Narcissist: When Defenses Crumble, Shame Overwhelms: Narcissistic Mortification, Pt. 2 (Compilation)

Okay, Joe's and Joets, Bidens and Bidets, I have a message for you. I have a message for you, and it's an important one. If you have a narcissist in your life, stand back. If you are on my YouTube channel, stand by. And if you have any kind of hair left, dye it orange. Orange is the new black. Orange is the future.

Now, many of you have complained that there was a sound of drilling. A very strong drilling sound in yesterday's video. It bothered you. You don't like to hear sounds of drilling, but it was not drilling. It was my neighbors having sex, and you thought you had it good.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology and a professor of finance in several universities around this shrinking globe. And today I'm going to bring you another pallet of frivolities and foibles from the world of the narcissist.

Before we go there, as usual, I'm going to answer some of your questions. So my first question: what do I anticipate after the pandemic in terms of mental health? I'll make it very brief because I've dealt with it in other videos. Hint hint. I anticipate three waves. I think the first wave would be a wave of mood and anxiety disorders. I think the second wave would be a wave of personality disorders, especially cluster B personality disorders. The pandemic and the measures adopted as a result of the pandemic, or in order to forestall the pandemic—all these put together create enormous stress and enormous anxiety and trigger narcissistic and even psychopathic defiant defenses. They are known as reactants. So that will be the second phase, the second wave. And the third wave—I think people who are prone to psychosis are going to develop psychotic disorders. So, for example, borderlines are very likely to develop psychotic disorders. Even some narcissists, especially some subtypes of covert narcissists. But many other people, people with underlying, um, schizo-schizophrenic-like schizophrenic-form disorders and so on. I think these people are going to ultimately develop psychotic disorders in the wake of this pandemic.

Next question: What do I think about the smear campaign? Um, there is the possibility that we can reframe the mass smear campaign. We can—we can think of it in classical terms. A smear campaign is a manifestation and an expression of the narcissist's underlying fundamental evil. The narcissist is bad. Narcissist is wicked. Narcissist is satanic. I mean, just look at me. And because of that, he engages in untoward practices such as smear campaigns. But we can think about it differently. Perhaps a narcissist is engaging in a smear campaign because it's trying to shift from internal mortification to external mortification. In other words, a narcissist who feels bad about himself, who is ego-dystonic, and we discussed that in the previous video. Such a narcissist would feel very uncomfortable because he's not used to feel responsible. He's not used to guilt and shame, regret, and remorse. These are novel experiences and not welcome ones. So such a narcissist forcibly tries to shift from internal mortification—“I'm bad. I'm guilty. I have misbehaved”—to an external mortification—“They are bad. They are guilty. They should be ashamed of themselves. They engaged in misconduct. They mistreated me. They abused me.” So to move from internal to external mortification, one of the tools possibly is the smear campaign. The smear campaign creates an echo chamber. You know, the narcissist goes to his friends. He says, "Wow, my wife is horrible." They say, "Yeah, she is horrible. You're right." You know, so he gets—he gets kind of validation. He validates his dim view, his denigrating view of the other. And it makes it easier for him to transition from an internal mortification—“it's all my fault, I misbehaved”—to an external mortification—“it's all their fault, they misbehaved.” The smear campaign gains the narcissist and garners and genders reactions that support the narcissist's new mortification—external mortification—support the narcissist's view that he is surrounded by monsters, that he is a saint, or in other words, that he is a victim. The smear campaign reasserts and buttresses the narcissist's view of himself as a victim.

Now, this doesn't happen in the bargaining phase because in the bargaining phase, as I've said in the previous video, in the bargaining phase, the narcissist accepts that he had created the dismal circumstances in which he had found himself. He understands that he is responsible. He put things in motion. He pushed everyone away from him. He caused his wife to cheat on him. He—I mean, he realizes that he is the primum movens, the prima causa, the first cause of everything that had happened, and in a way it comforts him in the bargaining phase because he wants to feel in control. He wants to feel that whatever is being done to him is done to him because he had initiated it. He had kind of—he used everyone as a pawn, as a device, as a machine. He put things in motion. So in the bargaining phase, the narcissist is very unlikely to transition from internal mortification to external mortification because internal—internal—internal mortification provides him with—renders him in control. But during the shared fantasy, it's a different story. During the shared fantasy, the narcissist is very likely to engage in a smear campaign, is very likely to bad-mouth his intimate partner, his business partner, whoever participated in the shared fantasy. Anyone who exits the shared fantasy is likely to be subjected to such a treatment, to such a procedure, to a smear campaign or to bad-mouthing, because the narcissist in the shared fantasy needs to shift the blame. He needs to transition from internal mortification to external mortification because he loves the shared fantasy. He wants to stay in it. He wants to sustain and maintain it. He doesn't want anyone to leave, to exit, to abandon the shared fantasy or him.

In the bargaining phase, the narcissist is instrumental. He's goal-oriented. He wants to push people away. He wants to get rid of his girlfriend, his intimate partner, his spouse. He wants to dismantle a business he has with someone or to seize some kind of collaboration. He's very goal-oriented. And whatever he does—his abuse, his mistreatment, his maltreatment, humiliating other people, sadistically taunting them, teasing, everything, all these behaviors are intended to push people away. And when he succeeds to push people away, he feels that he had accomplished his goal. He feels in control. That's in the bargaining phase. Not so in the shared fantasy. In the shared fantasy, when people abandon the narcissist, he feels really, really bad and rejected.

The thing is that everyone wants from the narcissist something that he's unable to give. Consider, for example, women in a heterosexual couple. I keep emphasizing, you know, I talk about men when actually it applies equally to women, and I talk about heterosexual men when it applies perfectly well to homosexual men and to lesbians, homosexual women. So heterosexual men, heterosexual narcissists. Consider women, for example. A woman wants a man. She wants a man as a life partner. She doesn't want a child. Never mind how delightful the child. She doesn't want a child. She's not looking for a child. She doesn't want to be a mother to her own spouse, her own intimate partner. She wants intimacy. She wants adult intimacy. And it's impossible to accomplish with a child. Similarly, she doesn't want a stern, disciplinarian, strict, and harsh father. And these are the only two roles that the narcissist can play. He can be a delightful child, you know, very cute and, you know, spritely, or he can be a stern, harsh, sadistic father—a kind of projection and ratification of the inner critic. But both a child and a father prelude certain behaviors and of course certain activities. It's very difficult to have sex with your own child. It's very difficult to have sex with your own father. Assuming these roles within the dyad, within the couple, gradually precludes sex, creates what we call sex aversion. To a woman, the narcissist is a child or a father. To a man, the narcissist is a loser or a failure. To his stakeholders, to his clients, to his suppliers, to his partners, he is also a failure because he cannot provide a full-fledged, all-rounded role application. He cannot—he cannot play social roles effectively. And so consequently, people put boundaries with a narcissist. And there are several types of boundaries. There's a classic boundary. The classic boundary is a rule of conduct. It's informing other people what is acceptable to you and what is not acceptable to you. And if they misbehave, if they violate the boundary, informing other people what the cost will be, what are the sanctions, what is the price of breaking and breaching the boundary? Similarly, what are the rewards if the boundary is observed? There are other types of boundaries. For example, there are defensive boundaries. Defensive boundaries are boundaries that are intended to keep things out, away. So, for example, confirmation bias is a defensive boundary against information. Confirmation bias means that you reject, ignore, repress, and suppress any information, any information or data that challenge your self-image or self-perception. That's a boundary. Aggression is a boundary. In effect, aggressive behaviors are boundaries. They set a clear perimeter that demarcates. There's a border there, guarded, protected, and shielded by your aggression. Reactants, defiance—these are boundaries and so on. So there are many boundaries. People use boundaries against the narcissist. Luckily for the narcissist, he is able to recover speedily even after mortification because he's not really rejected. He's not really rejected because he never fulfills any roles. He fulfills a single role. We'll talk about it in a minute because I'm going to discuss today the cerebral narcissist in the shared fantasy. So a narcissist, somatic, cerebral, doesn't matter, usually fulfills a single role. He could be a guru. He could be a stud. Could be a child. Could be a father. But he never—he never fulfills a gamut or a polypoly or a smorgasbord of roles altogether. A healthy person, typically healthy person, neurotypical, usually fulfills multiple roles simultaneously. So he can be a friend, a father, a husband, and a lover. The narcissist can't. He's a—he's a single-trick pony, single-trick horse. So he can never be a true intimate partner. He can fulfill a certain function, and that's it. So when the woman is rejecting the narcissist, for example, in a romantic shared fantasy, the woman exits in a variety of ways. We discussed that—she can cheat on him, she can betray him, she can just walk away. When the woman rejects a narcissist, she's not rejecting his presence because he's never present. He's never present except along a very specific dimension with a very specific role, a very specific function, a sliver. So he's never truly, fully present. So when she—when she rejects him, she's not rejecting his presence, she's rejecting his absence. Uh, when a woman cheats on the narcissist, she is not cheating on his presence. She's cheating on his absence. She's not cheating on his intimacy. She's cheating on his lack of intimacy. She rejects a narcissist's single function because she's looking for someone who can provide multiple functions. Of course, the narcissists are not—I mean, the vast majority of them are not idiots. They realize this. They realize and accept and prepare themselves, anticipate the constant losses. They mourn their inability to hold on to people. And they can't understand fully what—how—how—how do they provoke people all the time to hurt them? People do their worst to hurt the narcissist, and the narcissist is kind of flabbergasted because he refrains and recasts himself. He writes narratives in which he is a saint or perfect or very, very generous and altruistic. And he can't understand when people hurt him—his spouse, his business partner, his colleagues, his neighbors, his—when people go to extremes to cause the narcissist's pain and discomfort, the narcissist is discombobulated. He says, "What the hell? What have I done to these people?" And he attributes this to his uniqueness. He says, "Because they can't understand me. I cannot be understood. I cannot be known because I'm—I'm, you know, I'm so superior. I'm outside the remit and the periphery of these people's experiences, daily experiences. These people—I mean, they can't—I'm inaccessible to them." People can't get me, can't dig me, can't understand me, can't know me because I'm—I'm a little like God, you know. You can't know the mind of God. I'm godlike a bit. My false self is definitely godlike. And so people can't understand me. And because they cannot understand me, they feel envious or they feel intimidated and frightened or they feel inadequate, I cause—the narcissist tells himself. He says to himself, "My mere superiority, my mere hyper-intelligence, my mere enormous intellect, my mere handsome looks, my mere advantages, they cause people such discomfort, such humiliation, such injury that people want to pay back. They want to revenge and avenge themselves. They want to punish me. But they're punishing me not because of something I've done, but because of who I am, because of my identity, which is so far removed from their daily life, that they try to destroy me. They want to destroy me because I keep frustrating them with my displays of omnipotence and omniscience. My grandiosity is justified. It's not a confabulation. It's not a fable. It's not a story. It's not a narrative. It's true. I am superior." And he says, "Because I'm unique, they hate me. I cannot be loved by mere mortals because I'm immortal. I—" My abuse—in this way, with this story, the abuse that the narcissist experiences, and he does experience abuse. Everyone around the narcissist abuses him. It's reactive. Of course, the narcissist is first to abuse, but then they abuse him back, and he explains this abuse in this way, and so it becomes ego-syntonic. He can live with it. You know, now people ask me about supply, secondary, primary, they're very confused. Primary supply is anything that causes the narcissist supply. So it's attention, adulation, admiration. It's a flashy car. It's a new job, you know, president of the United States. It's something that causes him—it's an instrument to obtain attention. So if you—if you get a new job and it's a superior job, I mean, you get attention and also have power, access to sex, to money. Money garners attention, um, etc., etc. So anything that can lead to attention is primary supply. Secondary narcissistic supply is not the same. Now, you, as the narcissist's insignificant other, his intimate partner, you cannot provide him with primary supply, only with secondary supply. Secondary supply has several functions. You are his fan. You—you regulate his narcissistic supply. You keep it stable. You—you flatten the curve. You flatten the curve of the narcissistic supply in two ways. You're always there. You're permanent. You're regular. You're predictable. You know, you don't challenge him. You don't abandon him. You don't—so you are a stabilizing influence. And on the other hand, you memorize, you remember, you recall. You're like an external—external hard disk or external memory. You recall the narcissist's moments of glory and glamour and and victory and triumph. And you rebroadcast, you rerun. It's like reruns of series. You know, you rebroadcast this to the narcissist when he's low. When the narcissist fails to obtain supply, supply is deficient, he's mocked, he's ridiculed, he's abandoned, is shunned, is—I don't know what you tell him—"Do you remember how wonderful your lecture was? Do you remember meeting the president of Russia? Do you—" I mean, and then the narcissist perks up. It's like water to a plant, a shriveling plant. And that is secondary supply. But you provide the narcissist with secondary supply. You regulate the flow of narcissistic supply with your input and with your presence. But you also provide him with primary sadistic supply. You are the narcissist's favorite target to gratify his sadistic impulses if he has—if he has them. It's very important to understand that only a small minority of narcissists are sadists and only a small minority of them need sadistic supply.

