Transcription
My name is Savannah, and I'm the author of "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited." Today, we are back to normal in discussing an obscure concept in the study of narcissistic mortification. It's a bit of a difficult concept to grasp, so you will have to enter the narcissist's bizarre landscape, his surrealistic, nightmarish, Salvador Dali-like mind.
Before we go there, we must understand that the narcissist is the first victim of narcissistic abuse. The narcissist, or narcissism, is a post-traumatic condition. The narcissist had been traumatized and abused by a significant primary object, such as his mother, and the narcissist passes on the narcissistic abuse. It's like a country, like a channel; he channels his mother's narcissistic abuse. He does to others what his mother did to him.
So, mother did not allow him to separate from her and to become an individual. She did not allow separation and individuation. She abused him, as I mentioned. She objectified him; in some cases, she sexualized him; she parentified him, forced him to behave as a parent. She created dependency, servitude, a codependent relationship, emotional blackmail, fusion, merger, and she used the child to obtain narcissistic supply. And of course, if you go through this list, this is exactly what the narcissist does to his intimate partner.
In most cases, intimate partners collaborate in this charade, in this shared fantasy that I mentioned in a previous video, in this shared psychosis. Most of them agree to fit into the narcissist's narrative, his script, movie-like, Hollywood-like stage set, his theater of life. They agree to be actors on stage, or in some cases, props. But some potential and actual intimate partners refuse, refused to be courted, refused, declined to collaborate, confront the narcissist, attack and challenge the shared psychosis, the shared fantasy. They exit, brutalize the shared space of surrealism, dreamlike state. They wake up the narcissist, so to speak. It's exactly like waking up in the middle of a bad dream.
So, narcissistic mortification is about fear. It is when the narcissist is confronted with reality, with reality about himself. When the narcissist is confronted with who he really is, and we'll come to it a bit later how this process unfolds, but the narcissist is faced with the losses when he finally sees himself in the mirror, unfiltered, unvarnished. And when he finally confronts his personality, his shortcomings, his limitations, his defects, his deformities, his deficiencies, his lacks, he cannot cope.
Anyhow, the narcissist is living in a state of fear, constant fear. Narcissism can easily be described as an anxiety disorder or even a depressive disorder. This is why the new therapy that I've developed, culturally, works well. We've been with major depression nurses.
So, the narcissist is in intense fear. I am quoting Sigmund Freud now. "The narcissist is in intense fear associated with narcissistic injury and humiliation, with the shocking reaction when individuals face the discrepancy between an endorsed or ideal view of the self and a drastically contrasting realization." He is quoted in Groeninger's paper from 2013, another scholar of borderline personality disorder who dwelled upon the narcissistic phase in the development of borderline. Rothstein said that there is a fear of falling short of ideals, with the loss of perfection and accompanying humiliation, and this fear extends to intimacy and interpersonal relationships. As was observed by Fiscalini, it extends to unrealized forbidden wishes and related defenses. Always, as Quote aptly summarized, it is fear associated with rejection, with isolation, loss of contact with reality, the loss of admiration equilibrium in important objects. Kenberg augmented this list by adding fear of dependency and destroying the relationship with the significant other, fear of retaliation of one's own aggression and destructiveness, and fear of death.
So, this is the background. The narcissist carries all these fears with him at all times. Now, many of us have some of these fears, but no healthy or normal person has all these fears. And these fears are strongly and deeply associated with the narcissist's fantasies about himself. It's because he perceives himself as perfect, for example, that he is afraid to be discovered or uncovered or exposed as imperfect. He feels like a fraud at all times. He feels that if people only knew him better, they would have shunned him and appointed him. And you know what? He's right.
So, narcissistic mortification is this sudden—it has to be abrupt, it has to be a break. It's the sudden sense of defeat. The narcissist sees that all his efforts to sell himself, so to speak, all his fake it till you make it attempts, all his force up the facade, the false self, its crumbling, soft working. There's a loss of control over both internal objects and external objects or realities.
Now, you remember that narcissists don't interact with real-life, three-dimensional people out there. What they do, they take snapshots of these people, they internalize or interject the snapshots, and then they interact with these idealizations, with these internal objects, with these representations of people. Even an intimate partner doesn't exist for the narcissist in any true, real, or meaningful sense of the word. The narcissist interacts with the representation of that intimate partner.
