Transcription
This is all true in the makeup of the covert narcissist. Now to remind you, covert narcissism has several elements. Envy is a major, major thing with covert narcissists. They display pseudo humility, false modesty. "I'm just one of the guys. I'm exactly like you. I can understand you."
They also have victimhood, a victimhood stance. They're always the victims. They never do wrong. They, they can never do wrong. They always somehow, they always somehow fall prey to unscrupulous people, or abusive intimate partners, or institutions which are out to get them. And in this sense, covert narcissism is a close kin, a first cousin of paranoia. Most covert narcissists entertain paranoid ideation on a regular basis. The victimhood stance, the victimhood position, being a perpetual and professional victim. This excludes any other explanation to reality except some conspiracy against you. You're, if you spend your entire life believing that you're a victim, then people are out to get you. You, there's malign attention and intention focused on you. Of course, it's narcissistically gratifying. It's a form of displaced grandiosity. If you can't obtain supply, narcissistic supply directly, and covert narcissists are covert because they can't obtain supply directly. They fail. They are, they are kind of collapsed narcissists. Then you can obtain supply by believing yourself to be the victim of your betters, the victim of, uh, institutions, public intellectuals, God knows what. So, pseudo humility, a victimhood stance. But underneath all these, there is sadistic, malicious envy. It's the number one characteristic of the covert narcissist, in my view. It drives the passive-aggressive urges of the covert narcissist, as we shall see a bit later.
Now, the covert narcissist compensates, compensates for this with fantasy because he's not self-efficacious in reality. He is unable to secure outcomes in reality. He resorts to fantasy. And the fantasy could be anything. "I'm a good person. I'm a superhero in, uh, doing battle with super villains. I am the power behind the scenes. I am the true inventor or discoverer of this and that. I am a rescuer, a savior, a healer, etc., etc., etc." One of the roles of the, uh, fantasy is to make the covert narcissist feel safe. We'll discuss it a bit later. Okay.
Our well-being depends on connectivity. So narcissists of all stripes, overt, covert, somatic, cerebral, inverted, you name it. All kinds of narcissists are, are hurtful. They hurt you. Hurt people hurt people because they deny the possibility of true connection. They are one step removed. They are behind the glass darkly. The sadistic component in narcissistic pathologies is related to power, not only to pain. Classical sadism is about deriving gratification from hurting others. Other people's pain is nectar and ambrosia and a wonderful, wonderful thing to behold. Sadistic supply is about being gratified by inflicting pain on others and witnessing their writhing agony. But in the case of narcissism, sadism is connected to power, not only to pain, also to pain, but to power. More precisely, the sadism in narcissistic personality disorder has to do with a power to inflict pain. So, it's pain one step removed. The narcissist derives a sense of omnipotence, a gratification of his grandio, inflated self-image, the, butressing of his fantasy of omnipotence and omniscience. His whole structure lies on the ability to inflict pain on other people who are at his mercy, beck and call. In other words, the narcissist is more likely to act sadistically with his nearest and dearest. The narcissist interprets intimacy as the license to inflict pain. Intimacy empowers the narcissist. It grants him the power to inflict pain. It gives him access. It provides him with the levers and the leverage, um, to somehow torture people around him. And so, this is about power, not only about pain. And most notably, the power to inflict pain.
Now, sadism can be externalized and aggressive, inflicting pain. But it can also be passive-aggressive, which is the bread and butter of covert narcissists. Passive-aggressive sadism involves frustrating someone, withholding, avoiding, tantalizingly suggesting something and then going back on your word, breaking promises. All these are forms of sadism. But of course, narcissists, whether overt or covert, are not totally cognitively impaired. And some of them are not even intellectually challenged. They realize that inflicting pain on people can have adverse outcomes, can result in vengeance, vindictiveness, revenge, and retribution. Somewhere deep inside, they know narcissists and covert narcissists know that they're playing with fire, that there is karma, that one day they're going to pay the price. And wary of these possible unwanted outcomes, narcissists withdraw into a world of fantasy. And in this world of fantasy, they're not hated. They are not derided. They're not decrieded. They're not shunned. In this world of fantasy, no one wants to harm them. No one wants to punish them for their misdeeds. In this world of fantasy, they can torture other people. They can inflict pain. They can exert power. And none of this is going to have any consequences.
