Decode Secret Speech

Hello kiddos and kides. My name is S. Vaknin. I'm your favorite author of "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited" and a professor of psychology. And today, we have a very interesting topic: narcissists of all stripes, overt narcissists, covert narcissists, somatics, and cerebrals. Narcissists who are passive-aggressive. The narcissists who are not all narcissists. They use code. They use a cipher. What you see, what you hear, is not what you get.

And today, I'm going to teach you to decipher the code, to decode the narcissist's speech act, to understand that he is not trying actually to communicate; he's trying to conceal. In the various multifarious techniques that he uses in his attempt to manipulate you via this concealment, it's very pernicious. It's very insidious. It's very subterranean. It's invisible to all other people. And when you try to communicate this to others, family members, friends, your lawyer, your therapist, they think something's wrong with you because they can't see it for the life of them. There's the text, and there's the hidden text.

I've made another video on the difference between the difference between manifest text, the difference between the master text, and the difference between the hidden text. When the narcissist communicates with you, he's sending you a manifest text, but underneath it, there's always an occult, arcane, coded message, encrypted. And only you have the key. You and the narcissist, and nobody else. So this is today's topic.

But before we go there, something critical. It seems because it bothers a lot of you: why do I keep saying "love bombing" when I should say "love bombing"? The correct pronunciation is, of course, "love bombing," not "love bombing." The reason is my thick accent. Thick accent is a serious curse. Narcissism is a serious curse. And I have both. You can imagine where I am. So, at the beginning, in my earlier videos, I tried to use the correct pronunciation. I used to say "love bombing," and people kept asking me, "Love boming? Love booming? Love beaming?" I understood that something's wrong. So I decided to mispronounce the word, just to be, in order to be understood. And so now I'm saying "love bombing" to live. No place for doubt. Apologies for my accent. I am not responsible for it, you know.

Okay, I would like to read to you two quotes, two comments posted on on one of my videos, and then we proceed to the topic. Sunny Days had, uh, written the following. This is a quote. At the beginning of the movie "American Psycho," based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis, and so, at the very beginning of the movie, Patrick Bateman, the psycho in the movie, says the following: "There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me. No real me. Only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel the flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there." Great quote about the inner empty, schizoid core of narcissists and psychopaths. M. Wars, W.R.Z., whoever she is, had written a wonderful encapsulation of the book "Borderline Condition." Here's what you had written. Here's what you wrote: "I have BPD, borderline personality disorder, and you explain this very well. When I go into psychopathy, I ignore people and plot into future revenge, and I'm comfortable being alone for months. When I'm grandiose, I switch into narcissism tendencies. I feel empty. No emotions left of my own. I can't be alone. I need validation to breathe. I'm not good with any sexual rejection. I go into BPD rage. My narcissism will not allow rejection. When I go into my fragile BPD self, I'm like a burn victim, filled to the top with empathy, and when it's not returned, I go back to psychopathic tendencies, then histrionic for attention, and then back to narcissism because I can't accept that I'm simply not the best." You may not be the best, but this is the best description of BPD I've ever come across, honestly. Now, these are the self-states of BPD. You realize I encourage you to watch the videos on my channel regarding the various self-states in borderline personality disorder.

And now to the topic of today's video, not a minute too too early. And it is speech. When the narcissist communicates with you, there is what I call an envelope message, a manifest text, an overt text, uh, and a hidden, occult, coded message. It's always two messages. Always two. The envelope message and the hidden message. It's exactly like a virus. The virus is an envelope, and within the envelope, there is the RNA, there is the genetic material. The genetic material is the coded message. The virus needs a live cell to translate the coded message into new viruses, new proteins. And the envelope carries the coded message into the live cell, in a way deceiving the live cell. So the envelope of the narcissist's message is always reasonable, always flexible, always compromising, always socially acceptable, always common-sensical. The narcissist's envelope message is something any reasonable, rational, um, person would write. Somebody with impulse control, mature, adult, responsible, reliable. This is the envelope message. It conveys this image of the narcissist, the appearance of the narcissist. It's an external facade. But deep inside the envelope message, there is the viral genetic material. There is the hidden, occult, coded message which triggers you, pushes your buttons. And the coded message is based on your shared past experiences with the narcissist, on previous speech acts. It's like a train of train of thought or train of speech. The message seems to be stand-alone, seems to be self-sufficient. But actually, the message is intimately connected to previous messages, previous exchanges, previous fights, previous arguments, previous disagreements, previous gaslighting, and previous manipulation. So the message is intended to push your buttons in order to manipulate you. And it is based on information that only you and the narcissist share. No one else. This is privileged access information. These are experiences you have had together when you were alone. These are things he had told you and things you had told him that no one has ever become privy to.

