Why the Drama in Cluster B Personality Disorders

It's your spouse, your colleague, your neighbor, your boss, your own child.

They seem to be in a constant state of crisis.

But the crisis doesn't feel real. It feels contrived, it feels artificial.

There is a lot of emotional dysregulation, ostentatious displays of hyper-emotionality. There is switching between incompatible, irreconcilable self-states. The sweetest person could become a demonic psychopath.

There's chaos, disruptive behaviors, sabotage, passive aggression, identity diffusion or disturbance.

You can't recognize the same person from one minute to the next, from one day to the next. There's a lot of mixed signals.

I hate you, don't leave me. I love you. I wish you were dead.

There is inconstancy, indeterminacy, capriciousness, arbitrariness, and unpredictability.

In one word, there's a lot of drama.

Why the drama in Cluster B personality disorders? The cluster that is also known as the dramatic, erratic cluster, and for good reason.

Today, we will understand the role of drama in the lives of these people and what their drama does to you.

And no, I'm not talking about my videos.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm also a professor of clinical psychology.

Start with a definition.

Dramatization.

Dramatization is defined by the APA, American Psychological Association Dictionary, as attention-getting behavior, such as exaggerating the symptoms of an illness in order to make it appear more important than the occurrence of the same illness in another person.

In psychoanalytic theory, dramatization is the expression of repressed wishes or impulses in dreams.

So dreams are dramatic.

There are a few common features to the drama in the lives of all Cluster B personality disorders.

Cluster B personality disorders couldn't be more different to each other.

The psychopath is cold-hearted, cunning, scheming, calculated, machiavellian, callous, dis-empathetic and heartless.

The borderline, on the other hand is overflowing with emotions such as love and dedication and so.

So they seem to be incompatible.

But what unites them all is drama.

And the drama in the lives of the psychopath, the antisocial personality-disordered person, the patient with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and the much-forgotten histrionic personality disorder, the drama in the lives of all these actors has a few basic, common underlying features.

I'm going to deal with the underlying features first, and then I'm going to describe each and every cluster B personality disorder and its relationship or its relation to drama and dramatization as an instrument, as a behavior, as a mood, as a choice.

It is important to understand that drama enhances self-efficacy.

Drama is perceived by the disordered person as a positive adaptation, because drama secures outcomes.

When you, as a borderline or a narcissist or even a psychopath, histrionic, when you use drama, you get results.

Drama, therefore, enhances your ability to extract favorable outcomes from an environment which is sometimes indifferent, in the best case, or hostile.

Drama is also a form of external regulation.

By using drama, you elicit and solicit highly specific reactions from people.

These reactions are used to regulate internal psychodynamics, internal psychological processes.

Your sense of self-worthif you're a narcissist, your sense of self-worth if you're a narcissist, your sense of safety and stability if you're borderline.

So this is external regulation and drama is a tool intended to secure this form of regulation because internal regulation is missing.

Drama is addictive. It's addictive because it's a form of risk taking. There's a lot of adrenaline involved. There's a lot of dopamine involved. I'm kidding you not. It's hormonally addictive.

Drama is also a kind of challenge, challenge to oneself and challenge to the environment.

That's why it's so intriguing and so interesting and so captivating and so fascinating and so amazing.

Drama is a mystery. You never know how it's going to end and you never know how it's going to unfold. You cannot second guess the reactions of other people. You cannot anticipate and predict fully the way the environment would adapt to your drama and alter itself, transform, owing to your drama.

So drama contains a mysterious, adventurous element which goes hand in hand with risk-taking and thrill-seeking, psychopathic traits, by the way.

Drama also kind of goes hand in hand with grandiosity.

Because if you are at the center of the drama, let alone if you have initiated the drama, that makes you important. You're in the limelight. You're in the center of attention. Everyone revolves around you. Everyone tries to resolve your problems or predicament. Everyone is trying to help you or take you down. Whatever the case may be, you are suddenly the pivot and the axis around which everyone sort of revolves.

And so drama helps to distort cognition.

If you are grandiose like the narcissist, drama helps you to believe your own confabulations and self-deception.

It self-enhances. It allows you to buttress your fantastic, inflated self-concept, self-image and self-perception.

Only important people, only unusual people, only exceptional people find themselves amidst drama.

Drama is a hallmark and a sign and a badge of your exceptionalism and your uniqueness.

