When Narcissist Runs Out of Supply (Self-supply Compilation)

My name is Sam Dachnin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

Narcissists often frustrate other people.

Frustrating one's nearest and dearest has a double advantage.

It has the dual advantage of simultaneously satisfying the narcissist's masochistic tendencies and his sadistic urges.

So two birds with one stone frustrate your nearest and dearest and you satisfy your masochism and your sadism.

How is it possible?

Well, by withholding love, withholding sex, avoiding intimacy, avoiding the fulfillment of other people's desires and needs, the narcissist torments these people.

He taunts them.

He tortures them.

Even as he obstructs his own gratification.

Think about it.

If you don't have sex with your wife, you frustrate two people, your wife and yourself.

When you frustrate your wife, you are a sadist.

When you frustrate yourself, you are a masochist.

Self-sabotage, self-defeat, self-denial and self-destruction, the martyred victim stance.

All these serve to prevent the falling of attachment and intimacy and the potential for ultimate hurt, ultimate pain as they dissolve.

But self-denial, self-destruction, self-defeat, self-sabotage, all these also buttress the narcissist's sense of superiority, of uniqueness, of omnipotence.

Why is that?

Only the strongest, only those with a method, can overcome and vanquish strong desires, powerful urges, needs, emotions that easily overwhelm lesser mortals.

So by overcoming and vanquishing these desires and urges and emotions, the narcissist proves to himself that he is the strongest, that he is unique.

The narcissist adheres to his idiosyncratic brand of ascetic religion in which he is both God and the worshipper.

The narcissist's inner monologue goes like this.

I reject everything that matters to other people.

Everything that is deemed valuable, worthwhile, meaningful and desirable is nothing to me.

And I hold the weaklings who succumb to their emotions and drives, I hold these people in contempt.

Nothing they have or anything they can possess or attain, none of it, is of value to me.

It is all meaningless and worthless.

So the narcissist devalues the commoners, the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, the average joke, the pedestrian, the routine, the animalistic sex and the socially conformist.

And so self-defeating, self-denying and self-destructive behaviors and choices actually engender the narcissistic supply because when you self-deny, when you self-defeat, when you self-destruct, you uphold and demonstrate and prove the superhuman nature of the narcissist.

This proves that the narcissist is a superman above humanity and humanity's needs and humanity's emotions and humanity's drives and humanity's desires and humanity's preferences and wishes and priorities is above the frame.

He's a bubble.

He doesn't need sex.

He doesn't need intimacy.

He doesn't need other people.

He doesn't need society.

He doesn't need.

He denies his needs.

He denies his drives and urges and desires and wishes.

His self-denial proves to him, demonstrates to him and to others a kind of utter and titanic independence of society, even of nature because it doesn't need sex, a kind of independence of others in interpersonal relationships.

It's a form of counter-dependence.

It's a defiance of the world, of the universe, of God, of nature, of himself.

This overcoming, this elevating oneself to a higher plateau, this is the essence of the narcissist-narcissistic supply.

When a narcissistic supply is a short supply, embarking on the path of self-negation is actually an efficacious way, an efficacious shortcut to obtaining and securing narcissistic supply.

At the very least, he draws astounded attention to the narcissist.

Look at him.

He is without sex for decades.

Look at him.

He just turned down the best job imaginable.

Look at him.

He doesn't need other people.

He uses, abuses and discards them.

There is some shock and awe in observing the narcissist, especially the psychopathic narcissist.

He inspiresfear in others, that puts him over and above his audience, makes him a kind of malevolent entity, the type of alien that we all scream at in a good horror movie.

The horror movie is the narcissist life.

Today I'm having a Donald Duck moment.

Or is it a Donald Trump moment?

Lately, I and the rest of the world am not so sure.

At any rate, today we have a Cornucopia.

Many interesting and fascinating things from all corners of cyberspace, plus a central theme, a central topic.

This will be followed by quotes from books as had become a tradition.

My new Instagram channel is called Narcissism with Vaknin.

One word, Narcissism with Vaknin.

It's my new channel because my old channel has been blocked by Facebook.

And I've been asked on this channel, I've been asked by one of my followers, "Why did you delete your Jerry Springer video?

I thought it was honest and ballsy." Well, first of all, I did not delete it.

I had moved it to the playlist section.

All the videos you think, well, most of the videos you think had disappeared because YouTube had deleted a few of my videos.

Haters complained about hate speech and other things and YouTube had deleted a few of my videos.

But all those who survived and you can't find them on the main screen, they are in the playlist.

There are seven or eight, I don't remember, nine, playlists on my YouTube channel.

Just go there and you will find the missing videos.

Okay?

Scan the page, you will find it.

Playlists are mentioned in a variety of places.

Okay.

But what struck my interest in her comment was the use of the word ballsy.

She connected honesty with courage.

And I wrote back to her, ballsy is a peculiar choice of words to describe an infantile narcissist.

And she responded, well, it takes courage to be that honest with strangers and with yourself, also known as ballsy.

And my response was, you're confusing courage with impulsive recklessness.

And infantile narcissist is never courageous.

He's just oblivious.

He's indifferent to the consequences of his actions.

Sometimes if he's antisocial, he's defiant.

Also, if you hold people in contempt, if you don't care what they think about you, it takes no courage to be honest and open.

The potential consequences, the court of public opinion, don't matter.

Finally, negative supply is preferable to no supply.

The narcissist will go to any length and distance, even self-degradation, even self-humiliation, even self-destruction, self-shaming and self-trashing in public in order to secure supply.

You can see this on the Jerry Springer Show in Dolomite.

The C word here is not courage, it's compulsion.

The narcissist can't help it.

Today, later, the second half of the video, I'm going to read to you book excerpts from three books.

One of the excerpts will provide a very unusual view of empathy.

The second excerpt, that's Martin Luther King, Jr., about love, what he had to say about love.

The third excerpt is about fear.

Now we have become a culture of fear, risk averse, danger averse, thrill averse, novelty averse, how we cocoon ourselves and how we socially distance long before the age of the pandemic.

Fear had become the defining motivating factor in our civilization.

But before we go all there, I want to read to you a quote, a surprising quote.

It's from a book called Cattle Kingdom.

Cattle Kingdom, the hidden history of the cowboy west.

It was written by Christopher Knowlton and it was published in 2017.

And there's a sentence there caught my eye.

The long-born bull was notoriously ornery, sullen, morose, solitary and pugnacious.

As one cattleman put it, the longer he lived, the meaner he became.

I thought this applies to the long-born bull as well to one of our acquaintances, the narcissist.

OK.

Lydia Angeloska, in one of our endless exchanges, suggested a new concept which I found very, very fascinating.

She said, the same way a narcissist collapses and the same way a histrionic collapses, the same way perhaps a borderline collapses.

Sources of narcissistic supply can also collapse.

Sources of narcissistic supply can suddenly stop providing narcissistic supply.

They can turn off the faucet.

They can go away.

They can break up.

They can upset themselves emotionally or physically or both.

And at that moment, they stop providing the narcissist with what he needs most, secondary supply.

They go out in a minute.

And they become collapsed sources of narcissistic supply.

And it occurred to me that Angeloska's innovation, because it's a totally new concept to the best of my ability, Angeloska's innovation fits well with the collapse of other elements in the narcissist's eternal quest for the holy grail of narcissistic supply.

The source of supply can collapse, as Angelos had suggested, but also the pathological narcissistic space can collapse.

Sources of primary supply can collapse.

Intimate partners are sources of secondary supply, never primary supply.

Sources of primary supply can collapse.

And how does a narcissist cope with this?

He copes with this via something called auto supply or self supply.

He uses auto supply or self supply to create an equilibrium.

Let me give you a simile or in some ways a metaphor.

Those of you who remember your school days, if you had studied physics, I don't know, in Europe physics is mandatory, I don't know, in the United States with what's left of their education system is physics, physics is mandatory.

But we were taught about communicating vessels.

Communicating vessels are containers, containers which are interconnected with pipes.

And when you fill one of them with fluid, the fluid goes through the pipes to the other containers and the level of the fluid in all the containers is the same.

This is known as Steven's law, Steven's law of communicating vessels.

Steven was a fascinating character, Simon Steven.

He was Dutch, which already makes him interesting.

In Latin his name was Stevenus.

He was actually Flemish to be more precise.

He was mathematician, physicist, military engineer.

He did amazing things.

For example, he created a yacht, a land yacht, kind of a yacht with sails, but on land.

I mean, he was a bizarre character.

He translated many texts and so on.

He said his famous quote is, "A man in anger is not clever dissembler."

So Steven Simon, Stevenus was the guy who came up with the idea of the communicating vessels.

And it's a perfect simile to narcissistic supply because you pour narcissistic supply into the first container, into the first vessel, jar, jug, glass, doesn't matter.

You pour narcissistic supply and it spreads equally across the various emotional and psychological needs of the narcissist.

If you pour an insufficient amount of supply, the level will be very low in all these areas of psychodynamic functioning.

The narcissist needs a constant infusion of supply to maintain the level across all communicating vessels, high and the same.

When there's not enough supply, when the supply is missing, the narcissist administers supply to himself or asks his intimate partner to administer supply to him.

When the intimate partner administers supply to the narcissist, that's secondary narcissistic supply.

And when the narcissist does it to himself, when he fulfills these vessels with narcissistic supply by himself, it's called auto supply or self supply.

To refresh your memory, there are two categories of narcissistic supply and consequently two categories of narcissistic supply sources.

Primary narcissistic supply is attention, both in public forms like fame, notoriety, infamy, celebrity, and in a private, interpersonal form, adoration, adulation, applause, fear, fear, repulsion.

It is important to understand the detention of any kind, positive or negative, constitutes primary narcissistic supply.

Infamy is as sought after as fame being notorious is as good as being renowned.

To the narcissist, his accomplishments can be imaginary, can be fictitious or only apparent as long as others believe that he is an achiever.

Narcissists count more as far as the narcissist is concerned, count more than substance.

What matters is not the truth, but the perception of the truth.

It is impression management on steroids.

Narcissistic supply comes in two forms, animate, animate, direct, and inanimate, indirect.

Inanimate supply is composed and comprised of all expressions of attention which are communicated in personally, not personally.

For example, in written form, via third parties or as views on a YouTube video.

Inanimate supply also includes aggregate measures of popularity and fame, number of friends and likes on Facebook, as I said, number of comments on YouTube, numbers of readers in a blog, statistics, deaths in animate supply, his/her face, it's faceless.

Animate supply requires an interpersonal interaction with the source of the narcissistic supply, usually in the flesh.

To sustain his sense of self-worth, the narcissist requires both types of supply, inanimate and inanimate, but especially the animate variety.

He needs to witness first hand the impact his false self has had on living, breathing, flesh and blood human sources and on his immediate environment.

That's why isolation, quarantine and social distancing are very, very difficult on narcissists.

Now triggers of primary narcissistic supply include being famous, being a celebrity, having notoriety, fame, infamy, I mentioned that, or having an air of mystique when the narcissist is considered to be mysterious, inaccessible, or having sex and deriving from it a sense of masculinity, virility or femininity, or being close or connected to political, financial, military, spiritual, movers and shakers, power, authority, or yielding and wielding this power.

All these are triggers of primary supply, but who provides the supply?

Sources of primary narcissistic supply are all those who provide the narcissist with narcissistic supply on a casual, random basis, not so secondary narcissistic supply sources.

Secondary narcissistic supply includes living a normal life, normalcy, just being able to present yourself to appear to be normal is a source of great pride for the narcissist, having a secure existence, economic safety, social acceptability, upward mobility, and obtaining companionship.

And so having a mate, having an intimate partner, possessing conspicuous wealth, being creative, running a business, and of course the business is transformed into a pathological narcissistic space, possessing a sense of anarchic freedom, being a member of a group or a collective, having a professional or other reputation, being successful, owning property, flaunting one's status symbols, they are all secondary narcissistic supply.

But this source of secondary narcissistic supply is the narcissist intimate partner.

She has a very important function.

She records his moments of glory.

And when he's down, when he cannot obtain supply, when he supplies deficient, she reminds him of these moments of glory. She's like an external heart disk, external memory.

Then she stores supply, she witnesses the supply and she stores it.

And then when a narcissist needs it, she releases, it's like a slow release pill. She releases the supply.

This way she regulates the supply.

That's her main function.

The main function of the narcissist intimate partner is regulatory, to regulate the flow of supply. When there is a collapsed source of narcissistic supply, again, suggested originally by Lydia and Geroska, when there's a collapsed source of narcissistic supply, the narcissist will try to compensate for this. So when the source of secondary supply had collapsed, the narcissist will try to obtain more additional primary supply. The narcissist will also try to provide himself with supply, auto supply, self supply, which we're going to discuss in a minute. When there is a collapsed source of primary supply, primary narcissistic supply, when sources of primary supply vanish, disappear, mock the narcissist, when they create external modification and so on, when the narcissist remains bereft of all sources of primary supply, he's going to put the onus and the pressure on the source of secondary supply to regulate the deficiency, to cover up for the deficiency, to release memories of past moments of glory, past moments, past accomplishments, so as to compensate for the deficiency.

And again, he's going to use auto supply, self supply is a regulatory tool.

And finally, when the entire pathological narcissistic space collapses, to remind you, pathological narcissistic space is the physical places narcissists go to in order to obtain supply.

The local pub, the library, the church, the narcissist family is a pathological narcissistic space usually.

So when the pathological narcissistic space collapses, the narcissist tries to compensate by obtaining more primary supply.

What's the role of auto supply or self supply in all this?

Again, it has a regulatory role and in this sense, it's the exact equivalent of an intimate partner.

Again, we see auto eroticism, the bibbinal investment in the self, auto supply, self supply are as good as having an intimate partner.

They're interchangeable.

Don't have an intimate partner, supply yourself as a narcissist.

You can't supply yourself as a narcissist, you look for an intimate partner.

It's all investment in the self.

You can supply yourself in really dire straits when, you know, when as a last resort.

So it's a regulatory mechanism.

It is tied to schizotypal states where the narcissist is isolated, withdrawn.

I refer you to the previous video that I made.

And so he has no access to people.

He has no access in and to an intimate partner.

He may have divorced.

She may have abandoned him, cheated on him, betrayed him or whatever.

So he's in a schizo-istate, isolated, withdrawn, recluse, lone wolf.

And so at that moment, he will try to compensate via self supply or auto supply.

Now, what is self supply?

What is auto supply?

It's anything, anything that grants the narcissist, narcissistic supply, but is not dependent on any input or feedback from other people.

In other words, you remember that in narcissism, there is a God awful confusion between internal objects and external objects.

The narcissist misconstrues and considers external objects as totally internal.

So worst comes to worst, rock bottom.

When the narcissist does, he begins to relate to some of his internal objects as actually external.

And he derives from these internal objects, narcissistic supply, as though and as if they were external.

He may uplift himself with positive automatic thoughts.

He may tell himself that he's great, that he's a genius, misunderstood, but still a genius.

So he will give himself pet talks and so on, not in a healthy way.

Most of us, almost everyone does that from time to time, but in a syncopulsive way, repetitive and something that occupies the bulk of his time.

So he's going to have a dialogue, he's going to establish a dialogue with his internal objects, thereby estranging himself from his internal objects to the point of psychosis almost.

Almost to the point that he mistakes his internal objects as external objects.

He still maintains a modicum, a measure of reality testing, and he knows that he's talking to himself.

He knows that these objects don't exist out there, but he tends to identify them with external objects that had existed in his life from his past.

And he tends to, in a process that I call "twinning", he tends to twin in a current, contemporary internal objects with a past external object.

So he would identify, for example, an internal object with his ex-wife.

He would identify an internal object with his teacher, who admired him, etc.

So he would kind of twin the past with the future, with a present.

And so this leads to several types of auto supply.

The most prominent by far is paranoid or paranoid ideation.

Think about it.

Paranoid ideation, the belief that you are at the center of some kind of collusion or conspiracy theory, aggrandizes you, makes you appear important, at least to yourself.

If you believe yourself to be at the core or at the crux or to be the pivot and the axis of processes around you, that is the kind of magical thinking that elevates you, that renders you the center and the focus of attention.

