One of the self-styled experts who constantly plagiarizes my work once asked me, "Can you summarize a narcissist's life in under 30 seconds?" I took it as a challenge to my grandiosity and I answered, "Yes!" And here we go.
The narcissist is born as the cutest pylon. Cutie pie is a baby and then he is traumatized and abused by parental figures, sometimes by peers or role models.
There are many forms of abuse. Remember, spoiling, pampering, idolizing and pedestalizing are also forms of abuse because they instrumentalize and objectify the child.
So many $10 words.
Out goes the pylon and in comes the adult narcissist.
This is the adult narcissist. He is happy or lucky. He believes himself to be godlike and he looks for an intimate partner, someone to entrain, which is a fancy word for brainwashing, someone to entrain and to convert her into a figment of his shared fantasy.
And this lasts for two or three decades. Out go these decades.
And this is the narcissist in his final years. This is a cap which is intended to fend off reality.
As you see, this narcissist can no longer see what's happening around him. He is deep into his mind. The shared fantasy took over.
He grows a very long white beard because that's how God looks like in the Renaissance paintings. And then he dies.
How did I do? The narcissist's life in under 30 seconds. But in under two minutes actually.
But today we're going to discuss something that keeps recurring in the narcissist's life, early, late and final stages.
And this is frustration aggression.
Now to remind you, there was a guy named Dollard who in 1933 proposed the frustration aggression hypothesis which says simply that when you're frustrated, you would tend to convert your frustration into aggression.
As we say today, duh. D-U-H.
Okay.
The narcissist handles frustration very differently. Unlike healthy people.
As far as the narcissist is concerned, any frustration is perceived as narcissistic injury.
And if the narcissist were to be frustrated in public, that would constitute narcissistic mortification.
The narcissist's definition of frustration is also unusual. It is any attempt to disagree with the narcissist, criticizing, confront him, limit his desires and urges, not succumb to his wishes, not cater to his needs, say no to him or even possess boundaries.
If you are independent, if you're autonomous, if you're agentic, if you're boundaried, you cause the narcissist frustration and he perceives it as a malevolent form of opposition. Kind of narcissistic injury inflicted on purpose, you are torturing him.
And this perception of frustration as narcissistic injury and mortification creates a lot of apprehension in the narcissist. The narcissist is terrified of being frustrated. He anticipates frustration. He catastrophizes it and this generates in him intolerable anxiety and stress.
When the narcissist is exposed to mounting amounts of anxiety and stress, he decompensates. In other words, all his defenses shut down, including the infantile primitive defenses and especially the false self.
He becomes denuded of his defenses, skinless, defenseless.
And clinically speaking, the narcissist becomes a borderline. He switches, in my work, he switches to a borderline self state and he emotionally dysregulates and even acts out exactly as a borderline does.
So when you see a narcissist frustrated, anxious, rageful, opposed, confronted and denied, you see a narcissist who is fast becoming a borderline.
He would lash out, he would throw temper tantrums, he would emotionally dysregulate, he would feel swamped by his own negative affectivity, anger, envy, hatred even and so on.
And this could push the narcissist exactly as it does the borderline. It could push the narcissist to become a secondary psychopath. A psychopath actually.
The borderline becomes a secondary psychopath because she possesses empathy and access to positive emotions. The narcissist becomes a primary psychopath.
So let me clarify this because I misspoke a minute ago.
When the narcissist is faced with stress and anxiety and frustration, the narcissist transitions sometimes, depending on the extent, the narcissist transitions sometimes into a borderline state. His defenses shut down and he emotionally dysregulates.
If the condition, if the environment, the frustrating environment persists, the narcissist transitions to a primary psychopathic state. He becomes a psychopath. The borderline transitions to a secondary psychopathic state.
So both the borderline and the narcissist, they have a low frustration threshold, low tolerance for frustration. And this leads the narcissist to desperate attempts to eliminate the source of frustration.
In the case of the narcissist, frustration does breed aggression, but in healthy people, the aggression is intended to signal displeasure, discomfort, and modify the other party's behavior.
When you're frustrated, and if you're mentally healthy, relatively speaking, your aggression would be intended to change the behavior of the person who is frustrating you or to modify the environment in a way which would reduce frustration.
It's not the case with the narcissist. The narcissist aggression is externalized. It's reckless. It often culminates in verbal or physical violence.
This is the process known as coercive snapshotting. The narcissist aggression is intended to try to force you to conform to his expectations of you, to try to force you to coalesce with, to merge with, with the internal object in his mind that represents you.
The narcissist wants you to stop existing outside his mind and to fuse symbiotically with the object in his mind that represents you, and this way, of course, to eliminate the frustration.