Drama is a narrative.

Dramas are mini theatre productions, mini movies.

So drama involves a plot. There's a plot, there's a storyline, it's a piece of fiction, and it's a narrative. And it's a narrative that resonates with everybody's childlike wonder.

When we witness drama or when we're involved in drama, let alone when we initiate drama, when we engender it, we feel as if we were children.

There's a sense of wonder. There's a sense of what would happen next. Thrill, as I said. There's a lot of thrill in this.

It's a little like binge watchinga mystery television series or a thriller on television. It is as if you were catapulted into a movie and you're a character, a protagonist.

There's a bit of fictophilia here, a bit of even fictor sexuality.

And so drama fosters dissociation. It cuts you off from reality. It impairs your reality testing. You're no longer embedded in your environment, in the world at large, with other people, with situations that you have to cope with, strategies you have to adopt. All this is forgotten because all your resources, mental resources, are involved now, consumed by the drama.

So drama imposes huge costs in terms of mental resources. It is depleting and it renders the participants, especially the recipients of the drama, the ones who are exposed to the drama willy-nilly, unwillingly, not voluntarily. It exposes these people to huge costs. It depletes them, and then it makes them defenseless, vulnerable, malleable and amenable to manipulation.

Drama is therefore Machiavellian.

Drama in some cases, not in all cases, is a reenactment of early childhood conflicts.

For example, there's a lot of drama in the shared fantasy of the narcissists, idealization, devaluation, discard. It's all extremely dramatic because none of it is real. It's counterfactual.

Counterfactuality is a crucial element in the drama of Cluster B personality disorders.

And in the case of the narcissist at least, there's a re-enactment of early childhood conflicts and an attempt to find a different solution, to end the story differently with a maternal substitute.

And this involves drama because the minute you convert, for example, your intimate partner or your best friend, the minute you convert them into maternal figure, what you're actually doing, you're imposing on them a role.

It involves role play.

Role playing in the theater of the absurd, which is your early childhood recollections, an early childhood shame, an early childhood pain.

You coerce people around you as a narcissist, you coerce them into your theatre play, you make them, force them to say the lines and play the script, play out the script, or even become inanimate props in your mega production in the theater of life.

A lot of drama involves approach avoidance repetition compulsion, especially in borderline personality disorder.

But all people with Cluster B personality disorders have an insecure attachment style. And so dismissive avoidant and anxious and so on.

So the relationships, the interpersonal relationships of people with cluster B personality disorders involves a kind of idealization in the case of borderline and narcissists or approach in the case of psychopath and histrionic.

So there's an approach and then internal dynamics cause the disordered person to walk away, to push people away.

For example, in the case of the borderline, there is engulfment anxiety. The borderline suffers from twin anxieties, abandonment anxiety, the clinical term is separation insecurity, and engulfment anxiety.

When she gets too close to someone, when there's intimacy that emerges naturally, when her love is reciprocated suddenly, she's terrified, she feels suffocated, she feels engulfed and consumed, she's about to disappear, and she runs away. Approach, avoidance.

It's a repetition and it's a compulsion. It cannot be helped.

But the very dynamic of approach and then avoidance and then avoidance and then approach injects instability and unpredictability into the relationship. In short, it creates drama, it elevates drama into the organizing principle of the relationship.

These are the dynamics of insecure attachment.

One of the major roles of drama is to attempt to generate theories of mind and internal working models.

Allow me to explain.

A theory of mind is a theory about how other people minds function. What makes them tick? How likely they are to behave in certain ways, to avoid certain behaviors. And so this is called the theory of mind.

The process that leads to the formation of a theory of mind is known as mentalization, phronesis.

So people with cluster B personality disorders were unable in childhood to develop healthy processes of mentalization.

Consequently, they are bereft of theories of mind. They don't have a theory of mind.

When they grow up as adults, they attempt to generate a theory of mind. They attempt to understand other people somehow because they lack empathy.

And in the case of the narcissist and the psychopath, and probably the histrionic, there's no access to positive emotions. They lack the basic tools of comprehending other people, their social cues, their body language, their emotions, even their cognitions. It's very reminiscent of autism spectrum disorder.

Drama is used by cluster B personality disorder patients. Drama is used as a way to generate a theory of mind or theories of mind regarding people around them.