So paranoid and paranoid ideation are highly narcissistic and they are a form of auto supply, self-supply, because you don't need anything and anyone to buttress, prove, substantiate your paranoid and paranoid ideation on the very contrary.

Paranoia is a very solitary, very solitary kind of state of mind.

The second type of auto supply or self-supply is delusionality.

You can simply develop a delusion or a series of delusions.

Some people develop a delusion that God himself is interested in their lives, to the minutest details he micromanages their lives.

Others believe, others develop a delusion that, yeah, my wife had left me 46 years ago, but she will be back one day.

I mean, there's no end, there's no way to specify all possible content of delusionality, delusionality, but delusions are a very crucial, important mechanism for self-supply and auto supply.

Actually, there is even a therapeutic technique, it's called anchoring, like anchor of a ship.

And it is when we reorient the narcissist towards self-supply, we push the narcissist to sort of win himself off narcissistic supply and to substitute for it, to replace it with self-supply.

Rather than resort to fickle and ephemeral external sources of narcissistic supply, the narcissist is taught in the anchoring technique, is encouraged to resort to himself for supply, to look forward with excited anticipation to the structured pursuit of, let's say, hobbies, vocations, to develop certain traits and skills and reward eliciting behaviors.

And this self-mastery is a major source of supply.

This approach leverages the narcissist's grandiose solipsism and his fantasy defense mechanism, especially fantasies of omnipotence, and it renders the narcissist emotionally self-sufficient and proud of healthy progress.

So here's an example of a therapeutic technique that uses knowingly, consciously mechanisms of self-supply and auto supply.

But let's elaborate a bit on delusions, because delusions, delusional, delusions, that's the family of coping strategies that the narcissist had his most acquainted with.

When the narcissist is a child subjected to trauma and abuse, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape, he's being instrumentalized, parentified, objectified, beaten, sexually molested, is what to do.

Well, the narcissist as a child escapes to delusionality.

He develops a delusion, which is essentially the fourth self, a godlike entity, totally delusional, an imaginary friend, a comfort object that is delusional.

So the narcissist's default when there isn't enough supply, the narcissist's default is delusion.

Unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion and data from reality, he transmutes them.

Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially withdraws from reality altogether.

He chooses reality testing to soothe and to solve the pain of disillusionment.

The narcissist administers to himself a mixture of lies, confabulations, distortions, half-truths and outlandish interpretations of events around him.

And these solutions, these delusional solutions, we can classify them into groups.

Let's start with the delusional narrative solution.

The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as a hero, he's brilliant, he's perfect, he is irresistibly handsome, destined for great things entitled, kindhearted, wealthy, the center of attention, etc, etc, etc.

He's the protagonist of his own novel of fiction.

The biggest strain of this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies, that's the irony.

Delusion is a defense against reality.

The more reality challenges the narcissist, the more delusional he becomes.

That's why it's very wrong in therapy to challenge the narcissist's delusions, to introduce him, to force him to accept reality.

Because when you do this, it entrenches him. He becomes even more traculent, obstinate, resistant to treatment.

And finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, this delusion replaces reality altogether.

And the narcissist's reality testing deteriorates. He withdraws, he draws, he draws bridges and may become schizotypal, catatonic or schizoid.

Again I refer you to the previous video I made.

Then there is the antisocial solution.

The narcissist renounces reality to his mind, those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his perfection, his benevolent nature, his entitlement, his cosmically important mission.

These people do not deserve consideration. They are, you know what, they are intelligent, they are not human, they are subhuman.

Anyone who can gaze at the face of the narcissist, he is the son, you can't look at his face. Because he is glowing, there is an aura, he is saintly and godlike. And he is an amazing genius and he is unprecedented in the annals of humanity.

If you can't grasp this, if you disagree with this, if you are stupid enough to not realize it instantly, then something is wrong with you. What's wrong with you? You are not fully human. You are indistinguishable from monkeys and apes. So you don't deserve, you have no rights, you don't deserve any consideration.

And the narcissist has no obligation towards you. The narcissist's natural affinity with a criminal, his lack of empathy, lack of compassion, deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws, social morals, now this affinity with a criminal erupts. It blossoms. It flourishes, narcissist becomes a full fledged antisocial psychopath. He ignores the wishes and needs of others. He breaks the law. He violates all rights, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt of disdain. He derides and decries society in its codes. He punishes the ignorant ingrades, he becomes consummation.

And that is because these people, to his mind, drove him to this state of deficient supply. They acted criminal, they are the criminals. They had acted criminally.

And so he's just reciprocating. He's jeopardizing their safety, their lives, their property, their happiness, their mental health, because they've done it to him first. He defiles tit for tat, quid pro quo.

That's the second family.

Now the third family is, I mentioned before, the paranoid schizoid solution.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives, self-directed confabulations, which place him at the center of others allegedly malign attention.

The narcissist becomes his own audience, self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.

The narcissist develops persecatory delusions. He perceives slights and insults where none were intended.

This is known as hypervigilance. He becomes subject to a tease of reference, referential ideation. He believes that people are gossiping about him, mocking him behind his back, prying into his affairs, cracking his email.

And that reminds me of Donald Trump so much that I'm going to take another sip from the Donald Duck mug.

The narcissist is convinced that he is the center of malign and malintentioned attention. To be reliquing, to humiliate him, to punish him, to restrict him, to obsess with his property, to prevent him from realizing his potential and self-actualizing, to delude him, to impoverish him, to confine him physically, to dwarf him intellectually, to censor him, to impose on his time, to force him to action, to force him to inaction, to frighten him, to coerce him, to surround him, to besiege him, to change his mind, to part with his values, to victimize to murder him, and so on. Knowledge, escalation to the end. And all this, the narcissist is the center of this universe, of collusion, conspiracism, and inanity.

Some narcissists withdraw completely from a world, from a universe populated with such menacious and ominous objects.

But these objects are really projections of internal objects and processes, as you realize.

And these narcissists avoid all social contact, except the most necessary.

They refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, talking to others, or even corresponding with others.

In short, these narcissists become schizoids, not out of social shyness, but out of what they feel to be their choice.

The schizoid doesn't have a choice, the real schizoid.

Basically, dislikes people, doesn't need sex, and is utterly asocial, not antisocial, asocial.

Here the narcissist makes choices to let go, to give up certain proclivities and predilections that he has, certain tendencies and inclinations.

He gives them up knowingly.

But he gives them up, gives them up in his view, in his distorted mind, in self-defense.

The evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, they say to themselves.

I shall waste none of my time and resources on it.

Grandiose exit left.

Now the next family is the paranoid aggressive explosive solution.

The previous family was paranoid schizoid solution.

There's another variant, the paranoid explosive solution.

The narcissists, who develop their secretary delusions, resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict.

They become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and very rarely physically abusive.

They insult, castigate, humiliate, chastise, berate, demean and deride their nearest and dearest, often their well wishes and loved ones.

They explode in unprovoked displays of rage, indignation, righteousness, condemnation and blame.

Theirs is an exegetic bedlam.

They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment.

It's designed to provoke and humiliate.

They sow fear, revulsion, hatred and malignant envy.

They flail against the windmills of reality, pathetic, for long sight.

But often they cause real and lasting damage, fortunately, mainly to themselves.

And there's a middle ground version between the paranoid schizoid and the paranoid aggressive.

And that's the paranoid passive aggressive.

I refer you to videos on this channel which deal with passive aggression or negativistic personality disorder.

Another family is the masochistic self-harming avoidant solution.

Some narcissists, when they cannot secure supply, they are angered by the lack of narcissistic supply.

Such a narcissist directs some of this fury inwards, punishing himself for his failure to secure supply.

And this is masochistic behavior and it has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist's closest and nearest and dearest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors.

And so either way, to pay him the attention that he craves, it's like he's shouting from the rooftops, "I'm about to be suicide.

I'm about to harm myself.

I'm about to hurt myself." It's a cry not for him.

It's a cry for attention.

Self-punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism, a narcissistic cop-out.

By undermining his work, his relationships, his efforts, the increasingly fragile and vulnerable narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, avoids negative supply.

Self-inflicted failure is a narcissist doing and so proves that he is the master of his own faith.

This is in control.

This is a technique very often used by covert narcissists.

Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating, self-destructive circumstances which render success impossible.

Millan wrote in 2000 that masochist narcissists do this.

They sabotage everything.

They undermine everything.

They do this to prevent an objective assessment of their performance to render it improbable.

They act carelessly.

They withdraw in mid-effort.

They are constantly fatigued, bored, sick, disaffected and so passive aggressively they sabotage their own lives.

Their suffering is defiant.

In-your-face suffering, conspicuous victimhood, ostentatious self-renation.

They get drunk.

They do drugs.

They overspend.

They over it.

And so by deciding to abort their lives, to reject their lives as Cleggley put it, they reassert actually their omnipotence.

Not only am I in control of myself, I'm in control of your emotions because I make you sorry for me.

I make you sad.

I make you depressed.

I'm going to induce a state of mind in you.

I'm going to play with your emotions.

I'm going to sacrifice myself to eff up your mind.

The narcissist pronouns and public misery and self-pity, they are compensatory.

And again, as Milan said, they are intended to reinforce his self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

The narcissist tribulations and anguish render him in his eyes unique.

I am suffering.

I never heard anyone of anyone that suffered like me.

I mean, what he did to me, I think no one else had ever experienced this.

It makes him saintly, this suffering, this victimhood is virtuous.

It's righteous, it's resilient and significant.

He becomes an empath, then he graduate and he becomes a super empath.

Then he graduates and he becomes a supernova empath.

This empath label is grandiose.

It's highly narcissistic.

These are narcissists who had chosen the masochistic solution.

These narcissists are in other words self-generating.

What they do, they replace narcissistic supply from the outside or they react to narcissistic injuries and modifications by generating supply from the inside, self-generated narcissistic supply.

And they generate the supply by playing the victim, by becoming the victim, by identifying with victimhood, not only as a state of mind, but as an identity.

And so paradoxically, the worse is anguish.

The more horrible is unhappiness, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels.

He feels good.

He feels really good.

What if he is really, really bad?

So a narcissist reacts to a deficient narcissistic supply very much as a drug addict reacts to the absence of a particular drug.

The dwindling or absence of supply is a trauma and the narcissist experience post-traumatic stress.

The narcissist constantly consumes, praise upon, adoration, admiration, approval, flaws, attention, other forms of narcissistic supply.

They are lacking when they are deficient.

A narcissistic deficiency dysphoria sets in.

The narcissist then appears to be depressed.

His movements slow down.

His sleep patterns are disordered.

He becomes insomniac or sleeps too much.

His eating patterns change.

He gorges on food or avoids it altogether.

The narcissist is constantly dysphoric when he doesn't have supply.

He is unhedonic.

So he is sad and he finds no pleasure in anything, including his former pursuits, hobbies, professions and interests.

The narcissist is subjected to violent mood swings.

He becomes mood-like, lebile.

Mainly his rage attacks and he is visible and painful, a kind of emotional dysregulation.

So in a way, deficient supply pushes the narcissist to become a borderline.

The scholar Grotstein suggested the borderline personality disorder is failed narcissism.

When the child fails to develop narcissistic personality disorder, the child ends up being in a midway house and that is borderline personality disorder.

It's a failed narcissist.

So when the narcissist fails, when he collapses, he reverts to a borderline state.

And you see these extremely anguishing efforts at self-control and they fail.

He compulsively and ritually resorts to some addiction, alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, shopaholics.

He develops obsessive-compulsive rituals.

This gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort both to escape his predicament and to sublimate the aggressive urges that he has.

He is frustrated.

Dallin in 1939 suggested the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

He said frustration becomes aggression.

So the narcissist is frustrated.

He cannot obtain supply.

He becomes aggressive.

His whole behavior seems constrained, artificial and effortful.

The narcissist gradually turns more and more mechanical, detached and unreal.

His thoughts constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive.

His speech may falter. He appears to be far away in a world of his narcissistic fantasies where narcissistic supply is aplenty.

So the narcissist withdraws from his painful existence where others fail to appreciate his greatness, his special skills, his talents, his potential, his achievements.

Narcissist ceases to bestow himself upon a cruel, indifferent universe.

He is punishing humanity for its shortcoming, its inability to realize how unique he is and what a gift he is.

When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops parabolic delusions as we said, self-directed confabulations which place him in the center of others' malicious intentions.

The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of supply.

And again to remind you, some narcissists go into a schizoid mode (I refer you to the previous video I made) narcissistic or schizoid withdrawal.

This kind of narcissist isolates himself, a hermit in the kingdom of his hurt.

He minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers, flying monkeys, to communicate with the outside, devoid of energy.

The narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions.

His former compliance gives way to open withdrawal.

It's a rebellion of sorts.

Smiles are transformed to frowns.

courtesy becomes rudeness.

Emphasized etiquette is used as a weapon.

An outlet of aggression.

An act of self-righteous, sanctimonious violence.

The narcissist, blinded by his pain, seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic nectar that is narcissistic supply.

And in this compulsive quest, out of his control, the narcissist turns both to and upon those nearest to him.

His real attitude emerges.

For him, his nearest and dearest are nothing, nothing but tools.

One-dimensional instruments of gratification, functions, sources of supply, extensions, pimps of supply, catering to his narcissistic lust.

Having failed to procure for him his drug, narcissistic supply, the narcissist regards friends, colleagues, and even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating, potentially hostile objects.

He develops what we call persecutory objects.

In his wrath and fury and unmitigated rage, he tries to mend these people, to fix them, by forcing them to perform a game, to function a game.

He's very adamant about it.

Relentless, callous, reckless.

This is coupled with merciless self-flagellation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment the narcissist feels.

In extreme cases of deprivation, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation.

This is how deeply he loathes his self and his dependence on others.

Throughout this mess, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, heart in bank, to a past which never existed, make America great again, accepting the thwarted, fantastic radiosity of the narcissist.

The longer the lack of supply, the longer supply is missing, the more the narcissist glorifies, rewrites, refrains, misses, and mourns, a totally invented past.

This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, mounting to clinical depression.

The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia.

He concocts a persecuting world, a persecuting world, I'm sorry, a prosecuting world, incorporating in this world his life's events and his social milieu.

He creates a giant game of thrones and gives everyone a role, every place, every person, every event, all his personal history.

This gives meaning, this online virtual game, this MMOG, multiple player game, this gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to non-supply.

In this imaginary paranoid universe, there's a reason he's not getting supply.

It's a conspiracy.

It's a collusion.

There's no other explanation.

He's so self-evidently superior.

He's so much to offer.

He's so much to offer.

He's such a gift.

He's such an endowment.

He's so perfect.

He's so narcissists have 190 IQ.

Didn't you know?

And yet he's rejected.

He's ignored.

He's mocked.

He's ridiculed.

He's abandoned.

He's disrespected.

And it grates.

And in extremes, it mortifies, creates modification.

And so he needs to cope, to create external modification.

He builds a paranoid theory.

A paranoid theory of the world.

It's all, it's everyone against him.

It's malicious, malevolent intent working behind the scenes to deprive him, to discriminate against him.

It's injustice, writ large.

It's institutional.

It's individual.

It's individuals acting within institutions.

Everyone, everywhere is against him.

Otherwise, he would have received much more supply.

Proof that this paranoid ideation is not a delusion is that he's not getting supply.

Does it stand to reason?

Of course, he should have received supply.

Plenty.

Those, these theories of conspiracy account for the decrease in narcissistic supply.

The narcissist then frightened in pain, in despair, embarks upon an orgy of self-destruction intended to generate alternative supply sources.

Alternative attention at any cost.

The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction in the service of self-aggrandizing.

When he's deprived of supply, both primary and secondary, that's important, the narcissist feels annulled, non-existent, hollowed out, mentally disemboweled.

This is an overpowering sense of evaporation, disintegration into molecules of terrified anguish, dissolution, helpless and inexorable.

Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles.

Not to dust, like the zombies or the vampires one sees in horror movies.

And the only sustenance is not blood, it's supply.

It is terrifying.

The narcissist will do anything to avoid this fate.

Think about the narcissist considering him as a drug addict.