That's a big glass of wine. Vaknin, you'll get on with the lecture. Sorry. Sorry. Here we go. So you provide primary supply in the sense that you are the favored target. He—if he wants to humiliate—humiliate someone. If he wants sadistic sex, if he wants to taunt and torture and torment and tease, if he wants to put—put someone down in order to feel superior, etc., you will be the natural default choice, and he needs access to your body, and he needs access to your body because he wants to masturbate with your body. He masturbates with your body. It's very important to understand—no narcissist has sex. Not cerebral, not somatic, not covert, not inverted. There's no type of narcissist who makes love. They are incapable of love. And there's no type of narcissist who has sex. All narcissists die virgins because what they do with your body is they masturbate with it. You're an object. You're an animated sex doll. Or if the narcissist is—is a woman, you're an animated dildo, animated viper. So you're a housekeeper and a butler and a partner and a personal assistant. These are the services you're supposed to provide. You're also a mother. You're also a masturbatory aid, sex doll. You're the target of sadistic supply. And you're supposed to tell the narcissist how great he is, how wonderful he is, how victorious he is every time he's down. That's regulation of supply. And you're supposed to always be there when he needs you—when I mean, on call. You're like on standby, you know. So not a very appetizing job description, mind you. And so people have been asking me—"But he used to have sex with me, but now he doesn't have sex with me"—but he never had sex with me. And people are totally confused about the cerebral narcissist. Let's start by saying that the somatic narcissist, compared to the cerebral narcissist, is totally normal because a somatic narcissist loves everything you love. Now, a somatic narcissist loves access to human bodies. What you call sex, for him it's masturbation, but doesn't—doesn't matter. He likes this. He desires you. He finds you irresistible because he needs your bodies. He's a body snatcher, the somatic narcissist. But at least he wants your body. He usually likes to have a good time. He's a social drinker. He's gregarious. So the somatic narcissist is much more human than the cerebral narcissist. Much more human. He's vampiric. He's exploitative. He's autoerotic. Um, a bit—a bit—a bit of a latent homosexual. I mean, he has his quirks. He has his quirks and his glitches and his bugs. It's all true, but he's much more human than the cerebral narcissist. And so the cerebral narcissist is really seriously alien. There is very, very little in common. And I'm saying it as a professor of psychology with full responsibility. I don't want to say authority, but with full—I'm judiciously using these words. The cerebral narcissist has so little in common with normal, healthy human beings that I hesitate to call him human. It's an organism. It's carbon-based, and it has all the wetware and software. It has a brain. It has a liver. It has—I mean, it's okay in the anatomical sense. It's human, but not much—not much—not much more than that. The cerebral narcissist is a one-trick, insufferably haughty, delusional, and entitled pony horse. He is not God's gift to the world. God is his gift to the world. You get it? The cerebral offers a front-row seat to the pyrotechnics of his fortian intellect. So this is his gift. He says to you, "Listen, you get close to me. I mean, you become my intimate partner, for example. You become my business partner. You become my audience in a lecture. It's—so I'm going to give you the show of your life. I mean, just sit back, relax, and consume me because I'm the ultimate drug. My intelligence, my brain, my mind, they are the ultimate drug. They are mind-altering. They're like virtual reality. They're like augmented reality. They're in the matrix. Enter the matrix." So, and you have a front row. If you're my spouse, if you're my—I mean, I give you a front row, and—and it's pyrotechnical. It's like fireworks, you know? But that's it. That's all he gives you or anyone else ever. The cerebral narcissist gives nothing else besides—not sex, not commitment, not investment, warmth, family, home, children, empathy, attentiveness, attention, secure, support, friendship, intimacy, socializing, good time, leisure activities, positive emotions, love. Forget about it. None of these things are forthcoming from the cerebral narcissist. If you're trying to extract it from the cerebral narcissist, he's going to resent you, and he's going to abuse you. And also, you're foolish. It's a foolish errand to try to extricate or motivate the cerebral narcissist to any of these behaviors and traits. He doesn't have it in him. His mind has been molded at such an early stage of his life. Molded and deformed to an extent that is utterly irreversible and irrevocable. It reminds me that there were—there were nomads, vagabonds in Europe. They were called kachicosis. Compacos. They used to steal children, babies. They used to steal babies, and they used to put them in bottles, and the baby grew in the shape of the bottle. As the baby grew up, you know, became older, the bottle broke the bones of the baby, and—and then they would break the bottle, and they would have a baby bottle or a bottle baby in the shape of the bottle. This is the cerebral narcissist. He's invariably abusive and contemptuous of everyone, and sometimes sadistically so. Precisely because he thinks...

The only thing that matters are intelligence, intellect, analytical capacity. He honestly and firmly believes that it is an extreme privilege for you just to witness and admire his intelligence in action. He's motified, utterly motified. And that's narcissistic motification, which is far more common among cerebrals.

He's motified when you, his intimate partner, cheat on him. Cheat on him with other men who are considerably less endowed than him intellectually. Like he is the apex. He is the epitome. He's the top. How could you have settled for someone, the man you were treated with, who is less than him, less intelligent than him, less sharp, less analytical, less appreciient, less omniscient? How could you? How could you go for someone who is so vastly manifestly inferior to him intellectually?

He's shocked. He can't digest it. He can't understand it. Because in his world, the absolute only thing that matters is the intellect, intelligence, analysis. So when people shun the cerebral narcissist, when they label him a failure and a loser, he doesn't know how to cope with this. He's a self-imputed genius. How can they think this? So they are idiots. If they had reached these conclusions, they are so profoundly stupid. This just proves it. These conclusions serve to prove that they are because no one in his right mind would have missed the signals of his genius.

And when he fails to get the job that he was angling for after a job interview, I mean, he's besides himself. Jesus, how am I going to survive in this world? Everyone is so stupid, so backward, so primitive. I mean, people have zero analytical skills. I can't survive here. I wish I were born on another planet. He says, "I'm a vulcan, a volcanian, Star Trek."

The cerebral narosis cannot grasp that for intelligence to be meaningful to other people, the intelligence must be embedded in emotions, in empathy. The intellect must come replete with social skills and with the capacity for teamwork. Intelligence alone, all by itself, soistic intelligence and intellect that doesn't come with the ability to exercise it with other people, they are utterly meaningless. They might as well not exist. They are the equivalent of a, I don't know, smartphone. He doesn't get it. He simply can't get it.

He feels so entitled. He says, "People have to accommodate me. They have to modify their behaviors because what I'm bringing to the table is unprecedented. It's divine. It's unique. And people have to recognize this and they have to change. They have to change. The world has to change. The workplace has to change. My wife has to change. Everyone has to change and modify and transmogriphy and transform if they want to benefit, if they want to reap the fruits of the amazing gift that I had been given."

Moreover, as far as his spouse or partner are concerned, um, there is this issue of intelligence and intellect and so, I mean, to make any lasting sense, to make any meaningful impression, the nar, the cerebral narcissist's cognitive analytical prowess must be somehow transferable. He must somehow pass it on. So one way to pass it on is to communicate. But then this ribbal narcissist is intentionally non-communicative. He is on purpose. He uses, you know, language that is inaccessible to most people, incomprehensible even. He uses jargon or lingo or, you know, um, he would make it very, very difficult for people to understand him because he believes that obscurity, arcane language proves that he's superior, proves that he has access to knowledge and information that other people don't, puts him above the madding crowd and so on. That's one way. One way for an intelligence or an intellect to be meaningful is that it's communicated. But there's another way to communicate it: by procreating, by having children. You must pass off your intellect and intelligence, this genetic endowment to your offspring, or else your gift ends up being a one-off, ephemeral, an increasingly more tedious thing to behold. Kind of a blip or a glitch that keeps repeating itself like a pulsar or a quazar in the in the universe, a pulser. These are rotating stars that send pulses. The pulses ultimately become, you know, at the beginning it's very exciting and so, but you know, after six years of pulses, you get a bit tired.

If you are hyper intelligent, super intelligent and you communicate your intelligence, it has impact. It affects people. It alters lives for the better. You know what? Forget lives. It changes the world one way or another. But if you refuse to communicate and refuse to have children so that you can't pass it, you don't pass it verbally and you don't pass it genetically, I mean, then you're a freak. You're a freak show. You're a circus. A circus act. And how many times can you see the same circus act? You get boring. You become boring. You become tedious. And most cerebral narcissists with their endless soliloquiz, soliloquiz and monologues, they become very boring and very tedious. Trust me, sometimes I bore even myself. And I'm my biggest fan by far, and still I bore myself to death. I need a drink. Vakn you. Why? No. Get on with the lecture. Yes, sir. So this, the childless ribbon narcissist is a hoarder. He hoards his gift. He's so jealous. So envious that he refuses to share his gift even by his own progeny. He doesn't want, and and when they do have children, they're jealous of them. They're envious, very self, they're very destructive this way. They compete with their own children. Even when the children are very young, the competition rears its ugly head.

Okay. I have received many comments that had indicated that the structure that I had described in my previous video was not entirely clear. Surprise, surprise there. Let me try to elucidate, and this time in a skeletal way, like a skeleton without my usual pompous verbose flourishes. Here I did it again. So to start with, the narcissist approaches you and then avoids you. If you want to understand the governing principle of your alleged ostensible relationship with a narcissist, it's approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion. Narcissist is afraid of you. Whoever you are, romantic partner, business partner, doesn't matter. Neighbor, colleague, narcissist afraid of you. Because people have the capacity to cause the narcissist injury and mortification, and these hurt and even threaten life. So narcissist regards everyone as a potential menace. So he approaches, and when he feels that things become too cozy, too intimate, too fuzzy, too warm, too empathic, he withdraws. Approach avoidance. Approach avoidance. An endless perpetual mobil machine like a piston in a train, in a in a locomotive.

So, it all starts with the grooming and love bombing. And the grooming and love bombing phase includes false promises, lies, confabulations. Why? Because if a narcissist were to show his true face, let alone his true intentions, no one would come near him. So, he has to lie. He has to pretend. He has to act. He develops instant theespian skills. Thespian, look it up online. Next, the first phase is grooming and love bombing. Second phase: shared fantasy. He had captured you. He had acquired you. He is all over you. He had become your obsession. You become compulsive. You become possessive. You want him because he's the best thing since sliced bread. Better than sliced bread. So you can't live without him. Suddenly, here he can mold you. He can shape you into an actor in the theater production. That is his shared fantasy. Now don't confuse theater with life. Don't do this. That's theater. Narcissist has no life. Only consecutive movies, consecutive theater productions. It's a shared fantasy. And when he, when like a spider he had captured you in the web, and he feels your tremors and your movements, you know, communicated via the web. He can feel you. He has, he has called empathy. He scans you all the time and so on. When he feels confident that he is the new proprietor, that you had become his objectified property, he starts to abuse you. He starts to abuse you for two reasons. One, he wants to test whether you can become his mother or father. Again, if your narcissist is a woman, just change the gender pronouns. So, he wants to, in the case of a heterosexual narcissistic men, he wants to test, he abuses you, narcissistic abuse um um in the shared fantasy is intended to secure two goals. One, to test whether you can become a true mother. A true mother means that you will love him unconditionally, that you will accept his behavior and his conduct, including abuse. So he abuses you. He pushes the envelope. He wants to see how far it can go. He wants to see when you will show signs of abandonment, of giving up, of being desperate, of looking for someone else. And he wants to know your boundaries. In other words, he's testing your boundaries. So this is the first goal. The second goal: he is reenacting, that is unconscious and compulsive. He is reenacting his early childhood conflicts with his mother. All the aggression is displaced from his mother to you. You become his mother. And if the mother was was a dead mother, emotionally unavailable, depressive, narcissistic, and so on, he would push you to play this part through a process called projective identification. Now, if you play this part, he's justified in dumping you. He's justified in discarding you. If you don't play this part, and if you accept him and love him unconditionally, he is yours forever. He will be addicted to you forever. But extremely few women survive this. It's an ordeal by fire. Ordeal by fire. It's the closest thing to a terraneian terrestrial hell. The closest because he is abusing you and sending you at the same time mixed signals. The the first signal is, "Please, I want you to be my good enough mother. I want you to love me unconditionally. I want to ex I want you to accept my naughty side, my misconduct, my misbehavior, my faults, my foibless, my frivolities, my, you know, I want you to to truly love me like a child, a pure child." That's message number one. At the same time, he's sending the diametrically opposed message: "I want you to be a bad mother, a vicious mother, a wicked mother, the wicked mother of the north. I want you to abuse me and torture me and cheat on me and and ruin me and because I want you to be my mother, my original mother, the mother who had shaped me. I miss her. I want her and I want to continue to engage in the game that we used to have where you know she was abusing me, I was abusing her." This power play tries to create the power play via via mind games. These messages can't be reconciled. It's a lose-lose situation. There's no winning here. Only a supercentered, extremely resilient, hyper intelligent, mega genius woman can somehow find the middle ground by sending her own contrary mixed signals by modulating the narcissist's mixed signals. I'll dedicate a whole video to this some other time.