Similarly, an internal working model is a theory. It's a model that describes how relationships work and the various functions of the external environment, including other people who are known as external objects.

So the internal working model, for example, tells you how intimate relationships work, what to expect, what to avoid, how to act, their scripts embedded in the internal working model, sexual scripts, social scripts, relationships, and so on.

Again, people with cluster B personality disorder do not possess internal working model or their internal working models are highly disrupted or delusional or deformed or insecure or paranoid. So it's a problem. They don't have realistic internal working models that allow them to interact with the environment in a self-efficacious, agentic manner.

Drama is used by these people. They use drama to generate internal working models on the fly.

So now I've given you a mouthful. People with Cluster B personality disorders use drama to generate theories of mind about other people and internal working models about relationships with other people on the fly.

So they use drama to say, okay, now I know what makes this person tick, what motivates this person, what this person wishes and dreams and hopes and wants. And now I can relate to this person via an internal working model.

But how does drama serve this purpose? How do these people use drama to come up with late onset theories of mind and very belated internal working models?

Well, drama is a way, is a form of probing. These people use drama to probe, to test, to dismantle the world, the environment, situations, circumstances, take apart other people and look inside relationships.

The way a child does with the toy, you know, when you give a toy to a child, the child tries to take it apart in order to understand the internal mechanics, the mechanism, what makes this toy tick and how to relate to this toy in the most efficient manner. That's what children do.

And so, when a child, a very young child, is faced with television, they may wish to take the television apart to see if there are small people inside.

It's the same with cluster B personality disorder people. They use drama to take the television apart, to take other people apart, to disintegrate the world, to dissolve it, to decompose it, and to study it. They probe, they test, and they dismantle the universe.

Drama is a blunt force instrument, a tool, a wrecking ball, a tool that can destroy everything and does destroy everything.

But it's not destruction for its own sake. It's not wanton destruction. It's destruction, which is more scientific in nature.

Let me break this thing into smithering so that I can see inside it, inform and generate a theory about it and that's one of a major roles of drama.

Now, a lot of drama, especially in borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, to some extent, in psychopathy, a lot of drama involves intermittent reinforcement.

Hot and cold, I love you, I hate you. Reminiscent of approach avoidance, but on a micro level, whereas approach avoidance cycles are much longer in time, you know, an approach avoidance cycle can take years, intermittent reinforcement is that daily occurrence.

You can never predict the mood, you can never anticipate the language, the attitude, the motivation, and the behavior of these people. And they generate in you a dependency on their next move.

They hurt you, and then they are the only ones who can take the pain away. This is known as trauma bonding.

Drama is intimately connected with trauma bonding and with intermittent reinforcement.

To the point that I suggest to call it drama bonding.

Drama also monopolizes other people. It monopolizes the attention of other people, the presence of other people, the resources of other people.

Drama generates object constancy. It's fake. It's ersatz object constancy. It's not real. Because it depends crucially on the perpetuation and perpetration of the drama.

If the drama ceases or goes away, the people who were involved in the drama walk away as well.

But drama for a while, as long as it lasts, gives the impression that people are interested in you as the source of the drama, that they are there for you, that they will help you, that they're interested in you, that you're the focus of attention, that you're the center.

And so drama guarantees the physical presence and the mental wherewithal of people around you.

And so drama compensates for the lack of object constancy in cluster B personality disorders.

People with cluster B personality disorders have object inconstancy, or in the case of the borderline, introjecting constancy.

Be that as it may, an inconstancy, an impermanence to use Jean Piaget's language, an impermanence related to other people.

It's as if people with Cluster B personality disorders say, I don't know if that person who is important to me, who is significant, who means something to me, or I don't know if that person who I am about to exploit in whom I've invested so much, I don't know if this person is going to stick around.

And to make sure that they stick around, to make sure that they don't walk away, to make sure they don't become overly independent and autonomous and what have you, or defiant or whatever, to make sure of that, I'm going to generate, I'm going to create drama.

And these people, whose presence I want to secure, whose attention I want to guarantee, these people will be so immersed in my drama that they will always be there for me, as long as the drama lasts.

You're beginning to see that drama is a form of channeling and sublimating aggression.

Drama is aggressive by definition, because all dramas involve destruction.

Some dramas involve construction, but the initial stage always involves some kind of perturbance, some kind of disruption, some kind of destruction.

Dramas are destructive. And he says all dramas some kind of disruption, some kind of destruction.