Now, say the sadistic component in narcissistic personality disorder has to do with the power to inflict pain. Even if this power is not used, even if it is ambient and atmospheric, but in the narcissist's mind, once he has the power, even if it's not used, it is somehow discernable, invisible. Remember, the narcissist interacts with internal objects, not with external objects. So if he has the power to torture you in his mind, he has tortured you because he interacts with your representation in his mind. So the potential to cause you pain in his mind translates into having caused you pain. So narcissists are constantly hypervigilant, on their toes, and anxious. They know that they are hurting people on a regular basis. They realize that some people are going to lash out and lash back. There's going to be payback. They know this. And the only refuge is the fantasy world. And in this fantasy, nothing bad is ever going to happen because the narcissist is agulated and loved and adored and causited and shielded from the consequences of his actions. Because the narcissist in this fantasy world perceives himself as some kind of treasure, a preciously unique artifact, or a childlike entity. Who's going to punish a child? Who's going to hurt a child? And who's going to destroy the magnificence and uniqueness of an intellectual treasure such as the narcissist? The more sadistic the narcissist, the more evolved the fantasy. Fantasy in this sense is compensatory.
Now, covert narcissists have a much richer fantasy life than overt or grandio narcissists for two reasons. Number one, covert narcissists are cannot operate well in reality. They're not self-efficacious. They fail. Their failures, they collapsed. So the only way for them to generate supply is via self-supply in a fantastic world, in a paracosm. The second reason covert narcissistes have a much more developed fantasy world is that they hurt people much more. They are overt grandio narcissists are in your face. You see them coming. You can defend yourself and protect yourself against them. The covert narcissist is a snake in the grass. He's subterranean. The covert narcissist works via subterfuge and strategies. He is Machiavellian. He is conniving. He's cunning. He's scheming. And in this sense, the covert narcissist is very much like the psychopath, only without the daring acknowledgement of the psychopath, without the psychopathic facade or the psychopathic defiance or recklessness. Convert narcissists are poison, slow-acting poison. And realizing their impact on people around them, they know that retribution and payback are coming and they defend against it with a very well-evolved fantasy world.
Now, let's go to Italy, shall we? I mentioned the study. You can find, uh, you can find it in the literature in the description or the description is under the video. Children, not above the video. Thank you. And what do they say in this research? These are people from Italy. Um, Gon Roier, Alessandro Amo, Beatatrici and Patricia. They sound like retired mafio, but actually, they are psychologists. And so they were curious if sadism and grandio narcissism are related. And they wanted to find what in narcissism predisposes a narcissist to act sadistically or even to be a full-fledged sadist. Now, just to clarify, only a small minority of narcissists, very small minority, are full-fledged sadists in the sexual sense. In the, uh, emotional sense, sadism is a mental health disorder. It used to be a personality disorder until it's been removed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Committee, but it's still distinct from narcissism. However, sadistic elements, sadistic artifacts, sadistic behaviors, a sadistic tinge to certain traits, these do exist in literally all narcissists. And the researchers in Italy asked themselves, how is this sadism mediated? How does it penetrate and permeate narcissism? And how does it interact with the demands and exigencies and ups and downs, vicissitudes of narcissism? And they found out that sadism is intimately connected to malicious envy and narcissistic rivalry. These are two dimensions of pathological narcissism, and they succeeded to connect pretty convincingly, I think, sadism to grandio narcissism. Sadism refers to the tendency to derive pleasure from the suffering of others. As I said before, it's a component of the new construct of the Dark Tetrad. The Dark Tetrad is Machiavellianism, the tendency to manipulate people. Psych, subclinical psychopathy, psychopathy that cannot be diagnosed as psychopathy but has, but is all the hallmarks and behaviors of psychopathy. Sub, sub, subclinical narcissism and subclinical sadism.
Now, the tendency to control other people is common to both grandio narcissism and sadism. Both of these disorders have to do with control freakery, the need to control other people, and underlying that, an anxiety reaction or even anxiety disorder. So, there's anxiety about the environment, and the only way to mitigate or ameliorate this anxiety is by controlling it. And there are two ways to control it: grandiosely via narcissism, or by inflicting pain or threatening to inflict pain. Sadism. The relationship between narcissism and sadism has to do with narcissistic rivalry and malicious envy, as I mentioned. So, what is narcissistic rivalry? It's negative, having negative emotions when someone else receives attention, and having positive emotions when other people fail. So, you are elated when people fail, collapse, um, and you feel bad to the point of suicidal ideation even when other people succeed, especially if they succeed in something or in some endeavor or some undertaking or in some task or in some field that directly competes with the locus of the, your grandiosity. So, as a narcissist, if you feel that you're a genius and then someone else gets accolades and applause for his intellectual achievements, you're likely to experience, uh, rivalry, narcissistic rivalry. And if you consider yourself handsome and someone else ends up getting all the girls, you're going to experience narcissistic rivalry. And then when they fail with, with a girl, you're going to experience elation, happiness, contentment, jubilation, even cheer and joy. So, this is narcissistic rivalry. Malicious envy is when people compare themselves unfavorably to other people. This is done, for example, copiously in social media.