So, when suddenly an external object misbehaves, challenges the narcissist, disagrees, criticizes, mocks the narcissist, mocks, humiliates the narcissist publicly, does something that is unexpected in a shocking way, becomes aggressive. So, when someone outside the narcissist does this thing, it's not waking up; it's like there is an enormous clash, a schism, an abyss between the inner representation, the snapshot, and the person whose snapshot exists inside the narcissist. It's exactly as if a photograph would come to life and then attack you. Imagine that your entire photo album comes to life and attacks you in a variety of ways, mocks, humiliates you, et cetera.
So, mortification is caused by an addressing, meaningful person or an addressing person, someone who addresses against the narcissist, taxes, challenges him, and so on, even if this person is not significant or meaningful, but the context is significant. To many, mortification is also caused whenever the narcissist is forced to confront himself, not his true self, but the reality about himself. When he realizes that he has traits or behaviors which are, to use a British understatement, undesirable, self-destructive, inferior, compulsive. And so, when this mortification, when the narcissist is forced to look in the mirror and not to filter what he sees, but to really, really confront the monster in the mirror, the quasi-monster that is staring back at you, the hunchback, which is normal, who is no longer in Rotterdam, but right here at home with me, with you.
So, when the narcissist is faced with this hideous, hideous representation, which is him, it produces disorientation, but even more so, it produces terror. But terror is not fear. You know, we mentioned fears, we started with fears. Fears are anticipatory things, predictions. Fears are forms of catastrophizing. But terror is reactive because something really, really frightening has happened. And mortification, having to confront reality finally, especially about himself, leads the narcissist to a state of terror.
Heidelberg, who in the 1950s was a prominent scholar on mortification, said that this is the reason that there is a lot of energy pent up within the narcissist, narcissistic ego energy, known as libido or the id or multitudinous, which is a kind of self-destructive energy. So, all kinds of energy is damming up inside the narcissist, and at some point, he cannot manage them any longer if he is not supported from the outside. And today, we connect narcissistic supply in the absence of narcissistic supply, when it is deficient, or even much worse, when the supply is negative. The supply forces the narcissist, pushes him on a collision course with himself, forces the narcissist to become, in other words, self-aware.
Mortification hands the entire personality of the narcissist is overwhelmed by import and electability. It's like the narcissist sees the train coming head-on, and there's nothing he can do about it because he's chained, chained to the rails of his own grandiosity and his own utterly deficient and fallacious self-perception and self-image, his cognitive deficits. And so, he is there, the train is coming head-on, it's not gonna stop, and he knows it, and he's impotent about it. The feeling of helplessness is utterly, utterly shocking and drowning and overwhelming. The narcissist's entire personality or self-perception is constructed upon omnipotence. He is all-powerful, his godlike, and here he is helpless. And there's a lack of alternatives because he cannot, he fails to force the objects around him, the people around him, to conform to his narrative, to conform to the confabulation or the piece or the piece of fiction that he had created, the false self, and to sin. And he fails to convince people to support the false self, to buttress it, provide him, provide with supply. And he can no longer rely on the goodwill of people around him because many of them had become hateful or aggressive or are very angry at him or very disappointed with him, and they're gonna do bad things to him, they can humiliate him, they're gonna hurt him, they're gonna. And he knows it's gonna happen, he knows it's about to him.
Mortification sets in, and then there are infantile strategies because the narcissist, you remember, is a child, a small child, mine to eleven, an eleven-year-old. Narcissism mature other processes. So, infantile strategies of coping with frustration, with repression. So, the narcissist tries when he is mortified, when he's confronted with himself via the gaze of others, he tries to reassert himself. He becomes overly and grandiose, derisively grandiose, becomes he becomes buffoonish, it becomes funny. His hypervigilance is all over the place in him. All kinds of defense mechanisms kick in: splitting, denial, magical thinking.
Mortification is when the narcissist sees himself through other people's eyes. Now, this is not necessarily all bad. For example, that's precisely what I do in Cantera. I re-traumatize the narcissist and force him to see how small and insignificant he is by re-traumatizing him. I take him back to early childhood when he had been really helpless and when he couldn't predict the capricious and arbitrary and vicious and cruel behavior of others around him and when he had been traumatized. So then, sort of an entirely negative motivation is not entirely negative because it gives the narcissist a chance to free himself of the shackles of his task. Master the false self. The false self is like a slave, slaveholder. The narcissist is a slave. I compare narcissism to religion, where the false self is his Godhead, the Moloch, and the narcissist has to sacrifice himself, human sacrifice, to the false self. So, it's a cruel, vicious, dating. And so, mortification is when the false self crumbles, when the false self becomes very weak. It's the narcissist's chance to escape. Losses is like a hostage, and here's the kidnapper, kidnapper contracted COVID-19. Multiplication, and there's a transfer scheme.
