It is Sunday morning and you're talking to a narcissist.
Now why would you do that?
Probably. Because you really, really, really hate yourself.
Or maybe you have no choice. You're married to the narcissist. He's your boss. Your pastor. You have to be polite. It's a neighbor. You're caught in the vortex of communicating with the narcissist.
As you talk to him or to her, you notice that he drifts away.
I'm going to use the male pronoun, gender pronoun, although half of all narcissists are women.
You notice that he drifts away. His gaze is inverted into an inner space to which you have no access.
And it is within this inner space that your speech acts are absorbed, transformed, transmuted, and acquire a whole new meaning, if at all.
What does the narcissist hear when you talk to him?
Even when he pretends, when he feigns listening, even when he pretends that he is enraptured by what you have to say, he is not really all there. He is no longer with us.
And a very peculiar set of processes are triggered within his mind.
Your speech becomes unrecognizable to him and to yourself.
Suddenly, abruptly, he responds. He erupts. He says something which is utterly irrelevant and disconnected and disjointed.
He is having an inner dialogue with the internal object in his mind that represents you.
Today we're going to focus on the way the narcissist processes your speech acts, the way he understands you.
What is it that he hears when he attempts to listen?
And how does this translate internally within the machinations and the strategems of his tortured and demented and defective mind?
Within the deformity of his cognitive distortions, what comes out of all this mess?
What comes out of all this mess is communicating with a narcissist.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse and a professor of clinical psychology.
Now, you do recall, I hope, those of you who have been unfortunate enough to be exposed to my previous videos, you do recall that the narcissist is unable to perceive the separateness and externality of other people, of what we call in object relations theories, external objects.
When the narcissist comes across another person, and if this person matters to the narcissist in some way, it's a source of supply, a potential intimate partner, a participant in the shared fantasy, the narcissist then converts that person, creates an internal object, an introject, an image, an avatar, a snapshot of the external person, in his mind, and continues to interact with this internal object.
Here's the first insight.
Because you are merely and exclusively an internal object, because the process of othering in narcissism is disrupted, is hampered, the narcissist is unable to perceive you as a separate entity as external to him he perceives you as an extension of himself a figment of his imagination an element in his mind something to play with to toy with and to control within the vast space that is his disorder.
So you're an internal object. Everything you say, everything you say emanates from the inside of the narcissist mind.
Because you're an internal object, your speech is attributed to the internal object.
The narcissist cannot attribute your speech to you as an external object because he doesn't perceive you as separate and external.
He attributes the sounds that you make, the words that you use, the grammar and the syntax, the message and the meaning, semiotics and semantics. He attributes all this linguistic package to the internal object that represents you in his mind, to your avatar, to your representation, to your snapshot.
And so he perceives, he misperceives, your speech as coming from the inside of his mind, as emanating internally, as an internal voice.
In other words, whatever you say, good morning, pass the sugar, let's discuss our marriage, whatever it is that you say, no exemptions, no exceptions. Every single thing you say to the narcissist is emanating from an internal object, is broadcast by an internal object, is perceived therefore as an internal voice, or in other words, as an introject.
Here's the problem. The narcissist has an internalized bad object, what used to be known as primitive superego.
The narcissist inside himself has voices, other voices, not your voice, other voices.
And these voices keep informing the narcissist that he is unworthy, is inferior, is bad, is inadequate, he's a loser, is a failure, etc. This is the bad object, an internalized bad object.
But pathological narcissism is a compensation for the internalized bad object. The narcissist tells himself it's not true. I am worthy. I am good. Actually, I'm God-like. I'm a perfect entity.
So pathological narcissism is a reaction to these bad voices inside the narcissist's mind.
And when you talk to the narcissist, the narcissist experiences your speech as if it were coming from inside his head and therefore as if it were a part of the bad object.
The overwhelming vast majority of voices in the narcissist's head, in the narcissist's mind, are hostile, enemies.
And because he perceives your speech as an internal voice, he begins to see you as an enemy.
