You have experienced years of abuse, torrents or verbal castigation and chastising, harsh criticism, humiliation, public and private shaming, degradation. It seems as if the narcissist's only role and only job was to take you down, to pull you apart, to negate you and to vitiate you until you are no more.
And then one day you witness a miracle, much bigger than the parting of the Red Sea. The narcissist is shedding tears. Yes, you heard me correctly. He is shedding tears, also known as crying. The narcissist is crying and you love it. You want more of it.
Why? For two reasons.
Some of you believe that the narcissist tears are proof positive that there is something inside him which is redeemable, that there is an inner child or a part of the narcissist which craves for love and compassion, and that given this, the narcissist can heal and become whole and re-enter your life as a benign presence. And so, the narcissist tears tend to substantiate this view of the narcissist as a flawed being but not beyond help.
Others, other victims of narcissistic abuse, simply cherish the moment. It's a form of retribution, giving the narcissist a taste of his own medicine. Witnessing the narcissist in his moment of collapse, frustration, anger, helplessness, and hopelessness is a salve. It's a form of medicating the torture that has been your pseudo relationship with a narcissism.
So some victims of abuse are delusional, malignantly optimistic, with pathological hope, as Shadow de Angelis calls it and others are simply vengeful and they cherish and relish the backlash and the payback that the narcissist ostensibly is experiencing but both groups of victims of abuse are getting it wrong.
The narcissist cries for no reason known to healthy normal human beings.
Today we're going to explore the etiology of the narcissists tears, the causation, what makes the narcissists cry.
Indeed, actually this is the second video in which I've dealt with the narcissists displays of sentimentality and crying. Watch the first one titled, Why Narcissists Cry at the Movies? Self-Pity, not empathy.
You need to know this before we proceed. Next time you see your narcissist lacrimoso, next time his cheeks are swathed and washed by a torrent of tears, flee away, run away. Escape. You're in danger.
Crying is a warning signal. It's a red alert for reasons which I will expound upon a bit later.
Crying is also a part of the prosody of entraining. In other words, it's part and parcel of the narcissist brainwashing. It's a manipulative technique. It's not intended as a form of communication. Look, I'm crying, I'm hurting, I'm sad, and broken, help me.
That's not how the narcissist experiences his tears.
Tears, like everything else, like any other type of behavior, like any form of display, affect display, tears are meant to inducing you behaviors to modify your conduct. In other words, tears are Machiavellian, manipulative.
And apropos tearsers, my name is Sam Vaknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse, and a professor of clinical psychology in multiple universities too numerous to count, most recently Southeast European University.
Okay, the narcissist is crying. Your instinct, your reflex is to hug him, to embrace him, to offer succor and assistance and help, and to commiserate, or even provide advice. Perhaps your reflex is actually to, as I said, relish the moment, add to the narcissist misery, somehow push him down even further, degrade and humiliate him, confront him with his own weakness and vulnerability.
Both reflexes are dangerous, very dangerous for reasons which I will explain in a minute.
Number one, don't forget that you do not exist, as far as a narcissist is concerned, you do not exist as an external object. You are arrayed, an internal object, an apparition, an emanation, most probably a miasma.
In other words, you do not possess an existence that is independent of the narcissist mind.
When you defy this role, when you defy yourself, that is independent of the narcissist's mind.
When you defy this role, when you defy your status as an internal object, you frustrate the narcissist.
When you engage in behaviors which are proof positive of independence, personal autonomy, agency, decision making, when you have your own social circle, your own supportive family, your own friends, these are challenges.
In the eyes of the narcissists, you're trying to undermine, you're trying to sabotage the internal cohesive and coherent structure of his world, of his mind, as he perceives it.
It's actually not coherent and not cohesive, not orderly, and not structured.
But the narcissist, as usual, deceives himself into believing that it is.
Any challenge from the outside threatens to unsettle the precarious balance of the narcissist mind and he's not gonna forgive you for this.
When you frustrate the narcissist, when you defy the narcissists' expectations, when you act in a way which is agentic and independent and autonomous, when you make decisions and choices which are not in accordance with the narcissists shared fantasy and the narrative that he is trying to impose on you in all these cases you are not only frustrating the narcissists but you are threatening him.
The narcissist perceives this as a hostile act and you become instantly a persecutory object, an enemy.
There's a sense not only of frustration but a sense of loss of control and enormous anxiety. This leads to emotional dysregulation of negative affects.
In other words, this lead to rage, this leads to envy, this leads to kind of attempt to destroy you somehow, to remove you, etc.