And if you refuse, if you refuse to shut up, if you refuse to succumb, if you refuse to be submissive, if you refuse to be obedient, if you insist on your independence and personal autonomy and agency and self-efficacy, if you walk away, if you, in any of these cases, the narcissist would try to act in a way that would either eradicate you, obliterate you, eliminate you, annihilate you, or coerce you into behaving the way he wants to.
And this could culminate and escalate into physical violence, definitely.
Narcissists perceive frustration as emanating from the inside.
You remember that narcissists are incapable of perceiving external objects. They're incapable of conceptualizing the separateness and the externality of objects.
So as far as the narcissist is concerned, you don't exist out there. There's no external object that is you. There's only the internal object inside his mind that represents you.
And he goes on interacting only with the internal object.
So if you frustrate the narcissist, he doesn't perceive it as coming from the outside. He misperceives it as coming from the inside.
And his aggression is actually an attempt to reduce dissonance and anxiety by somehow modifying you so that you again become a compliant internal object.
It's an internal inside job. It's nothing to do with the outside. Going away won't do the trick because narcissists interact exclusively with internal objects.
They dehumanize you and then they objectify you. You become a figment. You become an avatar, an introject in the narcissist's mind.
So the narcissist can't just up and walk away. Say you're frustrating me. I'm gonna, I'm out of here. I don't want to be exposed to your frustration. So I'm out of here.
He can't do that because he carries you in his mind and you keep frustrating him from the inside unless and until he gets rid of you psychologically via entraining or brainwashing, physically through violence, or by coercing you to behave in a way which does not challenge, undermine, and contradict the internal object unless he accomplishes one of these three solutions.
The frustration, the nagging frustration is going to persist because it emanates, comes from the internal object in his mind that represents you. Your avatar is attacking him from the inside like some kind of Trojan horse or fifth column.
Now I mentioned that the narcissist transitions to a borderline self state under conditions of extreme duress, stress and tension and anxiety.
The borderline self state is impulsive and destructive. That is the famous narcissistic rage attacks, the temper tantrums. They are actually a borderline self state, not a narcissistic self state.
So more appropriately, it wouldn't be called narcissistic rage, but borderline rage or disregulated rage.
Coffee in the morning.
The psychopathic cold state, which in the narcissist is a primary psychopathic self state, the classic psychopath is cold, premeditated, ruthless, callous, relentless, inhumanly, this empathic, no empathy there.
Both the borderline state and the psychopath, the primary psychopath self state, are fantasy oriented because narcissism is a fantasy defense, gone haywire, gone awry.
So everything is infused with fantasy. Even these self states are fantastic and they involve impaired reality testing.
But the psychopathic self state in the narcissist is truly terrifying. Think Chris Watts. It's a truly terrifying state.
It's preceded by a covert state.
So when the narcissist transitions under stress, under anxiety, as a result of frustration, mortification, extreme narcissistic injury, when he transitions to a borderline state and then from a borderline state or psychopathic state, he goes through a covert phase.
There's a covert phase like a bridge between the borderline and the psychopathic state.
And during the covert phase, he appears to be completely normal. He suddenly becomes totally normal. He doesn't rage. He's not angry. He seeks consensus, compromises, he's caring. He may even be loving. He is perfect. He's a perfect ideal partner.
He's a bit ponderous, a bit brooding, a bit spiteful, somewhat passive aggressive. There's the hints of sarcasm and bitterness. He's determined, but he is evasive. He denies that there's any problem. He's overly polite, pseudo civility. He's pseudo civility. He's affected. He's ostentatiously obedient, as I said, or caring and so on.
And throughout this act of normalcy, the mask of sanity, the narcissist keeps imagining the final act of your destruction. He goes into detailed planning, obtaining all the necessary tools.
And I'm not talking necessarily about physical violence. It could be, for example, undermining or destroying your career.
It's a kind of revenge fantasy that doesn't necessarily involve your physical disappearance, but definitely involves inflicting enormous damage of you, ruining you.
It could be, for example, traumatizing you in a way that you will never recover from.
And this is done sometimes very covertly, sometimes very overtly. And it's very open to misinterpretation.
The victim often feels that she has had the upper hand or he has had the upper hand.
But that's a mistake. The trauma is there eating away at the innards of the victim, like some kind of parasite.
So all these revenge fantasies require a covert phrase where the narcissist hides and disguises his intentions, his detailed planning, his premeditation, his white hot rage, his extreme hatred, his conversion of your idealized object into a persecutory object. You become an enemy.
And his determination to destroy you, to destroy you for good.
