I am grateful for your topic suggestions and from time to time I even pay attention to them.
Okay, totachim and totahot, my name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a former visiting professor of psychology in white.
Today we are going to discuss a topic suggestion and it is the use of self-supply as a therapeutic strategy far superior to anything else we've been doing hitherto.
Hitherto, look it up.
We all know that the narcissist reacts with emotional dysregulation, decompensation, and acting out.
In other words, the narcissist becomes a borderline when he is faced with deficient narcissistic supply, narcissistic injury, and heaven-for-fend narcissistic mortification.
Let me elucidate a bit on all these arcane terms of the trade.
Emotional dysregulation is when you are overwhelmed by your emotions, you drown in them, you're unable to regulate them, you're unable to control them, channel them, sublimate them, render them socially acceptable.
This is called emotional dysregulation and it's very common in borderline personality disorder.
It's the defining feature of borderline personality disorder.
Decompensation is when all your defense mechanisms break down simultaneously and you are face-to-face with reality without the ability to render it bearable, tolerable, and palatable to you.
Acting out is when you act in ways which are usually self-defeating and self-destructive and also destructive to others, dangerous, risky, reckless, addictive, and so on and so forth.
Now, borderlines react in these ways when they are faced with abandonment and rejection.
Narcissists deteriorate, degenerate into a borderline state.
They are actually, according to Grozstein, they regress to a borderline state when they don't get enough supply, when they are narcissistically injured, they are narcissistically mortified.
Current therapies, current treatment modalities attempt to harness the narcissist's grandiosity, the narcissist's fantasy defense in order to effect some kind of transformation as a minimum behavior modification in lieu of the typical adult therapeutic alliance with more normal people.
So a therapist who has the misfortune of working with a narcissist would try to leverage the narcissist's grandiosity.
He would challenge the narcissist to attain therapeutic goals, to accomplish milestones of healing and recovery by challenging the narcissist's idealized fantastic self-perception as omnipotent, all-powerful, an omniscient, all-knowing.
The therapist would say, "Surely you can do this. Surely this is not beyond you. Are you sure you can manage this?"
So the therapist would challenge the narcissist's grandiosity.
That works wonders. That's a miraculous cure because narcissists are very gullible, very naive, and very divorced from reality, so they buy into this therapeutic type, Machiavellian manipulative technique.
The other way, which is commonly used, is to leverage the narcissist's fantasy defense in effect to create a shared fantasy with a therapist.
Within the shared fantasy, the role allocated to the narcissist is that of a recovering or healing patient.
These are the two majorly techniques used with narcissists.
Many, many treatment modalities are absolutely inefficacious.
For example, cognitive behavior therapy.
Narcissism is cognitive distortions.
The narcissist's cognitive biases and even cognitive deficits are so extreme and so all-pervasive, so ubiquitous that cognitive behavior therapy breaks down in the face of such carpe diem denial of reality.
So what's left is to play to the narcissist's prejudices and biases, and especially his self-inflated fantasy.
This approach of co-opting the narcissist's grandiosity, colluding with the narcissist's fantasy defense, this approach results in even more impaired reality testing.
It is true that the narcissist adopts himself to the demands he faces in order to uphold his grandiosity, in order to maintain the fantasy in the therapeutic space.
The narcissist is likely to modify his behaviors and even to some extent his cognitions in order to conform, to be accepted, to belong and to fit in, and thus to generate narcissistic supply from the therapist and/or from his environment, for example, from his spouse or children or co-workers or bosses or whatever.
So there is behavior modification.
This yields, this approach of grandiosity and fantasy, it yields behavior modification, but at an enormous cost, the narcissist becomes more and more delusional, delusional completely.
This kind of approach induces dissociation, schizoid reactions.
In other words, it results in dissociative and schizoid reactants.
The narcissist adopts a passive-aggressive stance of defiance in order to evade and to avoid the constraints of the therapy that dictates, that demands, the requirements.
The narcissist becomes more and more isolated, more and more atomized, withdraws, avoids, and the narcissist does this passive-aggressively in order to sabotage and undermine the therapy.
In short, the narcissist becomes a covert narcissist.
Similarly, the narcissist becomes dissociative, more and more dissociative. It's a form of reactance.
The dissociation helps the narcissist maintain his overall grandiose cognitive distortion.
The narcissist simply forgets that the initiative for the behavior modification emanated or came from the outside.
The narcissist convinces himself that it was his idea to change his behavior. It was his initiative to alter his cognitions, the way he thinks about other people and himself.
He is the one who cured and healed himself. He is the fixer and the savior, not the therapist.
So that requires a lot of dissociation, a lot of self-deception, and a lot of confabulation.
