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Narcissistic Grandiosity Bubbles

Uploaded 2/23/2011, approx. 3 minute read

I am Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

As one source of narcissistic supply, the narcissist finds himself trapped, frantic, though a times unconscious effort, to secure alternatives.

As one pathological narcissistic space, the narcissist's stomping grounds, is rendered uninhabitable because too many people see through the narcissist's manipulation machinations, the narcissist wanders off to find another.

These hysterical endeavors sometimes lead to boom-bust cycles, which involve, in the first stage, the formation of a grandiosity bubble.

A grandiosity bubble is an imagined, self-aggrandizing narrative, involving the narcissist in elements from his real life.

People around him, places he frequents, conversations he is having. The narcissist weaves a story, incorporating these facts, inflating them in the process and endowing them with bogus internal meaning and consistency.

In other words, the narcissist does what he does best, he confabulates, but this time the confabulation is loosely based on reality.

In the process, the narcissist reinvents himself in his life to fit the new fangled tale. He recasts himself in newly adopted roles.

He suddenly fancies himself an actor, a guru, a political activist, an entrepreneur, an author, or even an irresistible hunk.

The narcissist modifies his behavior to conform to these new functions and roles, self-allocated as they are.

He gradually morphs into the fabricated character, he shapeshifts and becomes the fictitious protagonist he has created.

All the mechanisms of pathological narcissism are at work during the bubble phase.

The narcissist idealizes the situation, the other actors, and the environment. He tries to control and to manipulate his milieu into buttressing his false notions and perceptions.

Faced with an inevitable grandiosity gap between reality and the bubble, the narcissist becomes disillusioned and bitter and devalues and discards the people, places and circumstances involved in the grandiosity bubble.

Still, grandiosity bubbles are not part of the normal narcissistic mini-cycle. They are rare events, much like trying on a new outfit for size and comfort. They fizzle out rapidly and the narcissist reverts to his regular pattern, idealizing new sources of supply, devaluing and discarding these sources or previous ones, pursuing the next victims to be drained of energy.

Actually, the deflation of a grandiosity bubble is met with relief by the narcissist. It does not involve a narcissistic injury.

The narcissist views the bubble as merely an experiment at being someone else for a while, as an exercise at acting.

The grandiosity bubble is a safety valve, allowing the narcissist to effectively cope with negative emotions and frustration by temporarily becoming someone else, by playing or play acting a role.

Thus cleansed, the narcissist can go back to doing what he does best, rejecting a false self and garnering attention from others.

Grandiosity bubbles are therefore cathartic.

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Self-Aware Narcissist: Still a Narcissist

Narcissism is pervasive and defines the narcissist's waking moments, infiltrating and permeating their dreams. Narcissists only admit to a problem when they are abandoned, destitute, and devastated. Narcissistic behaviors can be modified using talk therapy and pinpointed medication conditioning, but there is a huge difference between behavior modification and a permanent alteration of a psychodynamic landscape. Narcissism may improve with age, but it is rare.


How Narcissist Is Mortified

Narcissism can be addressed through behavior modification and treatment modalities, but pathological narcissism remains largely immutable. Mortification occurs when a narcissist's grandiose self-perception is challenged, leading to a collapse of their defenses and a confrontation with their true self. This process is exacerbated by aphantasia, which prevents narcissists from visualizing others empathetically, and the misinformation effect, which distorts their memories and self-perception based on external inputs. Ultimately, narcissists may create rich false memories to cope with the shame and humiliation of mortification, reinforcing their grandiosity and distorting their reality.


Narcissist's Pathological Grandiosity

Daydreaming and fantasizing serve as healthy anticipatory processes that prepare individuals for life's circumstances, but they differ significantly from pathological grandiosity. Narcissists exhibit four key components of grandiosity: omnipotence, where they believe they can achieve anything; omniscience, where they pretend to possess all knowledge; omnipresence, where they see themselves as the center of their universe; and a relentless pursuit of perfectionism and completeness. This grandiosity acts as a defense mechanism, shielding the narcissist from the painful realization of their limitations and imperfections. When confronted with challenges to their inflated self-image, narcissists often react with intense rage, perceiving such challenges as threats to their sense of self.


Raging Narcissist: Merely Pissed-off?

Narcissistic rage is a phenomenon that occurs when a narcissist is frustrated in their pursuit of narcissistic supply, causing narcissistic injury. The narcissist then projects a bad object onto the source of their frustration and rages against a perceived evil entity that has injured and frustrated them. Narcissistic rage is not the same as normal anger and has two forms: explosive and pernicious or passive-aggressive. People with personality disorders are in a constant state of anger, which is effectively suppressed most of the time, and they are afraid to show that they are angry to meaningful others because they are afraid to lose them.


Narcissist: Your Pain is his Healing, Your Crucifixion - His Resurrection

Narcissists need their victims to suffer to regulate their own emotions and feel a sense of control. They keep a mental ledger of positive and negative behaviors, with negative behaviors weighing more heavily. Narcissists need counterfactual statements to maintain their delusion of being special and superior. The grandiosity gap is the major vulnerability of the narcissist, and they are often in denial about their limitations and failures.


Why Narcissists Love Borderline Women and Why They Hate Them Back

Narcissistic mortification is a challenge to the false self, which crumbles and is unable to maintain defenses and pretensions. Narcissists use two strategies to restore some cohesiveness to the self: deflated and inflated narcissist. Narcissists engage in mortification, a form of self-mutilation, to feel alive and free from commitment to their false self. Narcissists seek out borderline women to mortify them and experience the unresolved primary conflict with their mother.


Narcissist's Grandiosity: Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Perfection

Narcissistic grandiosity has four components: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and the omnivore. The narcissist believes in their own power and that they can do anything they choose to do and excel in it. They often pretend to know everything in every field of human knowledge and endeavor. The narcissist is an omnivore, incapable of enjoying anything because they are in constant pursuit of perfection and completeness.


Grandiosity as Cognitive Bias (Kruger-Dunning Effect)

Grandiosity in narcissism is an inflated self-image that is divorced from reality and self-perception. It is a set of cognitive biases constructed on a foundation of cognitive deficits that emanate from a flawed reality test. The narcissist perceives reality wrongly and lacks empathy, making it impossible for them to anticipate others' reactions, needs, and preferences. The narcissist's grandiosity is a derivative phenomenon that relies on cognitive biases, such as the Dunning-Kruger effect, where they overestimate themselves and underestimate others.


Narcissists: Achievers and Failures

Narcissists are either compulsively driven overachievers or chronic underachieving wastrels. The disparity between the accomplishments of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies and inflated self-image is what is called the grandiosity gap. It is a staggering abyss and in the long run, it is insupportable and unsustainable. The narcissist's false self is so unrealistic and his expectations of himself are so way out there, his superego is so sadistic, these inner voices that criticize him, that there is nothing the narcissist can do to extricate himself from the Kafkaesque trial that is his life.


Narcissistic Supply Deficiency Coping Strategies

Sam Vaknin explains that the grandiosity gap between a narcissist's self-image and reality is grating on their nerves. As a result, the narcissist resorts to self-delusion, which can lead to various solutions. These include the delusional narrative solution, the antisocial solution, the paranoid schizoid solution, the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution, and the masochistic avoidance solution. Ultimately, the narcissist's pronounced and public misery and self-pity are compensatory and reinforce their self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

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