The borderline state is either sudden, eruptive borderline state. There's calm, there's no calm before the storm, borderline suddenly transitions into a temper tantrum, begins to break objects, this kind of thing.
So this is the eruptive borderline self state. And narcissists are famous for it. These are the famous narcissistic rage or temper tantrums.
But there's another option, another possibility. There's a borderline self state which is not eruptive. There's not calm before the storm. There's just a transition to the storm.
But there's another self state, another variant of borderline self state, where there is gradual escalation.
In this particular variant of the borderline self state of the narcissist, the narcissist wants to provoke a fight. He attempts to prick you, to needle you, to provoke you to the end.
This is projective identification. He is spoiling for a fight. He is looking to create a situation or an environment which would accommodate his alloplastic defenses where he could blame you for starting everything.
So this is more of a covert strategy and very typical of covert narcissists.
To summarize, when the narcissist is under duress or stress or anxiety or tension, humiliation, injury, mortification, the narcissist transitions to a borderline self state.
In the borderline self state, he could become eruptive after a period of calm that is like the calm before the storm, or he could become escalatory, he could escalate, he could create the preconditions for a fight where his misconduct would be legitimized by your reactive so-called abuse.
And then the narcissist is not all transition to the psychopathic self state.
And this is where the danger lies.
In the psychopathic self state, it looks as if the conflict is over, as if everything is back to normal, as if you have nothing to worry about, as if things have been resolved, a consensus has been restored, peace, truce and ceasefire have been declared.
But all this time, all this time, the narcissist is planning his revenge, his payback and your destruction. He's a great actor, and he can deceive you into a kind of complacency.
This is what happened with Hamas and Israel, by the way.
Now, the narcissist's alloplastic defenses, alloplastic defenses to remind you is when you blame other people for your own behavior, the consequences of your behavior. You don't accept them, you reject them. You say they made me do it. I acted this way because I had no choice. They discriminated against me. They abused me. They attacked me. I'm the victim. That's alloplastic defense.
The narcissist's alloplastic defenses justify the narcissist's aggression and even violence.
There is an external locus of control. The narcissist attributes his motivations, misattributes his motivations to the others, to other people. He outsources his motivation. He says, "You made me do it," which is like saying, "You controlled me." It's an external locus of control, and this aggravates the antisocial behaviors because the narcissist begins to perceive this whole thing as an issue of survival.
The question of survival, if he doesn't prevail, is going to be eradicated. He's going to die.
So he must win. He becomes the be-all and end-all.
And then if he fails to win, he sinks into an extreme depressive or dysphoric mood, often accompanied by substance abuse and withdrawal or avoidance from reality. Routines, daily routines or professional routines are impeded and disrupted, and so on and so forth. The narcissist basically falls apart. This integrates and transitions gradually into a pre-psychotic stage. I've discussed this in other videos.
Now, narcissists often use verbal and psychological abuse and violence against those closest to them. Intimacy breeds abuse and aggression in the narcissist because it's very threatening. Narcissists dread intimacy.
Some narcissists move from abstract aggression, the emotion leading to violence and permeating it to the physically concrete sphere of violence.
As they dehumanize and objectify, even their nearest and dearest, the narcissist's aggression shifts from inanimate objects, throwing cups of coffee, breaking furniture, slashing tires, your tires. He moves from this to animate objects. You, people around them, they don't see any distinction between inanimate and animate objects. You are just an object in the narcissist's mind.
Many narcissists, don't forget, are also paranoid and vindictive. That's the really, really dangerous type.
They aim to punish by tormenting. They aim to destroy the source of frustration and pain. They stalk. They harass.
This is the kind of narcissist who ends up murdering people. Or doing away with families, you know, whole family.
There's a typology of revenge here. The need, the urge to seek revenge on wrongdoers and evildoers. That's as ancient as Menka.
And there's an argument to be made that nothing is wrong with it.
And so deterrence and retaliation, retaliation restores a sense of justice. Justice is important.
But people attempt to address their grievances in three ways. And the narcissist gets the proportions wrong.
Let me discuss this a bit. Let me elucidate this.
The first way to obtain revenge or to restore justice, which is the way I look at it, Wiedergutmachung in German, is punitive, moralistic.
The aim of this type of vengeance is to restore justice, as I said. And with it, the victim's view of the world is orderly, predictable, structured and causal.
So this kind of revenge has to do with a victim, not with a perpetrator.
The victim just wants to feel at home in the world again. The victim just wants to feel that she will not become the arbitrary, random, capricious target of someone.
Perpetrators should be punished. Victims should be soothed and elevated. And society should publicly acknowledge who is who. And meet out opprobrium and succor and punishment, respectively.
This is the punitive, moralistic attitude. And this kind of revenge is healthy.