So the hidden message uses several leverages, deploys several techniques. And let's review them one by one. The first technique is counterfactuality or non-facticity. In other words, the hidden message assumes that you had agreed on something that you had never agreed upon. The hidden message pretends that you have a compact, that you have a contract, that you have decided on a course of action, that you have concluded something, that there is a decision already made, that there is a choice already adopted. But none of it is true. It's counterfactual. It's against the fact. The hidden message implies that the big picture is totally agreed upon. Now let's go to the details. And that is, of course, an element of shared fantasy or shared psychosis. So counterfactuality is the first technique.

The second technique is the victim stance, the victim language. The narcissist always, always pretends to be the victim. He's actually not pretending; he truly believes that he had been victimized. Victimhood provides him with moral justification for his misdeeds and misconduct on the one hand, and with social approbation and support on the other hand. Victimhood, in other words, is useful. And so he maintains the victim stance and language well into his hidden messages. And never mind what you say, and never mind what you do, and never mind how you behave, you will always be cast, you will always be described as the abuser. The abuser is your role in the hidden message. And the narcissist insists ferociously, vehemently, on his victimhood position. He is a victim, and you will not deny him his victimhood. It's his comfort zone. And he uses projective identification. Projective identification is when the hidden message pushes you, manipulates you into abusing the narcissist. Elicits from you an abusive reaction. The narcissist forces you to become an abuser because when you're an abuser, he's a victim. When you're the villain, he has the moral, moral upper hand. So he needs you to be the abuser. He needs you to be the villain. He needs you to act narcissistically and psychopathically. And indeed, most victims of complex trauma develop narcissistic, psychopathic, and borderline traits and behaviors. And these are reactive to the narcissist's constant messaging, constant signaling: "I'm a victim, you're an abuser. I'm a victim, you're an abuser." It's brainwashing.

The third technique is projection. Because the narcissist's victimhood is imagined, it's confabulated, the narcissist has to project his own traits and misbehaviors onto you. The narcissist, as a victim, needs to feel that he is pure, unadulterated, innocent, honest, good, upright, sanctimonious, self-righteous. Is the way to describe it. He is falsely modest if he is covert. So the narcissist, he has pseudo, pseudo humility. So the narcissist needs to believe that you are the opposite of all these things. And what he does, he takes the traits and the behaviors that do not sit well with his state of victimhood, and he projects them onto you. And this encourages in you a feeling of ego dystony. You absorb these emanations, this miasma, these vapors from from the narcissist. This process is called entraining. The narcissist entrains you to become an abuser, to become a villainous, villainous character in his movie or in his theater production. And you adopt the role. This process is called emergent roles within family, family system. This is the clinical term. So you adopt the emergent role. You do become abusive, provocative, malicious, malevolent, impulse, impulsive, reckless, defiant, contumacious, hateful. You become everything the narcissist wants you to become. And then you feel ashamed, and you feel guilty. The narcissist guilt-trips you. So sows in your mind the seeds of self-doubt. "Maybe he is right. Maybe I am the abuser. Maybe I am the narcissist." And the narcissist accomplishes this incredible feat of reversal of roles via his hidden messages. His hidden messages contain the projection.

And then there is gaslighting via equivocation. The narcissist never commits, never says yes or no. He says "maybe," or "really," or "if you say so," or "I could have agreed, had you know." It's always equivocal. It's always ambiguous. It's always in the air. It's always a maybe. And in this way, he challenges your reality testing. He makes you feel that you're crazy, that you're not grasping what's happening correctly. He rewrites history, and he rewrites your mind in the process.

The hidden messages are usually very hostile. The more appropriate, proper, formal the message is, the more hostile it is. This is passive aggression. Passive aggression masquerades as civility and good manners and formality, while underneath the surface, there is enmity, hostility, hatred, and the wish to destroy the recipient, the frustrating object. So there's a lot of hostility. And you pick up on it. Your sensors, your seismic sensors via empathy, pick up on this hostility. And it destabilizes you because being hated is an abnormal state. And you, you kind of ask yourself, "Why am I hated? Is it justified in some way?" And it unsettles you, disbalances you, ruins your equilibrium and homeostasis. And your view of the world is essentially a benign place with good people.

The next technique is manipulativeness and coercion via provocation. The narcissist provokes you exactly into acting the way he wants you to act. The narcissist is a puppet master, and his M hidden messages convert you into a marionette, into a puppet. The narcissist, for example, ignores your input or your requests as though you had never spoken. He renders you invisible and transparent. Mini-break and feeling invisible and transparent is the worst fear in the human mind. To not be seen is the most rudimentary, primordial, inferred terror in the baby's mind. The baby needs to be seen by his mother just in order to survive. Babies who are not seen are not fed. Babies who are not fed die. To be seen is a survival strategy. The narcissist, by ignoring things you say, by ignoring your requests, your wishes, your preferences, your priorities, your emotions, cognitions, by rendering you invisible, by not seeing you, as a strategy, threatens your survival, at least your mental survival.