Dramas are destructive.

And he says all dramas are aggressive.

They could be overtly aggressive, externalized aggression. They could be passive aggressive, underhanded and stealthy and hidden occult aggression. They could be self-directed aggression, internalized aggression. For example, attempted suicide, ostentatious and conspicuous abuse of oneself via substances or you name it. All these are forms of drama.

Drama are used to project punitive introjects and then force people around you to conform to the content of these punitive introjects.

In people with Cluster B personality disorders, they are really very evil and problematic and difficult processes, dynamics taking place internally.

These dynamics are intolerable, they are unbearable to the suffering person himself or herself.

And narcissist internally has a bad object, an internalized bad object, something that keeps informing the narcissist that is inadequate, inferior, stupid, ugly, this, that.

Narcissism is a compensation for this.

Same with borderline to a large extent, albeit with quite a few differences.

But in all these cases, there's a dynamic, a dynamic that is essentially egodystonic, a dynamic that is not acceptable to the individual, dynamic that is ego incongruent, a dynamic that is disruptive, that is uncomfortable, that is hated, that is rejected by the individual.

So, drama is a way to export this dynamic, to project it onto someone else, and then to force that someone else via the drama.

To force that someone else to become a persona dramatist, a participant in the drama, a character, a protagonist in the drama, and adopt the rejected part.

So the person with Cluster B personality disorders, rejects a part of himself or a part of herself, rejects internal dynamics, which are highly intolerable and unbearable, projects them on someone else, and forces that other person who is the subject of the projection, or the object of a projection, the target of the projection, forcing this someone else to conform to the projection and to play his or her part in the play, in the game, in the movie.

And so this is known as projective identification. This process is known as projective identification.

But not all drama, even in Cluster B personality disorders, not all drama is created equal.

The specific content of the drama ties in with the highly concrete and specific self-concept.

The content of the drama, its contours, its unfolding, its evolution, its internal dynamic, and most importantly, its plot, its narrative.

They're all derivative. They're all derivatives of the psychodynamics and the goals of the underlying disorder and the disorder of the individual.

So you could conceive, therefore, of drama as a kind of fantasy within a paracosm, within an alternative reality.

So in the case of the borderline, the narcissist, and the histrionic, dramas are enactments of fantasies.

And that's why we have psychodrama, a form of therapy, which uses drama.

Because drama allows you to reframe reality in ways which are conducive to mental health.

However, in the case of narcissism and borderline personality organization and histrionic personality disorder, the drama is a fantasy that is used to displace reality, to substitute for reality.

The counterfactual drama becomes reality, and so it is a paracosm. It is an alternative chosen reality, non-reality in effect.

And so this fantastic character, the fantastic elements in the drama, they serve psychological functions. They cater to psychological needs.

For example, in the drama of the narcissist, the fantastic elements in the drama would support and buttress the narcissist inflated, godlike self-image or self-concept.

In the fantasy of the borderline, there's a lot of drama, of course. Borderline's fantasy is highly dramatic, and the drama would serve to uphold and sustain and maintain the borderlines regulation via an external object.

So dramas are highly functional.

And one could even say that as long as the mental illness is there, dramas are actually survival strategies or positive adaptations because they channel the fantasy, they structure it in a way that allows the disordered individual to become self-effacing.

Like in codependency, in some cases, drama allows the individual, the borderline, the narcissist, the psychopath, the...

So, exactly like in codependency, drama allows the individual to control from the bottom.

In this highly specific type of drama, the control from the bottom drama or the codependent drama or the dependent drama, in this type of drama, there are displays of feigned helplessness, a kind of power asymmetry.

I'm weak, you are strong, you will save me.

There is ostentatious dependency. There is neediness.

And the idea is for the drama to trigger the savior, rescuer, healer, fixer complex in vulnerable people, people who are vulnerable to this message.

So that's why borderlines match perfectly with narcissists.

Because the borderline's drama is a drama of neediness, clinging, helplessness, and so on. And it triggers in the narcissists.

The savior, rescuer, guru, teacher, father, godlike complex, the messiah complex.

Of course, all this, this dynamic that I've just described, this interaction involves regressive infantilization.

The drama-making individual renders herself baby-like, as dependent as a baby, as needy as an infant, as helpless as a toddler.