Narcissists tend to surround themselves because they know this, because they know that their only chance at healing, the only chance of reintegrating with the true self, the only chance of escaping the hostage situation, they know the only chance is when they are modified. So, they surround themselves with people who have the potential to cause mortification. So, for example, consider the narcissist's intimate partners. Some narcissists would tend to surround themselves with promiscuous, labile, and dysregulated women. Why? Because with these women, they guarantee mortification, and only mortification guarantees freedom from commitment and the possibility of the adventure of the next shared fantasy. But also because mortification guarantees a sense of, even a temporary sense of liberation from the onerous, inexorable false self.
So, these narcissists would find homemakers, homely, domestic women, and so on, would find a man exciting. They would feel dead around such women. Only mortification makes these narcissists feel alive and sexually aroused. This multiplication or sadism, masochism, and liminal maximized, and the recreation of the primary unresolved conflict with mother, because remember, mother was the first one to inflict mortification on the child. This is why the child created masochism as a defense against mortification.
So, these women that the narcissist chooses, labile, broken, damaged, mentally ill women, their pawns. The narcissist selects them to fulfill roles in first in the shared fantasy and then in the liberating mortification anti-fantasy. These women first need to be integrated into a shared psychosis to assure it fantasy, but then their role is to re-traumatize the narcissist. The narcissist uses these women to reenact the unresolved conflict with his mother, the V conflict, the mother of all conflicts. The conflict is created, the mega mortification that led to the creation of pathological narcissism. He keeps hoping that with this woman, or that woman, labile, dysregulated, crazy, cheating, promiscuous, also for this kind of women will traumatize him, re-colonizing exactly as his mother did, and maybe, maybe there's a way out of the false self, maybe he will be free, first of the false self, for a few, I don't know, minutes, days, hours, and then free to move on to the next shared fantasy.
And some women say, "We cheated on the narcissist because we felt that this is what he wanted. We felt that this way we will please him, we will prove him right." The narcissist doesn't push his intimate partner bubbles away; he pushes his intimate partners to push him away. And of course, to tie in all the recent videos, the COVID-19 pandemic is a form of collective mortification. We have become a narcissistic, psychopathic civilization. The pandemic is a wake-up call. You are small, even insignificant. You don't know everything. You can't do anything. You're not only protected. You're not all-powerful. You're not all-knowing. You're not godlike. You're just specks of dust. You're nothing. So, it is collective mortification.
And if the narcissist is lucky, and he goes through the mortification phase, the re-traumatization phase, sometimes with the agency of a promiscuous woman or labile one, and he goes through this phase and is able to integrate and internalize the insight that he is actually very sick, this may be the first step in a therapeutic process of healing. This is what I create artificially, incomparably, create an artificial process of re-traumatization and mortification, which opens the door to the possibility of healing. But integrate in accepting the insight, the understanding, "Hey, and very Sigma narcissist, masochist, mental illness, and mentally ill." I'm not the first to suggest this. Idol bad enough, right? I mean, they were realized that the first step towards healing is the acceptance of the aim of the illness. But that it is very traumatic when a person realizes it's like getting news that you have COVID-19 or getting news that you have cancer. It's, it's shocking, disorienting, it's frightening terror.
Let's go back to a lecture on early childhood events. Mortifications are crucial in teaching the baby to distinguish between external and internal. Like when you're mortified, you suddenly realize someone is mortifying you. So, it's like the baby suddenly gets it. There's the baby and his mother mortifying mother. So, the baby also begins to form defenses, to form ego boundaries. And while doing this, the baby realizes his own limitations, and he learns to delay gratification, and he learns to select among options and make decisions. So, mortification is universal. Everyone goes through mortifications in early childhood because in early childhood, we are helpless, we are small, we are weak and stupid, and we're surrounded by godlike adults. That's very, very traumatizing and mortifying. But in the vast majority of cases, with healthy and normal people, mortification leads to good places, to the development of functional constructs, behaviors, and traits.
Of course, it is possible to be overtaken by multiple internal and external notifications, by multiple what we call today traumas. And it's possible to be so overwhelmed by by modifications, multiple modifications, that we start to repress them, we start to kind of forcibly forget them, to dissociate them. And so, repression and dissociation become indispensable when the number of modifications and the character, the nature of modifications, is such that they can no longer be tolerated, they're intolerable, unbearable. And we then also develop compensatory cognitive deficits: omnipotent or omniscient grandiosity, entitlement, invincibility, paranoid projection, magical thinking, and so on.
