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Why Narcissist is Fragile, Vulnerable

Uploaded 9/15/2024, approx. 14 minute read

Overt, grandiose narcissists appear to be so self-confident, so charming, life of the party, so authoritative, even domineering.

So why do we keep saying that inside the narcissist there's a frightened, cowering, traumatized little child, a fragile, brittle, broken core? Why do we keep saying that the narcissist pathological narcissism, his grandiosity, for example, is compensatory. It compensates for an inner lack of self-confidence and self-esteem, a fluctuating sense of self-worth, and an inferiority complex.

Why do we keep saying these things?

Well, listen to this video and you might have the answer from whom?

From Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse and a professor of clinical psychology.

There's a very simple experiment you can make in order to convince yourself that inside the narcissists there's a fragile, brittle, hypersensitive and hypervigilant core.

Challenge the narcissists, disagree with the narcissists, criticize the narcissists, offer advice and help to the narcissist, and you will see the reaction.

The narcissist becomes defensive, aggressive, demeaning, mocking, dismissive, or even anxious.

That is proof positive that all narcissists overt and covert inside internally are fragile and vulnerable.

Now, this is not the orthodoxy. That's not the mainstream.

The mainstream is that there are two types of narcissists, fragile, shy, vulnerable narcissists, also known as covert narcissists, and narcissists who are happy-go-lucky, super self-confident, and so on so forth, who actually believe, they do believe their own invincibility, omniscience, omnipotence, and so.

That is the current mainstream, but it is changing fast.

And gradually, many, many scholars are beginning to accept that pathological narcissism always compensates and camouflages an inner core, or actually an absent inner core, that very very fragmented very very sensitive very very susceptible and vulnerable.

Why is that? Why is this core problem say? Why is this core?


Why is this vulnerability, fragility and brittleness of the narcissist?

It's because the narcissist is delusional.

A delusion is a belief about the world, which is counterfactual. It defies the facts, defies what we know, defies all evidence, and yet cannot be eradicated, cannot be eliminated in the face of overwhelming evidence.

So when you talk to a delusional person and you present that person with an evidence, that his beliefs, his ideas, his concepts, his perception of reality are wrong. And you flood the delusional person with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The delusion persists. The delusional person refuses to let go. He reframes reality. He ignores what you are saying. He accuses you of ulterior motives. He devalues you. There are numerous defenses. Anything just not to give up on the core, on the delusion.

So the narcissist is delusional.

One of the narcissists' delusions is his self-perception, his self-image, his very sense of self.

It's a delusion.

He is grandiose. It's a cognitive distortion of reality. He perceives reality wrongly. He has impaired reality testing. He believes himself to be super genius, super brilliant, amazingly handsome, irresistible, godlike, all-powerful, all-knowing, and so.

Such self-imputed beliefs fly in the face of reality, of course. They are often contradicted, often undermined and challenged by reality, and yet the delusion persists.

The narcissists' delusion is unique. It is comprised of a rejection of reality, a rejection of inner reality, as well as a rejection of outer reality.

In classical delusional disorders, there is a rejection of outer reality.

With the narcissist, there is a rejection, a renouncing of the internal world as well as the external world.

And this dual rejection, this complete avoidance of anything that resembles reality, this is the reason for the narcissist's fragility, vulnerability and brittleness.

Let's start with the fact that the narcissist is not possessed of a self. He doesn't have aself. He has something called disturbed or diffuse identity. It's the same applies to borderline personality disorder.

So there's no self there.

In the years, during the years in which the self is formed, integrated and constellated, the process of self formation, the formation of the self, has been disrupted, disrupted by abuse, trauma, bad parenting, and so on.

So, in early childhood, when typical children, who later become normal, healthy adults, develop an ego in Freud's parlance, in Freud's language, or a self in Jung's language, or whatever you want to call it, this core identity, which is essentially there, felt as a core, felt as an identity, experienced as one's essence, this fails to develop in narcissists and to some extent in borderlines, it fails to develop.

So there is no self, there is no stable consistent identity, there is no stable, consistent identity.

Everything is regulated from the outside. There is an external locus of control.

The borderline regulates her emotions and moods from the outside via the intimate partner. The narcissist regulates his sense of self-worth and his very experience of personhood and self-hood via other people who provide the narcissists with narcissistic supply.