In short, colluding with the narcissist's grandiosity and fantasy defense results in a worsening of the narcissist's pathology on the one hand, even as the narcissist becomes more acceptable to other people around him.
The therapy of narcissism nowadays caters to the needs of people around the narcissist.
These so-called victims, it sacrifices the narcissist in order to benefit his human environment, his spouse, his family, his friends, his colleagues, his neighbors, society at large, reduces antisocial behavior.
The emphasis is on rendering the narcissist more sublimated.
In other words, converting the narcissist and the narcissist's behaviors into socially acceptable venues and ways.
The narcissist is thrown together with a bathtub. The narcissist is sacrificed, annulled, annihilated, repressed, suppressed, just to limit the narcissist's ability to inflict havoc and hurt and damage and pain on his human environment to prevent an additional stream of broken lives.
It's exactly the same way, in exactly the same way, we place psychopaths in prison. We sacrifice the psychopath. We give up on the psychopath's potential for rehabilitation, which is admittedly minimal, by locking up the psychopath.
The therapy of the narcissist, almost all treatment modalities, are focused on locking up the narcissist in his own mental prison.
They create a holding cell, a holding cell, a padded cell with a straight jacket inside the narcissist's mind by rather cruelly manipulating the narcissist's proclivities, shortcomings, failures, biases, distortions, deficiencies, defects, deficits, and deformities.
It's exactly as if we were to leverage someone's disability in order to prevent them from hurting other people.
Preventing someone from hurting other people is a legitimate goal.
And if we have to, then of course we have to either penalize or somehow restrict the freedom of agents of disaster, or agents of catastrophe, or agents of pain, and so on.
But only if there is no alternative, only as a last resort.
The problem in psychiatry and psychology today is that we have given up on the narcissist.
Mental health practitioners, I'm not a licensed therapist, but I'm still involved in the sphere of psychology. I used to be a visiting professor of psychology and so on.
So mental health practitioners have given up on narcissists. They've given up on psychopaths completely. They don't try to treat them. They don't try to rehabilitate them.
Never mind the nonsense online. This is self-interested, self-enriching nonsense.
The truth is, ask any practitioner. They don't like cluster B patients.
And so we've given up on this whole pretty substantial subgroup of the population, probably up to 10% of the general population.
And that's not okay. That is not okay. That is a betrayal of the ethics of the profession.
And yes, there is an alternative.
The solution is to transition from manipulative dependency on narcissistic supply from the outside to self-reliant and anxiolytic, albeit delusional, still delusional self-supply.
Let me try to explain this convoluted sentence.
I love convoluted sentences. They reflect my inner world.
The narcissist is dependent. It's a form of dependency. He's dependent on narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is attention, adulation, affirmation, or any kind of reactivity engendered in other people.
Narcissist needs to somehow stimulate other people to provide him with narcissistic supply. And this is usually done either via manipulation or coercively via coercion.
This is a dysfunctional solution. People suffer and we need to put a stop to it.
And then the way to need to stop to it is not to make the narcissist totally psychotic, not to push the narcissist beyond the edge so that he becomes totally divorced from reality, not to drive the narcissist insane. That's not a solution.
And this is what we're doing now today in clinics, in therapy. That's not okay. We don't do this to any other kind of patient. That's horrible.
The solution is to transition the narcissist from reliance on other people to self-reliance, on using other people, manipulating them, or coercing them to provide him with supply to self-sufficiency.
In short, we need to teach the narcissist how to be his own source of narcissistic supply process that I christened at the time, self-supply.
Yes, it's a phrase I have coined. Look it up.
So self-supply is delusional. Of course it's delusional because the narcissist lies to himself.
Still, his self-image is still inflated, still fantastic. It is a fantasy defense, but it has two advantages.
It doesn't involve other people in shared fantasies and therefore doesn't end up hurting other people on the one hand.
On the other hand, it's highly anxiolytic. It takes care of the anxiety disorders, the depressive disorders, and other comorbidities which fuel narcissism, the engines behind narcissism.
If the narcissist becomes his own exclusive source of narcissistic supply, he is no longer anxious about obtaining supply because like the government of the United States, he owns the printing press. He can print as many US dollars as he wants. He can print as much narcissistic supply and generate as much supply as he wants.
So his dependency is gone. The source of the narcissist's anxiety and depression is his dependency on other people.
And the catastrophizing that maybe one day he's going to lose all his sources of supply and find himself in a dissociative schizoid psychotic state, in short disintegrate, fall apart, become dysregulated. He's terrified of a scenario where he can no longer extract narcissistic supply from the environment because he's too old, because he's too frail, because he's been exposed, because he has nothing more to offer, because his creativity has died down, because he catastrophizes.