Burger and Maldonado remind us that pathological secondary narcissism is a reaction to the loss of infantile omnipotent illusions and the loss of a good and meaningful object, mother in this case. And in the child's mind, mother is associated with ideal. She's perfect, she's ideal. May lose his mother, he not only knows his mother, but he loses the very concept of the ideal, of the perfect. It's a loss of continuity, stability, coherence, and well-being of the personality itself.
Now, all of us cope with this. Healthy people cope with ease by transitioning from splitting to object relations to a more nuanced picture of the world. If you look at mother as ideal, and you lose her, you have two options. It's okay, I lost mother, isn't ideal. I lost the very concept of the ideal, of the perfect. And so, the alternative is all bad, totally imperfection. And this is called splitting, wooden bed, Dakota was thinking black and white, right and wrong. But the vast majority of healthy, normal people develop a nuanced picture. So, a mother is not all bad, but not all good. Everyone is a mixture of bad and good, right and wrong.
In adulthood, self-inflicted internal mortification, the realization that one is less than perfect, the realization that you have shortcomings, limitations, failings, that you're bound to be defeated and fail. These self-inflicted internal modifications are usually founded on reality. But in the narcissist, internal modification is founded on distortions of reality. And the narcissist uses internal modification to compensate for an external modification, to disguise it, and vice versa. He uses an external modification to compensate for an internal modification.
Now, I know you didn't get it. I didn't get it at first. Let's try again. Narcissist is externally mortified. For example, he's humiliated in public by someone. His wife cheats on him. His, I mean, he's something happened that mortified him, that challenged his self-perception, his grandiose, perfect, brilliant, irresistible, amazing, Sweden agrees, etcetera, etcetera. And so, he's for the first time, for the hundredth time, forced to face the fact that his self-perception is wrong, that his grandiosity is ludicrous. Sometimes such external mortification is totally unacceptable. The narcissist feels overwhelmed. But so, when he does, he invents an internal mortification and he says, for example, "It is all my fault. I made it happen. My wife cheated on me because I pushed her to cheat. I abused her. I rejected her, accumulated her, and withheld sex. So, she cheated on me." In other words, "I'm in control. I'm in control. It's all my doing. It's all my fault." This is called a plastic defense. Of course, if you say it's all my fault, it's all my doing, it restores a grandiose illusion of control over an external mortification. It's a delusion, but it's still better than not making that you have no control over other people, and then they do exactly what they want to do, regardless of you. And very often, the things they do have nothing to do with you, they have to do with their internal needs and people's internal psychodynamics. It's better to say, "I made it happen," even if it's with a very bad thing that happened, "I made it happen," then toward me, "I am not the prime mover and shaker. I am a relevant and irrelevant to these people's lives. They go on with their lives with and without me."
And the opposite, when there is internal mortification, when you need something really, really very bad, you say, "I'm evil. I have hateful thoughts towards people. I am corrupted and decadent. I am defective and deformed." So, this is internal mortification from admitting them. When you admit that you, as a narcissist, admit that your character is really, really wrong, it's very difficult to accept. It creates mortification. So, sometimes this bad is the narcissist creates an external mortification, fictitious external mortification, to replace the internal one itself. Saying, "I'm evil. I'm hateful. I am unworthy and bad." Missus, they are evil. They are unworthy. They are out to get me. They make me. In other words, for secretary, delusions also known as paranoia, is an external mortification which replaces an internal mortification. Yes, I acted badly. I misbehaved. I wasn't received. I was offensive. But I did it because of them. They made me do it because they are evil, that they are out to get me, they are out to hurt me, they're conspiring against.
Of course, the only true solution to a mortification is the regaining of control. And even then, it is only partial, as control is clearly been lost at some point, and this can never be forgotten or forgiven or effectively dealt with. So, narcissists bear grudges, and they ruminate a lot. They keep revisiting the scene of the trauma. It becomes an obsession. You can regain control of the mortification, but there has been a moment of mortification in which you had lost control. Clearly, you can regain your grandiosity and your perfect, your perfect composure and your brilliance and your omnipotence and omniscience in your mind, at least. But there have been a moment where you were helpless, you were humiliated. You removed the need to reframe narcissistic modification because it is an extreme and intolerably painful form of shame-induced traumatic depressive anxiety.