So, subjected to the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy, most women react in one of two ways. I would say 99% of women react in one of two ways. There are those women who withdraw. They are pushed away. They actually effectively emotionally exit the shared fantasy. Some of them, not all of them, some of them cheat. and they cheat discreetly because they don't want to hurt the narcissist. They still regard the narcissist as a wounded child. They understand the narcissist in some way. They and so they don't want, you know, they don't want to cause unnecessary pain, but they want to um gratify their unmet needs. They have needs and so they want to meet these needs. And so they if they cheat, they cheat discreetly. If they betray, they betray incrementally and mildly, and they withdraw only usually emotionally. When the narcissist spots this, remember he has this scanner. He has this radar called empathy. He gets you before you get yourself. He can anticipate every move you make. You can never fool the narcissist. Don't fool yourself that you had ever fooled the narcissist. He's extremely unlikely to show you that he knows that he understands that he anticipates you that he he has every detail about everything you have done with anyone. He will never show you this because it's a vulnerability. It proves his weakness. Spying on you is a weakness, etc. So, but he knows everything. You take it as a working hypothesis: your narcissistic partner knows absolutely everything you've ever done with anyone and your innermost thoughts and and so on. Cold empathy is the most powerful tool I know to penetrate other people's minds, most powerful. So he gets you. He realizes, he picks up the tremors like a seismograph. He knows the earthquake is coming and so he begins to stalk you. If you choose this solution, emotional absentism, having it on the side, double timing, you know, he begins to stalk you, a rottomanic stalking. And in a way, it's becoming even even a more pronounced case of approach avoidance. You know, he approaches you with a stalking and then he avoids you with the abuse. Becomes really bad.

Other women, you remember there are two solutions to there are two solutions to the narcissistic abuse in the shared fantasy. Other women choose to bargain. They bargain with the narcissist. They pose demands. They remind him of his promises. They ask for his commitment. They suggest some arrangement. They try to spice up this spice up the sex life. They um insist on going to couple therapy, marital marital counseling, etc. They try somehow to bargain their way into a better improved relationship. And this provokes the second type of narcissistic abuse. And the sole, the only goal of this second type of narcissistic abuse is to jettison the partner, to get rid of the partner once and for all. So while in the first case of narcissistic abuse and stalking they avoid and uh they avoid and you approach. In this case uh sorry in the in the first case uh you avoid and they approach. Yes. In the first case, first solution, you chose to withdraw. You chose to cheat discreetly. You choose to emotionally absent yourself from the relationship. So there you are the one who is avoiding. You are the one who is developing avoidant strategies and behaviors, and then they approach, stalking. So in the first case you avoid, they approach. In the second case uh you approach, you approach. You're trying to bargain. You're trying to restore the relationship. You are trying to make things better. You approach, and that now it's their turn to avoid, they push you away. So the stalking which is solution number I mean behavior number one. Solution number one provokes stalking or the type two abuse. Type two narcissistic abuse is the the the sort of abuse that happens in the bargaining phase. Whether you're stalked or whether you're abused. Majority of women end up abandoning the narcissist. Now some of them abandon dysfunctionally by cheating or and on the narcissist and betraying the narcissist ostentatiously or by engaging in a smear campaign or by taking revenge or by just abandoning overtly and conspicuously. So these are the dramatic personalities among you. If you yourself have mental health issue, like if you're borderline or codependent, you're likely to engage in a dramatic exit, exit lift. But the majority of of intimate partners of the narcissist, they just walk away simply. They pack their their things and walk away. Heartbroken, they give up and they just walk away. And so then the narcissist starts to reframe his internal motification, the the hidden the hidden implicit knowledge that he had made all this happen, that he is the one who had destroyed the relationship. So he's beginning to convert it to external motification. He's beginning to say, "Well, it's it was her fault. She misbehaved. She abused me. She cheated on me. She abandoned me." So this is from internal to external. And then it doesn't work very well. And there's a pendulum movement from internal to external, from external to internal. And the reason for this vacillation is that the shared fantasy is egoonic. The narcissist feels good in the shared fantasy. And when you exit the shared fantasy, he feels wronged. He feels that you had misbehaved. He feels that you he feels that you had abused him. He feels that he feels like a victim. While the bargaining phase is egoistonic, the narcissist doesn't feel comfortable with the bargaining phase. He hates it. He wants out. And so he feels that he's in control. When he pushes you away, when he narcissistically abuses you in the bargaining phase, he knows what he's doing. And he knows that in a way it's wrong to abuse people. So he has internal motification. The thing with Minnie, all I could get from her was coffee. She didn't give me this buzz of intoxication and passion and desire. You know what I mean? I've been with her for too long.

Okay, kiddos, and the same the same cycle with the very same steps, with the very same dynamics apply in all the narcissist's relationships: romantic relationships, uh, one night stands, business, in the workplace, in church, with neighbors. Take this model with all its steps, all its dynamics, all its behaviors and misbehaviors, avoidance, approach, all this. And you will see that it applies to the way the narcissist performs his job in the workplace, to his relationships with his colleagues and with his boss, of course, to a prolonged interaction with a specific neighbor, you know, enmity between neighbors, um to the way he functions in church and to his relationship with his children. This is the universal schema, the universal framework, the template of all the narcissist's relationships.

Okay, that's been a heavy a heavy video. So, I'll finish with two tidbits just to gratify you and edify you. We all under curfew and we are all in quarantine, or many of us are in quarantine, some of us under curfew and so on so forth. Now lockdown is a relatively new word and so it doesn't have a very illustrious history. The history, the roots of words, it's a discipline called etymology. Etymology is a study of the roots of words. So but curfew and quarantine are old words. They're like hundreds of years old and they have a very long and varied and colorful history, very similar to some narcissists. Curfew is a contraction, portmanto contra contra contraction of the original French. In French it was called couvre-feu, means cover the fire. You see, in the middle ages in Europe there was a bell and the bell was rung. They were ringing the bell at a certain hour in the evening. Usually it was about 8:00, depending on the location, depending on the sun and so on. Usually it was 8. And when the bell was rung, everyone had to put up fires, domestic fires, outside fires, all fire had to be all fires had to be extinguished. And the reason was that if you didn't extinguish the fires, they tended to spread. So very small domestic fires sometimes destroyed a whole city, like the great fire of London which started in a bakery in a tiny, and of course in Chicago. So domestic fires were very, very dangerous. They burned down whole towns, whole cities, whole villages. So when the bell was rung, cover the fire, curfew, this is they borrowed the term to refer to to a restriction on anything, not only on fire, on citizens' movements but after dark. So until very, very recently they were ringing the church bells when there was curfew, until very recently. No one, no actually I uh no one really knew why. They just knew there's a curfew and we have to ring the bells, but no one remembered why. What was what was the original purpose? I I refer you to the to the poem Grace Elegy uh written in a country church in a country churchyard and it's um it says the sentence there, "the curfew tolls the knell of parting day." It's an echo of uh of this thing.

Now, quarantine. Quarantine is to do with narcissism. Believe it or not, originally the word quarantine meant me meant a period of 40 days in which a widow had the right to remain in her dead husband's house. We find the first mention of this type of quarantine in the early 16th century. And so quarantine had to do with the relationships between men and women. Uh, when the narcissist dies, his widow can remain in his house for 40 days. Another use of quarantine, it was um pronounced quarantine. Another use was the desert in which Christ fasted for 40 days. So the desert itself was called quarantine and it was borrowed from the Latin word quadrainta, 40. Okay. The quarantine the way we use it today is an earlier word. Uh, it's actually started I mean I read online um things which are completely wrong. They attribute the word to Italy. Didn't start in Italy. It was it started in Croatia, in a city known today as Dubrovnik. An amazing place by the way. It's like medieval life come alive. It's a po It's a fort and a port put together. It's a stunning place. Once the pidemic is over, promise yourselves to go and see Dubrovnik. You've never seen something like this. It's on the sea. It's like someone took a fairy castle and put it on the sea. Anyhow, it wasn't called the Dubrovnik at the time. It was called Ragusa. And they passed a law and the original law was not 40 days. It was actually 30 days. And it was not called quarantine. It was called trentino. No. And it was like every ship arriving from any part of the world where there was a disease of some kind uh that ship had to be isolated. The sailors had to be isolated and the goods by the way had to be isolated for 30 days. So no

One, from Ragusa, Dubrovnik of today, was allowed to visit the ships during the Tantino; and if someone broke the law, they joined the ship crew. I mean, they had to remain on the ship for the mandatory 30 days.

And so, for close to 100 years, 80 years, 100 years, many many cities in Europe, port cities with harbors, they adopted this TanTino. So Marseilles had a TanTino, Pisa had a Tentino, and many many many other cities.

So something happened after 80 years. No one is quite sure what; something happened after 8 years, and they extended the period from 30 days to 40 days, and they renamed the 20ino and called it quarantino, which is the root of the word quarantine that we use today.

A little entertainment after a very heavy and difficult video. So I need a drink. Vaknin, why no? Let the people go. Let my people go. Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay. This was it for today. We discussed the cerebral narcissist. There will be a video. I'm threatening you. There will be a video dedicated to the somatic narcissist. Now, that will be real fun. What goes on in the mind of a somatic narcissist and the way he deceives you is amazing. He's a con artist, while the cerebral is an alien, a form of artificial intelligence. The somatic is simply a con artist, but a delightful con artist. You know, many women say, maybe somatic, maybe it's a narcissist, but it was worth it. So we'll talk about it. I promise. I know you miss me. It's easy. Just say, just say it. Come out and say it. Vaknin, we miss you.

My name, my name is Sam Vaknin, and I'm the only author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm also your favorite professor in any subject whatsoever. This happens to be psychology. Today we're going to discuss two tangential, uh, subjects. One is mortification and how mortification contributes to the regulation of moods in the narcissist and to the transition from one type of narcissist to another. I've dealt with these topics at length in previous videos, but today I would like to clarify it a bit.

The second topic on today's relatively short video is hoovering: a contribution to the dynamic of hoovering. I coined the word hoovering, together with many other words like ghosting, flying monkeys, somatic narcissist, cerebral narcissist, um, and so on so forth. I coined it to describe a process whereby the narcissist tries to revive the shared fantasy, but to revive a specific shared fantasy by re-acquiring, by teaming up again with a re-idealization, a re-idealized, previous intimate partner. Hoovering never happens if the intimate partner mortifies the narcissist. But anything short of mortification, and you are up for hoovering. Today I would like to make a minor contribution to this topic as well.

