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's a lot of emotional disregulation, 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-erotic 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. Now, Cluster B personality disorders couldn't be more different to each other. The psychopath is cold-hearted, cunning, scheming, calculated, Machiavellian, callous, desympathetic, and heartless. The borderline, on the other hand, is overflowing with emotions such as love and dedication and so on. 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 narcissist, or even a psychopath or 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-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're not. It's hormonally addictive. Drama is also a kind of challenge, a challenge to oneself and a 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. 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, of course. Dramas are many theater productions, many movies. So, drama involves a plot. There's a plot. There's a storyline. It's a piece of fiction. It's a narrative. And it's a narrative that resonates with everybody's childlike wonder. When we are, when we witness drama, or when we are 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-watching a 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 filia here, a bit of even fetosexualty.

And so, drama fosters dissociation. It cuts you off from reality. It impairs your real 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, as 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 narcissist: 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 reenactment of early childhood conflict and an attempt to find a different solution, to end the story differently, with a maternal substitute. So, and this involves drama because the minute you convert, for example, your intimate partner or your best friend, the minute you convert them into a maternal figure, what you're actually doing, you're imposing on them a role. It involves role-play in the theater of the absurd, which is your early childhood recollections, your early childhood shame, and your early childhood pain. You coerce people around you, as a narcissist, you coerce them into your theater 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, 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 narcissist, 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 between 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, and I say I am using the female pronoun, although half of all borderlines are men, 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 approach, and then avoidance, and so on, 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's minds function, what makes them tick, how likely they are to behave in certain ways and 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. For narcissism, 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 disordered 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. There are scripts embedded in the internal working model: sexual scripts, social scripts, relationship scripts. And so, again, people with Cluster B personality disorder do not possess internal working models, or their internal working models are highly disrupted, or delusional, or deformed, or insecure, or paranoid, or so. It's a problem. They don't have a realistic internal, 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 a 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. The same with Cluster B personality disordered 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 wanting destruction. It's destruction which is more scientific in nature. Let me, let me break this thing into smithereens so that I can see inside it and form and generate a theory about it. And that's one of the 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 a 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. And drama, 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 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're 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, inject inconstancy. 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, 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 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 they, 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 drama involves, 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 these, 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 from, for example, attempted suicide, ostentatious and conspicuous abuse of oneself via substances, or you name it. All these are forms of drama.

Dramas are used to project punitive injunctions and then force people around you to conform to the content of these punitive injunctions. 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're unbearable to the suffering person himself or herself. And the narcissist internally has a bad object, an internalized bad object, something that keeps informing the narcissist that he is inadequate, injurious, stupid, ugly, this, that. Narcissism is a compensation for this. Same with borderline, to a large extent, albeit with quite a few differences. But there, in all these cases, there's a dynamic, a dynamic that is essentially ego-dystonic, a dynamic that is not acceptable to the individual, a 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, 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 onto someone else, and forces that other person, who is the subject of the projection or the object of the projection, 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.

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 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 underlying, 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 display reality, to substitute for reality. The counterfactual drama becomes reality. And so, it is a paracosm. It is an alternative chosen reality, a 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 fantasy, fantastic elements in the drama would support and buttress the narcissist's 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 borderline's internal, borderline's 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-efficacious. Like in codependency, in some cases, drama allows the individual, the borderline, the narcissist, the psychopath, 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're 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 narcissist the savior-rescuer-guru-teacher-father godlike complex, the Messiah complex. Of course, all these, 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. Video dedicated to it. Karpman, K-A-R-P-M-A-N, 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, psychopathy, and so on. 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 would 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, 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 or 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 an anxiolytic, as the only way to reduce anxiety, to feel comfortable and safe. So, this is a 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 of every minute, or every hour, or every day, all her life, all his life. Half of all borderlines, 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, and so destabilizing, and so disorienting, and so on, that it drowns out the internal drama. It silences it, at least for a while. And so, this is the first function.

The second function: borderlines use drama to recruit other people. To recruit them as special people, special friends, 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, who are 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, um, into the remit of the drama, 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 life, is to avoid intimacy. Drama, of course, alienates people, pushes them away. That's one way of avoiding intimacy. But also, 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, and you know, then it's very intimate. She mistakes intensity for intimacy. So, dramas are very intense, and are perceived, therefore, to be 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, most healthy people are capable of this. They could, 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. 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 am, 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, as a combination between borderline and psychopath. The histrionic uses drama as a form of virtue signaling or trait 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 a 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 a resolution or a consequence that somehow enhances the narcissist's self-concept or self-image. So, the drama would lead to a kind of end that supports the narcissist's view of himself or herself. Half of all narcissists, and women, dramas in the dramas in the narcissist's life are highly weaponized, instrumentalized, and functional, and therefore they're much more pinpointed than the dramas in the borderline's life.

Dramas 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 levels of narcissistic supply, sometimes futilely, drama comes in. Drama is a simulation of narcissistic supply to start with. When you are dramatic, people pay attention to you. That attention is misconstrued as narcissistic supply by the narcissist. 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.

And 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 "I'm vanishing. I'm disappearing. I cannot, 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 used is used to forget about it, to somehow distract the narcissist. The dramas of the narcissist are very often self-defeating and self-destructive. The dramas of the narcissist generate threats to the narcissist's existence, well-being, freedom, prosperity. And so, at that point, this creates an existential crisis. And when you are in existential crisis, when you're fighting for your life, I mean, 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, it creates 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 am the target of a conspiracy, because people are envious of me." So, the drama has a dual role in this case, to restore senses of supply and make the narcissist deny the absence of real, quality narcissistic supply coming from outside sources.

That's been a dramatic video. And I hope you will recover and stay tuned for additional dramas in the Sam Vaknin YouTube channel.