His withdrawal symptoms, his cold turkey, are the same like a drug addict, like a jockey.

Narcissists, physiological effects, irritability, emotional ability.

In the absence of regular supply, narcissists often experience brief, decompensatory psychotic episodes.

This also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis accompanied by a major narcissistic injury.

And these psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism, magical thinking.

Narcissists are like children in this sense.

I keep saying it in all my videos.

Many narcissists, for instance, fully believe in two things.

That whatever happens, they will prevail.

And that good things will always happen to them.

It is more than mere belief.

It's magical thinking that is experienced as reality.

Narcissists just know it.

The same way one knows about air or gravity directly, immediately, assuredly, unthinkingly, automatically.

The narcissist believes that no matter what he does, no matter what he does, he will always be forgiven, always prevail in triumph, always come on top.

I call it narcissistic immunity.

The narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and insane.

The narcissist attributes to himself divine and cosmic immunity.

He cloaks himself in this immunity.

It renders him invisible to his enemies and to the power of evil.

The narcissist is a comic strip.

It's a Marvel movie, not marvelous.

Marvel.

It is a childish, fan-dance magoria.

But to the narcissist, it's very real.

The narcissist knows with religious certainty that good things will always happen to him.

With equal certainty, the more self-aware narcissists, and there are quite a few of them, this kind of narcissist, self-aware, knows that he will squander this good fortune time and again.

It's a painful experience, best avoided.

He knows that.

So no matter what serendipity or futurity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, he always strives with blind fury to deflect them, to deform them, and to ruin his chances.

And this is his only success.

Self-destruction.

Now, the next video, I'm going to read three excerpts from three books.

A very surprising excerpt about empathy.

Martin Luther King's words on love, which should resonate through the ages, and an excerpt about the cultural fear.

The narcissist expects dry spells in obtaining narcissistic supply.

He knows that narcissistic supply is a flow, like a river.

It has its ups and downs, it has its tidal moments, it wanes and waxes, and he learns to expect these irregularities in the supply chain.

That is precisely why narcissists team up with intimate partners.

The main role of the narcissist, insignificant other, is to regulate the supply, to stabilize it, to flatten the curve, if you wish.

The intimate partner provides secondary supply, which replenishes the missing primary supply.

So narcissists are well trained at regulating supply one way or another.

But what happens when the narcissist runs out of the ability to regulate supply?

When people around the narcissist are so disillusioned, so disenchanted, so disappointed, so angry and hurt, then they want nothing further to do with the narcissist.

What happens when the narcissist moves from one pathological space, exits it, and yet didn't have the time to establish a new one?

What happens when circumstances and the environment conspire to prevent the narcissist from obtaining sources of supply, for example, is hospitalized or is in prison?

What happens, in other words, when the narcissist faces the dawning realization that he will never have narcissistic supply again or that it is very unlikely?

How does the narcissist then regulate his internal environment?

How does he cope with such an imminent and very frightening threat?

And this is the topic of today's lecture, the second of three on schizoid narcissism.

And I would like to open with a quote.

It's by Ferenzi and Shando, who noted psychoanalysts.

It's titled "Notes and Fragments." It was published by the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, volume 30, 1949, when I was a young man.

And this is the quote.

"A surprising fact in the process of self-splitting is the sudden change of the object relation that had become intolerable.

This object relation changes into narcissism.

The man, abandoned by all gods, escapes completely from reality, creates for himself another world in which he can achieve everything that he wants.

He has been unloved.

He has been tormented.

And so now this man splits off from himself, a part which in the form of a helpful, loving, often motherly minder, commiserates with the tormented remainder of the self.

Because this remainder decides for it with the deepest wisdom and most penetrating intelligence.

This part, this motherly part, is a guardian angel that sees the suffering or murdered child from the outside.

It wanders through the whole universe, this child, seeking help, invents, and this part invents fantasies for the child that cannot be saved in any other way.

But even though this child cannot be saved in any other way except via fantasy, in the moment of a very strong, repeated trauma, even this guardian angel must confess his own helplessness and well-meaning deceptive swindles.

And then nothing else remains but suicide.

This was the quote that by the way launched called therapy.

Ferranci and Chandel are discussing actually re-traumatization.

They warn that such a process when the false self collapses is disabled, modification in activates it, there's no further protection and nurturing, and the guardian is dead, the guardian angel is dead or gone, they warn that inexorably leads to suicide.

It's not true, but it's partly true.

And today we're going to discuss the solutions that narcissists deploy and employ and use to cope with the removal of narcissistic supply as a self-regulatory instrument.

My name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Melignan's Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and your favorite professor of psychology.

When narcissistic supply is no longer available in principle and clearly will not be available for a very long period of time in the foreseeable future, either because all sources of supply had been alienated and depleted or because pathological narcissistic supply had crumbled or because external circumstances conspire to prevent the narcissist from going out there and obtaining supply or because internal circumstances prevent the narcissist from obtaining supply, either in the narcissist a covert narcissist, he's too shy, he's too fragile, he's too vulnerable, or he's too schizoied to go out there and scout for supply.

In all these cases, supply suddenly becomes not scarce but absent.

It's not a deficiency of narcissistic supply, it's the vanishing of narcissistic supply from the narcissist landscape.

Supplying could be more frightening than this because the narcissist uses narcissistic supply to keep himself together, not only to regulate his moods, his negative emotionality, his negative emotionality can overpower him as well as others, and he uses supply to regulate this.

But not only to reduce liability, not only to ameliorate anxiety, narcissistic supply has so many psychological functions that the only thing they can compare it to in normal people is love, actually.

Maternal love, spousal love, other love, object relations.

Narcissistic supply is the narcissist's object relation, only the object is himself.

The narcissist has a libidinal investment in himself and he invests it via narcissistic supply.

Narcissistic supply is the affirmation and the confirmation that the narcissist's fantasy world, his shared fantasy, his false self, his grandiosity, his inflated self-perception are real.

Narcissistic supply reassures the narcissist, deludes the narcissist, deceives the narcissist into somehow believing that he is still capable of maintaining a modicum of reality testing.

But there comes a point that he is unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion, countervailing data.

Confirmation bias doesn't work anymore.

So he reframes them, he ignores them, he represses them, denies them, blocks them out, transmutes them.

There are many, many ways of coping with information or data that countermand, undermine, challenge the narcissist's self-perception and grandiosity.

But if it goes too far, if he is no longer able to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist can react in one of two ways.

He can continue to remain in reality and undergo narcissistic modification.

And I advise you to watch my videos on narcissistic modification.

That's one way.

And the other path is to essentially become psychotic, divorce reality, withdraw into an inner world so complete that it is misperceived by the narcissist as reality.

And that is a good definition of psychotic disorder.

This is hyper reflection.

So when the narcissist is confronted with utter lack of supply or with overwhelming negative supply, the narcissist either is modified, loses his false self or withdraws from reality, becomes psychotic to soothe and solve the pain of disillusionment, the challenge, the disintegration, the falling apart, the, and the threat, the existential threat as Ferranci says, you know, could end up in suicide.

The narcissist administers a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths, outlandish interpretations of events, etc.

But what if this fails too?

What if the narcissist is undergoing modification and all his strategies, all the instruments he had developed since early childhood are not working anymore because there's no supply to drive them?

What to do then?

Well, the narcissist in this case, especially the schizoid narcissist, has a dual problem.

Not only he is not able to tap into new sources of supply, he finds the interaction with sources of supply very distasteful.

He is socially averse, sexually averse, schizoid narcissists are in a double bind.

So what do all these narcissists do when there's no more fuel to the car?

In 1995, I compared narcissistic supply to fuel that the car engine needs.

You can have the most amazing car with the most perfect Rolls-Royce engine, but without fuel.

It's not going anywhere.

If it's left standing for long, it decays, it falls apart and it's no longer recognizable as a car, but as a metal wreck, scrap metal.

So what to do to avoid this vampire-like conversion to dust?

You know these movies where vampires are exposed to the sun or you run a stake through them or silver bullets or whatever it is that works nowadays and they suddenly go up in a puff of dust.

What to do to prevent this?

So narcissists have several strategies, last resort strategies and solutions.

The first one is the delusional narrative solution.

The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as the hero, the protagonist.

He's brilliant in this narrative, in this piece of fiction, in this movie script.

He is perfect.

He is irresistibly handsome.

He's destined for great things.

He's entitled, powerful, wealthy, center of attention, etc.

The narrative is usually counterfactual.

It is counterfactual, that's why it's essentially a delusional disorder.

The narcissist develops a delusional disorder.

And the bigger the strain on this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies.

Attacking the delusion makes it more coherent, more pervasive, more resilient.

Finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, the delusion replaces reality and the narcissist's reality testing deteriorates.

He withdraws his bridges and may become schizotypal, catatonic or full-fledged schizoid.

The next solution is the antisocial solution.

The narcissist again renounces reality and everyone in reality.

To his mind, the people who pusillanimously failed to recognize his unbound talents, innate superiority, overarching brilliance, benevolent nature, entitlement, cosmically important permission, perfection or justice.

These people do not deserve his presence, do not deserve the gift that he is, nor do they deserve empathy and consideration such as he can muster.

The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal, with the antisocial, his lack of empathy, his lack of compassion, his deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws and morals and worries, his defiance, consummationness, lack of impulse control, reactance.

In other words, the commonalities between narcissists and psychopaths, they now erupt.

They flourish and blossom like an unseemly poisonous blight.

The narcissist becomes a full-fledged antisocial psychopath.

He ignores the wishes and needs of other people.

He breaks the law.

He violates all rights, natural and legal.

He holds people in contempt and disdain.

He derides and decries society and its codes.

He punishes the ignorant ingrates and those who caused him injustice.

He becomes vindictive, sometimes obsessively and compulsively vindictive.

And that is because to his mind these people drove him to this state, their responsible, alloplastic defences.

Everyone is guilty.

Everyone is to blame.

Everyone is responsible, except of course the narcissist.

By acting criminally, by jeopardising their safety, their lives, by absconding with their property, he's just rebalancing.

He's just recreating cosmic justice.

He's just putting things right.

The third solution is the paranoid schizo-eat solution.

And before I proceed, a lot of this would be familiar to you, you know, with the recent developments in the United States and so on.

All these things apply equally to collectives as they do to individuals.

Enough said.

Apply these things to your daily news.

The paranoid schizo-eat solution.

When narcissism fails as a defence mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid hypervigilant narratives.

Self-directed confabulations which place him at the centre of other people's allegedly malign malevolent malicious surreptitious attention.

The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient, self-supplied as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply.

The narcissist in this case develops paranoid ideation and persecretary delusions.

He perceives slides and insults and conspiracies and collusions and malevolence where none exist or where intended.

He becomes subject to ideas of reference, referential ideation.

People are gossiping about him.

They're mocking him.

They're prying into his affairs.

They're cracking his email or whatever.

They are out to get him and so on.

He's convinced that he's the centre of malign and malintentioned attention.

People are conspiring to humiliate him, to punish him, to obscure with his property, to delude him, to impoverish him, to confine him physically or intellectually, to censor him, to impose on his time, to force him to action or to force him to inaction, to frighten him, to coerce him, to alter his behaviour and all choices, to surround and beseech him, change his mind, part with his values, victimise, even in extreme cases, murder him.

Yes, he's the target of a plot to assassinate him.

Some narcissists go so far down this rabbit hole, withdraw so completely from a world populated with menacious and ominous objects, that they reach the point of dangerous, paranoid, grandiose psychosis.

All these are projections of internal objects and processes, of course.

That's the problem.

The problem is that in the absence of supply, the narcissist's inner environment is totally dysregulated.

All the levers of control are gone.

Things, I mean, the inmates break out of the asylum.

All the sadistic interjects, all the constructs, the dysfunctional constructs, they're out in the wild.

They take over, in effect.

They take over because they are charged with a normal pent-up energy.

They take over and they drive the narcissist to the point of no return.

This kind of narcissist avoids all social contact, except that it's necessary.

They become, in other words, forcefully, schizoid narcissists.

They refrain from this kind of narcissist, refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, talking to others, or even corresponding with others.

They become schizoids, not out of social shyness.

They're not avoidant, but out of what they feel to be their choice.

They say to themselves, "This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me.

It's an inner refrain.

It's like a mantra, affirmation, if you wish.

I shall waste a lot of my time and resources on these ingrates." That's the risk of affirmations.

Even positive affirmations are, to my mind, a very dangerous tool because positive affirmations tend to resonate with introjects and constructs within the personality that very often are hidden, repressed for very good reason because they are sick, problematic, dysfunctional, disordered.

A positive affirmation can bring such an introject or a construct into the surface.

Positive affirmations can render you paranoid, can render you narcissistic, can render you grandiose.

I see these affirmations all over the place like so much cancer, so much malignancy, and I see the impact of these affirmations in how people become more and more grandiose, more and more entitled, more and more narcissistic, and more and more paranoid.

The next solution is the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution.

Some narcissists who develop the secretary delusions and paranoid ideation, they resort to an aggressive stance.

So the first case they withdraw.

In this case, the approach.

The approach is violent, a violent resolution of an internal conflict, of a dissonance.

These kind of narcissists become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and sometimes physically abusive.

They insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean, criticise and deride, even their nearest and dearest, well-wishers, loved ones, friends, family.

They explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, sanctimoniousness, condemnation and blame.

It's an exegetic bedlam.

They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment, as designed to provoke them, to humiliate them, to put them down, to render them submissive, to subjugate them.

And these kind of narcissists saw fear, revulsion, hatred and malignant envy.

They flail against the windmills of reality.

They are pathetic for long, but they're dangerous.

Even they cause real and lasting damage, fortunately, mainly to themselves.

The next solution is the masochistic avoidant solution.

Remember, all these are solutions when the narcissist reaches the conclusion that actually he cannot extract supply anymore in a traditional way.

He cannot find willing collaborators, willing partners who would provide him with supply, with inertia and fantasy, or he cannot establish a pathological narcissistic space because of external circumstances or internal reasons, shyness, fragility, vulnerability.

In all these cases, the narcissist reaches the terrifying, harrowing conclusion that he has seen the lust of narcissistic supply.

And now he needs to find other ways, either to supply himself, to become self-supplier, or to coerce, to force the environment to provide him supply by becoming a psychopath or a dangerous, explosive paranoid, etc.

So these are the solutions.

Now, the last, the next solution is the masochistic avoidant solution.

The narcissist is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply.

Makes a mind-brain.

And he directs some of this narcissistic rage, some of this fury, inwards, punishing himself for his failure to secure and obtain supply.

And this masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist closest, nearest, dearest, loved ones, friends, even colleagues, to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors.

Either way, to pay him the attention that he craves.

Some of them take on the role of a savior.

They have a messiah complex.

They want to save him.

Some of them take on the role of making his life better, ameliorating.

So they try to make him happy and joyful and cheerful.

Some of them are simply dismayed and they express their anger and disappointment.

Some of them seek to persecute him, actually.

Whatever the case may be, he succeeds to elicit attention.

By damaging, self-trashing, self-destructive behaviors by self-defeat, he actually attracts people.

Because people have a tendency to save other people.

You see someone drowning.

You want to help him.

Self-administered punishment often manifests in this kind of narcissist as self-handicapping masochism.

A narcissist cop out by undermining his work, his relationships, his efforts.

The increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure negative supply.

Because self-inflicted failure is the narcissist doing.

He did it to himself.

So he is in control.

It's a choice.

If the narcissist destroys himself, it's his choice and it's his control.

So ironically, paradoxically, self-destruction is a form of grandiosity.

And it proves that he is the master of his fate.

Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances, which render success impossible.

Millen wrote in 2000 that masochistic narcissists are hell-bent on preventing an objective assessment of their performance.

They make it improbable.

They act carelessly.

They withdraw in mid-effort.

They are constantly fatigued or bored or disaffected.

And so they passive aggressively support their own lives.

Their suffering is defined in your face, conspicuous and ostentatious.

They decide to abort.

And by deciding to abort, they are the decision makers.

It's a manifestation of omnipotence.

You know, only I have the power to destroy myself.

Suicide is actually a grandiose narcissistic act.

It's very selfish.