Now you're beginning to see why is it so easy for the narcissist to convert you into a persecutory object, into an enemy in his mind during the devaluation phase.
The minute you talk to the narcissists, you trigger in him an internal voice which is indistinguishable from the other self-loathing, self-rejecting, self-hating, sadistic internal voices.
It's as if you've made, you've formed a coalition with these voices aimed at the narcissist, against the narcissist.
Your speech is filtered.
The narcissist does not expose himself, does not make himself available to your words, to your utterances, and to the meanings behind them. He filters everything. He filters everything because of his grandiosity.
Now, grandiosity is a cognitive distortion. It's a misperception of reality. It's a form of impaired reality testing.
The narcissist tells himself, I'm perfect, I'm brilliant, I'm drop-dead gorgeous, I'm amazingly intelligent and godlike, I'm omnipotent, I'm omniscient, all powerful, all knowing, etc.
It's a narrative. It's a narrative. It's a story that the narcissist keeps telling himself thousands of times a day.
And he is testing this story time and again by extracting narcissistic supply from people.
If he considers himself to be a genius, then input from people telling him that he's a genius feeds and fuels his grandiosity.
So, the narcissist cannot take the chance that your speech will somehow challenge or undermine this inflated, fantastic, unrealistic self-reception.
He cannot take this chance.
He perceives your speech as potentially challenging, potentially manipulative, possibly threatening, or at the very least, injurious.
He is hypervigilant. He is paranoid, has paranoid ideation.
The narcissist never interacts with you verbally without assuming in advance that you may somehow injure him, hurt him, harm him, cause him pain, attack him, challenge him, undermine him, demean him, humiliate him, shame him, disgrace him, debase him or expose him.
So the narcissist comes to the conversation with you not as an equal partner open-minded, ready to consider what you're saying your arguments or just willing and able to exchange pleasantries and, you know, greetings or whatever it is.
The narcissist comes to the conversation, attends the exchange, gets involved in the interlocution between you in bad faith.
He comes there already with his heckles up, suspicious, aggressive, vigilant.
He assumes the worst, he expects the worst, and he's prepared for the worst.
Any verbal interaction with anyone, regardless of intimacy or imputed intimacy, regardless of the type of the relationship, any communication can cause narcissistic injury. And if done in public and shames the narcissist and humiliates a narcissist, it could cause narcissistic mortification.
Words, language itself is a weapon. The narcissist weaponizes language, as I've described in numerous other videos on this channel.
He assumes, he firmly believes, he's convinced that you're going to weaponize language as well.
I'm weaponizing language, he says. I'm using language to hurt, to manipulate, to cause pain, to mortify behavior, other people's behavior, to obtain outcomes. I'm using language as a tool of self-efficacy.
Probably my interlocutor, my partner in this conversation, is doing exactly the same. And I am the target. I'm the mark. I may end up being a victim. I will never let this happen, says the narcissist.
And so what the narcissist does, he deconstructs your speech he analyzes it minutely in order to reveal the hidden text some occult true meaning what did you actually mean what are you aiming at What are the goals of this possible manipulation?
Are you trying to take him down? Are you trying to level the playing field in a power plane? Are you trying to take away his control over you? Coercive as it might be? What is it that you are striving at and aspiring to by initiating communication with it?
All narcissists are a bit antisocial, and so they assume that other people are pseudo-psychopathy and they have goals when someone tells you good morning they want something from you when they ask you how are you it's because they are gathering incriminating information about vulnerabilities which they can leverage later on if they offer advice it's because they want to humiliate you it's as simple as that there are ulterior motives behind every communication never mind how innocuous.
The narcissist reframes your speech to conform to his narrative.
When he is in the stage of idealization during the shared fantasy, your speech is proof positive that you're perfect. You can do no wrong. You're dropped dead gorgeous, you're amazing, you're intelligent and so.
When he's in the devaluation stage of the same shared fantasy, your speech is proof positive, how dull and dumb you are, how evil and malevolent, how scheming and cunning, how conspiring and untrustworthy, etc.