The narcissist also malingers, procrastinates, delays, postpones endlessly. Wears you down. This is passive aggression. It's another technique borrowed from passive aggression. He promises and he promises to promise, and then he promises that his promises to promise were real promises, and he is going to promise to promise you. And then he promises you, and it never happens. Nothing ever transpires. Nothing reaches conclusion or closure or result or outcome or anything. It's like waiting, waiting through swamp. It's like, you know, swimming in jam. It's never, it's, it's sooner or later becomes quicksand, and you drown in it, inexorably pulled down by his constant procrastination. Some narcissists procrastinate because they're perfectionists. They insist on a perfect outcome. And but the majority of narcissists procrastinate in order to frustrate you. Their procrastination is actually a transformation of aggression. The same thing with forgetfulness. Narcissists forget. They forget as a habit. They are professional forgetters. They forget what you had asked. They for forget your requests. They forget arrangements and agreements. They forget promises. They keep forgetting dates and hours and times and schedules and everything. Forgetting is another form of aggression. Together with procrastination and truancy, the narcissist is absent, physically or mentally, emotionally, or both. In most cases, both. He is truant. He is not there. And he's not there. He makes sure to not be there in the most crucial moments when you really, really need his presence for something, in order to decide something, in order to conclude something, in order to move on, in order to, you know, establish a schedule, in order to meet someone, in order to do business. At the very crucial moment, you can count on the narcissist's sudden, inexplicable absence with some stupid excuse. And neglect, forgetfulness, procrastination, and truancy are the four horses of the narcissistic apocalypse. They are intended to inflict upon you Armageddon, to destroy you totally.

There is intentional inefficiency, stubbornness, pseudo stupidity, faking it, "I didn't understand, I'm sorry," an outright sabotage. And all these are passive-aggressive techniques. The key to communicating with a narcissist effectively is to ignore the hidden message. To ignore all this. To not respond to the occult message, to the hidden message. To not allow the narcissist to push your buttons and triggers. But some people find it very difficult to accomplish. Some people are still in the throes of the of a relationship with the narcissist, or the narcissist still has some hold over them via his inject. For example, the narcissist is inside your head. Even when he's long gone physically, he's still inside your head. You can get yourself out of the narcissist, but you cannot get the narcissist out of yourself. So the best solution is to use professionals to communicate with the narcissist. If you can help it, never ever communicate with a narcissist directly. Force him to communicate with with your lawyers, with your accountants, with your best friend, with your family member, with your father, with with someone. Forces, force him to communicate with people who are oblivious to the hidden message. You remember that the hidden message is based upon shared experiences, shared past, a shared past, shared communication in the past. And so people from the outside, outsiders, they simply don't spot, they don't detect the hidden message. And so they're going to respond to the overt, open, reasonable, socially acceptable, common-sensical envelope message. And that's what you want. You want to keep the communication surface, on the surface. You do not want to go deep with the narcissist into the rabbit hole of his communications. So if you refer the narcissist to other people who are constitutionally incapable of even detecting the hidden message, the communication will devolve into envelope communication, surface communication, and you will not be triggered into actions that you're bound to regret later. If at all possible, go no contact. Any communication, refer to an intermediary, to a buffer, to a firewall. And this buffer or firewall will ignore the hidden message and convey to you only the open one. And so it's a filter.

The narcissist engages in something called palindromic speech. The communication of narcissists is either inward-facing. They verbalize their inner dialogues, conversing loud, sometimes with themselves. With the audience is a mere foil to their stream of consciousness. So this is the inward-looking communication. Or it could be outward-facing. When the narcissist communicates with himself, you are just an observer. You're an audience. He's bouncing thoughts off you. You're like a blank screen upon which he can project anything. That's his inner communication, actually. You're witnessing his inner communication. And I repeat, some narcissists do it aloud. I mean, they verbalize it. And then there's outward-facing communication. Narcissists talk in order to impress their interlocutors, in order to evade actually providing information, to obfuscate vulnerabilities. So what they do is they're not communicate; they don't communicate. They impress. They manipulate. They obfuscate. They obscure. They evade. Narcissists in language is a narcissistic weapon in the narcissist's arsenal. Pay attention to several warning signs. Number one: the use of indefinite pronouns and modifiers like "this" or "someone" or "that" when the narcissist does not specify, does not clarify any of the other parts of the speech, leaving the listener guessing as to what had occurred, to whom, when, where, and why. So indefinite pronouns and modifiers. Major sign of palindromic speech. By the way, many self-styled experts and coaches and so on online, they use the phrase "word salad." "Word salad" is strictly limited to schizophrenics. Schizophrenics have something called disorganized speech, and this is a word salad. Narcissists do not engage in word salad. No one actually engages a word salad except schizophrenics or people with psychotic disorders. So it's a misuse of the phrase, borrowed from clinical literature, wrongly by ignorant people.