The narcissist pronounced in public misery and his self-pity are compensatory because, as Millen says, they reinforce his self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness.

These forms of self-generated narcissistic supply.

It's self-supply.

And so paradoxically, the worse the anguish, the worse the suffering, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels.

He feels good only when he feels bad.

And these are the solutions in two big groups.

When the narcissist no longer has supply and cannot secure supply, in any way, shape or form, he either begins to self-supply, which is sexually autoreroticsexually auterotrophic and psychologically autotelic self-supplies, and he becomes his own source of supply.

And that's a total collapse.

It's a singularity.

It's a black hole.

He cuts himself off, reality.

Or on the contrary, instead of avoiding reality and becoming a self-supplier, the narcissist seeks to force the environment to give him supply by self-destructing or by becoming a psychopath.

So the absence of supply, the vanishing of supply, radicalizes the narcissist, pushes him into solutions which are recognizable personality disorders, such as schizoid or antisocial.

Mortification and collapse, as I have said in previous videos, are the bridges between personality disorders.

They are the engines that drive the transformations.

All personality disorders bleed into each other, merge with each other seamlessly.

We see in the same person symptoms, behaviors, traits, signs, manifestations of all personality disorders.

Either someone has a personality disorder and then he has elements of all personality disorders.

Or he doesn't have a personality disorder and then he has no elements of any personality disorder.

These are the two groups.

If you are a narcissist, you are also likely to be obsessive compulsive and paranoid, for example, or schizoid.

If you are a schizoid, you are likely to be a narcissist at some stage or paranoid, definitely, etc., etc.

These distinctions are artificial.

They are wrong.

They are known as the polythetic fallacy and they are cause for great criticism of the DSM.

It is a badly compiled and written book which does not reflect reality because reality is a dimension, is a spectrum, not discrete entities.

We are not discrete entities.

We are parts of networks and the network.

We are a network effect.

The concept of individual is very wrong because individual, like non-divisible and at all, is wrong.

It is not true.

And there is no such thing as personality.

It is a confluence.

It is the overlap.

It is the Venn diagram that makes you what you are.

A narcissist, even though they like to think of themselves as exceptions, of course, are not.

Nothing good, it lasts forever.

I gave you a three weeks vacation from St. Vachnin.

But it is over.

I am back with this video.

And today we are going to discuss what I call the system of residuals.

Can two narcissists inhabit the same body?

Now, this sounds a bit like the exorcist or demon possession or multiple personality disorder known today as dissociative identity disorder.

But actually, it is none of the above.

I am going to discuss the loaded question.

Can a narcissist be both overt and covert at the same time?

And when this rare condition happens, what does it mean?

How do we identify such a narcissist?

And what can we do about it?

And what can the narcissist do about it?

Is there any way out?

To be one kind of narcissist is bad enough to be two kinds of narcissist in the same body at the same time.

This subalternality or synchronicity is a horror show.

It is indeed a form of possession.

It calls for exorcism sanctioned by the Catholic Church.

But I cannot have this on my show.

I am a Jew.

So I am going to discuss psychology instead, a profession largely invented and propagated by Jews throughout modern history.

Okay, anti-Semitism aside, let's delve right into the topic of the video.

The problem starts with the concept of the unitary self.

At some point, modern psychology had taken a detour.

Various scholars had come up with concepts such as self, ego, personality, individual.

And these concepts had implied that we are all atons.

We are kind of self-sufficient, self-contained, solipsistic universes.

We do pass each other in the night honking our horns, our fore horns, like two ships.

But otherwise, we are totally separate.

We can be studied in isolation, in laboratories.

The context in which we are embedded, for example, the social context is secondary.

What matters are internal processes.

This is where psychology started to become delusional or divorced from reality.

If I had to diagnose current psychology, I would say that it has an impaired reality testing.

And why would I say that?

Because there is no such thing as individual.

Probably there is no such thing as a self.

Definitely there is no such thing as a personality.

All these concepts are very misleading.

We are formed.

We become in a process which is lifelong, as Ericsson had noted.

And this process involves other people all the time.

We are relational outcomes.

We emerge, we coalesce through interactions with other people.

We are the sum total of our object relations, starting with mummy and ending in the grave.

As we go through life, as we find ourselves and mesh with other people, we love, we hate, we find, we withdraw.

Yes, withdrawn is also a form of reaction to people.

As we interact socially, even if we are schizoid, even if we are avoidant, we still force to interact socially.

All these environments, phenomena, other people, they form us, they shape us, they make us who we are.

Now this observation is not new, of course.

It has been proposed by various object relation theorists in the 1960s.

But since then, psychology had taken an experimental turn.

Psychologists, when they grow up, want to be scientists.

It's a form of vanity.

It's a form of grandiosity.

Psychologists are not happy with being psychologists.

They want to be physicists.

They want to belong to medicine.

They want to become a part of the sciences.

So what psychologists have done in the past several decades is that they began to place emphasis on laboratory experiments, on studying animals as proxies for people, etc.

This was a very wrong turn.

So we ended up with a psychology that speaks very little to our common experiences.

We had become alienated from psychology, estranged from psychology.

We feel as if psychology has nothing to offer us.

And you know what the truth is?

That psychology has very little to offer us, which is why people gravitate to con artists, coaches and other forms of low life.

So it all started with this error, with this primordial sin of the unitary self.

Gradually, over the past few decades, there have been rebel movements, for example, the internal family system and others.

And these rebels, high-powered intellectuals and scholars, suggested another concept, a substitute for the unitary self.

It's a form of operating system, internal operating system, a CPU.

And this internal operating system determines which of several self-states emerges at any given time.

Let's revert.

Let's go back one step.

The new approach in psychology, these new schools, or relatively new schools, suggest that we actually don't have a self.

What we have instead is a family, a congregation, a parish, a group, a collective of sub-personalities, self-states, or what I call pseudo-identities.

Now these self-states are indeed like a family in the sense that they are internal dynamics between them.

They also share a lot of information with each other, so they are only partially dissociative.

The dissociation wall is permeable.

What one self-state learns, the others share mostly.

Not entirely, but mostly.

So there is a common database of experiences which renders identity cohesive, coherent, and continuous.

We have these multiple sub-states.

They inhabit an internal space.

This internal space is a shared database of common memories.

These common memories give rise to a fluid but stable identity core.

And this identity core in turn arranges the memories in meaningful ways.

Identity core serves as an organizing principle, an explanatory principle.

And there's an operating system, there's an overriding guiding principle, so to speak, which determines which of the self-states emerges at any given point.

And how does this determination take place?

How does the operating system decide which self-state emerges at any given minute?

It evaluates internal and external information.

Now this information is generated and provided by internal and external environments.

So the operating system monitors external environments and internal environments all the time.

And then it renders its verdict, it makes a decision.

Right now, self-state number three, the psychopathic self-state, should emerge.

Right now, self-state number one, the narcissistic self-state, should take over.

And right now, self-state number seven, the codependent self-state, the dependent self-state, should kind of pervade the personality.

So self-states alternate, sometimes dizzyingly and kaleidoscopically alternate among each other.

Now in the majority of cases, there are stable self-states which persist for weeks, months, years, sometimes decades.

But when people are mentally ill, for example, in borderline personality disorder, in narcissistic personality disorder, the self-states change very often.

They hand the baton in a relay, kind of.

They do this because the internal and external stimuli, the internal and external information, usually overwhelms the mentally ill person and creates dysregulation.

To cope with the threat of dysregulation, the operating system trots out, pushes out another self-state which is better capable and better able to cope with dysregulation.

So for example, when the borderline is faced with a threat of humiliation and abandonment and rejection, this threat, real or imaginary, overwhelms her.

She becomes dysregulated.

The operating system of the borderline becomes alarmed.

The operating system notices that the borderline is about to decompensate and disintegrate then and there.

So the operating system hurries and replaces the borderline self-state with a secondary psychopathic self-state.

The secondary psychopathic self-state is better capable of handling rejection, humiliation and abandonment even though it has its own drawbacks, for example, it's defined and reckless.

So this is how things work.

This is how things operate within what used to be called the personality and I prefer to call the ego system, not the ego system but the ego system or if you wish, the personality space.

And what determines of course which self-state will be selected by the operating system is self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is the overriding constraint which the system seeks to optimize when hailing forth these sub-personalities or pseudo-identities.

Operating system wants you to be self-efficacious.

In other words, it wants you to secure favorable outcomes from your external environment taking into account your internal environment, external processes and dynamics which are operating in you at any given moment.

So now we move into what I call system of residuals.

It's time to introduce myself.

My name is Sam Baknin and I'm the author of Malignant Sennfläu Narcissism Revisited.

I'm also a professor of psychology.

This was the general introduction to self-state systems which I believe and many other scholars believe is the regular normal state of things.

Everyone has a system of self-states, not only mentally ill people but people with mental health problems use the system much more.

They deploy the system much more often.

They exchange self-states.

They transition or switch between self-states much more frequently because they are dysregulated and overwhelmed by external and internal stimuli.

When all the relevant or available self-states at the disposal of the system are equally self-efficacious, what does the system do?

And what about the obverse condition?

What about the situation where all the self-states available to the system at the disposal of the system?

All these self-states are equally inept, equally incompetent, equally lacking in self-efficacy, equally unable to operate on the external environment and to guarantee to operate on and in the external environment and with the external environment to guarantee favorable outcomes.

What happens when all these self-states are losers when they are not built, incapable of functioning, when they are dysfunctional?

In this case, the system may opt, may decide to maintain two or more self-states in operation simultaneously.

It's a kind of hedging.

It's a kind of insurance.

Imagine the system as this old matriarchal figure, a matron, a mother.

The system says to itself, "I can't really use self-state number three.

I should have used self-state number three.

The circumstances had changed.

The external environment is menacing and threatening.

There is dysregulation in the internal environment, so I should have used self-state number three." My self-state number three is good for nothing.

It's a loser.

It's not efficacious.

So, I can't use self-state number three.

On the other hand, the nearest substitute, self-state number seven, is equally hopeless, equally incompetent.

So, I can't use self-state number seven as well.

What am I to do?

Poor me, poor operating system.

So, let me use self-state number three and self-state number seven together.

Now, they may compensate for each other's shortcomings.

This is a kind of insurance or hedging.

If I use multiple self-states, then maybe the favorable outcome, the desired result, will ultimately be obtained, however imperfectly.

So, the operating system on rare occasions may decide to use, may select two self-states, three self-states, and keep them upfront, public facing, simultaneously.

In this case, we have what I call a state of residuals.

A state of residuals is a mental state where two or more self-states, pseudo-identities, or sub-personalities are in charge.

It's like a ship with two captains.

And so, you know, in ancient Rome, there were constellations of two or three scissors governing simultaneously, the triumvirate and so on.

So, it's the same.

Two or three or four self-states in charge simultaneously.

And this ineluctably leads to dissonance and to internalized aggression because most self-states are mutually exclusionary.

In other words, self-state number seven has very little in common with self-state number three.

And when both of them are in charge, they're likely to clash and confront exactly like two incompatible people in a couple.

They're likely to fight all the time.

They're likely to generate a lot of internalized aggression.

And they're likely to lead the person into a state known as dissonance.

Now, I've described in previous videos and in lectures I had given, for example, the lecture I had given at McGill University in Canada, I described my model of personality disorders.

I'm sorry.

And I had suggested that people can transition between personality disorders via what I call a collapsed bridge or a collapsed state.

But the system of residuals is an adaptation and enhancement of my original concept.

What I'm now suggesting is that people transition between personality disorders and between subtypes of personality disorders.

For example, between overt narcissism and covert narcissism, between overt borderline and covert borderline.

So people transition between subtypes of personality disorders and even between personality disorders via a bridge, a collapsed bridge.

When they collapse, with the original personality disorder no longer guarantees favorable outcomes, people switch to another personality disorder or subtype of personality disorder.

I am now suggesting that sometimes on rare occasions when people try to affect this transition, when people try to cross the collapsed bridge from one personality disorder to another, for one subtype of personality disorder to another, when they try to cross the bridge, they get stuck in the middle.

They're unable to complete the transition.

At that point, a collapsed narcissist, for example, may evolve into a binary system of two residual self-states, an overt narcissist and a covert narcissist.

So we have, for example, an overt narcissist.

The overt narcissist collapses, is unable to secure narcissistic supply.

At that point of collapse, many overt narcissists transition to covert narcissists.

They become covert.

They cross the bridge of collapse.

The overt narcissist crosses the bridge of collapse into a covert state.

The system, the operating system takes care of that.

It hides, suppresses, represses, deactivates, disables, switches off one self-state, which is the overt narcissistic self-state.

And it activates, switches on another self-state, which is the covert narcissistic self-state.

Having completed this transition successfully, the overt narcissist becomes a full-fledged covert narcissist.

As a covert narcissist, he has a chance to succeed.

As an overt narcissist, he had collapsed.

But what happens when the overt narcissist tries to cross the bridge of collapse and fails to cross the bridge of collapse because both the overt narcissistic self-state and the covert narcissistic self-state are equally inefficacious, they're equally incompetent, they're equally inefficient.

In other words, what happens when we have a narcissist who collapses both as an overt narcissist and as a covert narcissist?

Someone who cannot function as an overt narcissist, but equally cannot function as a covert narcissist.

Someone who fails to secure favorable outcomes as an overt narcissist, but then goes on to discover that he is equally, equally an equal failure as a covert narcissist.

So he's a failure as an overt narcissist, but then he's a failure as a covert narcissist.

In this case, the transition from overt to covert will never be completed.

The person, the narcissist who is trying to transform himself from overt to covert, the operating system of these narcissists will determine that such a transition is dangerous because the covert narcissistic state is as self inefficacious as the overt state.

The covert state is as likely to collapse as the overt state had collapsed.

The covert state is as likely to create despair, depression, self-hatred, self-loathing and self-destruction as the overt state had done.

So there's no point to fully transition between overt and covert.

The same negative outcomes are guaranteed and negative affectivity.

So what to do in this case?

Well, the answer of the operating system is we maintain both conditions.

We maintain the overt narcissism and we maintain the covert narcissism simultaneously.

The operating system creates a binary system of two residual self-states, an overt narcissist and a covert narcissist in the same body at the same time.

Both conditions, the overt narcissism and the covert narcissism, both self-states are equally inapt and incompetent at securing narcissistic supply from outside sources.

But the operating system hopes that putting together the overt and the covert can miraculously somehow create a third entity, so to speak, which may be better able, however, residually, better able to obtain supply.

Again, it's a kind of insurance, kind of hedging.

Let's take the good aspects of the overt narcissist and the good aspects of the covert narcissist, combine them together in a binary state and hope for the best.

Such a constellation is geared to generate self-supply.

It does it in two very surprising ways.

The overt self-state is by definition superior to the covert self-state.

Now, you remember, in this particular case, there has been a collapse of the overt state.

Normally, there would have been a transition from overt state to covert state.

There's been a collapse of the overt state and there would have been a transition from overt state to covert state via the bridge of collapse, normally.

But in this particular case, both the overt state and the covert state are hopeless.

They're losers.

They're incompetent, inapt, unable to obtain supply.

So the operating system keeps both of them in operation, maintains both of them, doesn't switch off any single one of them.

But still, the overt narcissist is what the covert narcissist wants to be when he grows up.

The covert narcissist envies the overt narcissist.

The overt narcissist holds the covert narcissist in contempt.

The dynamic between these two self-states is very negative.

The overt self-state superiority to the covert state leads the overt state to reject the covert state.

I repeat, the overt state in this binary system holds the covert state in contempt and rejects the covert state.

The overt state regards the covert state as a good-for-nothing loser, as a nobody, as a lone entity, as a failure.

The covert state, on the other hand, envies the overt state, sabotages the overt state, undermines the overt state, hates the overt state.

There's no love lost between the overt and the covert state.

The covert state fantasizes about being and becoming an overt state.

And the overt state wants to eliminate the covert state because the overt state finds the covert state embarrassing, shameful, disgraceful, in other words, a form of constant narcissistic injury and even modification, internal modification.

So there's a war.

The minute the operating system had opted to not do anything, to not switch off any sub-state, to allow several sub-states to reign supreme simultaneously, at that moment the operating system had created a state of dissonance which is so extreme that it can only be described as internal conflict, a war.