But before we go there, I would like to add to your reading list the assignment for this semester. These are books that you have to read, as you know, you have to submit reports and so on, and I would, I, I, I'm about to add a book which I would place at the top of the list, so this is really a synchronicity; this is something you have to do; it's an amazing book, and even giants like Millon rely on this book extensively as an authoritative source, and it is, it's very short; it's, in terms of textbooks, it's less than 300 pages long, but it's a bombshell. It includes everything known about personality disorders. I strongly recommend it to any student, um, especially since you are postgraduates. Um, this is a way to, um, keep up to speed, keep up, keep yourself updated. So, Len Perry, S P R Y, is the author, and the book is The Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Five Personality Disorders: Assessment, Case Conceptualization, and Treatment. Uh, this is the third edition, published in 2016. One of the major advantages of this book is that it keeps making a distinction between a personality style and a personality disorder. Many people have the same personality style as someone with a personality disorder. For example, many people are grandiose, they're narcissistic, they're entitled, they lack empathy, etc., etc., yet they don't measure up to the level of a diagnosis. They have a personality style, and he has these amazing tables comparing the style to the disorder. Millon had adopted this contraption and had incorporated it in his seminal book, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, which I keep quoting from in my, uh, videos. So Len's Handbook of Diagnosis and Treatment of DSM-5 Personality Disorders: a must.

Let us now go to the topics of the video, starting with mortification. To remind you, narcissistic mortification is an extreme form of decompensation. Let's regress a bit. Each and every human being, each and every human being, healthy and unhealthy, has something called narcissistic defense mechanisms. Narcissistic defense mechanisms are strategies, ways of reframing and reinterpreting reality so that it doesn't inflict, um, grave damage on one's soul or psyche. So sometimes reality is too harsh, injuring, injurious, wounding, painful, hurtful, and cannot be countenanced, cannot be accepted as it is. Psychological defense mechanisms kick in, and they essentially falsify reality. They falsify reality by beautifying it, by changing it, by recasting it, by looking at it from another angle, by pretending, by denying, by repressing, by splitting reality into all good and all bad and identifying with the good. There are numerous ways of rewriting history and absenting yourself from unmitigated friction with reality so as to ameliorate anxiety, regulate your internal environment, including your moods and your emotions, and allow you to survive simply. So defense mechanisms are crucial for survival. In the absence of defense mechanisms, people disintegrate. They fall apart. They become psychotic. Borderlines, for example, have extremely primitive defense mechanisms. So they don't cope very well with reality. It's like they have no skin, and they are in direct touch with reality, not mediated through elaborate defense mechanisms. Similarly, narcissists resort usually to primitive defenses such as splitting or grandiosity. And narcissists, similarly, are constantly injured and wounded by reality: narcissistic injury. And so narcissistic mortification is when all the psychological defense mechanisms at the disposal of the narcissist crumble. All of them are disabled. All of them are inactivated at the same moment. And when I say moment, I mean moment. One could argue that, uh, normal people, healthy people also can undergo narcissistic mortification because in each and every one of us there's healthy narcissism. Here I disagree vehemently with Otto Kernberg. Otto Kernberg claimed there's no such thing as healthy narcissism. I completely beg to disagree, and on my corner are 99% of the scholars of narcissism. We all believe that there is healthy, healthy narcissism. Well, since there is healthy narcissism, and healthy narcissism underlies one's sense of self-esteem, regulates one's sense of self-worth, gives one self-confidence, since there is healthy narcissism, we should have something, we should have a narcissistic mortification also in the case of healthy people. But healthy people have numerous defense mechanisms: primitive, less primitive, highly evolved, socially embedded and contextualized defense mechanisms. So healthy people emerge from mortification almost instantly by drawing on ego resources and outside resources, which the narcissist doesn't have because it doesn't have a functioning ego. A narcissist has only primitive defense mechanisms: primitive, childlike, infantile, and these are his only protections against a hostile, harsh jungle out there. And when these defenses fall apart, he falls apart. And this process of falling apart is called decompensation. Defense mechanisms compensate for the unsavory, unpalatable, unacceptable aspects of reality. And when they disappear, when they are no longer available to the narcissist, there is a process of decompensation, inability to compensate. Reality invades, like a tsunami, like a tidal wave, invades the narcissist's emptiness; in effect, fills him up with tremendous pain and hurt, unleashes his buried, repressed, and denied negative emotionality from his early childhood. And he is, he becomes effectively a borderline. His emotions are dysregulated. His moods become labile. He becomes, to all intents and purposes, psychodynamically a borderline. Mortification pushes the narcissist to become a borderline. It is a result. What is mortification? It happens when the narcissist is exposed to a deeply traumatizing, deeply challenging, deeply humiliating event. And so the narcissist copes with mortification and with such events in one of two ways. He can render the mortification external. He can convert it to external mortification. What does it mean? External mortification is when the narcissist casts himself, presents himself, believes that he is a helpless victim. He adopts the victim stance. He pretends—he doesn't pretend; he believes, he's fully convinced that he had been victimized by malicious, envious, envious, or mentally ill people. And so he transfers, he transfers the shame and the humiliation and the guilt sometimes, and the responsibility and the locus of control to evil outsiders. And this preserves his self-image as a good person, a morally upright person who did nothing, who had done nothing wrong, who did not deserve such treatment. But if your fate and life and mental health and well-being and welfare and ability to function—if all of these are controlled from the outside, it's very frightening. It's threatening, and it pushes you to depression. When the narcissist chooses to externalize the mortification, he becomes clinically depressed. We can, we are beginning to see glimmers of what I'm about to tell you. Mortification seems to regulate moods and effects. It is a regulator. Now, borderlines, and to a large extent narcissists, but not only, histrionics, schizoids, paranoids, they have a problem with emotional dysregulation. Um, mortification forces them to make a choice in terms of moodability. For example, it forces them to choose depression. It's like what we call in quantum mechanics the collapse of the wave function. There are many possibilities: happiness, depression, this, that, and the other; and mortification pushes them to make a final choice and to adopt depression, the depressive stance. And so, by the way, in, in psychoanalytic terms, this is a regressive phase. It's regressing to the paranoid-schizoid phase of Melanie Klein, but we'll leave it aside for a minute. Function number one of mortification: reducing mood liability by settling on a specific mood, by a collapse of the wave function of moods in quantum mechanic terms. This is function number one. But there is also enhanced emotional dysregulation after mortification. There's the narcissist is awash with negative emotionality. Had he been a borderline, he would have been pushed to suicide. Indeed, many, many think that narcissistic mortification is life-threatening. I wouldn't go that far, but some scholars do, especially in the 1950s. So one option is to choose external mortification. Then there's a second option: to choose internal mortification. Internal mortification is when the narcissist says, "It's my fault. I made it happen. My, for example, my abuse pushed her to misbehave this way. My, my lack of agreeableness, my disagreeableness, um, forced people to humiliate me." So he accepts his contributions to the mortifying event, and he also accepts his ensuing responsibility. If he, if he actually engineered the event, if he led inexorably to the event, if he pushed everyone present to humiliate him, to torture him, to mock him, to, to, you know, impinge on his interests, whatever. If he pushed people to misbehave, then he's responsible for it. It's an acceptance of responsibility and contribution. And of course, by reframing the event this way, the narcissist restores his sense of mastery, his sense of control over the situation. I made it happen. His sense of control of others. I pushed them. They were my pawns. They didn't—it's, it's like Jesus says in the New Testament, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they are doing." So they didn't know what they were doing. I pushed them, and, and, uh, this position is very comforting, as a narcissist says, "Well, I'm in control of such situations; I can prevent them from happening," but this pushes him to be hypervigilant, to be paranoid, to develop referential ideation, to develop persecutory delusions, because if, if he's in control and if he can push people and, and so on so forth, he needs to be on his toes to prevent this from, from happening again. He needs to be on his toes in both cases. If people are evil and malicious, he needs to be on his toes; he needs to be on his guard. People are out to get him. They're about to hurt him. They're about to torture him and torment him and taunt him and humiliate him and mock him. And worse, he needs, he needs to be careful. So this, this creates hypervigilance, paranoid ideation, persecutory delusions, referential ideation, etc. But there is the same response when there is internal mortification, because in internal mortification it is the narcissist who makes, makes it happen. He sort of brings it upon himself. And in this case, the hypervigilance is self-directed. The paranoid and referential ideation is self-directed. The persecutory delusions are self-delusions. So we have two solutions: external mortification with outward-directed paranoia, and internal mortification with inward-directed paranoia. One could call it hypervigilance and autovigilance, if you wish. That's a very interesting statement because we have disorders with auto-plastic defenses. These disorders used to be called neuroses. It seems that we no longer use this term, more or less, but neuroses, at the time, there were disorders of autovigilance, when the patient took responsibility for everything bad and wrong that had happened in her life, and consequently was very afraid of herself as her worst enemy. "I've seen the enemy, and it is I." And so it seems that mortification, first of all, regulates mood, makes you, pushes you, pushes the narcissist towards depression if he chooses external mortification and pushes the narcissist towards neurosis if he chooses internal mortification. And in both cases, the mediating vector, the mediating resource, is paranoia. So mortification, mortification engenders paranoia, creates, provokes paranoia, but then the only question left is: is the paranoia directed outward, in which case there's depression, or is it directed inward, in which case there's neurosis? Now it sounds to you like, dah, like, so what, but it's a big deal, trust me. I'll tell you in a minute why, after I get some liquid courage. Is there anything better than red wine? Yes, more red wine. Okay. Why is it a big deal? It's a big deal because in the past, all the greatest minds of psychology made a distinction between psychosis and neurosis. There were the neuroses, multiple, and there were the psychoses, multiple. And it seems that mortification can create a bridge between neurosis and psychosis. It can create a bridge between internal objects interpreted as external objects in external mortification, and external objects interpreted as internal objects in case of internal mortification. Remember, when external objects are interpreted as—when external objects are interpreted as internal, that's narcissism. When internal objects are interpreted as external, that's psychosis, and mortification allows you both, depending which type you choose, you. It's like there's a menu. When you're mortified as a narcissist, you have a menu, or the waiter comes to the table and says, "m, you can choose one of two. We, today, we have a special offer: external mortification, and we give you the option of depression; and the other dish is internal mortification. We give you the option of neurosis." In the first case, essentially, essentially you react. You have narcissistic defenses. Narcissistic, ancient, primitive structures are activated. Melanie Klein would have appreciated this. And in the second case, neurotic structures are activated. And in both cases, in both cases, there's a god-awful, almighty confusion between internal objects and external objects. It seems that the mechanism that causes us to confuse internal and external objects is not actually trauma, but is the reaction to events, which is mortification. We may have to reconsider whether narcissism, borderline, etc., etc., are post-traumatic events or post-mortification events. And you can say, what's the difference? Trauma creates mortification. Not really. First of all, most traumas don't create mortification. But trauma, trauma is exclusively, usually exclusively the outcome, the outcome of a reaction to events that is not mediated via an interpretative framework. In other words, trauma is direct. You, you experience something, and there's trauma. There's no middle stage where you analyze, think about it, reframe it, put it in context. You don't have time to activate any defense mechanism. There's an event, and immediate trauma. It's a direct—so direct, I mean, the traumatic response is so immediate that there is good reason to suggest that trauma is simply a dysfunction of reality testing, not actually, not actually, um, a real wound or real injury or real, but simply misapprehending reality, and misapprehending reality in a way that is very threatening, of course. So you could say that trauma is a subspecies of paranoia. Paranoia is the same. It's triggered immediately, without mediation. So trauma is when you confront a potentially mortifying event and you immediately react by developing a full-fledged monopoly of cognitions and emotions which are integrated cohesively into a narrative which we later call trauma. That's trauma. Mortification is not the same. You can have mortification 5 days later, 5 months later, even years later. Mortification first undergoes a phase of cognitive analysis. The emotions are not on the surface. There's no access to most of these emotions because they're very threatening. There is, in other words, um, trauma first happens, then is dissociated. So the sequence in trauma is: event, trauma, dissociation. The sequence in mortification is: event, dissociation, mortification. It's a very, very important distinction, very crucial distinction, because in the case of trauma, it is already a cognitively and emotionally processed reaction to the event. It's a choice. In other words, in the case of mortification, I'm sorry, in the case of mortification, I repeat, I'm sorry, I misled you. In the case of mortification, it's a cognitively and emotionally processed reaction to the event. So mortification is a choice. Trauma is not a choice. Trauma is very similar to what Freud called an affect reaction. Trauma is totally a totally automated process. It's not a choice. It's, I would say, a constitutional propensity, a constitutional defect. I don't know what else, what other words to use. Um, it, it's like the person is trauma-ready. It's like high-definition-ready television—is trauma-ready. And this is his mode of reacting to reality. This is the language he uses to process reality and to try to act within reality self-efficaciously. Mortification is not like trauma because mortification requires a phase of analyzing what had happened and then allowing yourself to experience the reactive emotions, the emotions in reaction to what had happened. There's processing involved, and only then you can feel mortified. But this processing is unconscious, is dissociated. Summary: trauma is event and then trauma. So trauma is totally automatic reaction to event, if you have the tendency to process reality via trauma. So reality, trauma, forgetting about it. Dissociation: opposite reality, dissociating the reality, forgetting about it, background, unconscious processing, cognitive and emotional, and then mortification. Very crucial observation, and then, according to the choice you make, because you process everything cognitively and emotionally, then you make a choice: do I prefer an external trauma, or do I prefer an external mortification, or do I prefer internal mortification? If you choose external mortification, you end up depressed. Depression: you regulate your mood. You prefer to regulate your mood than to regulate your cognition or your emotion. You think your mood is the main threat. So you choose external mortification, and you end up choosing, making a choice of depression. You regulate your mood badly. It's a bad choice, but it's better than up and down. The other option is internal mortification, where you actually regulate your emotions and your cognitions in ways which are neurotic. Autoplastic, for example, you blame yourself.