You're challenging the narcissist's grandiosity, and you're placing him face to face with his shame and his vulnerability.
This generates in him self-pity.
Narcissists use crying as a form of virtue signaling and self-victimization.
When the narcissist cries, he's sending out a signal.
I'm a victim. I am moral. I'm righteous. I haven't done anything wrong and look what he or she is doing to me.
It's a manipulative tactic.
But it's important to understand that the narcissist cries intentionally, deliberately. It's a deliberate act.
Whereas in the vast majority of healthy and normal people, crying is a reflex. It's reflexive. It's uncontrollable and it's usually the outcome of empathy.
When the word empathy was first coined by a German, no less, the original word was einfühlen. That means a unity of emotions.
And it was applied at the very beginning, about a hundred and something years ago. The word empathy was applied to works of art. People's reactions to paintings and to sculptures, this is what scholars of the time described as empathy.
And indeed, when we are faced with a painting, with a movie, with a piece of art, with another person in distress, with sadness, with circumstances, certain circumstances like war or conflict or hunger, when we are exposed to images in the news, etc., we don't sit down and say, okay, this is very sad, and the appropriate reaction, the appropriate affect, would be to cry.
People don't do that. They cry because they cannot help it.
This is not the case with the narcissist.
The narcissist's crying, like absolutely everything else in his repertory, like every single aspect and dimension of his endless choreography, the narcissist crying is instrumental.
It is intended to convey a message, message to signal, especially virtual signal, to establish a position of victimhood, to manipulate his environment, to influence your behaviors, to shame you, to guilt trip you, to emotionally blackmail you, and to trigger in you, empathy, and maternal instincts.
This may not always work. The narcissist may cry and find to his utter shock that his intimate partner or his best friend or his co-workers find his crying hilarious and very welcome.
But even then it induces in people a loss of control. The narcissists' crying creates a loss of control.
The narcissists' tears dysregulate people, whether positively or negatively, they may enhance empathy and trigger maternal instincts, or they may cause people to behave in ways which are essentially socially unacceptable and even disgraceful. They may become vengeful. they may become rageful.
Whatever the case may be, the narcissists crying, the narcissists' lacrimos tears, they place people under the narcissists' control and sway.
Because the narcissists' tears cause people a form of disorientation, they feel as if they have been catapulted into some kind of dream scape.
It is so atypical of the narcissists to display emotions that any ostentatious behavior usually associated with emotions is very, very disorienting, very confusing.
And it is this confusion that the narcissist leverages it is this disorientation that the narcissists wishes to induce because then people's defenses are down, their vulnerabilities are exposed, and this allows the narcissist to obtain his goals, usually some form of narcissistic supply, or if the narcissist is malignant and psychopathic to obtain other goals such as sex or services or supply which is sadistic or anything else, access, power, you name it.
In the face of tears, people become defenseless, they either become very sad, they empathize, or they exalt, they're happy.
And in both situations, it's easy to make them do what you want them to do. They're vulnerable.
The narcissist's choice to cry is rare. Narcissists very rarely cry.
But when they do, it has to do with rage.
The narcissists' tears do not reflect an underlying depressive position. They're not associated with sadness, hopelessness, like in normal healthy people.
On the very contrary, the narcissist cries because he is furious. And he's furious because he experiences self-pity.
It's as if the narcissist is telling himself I'm being victimized here I should pity myself but pitying myself is shameful because it means I'm not Godlike I'm not omnipotent.
So I'm experiencing shame, this shame is life-threatening.
Now, who made me cry? My wife made me cry. My girlfriend made me cry. My co-worker made me cry. My boss made me cry. The government made me cry. Someone made me cry. made me cry and this agent this entity who made me or which made me cry they are all bad, they're evil.
Narcissists, you remember our children, the mental and psychological age of a typical narcissist is around two years old.
When the narcissist comes across a situation where he feels frustrated, denied, abandoned, ignored, rejected, humiliated or shamed, when he comes across a situation like this, or even when he anticipates such outcomes, he immediately regresses, he infantilizes. He becomes a baby or a toddler, an infant in any case.
And then at that point he feels helplessness, self-pity, impotent rage, and this triggers splitting.
I'm all good, says the narcissist. I'm all good.
And the people who made me cry, the institutions who made me cry, the circumstances which made me cry, they are all bad.
This is called dichotomous thinking. It's a division of the world into all bad and all good with the narcissist as the arch angel or the godlike figure, which by definition is all good.