The overt state's aggression towards the covert is recycled by the covert.

Now remember, aggression is a form of energy and there's a law of conservation of energy.

There's a law of conservation of aggression.

If one sub-state is aggressive towards another sub-state, this aggression simply passes hands.

The overt state hands over aggression to the covert state, transfers aggression to the covert state.

When the overt state maligns, humiliates, berates, demeans and degrades the covert state, the overt state is being aggressive to the covert state and this aggression is transferred from the overt state to the covert state.

Now, what can the covert state do with this aggression?

It has to do something with it.

Again, it's a form of energy.

Think of it as a battery.

Now the covert state's battery is charged with aggression, courtesy the overt state.

What to do with it?

The covert recycles the aggression.

The covert recycles the aggression in two ways.

First of all, the covert develops depression.

Depression is a form of self-directed aggression.

It's a form of using up the aggression in self-destructive, self-defeating ways.

The aggression is used up.

In hopelessness, the aggression is used up via self-loathing and the aggression is used up via reckless, dangerous acts which reflect self-destructiveness and dynamics of self-defeat.

This is one way the covert uses the aggression of the overt.

The covert leverages this aggression to create a state of depression, which again is self-directed aggression.

The second way, the covert incorporates the aggression into sadistic fantasies.

You remember that the covert's main state of mind is fantasy.

The covert uses fantasy defense to survive.

The covert in itself is unable to obtain supply.

The covert fantasizes about obtaining supply.

That's true for any covert narcissist, by the way.

Covert narcissism is an extreme fantasy defense, even more extreme than overt narcissism.

Both conditions involve grandiose fantasies.

But the covert's fantasies, as distinct from the overt's fantasies, often involve aggression.

Aggression, violence, sadism, the humiliation of others, the humiliation of others and worse.

The overt state is aggressive towards the covert state.

They are both coterminous.

They both inhabit the body at the same time.

One of them should have been switched off, but the operating system preferred to keep both of them operational and on.

So they fight.

They hate each other.

The overt state is attacking the covert state.

This attack is a transfer of aggression, transfer of energy.

The covert state takes this energy, takes this aggression and recycles it one way by generating depression, which is self-directed aggression, and another way by engaging in sadistic fantasies, which is other-directed aggression.

In other words, the covert internalizes some of the aggression and externalizes some of the aggression.

But this externalization is fantastic.

It's not in real life.

It's only in his fantasies.

The overt and the covert states actually collude in creating what we call a sublimatory channel.

Again, one step back, sublimation is the socially acceptable expression of primitive urges and drives, for example, the sex drive.

So a sublimatory channel is a very fancy way of saying a socially acceptable way of expressing primitive drives and urges.

If I have a sex drive or an urge to have sex, I would convert it into a socially acceptable way.

I would sublimate it and I would use a sublimatory channel.

If I have aggression, which is also socially unacceptable, I would try to transform the aggression into socially acceptable behaviors.

As I convert my aggression into socially acceptable behavior, I am sublimating it using sublimatory channels.

In the binary system, when the overt and the covert coexist, co-control, co-rain are both in charge, they collude, they collaborate in creating a sublimatory channel for the pent-up rage, envy and resentment that the collapse had created.

When the narcissist collapses, it's a very, very harrowing and traumatic experience.

It may lead to modification.

I have numerous videos on this channel and I recommend that you watch them.

But what modification does, it disables the grandiose defenses, it disables the false self in effect.

It leaves the narcissist defenseless, skinless, technically a borderline.

It transitions the narcissist into a borderline state.

So any collapse generates a lot of rage, disappointment, dysphoria, resentment, envy and other negative effects.

This is a volcano.

This is an eruption of negativity.

The narcissist experiences it as a form of disintegration in extreme cases or minimally as an extreme narcissistic injury.

And so what to do with all this energy?

The covert and the covert and the covert collaborate.

The overt takes this energy and directs it at the covert.

So the collapse had created negative energy.

The overt narcissist takes this negative energy, encapsulates it, packages it and hands it over to the covert.

It attacks the covert state.

It loaves the covert state.

It maligns and humiliates the covert state.

It rejects the covert state.

It berates and demeans and criticizes the covert state.

This way, the overt state hands over the negative energy of the collapse to the covert state.

The covert state is better equipped to deal with aggression.

Covert state had been dealing with aggression throughout his life.

So the covert state is in charge of aggression, sublimating aggression, repackaging aggression, recycling aggression, transforming aggression.

Aggression is the covert's thing.

The overt narcissist is very primitive when it comes to aggression.

He becomes psychopathic, defined, reckless, consummation.

The covert narcissist is much more subtle.

So the covert state uses the aggression, transforms it into depression and into sadistic fantasies.

Both of these are socially acceptable.

Society accepts the state of depression.

Society accepts fantasy as long as it is not translated into action.

So the covert acts in a sublimatory way.

The covert transforms the covert state, self-state, transforms the aggression into socially acceptable behaviors and means.

When aggression is channeled via grandiosity, it can resolve into one or more speech acts.

So when the covert takes the aggression and channels it, redistributes it, recycles it, repackages it, the covert generates four types of voice, internal voice, kind of introject, bodyless introject.

The covert's internal monologue or internal dialogue is comprised of four strands, four streams of consciousness, four types of speech acts.

First, judgmental, contemptuous and superior and unequal and the best and the first and the most.

This judgmental, contemptuous voice helps the overt express his negative energy, his aggression via the covert.

So it is a kind of courtesy, courtesy channel provided by the covert to the overt.

It's like the covert is telling the overt, listen, you are really a wacko, you're crazy, you're dangerous.

So here I'm giving an outlet, I'm giving you a way to express your aggression, please use it. Be judgmental, be contemptuous to other people or to me.

So the covert state, the covert self-state allows the overt self-state to abuse it. It encourages internal abuse within the system, within the binary system.

The overt abuses the covert and the covert allows it to happen because this is the only way to safely release the negative, aggressive, potentially violent energy of the overt having had collapsed.

Thus generates this nuclear-grade energy and the judgmental, contemptuous channel allows the overt to vent, to offload.

The second channel is the victorious channel. I'm unique for better or worse, for better or worse.

I can be unique as a loser, I can be unique as a failure, I can be unique as a victim. Even then, I'm unique.

The victorious voice is I'm more than you, I'm unique, you're not.

And so the victorious channel is a channel which is used both by the overt and the covert. Both the overt and the covert, don't forget, are grandiose. Both overt narcissism and covert narcissism are founded on grandiose fantasy. They're both fantasy defenses. The only difference is the covert does not succeed to translate fantasy into reality while the overt is much more self efficacious in obtaining supply.

But they're both victorious, they're both grandiose. So this is a mutual channel, a shared channel.

We have one sublimatory channel dedicated to the overt, judgmental, contemptuous channel. We have a second channel, which is a victorious channel, which is a shared channel.

The third channel is a merciful and pathetic channel. The merciful and pathetic channel is again given to the overt. It's usually an exclusively overt channel. But sometimes it is shared. It is a channel that says I pity people because they are inferior to me. I have compassion for people. I act charitably, but I do it ostentatiously so that I can garner narcissistic supply. Praise, for example.

The narcissist is merciful, empathic and forgiving because being merciful, empathic and forgiving renders him pro-social and communal and allows him to garner supply.

In a way, the narcissist is saying, look at me, I conform to social expectations. Don't I deserve praise for this? Don't I deserve narcissistic supply?

So the merciful and pathetic channel is more typical of the overt, but can be used by both.

And finally, the last channel is the educational channel, which is also a shared channel. We have three shared channels and one channel dedicated to the overt because it is the overt who had undergone the collapse. It's the overt who needs a specialized channel.

The self-state, the overt self-state still harbors and reflects the wounds of the collapse. It's still a traumatized, post-traumatic state. It's still a wounded state, an injured state.

So the first sublimatory channel, judgmentally contemptuous, is dedicated to the overt state. But the other three are shared between the two self-states in control, the overt and the covert.

The most channel is my favorite and also the most functional by far. It's the educational channel.

It says, I'm a guru. I'm an intellectual. I'm a thought leader. I elevate other people to my level by teaching them.

The educational sublimatory channel or educational voice has three pillars.

One, learning versus ignorance. The educational channel or educational voice encourages the overt narcissist and the covert narcissist to adopt a position of learning and teaching.

So sometimes they learn, sometimes they teach.

In order to learn, these sub-states have to acknowledge ignorance.

In other words, they have to acknowledge inferiority.

But this is very misleading because learning makes you better.

Learning makes you more.

Learning something makes you superior.

Adding knowledge and rendition and information makes you prevail.

So learning, even though it includes implicitly, it's founded implicitly on an admission of ignorance, learning is a process of becoming superior.

Learning is about being superior.

So when you teach, you are superior.

When you learn, you're becoming superior.

In other words, learning and teaching fully satisfy grandiosity.

And so the educational channel is the most sublimatory of all.

The educational voice is the most socially acceptable of all the four voices because it involves socially commendable, socially encouraged activities such as learning and teaching.

And because it allows the covert and the overt states to acknowledge ignorance, in other words, to humble themselves, they experience humility.

Even though it's fleeting, even though it's humility at the service of superiority, even though it's humility that leads to added grandiosity, it is still humility.

It's a healing voice.

It's a voice that causes transformation in the outlines, in the features of the internal binary system.

It reduces grandiosity by converting it into socially acknowledged, socially sanctioned security.

In other words, the educational sublimatory channel, the educational voice converts grandiosity into self-esteem, renders narcissistic supply, which is pathological, into healthy supply or self-supply, which is the foundation of self-esteem.

It converts grandiosity to self-esteem.

Now, in the binary system, because there has been a collapse and because both self-states are inefficacious in obtaining supply, the binary system is always a system of self-supply.

So this is a very important thing to understand.

The binary system is created when the residual system, the binary system is created when the operating system decides that both the overt state and the covert state are equally inefficacious in obtaining supply.

So now they can't obtain supply.

The overt state had failed, had collapsed in obtaining supply, and the covert state is incapable of obtaining supply.

So now we have a binary system with two self-states, both of them very bad at obtaining supply.

So instead what they do, they create a system of self-supply.

I have a video about self-supply in this channel.

They create a system of self-supply.

The overt self-state generates supply by humiliating and berating and attacking the covert self-state.

It endows the overt state with a sense of superiority.

So the self-supply in this system is actually an outcome of the conflict and the dissonance.

The overt need for supply is satisfying.

The covert state generates self-supply via the fantasy defense.

So the overt state feels superior, feels on top, feels gratified, feels grandiose because the overt state has a covert state which it can humiliate, berate, attack, demean, criticize, etc.

It's a kind of sadistic self-supply.

It's a kind of inner critic, writ large.

Sadistic inner critic.

Harsh inner critic.

So the overt state converts itself into a harsh inner critic and derives supply from what it does to the covert state.

The covert state derives supply, self-supply, by engaging in sadistic fantasies.

And it is sadistic fantasies.

The covert state prevails, is victorious, wins, is on top, humiliates other people, tortures them.

They have self-state in two locations.

One location is overt by humiliating the covert state and one location is covert by engaging in sadistic fantasies.

And so the educational voice gradually converts the grandiosity underlying these mechanisms into self-esteem.

And it accomplishes that by engaging in activities which are socially commendable and acceptable so that the resulting supply is very healthy and can garner and yield self-esteem rather than grandiosity.

The educational voice, the Educational Sublimatory Channel, is also founded on honest communication and on empathy.

In order to teach someone, in order to learn, you must engage in open communication, in honest direct communication, otherwise no real learning and teaching can take place.

Additionally, you need to put yourself in another, in the student's shoes. In order to teach, you need to understand the needs and wishes and deficiencies of the other.

When you teach someone, you impart knowledge in ways which are favorable, which are helpful to the recipient.

So you need to get to know the recipient. Similarly, when you seek to learn something, you need to realize what the other person has to offer. In both these situations, you need to empathize.

So the educational voice, the Educational Sublimatory Channel, encourages humility, healthy supply, self-esteem, honest communication and empathy. It's the beginning of healing.

The binary system is a unique opportunity for healing because no single self-state is in charge, not one self-state is in control, the resistance is low, the resistance to insight, the resistance to change is lower than usual.

And because there's a lot of dissonance and conflict in the binary system, because the overt self-state is attacking the covert self-state in order to generate self-supply. And because the covert self-state engages or retreats or disappears or vanishes or withdraws into a state of fantasy.

So the covert self-state is now totally a fantastic state and derives self-supply from the fantasy.

Both these self-states become vulnerable and they're vulnerable not only to attack from the outside, which would yield to modification, they're vulnerable to change, they're vulnerable to healing.

So one thought, one direction is maybe to induce artificially in therapy to induce a binary system, to induce the synchronicity of two self-states rather than one. Maybe in some ways we can engineer the collapse so as to generate, to create, to force the operating system to create a binary residual system where two self-states reign supreme at the same time and engage in conflict in order to generate self-supply, rendering them vulnerable to intervention from the outside.

In many ways that is what I had been doing in cold therapy intuitively. By re-traumatizing the patient I had created or had induced collapse, actually modification.

And some patients were unable to replace the self-states, the self-state that had been traumatized, the self-state that had been subjected to cold therapy, the self-state that had been mortified. Some patients were unable to replace this self-state with another self-state. So they remained stuck with two or three or four self-states simultaneously which allowed me in level two and level three of cold therapy to integrate these self-states via the educational sublimatory channel, to provide these self-states with a socially acceptable alternative, a sublimatory alternative to encourage these self-states not to be judgmental, not to be contemptuous, not to be victorious.

But to engage in learning and to engage in teaching via empathy and via honest communication.

I've done it and it's doable. But we need to render the narcissist vulnerable, open. We need to render the narcissist humble, humbled by its own turmoil, inner turmoil, by its own indecision, by the dissonance between the two self-states that had remained, the residual self-states. Only then the narcissist is weak enough, his defenses are down enough, his firewall is disabled, you're able to enter as a therapist and create some change.

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 Vaclin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited and a former visiting professor of psychology in white.

Today we're 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.

We all know that the narcissist reacts with emotional dysregulation, decompensation and acting out. In other words, the narcissist becomes a borderline when he's faced with deficient narcissistic supply, narcissistic injury and heaven-for-fend narcissistic modification.

Let me elucidate a bit on all these arcane terms of the trait.

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. Actually, 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.

And 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, narcissistically modified.

Now, 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?" Et cetera, et cetera.

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. And 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. The narcissist's 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 carpet wall-to-wall 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, 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, the dictates, the demands, the requirements, the narcissist becomes more and more isolated, more and more atomized, withdraws, avoids, and the narcissist does this passive-aggressive 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 reactants.

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, his 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 string 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.

Now, 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.

And 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. Nevermind 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 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. And 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, from 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've 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 hurt, doesn't end up hurting other people on the one hand.

And 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 schizo-encecotic state, in short disintegrate, fall apart, become dysregulated.

The narcissist is 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 that 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 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 hyper-reflexivity 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 interjects, 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 into it. He begins to develop decontinous 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. It'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 a 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. And 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 regulation then is totally internalized.

This is healing. This is absolute 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 motherships 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 modifications.

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. And he feels finally it is no anxiety, inner peace and 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's 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 is 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 our plastic 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.

That's why narcissist 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, that 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's 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.

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.

The narcissist is a ghoulish and sinister hybrid, an adult grafted onto a child.

The narcissist is often described as a man child but he is actually neither and the reason he appears so outlandish, so eerie, so creepy and weird, the reason he provokes the famous uncanny valley reaction as if he were some kind of almost human, an android, a robot, the reason he provokes these emotions in his human surroundings is because he juxtaposes wrongly. He becomes an adult where he should have been childlike and he becomes a child in adult situations and this misappropriation and misallocation of roles render him monstrous or freakish and very frequently both.

Gradually the narcissist is shunned by one and everyone, by one and sundry. He is left alone, he is avoided, he is ignored, he is mocked and ridiculed and derided, he is exposed, he is confined and so in this situation the sources of narcissistic supply are depleted to the point that they cannot be recovered or reconstructed and it is then that he resorts however reluctantly to self-supply.