Same speech. Same speech. He reframes it one way and then exactly the opposite way, in order to support narratives embedded in the shared fantasy and narratives inside his mind about himself, this narrative is known as grandiosity, and about relationships in general. This narrative is known as internal working model.
So your speech is mangled, mingled, molested, mutilated to the point of unrecognizability, only in order to conform to the narrative, to support it, to buttress it, and to prove it beyond doubt.
The shared fantasy is above all else. And this is of course a form of confirmation bias.
The narcissist filters out anything and everything you say which may in some way disagree with him, criticize him, may in some way display your independence, your personal autonomy, your agency.
He rejects all this. He just doesn't listen. He shuts it off. He shuts it out. It's gone. It's like water on oil, oil on water.
Whatever you say, whatever you say that does not conform to the narcissist narrative is dead in the water long before it has reached the narcissist's ears. It's dead on arrival.
The rest is being broken to pieces, disassembled, and then reassembled in novel ways, which somehow fit into the narratives, the narrative of the shared fantasy, the narrative of the grandiosity, the narrative of relationships in general, the narcissists biases, prejudices and so.
So this is confirmation bias.
And when you take into account that the narcissistic is dissociative, when this is coupled withdissociation, it means that large parts of what you have said are completely and unconsciously ignored. They're dissociated.
Remember, dissociation is a discontinuity in memory, especially long-term memory. Memory gaps, in the case of the narcissist they're massive, they're as massive as the borderlines.
And the narcissist imposes this defense mechanism, dissociation, on input from you in order to render the input innocuous, to render the input non-threatening.
By eliminating big parts of what you have said, by dissociating away certain things that rankle the narcissist, irritate, provoke, trigger and threaten the narcissist, the narcissist then creates a sanitized version of your words, which he can live with.
And the main mechanism at work here is a dissociation.
Of course, the narcissist never recalls what you have said, never remembers what you have said. Of course, a narcissist contests your memory, disagrees with you on what you have said.
He has heard something completely different in his mind. He recreates your speech in his mind because your speech is internal because you are an internal object.
And of course, a narcissist engages in every known error and bias, every error and bias known to humanity.
So there's also attribution.
Oh, this is meaning, by the way, and she is trying to tell me something, but I'm shutting her away because she's challenging my grandiosity. Only I do the talking in these videos.
Okay, Shoshanim.
Attribution error. Whatever you say reflects who you are. Not your choices, not your decisions, not your intelligence, not your analysis, not your knowledge, not your erudition, not your background, not your experience, none of this.
Whatever it is that you say is because of who you are.
And when you are being idealized in the shared fantasy, who you are is a perfect entity.
And so whatever you say is perfect.
And when you're devalued, who you are is evil and bad and deformed and crazy and sick and stupid.
And so everything you say is equally stupid and crazy and deformed, etc.
Who you are is your speech as far as the narcissist is concerned.
And this is a problem because in the devaluation phase, when you're converted into an enemy, into a persecutory object, when you join forces with the voices of the internalized bad object, when you torment the narcissists from the inside, potentially at least.
The narcissist is driven to get rid of you via the discard phase.
You are stand in for his mother.
I advise you to watch the shared fantasy videos.
But at that point, the narcissist converts you into another internalized bad object.
And it's a problem because the narcissist is actually multiplying the bad objects and there's another issue here.
The internal objects are elements in the narcissist's mind. They are part and parcel of the narcissist's mind.
So if there are so many bad internalized objects, maybe the narcissist's mind is bad. Maybe the narcissist himself is bad.
And the narcissist cannot countenance this, so he rejects you and he does he rejects you aggressively.
Ironically, your speech, your speech is used against you in the devaluation phase because it is proof positive that you are trying to sabotage the narcissists from the inside, that you're a Trojan horse of some kind.
You're bringing your speech as an internal object. You're bringing your speech into the narcissist's mind to pollute and contaminate and decompose it somehow.
Similarly, when you are being idealized, your speech augments the narcissist's, enhances the narcissist.