Number two. So we are not discussing warning signs. When you, when you listen to the narcissist or communicate with him verbally or in writing, they are warning signs of palindromic speech. Palindromic speech is the hidden message. So number one, indefinite pronouns and modifiers. Number two, if the narcissist is addressing an audience or you demand the truth and accountability from him, you can safely assume exaggeration, confabulation, reframing, and outright lying on his part. This is done partly also to cover up the narcissist's pervasive dissociation. Number three, when the narcissist expostulates on his motivation for doing something or when he recounts what had happened, he is either wrong, reframing to justify his misbehavior or or to restore ego syntony, or he's just lying out of self-interest, or he has dissociative gaps, amnesic gaps, and he's trying to bridge them with a confabulation. He tries to sell you on what makes sense rather than on the truth. If he doesn't know, know the truth, he will provide you with a plausible replacement, substitute, or alternative. You remember "alternative facts." If you keep reiterating the question, if you insist on an answer, if you insist on the truth, if you persist, he often contradicts himself and comes up with conflicting versions of the same events. Never trust what the narcissist says. Do not let his gaslighting undermine your trust in your senses, your judgment, your observations, your memories, your identity, and your common sense. Make sure that only what you see is what you get. Observe the behaviors and reactions of the narcissist and everyone around the narcissist for clues as to what had really transpired. Don't let the narcissist club you on the head, and don't wake up in his Platonic cave of shadows of an alternative reality.

Palindromic speech is any kind of statement about facts or inner mental states that intentionally, often or inadvertently, more rarely, creates confusion and disorientation in the listener. Gaslighting, lying, these are examples of crash and malicious palindromic speech acts. Confabulation and illogical, incoherent discourse, these are benign variants intended to bridge dissociative gaps in memory or to buttress grandiosity. And palindromic speech, which I, I'm, I'm saying again, that's the core of the hidden message. Palindromic speech makes use of various semantic devices. Pay close attention. When you talk to the narcissist, you need to be hypervigilant. You need to analyze any and every word, every phrase, every syntactical choice. Why did he put the words in this order? Why did he choose to say something? Why did he choose to not say something? That's the hidden text, the manifest text, the hidden text. So you're all the time on your toes. You're all the time analyzing. When you, you can't just take it for granted. And the narcissist makes use of several semantic devices. Number one, number one, referential shifts. Referential shift is when the words refer to one thing while appearing to be actually referencing another thing. It seems that he's talking about A when actually he's talking about B. He means to talk about B, but he's talking about A because talking about A disguises his real intentions, opinions, and judgments and manipulation with regards to B. So this is referential shift.

Double entendre. When he uses words or phrases which are open to two, sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations or meanings. So the same word can mean this thing, can mean A, or can mean B. But A and B can't be together. They're mutually exclusive. They contradict each other. And yet he uses a word that can be, can be interpreted in several ways, or a phrase that can, can be interpreted in several ways. This is double intended, double meaning.

The next one is contextual drift. Contextual drift is when the narcissist subtly, subterranean, uh, imperceptibly alters, changes the context of the conversation. And by changing the context of the conversation, he changes the message, and he changes the reality testing. He reframes the whole thing even as you are listening, and you're not aware of it because he's very good at what he does. So suddenly you find yourself discussing something you had no intention to discuss, and you ask yourself, "How did I get here?" That's contextual drift.

Next one is manipulative speech. Goal-oriented utterances intended to impress or to accomplish aims, not to communicate. There is misattribution or attribution errors, suggesting or preferring the wrong connections, the wrong links between alleged or ostensible motivations and intentions and actual actions. So he interprets actions in terms of wrong motivations, wrong intentions, and in this way, he, he deflects blame, for example, or he casts his own actions in the best possible light, or he casts your actions in the worst possible light. He assigns roles, and he assigns roles by misinterpreting, very often deliberately, intentions and motivations. Some narcissists, a small minority, are paranoids. So attribution errors are very common in paranoia and among conspiracy theorists. They have psychological trait called conspiracism.

The next semantic device used in polysemic speech and hidden messages is circumstantial mitigation. An external locus of control, a victim stance. Events conspire, people collude to yield the misconduct. And so he says, "I misbehaved. What I did was wrong, but you're guilty. It's your fault. You pushed me to do it." Or "Circumstances made me do it." Or "I couldn't help myself." Or "Something overcame came over me." So there's an external locus of control, and there's a victim stance. Events conspired, people colluded, and this gave rise to the misconduct. And he abrogates personal responsibility. He assumes the passive voice.