The more of a man child the narcissist is, the more likely he is to end his life, totally self-reliant, self-contained, self-subsisting and self-supplying, a solipsistic atom drifting in the world with zero interactions.

The narcissist's mental age is anywhere between two years and at the maximum nine years, nine years as a high-functioning narcissist. The vast majority of people with narcissistic personality disorder get stuck at age two when separation, individuation from mother fades.

Imagine that's an infant, not even a toddler, that's the mental age, the emotional age of the narcissist.

Cognitively the narcissist is capable of the most amazing deeds and feats but then when he has to process the consequences of his actions, reactions by people, input feedback, attempts to interface with him or to relate to him, he lacks the most basic apparatus, the most basic instruments and he doesn't know what to do and then he chooses to become an overbearing, coercive, sadistic, threatening, controlling adult, the parody of a man, an imitation of some kind, a simulation, gun or eye, artificial intelligence which consists only of a hallucination or he regresses, he regresses at the speed of light, it's disorienting and infantilizes, becomes a baby.

In order to avoid responsibility and to broadcast, to signal to the environment, I'm a child, don't hurt me.

In both situations self-supply is critical. Today I'm going to touch upon the eight or seven or eight techniques that narcissists use to self-supply. All narcissists go through schizoid phases, all of them withdraw from a world that had become injurious or mortifying, all of them process, lick their wounds, process trauma, all of them get re-traumatized, narcissism is a post-traumatic condition, a form of CPTSD, so all of them get re-traumatized pretty easily, they're triggered and so they go through schizoid phases. Self-supply is a critical component in the armoury of the narcissist, it's a prime tool for self-regulation. In the narcissist case, regulation is usually external, the narcissist does not have a self, he is selfless, so he doesn't have a sense of self, but he has a sense of self-worth and his self-worth keeps fluctuating to stabilize it and regulate it and monotonize it if you wish, he resorts to outsiders, to sources of narcissistic supply, so he's very much, narcissist is very much like a borderline or to some extent like a codependent, there is external regulation going on. When this fails for objective reasons and sometimes for subjective reasons, the narcissist undergoes a mental health crisis or develops a kind of micropsychosis, so these are subjective, it's a subjective background for avoiding people. Whenever the narcissist is incapable of extracting narcissistic supply from people, at that point he becomes his own audience, his biggest fan, a member of his own cult, he's God and the only worshipper, becomes a one-man society, a one-person culture and the totality and entirety of history compressed into a single body and that's the narcissist. Today's topic, how the narcissist men-child self-supplies. And a proper man-child, my name is Sam Vatrin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism, a revisiter. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology in Southern Federal University, or Stavandon, Beth Shriving, Russian Federation and I have been a member of the faculty of CEAPs for many many years now, or the decade. CEAPs is the Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies, an outreach program, it has campuses or offices in Toronto, Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom and another thriving location, Lagos, Nigeria. There was a mouthful wasn't it? Okay, let's delve right in. Self-supply is the ability to generate narcissistic supply, attention, adulation, admiration, affirmation, applause, self-congratulation, etc. So the ability to generate supply from the inside while convincing yourself that the supply is actually coming from the outside.

So clinically speaking, self-supply is a delusional disorder, that's a clinical term, it's a delusion and it involves a suspension or impairment of reality testing and a host of defense mechanisms and I refer you to my video on defense mechanisms that I've made about a few days ago and so they're all in action in the case of self-supply but there are ways to engender, harvest and consume self-supply. There are techniques developed early on in life by the narcissists and I'm going to discuss these techniques today.

Technique number one, reframing reality, rewriting the narrative, reinventing the story in a way that buttresses, upholds, affirms and confirms the narcissist's inflated fantastic grandiose view of himself.

Reframing reality involves filtering out, countervailing, negating and challenging information and data on the one hand and taking in elements of reality which can be profitably recombined into a plausible sounding story or narrative that convinces the narcissist himself that his false self is not false.

So the narcissist treats reality as a kind of raw material and then he processes this raw material to produce narcissistic supply in-house, it's like a moonshine factory making whiskey at home during the prohibition period.

So he generates narcissistic supply inside but he does use elements from reality and the reason he needs to use realistic elements is because the narcissist is not actually clinically delusional, he is partly delusional but he is still very much in touch with reality through representations of reality in his mind through internal objects.

So he internalizes reality and then of course he photoshops it, idealizes it, devalues it, processes it, reframes it, falsifies it and everything else.

So while the psychotic raw material is his internal world, the narcissist raw material is the external world and he converts it into a 100% internal representation, internal tableau.

So the narcissist reframes reality in a way that helps him to admire himself, to pay attention to himself, to adulate his own accomplishments, to be old, awestruck and speechless, faced with his own grandeur, magnanimity, charity, intellect etc etc.

But wherever the locus of control may be.

So this is a reframing of reality mechanism number one.

Now we all to be clear, we all reframe reality very frequently but we usually do it in order to avoid hurt and pain, unpalatable outcomes, in order to protect ourselves from dissonance and the anxiety that ensues.

And so these are practical functional reasons to reframe reality.

The narcissist reframes reality needlessly, absolutely needlessly, just in order to support a narrative or a story that is counterfactual mostly, not fully but mostly.

So in this sense the narcissist behavior is very similar to the generation of an ideology. Narcissists are ideological, they have an ideology and they are religious. Narcissism is a form of private religion. Narcissist is God and the only worshipper and the body of the church.

So this rigidity, because religions are rigid, ideologies are even more rigid, ideologies are secular religions. So this rigidity is what forces the narcissist to constantly rewrite reality because reality is not rigid. Reality is surprising and flexible and unpredictable and indeterminate and uncertain and that's not helpful. That's not helpful because the narcissist's only defense against disintegration, against the compensation, the only defense is the belief that some things are immutable, unchangeable, forever.

No, not God, the narcissist or more precisely his view of himself.

That is for eternity. The second mechanism is to create an inflated counterfactual self-perception in a way that no longer requires external input.

So to kind of augment, ossify, rigidify, fossilize the narcissist's perception of himself, which is, as I said, often counterfactual, always inflated and fantastic.

So to cast this self-perception in stone and marble so that it becomes a work of art for the ages. So once this is done, there is no need for narcissistic supply from the outside. The only thing the narcissist needs to do is to regurgitate, recycle, rehash old supply. The narcissist becomes his own secondary source of supply, his own recording mechanism, recording and replaying mechanism, a reenactment of his days of glory, his accomplishments, the reactions from the environment, etc. So he sits there convinced of his own grandeur's self-perception, convinced of his own divinity, convinced that he's a deity, and he recycles memories, essentially, also reframed, also falsified.

But what he perceives as memories, he recycles them to constantly buttress and support this self-perception. So if the narcissist, for example, has an image of himself as a good, helpful person, if he has an image of himself as someone who is always victimized, or if he has an image of himself as someone who is constantly at the center of conspiracies and malign attention by others because of envy or hatred or whatever, these are examples of self-scripts, self-narratives that no longer require input from the outside. The narcissist would say, and it flies in the face of evidence, that narcissists could commit any and every conceivable reprehensible moral act, anything from stealing to, I mean, you name it, narcissists would do anything, and then he would say, I'm a good person, I've done these things because I had no choice, I had no choice because I'm traumatized or because I'm victimized or because I was forced to do it or because I was manipulated or because I was misled or because I am a paper pleaser and I just wanted to please others or because I'm co-dependent and I'm mentally ill and I can't help it. And so this is an example of self-supply. Similarly, when the narcissist constantly casts himself as a victim, he can do no wrong, he is never responsible for his choices and decisions and everything is coming from the outside. All his intimate partners are evil and corrupt and horrible and tormented the poor thing and he couldn't help it. That's an example of self-supply. And of course, paranoid ideation is a major instrument of self-supply. Paranoia, by definition, requires secrecy, requires isolation. You isolate yourself because you're at risk, you're under a threat, you're threatened, so you isolate yourself, but you can perceive the act of isolating yourself as an aggrandizing act. You're isolating yourself because you're a very important person. You are the butt of conspiracies at the center of conspiracies. You are of interest, I don't know, to the CIA or to some group of people who are gangstalking you.

So paranoia is the flip side of the narcissism coin. It's a grandiose reaction, a grandiose cognitive distortion.

And when you develop paranoid ideation, it's a double yummy as far as self-supply because it legitimizes your isolation and it convinces you that you are a very, very crucial person, a person of import.

And so paranoid ideation is very common in self-supply.

The next technique is to reassign weights to sources of supply.

So you rank certain sources of supply as low and others as rich, poor and rich, negative and positive, fake and real.

So you assign weights to sources of supply and it is your power as an arbiter, as a judge, as a referee to decide which source of supply would count and which one would be discounted or discarded.

It is this power that constitutes self-supply.

So the narcissist who self-supplies this way sits at home alone and ticks off boxes.

This source of supply is meaningless.

This source of supply is important, but I got all the supply I needed. And so he kind of rearranges the narcissistic supply space, the pathological narcissistic space, in a way that all sources of supply become extensions of the narcissist. Under his judgment and control, he decides their destiny in fate, in hierarchy and ranking and gives him a feeling of being godlike.

The next technique in self-supply is to convert negative to positive supply.

When the narcissist receives negative supply, for example, when he is criticized, when he is attacked, when he is ridiculed or mocked, when he is threatened, when he can take this and convert it into positive supply.

One way of doing it is via paranoid ideation. They are threatening me because I mean a lot to them. They are stalking me because to this very day, I'm a very important person in their emotional lives. They can't give up on me. They're sad, they're heartbroken that I'm out of their lives. They are threatening me because they're desperate and there's nothing else they can do. They're helpless because I'm omnipotent.

They are ridiculing me and mocking me because they're stupid. They're getting it wrong. They can't understand certain things and so ultimately they are the derisive figures. They are worthy of derision and so on and so forth.

So taking negative supply and converting it into positive supply by reframing the situation, making many assumptions and creating many hypotheticals and then constructing a coherent, cohesive, self-consistent narrative around these assumptions and figments.

So the negative supply suddenly becomes proof of importance, proof of meaningfulness, proof of significance.

So narcissists very often would brag about having enemies. They would share the threats they're getting. They would be gratified by how important they are, how important they still are to the people who are attacking them, threatening them, berating them, mocking them, etc, etc.

Because this is exactly like paranoid ideation. The narcissist is still the center of attention. This is one way of self-supply.

The next technique of self-supply is future or past orientation.

The narcissist can tell himself, "I will be recognized only in the future. I am so ahead of my time. I am such an incredible genius that only future generations will adulate me, admire me, and appreciate my contribution." And these future generations become real to the narcissists because the narcissist interacts only with internal representations.

And so he basks in the glow of his future glory, yet to be realized, actualized and accomplished.

Another way is to go back to the past, to develop past orientation and to say, "Well, I have changed the world. I have been meaningful. I have done this and I have done that." And then to assume that you are still present in the minds of those generations in the past somehow.

So it's to impute presence, influence to people in the past or to people in the future.

That's one way of self-supply.

The next way to self-supply is very similar to paranoid ideation, but not exactly. It's self-aggrandizing referential ideation, ideas of reference.

It's to assume that any post made on Instagram is about you. Any video or video snippet has to do with you. They are hidden messages. They are occult signals. There is an attempt to communicate or beg you to communicate.

So the belief that other people's speech acts, behaviors, choices, and decisions revolve exclusively around you is known as referential ideation and is a major form of self-supply.

The narcissist develops theories, multiple theories, as to why people behave the way they do, especially if they do it in public. Why they behave the way they do? Because of him.

It all has to do with him. They are processing grief. They are threatening him. They're making a promise. They are attempting to communicate. You name it. He's going to create a theory of why they behave the way they do, which has to do with him. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, these theories are wrong.

Referential ideation is often wrong. And finally, another method of self-supply described by scholars who worked with narcissistic modification. It's the delusional revenge fantasy.

Delusional revenge fantasies, especially after modification, are major ways to self-supply. The narcissist goes into extreme intricate, fine detail in planning revenge upon his enemies, real and perceived. He leaves the revenge. This is known as imagery. It's like an imagery exercise. His revenge becomes like a theme park. He enters the theme park and he cultivates and nurtures and waters and thinks about and contemplates and considers and analyzes and sitsarizes everything. It becomes a full-time job. It becomes a pastime, a hobby.

The revenge fantasy fulfills him with a sense of omnipotence and even omniscience because he knows what he's planning. They don't. He knows what's coming. They don't. And this asymmetry of information gratifies him, no end, and caters to his sadistic side as well.

This is a form of self-supply.

Now, there are many other forms of self-supply, but these are the most common strategies.

Self-supply is a crucial maintenance phase in the narcissist cycle of existence.

Narcissists often run out of narcissistic supply and they have to self-supply or perish. And so they self-supply.

Additionally, self-supply is a mechanism of self-regulation that appears to be external regulation. So it's ego congruent. It doesn't disrupt the narcissist balance, equilibrium. The narcissist experiences self-supply as a natural continuation of external supply because he makes no distinction between external objects and internal objects. Everything is happening in his mind, in his head.

So self-supply is perceived as external, especially if the self-supply is linked intimately to specific internal objects which represent people out there, real external objects. Internal objects in his mind are infused with the energy of the self-supply. They are affected with self-supply. And so they attain, these internal objects attain an existence of their own and are misperceived as external.

The narcissist's classic confusion between internal and external objects.

In many ways, what I'm describing is a bit psychotic because it involves elements of hyper reflexivity. And this is what Kernberg, this is Kernberg's observation. That's why he called borderline, borderline on the border between neurotic and psychotic.

Self-supply is the purest form of supply and the crystallization of the narcissistic disorder of the self. It is through self-supply through the prism of self-supply that we can study pathological narcissism better than any other way. Isolate the narcissist on an island and his narcissism would transition smoothly and seamlessly from external supply to self-supply. The narcissism will continue unhindered. The narcissistic personality structure and organization will not be disrupted or interrupted.

But the supply would become internal and to a very large extent delusional. The narcissist's man-child is on the border between man and child, undecided, in limbo, borrows elements from both.

And because it's a very young child, self-supply is very, very reminiscent of certain dynamics in childhood such as primary narcissism. And yet it involves adult, adult elements such as revenge fantasies. And so again, we see the chimeric nature of the narcissist, the hybrid nature of the narcissist. It is a man or a woman of course not fully formed, half-baked, disrupted in a process, a human being interrupted.

Similarly, magical thinking, which is typical of childhood, is an integral part of self-supply.

The narcissist confuses the reality of his internal world with the reality of the external world. Consequently, events and dynamics that are happening inside his mind are misperceived to have occurred or to be occurring in the outside, externally, in the real world.

Gradually, the narcissist comes to develop superstitions and believes that he is capable of affecting the outside world by merely altering his internal landscape, by merely thinking about something or wishing something to happen, or imagining something or believing in something he induces in his mind, he induces change in his environment, both human and inanimate.

This is very typical thinking in childhood. Children have this more or less until age 36 months, but it survives into adulthood in pathological narcissism and is at the core of self-supply.

The narcissist projects his supply onto an unsuspecting environment, but because to his mind there's no distinction between in and out, internal and external, this act of projecting the supply outward is misperceived as receiving supply from the outside. Actually, the supply is 100% internal, but perceived or misperceived is 100% external.

Magical thinking is another example of the men-child hybrid in narcissism.

There's also the issue of the action of primitive defense mechanisms such as projection, but also splitting, projective identification and so on. These infantile regressive defense mechanisms no longer operate in adulthood in the vast majority of healthy and normal people, but with a narcissist they still very much dominate.

Narcissism or pathological narcissism is a failure at developing adult defense mechanisms, and so the childhood ones, the childlike ones of the infantile defense mechanism survive.

Self-supply relies on these mechanisms.

For example, the narcissist splits everyone into all good people and all bad people, and the old bad people are after him, they're out to get him, and this fosters paranoid ideation, but of course paranoia is a form of grandiosity.

Similarly, the narcissist divides the entire world into good and evil, black and white, hot and cold, loving and hating, and so on and so forth.

This splitting mechanism creates the equivalent of a morality play. The narcissist is on the side of good versus evil, he's on the side of good people versus evil people, he's being persecuted and prosecuted and threatened by really bad characters.