So the narcissist derives his self from the outside, and it is not a real self, of course. It is a hive mind. It is ersatz. It is fake. It is a simulacrum, simulation of a self.

Internally, the internal landscape, the inner landscape is fragmented. It is populated with mostly hostile and devaluing internal objects.

It's like a vast field with thousands of internal objects, some of them active, many of them dormant, and most of the active ones are enemies of the narcissists, internal enemies, Trojan horses, fifth column. They act against the narcissists, in a variety of ways.

The narcissists' only defense is his narcissism.

Fantasy and cognitive distortions such as grandiosity defend against shame and rage and they compensate for this empty schizoid core and internalize bad object, the self-disparaging, self-hating introjects inside the narcissist.

So the narcissist needs to falsify external reality because he has not internal reality.

Rather than have an internal reality, a core identity, a stable presence, some kind of cohesive essence, instead of having all this, what the narcissist has is a battlefield, a war raging between introjects inside him, most of which are out to get him, how to take him down, how to humiliate him and disparage him.

And when I say him, her, half of all narcissists are women.

So the fantasy and the cognitive distortions, the rejection of reality, the falsifying of reality, it's a kind of defense mechanism, writ large, defense mechanism gone awry, defense mechanism, a rogue defense mechanism if you wish.

So fantasy and grandiosity serve to fake external reality in a way which would allow the narcissist to vicariously experience a stable, immutable sense of self where there's none, where there's no self.

It is this emptiness inside the narcissist and the piece of fiction, the narrative that is superimposed on it, that render the narcissist vulnerable and fragile and brittle, because it's all fake. It's all untrue. It's all a story. It's nonsense.

Reality can undermine the pillars and foundations of this construction at any minute and often does.

This is called narcissistic injury or narcissistic mortification.

The narcissist is in a constant state of panic and terror because the narcissist knows somewhere deep in the recesses of his convoluted, diseased mind. The narcissist knows that all this is a lie.

This is not only self-deception, but the deception of others. It's a massive con. The whole thing is a massive con. It's a simulacrum. It's make-belief. It's a movie. And he knows it.

There's this imposter syndrome, internalized and externalized. And the narcissist knows that his severely, a severely impaired reality testing renders him vulnerable to contradictions, to challenges from reality, posed by reality, to the stratagems and manipulations of other people.

This whole I don't exist, but I'm going to pretend that I exist as a god, is untenable. It's untenable, it's even ridiculous, I would say.

Narcissus is a comic had they not been tragic.

And so the narcissist walks around people, walks in life, traverses life, pretending to be someone he's not, and someone, no one can be, a god, a divinity, a deity.

And he's pretending to be someone he is not, because he is not. Because there's no one there.

Is there a greater vulnerability than absence? I keep saying that the narcissist is an absence masquerading as a presence.

If you pretend to be present, if you pretend to be to exist and you don't, is there a greater vulnerability than this?

I don't think so.

The narcissist is fragile precisely because he anticipates attack. He's in a constant state of extreme anxiety. He knows what's coming. He knows the next narcissistic injury is on the way, the next humiliation, the next contact with his buried and repressed shame, life-threatening shame, the next narcissistic mortification.

The narcissistic life is a constant war zone. And reality is perceived as a terrorist organization. And the agents of reality, other people, for example, are terrorists.

The internal fantasy of the narcissist, which he tries to impose on other people in the form of a shared fantasy, is about a paracosm, an alternate reality, a virtual reality, a metaverse, if you wish.

And he's there, embedded there, and he's hunkering there. It's a survivalist instinct. It's a bunker. And he's entombed there, awaiting the inevitable nuclear war, which may or may not obliterate him and his defenses.

The fragility of the narcissist, the brittle nature of the narcissist, is the outcome of the inevitable clash between harsh, intruding, imposing reality and the paracosm that is a narcissist mind. A playground of fantasies, make-believe, imagination, narratives, fiction, movies, theater production. And all theater productions end at some point.

It is a fear of mental death. The narcissist is experiencing inner death and grieving it all the time. He's dead inside.

Yet he tries, attempts to pretend that he's very much alive. And he succeeds to convince himself, he confabulates. He convinces himself that he's very much alive, not only very much alive, but very much alive, in a superlative and superior way as a deity or a godhead.