Modification threatens the integrity of the self. It is a sudden awareness of one's limitations and defects. I'm referring you to Lansky's work in 2000 and Libby's excellent presentation in 2006. When the narcissists are faced with their own hopeless, unlovable, badness, and worthlessness, they are mortified by this, and they experience shock, exposure, and intense humiliation. And sometimes it's converted to somatic symptoms. Narcissists describe the feeling as being annihilated, as disintegrating into molecules, into thin air, garbage. In 1989, M described it as a virtually intolerable experience of terror, fright, or dread related to a sense of overwhelmed helplessness, reminiscent of the overwhelmed illnesses of infancy. An annihilating anxiety, fear of the disintegration of the self or of identity. As Libby quotes him, Libby had a purple postulates that narcissistic modification is a sudden loss of the psychic sense of self, which occurs simultaneously with a perception that the tie to a self-object is strengthened. Self-object is an object and what is the self and is very significant. Code whom she quotes added in 1971, if the grandiosity of the narcissistic narcissistic self has been insufficiently modified, then the adult ego will tend to vacillate between an irrational overestimation of the self and feelings of inferiority and will react with narcissistic mortification to the thwarting of its ambitions.
And actually, it's one of the very few topics in psychology where there is no disagreement between all the schools of psychology. Because, for example, if you take object relations theories like Bion, Bion or Winnicott, and they agree. Bion is something called nameless dread. Winnicott's original agonies of the collapse of childish consciousness as it evolves and matures into another. In these grades and admonition, simply simply different means to modification. And they all agree it's rooted in childhood.
One possibility is that it may have to do with a lack of what we call evocative constancy. Evocative constancy is the capacity to maintain positively toned images of self and others with which to dispel feelings of self-doubt. It was first described by Adler in Bowie in 1979. It is intimately linked to something called self-reflexivity, the ability to oscillate easily among varying perspectives of the self. And it crucially relies on the smooth operation of evocative constancy. So, reflectivity and constancy go together. In cases of psychosis, for example, there is hyperreflexivity. So, there is a big problem to differentiate the self in various self-states from external reality.
Libby describes two strategies that narcissists use to restore a modicum of cohesiveness to the self. What she calls the deflated narcissist debases the self and inflates already Eliza's the object in order to require the object. And so, for example, such a narcissist would atone, grandize the object of self-punish or self-flatter, and it's designed to appease and all, all done to self-objects. Libby was not the first to do this, to suggest this. Anna Freud presaged this with her concept of altruistic surrender. Such sacrificial and therefore self-disparaging, not to say self-destructive, altruism. In other words, when the narcissist is mortified, exposed to each, to him, to reality, to the reality of his self, to the fact that his false self is false, when he's modified, one option is to say, "Well, the person who addressed against me, the person who modified me, she was right. She was right because I did something wrong. I abused her and mocked her. I rejected her. I withheld. I behaved." She was right to do this. "And let me repent. Let me display remorse. Let me atone for my sins. Let me, let me reacquire. Let me bring her back to man."
Another strategy of what lyrical inflated narcissist in revenge seekers is force debasing of the objects, attacking the other in order to aggrandize and re-sterilize itself. There's always a winner and a loser. Such narcissists fight fire with fire, or take an eye for an eye. I'm writing the scales of justice, they're only winners and losers. And these narcissists must be the winners. Shamers have also adept at short-circuiting the plunge into mortification altogether, preemptively expelling impending feelings of shame and ineffectiveness by humiliating the other. Whichever route is taken, the individual cannot recover from mortification until a tolerable, familiar self-state is reacquired, either by re-establishing the other as an approving object or by destroying the other temporarily or permanently.
Narcissistic conceit is designed to project defective self-experiences onto self-objects. It's the second option. So, what do we do in treatment? Treatment, we try to focus on converting mortification to shame. Shame is different to mortification because it includes the capacity to tolerate it. You can tolerate shame, and you can use it as a signal. Both defensive styles, the inflate deflated and inflated, require continued dependence on self-objects. Even if you say the self-object is right, I misbehave, you are still dependent on the support, and it must be mounted again in a game. Tolerating, bearable, she can make self-appraisal and self-tolerance possible, ultimately leading to a psychic separation and self-reliance.
I want to describe two cases. There's a patient, he craves love and intimacy, also sex, sex, ray finds intimacy, so craves love, intimacy, and sex, but he hates himself for this life-threatening vulnerability, as he proceeds to create something is to be meek, to be vulnerable. So, he uses the patient uses projective identification and projective interjection coupled with secretary paranoia. Wow, these are big words. I love big words. So, let me use small words. No, the patient egregiously misbehaved, and so he forces others to hate him. When they hate him, they act against him. So, then he perceives them as hateful, with some justification. In this way, he prevents the formation of love and intimacy, of course, as well as direct sexual relations. So, here's a sequence: he wants love, he wants sex, wants intimacy, but enemies became forcing people to hate him, forcing, for example, women to hate him, to be disappointed, to be angry, and then misbehave, especially see. Then his behavior accomplished love and intimacy and sex with these women because they misbehave. So, he kills two birds with one stone. He avoids acknowledging his own suicidal self-hatred, and he sidesteps being vulnerable to a dangerous level by being dependent on, for example, an intimate partner, which he also perceives as suicidal weakness.