The minute the narcissist splits, you made the narcissist cry because you resisted him. You objected to something. You disagreed with him. You humiliated him. Whatever the reason may be.
At that point, the narcissist splits. He becomes all good and you become all bad.
There's self-pity and there's a sense of threatbecome all bad.
There's self-pity and there's a sense of threat.
Because there's a sense of threat, a psychopathic protector self-state emerges, which is a fancy way of saying that the narcissist becomes highly psychopathic, highly antisocial.
This is very reminiscent of the mechanism in borderline personality disorder.
When the borderline anticipates or experiences rejection, abandonment, separation and humiliation, she becomes a secondary psychopath.
When the narcissist experiences the same, when he is frustrated, when he is impotently enraged, when he is self-pitying, when he experiences shame and mortification, at that point he becomes a primary psychopath.
It's a temporary stage known as the protector self-state.
But still, he becomes utterly psychopathic, dangerous, aggressive, sometimes violent, defiant, contumacious, hateful of authority, and reckless.
You are faced with a psychopath not with a narcissist.
Think of it as multiple personality disorder. When you trigger the narcissist, when you confront the narcissist, when you object to something, when you resist, when you disagree, when you shame the narcissist somehow, when you expose him, when you degrade him and reduce him and criticize him and insult him, when any of this happens, it's multiple personality, the narcissist personality or the narcissistic self-state vanishes, and the psychopathic self-state, which is protective, takes over.
And the psychopathic self-state has only one goal, only one goal, to eliminate you, to destroy you, to remove you from the scene, because you are constant source of dissonance, constant source of discomfort, displeasure, shame, harrowingshames, utterly consuming shape.
And the psychopathic protector, self-state, has to remove you mentally, psychologically, and if all else fails, physically.
When we witness situations like the Watts family, where the narcissist murdered his wife and his own children, it's because the process that I'm describing has happened.
As a psychopath took over, the narcissist became a full-fledged psychopath.
And then the only thing this psychopath could focus on, the only goal, it's a tunnel vision.
This psychopathic protector of self-state is a one-track-minded robotic monstrosity and needs to get rid of you in whatever way, whatever it takes, is going to do it.
Remember that the narcissist is a very powerful adult, but with a mindset of a child.
Frustration, according to Dollard in 1939, frustration leads to aggression.
And this is true for adults as well, but because the narcissist is a child, mentally speaking, psychologically speaking, is an infant, the frustration and the aggression are associated with magical thinking, with temper tantrums, with inability to control impulses, impulsivity, with rage that is all subsuming, and with a splitting of a maternal figure.
You're the narcissist mother and you have let the narcissists down, you've disappointed the narcissists. You have proven to the narcissists that you're a bad mother.
And so as a bad mother, you deserve to die, sometimes literally, but definitely figuratively.
The magical thinking allows the narcissist to construct implausible, impossible, science fiction kind narratives.
The narcissist transitions into a psychopathic self-state.
The psychopathic self-state protects the narcissist from the shame that is self-destructive and life-threatening.
And the psychopathic self-state seeks to destroy you because you are the one who provoked this shame. You are the one who made the narcissist cry.
So, the psychopath, the newly emergent psychopathic self-state, seeks to destroy you. You're the cause of this frustration.
But because the narcissist is a child and because he has magical thinking, in his mind, all this is temporary.
In other words, even if the narcissist were to kill you physically, in his mind as a child, a two-year-old child, your death is a temporary condition, a transient condition. You're going to revive, you're going to resurrect, you're going to come alive again.
It's as crazy as this.
The narcissist's magical thinking is exceedingly infantile. It's very rudimentary.
And so the narcissist believes that his wishes always come true.
Now he wishes you dead. Two hours from now, he wishes you alive. And he sees no contradiction between these two wishes.
He is all-powerful. He is godlike.
Now imagine a two-year-old psychopath equipped with the body of an adult, the instruments of an adult, and the weapons of an adult. It's a major risk, major risk, and you should take this very seriously.
When the narcissist starts to cry, pack your things and go away. Go away for a few hours, go away for a few days. Make sure that he calm down. Make sure that he has regained his equilibrium and his homeostasis. And make sure that he has reverted from a psychopathic protector of self-state to a narcissistic self-state.
Make sure that he no longer perceives you as a threat. He no longer regards you as a slayer. He no longer considers you as the agent of his death and dissolution and destruction.
In other words, you're no longer the enemy. You're no longer the persecutory object.