Okay, we said in earlier videos that collapse and mortification regulate moods, but they also regulate something much more important: switching between self-states. Now, what is called diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—what is called personality disorders—that's a very antiquated notion. This notion is like at least 50 years old, if not 60. We don't think about these things this way anymore. It's very good for insurance purposes, it's very good for pharmaceutical companies and, you know, medical doctors and hospitals, but scholars in the field, we don't think about it this way. We think in terms of post-traumatic conditions, dissociation, self-states. We don't think in terms of personality disorder. This is very old thinking. So personality disorders are self-states. And because there are self-states, and because disordered people have many self-states, you can easily switch from one so-called diagnosis to another so-called diagnosis. You can easily switch from one personality disorder to another personality disorder. You can switch from one self-state to another self-state. For example, borderlines, under stress, anticipating rejection and humiliation and abandonment, borderlines switch from one self-state, the borderline self-state, to another self-state, the secondary psychopath self-state. That's an example. Similarly, narcissists switch from the narcissistic, grandiose self-state to the paranoid self-state. We all switch. I mean, mentally ill people, mentally disordered people switch between self-states. What is the trigger? What decides if there is switching or not? Mortification and collapse. Mortification and collapse. They are the triggers and the bridges. They cause the covert narcissist to become overt, the overt to become covert, the somatic to become cerebral, the cerebral to become somatic, the inverted to become overt, the borderline to become psychopath, the psychopath to become narcissist, the narcissist to become borderline. All these things happen daily, all the time, to all people with so-called personality disorder. Any therapist will confirm this, and any spouse, any intimate partner of a person, of someone with personality disorder will confirm this. Narcissists often are obsessive-compulsive. Obsessive-compulsives are grandiose people; are paranoid, and everyone will tell you that making these artificial distinctions between personality disorders is nothing short of counterfactual. It's psychology's fantasy. It's not true. It's simply not true. And in the ICD-11,

They are thinking of UNIF, putting everything under one diagnosis, personality disorder, which is something I've been advocating since 1995. But what I've added in the last four years is the mechanical psychonamic explanation why people shift between these so-called diagnoses because they are mortified.

And when they're mortified, they are faced with a choice. They have to process the events. They analyze them cognitively. They experience them emotionally. And all of this happens in the unconscious. And then they make a choice. It could be a mood-effective choice: I choose depression. Or it could be a neurotic choice, a choice of neurosis: I accept responsibility, and so on. But in both cases, they transition to another diagnosis, another type. The covert goes through mortification and, if he becomes, for example, a neurotic, if he chooses neurosis, he becomes instantly overt. Because what is neurosis? It is to say, "I was in control. I did everything. It all happened because of me." That's a grandiose statement. Covert narcissists who make grandiose statements openly are not covert anymore; they're open, they are overt. So, through such processing of the mortification, the covert becomes overt. And that's only one example.

Similarly, the borderline, if the borderline chooses internal mortification—for example, she anticipates abandonment, or she has been humiliated, or she's been openly rejected by someone—borderlines cannot digest and cannot assimilate rejection, abandonment, and humiliation. So when this happens to them, they're mortified. The minute they are mortified, they begin to process the mortification. The processing time in borderline is very brief; it's days, hours, sometimes minutes. And so they process the mortification cognitively. They process the mortification emotionally. It all happens in the background, in the unconscious. The borderline just feels ill at ease, uncomfortable, because egotism is growing as the processing continues. Egotism is growing. And so, at some point, the mortification becomes conscious. Yes, the processing is finished, and it becomes conscious. And then the borderline has to make a choice: Do I want to be depressed, or do I want to be neurotic? If she chooses neurosis, she transitions to secondary psychopath. Because what is neurosis? What is the internal mortification solution? It's to say, "I'm in control. I am the master. I'm going to decide how things are going to happen." That's defiance. That's lack of impulse control. That's recklessness. These are all features of the psychopath. So she becomes psychopathic because she had chosen the internal mortification thing. But what happens if she chooses the external mortification and she becomes depressed? Well, we have a combination of borderline with depressive aspects. And, of course, what is a borderline with depressive aspects? It's a covert narcissist. It's a covert narcissist because her grandiosity is preserved, but her depression pushes her into a schizoid position, into the background, away from people. And if you put all these together, you get a covert, but not any covert, covert narcissist.

Similarly, I can show you how applying these simple principles gives you any diagnosis within the personality disorders space—schizoid, I mean paranoid, you name it. Here's a game for you: sit at home, write down these principles—mortification, unconscious processing—and then you can choose depression or neurosis. In depression, you're not in control; in depression, you're controlled from the outside. In neurosis, you control. Okay? Simple principles. Take them, use them, apply them to personality disorders and see the amazing results. You easily transition from narcissist to schizoid, from schizoid to borderline, from borderline to paranoid. Immediately you see they are all facets of one single clinical entity. It's so obvious.

Okay, I want to talk, to say a word or two about hoovering, and I will let you go, having hoovered you into this video. Um, when you dump the narcissist, when you abandon, when you break up with the narcissist, and even when the narcissist discards you, even when he discards you—discarding you, when the narcissist discards you—that's internal mortification. The narcissist has failed; otherwise, why would he have to discard you? For example, if he discards you and he devalues you, he has to admit that he had made a mistake when he had idealized you. If I say to myself, "She's stupid and ugly. I have to get rid of her," I also instantly have to ask myself, "Then how come did you consider her beautiful and intelligent only two years ago? Were you wrong then, or are you wrong now? Are you capable of being wrong?" The discard phase is a challenge to grandiosity because, to devalue your intimate partner and then to discard her, you must admit that you had made a mistake when you had idealized her. So there's a mortification there, and exactly this mortification pushes the narcissist to hoover because even the discard—and, of course, when you break up with the narcissist, or you dump him, or you cheat on him—all these events are mortifying events, and it's a challenge to the narcissist's grandiosity. He needs to resolve the mortification. And he resolves the mortification by converting it into either external or internal. In a minute, we'll connect it to hoovering.

The narcissist, when he discards you, devalues and discards you, or when you devalue and discard the narcissist—because you remember this process of idealization is mutual: the narcissist idealizes you, you idealize the narcissist; it's co-idealization, core idealization. Devaluation is the same: core devaluation. You devalue the narcissist; the narcissist devalues you. Whichever the case may be, it's mortifying. If you are the one who had dumped the narcissist, it's definitely mortifying. If he is the one who had discarded you, he has to admit that he had made a mistake when he had idealized you. That's mortifying. It's a challenge to grandiosity. So he can then choose—once mortification sets in—he must choose between external and internal. He can say, "Well, good riddance. She's stupid. She's ugly. She's fat. She's old. She's whatever." So external mortification involves overt devaluation, blaming the other: "She's evil. She's malicious. She conspired against me. She stabbed me in the back. She betrayed me." Internal mortification is transferring the locus of control to you. But this creates narcissistic injury. It's a horrible narcissistic injury because it means that the narcissist is handing the locus of control to you. You are in control. You had implemented your evil scheme, and he was your raw material. The narcissist was a victim. Being a victim and being God doesn't sit well together; God is not a victim. God's son was a victim, but God is not a victim. So it's a problem for the narcissist to maintain both simultaneously. You know, it creates what we call cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the narcissist believes himself to be God. And on the other hand, here he is the victim of a woman he had just devalued. So he is not only a victim; he's a victim of an inferior person. Mortifying.

If he chooses internal mortification, it's even worse because he says, "You know, I pushed her away. I made her cheat on me. I abused her. I mistreated her. I rejected her and humiliated her and abandoned her long before she did. I'm still in control. I made this happen." Okay. If you're still in control and you made this happen, you made what happen? You made what happen? You destroyed your relationship. You proved yourself an idiot for having idealized the wrong person. What did you make happen? So in both cases, there's a challenge to grandiosity. The only way to restore the grandiosity is to hoover you. Hoovering is about restoring grandiosity. End of story. There's no other motive to hoovering. People keep asking me, "Why does he hoover me?" He has, you know, another source of supply. He's married. He's, you know, he's hoovering you, not because—not only when he doesn't have other sources of supply. That's functional hoovering, and that's not okay. He is hoovering you, not usually—he is trying to hoover you mainly to restore his grandiosity. Very, on very few occasions, it has to do with practical, functional, utilitarian thinking like, "I don't have a source of supply. I'll go back to Amanda," or "I don't have a shared fantasy. Let's try to reestablish a shared fantasy, and I will re-idealize Amanda so that can fit into the new shared fantasy." It's hard work to hoover, to re-idealize. It's counterfactual. You have to fight your yourself. You have to—and again you have to admit that you're wrong because you had devalued Amanda only two weeks ago. Why are you hoovering her now? I mean, two weeks ago she was an idiot, stupid, ugly. What happened in these two weeks? I mean, that's the fastest diet on earth. If so, there's a lot of—there are many internal contradictions in hoovering. It's a very fraught and problematic process for the narcissist. So he hoovers you to restore his grandiosity, and the aim—even sometimes unconscious aim—is to hoover you and then, when he succeeds, to immediately dump you vindictively. A lot of hoovering is concerned with revenge, with punishment.

Hoovering is intended to reaffirm the narcissist's grandiosity: "I'm irresistible. I'm amazing. I'm the one and only. I'm unique. She can't find a substitute for me." So this is reaffirmation of grandiosity, rebuilding it. The second reason is to punish you for your transgressions—for not fitting in into the shared fantasy, for not fulfilling your maternal role, for failing as a mother, for not being his admirer and fan, unthinking admirer and fan, for not catering to his sexual kinkiness and sadism, for letting him down and disappointing him by not agreeing to participate in his adventures as a playmate. There are numerous reasons why you had let—why you had kind of let him down, and these are transgressions, especially if you cheated on him or stole his money or something—if you if you did—if you really did something not okay, if you had misbehaved. So he needs to punish you for the transgressions. Motive number one: restore grandiosity. Motive number two: punish her. It's a penal, punitive measure. And reason number three is to teach you to behave yourself in the future, to condition you. Hoovering is a form of operant conditioning. It's a form of intermittent reinforcement: I discard you, I hoover you, I discard you, I hoover you. Hot and cold, warm and freezing. Loving, hating; it's intermittent reinforcement, and it creates trauma bonding. Hoovering is a long-term, non-contemporaneous, non-continuous—that means it's a long-term form of intermittent reinforcement where the reinforcement, the opposite reinforcement, comes a bit later; it's divorced in time because most intermittent reinforcement is immediate: I hate you now, I love you in two hours. This is: I hate you now, I love you in two years. So it's very long, intermediate reinforcement, but it is, and it creates trauma bonding. It teaches you to behave yourself in the future. It's exactly like housebreaking a pet. You housebreak your dog, you housebreak your cat: "Don't pee on the carpet, and don't pee on Sam," etc. So um, he's domesticating you. He's conditioning you and molding you, Pygmalion style, to be his perfect snapshot. He is reverting you to the snapshot so that you can fulfill your role in a shared fantasy.