Now, this is a form of rewriting the world as a theater play, rendering the world a theater play.

The cinematic aspects of the narcissist mind and life are undeniable in self-supply. That's why I keep saying that self-supply is the purest form of pathological narcissism.

Some reminders.

Locusts of grandiosity, the narcissist is grandiose, he distorts reality, refrains it so as to support an inflated and fantastic self-image.

Grandiosity therefore is a cognitive distortion, but there is a misperception of grandiosity as usual among self-styled experts online.

Grandiosity is not about being the best, the fastest, the greatest, the most amazing. Grandiosity is about being special, unique, one-of-a-kind, sui-genres, unprecedented.

So listen well, even negative input, even scathing feedback, even the most extreme criticism, humiliation, put downs, you name it even these can constitute narcissistic supply.

Sometimes you attack the narcissist, you go at the narcissist, you try your best to humiliate the narcissist, to expose the narcissist, to derive the narcissist, to laugh at the narcissist, to mock, to ridicule and so on and so forth, only to discover that all this time you have been providing the narcissist with narcissistic supply a plenty.

Thank you very much.

So if the attack or the criticism or the humiliation or if they are sufficiently extreme, they constitute narcissistic supply.

So if you tell the narcissist, you are the biggest abuser ever, you are the most accomplished con artist, you are the most egregious failure, you are the most unprecedented waste. These are forms of narcissistic supply. They will not lead to narcissistic injury and they will not result in modification because they aggrandize the narcissist, they render the narcissist special, unique, fascinating, amazing, the center of attention.

It's a wrong way to go about it.

Okay, so this is the first point, the locus of grandiosity.

A narcissist could be very proud of his failures, of the fact that he is a loser, of his abuse, of his misconduct, simply because they are unprecedented, they are special and unique and amazing and egregious and extreme and radical that renders him, renders him one of a kind, hence narcissistic supply.

I'm a man who keeps his promises. Sometimes. Well, this is one promise I'm going to keep. I'm going to give you bullet points regarding this video so that those of you who cannot tolerate my face or my voice or both for longer than three minutes can log off having grasped and having heard everything I have to say.

So here it is, the summary of today's video and those of you who would like to learn more can proceed to listen to the rest of the video.

Today's video deals with self-supplying, the techniques that narcissists use to supply themselves when they are unable to secure the supply from the environment, from other people.

The narcissist self-supplies in order to avoid collapse and in order to avoid dysphoria or depression, which are usually the married companions of collapse.

And this delusional solution, self-supply of course is delusional, renders the narcissist auto-erotic. In other words, the narcissist is emotionally invested in himself and there is no emotional investment without a sexual dimension.

So this is known as auto-erotism. And because the narcissist converts himself into the object of his own infatuation, admiration, adulation and attraction, the narcissist is incapable of being attracted to other people.

And so the narcissist becomes cerebral, asexual.

When the narcissist experiences imminent collapse and begins to self-supply, this kind of narcissist becomes cerebral, even if typically he is somatic, even if the dominant type is somatic, because he also becomes auto-erotic, invested in himself in every possible way and only in himself.

Now, plentiful narcissistic supply, when there is a lot of external narcissistic supply coming in, also poses problems for the narcissist.

The narcissist reacts to an avalanche of overwhelming, drowning, dysregulating supply, unexpected supply by developing a form of fantasy that is resilient, that is counterfactual, of course, it's not related to reality, it's a fantasy, but contains elements of siege, betrayal, paranoia, suspicion. It is not a shared fantasy. It is a fantasy that involves only the narcissist and other people out there who are envious of the narcissist.

The narcissist renders himself the butt and the center of conspiracies and so on and so forth.

Now, an overabundance of narcissistic supply creates residual libido.

Narcissistic supply enhances the narcissist libido. The narcissist uses some of the libido and then there's change left, there's libido left.

Now, you can read about the narcissist's free libido, reserve libido, and residual libido in the link in the description. But suffice it to say in the bullet point summary that a narcissist who is exposed to an unexpected, deluge flood of narcissistic supply becomes typically somatic because his libido explodes and there is excess libido and he doesn't know what to do with it, so he somatizes it, he sexualizes it, he becomes hypersexual.

Okay, the techniques of self-supply which I dwell on in this video are future orientation, exclusive privilege or superior reference, self-referential transcendence, self-audiencing, self-referential ideation and attribution, contemptuous withholding, and paranoid ideation.

And if you want to learn more about these techniques, unfortunately you would have to wade through the rest of the video.

The first part of the video is an introduction to the dynamics of deficient supply and excess supply.

Both deficient supply and excess supply create problems for the narcissist and he defends against these problems, against these emerging issues, by developing fantasies, a fantasy of self-supply and/or a fantasy of siege and betrayal.

In the first case, the narcissist becomes cerebral because hefantasies, a fantasy of self-supply and/or a fantasy of siege and betrayal.

In the first case, the narcissist becomes cerebral because he is auto-erotic, he is invested emotionally and sexually in himself, he becomes the object of his own desire.

In the second case of abundant or overabundant supply, the narcissist becomes somatic because the supply generates excess libido, excess if you wish, life-drive or life-force, excess sex-drive and he uses it with partners that he objectifies and instrumentalizes and so on and so forth.

This is a summary.

Because so very few of you are watching my videos, I decided to switch to self-supply.

I got myself a pilpilot and this pilpilot never argues with me, never criticizes me, he's always there when I need it and always nods its trunk in perfect adulation and agreement with everything I have to say.

What more can I ask for? And this is today's topic, the techniques of self-supply.

When the narcissist can no longer obtain supply from the external environment, he generates supply from the inside but he does it in highly specific ways which I'm going to enumerate in this unwatched video.

And who the heck am I?

My name is Sam Vachnin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a former visiting professor of psychology and I'm currently on the faculty of CEPS Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies and I'm the proud owner of this pilpilot.

Thank you V.

Okay, so Shannon Pilpilotim and pilpilotot, it's time to delve right in as we usually do.

First of all I advise you to watch the previous video on self-supply titled self-supplying narcissist miracle cure. The link is available in the description which is still mysteriously under the video.

Okay, the narcissist self-supplies in order to avoid collapse.

Let me remind you what is a collapse. A collapse is a long period, not a single event, but a long period of deficient narcissistic supply. An inability to elicit supply, narcissistic supply, from the human environment. A failure at obtaining narcissistic supply from sources extant and potential. A rejection by sources of narcissistic supply. The dropping off of such sources and the inability to secure secondary narcissistic supply, for example from a spouse.

So the narcissist finds himself in a vacuum of supply, hoho vacui. He finds himself horrified by the lack of supply and he catastrophizes, he says to himself, I'm never gonna obtain supply, it's over.

Now when I say he, it's a she, she is a he, yeah gender pronouns are interchangeable because 50% of all narcissists nowadays are women who are ready for women's liberation. So the narcissist self-supplies in order to avoid this condition known as narcissistic collapse because narcissistic collapse often goes hand in hand with dysphoria or depression and I refer you to my video on the three depressions of the narcissist.

It's an intolerable condition bordering on modification and so the narcissist resorts to his favorite strategy and his favorite solution is fantasy. It's a delusional solution. It's a solution that says you don't need anybody, you don't need anyone, you are your own best source of narcissistic supply. You are so far superior to others that your opinion of yourself matters much more than their opinion of you and so it is delusional but it also creates a redirection.

The narcissist redirects his emotional investment, his catharticis from the outside to the inside. It is a transition, a reverse transition, a regression from object relations narcissistic self-object relations. So it's full, full steam backwards to infancy.

The narcissist becomes auto erotic. Now I've been asked an excellent question for a change by one of you. You ask me when the narcissist self-supplies he does not refer to external sources of supply so he cannot be cerebral and he cannot be somatic.

What is the type of a self-supplying narcissist? Is he cerebral? Is he somatic? Is he covert? Is he overt? All these definitions become meaningless when the narcissist isolates himself solipsistically becomes a schizo-it, a hermit and does not refer anymore to external objects also known as you.

So in such a situation the narcissist energies, life energies also known as libido. Libido is comprised partly of the sex drive, eros and partly of elavital, the life force.

When this life force is directed inwards the narcissist also becomes auto erotic. All his drives including his sex drive are become self-directed.

In this case the narcissist is far more likely to become cerebral.

So self-supplying narcissist, the vast majority of self-supplying narcissists become cerebral because they also become auto erotic and therefore they cannot be somatic. They can still be cerebral, they can still be creative, they can still produce works of the intellect but of course they cannot have sex with someone else.

And their bodies are objects of sexual desire so they redirect the sexual desire at themselves but this sexual desire is more erotic than proper sexual.

In short it is far more likely that the self-supplying narcissist would become cerebral or attempt to become cerebral even if he is not intelligent enough to pull it off.

So many somatic narcissists who are facing collapse because they're getting older, they're getting sicker, they are off the market, they're out of the market. Many such narcissists suddenly develop pretensions at intellect.

So somatic narcissists who are faced with collapse suddenly try to become cerebral narcissists, they try to become gurus, they try to become public intellectuals, they try to become philosophers, they try to become experts in self-style of course and self-declare the experts in some field.

So the transition from somatic to cerebral in the case of imminent collapse is very very common.

Now when the narcissist's supply is deficient, the narcissist is likely to become cerebral, exactly the opposite happens when there is plentiful external narcissistic supply.

That is also a problem. Both collapse deficiency and plenty are problems.

There needs to be a fine-tuned regulation of the flow of narcissistic supply. If you get too much of it or if you get too little of it, the narcissist decompensates, acts out and essentially falls apart. It even becomes pseudo-psychotic.

So when there is too much narcissistic supply, plentiful narcissistic supply, this leads the narcissist to develop resilient, ever more counterfactual, unrealistic fantasies. But these fantasies are not shared fantasies. They are fantasies of siege and betrayal, the fantasies of paranoia and pain and hurt and shame.

So the reaction to plentiful narcissistic supply is on the one hand increasing hyper-vigilance, paranoia even, a sense of siege being under siege, a sense of betrayal, referential ideation. People are conspiring against me, mocking me, talking about me, gossiping about me, etc. On the other hand, the excess narcissistic supply, the narcissistic supply that cannot be consumed because there's too much of it, is converted into residual libido. It generates too much libido.

So too much supply is translated to too much libido and this renders the narcissist somatic in a predatory way.

When the narcissist is exposed to fame, celebrity, adulation, sudden abrupt success beyond the narcissist's wildest dreams, exposure to multitudes of adoring fans, etc. etc. The narcissist would tend to become somatic but not only somatic, he would tend to become a sexual predator in the majority of cases.

So we have these two situations, an imminent collapse, declining narcissistic supply, deficient supply and then complete lack of supply where the narcissist tries to convert himself into a cerebral narcissist and invests all his energies, emotional and sexual, in himself.

And the opposite situation is when the narcissist is suddenly deluged and flooded with narcissistic supply, especially unexpected narcissistic supply, this enhances his libido, especially the aero spark, the sexual drive. He becomes somatic even if he started off as a cerebral, he becomes somatic and very likely a sexual predator.

Now I've analyzed all this 25 years ago, 28 years ago, our time passes, 28 years ago I've analyzed all these mechanisms in minute and intricate detail and it's available in the Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revisited. I will post a link to the segment section of Malignant Self-Love that deals with these issues.

So again you can find it in the description if you want to delve much further into these amazing transmogrifications and transformations between somatic and cerebral as a way to either compensate for lacking a lack of narcissistic supply or for excess narcissistic supply that threatens to overwhelm, dysregulate and drown the narcissist.

Okay so this is in the essay and you can find the link in the description.

I promise you to discuss techniques of self-supply.

Again to remind you self-supply is when the narcissist gives up on external sources of narcissistic supply and decides that he is his best source of narcissistic supply by far the most qualitative, the most superior and he needs nobody. He needs no one. He can supply himself with narcissistic supply plenty. There's no need to resort to an environment which would prove to be injurious and rejecting.

And the narcissist supplies himself in several highly specific ways and I'm going to enumerate them now.

Number one, future orientation. The narcissist tells himself future generations would appreciate my legacy. In due time history would prove me right. I would be proven right by future scholars etc.

So the narcissist reorients himself rather than be grounded in the present where there's no supply, there's narcissistic injury, there's even modification, there's constant reminders of failure and defeat.

This kind of present the narcissist rejects and he starts to reorient himself to become a denizen of the future.

His outlook is future oriented. He keeps talking about his legacy.

Now it doesn't matter what people say about him. Now it doesn't matter that he's being rejected and mocked and ridiculed and criticized and exposed. None of these matters because the future will vindicate him.

This is technique number one of self-supply.

Second technique of self-supply is to refer to exclusive privileged or superior reference. The narcissist measures himself against highly specific handpicked chosen people. He says to himself I don't care what the hoi polloi say. I don't care what people on the street have to say about me. I care only about my peers and my peers are geniuses. My peers are accomplished people. My peers, my potential mentors even are at the top of the game in their profession. Only geniuses can understand and appreciate my work.

So he gives up. He gives up on the sources of narcissistic supply that they had been tapping hitherto by reframing the situation and saying I'm rejecting them. It's not that they are rejecting me. I'm the one who is doing the rejection.

This way the narcissist feels that he is in control. He regains and reasserts mastery. He is the boss. He's calling the shot. He's a driver's seat.

This is a reframing, a totally delusional counterfactual reframing of the process.

The narcissist is rejected by potential sources of supply and actual sources of supply. But rather than acknowledge this fact and endure devastating narcissistic injuries and modifications, the narcissist says that's not true. I made them do it or I'm the one who has rejected them.

And I rejected them because I deserve better. I deserve an audience which is much more sophisticated, much more chic, much more knowledgeable, much more intelligent, much more everything.

So I'm transitioning from an audience which is beneath me, sources of narcissistic supply which are low grade and whose supply is low grade and fake. I'm transitioning from this group to an alternative group.

Of course it takes time and there's a transition period, but ultimately I will be recognized by this new reference group which is far superior to the previous reference group.

This is the second mechanism.

The third mechanism is what I call self-referential transcendence.

Self-referential transcendence is when the narcissist convinces himself.

There is in some ways superior to the overwhelming vast majority of the rest of humanity.

It is self-referential because it is the narcissist who convinces himself. He is doing the convincing and it has to do with transcendence.

So such a narcissist would say I am hyper moral. My morality is amazing. No one is as moral as I am. I'm strong. I'm inordinately strong. I'm not aware of anyone who is as honest and as strong as I am. I'm gifted. I'm a unique genius. There are only eight other people in the world who are as geniuses as geniuses I am.

I'm a martyr. I'm a victim. I'm a healer. I'm a savior. I'm the scourge of evil people. I'm going to eradicate evil people. I'm a protector, for example, a protector of women.

All these are forms of self-supply.

The narcissist by referring to himself in a way that is self-aggrandizing entrenches his delusions of superiority and grandeur.

And this way transcends the temporary hiatus or temporary lack of narcissistic supply.

The next technique is self-audiencing.

Self-audiencing is when a narcissist essentially splits himself into he is the source of creativity. He produces works, works of art, works of the intellect.

And at the same time, he is also his own exclusive audience. Not only is he his best audience, he is his exclusive audience. So it's a kind of multiple personality.

The narcissist becomes his own critic, his own fan, his own audience, his own follower, his own disciple, his own protege.

And this self-audiencing is manifested in a variety of forms.

For example, the journaling. The narcissist can write a journal, a diary, and then convince himself that it is an amazing work of art, the equivalent of Anne Frank's diary or I don't know, Marcel Proust.

And one day, the journal or the diary will be discovered and will become a literary masterpiece. It's an example of self-audiencing.

Another way, self-documenting. Accumulating every scrap of paper, every electronic document that ever passes or crosses the narcissist's variety of devices, documenting, documenting, documenting, even going to the extent of recording oral interviews with others, creating a rich, all-encompassing, all-pervasive, ubiquitous documentation of the narcissist's life, living behind a legacy that will be explored by future scholars and will be the only then appreciated for what it is, the documentation of a singular mind.

Another example of self-audiencing is self-appraisal when the narcissist analyzes himself and says, objectively speaking, I'm a genius, you know, compared to others, I'm exceedingly handsome.