And finally, there's logical fallacies. Simply, very a very famous example is post hoc ergo propter hoc. In other words, if B had followed A, it means that A had caused B, which is absolutely wrong. I mean, it could be, but it doesn't have to be. Or correlation is causation, or reference to authority, or ad hominem attacks, and so on. Narcissists use logical malapropisms and fallacies to support his palindromic speech. And palindromic speech is efficacious, efficacious because the base rate of the base rate cognitive bias, the base rate cognitive bias states that in one of its renditions, that people automatically, fully believe 95% of what they, they are told, site unseen. People don't bother to verify. They don't bother to cross-check. They don't bother to confirm. In 95% of the cases, they just take it for granted. They assume that most people are good, well-intentioned. They assume that most people are good, that the world is benign, that people are not evil and malevolent and malicious. So they have a base rate cognitive bias. They accept. And palindromic speech uses this, this vulnerability, this weakness. Uh, and that renders palindromic speech very efficacious. And palindromic speech mitigates the ineluctable hurt and pain associated with truth-telling. Honestly, no one likes to hear the truth. People hate truth-tellers, which is why I'm hated. I'm kidding. You're not. I think I'm hated because I'm a truth-teller. So people hate truth-tellers. And palindromic speech caters to this bias. "I don't want to. I've made up my mind. Don't confuse me with the facts." And so palindromic speech colludes with psychological defense mechanisms such as denial and with behaviors such as reframing and avoidance. It is powerful, very powerful psychodynamic allies inside you. The narcissist co-opts. The narcissist works with, leverages your own psychological defenses. That's what makes the narcissist speech so, um, irresistible, so hurtful, so accomplished.

There are two other obstructive speech patterns: the hypothetical speech pattern and the counterfactual speech pattern. The narcissist, borderline, psychopath, they use hypothetical speech to test the waters, to see how their interlocutors would react to certain information. So sentences like, "Maybe," or "Possibly," or "It could be that," or "I think that," or "I thought so, but wasn't sure." These are all forms of exploratory excursions. The, the narcissist and borderline psychopath, they're testing the waters. How are you going to react if they were to convert the sentences into certainties? How would you take it badly? If they say something so, so they say, "Maybe I should have done this. Maybe you should have done this." The "maybe" is kind of deniable, plausible deniability. I, you know, I said it, but it just said maybe, you know? It's like someone insults you, humiliates you online, and then at the end, they write, "Just saying." You know? So maybe X. In the narcissist's speech, "maybe X" means X had actually happened. X is the truth. But how do you feel about it? "Maybe X." I'm testing.

Counterfactual speech is a lie or misinformation disguised. There's either a rhetorical question or a statement of settled and universally accepted fact. For example, "Maybe she flirted with me at the restaurant, but she didn't come to my room later that evening, now did she?" Well, that's a strong indicator that she did visit his room that night. And so this is counterfactual speech.

There are three types of manipulative speech: victim speech, entitled, demanding, dependent, transparent, whining, grievances, grudges. That's victim speech. It's a manipulative type of speech. Codependence and borderlines engage in this speech a lot, and so do narcissists. Then there is child speech: entitled, demanding, dependent, transparent, manipulative, naive, immature, fantastic. Narcissists have this. And then there is a psychopathic speech: entitled, envious, competitive, malicious, opaque, coded, dense, and multi-layered.

Let's discuss a bit lying and confabulation. If the mouths are moving, they're lying. Histrionics, borderlines, psychopaths, narcissists, they move their mouth, they lie. They lie all the time. Their lies may be goal-oriented to secure money, to secure sex, to secure narcissistic supply, or the presence of the intimate partner. The lies may be intended to regulate grandiosity or a labile sense of self-worth, to buttress a stance of victimhood, or simply because the forbidden and the illicit and the risky are thrilling and novelty. And this is in case of serial, uh, cheaters who lie and deceive, promiscuous, um, attention, uh, addicted people, and so on. So when you communicate with these types, what they say is largely irrelevant. The only relevant information is why they had chosen to say what they had said. So don't pay attention to what they're saying. Ask yourself, "Why are they saying it?" The selection of lies, the choice of of confabulations, is revealing, telling, and informative. And the same applies in psychotherapy, by the way. The anamnestic, the intake phase. In the intake phase, most patients confabulate. They offer narratives that are osy, syonic, self-justifying. So what the patient says is not nearly as important or crucial or edifying as to why the patient had chosen to say what the patient had said. The choices they make in telling their stories are much more important than the stories.