These are the functions of hoovering, and it's intimately connected to the mortification that he had experienced when his grandiosity had been challenged in the disintegration of the shared fantasy. When, in the face that the shared fantasy disintegrates, whichever solution he chooses—internal mortification or external mortification—his grandiosity is severely tested. If he chooses external mortification, you control the situation. You had the upper hand. You, in your evil mind, wicked schemes, and so on, you destroyed him. He had been the victim. But that means that he's helpless. He's not omnipotent. He's not godlike. That's mortification. If he chooses internal mortification, he stupidly destroyed the shared fantasy. He misjudged you when he had idealized you. It reflects badly on him. It also leads to mortification, and mortification forces him—forces him to compensate by hoovering. Hoovering is a compensatory grandiosity re-restructuring, or grandiosity reconstruction measure, which at the same time molds you, changes you, conditions you, and transforms you to become such a partner in a future shared fantasy which will not force—who will not force the shared fantasy again into bankruptcy. Be the right partner. Background noise. Fan, admirer. Sexual sex slave. Mother. Got it, kiddos. Okay, until next time.

During this pandemic, I've introduced you to many new concepts—concepts such as shared fantasy, mortification, dissociation, secondary psychopathy. All these concepts are relatively new. Shared fantasy was first described in 1989, the same year that covert narcissism had been first diagnosed. So what I will attempt to do in this video is to provide you with checklists, bullet points, signs one, two, three, four, tests—tests that you can apply at home. Just follow the algorithm, apply the tests, the list of signs, the list of behaviors, the lists of symptoms in order to reach a conclusion: What is it? Which animal is it that you're dealing with? And I'm going to dissect, disembowel, eviscerate, and analyze all the typical behaviors of the narcissist within the cycle of the shared fantasy. And this is going to be in capsule form. So you're going to have a short list for mortification, a short list for shared fantasy, etc., etc., etc. And I hope you find it helpful. There's also a link at the description. In the description, there's a link where you can download a PDF file with the entire text of this video, except my jokes, which are proprietary, and this famous announcement: My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited and a host of books, ebooks, videos, etc., etc., about pathological narcissism and personality disorders. I'm also—also I insist—a professor of psychology. So let's dive right in, scuba gear and all, shall we?

Let's start with a list of—a test for romantic jealousy. How do you know if your narcissist is romantically jealous or not? Now you remember that narcissists are actually rarely romantically jealous or possessive when they are faced with abandonment. They become possessive, but generally they're not. Still, there are certain relationships, certain intimate relationships where the narcissist does actually become romantically jealous. And here are the three signs when the narcissist is attached to his intimate partner in a way that he misperceives as love. When the narcissist tells himself that he is in love with his intimate partner, he socializes with her friends and family as well. If he is not in love with her, he rejects her friends and family. This is test number one: Does he agree to socialize with your friends and family? Test number two: When the narcissist tells himself that he's in love with an intimate partner, he does react to triangulation. If he does not love the intimate partner, he does not react at all with jealousy, with competitiveness, or with possessiveness, never mind what you do with other men, even in his presence. Test number three: Women tend to conform. Well, we are talking—I'm using the gender pronouns loosely. It applies vice versa. That means when I say "he," it applies to a "she." When I say "she," it applies to a "he." So, in the case of a heterosexual male narcissist, women tend to conform to the narcissist's expectations. They tend to mold themselves in order to please the narcissist. When the narcissist loves a woman, she would tend to play and act—the narcissists are very attracted to this specific type of woman. We're going to discuss it a bit later. So the changes in your own behavior—if you find yourself that you're more, shall we say, sluttish, more flirtatious, more seductive, more open to the advances—sexual and emotional advances of other men—it's an indicator that your narcissist actually considers himself to be in love with you. Similarly, if your narcissist is not in love with you, you would tend to act as a homely service provider, a housekeeper, personal assistant, a housewife. Let's recap the tests: How do you know if your narcissist thinks that he is in love with you? How do you know if your narcissist is romantically jealous? One, he socializes with your friends and family. Two, he reacts to your misbehavior with other men, including triangulation. Number three, you change. You tend to become more and more open, not to say sluttish, with other men in his presence.

How do we know? How do you know if the narcissist is mortified, or is it only narcissistic injury? How can you tell if the narcissist had been—is in the throws of mortification, or if he's just sulking because he had been narcissistically injured? When the narcissist admits—admits to being abusive, sadistic, crazy, his own worst enemy—when he says, "I inflict unendurable pain on myself by knowingly hurting people and abusing them," if he owns up to his predatory behavior, that's a sign of mortification. Sign number two: if he begins to self-deprecate, if he says that even that other men are vastly preferable to him, he would say, "I'm not good for you. Go look for some other men." You know, if he presents himself as irredeemably inferior, disabled, not superior, infantile, or not a man at all, that's sign number two. Sign number three for mortification: If he feels disrespected, if he berates himself, if he feels that people fear him or hate him or are revolted by him—in other words, if he detects negative emotionality in other people, negative reactions in other people—that's a sign of mortification. Number four: if he feels that he is not loved, that he is not safe, that his needs and his health are no one's priorities, that even his most profound need weighs less than the most trifling desire or wish of his nearest and dearest, that's a sign of mortification. And the last sign of mortification is when he feels that he is gullible, that he's being gaslighted, or that he is an easy mark, when he feels that other people are malevolent and malicious and conspire against him and target him and that he is easy prey. And he explains it—with the—because of the shared fantasy. He says, "I'm like that because of the shared fantasy. I live in fantasy, or I'm in a post-traumatic state, or I'm dissociating. I can't remember things, or my reality testing is short. I don't gauge reality properly, or I'm grandiose, or I'm disempathic. I don't have enough empathy. I can't read people. Can't read social cues or sexual cues or body language." If he admits to any of these things, there's a sure sign of mortification. Narcissists behave in these five ways only—only and exclusively when they are mortified, not when they are narcissistically injured, not when they go through a life crisis, not in any other circumstance. These are the five signs of mortification. Okay.

Why does this cerebral schizoid narcissist accept cheating within his shared fantasy? Narcissists are terrified and nauseated by the perfidy, deceptiveness, and promiscuity of women precisely because they have a preference for this potentially mortifying profile in mate selection. I'm going to increase the font because I'm exceedingly old and I can't see anything. Right? So they're attracted to these kind of women, and they are terrified of their own attraction. So to survive, the narcissist needs either to avoid women altogether, which makes him infinitely sad, or to accept that in order to persevere and survive within his increasingly more sexless shared fantasy, his intimate partner has to meet her or his sexual needs and emotional needs with other men. Um, within the shared fantasy, the narcissist is a child or a father, but never an adult man. And he accepts that while his partner should have the liberty and the will to outsource her sexual and emotional needs, to team up, to find love and intimacy in sex with other men, he doesn't have—he's not allowed to do the same. He's prohibited from doing the same. And he acquiesces, he accepts this glaring asymmetry, this bizarre arrangement for various reasons. Number one: As long as there are no indications of imminent abandonment, he doesn't care if she is with other men, but he knows that she would be hurt and she would feel insecure were he to have any interaction with other women. Of course, remember the gender pronouns are interchangeable: he, she, she, he. Reason number two: He should be grateful to his intimate partner for any time spent with him and on his knees. He is so broken and so damaged and so mentally ill, irredeemably mentally ill, that her presence in his life is a sacrifice on her part. She's doing him a huge favor. He has no right and is in no position to establish boundaries or rules and to enforce them. He needs to become unbounded; otherwise, she would just walk away. Number three: She is an adult; he is not. She needs mature, conventional, reciprocated, and regular sex and intimacy; he does not. So he has to compromise. He has to sacrifice in order to allow her to secure her needs and to make sure that she's present in his life, to secure her commitment to the relationship. He needs to let her go. He needs to free her. Um, the cerebral narcissist's intimate partners are virtual singles. That's when a married woman behaves as a single. Um, she's a virtual single; she's married to or she's in a relationship with a petulant child or a stern father at home. Dating others is the only outlet and the only escape. And it's easily provable that the cerebral schizoid narcissist has an infantile and immature state of mind, not that of an adult man.

Only during an active shared fantasy such a narcissist experiences fear of loss and abandonment, separation anxiety. So only during a shared fantasy he is capable of experiencing romantic jealousy when he is faced with abandonment. But he never experiences competition with other men as all males do. The cerebral schizoid has only the first typical of a pre-edipo child. Um, only the first attribute: abandonment anxiety. He rarely has romantic jealousy when he's faced with abandonment, actual abandonment. And he never competes with other males. He gives up. If a male approaches his intimate partner, he would just give up. He would not protest. He would not stand up to his rights. He would not challenge. Nothing. You just walk away.

Um, the fourth reason: he can have sex only within a shared fantasy, a new relationship. So cerebral schizoid narcissist to have sex needs to abandon his intimate partner and find a new one. His intimate partner, on the other hand, can compartmentalize. She can have sex and love intimacy with other men, and she can still stay or remain in his life within the shared fantasy and mother him and service him.

The next reason: any new shared fantasy will end the same way with sexlessness and acrimony. So why bother? As long as he is getting supply and services, however meager, better stay put and forget about sex. He moves on to a new shared fantasy only when two of the three S's are missing. To remind you, the three S's are supply, sadistic and narcissistic, sex and services. When two of the three are missing, um, the woman, the intimate partner had come to replicate his bad dead mother. She had become his dead mother, and she had failed in her role as a good enough mother, which he perceives as betrayal.

The next reason for the asymmetric arrangement where the intimate partner can cheat and the cerebral schizoid narcissist cannot: Only mentally ill, broken, damaged, and traumatized women succumb to the narcissist psychosexuality. Only such women enter the shared fantasy. And this poses, of course, serious risks: Exposure, blackmail, suicide, criminal liability. So scouting for a new shared fantasy is an absolute desperate last resort.

Next reason is that the cerebral schizoid narcissist successfully sublimates his autoerotic, sadistic, kinky sex drive. He really prefers solitary activities such as, I don't know, reading books, watching movies to sex, and he is far more gratified by these activities as well. The biological drive of this schizoid cerebral narcissist is entirely satisfied with pornography. His psychosexual kink and sadism require a compliant life body. But the prize is not worth the price. So he suppresses his urges. He suppresses his drive. Exactly the same way, for example, practitioners of pedophilia or other paraphilias suppress their drive, their sex drive in order not to harm children, or latent homosexuals who are not out, did not out; they also suppress their drive, rejecting women, frustrating and humiliating them when he cannot have them for his sadistic pleasures. Sometimes this kind of causing pain is preferable to sex, as good as sex. Feels as good as sex.

And finally, allowing the partner to cheat on him restores the narcissist's delusion of being in control. I made her do it. She had my blessing, and she had my permission. And it restores his status as the morally upright victim. Okay, that's the bullet list for unilateral cheating or legitimized cheating in relationships with cerebral schizoid narcissists that the narcissist cerebral automatic ends up with dependent, codependent, immature women, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, or psychopathic features is totally understandable. Only broken, damaged, traumatized women would be attracted to the narcissist emanations and his magic spell during the love bombing or grooming phase. But narcissists also end up uh conjuring shared fantasies with totally healthy women: Women with a healthy sex drive, women who are boundaried, women who are self-sufficient in the best sense of the word.

Why at all? Why do they seek the company of women at all? And again, genders are interchangeable. Got it? If I say he, you can replace it with she. Why does the narcissist seek to have a shared fantasy at all? If he is so averse to intimacy, if he regards emotions as a form of weakness, if he um is incapable of maintaining regular sexuality, regular sexual relationships in the relations in the long term, why team up with with women at all? Even the somatic narcissist becomes asexual after a while with the same woman. That's why he needs to change them so often. So the narcissist enjoys sex only when he is grooming a new partner for an emerging shared fantasy. Once a partner is acquired and secured, the narcissist becomes essentially celibate, loses all interest in sex. So why go through the inevitable deception, the acrimony in the wake of inelectable sexlessness? There are 10 good reasons. I promised you bullet lists. So here's another one.

Number one, choosing um an asexual woman, a woman who is sex averse either because of her traumatic experiences or because she has a very low sex drive, a hyposexual woman; that would defeat the purpose. The purpose is to create an illusion, a delusion and a self-delusion of normalcy. The narcissist tries to broadcast to the world and to convince himself that nothing's wrong with him, that he is actually normal. It's the same motivation that drives latent homosexuals to get married; still trying to it's a form of virtue signaling. I'm not homosexual. Everything is okay with me. Not that anything is wrong with homosexuality. Don't misunderstand me. But many homosexuals who are latent, didn't out, um, do think that homosexuality is a problem. And until 1973, by the way, homosexuality used to be a mental health diagnosis in the diagnostic and statistical manual. Anyhow, narcissists are trying to tell everyone, "Look at me. Normal. I have a normal wife. I have normal kids. I have a normal life." So, choosing an asexual woman defeats the purpose.