Another case study. The patient idealized a potential partner, but rejects, rejection, verbally abuses her, withholds sex, humiliates her. Let's reverse the genders. The patient idealized the potential partner, but she rejects, verbally abuses, withholds, humiliates him, and he reacts by picking up another partner. Triangulation, very classic scenario. His behavior, or rather his misbehavior, challenges her omnipotence. She feels hopeless, humiliated. Challenges her omniscience. She failed to spot his conspiracy to team up with another bomb. She calebly trusted his lies about himself and about their interactions. He challenges her perfection. He rejected her. Challenges his superiority. It shows an inferior or a superior alternative. Or he challenges her brilliance. The incident proved that he regards her as a damaged fool. It challenges the self-perception as a loved and protected child because everyone involved, especially her former intimate bomb, envied her, hated her, centrosome. The internet partner's behavior, misbehavior, by choosing another partner, sort of demolished it. It's like an explosive device, improvised explosive device of the caliber of a divorce from a nuclear bomb. Everything is annihilated in a radius of a hundred kilometers. Nothing, nothing is left of the false self, not grandiosity, not superior, not omnipotent, omniscient, nothing. All the defenses crumble, and it leads to a condition known as decompensation.
And so, in this state of mortification, she repressed the intolerable external narcissistic mortification, she repressed the public exposure of her glaring and fixable inadequacies, limitations, and defects. What she did, she invented an internal one. So, she couldn't face the external mortification, and zero, I mean, nobody, it'd be relevant and effective, deficient, she confesses. So, she invented an internal one. "He's be his misconduct is all my fault. I made him misbehave. I force him to misbehave." And that's an attempt to restore a grandiose omnipotence. He doesn't know his work, by the way. When it doesn't work, she, when it didn't work, she resented paranoia, replacing one external mortification with another external mortification. Yes, I had been humiliated. I've been exposed. I've been bad. This was done to me by evil people. Whoever ultimately my ex-intimate partner picked up another partner, he was an evil person, and he was outwardly. And he's a failed attempt to not feel hopelessly damaged and evil, to restore ego-syntonic. And as wage her pain and desperation, "I'm okay. They are evil. He is evil. I am okay." Easily.
And very often, she will try to remain in touch with him in order to support with evidence both these alternative mortifications, and she will let go. And this leads to stalking. This is the 50m. This is the second psychological foundation of stalking. And she may ghost him, oh, the goal, no contact, let go of him, only once she had succeeded to integrate the two alternative mortifications, thereby fully accounting for all the events in a manner that is somehow realistic or at least satisfying. So, she would, for example, convince herself by talking to him that his behavior did cause him to overreact, but but his egregious, disproportional, and unjustified misconduct, his reaction is because he is a psychopath and evil. So, she combines the two narratives: "I made him do it, but he shouldn't have done it. I made him do it, and the fact that he did it proves that he is an evil, psychopathic person, and his new partner is an envious supporter, and all the witnesses of malicious haters, etcetera, etcetera." So, she restores grandiosity by vindictively punishing everyone involved, either metaphorically or symbolically, or sometimes in reality, by taking actions.
And of course, mortification is intimately connected to shame. Ironical and guilty people experience guilt because they have had the power to make a different choice. You can say guilty if you didn't have a choice. One cannot feel guilty when one is powerless or impotent and therefore not responsible for events, circumstances, and decisions. So, guilt goes with empowerment. You own your actions in the situation. Helpless people feel shame, not guilt. This is why pathological narcissism is associated with shame, not with guilt.
The grandiosity gap is the difference between self-image, the way the narcissist perceives himself, a false self, and contravening cues from reality. The greater the disparity between grandiosity and reality, the bigger the gap, and the greater the narcissist's feelings of shame. And there are two varieties: rushing narcissist extreme, which is the narcissist's experience of the grandiosity gap, and the affective Coromant. Subjectively, narcissistic shame is experienced as a pervasive feeling of worthlessness. The dysfunctional regulation of self is the crux of pathological narcissism, as you remember. So, the loss feels when he is ashamed, if he is worthless, if it's invisible, ridiculous, the patient feels pathetic, foolish, deserving of mockery and humiliation. Narcissists adopt all kinds of defenses to counter narcissistic shame. They develop addictive, reckless, or impulsive behaviors. They deny, they repress, they withdraw, they arrange, they engage in compulsive pursuit of some kind, unattainable, of course. They try to be perfect. They display holiness and exhibitionism. All these defenses are primitive, painful: splitting, projection, projective identification, intellectualization, all kinds of psychological defense.