And so it converts people around the disordered individual into parental figures, saviors, rescuers, healers, fixers, and they fit well into the Karpman drama triangle.

A video dedicated to it, Karpman, Drama Triangle.

Now let's go into the specific disorders.

Start with antisocial personality disorder, aka psychopathy.

Now people ask me, by the way, before I proceed, about sociopath, this and that.

The official clinical term is antisocial. Psychopathy is not a recognized clinical term. There's no psychopathy in the DSM, for example.

Sociopath or sociopathy is the old word that we used for psychopath or psychopathy. There is no difference between psychopaths and sociopaths.

Sociopaths are not less and not more and not different to psychopaths because it's simply the older word that has fallen out of use.

Okay, that's the clinical academic background. If you go online, everyone and his dog is a self-styled expert and they will tell you otherwise. But it's up to you to decide who knows best.

Now, in the case of the psychopath, drama is used to secure control, to manipulate people.

How is this accomplished?

The psychopathic drama is very menacing. It is intimidating. It has overtones and undertones of catastrophizing. Something horrible is going to happen.

And the drama of the psychopath creates information asymmetry it's like the psychopath knows something you don't and this something that he knows this information overload in the case of the psychopath this elevated level of access is very important. It has to do with survival. It's a crucial bit of information that you're missing.

It creates in you, as the recipient of the target of the psychopath's drama, creates in you anxiety, disorientation, a sense of dislocation, and this induces dependency on the psychopath. When you're in the presence of the psychopath, the psychopath would create intentionally drama to enhance uncertainty. This uncertainty creates anxiety, is anxiogenic, creates anxiety in other people. And they look to the psychopath to reduce this anxiety. They begin to regard the psychopath as anxiolytic. It's the only way to reduce anxiety, to feel comfortable and safe. So this is the role, the main role of the psychopath's drama. The borderline's drama has multiple roles. That's why drama is so embedded in borderline. That's why it's a critical diagnostic criterion, actually, in borderline, personality disorder. Because it caters to a panoply of needs and regulates a series of very crucial dynamics, moods, emotions, and even cognitions. Start with the fact that in borderlines, external drama is used in order to drown out internal drama. Drama is present in the borderline's life all the time. Every second, every microsecond of every second or every minute, or every hour, or every day, all her life, all his life. Half of all borderlines are men, I repeat. So there's always drama. However, a lot of the time the drama is internal. There is this cacophony of clashing voices or internal objects that argue with each other. It's a mess. There's a lot of drama internally.

Sometimes this internal drama becomes unbearable, threatening, overwhelming. And so then the borderline creates, deliberately, on purpose, creates external drama. The external drama is so cacophonous and so noisy, and so perhaps threatening, so destabilizing, and so disorientorienting and so that it drowns out the internal drama. It silences it, at least for a while. And so this is first function. The second function, borderlines use drama to recruit other people, to recruit them as special people, special friends, intimate partners, you name it. Enablers, colluders, collaborators and so on. The drama is used to recruit people, to participate in the borderline's shared fantasy, to share the burden drama loves company, exactly like misery. So if you dramatize your situation, including your internal situation, if you dramatize your mental illness, if you dramatize your neediness and helplessness, if you dramatize it, you recruit other people, people who are empathic, who are helpful or sometimes interested. You also, of course, attract predators. There's a risk attached to this strategy. But be that as it may, you share the burden of your internal drama by generating external drama and bringing into the ambit, into the remit of the internal drama, people from the outside. You could look at it this way. The external drama in the borderline's life is a way of projecting the internal drama and involving other people in it so that the burden of the internal drama is shared and dissipates. The last function, a very important function of drama in the borderline's life is to avoid intimacy. Drama, of course, alienates people, pushes them away. That's one way of avoiding intimacy.

But this is another thing. The borderline mistakes intensity for intimacy.

So as far as the borderline is concerned, if something is high strong and colorful and unpredictable and volcanic, then it's very intimate. She mistakes intensity for intimacy. The dramas are very intense and are perceived, therefore, to be as very intimate. The truth is that there is some merit to this thinking. We have multiple studies that show that in dramatic situations, for example, in war, in prison, there's a lot of bonding taking place. There's a lot of intimacy that is created among victims, for example, of the same natural disaster.

So drama does engender intimacy.

Problem with the borderline, she's incapable of transitioning from dramatic intensity to pedestrian intimacy.