Narcissists lecture. They never talk. They seek to impress. They never communicate. They ignore other people's input. They actively suppress such input rather than listen. The narcissist is so invested, so immersed in extracting narcissistic supply from his interlocutors, so, so, um, so concerned with dazzling them with his brilliance or with his sexual irresistibility that the narcissist is oblivious to his body language, to his verbal cues, to his interjections, to events around him, or to the environment at large. It's a compulsion. It's obsessive. The narcissist expostulates, hectors, pontificates, opines, defines, edifies, rectifies, rants and raves and rambles for hours on end, ceaseless and breathlessly. All of you have been exposed to the narcissist, to the narcissist monologues, unending monologues like this lecture. And always from a position of pompous self-importance and verbose superiority and for authority. Yeah. People, his mom and num audience find the narcissist's exhibitionistic, delusional, and coercive grandiosity so repellent, so off-putting, that they shun his unilateral company altogether. At the end, that's why most narcissists are left alone. These people can't stand them anymore.

But what about speech acts which are abusive? When what happens with the narcissist, psychopath, borderline? Never mind abuse speech, not only use speech, but abuse speech. There are three examples. Let's start with big picture evasiveness. "It's my mini day. Let's start. Oh, it's mini's day with me. Let's start with big p, big picture evasiveness." Narcissists hate details. Narcissists are too self-important. The narcissist's life is too cosmically significant to be wasted on frivolous trivia and trifles. Narcissists are above the fray of the coterie, of the the daily, of the pedestrian. They concern them, they concern themselves only with strategy, never with tactics. Narcissists lay out in sweeping, synoptic terms the big picture. They leave it to lesser, inferior mortals like you to fill out and fill in the yawning gaps and to iron out the glaring inconsistencies in the narcissist's big picture and hair-brained schemes. Any attempt to involve the narcissist in the minutiae of decision-making and the give and take of human endeavor is perceived by the narcissist as coercion, a humiliating, ill-intentioned, and deliberate challenge to his grandiose self-perception. This F self. The narcissist's unwillingness to dirty his hands with the routine, the mundane, virtually guarantees that his, his herbin schemes, hastily laid plans, convoluted stratagem, guaranteed that they will go all right. They will end in failure. The narcissist's coercive delegation of tasks, the cascade of often contradictory instructions, the grandiosity, the aggressive superiority that characterizes his expectations, his fantasies, his so-called planning, all these alienate and infuriate his bosses, his underlings, his employ, his collaborators, his partners, his suppliers, his customers, his intimate partners. Some, some narcissists end up acting all alone because of that. And some of the victims of the narcissist, the recipients of his harangue and his hectoring and preaching and tirades and vitriol and dire tribes, some of these victims end up acting passive-aggressively and spitefully, undermining the joint enterprise. Others, warned by the narcissist's aloofness and god-like detachment from reality, simply give up on him. They go through the motions robotically, awaiting the inevitable meltdown of the narcissist.

Then a second abusive speech act is alloplastic defenses and shifting the blame. Narcissists are hypervigilant and consequently they misperceive rejection and insults everywhere. Not being sexually desired, not occupying the center of attention, not garnering narcissistic supply, not being the alpha male in the room or the most intelligent person in the group, all these constitute grave narcissistic injuries to the false self. The psychopath, as distinct from the narcissist, is goal-oriented. So, so he regards the very same rejections as mere obstacles, challenges to be overcome. He says to himself, "I'm not desired. I will render myself irresistible, and I will make her jealous by triangulating." Or "I will just just move on to the next target." "I am not the center of attention," says the psychopath. "If I want to, I will make sure that I am." And so on. So both narcissists and psychopaths are competitive. They are both hell-bent on winning and prevailing, but for different ends and reasons. The narcissist's narcissistic supply. The psychopath seeks power, money, connections, position, sex, and so on. The narcissist seeks to secure an uninterrupted flow, regulated flow of narcissistic supply. The psychopath simply aims to accomplish and achieve goals. Another facet shared by narcissism and psychopath is their alloplastic defenses. They're never fully, fully responsible. They're never to blame. They're never guilty, accountable. They, their misconduct is never their own. They don't own their misconduct. Narcissists who cheat on their spouses, for instance, they're likely to say, "I was drunk. I was taken advantage of." Or "You made me do it." Or "I had no choice under the circumstances but to act the way I did." The psychopath loses the theory of just desserts. Psychopath will say, "They deserve it. They had provoked me. They mistreated me. They acted stupidly, so they had it coming." Or "I deserved it, so I took it." Or "This is the way of the world, and I had to do what I did just in order to survive. A man has to do what a man has to do."