The second type of shame is self-related. It is a result of the gap between the narcissist's grandiose ego ideal and his self or his ego, which is very minimal and dysfunctional. This is a well-known concept of shame, and it has been explored widely in the works of Freud in 1914, like 1960, Jacobson in 1964, Kohut 1967, Kingston 1983, Sparrow 1984, and Morrison 1989. But one must draw a clear distinction between guilt or control and guilt-related shame in conformity relationship. Again, guilt is an objective list, so to speak, a terminable philosophical entity, given a relevant knowledge regarding society and culture. A question, you can anticipate or predict when guilt will arrive. It is context-dependent. It is a derivative of an underlying assumption by others that a moral agent exerts control over certain aspects of the world. This assumed control by the agent impugns guilt to the agent if the agent acts in a manner in commensurate with prevailing mores, morals, or conventions, or in the age of refrains from acting in a manner commensurate with ease. So, there's always an agent, someone with will and control who could have made a different choice. Choice is crucial, crucial component of guilt.
Shame, in this case, is the outcome to the actual occurrence of avoidable outcomes, events which impute guilt to a moral agent who acted wrongly or refrained from acting. So, this is a specific type of shame, shame connected to guilt. And again, it's the outcome of action, avoidable outcomes, which impute guilt to the moral agent because he acted wrongly or refrained from acting, which is in itself from very often. And we must distinguish guilt from guilt feelings as well. Guilt follows events. Guilt feelings can precede events. Guilt feelings and the attaching shame, guilt-related rain, can be anticipatory. Moral agents assume that they control certain aspects of the world, which makes them able to predict the outcomes of their intentions and to feel guilt and shame as a result, even if nothing had happened. Guilt feelings are composed of a component of fear and a component of ecstasy. Here is related to the external objective observable consequences of actions or inaction. But a moral agent in society has to do with inner a consequence city, ego-dystonic, threatens the identity of the moral agent because being moral is an important part of the identity of a moral agent. The internalization of guilt feelings leads to a shame reaction. This is the connection, the subterranean connection between guilt and guilt-related shame. But remember, interrelated shame is not the same as narcissistic shame or self-related tree. Thus, shameless to do with guilty feelings, not with guilt.
And so, let me remind you, guilt is determined by the reactions and anticipated reactions of others to external outcomes, such as avoidable waste or preventable failure. So, there's a fear component here. Guilty feelings are the reactions and anticipated reactions of the moral agent himself to internal outcomes, to helplessness, loss of presumed control, and statistic injuries, anxieties, and so forth. And so, we now establish it, there are three types of shame: narcissistic, self-related, generate. There's a fourth type, conformity-related ring. It has to do with the narcissist's feeling of otherness. Nancy's feels alien, freakish, an outlier, an outcast. This kind of shame involves a component of fear of the reactions of others to one's otherness and a component of anxiety of the reactions of ones to one's events. Guilt-related shame is connected to self-related shame. They head through a psychic instructor came to the super-ego. Conformity relationship is more akin to a narcissistic she. Lydia Dangled obscure suggests that made a few reservations about she, she advanced the idea that some children subjected to abuse by in dysfunctional families, the children are objectified, dehumanized, the boundaries abridged, the growth is stunted. So, when Gelevska suggested these kind of children developed intense feelings of shame, they turn out to be codependent.
So, narcissists, owing to the genetic makeup and innate character, but according to Angelica, children who turned out to be codependent as adults are resilient, while the more fragile narcissists seek to evade shame by concocting and then deploying the phone search. So, one can obscure says there's a universal setting abusing dysfunctional families, and then the resilient ones become codependent, and the more fragile and vulnerable ones become narcissists, and they're trying to evade shame by not being, by denying their own existence, by disappearing into or away from a fourth set. As she observes, shame motivates normal people and those suffering from cluster B personality disorders differently. Shame constitutes a threat to normal people, to the true self of normal people, but it constitutes a threat to the false self of narcissists, borderlines. And so, going to the disparate functionality psychodynamics of the true self and false self, the ways shame affects behavior and manifesting all populations differently. Additionally, pervasive constant shame forces anxiety and even fears or phobias. These can have either an inhibitory effect or, on the contrary, at this inhibitory function. In other words, shame creates anxiety, fear, and phobia, and this can either inhibit you, paralyze, or they can actually push it to action mode, to action.