Whereas most healthy people are capable of this. They could experience intimacy with someone in a dramatic situation, but then take it on and continue with it, continue to run with it in daily life.

The borderline is incapable of this, which is why the borderline constantly generates drama. It's her habitat, it's her natural milieu, it's her comfort zone.

The borderlines don't do daily life, pedestrian, mundane, humdrum very well.

We go to the histrionic.

The histrionic uses drama as an ostentatious display of hyper-emotionality and hyper-empathy.

That's why many empaths, so-called, are actually histrionic or narcissistic.

So the drama in the case of the histrionic is intended to attract attention, but not to the histrionic as an individual, to attract attention to her traits and to her behaviors.

Look how emotional I am. Look how empathic I am, look how open I am, look how amazing I am, but amazing in the sense that I can afford you, I can provide you with an experience that you've never had before because of my intensity.

So we could regard the histrionic, as far as drama is concerned, is a combination between borderline and psychopath.

The histrionic uses drama as a form of virtue signaling or trade signaling and then captures the individual, captures the target, and controls and manipulates the target.

And finally, the narcissist, of course, although narcissists don't like to be the last ones, most narcissists would resent me for this.

As far as the narcissist is concerned, drama in the narcissist's life is used to attract attention. It's an attention-seeking behavior.

But it is also used to self-enhance. The drama is tailored in order to yield an outcome or resolution or a consequence that somehow enhances the narcissist self-concept or self-image.

So the drama would lead to kind of denouement, to an end that supports the narcissist's view of himself or herself, half of all narcissists, the women.

The dramas in the narcissists' life are highly weaponized, instrumentalized, and functional, and therefore they're much more pinpointed than the dramas in the borderline's life.

Drama is a substitute for narcissistic supply.

So when narcissistic supply is reduced, there's a protracted state of reduced narcissistic supply, or deficient supply when there's a state of collapse and the narcissist is hunting for more cells of narcissistic supply sometimes futilely, the drama comes in.

Drama is a simulation of narcissistic supply.

To start with, when you're dramatic, people pay attention to you.

That attention is misconstrued as narcissistic supply by the narcissists.

So drama is simply a way of, it's a cry for help.

The narcissist's drama is a cry for help it's like saying hey guys pay attention to me i'm here see how amazing i am see how godlike I am you know and the only way to get your attention the only way to secure your presence and monetize your eyeballs so to speak is to create drama. So that's what I'm doing.

It's a way to open the spigot of narcissistic supply.

Now finally, drama allows the narcissist to distract himself in a state of collapse.

State of collapse is when the narcissist is absolutely unable to obtain supply. No matter what he does, he fails to obtain supply.

That creates a major crisis. It creates depression.

So there's a mood disorder attached to it.

That's why drama is also very common in the manic phase of bipolar disorder.

So it creates this internal drama of unvanishing and disappearing. I cannot exist through anyone's gaze, because no one is looking at me, no one is interested in me. It's horrible and it's a sense of despair.

And so drama is used to forget about it, to somehow distract the narcissist.

The dramas of the narcissists are very often self-defeating and self-destructive. The dramas of the narcissists generate threats to the narcissist's existence, well-being, freedom, prosperity.

And so at that point, this creates an existential crisis. And when you're in existential crisis, when you're fighting for your life, narcissistic supply becomes a secondary consideration when you're fighting for your life.

So the drama is used to distract the narcissist from the fact of his or her collapse.

At the same time, the drama allows the narcissist to self-supply.

I'll give you an example.

If the narcissist creates a drama which is paranoid, the narcissist convinces himself that he is at the center of some conspiracy, malign intent or malevolent attention.

This paranoia places the narcissist firmly at the center of attention of the conspiracy, the center of attention of the colluders, and so that constitutes self-supply. It restores the flow of narcissistic supply via a delusion, a paranoid persecutory delusion, and of course, a drama.

So drama is used simultaneously to distract the narcissist from the fact, from the reality of no supply, never mind what I do, and at the same time, self-supply by, for example, saying, I am not getting supply because I'm the target of a conspiracy, because people are envious of me.

So the drama has a dual role in this case to restore self-supply and make the narcissist deny the absence of real, qualitatively narcissistic supply coming from outside sources.

This has been a dramatic video and I hope you will recover and stay tuned for additional dramas in the Sam Vaknin YouTube channel.