But like everything else in psychology, it has a malignant variant.
It tends to devolve in mentally ill people. It tends to devolve into an obsession. It becomes intrusive. Unfortunate thoughts take over.
And then it becomes a compulsion, an irresistible urge to behave in a way that is sometimes criminal or inconsistent with one's values or even inconsistent with one's true wishes, incommensurate with one's skills, needs, long-term interests, capabilities, will, ego, and so on and so forth.
It becomes, in short, a revenge fantasy.
So this kind of revenge, the punitive, moralistic revenge, if it is not checked by society, could become a crusade of vengeance, an individual's crusade of vengeance and ruin the mental health of the victim as she becomes gradually a perpetrator of her own abuse and even crimes.
This kind of vengeance is unhealthy and in the long term counterproductive as it taxes the victim's time and resources, especially mental resources. It adversely affects her other relationships. It renders her dysfunctional and ultimately it consumes her and she becomes insane.
The second type of revenge is narcissistic revenge.
This is the narcissist's way of restoring his self-imputed grandiosity and of recuperating from a narcissistic injury.
This is especially true in narcissistic mortification and it is known as the external solution.
I urge you to watch my narcissistic mortification videos.
Having fallen prey to malfeasance or to crime or to mistreatment or even to mere confrontation or disagreement or criticism, having come across someone who is boundaried and independent and refuses to become an element in a shared fantasy, an internal object, the narcissist regards himself as having been victimized.
He begins to self-chastise because inside the narcissist there is a bad object. Inside the narcissist there is a coalition of voices that keeps telling him, keeps informing him how inadequate he is, how gullible, how stupid, how unworthy, how ignorant, how helpless and so on and so forth.
And he needs to silence these voices.
The only way to silence these voices is to prove them wrong by demonstrating omnipotence. God-like quality.
You are wrong. I am God. I am going to prove to you that I am God because I am going to punish my abusers. I am going to punish the people who have victimized me.
This experience starts with a humiliation and the circumstances of victimhood contrast sharply with the narcissist's inflated view of himself as omnipotent, omniscient, brilliant, shrewd, perfect and so on and so forth, invincible.
So by bringing the allegiance of the perceived perpetrator or culprit to utter ruin, the narcissist regains his grandiose inflated, fantastic sense of self or actually regains or reactivates his false self.
In short, when the narcissist punishes someone, he perceives as a perpetrator. When he punishes someone who refused to comply with his demands, refused to be submissive to him, obedient. When he punishes someone like that, someone who has humiliated him in public or in private, injured him, mortified him. When he punishes the source of this frustration and pain, he reconstitutes and regains the cognitive distortion of grandiosity. He is again God-like. He restores his divinity.
So whenever you, by the way, engage in some kind of revenge fantasy or even actions of vengeance and revenge, ask yourself, is your bruised ego? Is your grandiosity? Is your narcissism the main reason for your indignation and spite?
And if it is, try to separate the elements of your conduct that have to do with your justified grievance and the elements of your conduct that revolve around your unhealthy narcissism.
Avoid the latter and pursue the former.
Whenever you have a grievance, whenever you want to restore a sense of justice, whenever you want to punish justly a perpetrator, ask yourself, what's the extent of my revenge fantasy? What's the extent of my retribution? My pursuit of the perpetrator. Have I gone over the line? Have I myself become a narcissist and a psychopath? Is it about restoring justice and protecting others? Or is it about my own narcissistic, sadistic, psychopathic gratification?
You'll be surprised. Very often, it's the latter case.
And finally, the pragmatic, restorative revenge.
With this type of revenge, the victim merely wishes to restore her fortunes and to reassert her rights.
In other words, to revert the world to its erstwhile state by acting against her perpetrator or violator decisively and assertively.
The victim says, I just want the world to be back as it used to be. I just want to restore everything the way it used to be.
And this is essentially a healthy, functional and just way of coping with the pain and damage wrought by other people's malicious and premeditated misbehavior.
Reparations, for example, compensation, victim compensation, all these are forms of pragmatic, restorative revenge.
A pragmatic, restorative revenge is another name for justice. It's the only healthy type.
The narcissist engages in the first two types, punitive, moralistic and narcissistic, and almost never engages with the third type, pragmatic, restorative.
Healthy people engage in pragmatic, restorative retribution or punishment, and almost never with narcissistic or moralizing punitive kind of revenge.
So this is the distinction between narcissist and healthy people.
I hope this presentation has not been too aggressive and hasn't caused you narcissistic injury and mortification.
But if it has, feel free to go after me in a punitive, moralistic, narcissistic or pragmatic, restorative way. You choose.