But if the narcissist is his own source of supply, there's nothing to catastrophize and no need to worry, the anxiety and depression are gone.
In short, we stabilize the narcissist.
By teaching the narcissist to rely on self-supply, we stabilize the narcissist's fluctuating sense of self-worth and vicissitudinal internal world.
His ups and downs, his cycles, which are very similar to the border linesthe borderlines.
Self-supply creates an addictive dependency of the false self on internal structures and processes.
Pay attention, it's a very important sentence, mainly because I'm the one who said it.
I just love this self-aggrandizement on camera.
Seriously, self-supply means that the false self, which is the construct that the child had become in early childhood, so as to avoid hurt and abuse and pain.
So the false self now resorts to the internal landscape of the narcissist, to the narcissist's mind, to the narcissist's playground of internal objects.
In self-supply, the false self is inwardly directed, not outwardly directed.
The supply is endogenous, not exogenous.
The false self cuts itself off the external world of other people as sources of supply.
And the false self teaches itself to resort to the voices in the narcissist's mind, the internal dialogue between them, the psychotic elements of hyperreflexivity and paranoia, where the narcissist is the center of attention and he is godlike, he is the universe.
But the false self becomes yet another competing internal object, albeit a dominant one, similar to the host personality in dissociative identity disorder.
Self-supply techniques, teaching the narcissist to rely on himself as the exclusive source of narcissistic supply to pay attention to himself, creates an addiction and a dependency of the false self on internal structures and processes.
Immediately, the narcissist experiences this as a breakdown in his unitary self.
The narcissist, like every other human being, has an illusion or a delusion of a unitary self. It's totally wrong.
No one has a unitary self. We all have an assemblage of self-states.
But when the false self of the narcissist resorts to internal structures, to introjects, to internal objects, to voices, to introjected voices, when the false self redirects itself from the outside world to the inside world, the narcissist experiences it as if he broke in two.
It begins to develop disociative thinking.
There is the false self and there is the narcissist who is providing the supply to the false self.
At that moment, there's a schism. And we call this phenomenon, in clinical terms, estrangement.
The narcissist, for the first time in his life, experiences estrangement.
Estrangement is very common in borderline personality disorder.
Borderline often feels that she is like two people or three people.
The patient with borderline personality disorder is very, very close to some variants of dissociative identity disorder.
She's highly dissociative, for example.
So the borderline patient is very experienced in this.
She perceives herself as one or two or three competing entities.
The narcissist doesn't have this experience, the classic, the overt, I mean, narcissist of all kinds.
They don't have this experience. They have the experience of a single self or single entity.
And that is the false self.
But when the false self has to resort to the narcissist mind, has to mine the narcissist mind like mining Bitcoin for supply, at that moment, the narcissist becomes borderline, experiences estrangement.
There's the false self and there is the source of supply of the false self, which is the narcissist.
So these are two.
Suddenly we are two, says the narcissist to himself.
I've been one until yesterday and now I'm two.
This estrangement is a very disorienting experience.
It is as if the false self has been not only introjected, but also projected.
The narcissist experiences himself both when they're in the process of self supply.
I repeat, only in the process of self supply, where the narcissist is the source of supply and the consumer of the supply, the false self.
Only then the narcissist experiences himself as both an internal object and an external object.
Paradoxically self supply, this solipsism allows the narcissist for the first time in his life to experience a healthy, normal differentiation between external and internal.
External objects and internal objects.
As a source of supply, the narcissist is an internal object. As a false self, which consumes this supply, the narcissist is an external object.
First time in his life, the narcissist realizes, oh my God, there is someone besides me, even if it's actually me.
There is the possibility of other entities, other objects outside myself. I can interact with these objects as if they were not me.
Here I am providing supply to an entity outside myself.
How do I know this entity, the false self is outside myself?
Because it consumes the supply that I'm providing.
And wait a minute.
If the false self is consuming the supply that I'm generating, then it cannot be me.
Of course, the minute the narcissist realizes that the false self is not him, is not the narcissist, is a construct, is an entity, is an invention, a concoction, confabulation, but not the totality of the narcissist.
The minute the narcissist realizes this, it is the beginning of healing. It's the beginning of integration.
Yes, you're right.
It's exactly what we do when we treat people with dissociative identity disorder. We integrate the host personality with the alters, with the other fragmented pieces of personality.
Same with the narcissist.
The minute we teach the narcissist not self supply is an exclusive method of obtaining supply, that minute the narcissist realizes the externality of the false self and has every incentive to merge with it, to fuse with it, to integrate with it, to become one.
And the regulation of the sense of self-worth and of every other psychodynamic, the regulation then is totally internalized.
This is healing. This is absolutely healing.