The third abusive speech act is much more famous. Um, I was the first to incorporate gaslighting into narcissistic abuse in 1995. Gaslighting preceded, of course, my work. In 1995, you have descriptions of gaslighting as early as 1968, using the term gaslighting. But I was the first to introduce gaslighting into the discourse of narcissistic abuse when I coined the phrase "narcissistic abuse." So passive-aggressive gaslighting is an abusive speech act. Nothing is more infuriating than the passive-aggressive evasiveness or gaslighting of the narcissist or or psychopath. It's like trying to hold on to a slimy goldfish. It's, you can never catch, you can never kind of settle. There's no fixed point. Everything is in flux. Everything is kaleidoscopic. You can't get a straight answer. You can't get the truth of what had happened, if anything had happened. The narcissist and the psychopath denies that anything at all had happened. Then he parades a kaleidoscopic array of protein, contradictory versions of what may actually have happened or occurred. Then he minimizes the meaning of what finally he grudgingly acknowledges had transpired. Throughout this teeth-extracting process, the narcissist implies that to dispute his claims or to doubt him is a sure sign of mental derangement and proof positive of an impaired reality testing, or else it's malicious. Having admitted wrongdoing, the narcissist axiologically reframes the transgression. In other words, he misattributes it to some values. He did nothing wrong in his book. The values of the injured party are old-fashioned, possessive, plain irrational. The other party is insanely jealous. The narcissist's misconduct is common or accepted where he comes from. It's a question of culture. He could not have acted differently under the circumstances and constraints of the moment. "Isn't this understandable? Why you keep harping at it? Can't we let go?" He had not premeditated intention to act the way he did. It just simply happened. It just happened because he was drunk or high or stressed or angry or sad or disappointed or lonely or miserable or something. So it's never his fault. Things happen to the narcissist or or the psychopath or the borderline. Things happen to them. They are the passive receptacles and recipients of fate, destiny, institutions, other people. And finally, the narcissist shifts blame. A plastic defense with an external locus of control. He shapes the blame. He shapes the blame. You're guilty. He guilt-trips you. The narcissist, psychopath was drunk, for example, was high. He was forced into acting the way he did. He was co-opted. He was, he got taken advantage of. He was raped, or she was raped. He, he was taken by surprise. He was giddily taken advantage of. He's been abused. He's the victim. And then there's the perennial, "It is all the victim's fault." It's all the fault of the party that was hurt. "She made him do it. She misbehaved. She had abused him and provoked him and pushed him to misbehave, to misdeeds, to the brink of insanity, to the point of no return, where he could no longer recognize himself. She drove him insane." Usurping the victim role is a sure-fire sign that the narcissist or psychopath has done something truly rotten or truly dangerous. When the narcissist goes out, goes all out on the offensive, you, you know that he did something really, really bad.

Gaslighting by narcissist and psychopath is surreal. It's disorienting. They lie reflexively with a straight face and without missing a bit. The psychopath's prevarication frequently involves very convincing mimicry of other people's behaviors and effects, and this engenders an alternative, almost hallucinatory or nightmarish reality. So I'll give you two simple rules. Number one: the psychopath is never sad. He's always mad. Not sad, mad. And sometimes bad. He's mad at you. And number two: when the psychopath says "I'm bad" when he's offensively contrite and repentant, what he means to say is "I'm afraid." I'm afraid of the consequences of my action. Or "I'm pissed off that I was found out." I, I'm very angry that I, I love myself to be caught red-handed in flagrant. So when the N, when the psychopath and the narcissist say, "I'm bad. I'm sorry. It's my fault. I regret it. I'm remorseful." They don't mean this. They mean to say, "Too bad you found out." As Hervey Cleckley wrote in his masterpiece, "The Mask of Sanity," actions and behaviors are the psychopath's only true forms of communication. Actions and behaviors are the narcissist's language. We should therefore pay attention exclusively to what the psychopath and narcissist do and utterly ignore absolutely everything they say.

So why do we often believe and trust narcissists and borderlines, psychopaths, when they tell us what had happened? Why do we fall for their lies? Because they're not lies. Psychopaths prevaricate to secure goals. Narcissists and borderlines rarely do. Most commonly, they confabulate. Confabulation is a desperate attempt to bridge dissociative memory gaps, lost time, blackouts. Narcissists and borderlines, desperate to make sense of a discontinuous, disjointed, fragmented world. And to do this, they accomplish this, they build these bridges by extrapolating from past experiences and creatively generating a fiction, a narrative, so as to what probably, plausibly might have happened in the missing hours or minutes or days. Confabulating is intended to both restore identity continuity and cohesion and to hide the missing segments in the narcissist's or borderline's personal histories. Confabulations effectively form of false recall or false memories. Confabulations are irresistibly convincing and alluringly reassuring because the narcissist or borderline honestly and firmly believe that they're true. And confabulations have the power of memories, and they appear to be objective and authentic. They're always very likely, very plausible, even highly probable. So they're easy to accept by all people, by all parties. In many cases, there's a fourth reason. The confabulation allows everyone involved to negate and efficaciously ignore a painful reality or an uncomfortable alternative scenario or set of facts. We all, including the confabulator, want to believe the confabulation because it affords us comfort, sore peace of mind. Narcissists and borderlines dissociate and then confabulate ceaselessly. It is easy to be drawn into to their counterfactual, alternative reality or universe, the twilight zone of their inventive probabilities, the psychotic realm of their discontinuous existence. Confirmation bias does the rest. Having committed ourselves to the narcissist's or borderline's version of events, having entered the alternative universe, we filter out, we suppress all countervailing information and contradictory or challenging facts or possibilities.