As long as a narcissist expresses anger with you, frustration, and so on, stay away.
Initial communication with the narcissist should be remotely via the internet, via phone, Skype, I don't know. Do not be in the physical presence of the narcissist, especially when he cries.
Remember, healthy, normal people misinterpret behaviors and traits of narcissists. Because the narcissist is a mirror image of a healthy person. It's a topsy-turvy human being or wannabe human being.
Whereas when people cry, they're less dangerous. When the narcissist cries, he is way more dangerous.
I want to talk a bit about frustration and what we know about frustration and so on so forth.
Frustration is when we have an impulse and we cannot act on it.
Now this is a very primordial, this is a very atavistic and basic way of looking at the human psychology.
We all have impulses, but in due time we learn how to constrain them, how to control them, and how to sublimate them, how to convert the energy of the impulse into a socially acceptable activity.
And yet, it creates frustration.
Whenever we want something very badly, and there's no way we can get it, we become frustrated.
Whenever we feel the need to act, whenever we actually act and the outcomes do not correspond to our expectations, to our imagined outcomes, we become frustrated. Whenever you're prevented from obtaining something, you've been led to expect, based on past experience, for example, based on social norms, then you become angry and then you become aggressive.
Frustration translates into anger or rage in the case of the narcissists and this leads to aggression or violence in the case of the psycho.
It's valid, this paradigm of frustration aggression is valid in all the animal kingdom, not only among human animals.
Non-human animals react with visible frustration. For example, when they're hungry, if you prevent a hungry animal from obtaining food that it can see, food that it can smell, the animal reacts with frustration and immediately with aggression.
When a child is not allowed to play with a visible toy or with a peer, the child becomes aggressive and very often violent.
Internal forces can include motivational conflicts and inhibitions. External forces can include the actions of other individuals, admonitions of parents or others, and the rules of society, injunctions both societal and parental.
All these lead to the restraining and constricting of impulses, to the moderation and tempering of expectations, all these are accompanied with a modicum, some level of frustration, and frustration, therefore, is an emotional state.
There are good arguments to suggest that frustration is an emotion and therefore is subject to emotional dysregulation.
We can be overwhelmed, overcome by hate, by fear, by love. We can be overwhelmed, overcome by frustration.
Indeed, in classical psychoanalytic theory, frustration is perceived as some kind of psychic energy that is dammed up, that is accumulated. And then seeks an outlet in wish-fulfilling fantasies and dreams or in various neurotic symptoms.
Frustration is a huge power, and it can wear many guises and disguises. Camouflages itself.
In the case of the narcissists, frustration is intolerable. We say that narcissists have a low threshold of frustration.
This threshold is even lower when it comes to psychopaths. So when the narcissist transitions from a narcissistic self-state to a psychopathic self-state, the tolerance of frustration goes even further down and the potential for aggression and violence is much enhanced.
I keep mentioning the frustration aggression hypothesis first proposed in 1939 by John Dollard and his colleagues.
Dollard said that frustration always produces an aggressive urge, and that aggression is always the result of prior frustrations.
Neil Miller, one of our proponents of this theory, later noted that frustration can lead to several kinds of actions, But he maintained that the urge to aggression will become more dominant, the longer the frustration lasts.
In 1989, a US psychologist by the name ofLeonard Berkowitz, no, not the son of Sam, someone else, Leonard Berkowitz.
He proposed that frustration must be decidedly unpleasant in order to evoke an aggressive urge.
So as you see the debates about nuances, but there is no psychologists alive or dead who would dispute the in ineluctable and direct connection between frustration and aggression.
So when you say the narcissist is frustrated, you know the next stage is going to beaggression. It could be overt aggression. It could be passive aggression. It could be sabotage or undermining. It could be something bad, but something bad is going to happen.
Why stay? Why take the chance? Why continue to interrupt? Walk away.
We have something called in psychology something called frustrating non-reward hypothesis it's a proposition that when you withhold previously given reinforcement of responses this creates frustration which leads to aggression.
In operant or instrumental conditioning, we reinforce behaviors. If you behave well, you get a positive reinforcement.
For example, you're allowed to watch a Sam Vaknin video.
When you behave badly, then you get a negative reinforcement. Actually, you don't get a negative reinforcement, but the positive reinforcement is withheld.
In other words, you're not allowed to watch a Sam Vaknin video, which is the end of the world.
So this is known as operand or instrumental conditioning.
Now imagine that you developed an expectation that whenever you behave well, you're going to hear my voice and going to see my face and you're going to live the rest of your life in bliss.