Self supply also guarantees a sense of secure base because the narcissist feels safe. There's no separation in security. There's no abandonment anxiety.
If you are your own intimate partner, if you are the exclusive source of narcissistic supply, which is the only way the narcissist experience intimacy, if you are the only source of supply, then no need to worry, no need to catastrophize, no need to stay awake at night. There is safety. Security is restored. You are your own secure base.
But wait a minute.
What is a secure base?
It's a parental figure.
The first secure base in life is a good enough mother and a dead mother, a mother who is depressed, absent, emotionally withdrawn, narcissistic, exploitative, parentifying, you name it, abusive mother, a dead mother.
She's not a secure base. She's a base of terror and horror.
So self supply in the narcissist allows the narcissist to experience himself as a secure base.
But if the narcissist is his own secure base, then that means that the narcissist is his own parent, his own mother.
Self supply allows the narcissist to mother himself.
There's no need for dual mothership anymore. He doesn't need to go out to look for mothers in his intimate partners, substitute mothers. No need.
He can now self-parent.
Self supply guarantees a sense of secure base and opens the door to good enough self-parenting.
Self supply is a bit like self-soothing, self-supply, skirts, avoids all the pitfalls of narcissistic injuries and narcissistic mortifications.
When the narcissist supplies himself, when he is the sole exclusive unique solipsistic source of narcissistic supply, he can never ever be narcissistically injured or mortified.
When he feels finally it is no anxiety, inner peace in a good enough internalized mother who allows him to reparent himself.
The therapy becomes much more productive because as long as the therapist encourages the narcissist grandiosity, as long as the therapist colludes with the narcissist's fantasy, there is a power play between the therapist and the narcissistic patient.
It's a game of one upmanship.
But the minute the therapist teaches the narcissist to self supply, the narcissist no longer needs to compete with the therapist.
The therapist actually disappears as a source of supply or as an antagonist or competitor.
The entire game of narcissistic supply, shared fantasy, the maintenance of grandiosity, the entire game is internalized and the therapist becomes irrelevant.
There's no transference, no counter transference, no competition, no nothing.
The therapist becomes a facilitator, a sounding board at best or at worst.
The entire dynamic, therapeutic dynamic now unfolds and unfurls inexorably in the narcissist's mind.
Self supply is regulatory. It stabilizes the narcissist's sense of self worth, restores the internal locus of control because the narcissist is in charge of his own supply and there's no dependency and it diminishes the need or the opportunity for alloplastic defenses, accusing others, blaming others and then punishing them.
For example, in narcissistic modification.
The fact that all good things, the supply, all good things emanate from the inside. This very fact that the narcissist can rely on himself for self gratification, self soothing, self parenting, in short for self love because supply is perceived as love by the narcissist.
The narcissist's mistake, a shared fantasy for love affair.
So the minute all these goodies come from the inside, that minute the bad object is dead.
The fact that all good things, supply, soothing, comforting, parenting, all these good things come from the inside counters the pernicious effect of the bad object, reduces the frequency of antisocial and non-sublimated socially unacceptable misconduct.
Think about it for a minute.
The narcissist cannot tell himself, cannot convince himself, cannot argue that he is inadequate, inferior, bad, stupid, ugly.
How can the narcissist continue to say this if he is the source of his own supply?
The narcissist can no longer maintain the fiction of a bad object because he is good to himself.
He has become his own best friend, not his own mortal enemy. He has converted himself from a persecretary sadistic object, a harsh inner critic, a hateful super-ego, whatever you want to call it, he has converted himself from this to a mothering figure who provides him with supply, with love, with affection, with compassion, with acceptance.
This is narcissistic supply, attention.
Narcissistic supply that comes from the inside converts and transforms the narcissist into a good object.
Only good objects give the narcissist an endless stream of narcissistic supply.
People who give the narcissist narcissistic supply are good objects because the narcissist splits.
There's a splitting defense. Anyone who gives the narcissist narcissistic supply is all good. Anyone who withholds narcissistic supply from the narcissist, anyone who rejects the narcissist is all bad.
The same defense exists in borderline personality disorder.
So the minute the narcissist becomes his own source of supply, he also becomes all good and the bad object dies.
Look how many advantages. Look what an amazing transformation the self-supply technique can create.
Loss of the bad object, self-parenting, self-love, self-regulation, pro-social behavior or communal behavior. No dependence, no anxiety, no depression, the beginning of healing, integration of the self.
Wow.
What else do you need, Mr. Therapist, to transition from abdicated adversarial methods to accepting the narcissistic pathology, teaching the narcissist to become his own best friend and to abandon the constant need to control, coerce and manipulate others in order to secure constant sempiternal supply.
Teach the narcissist to generate supply from the inside and you will have taught him also how to become much better social being. ###