Now, I want to find out online, so bear with me for a minute. I want to find online something I had written a while ago and read it to you because it's a, because it's an example of what I'm saying. And here's what I wrote: "Your wife dolls up, she grabs a bottle of Lure, excited, and she rushes out the door at 9:30 p.m. She says that she had been invited for a late dinner by a friendly couple. Do you believe her? Belief is not the same as trust. Belief is purely cognitive, not emotional. First, you have to care enough to scrutinize and contemplate the issue. If, if the outcome is of no importance to you, the resource-efficient path of least resistance is is to believe. Next, the facts must align with the belief. The facts cannot be blatantly counterfactual, contradict the belief. If the facts match a possible benign interpretation, you are likely to adopt this interpretation in order to reduce dissonance and hurt owing to to the deceit of your wife. So you're likely to adopt confirmation bias. If you wish, or if you're forced to maintain the status quo, the way things are, turning a blind eye, self-deception is actually the only viable option. And finally, awareness and even vigilance are inversely proportional to the extent of idealization, splitting, projection, reframing, and other defense mechanisms. You are far more likely to believe your wife if you're still idealizing her. For example, eyes wide shut are conducive to belief." So this is an example of gaslighting and why we believe gaslighting and lies and confabulations.

I want to end with a general statement. There's no reasoning with the mentally ill. Mentally ill people cannot be reasoned with, cannot be analyzed with any rationality. This is because mentally ill people are capable of harboring opposing, dissonant, and contradictory cognitions and emotions at the same time. This is called paradoxical thinking, hyperflexibility. So the, the mentally ill person can at the same time believe two contradictory things, think two mutually exclusive things, feel ambivalently to conflicting emotions. You can't baton called it the double bind. Laying DB it. The incompatible. Not the speech acts and decisions of mentally ill people need to be deconstructed, not merely observed from the outside. People with psychiatric or psychological problems appear to be impulsive, erratic, labile, unpredictable, antisocial, deregulated, disempathic, dangerous, heartless, mendacious, and egotistical. But the truth is, mentally ill people are simply meandering along the conflicting paths of their psyche. This fragmentation of the alienated self, this connecting, emotionally investing in internal rather than external objects, may have to do with what Gens called ontological insecurity. Even in patients with milder syndromes, such as personality disorders, there is a glaring absence of order, structure, continuity, cohesive identity, meaning, emotional stability, reduced anxiety, and consistent positivity or negativity. There's no consistency. It's not the balance that matters, it's a consistency. And such epic fault lines, fracturing, fragmenting, impedes the evolution of a theory of mind, a world life, and a world view. Destroys logic itself, undermines it. We base our perceptions, our understanding of other people on intersubjectivity, and we use empathy. It's mentalization, theory of mind. We place ourselves in other people's shoes. But in it, is a speculative system, of course. It is founded almost entirely on trust. It is based on honest self-reporting by other people regarding their inner mental states. It is based on correlations of these self-reports with observable actions and behaviors. Dishonest self-reporting leads to discrepancies with observables, and these engender disorientation, anxiety, uh, induce dysfunctional responses in us. People with cluster B personality disorders, dramatic, erotic, these people consistently mislead, misrepresent their psychological self-states, their emotions, their cognitions. Their self-reporting is fallacious. This prevarication has to do with identity disturbance, dissociative amnesia, confabulation, and manipulative lying and gaslighting. And consequently, it's hopeless. There is no point in trying to grasp, analyze, comprehend, understand, retrodict, predict these personalities. These personalities do not possess a stable core, and in many respects, don't exist. There's an empty schizoid core. There, there's emptiness. It's not negotiating with the void. It's like howling into deep space. They're either subjected to and at the mercy of labile and deregulated whims of their moods or emotions, or they are no longer with us, steed in delusions of grandeur with fantastic landscapes, pseudo-psychotic, impaired reality testing. And in many cases, they're simply lying through their teeth. So why bother? And every word I said here is the truth. Maybe.