And then suddenly you behave well and someone prevents you, doesn't give you, doesn't allow you to access YouTube.
This would create frustration and the frustration would lead to aggression.
The internal state of frustration motivates the subject. This is known as the frustration effect.
Frustration creates motivation, but the motivation is negative.
Frustration, the motivation generated or engendered by frustration, is a motivation to remove the reason for the frustration, the cause of the frustration.
So it's a destructive motivation. You wish to destroy the entity, the situation, the institution that frustrated you.
This was first described by Abraham Maslow, who was a US behavioral psychologist.
I mentioned frustration tolerance, it's the ability of an individual to delay gratification or to preserve relative equanimity when encountering obstacles.
So many people have a high frustration tolerance. They try to do something, it's not working well, they come across many obstacles and hindrances and impediments and they persevere. They still go on.
Or they expect something good to happen, it doesn't happen. Or they expect some reward and they don't get it. Or they have an impulse, they want something and they can't obtain it, so they have to delay gratification.
These people are mature. They're adults. They know how to control the frustration, sometimes even how to channel the frustration, to convert it into positive motivation. Narcissists cannot do any of these things. Narcissists are children. They cannot delay gratification. They act on their impulses. They are furious when they are denied some benefit or reward. When they encounter an obstacle, they regress, they go back, they don't go forward. They are very in effect helpless. There's a...
Narcism is a form of learned helplessness. It's as if the narcissist says, reality is too much for me. I'm unable to cope with reality. I don't have the skills. I'm inadequate. This is known as the internalized bed object. So I'm going to give up on reality. I'm going to live in fantasy.
But then the narcissist expects you to participate in the fantasy, to support the fantasy, to affirm the fantasy, to confirm the fantasy, and to become a figment of the fantasy.
And if you don't, you're an enemy, you're a bad mother. And you really, really, really need to be punished. And the fury is so enormous that the narcissists starts to cry. He's so frustrated.
Reminds you of something? Yes, the terrible twos, two-year-old babies, two-year-old infants, that's a narcissist. The growth of adequate frustration tolerance occurs as a part of the child's cognitive and effective development. If the child's development is disrupted or arrested by abuse and trauma by being instrumentalized or parentified, then the child does not develop the necessary cognitive and effective tools to cope with frustration.
There is no strengthening of the adaptive levels which allow a mature adult individual to cope with frustration. Only therapeutic intervention could help, but narcissists are not amenable to therapy, of course, because they compete with a therapist. They are more knowledgeable than the therapist. They are more knowledgeable than the therapies. They are more intelligent than the therapies. They're also more handsome than the therapies and they're definitely younger than the therapist. So, therapy is no good. Without therapy and without the necessary adult mature tools of coping with frustration, the narcissists is exposed to constant cycles of frustration aggression, frustration, frustration, frustration, gradually aggression becomes a second habit. The narcissists becomes more verbally abusive, not less, more prone to violence, not less, more externalized aggression, not less, more destructive to himself and to others, not less. Narcissism is a condition that is exacerbated by habituation. The narcissist gets used to aggression as a solution to frustration. And so it becomes a habit.
That is why it's very dangerous to witness the narcissist's frustration and to try to intervene in any way, negatively or positively, because you will bring on your head the wrath of the narcissist and his wish to get rid of you in any way.
At that moment, the narcissist is clinically insane, utterly psychotic, insane. It doesn't know what he's doing and definitely cannot control. There's no decision making. There's no process of rational choice. There's just primitive, primordial urges that take over the analysis. He becomes an automaton, a robot with the wrong programming, with glitchy programming. You'd better stay away. So when the narcissist cries, don't cry with him. When the narcissist cry, don't try to hug him or embrace him. That is humiliating and shameful. When the narcissist cries, don't offer advice or succor or help because this means the narcissist is less than godlike. He's not omnipotent. He's not all-powerful not all knowing you're humiliating the Nazis when the narcissist cries don't empathize with him don't cry too don't when the narcissist cries definitely don't gloat don't be don't be happy, don't smile, don't laugh when the narcissist cries, there's only one thing to do.
Pick up your purse, a few changes of clothes, your car keys, slam the door behind you, and do not come back at all, or at least don't come back until you've made sure that the narcissist psychopath, an inner psychopath, the psychopath that has taken over when you have frustrated the narcissist and denied him, that psychopath is gone.
Because this psychopath wants you dead, at least metaphorically, but unfortunately on some occasions physically.