So this is self-appraisal.

Of course, the self-appraisal is a direct derivative of the fantasy and therefore it's delusional.

It's delusional self-appraisal and it is intended to provide the narcissist with narcissist self-supply.

So these are all examples of self-audiency when the narcissist becomes his own most faithful, most loyal, most adoring, most forming audience.

The next technique is self-referential ideation and self-referential attribution.

It's when the narcissist projects onto other people, parts of himself that he is ashamed of, parts of himself that he rejects, parts of himself that challenge and undermine his grandiose inflated, fantastic self-perception. He projects these parts onto others and then he attributes these parts to others and sometimes he even forces others to behave accordingly, something known as projective identification.

An integral part of this process is self-referential ideation, developing ideas about other people and how they see the narcissist. So the narcissist tells himself, for example, everyone envies me. That is self-referential ideation. Everyone envies me. Everyone is talking about me. I'm the center of attention. I'm the life of every party. I'm being sorely missed. My ideas are influential. Everyone is plagiarizing and pilfering them. So sentences about other people which reflect directly on the narcissist, sentences, statements about other people's state of mind as it refers to the narcissist. These are self-referential ideation and attribution, making assumptions which are fantastic in many cases, counterfactual, not in all cases, but in many cases, making assumptions about other people and how they see the narcissist, their attitude to the narcissist and even their plans, their agenda when it comes to the narcissist.

So this leads gradually, self-referential ideation and attribution gradually evolves. The longer the period of collapse and the longer the period of self-supply, self-referential ideation and self-referential attribution gradually evolve into paranoid ideation.

Paranoid ideation is of course self-aggrandizing. It's a form of grandiosity. I am the focus of a conspiracy. Unsufficiently important to be at the heart of malign intention and attention. Everyone is planning to take me down because I matter, because I'm important, because I'm critical. And so paranoid ideation places a narcissist at the center. It's a center of a conspiracy. It's a center of a collusion. It's a center of malign intention. It's a center of malignant attention. It's not a good center, but it's still the center.

And this is supported by the betrayal and siege fantasy that most narcissists have and also by self-referential ideation and attribution.

Now it's very important to mention here that self-referential ideation and attribution and paranoid ideation are both triggered. They're triggered by both a lack of supply, a collapse, and too much supply, an excess of narcissistic supply. Both situations which are out of balance dysregulate the narcissist.

When the narcissist is exposed to an avalanche of narcissistic supply, when he's deluged with narcissistic supply and it's abrupt and it's unexpected, he doesn't have the tools to cope with it. He develops a siege and betrayal fantasy where he is at the core of some malign malignant attention, conspiracies, and collusion.

And that's because everyone wants to take him down. Everyone envies him and he's becoming too influential. And so the powers that be, for example, want to destroy him. So this is a reaction that is a form of self-supply when narcissistic supply is deficient and a form of desperate attempt to regulate when narcissistic supply is overwhelming and dysregulate.

Okay. Now the last technique of self-supply is contemptuous withholding. The narcissist isolates himself, becomes a hermit, you know, schizoid. And he says to himself, withdrawing my presence, my absence, these are punishments. I'm punishing people. They could have enjoyed my company. They could have benefited from my ideas. They could have basked in my personality. They, and they gave all this up in their infinite stupidity. They didn't appreciate me. They didn't reward me. They didn't supply me. They didn't notice me. So I'm holding them in contempt because only stupid people would have missed my shining presence. I'm withholding myself. They don't deserve me. They don't deserve my contributions and my output. I'm alone because no one is on my level. And I know no one is on my level because they wouldn't give me narcissistic supply, which I richly deserve.

So there is contempt here. And the contempt leads to withholding, withdrawal and avoidance as punitive measures against potential sources of narcissistic supply or actual sources of narcissistic supply who ceased to supply the narcissist.

The narcissist perceives a lack of supply, the withholding of supply. He perceives it as an act of aggression. He perceives it as a malevolent malign act. He cannot, the narcissist cannot countenance the possibility that he doesn't deserve narcissistic supply. He believes that his very existence is in itself a cosmic event of spectacular proportions.

And so when people withhold supply, when they refuse to provide the narcissist with supply, when they provide the narcissist with negative supply, they criticize him, they disagree with him. When they suddenly cease to provide supply, having supplied the narcissist in the past, the only explanation the narcissist has is there is malice here. There's malevolence. This is done on purpose. It's an act of aggression or passive aggression. It's intended to destabilize me, dysregulate me, destroy me, devastate me, take me down, ruin me, push me to do something crazy, to act out in order to entrap me.

So the narcissist then devolves into a resilient entrenched unassailable fantasy of betrayal and siege and paranoia and hypervigilance and suspicion. He convinces himself that his value, his grandiosity is fully justified and buttressed and supported by this evidence. The very fact that everyone envies him, everyone is trying to take him down, everyone is refusing to provide him with narcissistic supply that he so evidently deserves, these very facts prove conclusively how important he is, how critical he is, how influential he is, because only powerful, influential, important people are at the butt of conspiracies and collusions.

Paranoid ideation comes the main form of narcissistic supply at the end of the process of self-supply.

Now self-supply is still vastly preferable to dependency on external sources of narcissistic supply. Self-supply is the closest that the narcissist can come to, I wouldn't say healing, but to social functioning.

By self-supplying the narcissist stops harming other people, by confining his attentions and his intentions to himself only, the narcissist's abrasive and antisocial dimensions and aspects are all but eliminated. He withdraws into a world of fantasy that is essentially psychotic.

And yes, clinically this is very unhealthy, but the manifestations of narcissism which are harmful to others, hurtful to others and dangerous to others all but vanish when self-supply becomes the dominant mode of narcissistic supply.

And that's why I think the focus in the treatment of narcissism should be on teaching the narcissist to self-supply in a way that does not devolve into delusionality and paranoia, to teach the narcissist to self-supply in a benevolent manner.

For example, to self-audience, self-auditing is harmless, it's innocuous, future orientation is okay. Referring to specific highly privileged, exclusive people in his mind, that's also okay as long as it does not deteriorate to irretrimaniac delusions.

There are ways to redirect and channel the narcissist's energy so that the narcissist's self-supplies and the self-supply is sufficient so the narcissist becomes self-sufficient and self-contained and yet the narcissist's self-sufficiency precludes behavior that harms other people.

For example, when the narcissist's self-supply is no longer in need of a shared fantasy, he gives up on the shared fantasy way of relating to other people.

So people don't suffer anymore, they don't become figments of the narcissist's imagination captured within his shared fantasy like so many ants in amber.

When the shared fantasy is gone as a solution, replaced by techniques of self-supply, no other people are involved except the narcissist.

So a lot of suffering is ameliorated and reduced and eliminated and isn't this the goal ultimately of all psychotherapy and healing.

Here is a quiz for you on this Sunday day. Guess who is the narcissist and who is his long-suffering partner?

And the penalty for getting it wrong is you have to watch this video to the end. Can you conceive of anything worse than this punishment?

Don't answer this. Don't answer this. I'm sorry I asked the question. I will draw it. Please.

I can't be confronted with harsh, cruel, bruising reality, the truth.

Okay, Shoshanim, Shifanpanim and happy almost Christmas.

Today we are going to discuss the narcissist doing you the greatest favor ever. The narcissist endowing you, bestowing upon you the privilege of being with him and I call this sacrificial entitlement.

Now we all know that narcissists are entitled. They think they deserve special treatment just by virtue of existing, by virtue of gracing the planet with their immaculate presence. They are godlike. They are worthy of worship and admiration and frustration and special services and of course the four S's sex services supply, statistic and narcissistic and safety.

Narcissists feel entitled to this. They don't think they have to invest or commit or do hard work or toil they don't think they have to study. They don't think they have to progress up the ladder, corporate ladder or the ladder of a relationship. They're not into evolution.

The narcissist is into revolution. The narcissist regards himself as a catalyst. His very presence, his very existence should trigger automatically the chemical or alchemical reactions which would yield to the utter materialization and realization of his goals, cater to his emotional needs and soothe him and comfort him with narcissistic supply a plenty.

So within this context of I exist therefore I deserve to paraphrase Descartes, within this context you must understand that it is your privilege to serve the narcissist.

It is an amazing favor bestowed upon you. It's a gift to be able to witness and document and record his life. He is sacrificing himself to afford you with these opportunities. His entitlement in this case is sacrificial or self-sacrificial.

Now of course sacrificial entitlement is a form of self-supply. It combines grandiosity and victimhood. The grandiose part is I'm amazing, I'm perfect, I'm brilliant, I'm a genius, I'm drop dead gorgeous, I'm one of a kind, I'm endowed, I'm gifted, I'm skilled, I'm unprecedented and therefore I am something or someone to be aspired to. I'm a role model and I am such an enticing package that I am irresistible. Everyone would want desire, crave to be with me. That's the grandiose part of sacrificial entitlement or let's say that's the entitlement part and the second part in sacrificial entitlement is the victimhood.

The narcissist says for me to be with you, for me to accompany you, for me to provide you with advice and succor to listen to you, for me to share my life with you, that's a sacrifice. I'm such an elevated being. I'm the equivalent of a deity and I gain to come down to earth to be with you. I'm sacrificing my superiority, my amazing intellect, my gifts endowments and skills, my potential future. I'm sacrificing all this just in order to be with you and you must appreciate it and you should be grateful for my concessions and my sacrifices.

So sacrificial entitlement combines grandiosity with victimhood. On the one hand, it elevates the narcissist into a god-like posture. In this sense, sacrificial entitlement is a form of self supply.

On the other hand, it convinces the narcissist, sacrificial entitlement convinces the narcissist that he is giving up, missing out, sacrificing, being less than he could be just in order to be with you, to share his life with you, to serve as a companion, an intimate partner or friend to you, a father to you, a husband to you, whatever role may be. They all require the narcissist to minimize himself, to not actualize his full potential because his full potential is divine.

You in other words, you are the human who drags him from heavens. You are the one who reduces him. You are the one who plunges him into the abyss of reality and humanity. He is above all this. He is god-like. He is a deity and you, by virtue of your limitations and of the fact that you are mere mortal, mere human, you force him to reincarnate in your form and shape.

Narcissist therefore is a Jesus complex. I am God, but I am God incarnate. I am God in the flesh of a human being. I am God who consents, condescends. I am a god who agrees, however reluctantly, to share the human experience with you.

Had you not been in my life, I would have been pure, unadulterated, immaculate, perfect being. You in other words, my intimate partner, my child, my colleague, my neighbor, my good friend, you drag me, you reduce me, you push me into the imperfection that is the human condition. And I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to do this for you, but you must realize that I'm a victim of my good heart, that I'm doing this just to cater to your needs and to be there by your side and to hold your hand.

And you should really, really, really be grateful for this and appreciate it because this is the most amazing sacrifice, most incredible, humongous sacrifice conceivable.

I'm sacrificing my essence, my quiddity. Who I am, says the narcissist, I'm sacrificing all these just so that you may survive, just so that you may experience well-being and happiness in my presence.

So I recognize my uniqueness as a godlike figure, that's the grandiose part, but I'm willing to let go of it just in order to be with you.

And that is the victimhood part, the sacrificial part.

Similarly, narcissist would say, I'm excessively moral, I attain the high moral ground. I'm rigidly ethical. I would never do anything that reaches any boundaries or ethics or morality, and they would use this morality as a club. They would beat you up with their morality. They would, it's punitive, they would punish you with their morality.

That is an example of sacrificial entitlement. I'm entitled to special treatment by virtue of being the perfect moral agent, by virtue of being a paragon of ethics.

So this is the grandiose part, and I'm sacrificing myself. I'm constraining my behaviors, I'm controlling my impulses, I'm postponing gratification, I'm doing all this for you.

That's the sacrifice.

So this is the moral narcissist, pro-social or communal narcissist.

Similarly, narcissist give, they give money, they give gifts, they give to charity, but their giving is grandiose, it's ostentatious, and it's manipulative. They give in order to receive.

And so their giving is a form of sacrificial entitlement. I am sacrificing, I'm giving you my money, I'm giving you my property, I'm giving you access to me, to myself, I'm giving you my contacts, I'm giving you, I'm being altruistic, I'm being charitable, I'm being selfless. That's a sacrifice.

But in due to this sacrifice, I'm entitled, I'm entitled to your gratitude, I'm entitled to your obedience and submissiveness, I'm entitled to your sex, to your services, to your supply, and to your presence, which makes me feel safe. I'm entitled to safety.

So narcissistic giving or narcissistic altruism or narcissistic charity, quote unquote, they're manipulative, they're Machiavellian, and they're intended to cater to the narcissist's sense of entitlement by ostentatiously sacrificing.

You know the kind of mother who says, "I sacrificed my life for you, now you owe me." That's an narcissistic mother.

The narcissist's broadcast to you, his transmission to you is, "You have the privilege to be privy to my life. You have the amazing gift of being able to witness my adventures and my accomplishments and my moments of glory." This is something other people would die for.

And here it is, handed over to you on a plate. You should be eternally grateful to me.

And your gratitude should translate into action by being obsequious, obedient, submissive.

The narcissist says to you, "The life you share with me is a transformative experience comprised of hundreds of teaching moments." Now it's very ironic because that happens to be true.

A life with a narcissist is most definitely transformative and has thousands of teaching moments. However, the narcissist believes that your transformation is for the better, is improving you somehow, is upgrading you from less to more. That's his point of view.

While your point of view is, of course, that the narcissist is destroying you, ruining you, devastating you, punishing you, withholding from you, intermittently reinforcing you, trauma bonding you and so on.

Now, objectively, you are right, of course. These are the outcomes of the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy is the only way the narcissist can relate to other people.

And it involves inevitably, the valuation and discard is built into the shared fantasy.

But the narcissist is so self-delusional and so self-deceptive that he regards the time he has had with you as a huge endowment, a huge gift that he has given you. Because you will never be the same afterwards. You will be far more mature. You will be more experienced. You will be more worldly. You will be more educated. You will be more something. Of course, your subjective experience is that you will be a lot less.

So when you abandon the narcissist finally, or when the narcissist even discards you because you're a bad object, you're a per secretary object, I'm sorry, and you're an enemy, narcissist discards you because you leave him no other choice.

When this breakup, whether you abandon him or he abandons you, when this breakup finally happens, the narcissist regards your behavior as the most egregious form of ingratitude. You're ungrateful. You're ungrateful because he has given you everything imaginable, which millions of other people would be clamoring for, dreaming of, and would never attain. And yet, you bite the hand that feeds you. You reject him. And this is part of your inexorable devaluation. You're a per secretary object, partly in big part because you are ungrateful.

Perhaps you're ungrateful because you're too stupid to be ungrateful, to be grateful. Perhaps you don't even realize or appreciate what the narcissist has given to you. Perhaps you don't possess the intellect to properly assess and evaluate the narcissist's gifts. And perhaps you are just a slut, immoral. Whatever the case may be, the narcissist has given you the world and you were stupid enough to reject it in his eyes, and he will never forgive you this, even if he were to over you. Even if he were to over you, it would be with a certain kind of reserve because he would consider you somewhat inferior, having missed the first opportunity to be with him, having botched up this unique breakthrough that you could have had just by virtue of sharing your life with him.

Then it says a lot about you. Re-idealizing you in the hovering attempt is not as easy as the first time around because the narcissist harbors the memories of the narcissistic injury and has to reshape the per secretary object in his mind. He has to convert you from enemy to an ideal object. That's quite an honorous work. It's a lot of toil, a lot of investment and commitment.

And the narcissist regards even this as credit, a credit to him. The very fact that he has idealized you should render you eternally grateful to him, eternally in his debt, eternally in hope even, because whenever have you been idealized, whoever treated you this way, hasn't he been the first to see the true you, your real potential, the fact that you're perfect? Hasn't he provided you with access to his gaze so that you can share this love that he has for this idealized image? You can fall in love with yourself, become self-infatuated? Hasn't he taught you to self-supply in other words?

Yes, he has.

And he cannot forgive you. He cannot forgive you for having been having been too moronic, too stupid or too evil or too dysregulated to walk away from all these riches, from these treasure chests that the narcissist is.