And that's a process I described, a process that I called co-idealization.
Narcissist idealizes you, is actually idealizing himself.
All in all, the narcissist pays more attention to what you haven't said than what you have actually said. More attention to what you have not said than to what you have actually said.
The narcissist reads a lot into the absences and the emptiness and the silences because ultimately he is nothing but an absence.
So the narcissist asked himself, why didn't she say this? She could have said it, but she didn't say it. Why didn't she say it? Is she trying to challenge my authority, undermine my godlike status? Is she conspiring against me? Is she acting maliciously and malevolently? Is she pitying me? Is she shaming me? Is she humiliating me?
The narcissist attributes malevolence to the silences, to the missing words, to the unfinished sentences, to the things you could have said and chose not to.
Narcissists throughout, even in the idealization phase, the narcissist is gathering the evidence against you because he is driven inexorably to devalue and discard you.
He can't help it. These are the internal dynamics of the shared fantasy which are stronger than the narcissist.
Something from the very first moment, even in the love bombing stage, the narcissist is collecting proofs and evidence, building a case against you, like a criminal dossier, criminal record against you that he might or will inevitably, ineluctably use in the devaluation and discard phase.
Anything you say can and will be used against you at the end of the shared fantasy.
But even worse, everything you do not say can and will be used against you at the end of the shared fantasy.
It is Miranda, the Miranda warning, doubled over, reversed and hurled back at you.
The minute you have contracted with a narcissist, as an intimate partner, as a colleague, as a good friend, the minute you have entered a narcissist's life, you've entered a twilight zone, a never land, where all the rules are upside down, topsy-turvy, and you are humpty-dumpty, waiting to be broken and never be put back again.
So, the narcissist invites you to this surreal landscape.
And from that moment on, you're his hostage and his captive.
And your words, your words are slings and arrows that the narcissist uses to inflict pain on you, damage, to control your behavior, to own you, to manipulate you, to modify your behavior.
You should consider your relationship with the narcissist as an interrogation in a police station.
The police are never your friends. They're out to get you, they're out to frame you, they're out to put you behind bars.
This is the only form of relationship with a narcissist.
He is a captive and hostage of his own dynamics.
And he takes you along for the ride. He inducts you into this merry-go-round roller coaster over which he has no control whatsoever.
One last comment to the clinicians among you.
Even when the narcissist engages in fatty communication, communication intended to serve social purposes or to maintain social cohesion or to signal social communication. Even when the narcissist engages in fatty communication, which is it is clearly manipulative, it is simulated.
And on many occasions, the narcissist devolves into, for lack of other words, can only be described as paleolalia or echolalia or even a schizophrenic word salad.
There seems to be a problem, an underlying substantial, constitutional problem, structural problem with the narcissist communication.
It may have to do with the fact that the narciss's development, personal growth, have been disrupted in early childhood when communication skills are acquired and paired with language acquisition.
It may be something else. Maybe the narcissist paranoia, maybe it's grandiosity, the fantasy itself, the fantasy defense.
It's not clear at this stage. There are almost no studies on this topic.
But narcissism comprises a communication disorder, clearly.
And the narcissist's inability to actually listen to another person, incorporate that other person's suggestions, insights, input, decipher cues and signals accurately. All this is extremely reminiscent of autism spectrum disorder.
Itmay be that the narcissist's inability to communicate efficaciously has to do with some residue of autism in all narcissists. I'm not quite sure because there's no literature to go on. No studies have been conducted.
But the narcissist communication style, the narcissist incomprehension of verbal and non-verbal communication. The narcissist out of the blue utterly sometimes demented responses the narcissist focus on an internal dialogue rather than an external one the narcissist affinity to to some communication styles in psychotic disorders.
All these are indicative that in narcissism, communication is a fundamental problem, not a side effect, and not something to be ignored.
One could even argue that the narcissist's failure to communicate has contributed or does contribute to the formation of pathological narcissism as a kind of compensatory reaction.
Something for you, PhDcandidates to consider in your dissertations.