And then reality threatens always. Reality threatens to expose him for what he is. A non-entity, being, no nothingness.

The narcissist has no boundary self, no ego to push back or to mediate these countervailing messages from reality.

So they acquire, these messages acquire, these signals, acquire a threatening nature, especially when they collude with a primitive superego in an infantile moral defense.


Now that's a mouthful. Allow me to explain.

The narcissist has an internalized bad object, a set, a group of voices, coalition of introjects that keep informing the narcissist that he is inadequate, unworthy, a loser, a failure, ugly, stupid, etc.

But pathological narcissism is a defense against this.

It's as if the narcissist is saying, you, to the voices, to these voices, to these intruders, you're wrong.

Not only am I not stupid, I'm a genius, not only am I not impotent, I am all-powerful, I'm omnipotent, not only am I not stupid, I'm a genius, not only am I not impotent, I am all powerful, I'm omnipotent, not only am I ignorant, I am omniscient, I know everything, I'm exactly the opposite of, you're perceiving me so wrongly, he says to these internal disparaging voices, you're perceiving me completely wrongly, I'm the exact opposite of your misperception.

So this is pathological compensatory narcissism.

And then there the messages that come from the outside. And these messages that come from the outside, they collude with these voices. They enhance them, augment them. They serve as evidence. They prove these voices right.

And these voices are what this internalized bad object is known as the primitive superego. And it is involved in something called the moral defense, which I expound on in other videos.

In a nutshell, it's when the child says, I'm all bad, mommy is all good.

So whenever the narcissist is confronted with reality, he regresses, he infantilizes, he self-infantilizes, he becomes a child again. And as a child, he's all bad.

The reality amplifies and magnifies the internalized bad object to the point of suicidality.

So the narcissist needs, simply in order to survive, to shut reality off.

And this inability to access reality as it is externally, inability to access an internal reality which is non-existent.

The fantasy, the fallacious, counterfactual fantasy that separates the inaccessible external reality from the non-existent internal reality, all this construct, all this structure is a house of cards.

This is the narcissist's fragility and brittleness. That's why he breaks down very often actually.

Even the most apparently resilient, thick skin, super strong narcissists is very, very, very hypersensitive to slides and insults and criticism and disagreement and tends to be hypervigilant, precisely because the narcissist knows that a single remark, a single look even, can bring the whole house of cards precariously balanced down on his head.

And then he would have to face both external reality, which is harsh, uncompromising, and non-aggrandizing, and internal reality, which is harsh uncompromising and non-aggrandizing, an internal reality which is a black hole, a howling emptiness.

And there is nothing more terrifying than this.

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Embarrassing Narcissist

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


Narcissists: Achievers and Failures

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


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Faces of Narcissist's Aggression

Narcissists possess a grandiose sense of self-importance and believe in their unique mission, often viewing their lives as significant narratives meant for future documentation. They expect others to recognize their entitlement and comply with their needs, leading to frustration and aggression when the world does not accommodate them. This aggression can manifest in various forms, including passive-aggressive comments disguised as helpful advice, which serve to inflict emotional harm. Ultimately, narcissists harbor deep-seated hostility and resentment, making their interactions potentially harmful to those around them.


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The narcissist constructs a false self that is godlike and seeks admiration, adulation, and attention from others. They create a narrative of their life that is partly confabulated to prove the veracity of their grandiose claims. However, reality intrudes, and a gap opens between their self-perception and their pedestrian existence. The narcissist copes with this by denying reality and inventing a new narrative that accommodates the intrusive data.


Dissociation (Amnesia) & Confabulation in Narcissism (Intl. Conf. Clinical Counseling Psychology)

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Masked Narcissist: Private Vs. Public Personas

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Why Narcissist APPEARS So STUPID (Borderlines and Psychopaths, too!)

Narcissists, despite often possessing high intelligence, frequently exhibit profound stupidity in their interactions and decision-making due to cognitive distortions like grandiosity and a lack of empathy. This disconnect from reality impairs their ability to learn from past experiences, leading to repetitive mistakes and self-destructive behaviors. Their immaturity and reliance on external validation further contribute to their inability to navigate life effectively, making them susceptible to manipulation and poor judgment. Ultimately, their intellectual capabilities are overshadowed by their emotional and social dysfunctions, rendering them inadequate in real-life situations.

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