Number two, sex. Even the memory of sex guarantees addiction. Sex and the memories of sex guarantee addiction. And addiction guarantees no abandonment. If the woman gets addicted to the narcissist, she will not abandon him even when the sex stops. It is a continuing delusional hope that things will get better. The narcissist binds the woman powerfully, and this reduces the risk of abandonment, and he does this via sparkling, scintillating sex at the beginning; technical fireworks.

Reason number three, to convert his partner into a bed for secretary objects, thereby justifying and perpetuating the narcissist's moral superiority and victim stance. I'm a victim, a morally superior. She is cheating on me. She is not having sex with me.

Number four, to reenact early childhood traumas with his rejecting, absent dead mother.

Number five, to test his partner's unconditional love and allegiance. I'm going to be asexual or sexless. Let's see how long you're going to love me. Let's see how long you're going to remain faithful. Let's see how long it will take you to betray me, stab me in the back, and cheat on me. It's a test.

Number six, to control his partner via her guilt and shame over her inevitable misbehavior with men as she seeks to cater to her most fundamental and basic needs of love, intimacy, and sex.

Number seven, sexlessness legitimizes sexlessness and the inevitable inelectable betrayal or cheating or abandonment. Legitimizes defiance and contempt for the partner, restores a sense of grandiosity. She has to answer for her misdeeds. She has to deceive and pretend and act. She has to be scared and walk on eggshells while the cerebral narcissist or the narcissist observes, observes her, observes her pitiful squirming, and he does this smugly, and then he forgives her magnanimously in a theatrical dramatic act.

Reason number eight: allowing the partner total freedom, including the freedom to cheat and misbehave with others. This total freedom guarantees that she will stay out of the narcissist's affairs. She will let him be. And the narcissist delights in solitary pursuits within his solipsistic black hole. All narcissists, even somatic ones, even gregarious ones, even pro-social and communal ones, all of them have a schizoid core. Gregariousness comes at a cost. Narcissists have to pretend and act. It's energy depleting. They want to be left alone most of the time.

Number nine, pushing the partner to cheat. Collusive infidelity, masochistically, is an act of masochism. It is intended to masochistically punish the narcissist for his own self-loathing and self-hatred owing to his disabling mental illness. The narcissist perceives himself as a bed unworthy object in such machinations, driving his intimate partners to misbehave. This guarantees extreme pain and finally mortification.

And number 10, sadistic narcissists, which are a small minority of narcissists, use sex withdrawal to punish and control their partners.

Why remain in an abusive, dead relationship? Why be constantly betrayed, humiliated, and reduced? Because multiple relationship failures in the past had convinced the narcissist that he can do no better. So why bother to try again with someone else? And this applies equally well to codependents, borderlines. Anyone, honestly, anyone with mental illness, anyone with bipolar disorder, anyone with depression, anyone, anyone with schizoid personality disorder, anyone who's a paranoid, anyone who's a schizophrenic; uninterrupted stream of failed, painful, hurtful, damaging, destructive, mortifying relationships. So why go through it again? If you have a personality disorder, for example, such gloomy self-disparagement is fully justified and realistic. All future liaisons are doomed, and they're doomed to end in acrimony, in cheating, in hurt and pain.

Why not remain single then? Isn't remaining single preferable to the hell of a dysfunctional dyad couple? Well, remaining single is, of course, preferable to engaging in an endless stream of failed relationships. It is. And most mentally ill people, most people with mental health problems indeed end life all alone in a schizoid state. But some narcissists require a shared fantasy. Shared fantasy with an insignificant other, with an intimate, so-called intimate partner. And they need their shared fantasy in order to avoid decompensation and depression. They settle for anything on the table. However lurid, however degrading, however humiliating, they realize that no one is going to agree to be with them unless they make massive concessions. And so they render themselves unbounded doormats. And ironically, this very prostration, this very submissiveness and obedience and doormatness, this obsequiousness, it is exactly the thing that drives their partners away. Their partners are disgusted with the desperation of the narcissist. The partner is disappointed. The partner is angry at herself for having settled for a spineless worm rather than a man. Having been repeatedly damaged, these partners recoil from any attempt by the errant narcissist to hoover, lovebomb, or groom them into a new round of approach-avoidance. Sooner or later, narcissists end up the same way, abandoned time and again until it is too late for the narcissist to find the next willing collaborator in his charade of a life unlived.

Here you go. So hello, hello everyone, and today uh we have uh Sam Vaknin here today uh with us and the author of malignant self-love: narcissism revisited. Hello Sam. Hello, thank you for having me again. Uh, thank you so much because I know that you are busy and um yeah, so never so busy to talk to you. Thank you so much. Today I would love to speak with you about mortification. Uh, and my first question will be um what is mortification about because um it's a difficult topic and not so many people understand what is it, and you know, yes, unfortunately, the leading, the leading videos on narcissistic mortifications which were made in the past few weeks are very misleading. So when you go on YouTube and you type narcissistic modification, you get videos from self-styled experts that are completely wrong. They confuse narcissistic mortification with narcissistic injury, narcissistic wound, and narcissistic scar. So I suggest to start by defining what what is injury, wound and scar, and then we can go on to discuss narcissistic mortification, and then you will see the huge, you will see the huge difference between injury, narcissistic injury, narcissistic mortification. I'm again warning that the only credible sources for information about narcissistic mortification in this particular case happen to be on my channel because I have four videos based on the literature, on the scholarly literature, on the academic literature. All other videos regrettably are confused completely narcissistic injury and narcissistic mortification. So you should be very careful what you're watching and what you believe once you're watching. Let's start with definitions. Narcissistic injury and I'm reading is an occasional or circumstantial threat, real or imagined, to the narcissist's grandio and fantastic self-perception; the false self as perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to special treatment and recognition regardless of actual accomplishments. So any threat to this self-perception, this inflated grandio self-view is narcissistic injury. Narcissistic wound is a repeated or recurrent identical or similar threat. In other words, narcissistic wound is simply narcissistic injury that keeps repeating itself. So if you have the same injury time and again, for example, from the same person or in the same environment or owing to the same circumstances, if the injury repeats itself, it becomes a wound. And then there is narcissistic scar. Narcissistic scar is a psychological defense against a narcissistic wound. The defense is intended to sustain and preserve the narcissist's grandio and fantastic self-perception; his false self. So these are the three things. Mortification has nothing to do with narcissistic injury or narcissistic wound. Absolutely nothing. It's a totally different dynamic with totally different outcomes for totally different reasons. The ethopathology, the ethology, the causation of mortification is very different; the the whole process is very different, and it's a great misfortune that people online are confusing the two. So now if you want we can discuss narcissistic mortification. Yes, please. Okay, we start with phenomenology. How does it look? How does mortification look? Yeah. Mortification happens only when there is someone, a human being, who aggresses against the narcissist, becomes aggressive with the narcissist, shouts at the narcissist, humiliates the narcissist, attacks the narcissist physically, verbally, psychologically, in any way. So there must be an aggressor. Condition number one. Condition number two, it must be in public, not not privately. Mortification never happens privately, only in public. And not only any public, but a public that matters to the narcissist, for example, his his colleagues or his peers or people he admires, role models and so on. So that's the second condition, public. The third condition, it must be sudden, unexpected, unpredictable, abrupt, so that the narcissist is not preparing himself, but it's like a thunder, and he's shocked completely and is without defenses. That is a third condition. Now, if these three conditions are met, an aggressing person, person who aggresses against a narcissist, suddenly in public, the narcissist reacts with narcissistic mortification. Consistent mortification involves shame, humiliation, trauma, real trauma, not mini trauma, severe trauma, depression, anxiety, and all these attacks happened to the narcissist at the same moment. So he is utterly overwhelmed and flooded. And this is, of course, a borderline condition. This is emotional dysregulation. What mortification does to the narcissist, it strips away the defenses, the narcissistic defenses like the false self, and then what is left is actually a borderline, someone with borderline personality organization or borderline defenses. At that moment, the narcissist realizes the limitations and defects of his true self. In other words, the false self is disabled, deactivated. We call this process decompensation. There is no false self separating the narcissist from the world. So reality impinges on the narcissist, touches the narcissist directly without a firewall, without protection, without mediation. It's very direct. And then the narcissist feels how defective he is, how limited he is, how what a failure he is, what a loser, how inadequate he is. In other words, the narcissist gets in touch or becomes aware of his internal bad object. This is this is how it looks. Now, the minute this happens, um when the defenses are done, some really, really terrifying things begin to happen to the narcissist. I want you to understand that all this takes place within 5 minutes. Mortification is not a process. It's not a process. Okay? It's an event. So, so how is this process unfolds when this um, you know, when NPD sees himself or herself right uh without filter, without without um false self, at that moment when the false self is disabled, the narcissist is no longer able to confuse external objects with internal objects. Remember, remember that in pathological narcissism there is a confusion between external objects and internal objects. A narcissist internalizes external objects, and then he feels that he is in control because internal objects can be controlled. They never abandon the narcissist. They never humiliate the narcissist. So the narcissist prefers to be in touch with internal object objects that represent external objects. So, if the narcissist is in touch with you, if he's in an intimate relationship with you, even if he's your friend or even if he's your colleague, he's going to create a snapshot of you, a photograph of you, and he's going to internalize it. He's going to interrogate it, and he's going to continue to interact with the photograph, not with you, never with you. This is a defense because that way the narcissist feels superior and safe. The object is inside his mind. So he is the boss. But mortification destroys this mechanism. So the narcissist no longer is able to internalize you. You become an a truly external object which is out of control. And so the narcissist is in a state of terror, horror, disorientation. The false self is destroyed, and all the external objects invade, invade the narcissist's mind. Like Russia invaded Ukraine, you know, all the all the external objects that the narcissist kept out suddenly they intrude. They penetrate the narcissist's mind, and the narcissist is totally at a loss what to do. He feels hopeless. He feels like there's no alternatives. He feels helpless. And above all, he feels that he's lost that he has lost control over his his own world, over his internal world and the external world. So he is no longer God. He is no longer perfect because God controls everything. And so the mortification disabled the false selves. The external objects invaded the narcissist's mind. He became aware of the external objects. He lost control. And that means that he is not perfect. He's not godlike. So huge shame and huge humiliation that is not god because the narcissist's defenses: I'm god. I'm I know everything. I'm all powerful. These are defenses against shame, against inferiority. And so he doesn't have these defenses anymore. And he literally disintegrates. He falls apart. He becomes paralyzed, disabled, depressed, anxious, and absolutely suicidal. Mortification leads to two two effects that are rare in narcissism. Number one, self-awareness. Self-awareness of the bad object, limitations, defects, inabilities, inadequacies, deficiencies, deficits. This is new to the narcissist. This is shocking, and it comes as a river. You cannot stop it, you know, because the false self is disabled. And the second thing is intrusion of external objects terrify the narcissist so much. And that when it is coupled with his shame over not being God anymore, he wants to die. There's a very powerful suicidal ideation. Again, it's a borderline condition. Again, this is actually a borderline state. Mortification is regression. Regression of the narcissist back to borderline condition. Grotstein, who was a famous psychoanalyst, Grotstein said that narcissism um is borderline, I'm sorry, borderline is failed narcissism. Yes, the the borderline wants to be a narcissist as a child, but she fails and she remains a borderline. The narcissistic child succeeds to become a narcissist. But the mortification pushes the narcissist back in time to very early childhood when he was still borderline before he became narcissist because all the defenses are gone, and he becomes borderline. He's suicidal. He wants to mutilate himself. He's full of shame, humiliation. He's terrified of external objects. He has abandonment. Exact. It becomes exactly borderline. But the borderline is used to be borderline. You know, she has experience. She developed defenses. She develops routines, procedures. She manages to survive with her disorder. The narcissist doesn't have experience how to be a borderline. So when the narcissist is suddenly overwhelmed and flooded with a borderline condition, narcissist develops major depression and extreme suicidal ideation. Very dangerous condition for the narcissist. He also becomes self-aware. So if there is therapeutic intervention, this is the time, mortification is the time for for therapy actually. Mhm. Now, Libby, Libby, which is one of the great scholars of narcissistic mortification, she described two types of narcissists, what she called the deflated narcissist. Today we call it covert narcissist. The deflated narcissist and the inflated narcissist. Today we call them covert and overt. So she said that um when the mortification happens, there is an initial phase of paralysis. Narcissist is paralyzed. He's so shocked. All the experiences in mortification are totally new to the narcissist. For example, direct contact with external objects. He doesn't know how to do this. Finally being in touch with emotions. He doesn't know how to deal with emotions. The bad object takes over. His grandiosity is incapacitated. He doesn't know how to deal with all this. There's no fantasy defense. There's no cognitive distortions. I mean, he would rather die. It's so shame, shaming, humiliating, depressing, and above all terrorizing that he wants to die. That phase lasts anywhere from days to weeks. That's a very dangerous period if there's no therapy. Following this phase, the narcissist tries to rebuild his narcissistic defenses, and Libby describes a process which she calls internal to external mortification. And this is a very interesting process. The narcissist, remember, is not grandiose. The mortification disabled the grandiose. Narcissist has been humiliated publicly, shamed publicly by an aggressive person. So he cannot be grandiose. So the narcissist tries to rebuild his grandiosity. How does he do that? By lying to himself. Of course, that's what narcissists do. So he lies to himself. He says, "This person who wronged me, this person who humiliated me, this person who shamed

Me, he did all this because I made him do it. I made her do it; she cheated on me in public with someone because I pushed her to cheat on me. He stole, he humiliated me in public because I provoked him. So the narcissist lies to himself that the aggression that he had experienced was because of him, of his behavior, or actually because of his misbehavior.

