissist intimate partner has been rendered a figment of the narcissist's mind. She doesn't exist anymore externally. She exists only internally.
The narcissist is making love to himself in every possible way.
So in adulthood, all narcissists overt and covert simply fail in the conforming pseudo-normal solution. They try it from time to time and they keep failing.
So because they keep failing with this solution, all of them gravitate to the other solution, to the defiant antisocial solution.
And all narcissists without a single exception overt, grandiose, covert, shy, fragile, vulnerable, somatic, cerebral, you name it, all narcissists end up being defiant and antisocial because their attempts to belong, to be accepted, to conform, to maintain a stable life, a relationship that is functional and long term, all these attempts keep failing.
So they say the hell with it. I'm going to be my own man. I'm going to stand out. I'm going to be unique. I'm going to be special. I'm going to be perfect. I'm going to be God-like, etc. I'm going to be defiant and contumacious and reckless. And I'm going to be a hero. It's a psychopathic mindset.
All narcissists are driven towards a psychopathic pole in adulthood.
Middle age brings its own challenges.
The body declines.
This cognitive decline.
And so middle age constitutes diffuse mortification.
The narcissist keeps getting exposed to other people's criticism, even ridicule. It's very humiliating.
And he gets in touch with his own reservoir of life threatening shame time and again.
So middle age is diffuse mortification.
And because the narcissist no longer has any skill at exercising the conforming pseudo novel solution, the narcissist reacts to this diffuse mortification of gradual decline by becoming rebellious.
The narcissist rebels against the dimming of the light.
Narcissist defies society, authority, his own family. He just breaks all the structures that he has constructed, all the chains, what he perceives as chains. He is a Prometheus unleashed and unbound.
And so he rebels.
Of course, this rebellion creates a lot of anxiety or even panic.
The narcissist in the middle age narcissist always suffers from anxiety and very often from depression.
So many narcissists regress.
This used to be called the midlife crisis. Many narcissists regress. They regress to the womb, a safe place. A place that allows them to maintain their grandiose self perception and self image without any external challenges, because it's isolated from the world.
They become solipsistic and in clinical terms, schizoid. And they engage much more forcefully and ubiquitously and more pervasively in shared fantasies.
The maid selection becomes severely impaired. They choose the wrong maids peak time, wrong age, wrong mental health, wrong everything.
So in the middle age, because the narcissist declines mortifies him. He rebels. He regresses. He becomes infantilized. He retreats and withdraws into a fantasy defense and he tries to fit into the fantasy defense.
Maids romantic mates, intimate mates, friends, you know, colleagues tries to fit into this shared malign, metastasizing shared fantasy. He tries to fit into it, into it, all kinds of people which are highly inappropriate and detrimental to the fantasy defense.
And this of course tends to mortify him even further and more frequently.
So middle age in narcissism is a counter suck. It's a dead end because none of the solutions is working.
Not the first and not the second.
When narcissist is antisocial and defiant, it leads him nowhere basically.
When he tries to conform and be pseudo normal, he keeps failing.
Middle age is a very, very difficult phase of life for the narcissist.
And then there is senescence old age.
And this is when the narcissist pays the price, bears the consequences of his choices, decisions and behaviors in the past, anything from social isolation, ostracism, incarceration in extreme cases, indigence and so on.
Senescence in the narcissist, the end years, the end game, the declining years, the years of putrescence and decay and decomposition.
These are the most difficulties because while in the middle ages, the narcissist keeps experimenting with the antisocial defiant solution and the conforming solution and the pseudo normal solution and so on.
He keeps kind of going through, rotating through a cycle of compensatory solutions gleaned from his earlier life, adulthood, lessons in senescence.
He has given up. He has given up on all attempts to engage with life.
He no longer tries to implement these solutions. He's overwhelmed by the consequences of his past, his choices, decisions and actions.
And he's in a constant state of extreme anxiety. He's pretty paralyzed by it.
And now, of course, these are all generalizations.
We find people, for example, like Donald Trump, who are still essentially engaged in a battle which is much more typical of adolescents, adolescent narcissists.
So depending on the on how stunted the development is, how arrested it is, we can find narcissists trapped in childhood or in adolescence until they die.
But these are a minority.
The trajectory of the lifespan that I've just described with its interplay of the two solutions, sometimes working, sometimes not, with the consequences of these solutions working or dysfunctional.
This is typical of the narcissist life.
It's a typical narcissistic biography or resume starting with a lie, the false self and ending with the cost of this tremendous deception, self-deception above everything else.
The narcissist, in his last years on earth, begins to realize the meaning of karma.