Both narcissism and codependents compensate for the shame. The former narcissists by developing a need to be needed, and the latter by developing a need to deny their needs. So, codependents have a need to be needed, and narcissists have a need to deny their neediness. The true self involves an accurate reality test with minimal and marginal cognitive deficits, as well as a capacity to empathize on all levels, including especially the emotional. People whose true self is intact, mature, and operational are capable of relating to others deeply, for example, by loving them. This sense of self-worth, this cannot be healthy, new, is stable, it's grounded in a true and tested assessment of who they are, reality tested, maintaining a distinction between what we really are and what we dream of becoming, knowing our limits, our advantages, and faults, and having a sense of realistic accomplishment in our life. All these are of paramount importance in the establishment and maintenance of our self-esteem, sense of self-worth, and self-confidence.
Shame threatens the true self when challenging the affected person's ego synteny by forcing her to feel bad about something she had said or done. And the solution is usually facile, and usually easy, and it end reverses the shameful situation by apologizing, by making amends. That's what we will do. We feel ashamed, we apologize. In contrast, the false self leads to false assumptions, to an impaired reality testing, to contorted personal narrative, to fantastic allusions, to grandiose, inflated sense of being. And this grandiosity is rarely grounded in real achievement, real merit. The narcissist's feeling of entitlement is all-pervasive, ubiquitous, demanding, and aggressive. It easily deteriorates into open verbal, psychological, physical abuse of others. When the patient with a false self feels shame, it is because his grandiosity, the fantastic narrative that underpins his false self, is challenged, usually, but not necessarily, in public. There is no easy solution to such a predicament, such mortification. The situation cannot be reversed. The psychological damage is done. Whatever happens later, the patient urgently needs to reassert his grandiosity by devaluing or even destroying the frustrating, threatening objects, the source of his misery. Another option is to reframe the situation by delusionally ignoring it or recasting it in new terms. "Was all my fault. I control it."
So, shame motivates normal people to conduct themselves from socially and realistically. Shame pushes the disordered patient, the narcissist, and the borderline, the psychopath, in the exact opposite direction, to antisocial or delusional reactions. Shame is founded on empathy. The normal person empathizes with others. The disordered patient empathizes with himself. But empathy and train have little to do with a person in whom with whom we empathize. The empathy they may simply be the result of conditioning, socialization. In other words, when we hurt someone, we don't really experience his, her pain. We experience our pain. Hurting somebody hurts us. The reaction of pain is provoked in us by our own actions. We have internalized other people's pain. We have been taught a learned response to feel pain when we hurt someone. So, it's learned. It's like learned helplessness. We attribute feeling sensations and experiences to the object of our actions. It is the psychological defense mechanism, projection. Unable to conceive of inflicting pain upon ourselves, we displace the source. It is the others' pain that we are free. We keep telling ourselves not our own. In other words, when we have at someone, we actually hurt ourselves. But because we cannot admit that we are hurting us, we we say we hurt someone. Hurting someone is a piece of fiction. You can hurt other people, of course, no question about it. But what you feel about it is when you wreck yourself. And because you cannot admit that you're by hurting others, you actually hurting yourself, you stick today to the fiction that you're working only on us.
Additionally, we had been taught to feel responsible for our fellow beings and to develop guilt and shame when we fail to do so. So, we also experience pain whenever another person claims to be anguish, feel guilty, or into his or her condition, if it somehow I know responsible, accountable, even if we had nothing to do with the whole affair, we feel ashamed that we haven't been able to end another person's agony. And this agony is the key to healing narcissism. The key. The narcissist needs to go again through the original conflict with his primary object, usually mother. He needs to experience agony. He needs to be able to feel again. Only by being re-traumatized can he regain a sense of his true self and understand and assimilate and integrate the insight that there is nothing about his false self that is real, and everything that is false, and that it is no longer functional in his adulthood, no longer adaptive in his adulthood, as it had been in his childhood. Many cases leading him to dysfunction, humiliation, and further modification.
The false self is the narcissist's biggest enemy. It made him disappear as a child, and he does everything in his power to make sure that it never reappeared, and never reappears, not as a child, not as an adult, not in any form. The false self is a parasitic psychological construct which had taken over the narcissist like a Body Snatcher. And in therapy, we should teach the narcissist to feel again. But not to feel um, in the first stage, to feel shame, to feel shame, and then to feel guilt, and then the rudiments of empathy. And this can be done only if we shatter explosively the false self by forcing the narcissist to experience mortification, traumatic mortification. And this is a very good summary of what we do in con third.