He says to himself, "Yeah, people humiliated me. People shamed me. People attacked me. People aggressed against me. People were bad to me, even. But all of this because I made them behave this way. I control their behavior. So because I control their behavior, it means that I am God. I'm again God. They were my puppets. They were just my puppets, and I was the puppet master. I was playing with their strings." So he is lying to himself. This is called autolastic defense. Autoplastic defense says, "I am guilty. I am responsible. I'm to blame. I made all this happen. I was in charge. I was in control. And even I'm evil. I did it because I'm evil." And then the narcissist restores his sense of control and sense of grandiosity. Because all these people who misbehaved, humiliated him, mocked him, laughed at him, attacked him, criticized him, disagreed with him, all these people, they did all these things because he told them to do to do it. He was in charge. So this is called internal defense. Libby, Libby's term is internal mortification.

But then, at some point, the narcissist, if if the narcissist keeps saying, "I'm the bad guy. I'm the bad guy. I'm evil. I push them to do it. I push this woman to cheat on me. I push this man to criticize me. I push the other men to beat me up. I push them to do it in public. I provoked them. I attacked them. I humiliated them." So this was retaliation, reactive abuse. Yeah. But if the narcissist keeps telling himself this story, that means that he is a bad object. It means that he's evil. He's malevolent. And the narcissist cannot accept that he is a bad object. Because if the narcissist gets in touch with this bad object, he becomes suicidal, borderline. That's very dangerous. So the internal solution for the m for the mortification, the solution that says, "I'm the bad guy and I made everyone behave badly," this solution cannot hold because it means it means your bad object is correct. So then the narcissist transitions to an external solution. So first stage paralysis, second stage internal solution: I made them do it. Third stage external solution. External solution is aloplastic. It's an aloplastic defense. External solution simply says, "These people are evil. They are malevolent and malicious. They're bad. They conspired against me. They they are ungrateful, etc., etc." So now now they are bad, not the narcissist. The narcissist didn't do anything. They they attacked him for no reason. So it's exactly the opposite of the internal solution. The narcissist's mind is very flexible. The narcissist can lie to himself that way, and then the next minute can lie to himself exactly the opposite. It's a it's a form of mental illness because the narcissist has no dissonance when he contradicts himself. Healthy people have dissonance when they contradict themselves. Not the narcissist.

So now the narcissist says, "Forget my previous story. I did not provoke them. I didn't do anything bad to them. I was not the puppet master. They were not my puppets. They are bad people. They're evil people. They did it on purpose. It's a conspiracy against me." And this is aloplastic defense. And then he develops paranoia. He becomes paranoid. He said, "These people, they're my enemies, and they're going to persecute me and they're going to pursue me, and so therefore I must destroy them." And the narcissist becomes psychopathic, vindictive, and truly evil. Truly evil. And he tries to destroy these people who caused him the mortification because he believes that. So yes. So what what can we expect when we are mortified, um, narcissist, when we are this um aggressive person? He will come after you; he will transition; he will be paralyzed, depressed, suicidal; this then he will then he will then he will posture; he will say, "You are nothing; you're just a puppet; I made you do it; I was in control; you did what I wanted you to do; what you did, I wanted you to do it; it was me," and so on. Then suddenly, but very suddenly because he cannot tolerate the bad object. He cannot say, "I am the bad person who made you misbehave. I'm the evil person. I caused you to cheat on me, to betray me." You know, he cannot say that because he cannot admit that he's a bad object. So suddenly he will move, and you will become the bad object, and he will try to destroy you. He will become very vindictive. He will conspire against you. He will lie. He will he will try to destroy you in every way possible. He's very he will become very vindictive in the long term. It can take years. Can take absolutely years until he's satisfied that he had punished you somehow and that justice has been restored and balance has been restored and his grandiosity and control have been restored because he's like God. God punishes the sinners. He needs to punish you because you committed a sin. You were sinful. He is God. You attacked God. This is blasphemy. You need to be you need to be burned on the stake like the Inquisition, you know. So he is he has this morality. He in his mind he is a moral person for punishing you. This is a moral ethical act because you are evil. You are vicious. You're wicked. You're a sinner. And you must be punished. You must be taught a lesson or you must be removed from society, put in prison or something. You must be punished because if you are not the bad, the evil person, the narcissist is the evil person. One of you is evil. Mhm. Either the narcissist deserves the mortification because he is evil, he's bad, or the narcissist is innocent. He's a victim. He didn't do anything wrong. And that makes you evil, makes you wicked. And so you need to be punished to restore justice, cosmic justice, but also to teach you a lesson and to remove you from society. That's that's dangerous. Very dangerous. Mortified narcissists are vengeance machines. They go on and on and on, and they are unstoppable. And never mind how many times they fail, they go on. They they never stop. And because they lost their grandiosity, they need to restore it. And only you can restore it. The problem is you took away their grandiosity. Now you have it. They want it back. The only way for them to restore their grandiosity is to devalue you, to destroy you because you took if we will if we will disappeared from from his or her life. What's then after mortification? No such thing because you never existed in in his life. You were never an external object. You're an internal object. So you're always in the narcissist's mind. Never mind where you go. You can go to

Yes, I understand this. But when you're disappear with uh like you know, you moved somewhere or you changed jobs or whatever, nothing, no nothing, nothing because the narcissist's introject constancy; in other words, you are in the narcissist's mind until he dies, and your introject is in the narcissist's mind. The narcissist continues to interact with your introject even if you divorced him 20 years ago. He continues to have dialogues with you. He continues to punish you or to correct you or to and then suddenly he can appear after 20 years and continue like nothing happened because he did have a continuous relationship with you in his mind. You went away. You got married. You had children. I don't know what happened to you. Yes. But in the narcissist's mind, you're still here inside his head. And so he doesn't see anything strange to continue the relationship with you after 20 years. He every day he had a relationship with you. Same same with mortification. You became a persary object. It's called a persary object. You became you became an enemy within. And he needs to eradicate this enemy. He needs to destroy this enemy. And where you are physically is totally irrelevant because the battle, the war is inside his head. He needs to kill you. He needs to destroy you to match the external object with the internal object. Once he succeeds to destroy the internal objects, he needs to destroy the external so that he can match them and have peace. But the battle is is ongoing in his head. And so he he he makes all kinds of conspiracies and plans. He stalks you. He attacks you. He goes to the police and lies. He goes to I mean he would he would never stop. But of course, when I say he, to be clear, it applies to women as well. That's just to be clear. Today more or less it's 50/50. Borderline and narcissism are 50/50. 50% male and 50% female. It's um it's it's a dramatic change in the last 20 years because 20 years ago about 75% of people diagnosed with narcissism were men. Today it's only 50%. Women are becoming more and more and more narcissistic and psychopathic and um and so and by the way, less and less borderline. So this is a very dangerous situation because if you because women are much more sensitive to mortification than men. For example, it's much easier to modify a woman. All you have to say, all you have to do is criticize the way she looks. If you tell a man you're fat, you're fat. Okay, you say to a man you're fat in public, it will be narcissistic injury. If the man is a narcissist and you tell the the man you're fat, it's injury, but it's never mortification. But if you tell a woman you're ugly and fat in public, that's mortification. So women have many more many more options and venues for mortification. Women are much more easily mortified than men. Much much more. Because they are much more sensitive on multiple levels, including the the way they look, the way they eat, the way they dress, the way men don't have all this. Men men doesn't care if you tell him you're dressed badly. Okay, I'm dressed badly. What's next? What's on the menu? But you tell that to a woman and you do it in a shaming, humiliating way in public in front of her own girlfriends, for example, or women she competes with, and you you definitely might create mortification, and then you're her enemy for life until she destroys it. So this is the rise in narcissism and psychopathy among women is absolutely terrifying. Terrifying because the potential for modification is I think three, four times higher among women than among men. Mhm.

Sam, if we still have time, how NPD if he or she can cope with cope with mortification uh by himself or herself? Is it possible? Yes. If if you don't commit suicide, if you survive the depression, the internal solution will kick in automatically. The internal and the external solution, the solutions described by living. These two solutions, they're automatic. It's not a decision. It's not a choice of the narcissist. They kick in automatically. So you have just to survive the period. You have to survive the period where you are very depressed and anxious, humiliated and ashamed to the point that you want to die. So you have to survive that period. And if you survive it, then your grandiosity will be restored, your false self and so on. So during that during that period the narcissist is a borderline, then the chances for suicide are in some settings up to 60%. It's very very it's a traumatized borderline, and I have another video where I where I analyze the situation there with studies and so on. So about a 62% chance of suicide. It's not small. It's very very dangerous. Some last questions. You are speaking a lot uh about um you know, different emotions but mostly about shame. Why shame is uh associated with mortification? Why? Why this one? Shame?

Well, first of all, mortification involves being humiliated or being ashamed in public. Yeah. But you know, shame is the shame is the main emotion in narcissism. And many many scholars like Moison and and others they think that that narcissism is is defense against shame. The child the the small child is made to feel ashamed, made to feel insufficient, inadequate; love is conditioned on performance, and very often the performance is not enough and so on so forth. It's it's the manipulation of the small child who later becomes a narcissist consists of shaming the child somehow, and the child accumulates this shame a lot. The child is also ashamed that he cannot become an individual. The parental figures don't allow the child to separate and individuate. Don't don't allow the child to become a person. They breach the child's boundaries; they don't respect the child. In other words, abuse is is a form of disrespect. So abuse causes a lot of shame. That's why that's why victims very often don't complain. They don't complain because they feel ashamed. They feel ashamed of their victimhood. The child is a victim and feels ashamed of his victimhood, and he carries this shame through life and he grieves. He grieves what he could have been and would never be. And he grieves the way his parents uh treated him. So there's what we call long grief. Long grief and shame. When mortification happens, the narcissist gets in touch with his shame because all his defenses disappear. He suddenly feels like he's a two-year-old with huge shame and nothing to do about it. He's helpless, and he's hopeless. And there is this overwhelming sense of grief, mourning. And then there's a question, "What am I grieving?" If I'm a narcissist, I've been mortified. I'm depressed. I'm anxious. I'm in touch with my shame. And I'm I'm grieving. What am I grieving? I'm grieving myself. I'm grieving myself. So if I'm grieving myself, I'm already dead. That's the big lesson and realization of mortification. Suddenly the narcissist realizes that he is dead inside. That he has never lived. There's never been a life there. So he says, "All my life has been fake. I've always been dead. Let me die. Let me just die." And that's okay. If if mortification is not, you know, for example, if a narcissist is lonely, there's no family, no friends, which is the typical case when the narcissist is much older and so on so forth, the chances of suicide are enormous. Absolutely enormous. So even if you don't like a narcissist, even if you think many times before you humiliate or shame or attack a narcissist in public because you may well be condemning condemning him to death, and yeah, there are many narcissists deserve many punishments, but I don't think death is one of them. Sam, thank you so much for explaining this for us because like I said before, it's really difficult uh topic and it's a lots of misunderstanding. So u thank you so much for your time and uh it was nice to talk to you. Yes, nice to see you again. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye.