My name is Sam Baknin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Langue, Narcissism Revisited. What happens when the narcissist fails to secure or to obtain sufficient narcissistic supply? Well, the narcissist then reacts very much as the drag addict would react to the absence of his or her particular drug of choice. You see, the narcissist constantly consumes or, one could say, trays upon adoration, admiration, approval, applause, attention and other forms of narcissistic supply. When lacking or deficient, the narcissistic's deficiency dysphoria sets in a kind of depression. The narcissist then appears to be down, depressed, his movements slow down, his sleep patterns are disordered, he either sleeps too much or becomes insomniac. His eating patterns change, he begins to gorge on food or avoids it altogether. When narcissistic supply is insufficient or deficient, the narcissist is constantly dysphoric. He said, he is unhedonic, he finds no pleasure in any, including these four episodes of his own interest. He is subjected to violent mood swings, mainly rage attacks, and all his visible and painful efforts at search patrol discernibly fail. The narcissist may compulsively or ritually resort to an alternative addiction. Alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, pathological gambling or show publicism. These are all substitutes for love and substitutes for narcissistic supply. And this gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort, both to escape his predicament, the lack of narcissistic supply, and to sublimate his aggressive urges. His whole behavior seems constrained, artificial and effortful. The narcissist gradually turns more and more mechanical, robotic, detached and unreal. His thoughts constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive. His speech may falter or become slurred. He appears to be far away, in a world of his own making of his narcissistic fantasies, where narcissistic supply is aplenty. When he cannot secure a supply in the real world, the narcissist retreats into a fantasy world. He withdraws from his painful existence, where others fail to appreciate his greatness, his special skills, his talents, his potential, his achievements. The narcissist thus ceases to bestow himself upon a cruel universe, punishing the universe for its shortcomings. His inability to realize how unique the narcissist is. When narcissism thus fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid persecutory delusions, self-directed contrabulations which place him at the centers of other people's allegedly maligned potential. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply. And so, the narcissist withdraws from the world, becomes a hermit, goes into a schizoid mode. He isolates himself, a monk in the kingdom of his own pain, agony and hurt. He minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers and couriers to communicate with the outside. Devoid of energy, the narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions. His former compliance gives his way to open withdrawal, a rebellion of sorts, although no defiance. Smiles are transformed to frowns, courtesy becomes rudeness. Emphasizer ticket is used as a weapon, an outlet of aggression and act of violence. The narcissist, blinded by pain, seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic nectar that is narcissistic supply. And in this quest, the narcissist turns both to and upon those nearest to him. His real attitude emerges. For him, he is nearest and nearest to nothing but instruments, tools, one-dimensional, venues of gratification, sources of supply, pimps of such supply, catering to his narcissistic lust. Having failed to procure for him his drug, narcissistic supply. The narcissist regards friends, colleagues and even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating objects. In his wrath and rage, he tries to mend them by forcing them to perform again, to function, to obtain, for him, narcissistic supply. It rarely works, because this is coupled with merciless self-flagellation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment. Also, at least, the narcissist fails. In extreme cases of deprivation, when the narcissist has absolutely no access to any form of narcissistic supply, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts of ideation. And this is how deeply he loathes his self and his dependence on narcissistic supply. Throughout this extremely agonizing anguish process, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, harking back to a past, which never existed, of course, except in the narcissist's thwarted, fantastic grandiose thing, but he harks back to a past where narcissistic supply was everywhere. The longer the lack of narcissistic supply, the more the narcissist glorifies, rewrites, misses and mourns this absolutely imaginary past. This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, amounting to clinical depression. The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia. He concocts a prosecuting and persecuting world, incorporating in it his life's events and his social milieu. And this gives meaning, this paranoia, this conspiracy theory gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to no-supply. These theories of conspiracy or conspiracies account for the decrease in narcissistic supply. The narcissist says, I'm not getting supply because people are against me. The narcissist is then frightened, in pain, despair, and barks upon an orgy of self-destruction. He intended to generate alternative supply sources. Attention, at any cost, the cost of being feared, the cost of becoming infamous, notorious, the cost of ruining himself. The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction in the service of self-aggrandizement. When the private narcissistic supply, both primary and secondary, the narcissist feels an odd, hollowed out, mentally disemboweled, disintegrating, like a cloud of molecules. And this is an overpowering sense of self-evaporation. These atoms of terrified anguish, helplessly, inexorably melting into the background, becoming invisible. Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles like the zombies of the vampires one sees in horror movies. It is a terrifying sight to behold, and the narcissist will do anything to avoid it. Think about the narcissist as a drug addict. His withdrawal symptoms are identical. Delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional, liability. In the absence of regular narcissistic supply, the narcissist often experiences brief, decompensatory psychotic episodes. It's that bad. This also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis, accompanied by a major narcissistic injury. These psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism, magical thinking. Narcissists are like children in this sense, many for instance, fully believed in two things, that whatever happens, they will prevail and that good things will always happen to them. They have magical cloak immunity. It is more than mere belief in the case of the narcissist. The narcissist just know it to be true, the same way one knows about gravity, directly, immediately, assuredly. The narcissist believes that no matter what he does, he will always be forgiven, always prevail and triumph, always come on top. The narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and callously insane. He attributes strengths of divine and cosmic immunity. He cloaks himself in it. He renders him invisible to his enemies and to the powers of evil. Of course, it's a childish phantasmagoria, but to the narcissist, it's very real. The narcissist knows with religious certainty that good things will always happen to him. With equal certitude, the more self-aware narcissist knows that he will squander his good fortune time and again, and that's a painful experience best avoided. So, no matter what serendipity or fortuity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, he always strives with blind fury to deflect them, to deform them, and to ruin his own chances. The narcissist is his own biggest enemy, and that is the cosmic joke, the irony of it all. While looking outside, in a fit of paranoia, the real danger lurks inside. Okay, bubot and bubim. I'm back, and I have a surprise for you. Mini is back. I don't know where she has been, she has been, and what she has been up to, but we have a don't ask, don't tell policy. So, I'm glad she's here. She's always so warm and soothing. Okay, shoshanim, today we are going to discuss collapse. What happens to the narcissist when he is utterly unable to obtain supply, no matter what he does, no matter what he tries, no matter where he goes, no matter who he communicates with, he fails to obtain supply. What happens then? How does the narcissistic experience his inability to obtain supply? What are the internal dynamics? We know that the narcissist disintegrates, a process known as narcissistic collapse, but what is the subjective experience of this collapse? Does the narcissist feel bad? Is he capable of remorse? Are there any long-term changes in the narcissist's personality, traits, behaviors, and interpersonal interactions? Stay tuned, and you will have the answers to all these questions and many more besides. But how can I start any video without a diatribe? Again, my target is the self-styled experts online with and without academic degrees. Most of them misuse the term failed narcissist. Failed narcissism is a stage in childhood development. It was coined by Grozstein, who was a psychoanalyst.  The abused and traumatized child, the instrumentalized and parentified child, tries to become a narcissist in order to fend off shame and hurt. And when the child fails, he becomes a failed narcissist, also known as emotionally dysregulated borderline. Grozstein said that borderlines are failed narcissists. So when the adult narcissist fails to obtain supply, is defeated, is exposed, is shamed, and humiliated, and excommunicated, etc., etc., or imprisoned, and so on, that's not a failed narcissist. That's a collapsed narcissist. The correct term is collapsed narcissist. Second thing, there is no type constancy in narcissism. A cerebral can become a somatic.  Narcissists would do anything to secure narcissistic supply, including changing types. Type in constancy. So it's very important to understand that narcissism is not a stable personality structure, and that narcissists transition via collapse to other types. So when the overt narcissist collapses, cannot obtain supply, he may try to become a covert narcissist. When the cerebral narcissist fails to obtain supply, for example, he doesn't have enough use, he doesn't have enough views on his YouTube channel, he may become somatic in order to garner supply from sexual conquest. Type in constancy. This process is known as type reversion. So narcissists oscillate and vacillate between types. When type reversion fails, it leads to narcissistic modification, decompensation, and the emergence of a borderline-like personality with emotional dysregulation and mood-lability. I encourage all of you to watch my videos on narcissistic modification. This was a phrase first coined in 1957, four years before I was born, it's more relevant than ever. Narcissistic modification. As one source of narcissistic supply dwindles, the narcissist finds himself trapped in a frantic, though at times unconscious, but in a frantic effort to secure alternatives to the vanishing supply. As one pathological narcissistic space is rendered uninhabitable, the narcissist wanders off to find or to establish another pathological narcissistic space. Again, I encourage you to watch my videos on pathological narcissistic space. The pathological narcissistic space is the narcissist stomping grounds, his horns, his dives, where he goes to obtain supply. It's usually a physical location. But when too many people see through the narcissist, manipulation, machinations, and skimming and cunning, when too many people are onto the narcissist, or when they're simply tired with the narcissist and his insatiable demands for narcissistic supply, then the pathological narcissistic space becomes dysfunctional and uninhabitable and the narcissist moves on. These are all cataclysmic and traumatic events in the life of the narcissist because narcissistic supply is the glue that holds the narcissist's personality for whatever it's worth, holds it together. It's anyhow disorganized. Some people say, some scholars say that narcissistic personality is more disorganized than even borderline personality. Canber was of this opinion. And so it's anyhow chaotic and disorganized. Narcissistic personality disorder, narcissistic supply, I'm sorry, holds everything together. This precarious house of cards when supply is absent, everything threatens to crumble and fall apart. These hysterical endeavors to try to find substitute supply sometimes lead to boom bust cycles, a little like Wall Street. These cycles involve in the first stage the formation of what I call a grandiosity bubble. Grandiosity bubble is a self-contained space. I will discuss it in a minute. Within this space, within this bubble, the narcissist supplies himself. He is unable to obtain supply from other people. His sources of supply had abandoned him. He is alone. And so his only source of supply is himself. And this is called self-supply. I have several videos analyzing the process of self-supply. Long-term self-supply can lead to what I call binary narcissism. The emergence of covert and overt structures, processes, behaviors, traits, cognitions and emotions. Overt and covert in the same person. And of course, this creates a normal conflict and a normal dissonance. I have a few videos dedicated to binary narcissism. Just go to the search function on my YouTube channel. It's designated by the magnifying glass. Click on the magnifying glass and type binary narcissism, narcissistic modification, self-supply. And you will be instantly gratified in the best Vaknin tradition. Back to grandiosity bubble. When the narcissist fails to obtain supply, as I said, he creates a grandiosity bubble. Grandiosity bubble is an imagined self-aggrandizing narrative involving the narcissist and elements from the narcissist's real life. People around him, places he frequents, conversations he is having. The narcissist weaves a story incorporating these facts, inflating them in the process and endowing them with bogus internal meaning and consistency. In other words, the narcissist confabulates and he believes his own confabulations. That's why I keep saying narcissists never lie. They believe their prevarications. But this time, the confabulation is loosely based on reality. In the process of inflating the grandiosity bubble, the narcissist reinvents himself and his life to fit the newfangled tale he recasts himself in newly adopted roles. He suddenly fancies himself, I don't know, an actor, an author, a guru, a political activist, a narcissism expert, an entrepreneur or an irresistible hunk, just like me. He modifies his behavior. The narcissist tries to conform to these new storytelling elements, to this new script and to his new functions. He gradually morphs in shape shifts into the fabricated character and he becomes the fictitious protagonist that he has just created. All the mechanisms of pathological narcissism are at work during the bubble inflation phase. The narcissist idealizes the situation. He idealizes the other actors in the play, a process known as co-idealization. He idealizes the environment. Everything is ideal and fantastic. The narcissist tries to control and manipulate his milieu into buttressing his false notions and perceptions. Faced with an inevitable grandiosity gap, the gap between his imagination, his fantasy and reality, faced with this gap, the narcissist becomes disillusioned, bitter. He devalues and discards. People, places and circumstances involved in the bubble and the bubble deflates. Inflation, deflation is the narcissist equivalent of idealization devaluation. The narcissist self-supplies within the bubble. He inflates the bubble, that's the idealization phase, and then the bubble deflates, faced with the onslaught of reality. The bubble doesn't hold. It breaks apart, which is the equivalent process to devaluation. And still, grandiosity bubbles are not a part of the normal narcissistic mini-cycle. Grandiosity bubbles are rare events. They are much like trying on a new outfit for size and comfort. Grandiosity bubbles fizzle out rapidly and the narcissist reverts to his regular pattern, idealizing new sources of supply, devaluing and discarding these sources, pursuing the next victims to be drained of all life. Actually, the deflation of a grandiosity bubble is met with relief by the narcissist. It does not involve a narcissistic injury. The narcissist views the bubble as merely an experiment at being someone else for a while. It is a safety valve, allowing the narcissist to effectively cope with negative emotions and frustration. And so cleansed cathartically, the narcissist can go back to doing what he does best, projecting a false self and garnering attention from others. Narcissists are addicts, the junkies. They are addicted to narcissistic supply and they react with depression, paranoia and schizoid withdrawal to the absence or deficiency of supply. Narcissists decompensate, act out, experience brief psychotic episodes when they are deprived of narcissistic supply in the long term. And many narcissists resort to self-delusion and able to completely ignore reality, contrarian opinions, countervailing information and data. The narcissist transmutes these things. Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially withdraws from reality. To soothe and solve the pain of disillusionment and disenchantment, the narcissist administers to himself a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths and outlandish interpretations of events around him. And then he goes on to believe all these things. The narcissist, when he is faced with dwindling, vanishing narcissistic supply, adopts one of several solutions. And I'm going to describe these solutions to you. One of the main problems in narcissism is that it is an extremely variegated phenomenon. It's very difficult to put all narcissists in one basket. Narcissists, for example, when they are faced with a lack of supply, choose different solutions. And these solutions are diametrically opposed to each other. They're mutually exclusive. So it looks as if some people are narcissists and some people are not, even when they are. And here are the solutions. The first one is the delusional narrative solution. Remember, these are the solutions the narcissist adopts, having tried to obtain supply in a classical way from sources of supply and failed, a process known as collapse, having tried the grandiosity bubble and failed, having attempted self-supply and failed, having experienced modification, narcissistic modification, and then unable to cope with the life-threatening modification. The narcissist withdraws from reality. He develops solutions. One of them is the delusional narrative solution. The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as the hero and the protagonist. In this narrative, he is brilliant, perfect, irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, powerful, wealthy, the center of attention. In short, he is some buckney. The bigger the strain on this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies. Finally, if it is sufficiently protracted long time, the delusion replaces reality, and the narcissist reality test deteriorates to the point of delusional disorder or even psychotic disorder. The narcissist withdraws his bridges and becomes schizotipal, even catatonic or schizoid. The Swedish had described the post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome very similar to this. Now, the next solution is the antisocial solution. Again, I'm reminding you, these are solutions to collapse, to an inability to obtain supply, never mind what the narcissist tries to do. Maybe people around the narcissist are no longer available to provide him with supply. Maybe they are too angry at him, disillusioned with him. Whatever the case may be, he cannot obtain supply. So the first solution is to become delusional, but the second solution is to become antisocial. The narcissist renounces reality in dissolution to his mind. Those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents in innate superiority, overarching brilliance, benevolent nature, entitlement, cosmically important mission, perfection, etc., those who are too low-bro and too inferior to grasp his superiority. They don't deserve consideration, they are subhuman. He holds them in contempt. The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal and with the psychopath. His lack of empathy is in compassion. His deficient social skills. His disregard for social mores and morons and laws and rules. His defiance, his reactance, they now erupt and blossom.  He ignores the wishes and needs of other people. He breaks the law. He violates all rights and boundaries, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt and disdain. He derides and decries society and its codes.  And that these people to his mind drove him to this state. They are responsible. They deserve what's coming. He acts criminally. He jeopardizes the safety, lives and property of these people because they deserve every conceivable punishment for having pushed him to this particular corner. That's the antisocial solution. Another solution is the paranoid schizoid solution. Again, when the narcissist collapses, everything failed. Grandiosity bubbles, self-supply, other people's supply, pathological narcissistic space. All the devices and mechanisms and strategies don't work anymore. For some reason, the narcissist becomes much less self-efficacious. He is unable to extract narcissistic supply from his environment. And the grandiosity gap has grown to the point of intolerability. It's unbearable. At that point, the narcissist adopts solutions. One of them is a delusional solution. Other solution is to become essentially criminalized. The third solution is the paranoid schizoid solution. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives. Self-directed confabulations which place the narcissist at the center of other people's allegedly malign attention and intention. People or institutions are persecuting him. The narcissist becomes his own audience and he is self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply. The tales he is telling himself. The tales of persecution, the tales of abnegation, the tales of pursuit and chase by malevolent malign malicious institutions and individuals who are envious of him or afraid of him. These tales are actually his narcissistic supply. Paranoia or paranoid ideation is actually a form of narcissism because it places the paranoid at the center of attention. It's a form of grandiosity. The narcissist develops the secretary delusions. He perceives slides and insults where none are aware or intended. He becomes hyper-vigilant. He becomes subject to ideas of reference, referential ideation. He believes that people are gossiping about him, mocking him, prying into his affairs, violating his privacy, cracking his email, hacking his accounts. The narcissist is convinced that he is the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, abscond with his property or ideas, delude him, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor his speech, impose on his time, force him to action or to inaction.  Part with his values, victimize him or even murder, assassinate him. These delusions are self-generated. They don't require any support and any evidence. They're not evidentiary. And so this self-generation of delusions, the secretary delusions, paranoid ideation, that's a supply. It's a form of malignant, cancerous self-supply. Paranoid narcissists who had chosen the paranoid, settled on the paranoid schizoid solution, refrain from meeting people, from falling in love, from having sex, from talking to others or even from corresponding with others. Their lives are constricted. They turn themselves more and more to a single physical space and a single type of interaction, which is minimal. In short, these narcissists become schizoids, not out of social shyness and not because of the general motivation of the schizoid, a lack of interest in people, but out of what they feel to be their choice. This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, goes the inner refrain of this kind of narcissist. I shall waste none of my time and resources on this ungrateful environment. And the narcissist convinces himself that his survival depends on withdrawing from the world. This is the paranoid schizoid solution, but there's another type of paranoid solution. Again, these are solutions to deficient narcissistic supply. The other type of paranoid solution is the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution.  They resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. These kinds of narcissists become verbally, psychologically, situationally and rarely physically abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, hector, berate, demean and deride that decry their nearest and dearest and often other people who are well-wishers and loved ones. In extreme cases, they even direct these vitriol and diatribes at total strangers. These narcissists explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, condemnation and blame. Theirs is an exegetic bedlam, they interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment is designed to provoke and humiliate them. Their hypervigilance leads directly to paranoia, aggression and violence. These narcissists saw fear, revulsion, hate and malignant envy in everyone around them. They flail against the windmills of reality. They are apathetic for law and sight, but often they cause real and lasting damage. Fortunately, mainly to themselves, unfortunately, very frequently also to others. Then there is the masochistic avoidant solution. A narcissist who chooses this solution, who selects for it, is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply. He directs some of this fury and frustration aggression inwards, punishing himself for his failure and defeat. This masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist's closest, nearest and dearest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors. Either way, to pay him the attention that he craves by molesting himself, by punishing himself visibly, by hurting himself. This kind of narcissist forces everyone around him to cater to his needs, to walk on eggshells, to become enablers, to collaborate with him. And this constant ambience of anxiety and fear and attention is the narcissistic supply. Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism. It's a narcissistic copout. By undermining his work, his relationships, his efforts, the increasingly fragile narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, negative supply. He transitions from overt to covert. Self-inflicted failure is a narcissist doing. It is self-inflicted. The narcissist is in control of this process.  I may have failed, but I made it happen. She may have cheated on me, but I pushed her to do that. Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances, which render success impossible. Mylon had written that this is a way to avoid an objective assessment of their performance to render it improbable. These narcissists act carelessly. They withdraw in mid-effort. They're constantly fatigued, bored, or disaffected, and they passively, aggressively sabotage their own lives. Their suffering is defined in your face, visible. And by deciding to abort, they reassert their omnipotence, because I have decided to abort. The narcissist is pronounced in public misery, self-pity, sanctimonious self-righteousness. They are compensatory. Again, Mylon wrote that these reinforce the narcissist's self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of wealthlessness, and Masterson added shame. The narcissist's tribulations and anguish render the narcissist in his own eyes unique, saintly, virtuous, righteous, resilient, significant, and holy. This is a form of self-generated narcissistic supply. It's a form of self-supply. All these solutions are forms of self-supply. And so paradoxically, the worse, the worse the anguish and the unhappiness, the more egregious the defeat and the failure, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels. He feels good only when he feels bad. So these are the solutions that narcissists opt for and select when they are faced with a dearth, with a lack or deficiency of narcissistic supply, and they have exhausted all the means to obtain supply. The narcissist reacts to his failure to obtain enough narcissistic supply very much as a drug addict reacts to the absence of his particular drug, the dwindling or absence of supply is a trauma. The narcissist experiences a kind of post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic reaction. The narcissist constantly consumes, he actually prays upon, adoration, admiration, adulation, approval, applause, attention, other forms of narcissistic supply, including negative forms of supply, or not rightly being feared. When lacking, when deficient, a narcissistic deficiency dysphoria sets in. It's a kind of mild depression, a little like dysthymia. The narcissist appears to be depressed. His movements slow down. His sleep patterns become disordered. He either sleeps too much or he becomes an insomniac. His eating patterns change as well. He gorges on food or he avoids it altogether. Some narcissists develop eating disorders. The narcissist is constantly dysphoric, sad, unheal only. He finds no pleasure in anything, including his former pursuits, hobbies and interests. The narcissist is subjected to violent mood swings, mainly rage attacks, and all his visible and painful efforts as self-control fail. Such a narcissist faced with the catastrophic certainty of lack of supply. He catastrophizes. He anticipates, he anticipates never ever getting supply again. So he may compulsively, compulsively and ritually resort to an alternative addiction. Alcohol, drugs, love, reckless driving, shop capitalism. They all substitutes for narcissistic supply. The gradual disintegration, this gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort both to escape his predicament and to supplement his aggressive urges to render them socially acceptable. The whole behavior of the narcissist seems constrained, artificial, effortful, as the period of lack of narcissistic supply continues as time goes on and is unable to obtain supply. The narcissist gradually becomes more and more mechanical, detached, robotic, unreal. It begins to resemble a schizoid in many ways. The thoughts of the narcissist constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive. His speech may falter. He becomes a lot more dissociative, amnesiac. He appears to be far away in the world of his narcissistic fantasies where narcissistic supply is aplenty and abundant. The narcissist withdraws from his painful existence where other people fail to appreciate his greatness, special skills and talents, potential or accomplishments. The narcissist seizes to bestow himself upon a cruel rejecting universe. Punishing the world for its shortcomings, its inability to realize how unique the narcissist is, Gantrit described it in the 60s as an interaction with an internalized bed-object. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid delusions, as I've mentioned, self-directed confabulations, which place the narcissist at the center of other people's alleged malign intentions. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply. And again, many narcissists go into a schizoid mode, narcissistic or schizoid withdrawal. Many narcissists isolate themselves, hermits in a kingdom of hurt and pain. This kind of narcissist minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers go-betweens to communicate with the outside. It's a vicarious form of existence, by proxy, devoid of energy, depleted. The narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions. His former compliance, his mask falls and it gives way to open avoidance, a rebellion of sorts. Smiles are transformed into frowns, courtesy becomes rudeness. Emphasize etiquette, a bit affected, is used as a weapon, as an outlet of aggression, as an act of social violence. The narcissist becomes a spectacle. Blinded by pain, he seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic nectar. In this quest, the narcissist turns both to and upon people around him. His real attitude emerges. As far as the narcissist is concerned, his so-called nearest and dearest are nothing but tools, two-dimensional instruments of gratification. Sources of supply, pimps of such supply, catering to his narcissistic lusts, I call these insignificant others. Having failed to procure for the narcissist his drug, having failed to garner for him narcissistic supply and sources of supply, the narcissist regards friends, colleagues, even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating objects. In his rage and wrath, the narcissist tries to fix these people by forcing them to perform again to function. And this is coupled with a merciless self-flagellation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment. The narcissist feels that he had failed, especially himself, his idealized self-image. He renders him a perfectionist. His standards can never be met. He sets himself up for failure. In extreme cases of deprivation, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts. This is how deeply he loathes himself and his dependence on narcissistic supply. Throughout, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, harking back to the past, actually to an imaginary past, to a fantastic past which had never existed except in the thwarted fantastic grandiosity of the narcissist. The longer the lack of narcissistic supply, the more the narcissist glorifies, re-rides, reframes, misses and mourns this ostensible past. This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, amounting to clinical depression. The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia and concocts a prosecuting world, incorporating this worldview into his life's events and social milieu. It becomes an organizing and interpretative principle. It gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to no-supply. And these conspiracy theories account for the decrease in narcissistic supply.  The narcissist is frightened, is in pain, is in despair. He can't hold himself together, is falling apart, is disintegrating, is experiencing his own emptiness. This void, the howling void inside him, this whole of mirrors where no one is reflected. And so he embarks on an orgy of self-destruction intended to generate alternative supply sources, attention at any cost. The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction as a spectacle, self-annihilation and self-defeat in the service of self-aggrandizement. Goethe de Maume, the Twilight of the Gods. Hitler in the Bunker is a prime example of this. When deprived of narcissistic supply, both primary and secondary, the narcissist feels annulled, hollowed out, mentally disemboweled. It's an overpowering sense of evaporation, disintegration into molecules of terrified anguish, helplessly, inexorably, ineluctably. There's nothing the narcissist can do about it. It's the ultimate, the consummate form of helplessness. Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles. Not like a cookie, but like the zombies of the vampires one sees in horror movies. It is a terrifying process to behold and even more terrifying to endure and experience. The narcissist will do anything to avoid it. Mortification leads to this. Consider the narcissist. Think about the narcissist as a drug addict. His withdrawal symptoms are identical. It's the cold turkey of no supply. Delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional ability. In the absence of regular narcissistic supply, narcissists often experience brief, decompensatory psychotic episodes. And this also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis accompanied by a major narcissistic injury. The psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissism. Magical thinking. Narcissists are like children in this sense and not only in this sense. Narcissism, pathological narcissism in adulthood as Freud had observed 110 years ago is a form of infantile regression. Many, for instance, fully believe in two things. Many narcissists fully believe in two things. Then whatever happens, they will prevail. In other words, they're immune to the consequences of their actions. And it's a kind of law of attraction. The universe is at their beck and call. And that good things will always happen to them. It is more than mere belief, actually. It's conviction. Narcissists just know that these things are true. The same way one knows about gravity, directly, immediately and assuredly. And of course, this is very conducive to psychosis, to a divorce from reality. Impaired reality testing sometimes become no reality testing. The narcissist believes that no matter what he does, he will always be forgiven, always prevail in triumph, always come on top and never pay the price. Narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and insanely reckless. The narcissist attributes to himself divine and cosmic immunity. He cloaks himself in it like an invisibility cloak. It renders him invisible to his enemies and to the powers of evil conspiring against him. It is a childish phantasmagoria. But to the narcissist is very real. The narcissist knows with religious certainty that good things will always happen to him. With equal certitude, the more self-aware narcissist knows that he will squander this good fortune, time and again. And it's a painful experience and it's best avoided, but it's inevitable. So no matter what serendipity or what fortuity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, what gifts he's endowed with, he always strives with blind fury to undermine them, to deflect them, to deform and to ruin his chances.  The inevitable good becomes a choice, a choice that restores the inner generation of narcissistic supply, self-supply. My name is Sam Baknin. I'm the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a series of other books and e-books about personality disorders and other topics. I'm also a professor of psychology and a professor of finance in several universities. In October of this year, I'm going to publish a very long paper in a prestigious academic journal in the field of psychology. And in this paper, I'm going to make a claim which is bound to be controversial because I never make claims that are not controversial. It's not fun. So this controversial claim is that all narcissists are both overt and covert. There's no type constancy. Narcissists oscillate between being overt and covert. And they do so in reaction to changing life circumstances and especially to incidents of extreme narcissistic injury leading usually to modification. And so that's the first claim. And the second claim I'm going to make has to do with the behaviors of coverts who are predominantly classic. In other words, when the classic narcissist or overt narcissist becomes covert, he is not fully covert. There's a kind of sub variant of covert, which I call collapsed covert narcissists. Every personality disorder has a collapsed state. There's a collapsed narcissist. I have a video on this channel which deals with collapsed histrionics. There is a collapsed borderline. I will dedicate a video to this a bit later this week. And there is a collapsed covert narcissist. Now, this gives me the opportunity to teach you a useful tool. If anyone confuses failed narcissists with collapsed narcissists, they are not the experts they claim to be. And they don't know the first thing about narcissists. Failed narcissism is a phase in the development of borderline personality disorder. It was first discovered, suggested and described by a scholar of great importance. His name was Grotstein, G-R-O-T-S-T-E-I-N Grotstein. Grotstein said that borderlines are actually failed narcissists. As children, they had tried to develop narcissistic defenses in the face of extreme abuse and trauma, but they had failed. And instead, they remain exposed. They remain without a skin. They remain vulnerable to their own emotions and to pain emanating from the outside. Consequently, they become hyper-vigilant. They anticipate rejection and humiliation and abandonment. And they react with decompensation. They lose it. And they act out. They misbehave recklessly, defiantly if they are antisocial. So today we are trying to unify the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and secondary psychopathy. But that's a topic that I've dealt with in at least three separate videos on this channel. Failed narcissism is a stage in development of borderline. When we talk about a narcissist who fails, a narcissist who does not succeed to obtain narcissistic supply on a regular, predictable and repetitive basis, a narcissist with deficient narcissistic supply, that's not a failed narcissist. That's a collapsed narcissist. And any self-styled expert with or without the title doctor who confuses the two simply never read the literature and is exactly that, a self-proclaimed wannabe expert. Be very careful. There are a lot of fakes out there, out for your money and nothing else. So the collapsed narcissist, either too, we thought that the collapsed narcissist simply goes through a phase of withdrawal, a schizoid phase, or becomes antisocial, becomes a bit psychopathic or delusional, reframes situations in a grandiose way and so on and so forth. It's interesting that one of the main strategies of the collapsed classic narcissist is to become for a while a covert narcissist. He becomes a covert narcissist and he, in this way, copes with his collapse. Now, this would mean that there is no type constancy, that every overt or classic narcissist can be covert and essentially every covert can be overt. To test this hypothesis, I conducted two studies, and this is the paper that will be published in October. It's being peer reviewed right now. I conducted two studies to remind you, I have the world's largest database of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And this database comprises 1,800 people. The first one in my database dates back to 1997, so it's a longitudinal database, it's very long. And I've also interviewed an average of five family members, colleagues and so on of each of these narcissists. So the database in totality has something like 15,000 people. Now, each of these people had responded to a questionnaire comprised of 683 questions modeled roughly on the MMPI2. And so it's a database with a gigantic number of data points and allows me to data mine at my leisure using tools that are off the shelf, so statistical tools. So I conducted two studies. The first study, I simply data mined the database and found out the patterns, the patterns of conversion from collapse to covert and back. And then I administered a questionnaire to close to 3,000 family members who had agreed to participate. About 70% of them women, 30% of them men. And I asked them a series of questions about how they had experienced this switching between overt or classic and covert. And I'm using the word switching very judiciously because switching is how we describe the word that we use to refer to a change in personalities in multiple personality disorder, shifting from one personality to another for one alter alternative personality to another in multiple personality disorder. Today known as dissociative identity disorder. This shifting is called switching. And I think the narcissist switching from classic to covert is exactly a dissociative state. It's a self state exactly like borderline. In general, the picture emerging is that all these personality disorders are forms of multiple personalities. They are all they all involve multiple self states which approximate and are asymptotic to full fledged personalities. And they all involve switching. So there I was with this majority of the 3000 to my good surprise responded. And now I had a complete picture of how people experienced analysis is when he switches from overt to covert. And I incorporated it in the paper. Now, in this particular video, I don't want to be too academic or too dry. Maybe it's too late for this and so on. And what I want to what I did instead, I had rewritten the paper with with the first person program. It's like I've rewritten the paper as though it were a personal testimony.  So I am 99% of the time I'm not covert. So the majority what you're about to hear has nothing to do with me. Even though I will be using I my mind, most of it doesn't have to anything to do with me. But it is a composite, a collage and agglomeration and aggregation of all the information provided in the two separate studies. Bear that in mind before you bombard me with comments about my personal life and so on so forth. Some of it applies to me, of course, I have gone through covert states. I now realize, but the bulk of it, the bulk of it describes hundreds of narcissists and their family and thousands of their family. So it's a valuable, I think, contribution to interpersonal dynamics in the within the experience of switching from overt to covert. First of all, when the overt becomes covert, he develops immediately conflict aversion conflict aversion isn't every possible situation in business at work with family members in romantic or interpersonal relationships. Such such narcissists would suddenly lose boundaries, not enforce boundaries. They will not fight for their rights. They will allow other people to pilfer their ideas. They will never protest. They will never take action. They will never fight back. They don't stand up for themselves, not because they're cowards, but because of other reasons. So I asked these, I asked these people, why don't you stand up for yourself when you become covert? What happens to you when you become covert? So the question of shyness or vulnerability or fragility is none of these have to do with not fighting back. It's a question of, it seemed to involve other psychodynamic processes and motivations. And this is what these people, this is what these people told me. I don't fight back. I don't protest or stand up for myself, not because I'm a coward, but because I am just or because I'm practical or because I'm indifferent or because I'm grandiose. And I broke it down this way, just. Many narcissists said, I cannot satisfy the emotional, sexual or business needs or whatever. I cannot satisfy needs in the case of interpersonal relationships.  So I have no right to set boundaries. I have no right to make demands or to enforce rules of conduct. I encourage women in my life to look after themselves and to outsource their needs. That's in interpersonal relationships. Same in the workplace or in business. I cannot provide the goods. So I encourage outsourcing. The second reason covert narcissists gave to becoming dormants, to becoming submissive, to becoming reticent, to withdrawing, to not fighting, to not standing up for themselves, to not enforcing their rights. The second reason was practical. Many covert, many narcissists said, there is no point in fighting back. Some of them said, my reputation is so short that no one will ever believe any of my claims or intentions, not even my so-called nearest, dearest, intimate friends and significant others. So for practical reasons, I'm not fighting back. And then there was a very big group, which we will focus on today, of narcissists who had switched from classic to covert. And they said that their character had changed. They became indifferent. They say, I easily switch off. I tune out. I repress. I dissociate. I reframe. I move on. I sometimes mind some things, but I never care about them. Everything and everyone becomes meaningless to me, imbued with no emotions. They were describing the process called decafaxis, imbued with no emotions. They admitted that I'm quoting these confuses people, especially women, and drives them to test me and to test my boundaries in an attempt to ascertain the extent of my involvement. But it doesn't work. I remain indifferent. And finally, some of them admitted that one of the reasons they're not fighting back is because they are grandiose. Fighting back means that I care. Caring is vulnerability. I don't want people to see that I care. Not caring is the ultimate form of personal strength. It enhances my feeling of omnipotence. So they're not fighting back. They're not imposing rules. They are not enforcing boundaries because they're grandiose. That's for the lesser more. It's all for them. So the only times switched covert narcissists collapsed, collapsed covert narcissists engage in conflict is when they are afforded the opportunity to statistically humiliate other people, preferably in public. Covert narcissists are very insidious, very pernicious, very subterranean, very passive aggressive. And if they can't humiliate the public, they will give them statistic supply. So it is only then that they may suddenly come alive and erupt in conflict. And I focused in my in my study, I focused on the issue of sexual exclusivity. And the reason I chose the issue of sexual exclusivity in a diet in a couple in an intimate interpersonal relationship is that sexual exclusivity provokes our most primordial defensive instincts. Like if someone homes in or zeros in on on the woman with me, I would become an animal. I would, I would be romantically jealous. I would act out I may even become violent. The sexual, nothing, nothing provokes more basic reflexes, instincts, drives, urges and reactions.  That's why people react to cheating, for example, with extreme trauma. So I decided to choose this because it combines into the intellect, primordial basic primitive drives, the body, body and mind. And it's like a package to you. And I focused on this and I tried to see how the behavior of the overt or classic noses would change if he were to become a collapsed covert noses. So, and I'm going to use the first, the first person singular, although I remind you that this is not about me. This is a composite or a collage of hundreds of testimonies by noses and thousands by their family members.   Though she can be present in my life in other functions, she is not a woman to me and I do not care.  I sometimes even encourage the woman in my life to be with other men in order to get rid of the relationship altogether or to transform it into a sexless, sexless companionship. Women interpret it, so now I'm drawing on the study of the family members. Women interpret it as proof that I do not care about them. They want to test me and my boundaries and to see if I would mind when they misbehave with other men.  We recreate our childhood with each other, of course. So the first sign of switching from classic narcissism to collapsed, covert narcissists is losing interest. Losing interest in difference. I have described indifference within sexual, romantic, interpersonal relationship, but this indifference extends to all realms of life. And so I'm continuing with the collapsed covert narcissists. I have a feeling that I don't know how to be a man. I switch between hero, macho, all women be damned, and zero, resistance is futile. Any passing male is more men than I am and is going to beg and beg the woman in my life. And here I took experiences described by hundreds of narcissists and I amalgamated them. I put them together as a first person testimony. Men just walk to women who are with me, lovers, girlfriends, wives, and they pick them up in my presence. This is because when we are in public, I show zero interest in the woman with me. And I give no hint of intimacy of any kind with her. I ignore the woman completely. Or if I pay any attention to the woman at all, it is briefly just to mock and to berate her painfully. And this sometimes arouses the other man's saviour protective damsel or princes and distress instincts. I've been told by men, you don't protect your women. Men talk to me about my women disrespectfully. Men don't respect me. They disrespect me. They misbehave with the woman who is with me and they know it. But they think that I do not mind. They think I do not care. So they see an opportunity to take advantage of my sad and mad partners and of my blatant indifference. Showing an utter lack of interest is tantamount to communicating a license to proceed. It's like saying to the other men, you're not disrespecting or offending me by absconding with my woman. Go ahead. Go with her. Do with her whatever you want. When I make clear that their behaviour bothers me, they explain, they apologise, they minimise, and they all stop immediately. And of course, this is a collapsed covert narcissist, describing his behaviour when he becomes a classic overt narcissist again. So the same collapse, the same narcissist can go through periods of total indifference, encouraging actually his woman or giving her license or giving other men license to misbehave, to sleep around, to cheat. And then suddenly having switched back from collapsed covert narcissist to overt narcissist to classic narcissist, he regains his sense of possessiveness, ownership, romantic jealousy, and he demands sexual exclusivity. It can be extremely disorienting. It's like two personalities. One could even argue these are two personalities. One of them doesn't care about sexual exclusivity at all. Doesn't care about the intimate partner at all. He's unable actually to have any kind of intimacy. And the other one is very possessive, very jealous. It's the same person. We are not talking about two people. We're talking about an overt classic narcissist who goes through a phase of collapse and becomes covert narcissist. These men don't take the woman away from me. They don't do anything against my will. They don't do anything against her will. I gave up on the woman. I discard her publicly. And she wants the other men. There's no underhandedness. There's no coercion or expropriation. They're not in the open with full knowledge and consent. Consent of everyone involved. And so I cannot really claim innocence. I cannot say I didn't know that they're going to have sex. I didn't know he was going to have sex with them. It is I who actually foretell I foresee the sex. And I give them my assent and my assurance that I don't mind. I know that they're going to spend the night together. I know they're going to dream together. I know they're going on a vacation together. And I realize that when they get drunk or when they are isolated on an island in vacation, when she flirts with him, shamelessly in my presence, I realize what's going to happen. I decline to force myself on them. I don't insist to join them. I don't insist even when I'm invited. I withdraw. I withdraw and give them full freedom. I have only myself to so-called blame. Men don't abscond with my woman property. I give my woman to the men because I'm not interested in her in any way. This is how this is the inner experience of a collapsed covert narcissist. If he experiences indifference, whether it's real indifference or feigned indifference, it's an open question because when the collapsed covert narcissist reverts to classic form, he experiences horrible pain, horrible agony over what had happened. So it's like he's leading himself to modification. It's like in a classic narcissist, modification leads to enlightenment and self-awareness. But in a covert narcissist, modification leads to classic narcissism. Modification is the way the covert narcissist awakens himself and becomes a full-fledged, overt classic narcissist. And the classic narcissist, when he experiences modification, he experiences self-awareness. And then a covert phase. Modification, therefore, is the bridge between overt and covert and back. That is the mechanism we've been missing. We've been racking our brains for the last at least 30 years, asking ourselves, how is it possible that an overt narcissist can become covert? There are so such diametrically opposed types. How can a single individual be both? Well, through the process of modification, which shuts down the false self for a while and allows the covert, indifferent, withdrawn, schizoid, self-effacing, passive-aggressive mode to emerge. Classic narcissist said, I'm immersed in interacting with a male company, trying to impress her. I usually meet in groups. So the role of the woman by my side is very unclear. Is she a hanger-all? Is she an admirer, a student, a guest, and a strange wife, an ex? Did we have a lover's quarrel? I leave that hanging in the air. I never protest when a man flirts with the woman next to me, when he picks her up. I give the impression that I couldn't care less, that I'm not bothered at all, that I have better, more important things to do than to get involved. In truth, I'm kind of afraid of confrontation. I feel weaker, much less of a man than the other man. I'm also certain that the woman will mock me and humiliate me in front of the other men and still abscond with him, still go with him. I don't have the power, I don't have the right to stop her. And that's already a classic narcissist. Actually, he's not aware, but he's describing a covert mindset. I never stand up for my woman. I never protect the woman in my life, even when I know that she is vulnerable, very drunk, unhappy, sad, depressed, or sick.  I let the woman go with him. I let her get hurt. I don't care if my intimate partner is mocked, physically attacked, falls ill, is depressed, sexually assaulted, or needs me in any way. Except if helping her generates narcissistic supply, as a guru, a psychologist, an advisor, a wise man, a father figure. So this is a description of the transition back from covert to overt. We have the two sides. We are dealing with sexual exclusivity in interpersonal relationships, to remind you, because they evoke and provoke the most intense emotions. And these emotions are partly primitive, reptilian, if you wish, and partly civilized, and partly intellectual, and partly bodily. There's no other realm of life which provokes this concoction. So that's why I decided to study this. And so many, many narcissists used a phrase that I invented, virtual single. They say, my women behave like virtual singles. In my presence, they always prefer to communicate with other men, aggressively pick them up, flirt with them, spend long stretches of time with them. Days, sometimes whole nights, go to bars, go to nightclubs alone, and pick up men there. They have emotional affairs. They cheat repeatedly. They become so desperate that they signal to men, in my presence, they give them their phone numbers. They flirt with them, even when they are having an evening out with me. They feel no real bond with me. They're starved for sex and intimacy, to be wanted, to be cherished. They feel used and abused by me. They want out by any means. They feel exploited. Cheating and ostentatious infidelity is their exit strategy, as you have said in your videos, writes one. By the way, this puts paid to the myth that narcissists are not self-aware. Had narcissists been totally not self-aware, processes like narcissistic injury and modification would not have been possible. It would not have been possible to penetrate the narcissist mind. It requires a modicum of standing out outside yourself and looking at yourself, of introspection. The narcissist continues. When asked directly, the woman with me lets the other men know that I don't care, that I don't mind her misbehavior, and that I have no interest in her. I don't care about her whereabouts, or who they are spending the time with, or when and if they will return to me, and how she chooses to act. The woman in my life is likely to say he's busy with his work, or he rejects and abuses me. He's very sick. He has mother issues. He told me, he told me I can sleep with others. They would use a variety, a monopoly of excuses and explanations. Some of the narcissists feel this, experience the covert phase following the collapse, experience the covert phase as deeply humiliating. Men disrespect me completely into my face for letting them have my women in whom, presumably, I'm invested as my property. So they imply that I'm a doormat. Some of them say that I'm not involved in my intimate partner's life, and I don't involve her in mine, that I'm not human. Even men who admire and value what I have to give, intellect or contributions to business, pity and mock me as a pompous fool, a deranged freak, a doormat, non-men in other realms of life. Okay, so this was an example of the collapse, covert experience of indifference in a field, an area of life, where we would have thought indifference is impossible.  Even there, he is rendered totally indifferent. But this is an aspect and dimension of a larger phenomenon, which is a form of people-pleasing. And we must contrast people-pleasing with primary psychology. So many of the narcissists say men have been taking away what's rightfully mine all my life, my time, my ideas, my money, my reputation, my history, my women, my contacts. Based on my indifference and collusion in this plunder, all men have reached two conclusions. One, as a people-pleaser, I have no boundaries, no dignity, no self-respect and no sanity. I'm defenseless. What they can do to me and to mine is limited only by their own pity, compassion, morality and sense that there is nothing more to take or that the maintenance cost is becoming too high. And this makes people in my life feel unsafe and unprotected and makes my partner feel disillusioned. And the second conclusion that people reach when they observe the covert phase, the collapsed covert phase, is that the person who is undergoing this switch is very mentally ill, utterly dysfunctional, incapable of maintaining even the rudiments of a relationship or capable of having sex, gauge reality or act in reality self-efficaciously, even if only to the extent of holding on to what and who is his. So many narcissists describe the moment of loss, the moment where they had lost their spouse, their family, their money, their business, their freedom. They describe the moment of loss as intimately connected to a phase of modification followed by collapsed covert narcissism. It is then having been observed from the outside that people got alarmed, got frightened and walked away because it is then that the underbelly of the narcissist, the hidden black hole like deep space, void and darkness, the totally empty hole of mirrors, it is then that the non-existence, the absence of the narcissist in his own life and in his own mind became glaringly apparent and it's a terrifying sight.  As long as the overt or the classic narcissist maintains the show, as long as the show goes on, there will be people charmed by him, succumb to his charisma, play along with his stratogens, collude, co-opt and collab, collaborate with his plans, etc. As long as it keeps it together. But when it disintegrates and switches and transitions via the modification bridge to a collapsed covert state, it is then that they see the true face of the narcissist. The nothingness, the absence, they see that there's no one there. It's the most terrifying experience. And so now this is to say, gradually everyone comes to regard me the same way, with a mixture of wariness, pity, revulsion and contempt. Some are envious of my gifts and project their envy and their sense of guilt and shame for having abused me by becoming even more aggressive. They compensate. I mean, they feel guilty and ashamed. When they see the narcissist disintegrating, there's immediately an empathic reaction. Like you feel bad. And some people feel guilty and ashamed. They feel that they had caused, they had caused the disintegration. They pushed the narcissist over the edge.  But some people, if they're immature, if they are narcissistic themselves, they would react to their own discomfort, to their own shame and guilt with extended and enhanced aggression. The majority would just walk away, having squeezed the narcissist's drive of any usefulness. Narcissists say, from time to time I try to fight back. But when I asked the narcissist in the sample to tell me how do they fight back? How do they extricate themselves, like the Baron Minkhausen lifting themselves by their own hair? How do they extricate themselves from the pit, the cesspool of covert narcissism? How do they restore themselves back into an overt or classic state? I found out that they do it by conning people, cheating people, deceiving, making false promises, lying, or engendering the fantasy and then drawing people into the fantasy. For example, drawing women into the fantasy via the process of grooming. There's a series of videos I made about this shared fantasy. So they con people, they cheat people out of money, out of love, out of compassion, out of, they simply pretend to be who they are not. They assert themselves by taking instead of giving. And at that point, gradually they regain their classic narcissism, their overt narcissism. And suddenly, with the same intimate part, they would make a new list of demands, boundaries and rules, which include, for example, sexual exclusivity. Some narcissists said, even when I failed, even when I failed, I still tried to con people. But even there, as a con artist, I failed time and again. People saw right through me, people walked away, women cheated on me repeatedly, their needs unmet. And the hope that I will set these people free, let them go once they make me aware of their betrayals. That is the force that drove all of them. In other words, what this narcissist is saying is that when people discovered that he is conning them, that he's lying to them, that he's deceiving and cheating, they transgressed against him, they betrayed him, and they did it ostentatiously, openly, so that he would let them go. Conning people, said this narcissist, was setting boundaries for and asserting not myself, but the fictitious character that I had created for the con. So again, it defeated the purpose. Again, I ended up giving everything of myself freely to another entity, albeit an entity that I myself had conjured up. It's a very, very fascinating observation. This narcissist says that when he felt himself transitioning from classic through modification to collapse and from collapse to covert narcissism, he wanted to go back. He wanted to be classic again. And he felt that the only way he could do this is by conning people, cheating, deceiving, taking for them. So he tried to do this. But in order to do this, he had to come up with a fictitious figure, with a false self, with an act. And then he suddenly realized that whatever he's taking from other people, it's not he who does the taking. It's the false self. It's the invented character. It's the conjured up entity. It's again not him. Whoever is conning other people, deceiving them, cheating them, stealing from them, taking from them. It's not him. It's the character he had invented. Again, he has been usurped. Again, he has been replaced, displeased and substituted for. Similarly, I make women fall in love with a false apparition. An emanation, a fespian project, a role play. Never with the real me. The grooming phase over, upon entering the shared fantasy, all my women discovered to their dismay that I had conned them into a relationship with a complete, abusive and mentally disabled stranger, which is the real me. Of course, the most fervent wish of these women is to up and walk away by any and all means necessary, including by having casual sex with strangers ostentatiously. So grooming is like making women fall in love, not with the narcissist or the psychopath, but with another person he had created, a facade, a potemkin person, a fictitious entity. So they fall in love with this and then they discover the real thing, the real McCoy, and they walk away. Again, by luring women into my lair, I am giving myself abundantly to another man. That other man is a fictitious character. In my case, for example, it's the irresistible genius. I am doing the dirty work of this fictitious man. I'm doing his dirty work for him. I'm satisfying his grandiose and sadistic needs to uphold and prove his irresistibility, and then to taunt, frustrate, humiliate and dispoil the women he captivates. Those are his needs, not mine. I dedicate all my resources to catering to these needs on his behalf. Again, there's a situation of exploitation and gallability. Again, the real narcissist is not catered to, is not satisfied.  They often complain about their relationship and how its dysfunction is brought on the adultery. So in the typical, classic relationship, women complain about their relationship and say, well, their relationship is not working well. That's why I'm fornicating, that's why I'm cheating. But the intimate partners of the narcissist don't describe their relationship as the problem. They describe the narcissist as the problem. They actually like many elements in the relationship. They miss these elements, but there's no way they could countenance the narcissist himself. It's a mirror image of normal reality. In normal reality, you love the person you're with, but you're having difficulties in the relationship. When you're with the narcissist, you love some elements of the relationship. It's exciting, it's thrilling, it's adventurous, but you have serious problems with the person you're with. Something is seriously awry with the narcissist, which makes even the greatest rewards and gifts he can offer and incommensurate compensation. And so these are the only two modes the narcissist has, the Dormat and the Psychopath.  One of them is comatose, one of them is recessive, one of them is dominant at any given time. At some points, the narcissist becomes avoidant, celibate and a con artist.  At some points, and the psychopath micromanages the shared fantasy. At some points, the Dormat is the one who is modified. You remember that modification leads from covert to overt. And so sometimes the Dormat is modified. It's when we force two alternative self-states to encounter each other and to communicate. But even as the Dormat continues to process the modification, the psychopath continues apace with his exploits, forcefully dissociating the Dormat in order to function. So when the overt transitions via collapse and modification to the covert, when the covert transitions via collapse and modification to the overt, there is a short period of dissociation where the dominant personality at that moment is fighting back. It doesn't want to go away. So if you're covert, you're modified, you're about to become overt, the covert will reassert himself.  This is part of, again, a bigger problem of delusionality. One of the main management problems in narcissism, both in a therapeutic setting and for the narcissist himself, when he tries to manage his life, his cognitions, his emotions, is this delusionality. It's not only a lack of self-awareness, it's taking the information available and then reframing it in a way that supports grandiosity, grandiosity or other misconceptions. It's delusionality in the sense that the reality testing is impaired. The narcissist is divorced from reality at any time. And so, for example, in the vast majority of cases of narcissists, everyone who comes in contact with the narcissist shuns him and ultimately flees, runs away. I mean, look at, for example, Donald Trump. He's a president of the United States, but look how many hundreds of people have abandoned him already in the last three years. Men do it one way and women do it another, but all of them flee, all of them run away, all of them escape, all of them scatter, all of them don't want anything further to do with narcissists, they shun him. Men don't mind or even relish being seen as assertive and decisive, so they just vanish or they tell the narcissist off. Women prefer to be thought of as sluts rather than heartless, traitorous bitches, so they cheat ostentatiously to get rid of the narcissist. So each gender has its own coping mechanisms and so on and so forth. In the sunlight, people will avoid the narcissist, like the virus of the mind, which can cause systemic infection, even when people recover from exposure to the narcissist. There are always multiple organ long-term damage, like the COVID-19, but the narcissist doesn't see all this.  His compensatory grandiosity compels him to reframe everything counterfactually, counterfactually and delusionally. Let's take a few examples. Narcissists might tell you, everyone is addicted to me, everyone misses me horribly and it is their loss that I'm out of their lives. And the reality is people, especially women, can't wait to get away from the narcissist. They do anything. They do everything. They even go to extremes to set themselves free to immediately go no contact with the narcissist unless and until the narcissist can be of use. And they proceed with their lives happily after the narcissist and profitably. And they decline the narcissist's attempts to over or renew contact. And sometimes they do this aggressively and hatefully. And yet all of this doesn't affect the narcissist's perception that people are addicted to him, that they miss him, that they want him in their lives. And so Narciss doesn't realize that it's 100% his loss that people flee and are boring having crossed paths with him. He doesn't realize, think it's their loss. And he's very traumatized, the reason for modifications is that he is traumatized when he realizes that he can be humiliated. He can be made unsafe, even by non-core issues, not important issues, even by useless people. When the narcissist goes through modification, he feels unsafe, disoriented. The whole situation looks like marriage and surrealistic because his grandiosity impairs his reality testing. He is inside the delusion, he has selective attention, he filters out things. And this renders him dangerously unaware of his environment, gullible to a frightening extent. The narcissist delusionally, for example, considers himself witty or funny, fascinating, authoritative, omniscient, transformative, addictive, irresistible, hyper-intelligent or hypersexual.  And yet, very few narcissists would use these terms to describe themselves. On the other end of grandiosity, there's paranoia. For secretary delusions, everyone, especially women, tried to deceive me, to manipulate me, to lie to me, to get away with abusive misbehavior.  But actually, people perceive the narcissists as histrionic, as provocative, and they don't respect him, they don't admire him, they are not old by him, they're not afraid of him. None of this is true.  But they do so in extremes, when the narcissist is sadistic, or bullying, or threatening. And even then, when there is a real conspiracy, a real collusion to hurt the narcissists, the narcissist will fail to notice it, because of his grandiosity, cognitive deficit. The thing is that it's all based on cognitive dissonance. When the overt or classic narcissist fails, he rejects reality, he rejects life, and he refuses to accept his responsibility for his own life. He becomes, therefore, covert in the shadows, hiding a reflection. So, it's rejection which is intended to settle the dissonance, to resolve the dissonance, and to ameliorate the anxiety that comes with dissonance. The narcissist deludes himself that he provides value-added, I don't know what analysis, money, insight, healing, support, succor. He convinces himself that he's so unique that people will never give up on him. Never mind how negativistic, passive-aggressive, aggressive, sadistic, frustrating, withholding and hurtful he is. They will never give up on him, because what he has to give is unique, can't be found anywhere else, and invaluable, has no price, worth every price, priceless. In reality, the narcissist provides value-added that sometimes is a bit unique, but it's not indispensable, it's not irreplaceable. It's definitely not worth the emotional price that people have to pay for his abuse. So, people, men and women give up on the narcissist with lackrity. They go no contact, post-haste. People may respect the narcissist for some accomplishments or for his intelligence, but this is also very misleading. It's false sanitizing, because an intelligent, charming, magnetic, charismatic narcissist, it implies that he's wise or mature, and narcissists are not wise or mature. When people get to know the narcissist up close, they lose all respect for him. And coupled with their envy and revolt at his obnoxious and pompous personality, this sometimes leads, if they are narcissists, if they are psychopaths, if they are victims of abuse who are vindictive and vengeful, sometimes this confluence of disrespect, envy, and revolt, revulsion, leads them to virulent displays of public humiliation, shaming, narcissists shaming, and passive-aggressive, opunitive acts, which in turn lead to modification and collapsed covert state. Such disrespect is also communicable, contagious. People catch it from each other, you know? And this contagion is exacerbated by the narcissist's own behaviors. Ironically, when he feigns indifference in a covert state, it increases the incentive and the motivation to hurt him even more, through his firewall of apathy. And when he's reactant, when there's reactance and defiance, when he's antisocial or psychopathic, of course you want to put you down, like a rabid dog. The apathy of the narcissist in the collapsed covert state is not perceived as a sign of strength, but on the contrary, it's perceived as a doormat, cowardice, weakness, absence of enforceable boundaries. The narcissist opens himself up to contempt, abuse and derision exactly by becoming covert. When alternatively, people perceive the narcissist's feigned and ostentatious disinterest as passive aggression. The narcissist's disrespect for and ostentatious disinterest in his intimate partners is interpreted by extension as a lack of dignity, lack of strength, lack of resilience and lack of self-respect. Who doesn't care for his property, for his intimate partners? Who doesn't protect people he loves?  So similarly, if the narcissist switches from collapsed covert state to a psychopathic, antisocial, defiant, overt narcissistic state, if he then pendulates, if he swings, if he switches from covert to malignant, his reactance, his defiance, his aggression, they're not perceived as credible. He's about as intimidating and deterring as a spoiled brat and equally repulsive and antagonized. It's one of the few points where I fully agree with with Jordan Peterson. Nothing more repulsive than a spoiled brat. And the narcissist's conspicuous attempts to man up, to deter, to intimidate, they provoke the offended parties to escalate into egregious territory. Narcissist induces escalation in a war he can never win. People, men and much more so perhaps women, they have very little to, very few strategic options in such cases. They have to become aggressive. And they have to hurt the narcissist. In a way, they have to modify him. He's like in a, in a daze, in a trance. They have to wake him up. They have to bring him back to reality screaming and kicking and you know, there's no other way. He can go into deep space. He can, he's, you know, he's in a trip. He's high on his own grandiosity. Even as a covert, he is high on his own grandiosity because the covert feigned indifference is a form of grandiosity. I mean different. I don't care. See if I care. I don't mind. You can do anything. Who are you?  It's grandiosity. And so this is, this is the dynamic that the switching from overt to covert provoke. And the inner dialogue of the narcissist, both classic and covert and covert. They share a single template. It's a little like Microsoft Word with the same software. You can write this novel or that novel. You can write a novel or poem with the same template. You get overt classic narcissists and covert. So the dialogue goes like this. People says the narcissist to himself. Men and much more so women. They have very little to offer me. Compared to alternatives like books or films, people are bore me to death. They can teach me nothing of course. Nothing relevant or useful. I know everything. They are wasteful. They're inefficient. They're untitled. They're inflated. In other words, the narcissist projects. He says everyone is a narcissist. Everyone is grandiose. To maximize return on investment because the narcissist like to think like to think in objective terms. They consider themselves optimizing machines, optimizing devices, all wise, all knowing robots. And they everything is like dictated by ultimate supreme rationality. You know, unless unless they play the spiritual, the spiritual guru or the public, intellectual, philosopher, psychologist who has all the answers. Unless they play this game, majority of narcissists would pretend to be optimizing machines. So to maximize return on investment, the bottom line in the balance sheet, the narcissist says to himself, I need people to adhere to strict standards and rules and to obey me. It is my way or the highway. Take it or leave it. This is not flexible. And so this insistence on following the narcissist's rules of conduct. This has the added bonus of gratifying the narcissist's sadistic impulses because it frustrates and hurts other people. And that's fun.  It's even more fun than sex. Of course, the reality is other people are not inferior to the narcissist. I would even say as a general rule the overwhelming vast majority of people are way superior to the narcissist in almost every conceivable way, perhaps with the exception of intelligence or intellect in some isolated cases. The narcissist is deficient, cognitively deficient, emotionally non-existent, is as clueless in social situations and in sex as the most autistic person. Women cheat on the narcissist because as he is, he is not lovable. And this creates in them a frustrating and infuriating, tantalizing dissonance. They love an unlovable person.  And so men equally reject the narcissist because of this incongruence, lack of cohesion and coherence between what he promises and what he shows, the appearance and the substance or actually the lack of substance. There's nobody there. It's a zero in the fullest sense of the word, not as a value judgment, but as a mathematical description. The narcissist is a zero. This is nobody there. And when a woman cheats on the narcissist, the narcissist tells him, so how could she have chosen? How could she have opted for such an inferior man? Look at me. I'm intelligent. I'm irresistible. I'm handsome. I'm rich. I'm powerful. How could she have ended up with him?  They bring normalcy into the life of the narcissist's intimate partner. His abuse creates claustrophobic, suffocating, hypervigilant bubble with no atmosphere.  Women don't perceive the narcissist's absence in their lives after the breakup. There's a punishment or a loss. They perceive it as wonderful liberation. Liberation is a relief. It's a reward. Of course, they miss. His intimate partners miss some aspects. Some narcissists are very insightful. So they miss maybe the psychological insights. Other narcissists are reasonably good lovers. They miss the sex. You always miss something in someone. So generally, most intimate partners would miss something. But largely and overwhelmingly, they're relieved. They're relieved. They're liberated. They're happy. They're happy to have gotten rid of the narcissist and his sick shared feminism. They are much happier. They're much happier when the narcissist is away. And even when they are together ostensibly, they try to avoid the narcissist. And all women, if the narcissist allows them closure or closure dialogue, they compile these long and exhaustive lists of the narcissist's shortcomings, deficiencies, disadvantages, et cetera, et cetera. And these lists are very, very, very long, almost internal, almost endless. So this by itself proves that all other men alternatives are vastly superior to the narcissist and way more attractive to his intimate partners. You see, what the narcissist fails to understand is that women first connect to a man as a person. And they want a person who loves to be with people or more specifically loves women. They want someone who is kind, who is interesting, who is passionate, who is horny. They want openness, gregariousness. They want safe acceptance, a core, a good time. So they end up being with other men. And what I'm saying here applies to business as well, applies to the workplace, applies to organizations the narcissist belongs to. I don't know, church, political party. People want, people, people want human beings. People want persons to be with. They don't want to be with pale and dysfunctional and glitchy imitation of humans like the narcissist. Other people allow for intimacy to develop patiently and attentively. And so when the narcissist's intimate partner betrays him, cheats on him with another man, it's because they see in that other man the man, the person.  Women are attracted to other men because of the person, the personality. The sex is a derivative. Many narcissists are functional schizoids. In other words, even if they socialize a lot, they don't really socialize. They are averse to people. They hate men.    Except when and for as long as other people are of some use to the narcissist, I don't know, give him supply, money, access, sex, services. In this sense, all narcissists are very psychopathic. They are out to get narcissistic supply. And it's a goal. And they will instrumentally use other people to obtain this goal. But otherwise, they are very averse to humanity.  Sex is not a sufficient compensation as far as a narcissist is concerned. Any other narcissist never has sex. Women are no exception. They are useful to the narcissist in his pursuit of sadism, to despondent, to degrade them, to humiliate them. And this will lead to providing with services the three S's, supply, services, sadistic sex. He's willing to invest in order to extract benefits, but only when there is an immediate, specific, and high return on his investment. Instant gratification, entitlement, or one of the other goals that I mentioned. And with women, the investment horizon is longer. Women demand reciprocity in some respects, sexually, emotionally, time-wise.  So it's a bargain. And if the bargain is not kept, women end up being with other men. They cheat and deceive. When the investment tap is closed, or when there is asymmetry or imbalance. And the narcissist intimate partner would even end up with other men who are as abusive, grandiose, entitled or sadistic as the narcissist is. But these men give them something. Attention, sacor, money, children, stability, reliability, goals, sex, good time, socializing, something. The narcissist only takes. Even the narcissist sex is autoerotic, sadistic, choosing the woman's body. There's no reciprocity there. Narcissists can give insights. Narcissists can be entertaining. But even these can be overbearing, meandering, compulsive, pompous, wrong, aggressive, sadistic. And ultimately, he degenerates into unwanted rants, ramblings. It's too much. The narcissist is a caricature of a human being. It's too much to emphasize. And so when a woman has to make the comparison between the narcissist and any other man, I mean, narcissists usually end up losing. End up losing the game.  It's where everything is revealed. There's maximum intimacy, maximum emotions, primordial and contemporary, civilized, bodily and mental, intellectual and emotional, cognitive and feelings. I mean, everything is there. It's a microcosm and a macrocosm. It's the cosmos itself. The workplace has a subset of these features. Friendship has another subset of these features. But only an intimate relationship with an intimate partner, an interpersonal, prolonged interaction. Only there the true face of everyone involved gets revealed. And only there the narcissist can transition via modification from one self-state to another from avert to covert, from covert to avert. And now to round it up, to sum it up, I want to discuss the issue of whether anyone is preferable to the narcissist. Because this seems to be the behavior of the narcissist's intimate partners, the narcissist's business partners. The narcissist's friends. They all seem to give up on the narcissist and then proceed to develop relationships, sometimes instant relationships, sometimes one-night relationships with perfect strangers. Does it make sense? If you have known the narcissist for years, does it make sense for you to replace him with a total stranger overnight? If you have worked with the narcissist for years, does it make sense for you to dump the narcissist and start something with someone totally new? The answer is yes. It's a rational choice. Consider, for example, dating a perfect stranger. When you're dating a perfect stranger, there is a 1 to 3% chance of ending up with the narcissist or a psychopath. 1 to 3% of our population are narcissists and psychopaths. So when you are with a stranger, these are your chances.  So it's much better to take the odds of 3% than to take the odds of 100%. It is rational to trust and to take chances with strangers and not with the narcissist or the psychopath. And it's wrong to think that spending time with a narcissist, having a relationship with the narcissist, having a previous acquaintance with the narcissist, regardless of length and intensity, should change these calculus, because he doesn't. First of all, the psychopathic narcissist is a pathological liar, so his self-reporting is very suspect. Can't learn much by spending time with you. And second thing, from the very first moment, he abuses lies, tortures, manipulates, openly, throughout any relationship, business, personal. So you gain nothing by spending time with the narcissist. You gain nothing. Narcissism is a guarantee of ultimate loss and abuse. Why take the chances? So this is what I wanted to tell you, that there is no type constancy. Narcissists switch from classic to covert when they go through collapse and modification. They switch back from covert to overt when they go again through collapse and modification. And I wanted to reassure you, as victims of narcissists, survivors of narcissistic abuse, or people who contemplate being in relationship with narcissists or exposed to people who suspect are narcissists, it's very rational to walk away. And it's very rational to prefer even relationships, even one-night stands, even dating, even with perfect strangers, than with the narcissists you know. Because you don't know. There's no such thing as knowing the narcissist. I just demonstrated to you that narcissists have self-states, exactly like borderlines, exactly like people with dissociative identity disorder. There's nobody there, and because there's nobody there, anyone can be there, and everyone is there. The narcissists you think you know can suddenly experience narcissistic injury, modification, a collapse, and he becomes covert. And that's a narcissist you don't know. Surreptitious, undermining, underground, passive-aggressive, maliciously dangerous. And then he goes back to being overt via another collapse, another modification, and you have a grandiose abuser with sadistic overtones. Why do you need this? Why do you need any of this? No contact. In 1995, I suggested a coherent strategy of no contact in a series of papers. The no contact strategy is not simply going no contact. It has dozens of steps of what you should do to ascertain that you are in a real no contact state. And I encourage you to watch the videos on my channel which deal with no contact. These transitions, there's a new way of looking at the narcissistic dynamic, but it doesn't really add any meaningful insight to the question, to the doesn't really provide a new answer to the question, should I be with him or not? Not. To be a narcissist is a full-time job. A narcissist needs to secure narcissistic supply on an ongoing basis. Exactly like a junkie has to secure his next fix. Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles. It's a full-time job. It's energy depleting. And many narcissists do not have the skills, talents, or qualifications to obtain supply. They are the collapsed narcissists. And today, I would like to discuss the collapsed narcissist and a new concept I have come up with the collapsed histrionic. My name is Sam Dachni and I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love Narcissism Revism. Pathological narcissism is thought to be the result of a prolonged period of severe abuse by primary caregivers or by peers or authority figures. In this sense, pathological narcissism is a reaction to trauma. It's a post-traumatic condition. Narcissism is a form of post-traumatic stress disorder that got ossified and fixated and mutated into a personality disorder. All narcissists are traumatized. All narcissists suffer from a variety of post-traumatic syndromes such as abandonment anxiety, reckless behaviors and other anxiety disorders, mood disorders, somatophone disorders, or the image problems, and so on. But the presenting signs of narcissism rarely indicate post-trauma.  It's a doctor. The narcissist presents to the world a facade of invincibility, equanimity, superiority, skinfulness, cool-headedness, invulnerability, nonchalance, and in short, indifference. This front that the narcissist presents to the world is penetrated in times of great crisis that threaten the narcissist's ability to obtain narcissistic supply. It is also bridged and collapses when narcissistic supply is spurious, fake, or low-grade, negative, or static. And then the narcissist becomes a collapsed narcissist. Many surf-styled experts online use the term failed narcissist, but it's a failed term. It's a mistake. Failed narcissist is a term that was invented by Grodstein, a scholar, to describe one of the phases in the development of borderline personalities. The correct term is collapsed narcissist. The collapsed narcissist is very much like the collapsed histrionic. The collapsed histrionic is usually a woman with body image somatoform issues, and a low sense of self-worth. Yet, she still needs men, and she uses men to regulate her flagging self-esteem and deficient self-confidence. This creates a permanent dissonance and anticipatory anxiety as such a woman expects fully to be rejected and humiliated by men. Low self-esteem often leads to an impaired reality test. The collapsed histrionic misreads environmental, social, and sexual cues. She often ends up being mocked, shunned, abused, or sexually assaulted by men. She compensates for her insecurities with brazen defiance and grandiosity, as well as with substance abuse, alcoholism, all of which compound her ability to properly gauge reality. The collapsed histrionic's feelings of inferiority and inadequacy lead the collapsed histrionic to social withdrawal and to reclusiveness. She rarely dates men, and when she does, she aggresses against, pushes away, and abuses her teammates, winners, accomplishment, even when they are genuinely interested in her. She engages in pre-emptive abandonment. She dumps them before they dump her.  Both histrionics and narcissists require a form of narcissistic supply. And when the narcissistic supply is deficient when it's missing, they resort to several adaptive solutions. The first solution is the delusional narrative solution. The narcissist or histrionic construct a narrative in which he figures as the hero, brilliant, perfect, irresistibly handsome, beautiful, destined for great things, entitled, powerful, wealthy, the center of attention, etc. The bigger the strain of this delusion will charade the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the grandiosity gap the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies. Finally, if the delusion is sufficiently protracted in time, it replaces reality. And the histrionic and the collapsed histrionic and narcissists reality test deteriorates considerably. He or she withdraw the bridges may become schizotypical, catatonic or schizoid. Another solution is the antisocial solution. The narcissist or histrionic renounce reality. To the narcissist or histrionic's mind those who pucillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his benevolent nature, hair, stunning beauty, entitlement, cosmically important mission, affection, etc. Anyone who fails to recognize the real foundations of the narcissist or histrionic's grandiosity they don't deserve consideration. The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal, the lack of empathy and compassion, efficient social skills, disregard for social laws and morals they are also common to the histrionic. Both narcissists and histrionics have a psychopathic overlay. Actually many scholars claim that histrionic personality disorder is the female variant of psychopathy antisocial personality disorder. In all this complex, all this antisocial defined, brewed, erupts and blossoms. The rejected narcissist, the rejected histrionic full-fledged antisocial, sociopath or psychopath, he or she ignores the wishes and needs of others breaks the law, violates all rights naturally legal, holds people in contempt and disdain, derives in the Christ society and its codes, punishes the ignorant ingrates and transgresses on the emotions and rights of even loved ones. That to his or her mind these people drove him over to this state they are guilty, they are responsible for her or his acts. By acting criminally and by jeopardizing their safety, lives and property the narcissists, the collapsed narcissists of the collapse histrionic exacts vengeance, reciprocates, restores balance and justice. It's a power play within a power matrix. A variant of this pattern of conduct is a passive aggressive solution.  Procrastination, malingering, perfectionism, forgetfulness, neglect, truancy, intentional inefficiency, stubbornness and outright sabotage. This repeated and advertent misconduct has far-reaching effects. Consider the negativists in the workplace. He or she invests time and efforts in obstructing their own chores and in undermining relationships. But these self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors wreak havoc throughout the workshop of the office. Same in romantic relationships. Despite the obstructive role of their play, passive aggressives feel unappreciated, bored, cheated and misunderstood. Left out, they chronically complain why can't be criticized. They blame their failures and defeats on others, posing as martyrs and victims of a corrupt, inefficient and heartless system or corrupt inefficient and heartless people. In other words, they have alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control. Passive aggressives sunk and give the silent treatment in reaction to real or imaginary slides. They suffer from ideas of reference, referential ideation. They believe that they are the but of derision, contempt and condemnation. Their mildly paramount the world is out to get them which explains the person's misfortune or they are being purposefully left out and cut out. In the words of the diagnostic and statistical manual they may be silent, irritable, impatient, argumentative, cynical, skeptical and contrary. Rageful and spiteful, they are also hostile, explosive, they lack impulse control and they are sometimes reckless. The next solution to deficient narcissistic supply commonly adopted by collapse narcissists and histrionics is the paranoid schizoid solution. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism the narcissist develops paranoid narratives such directed confabulations which place him at the center of others allegedly maligned intention attention and intention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of narcissistic supply. The narcissist develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slides and insults where none were intended. Collapse narcissists and collapse histrionics are hyper vigilant. The narcissist or histrionic becomes subject to referential ideation. People are gossiping about her mocking him trying into his affairs cracking her emails, etc. The narcissists and histrionic become convinced that he or she is the center of malign and malintentioned attention.  Some narcissists withdraw completely from the world populated with such relationships and ominous objects. They are really projections of internal objects and processes, the secretary objects. These collapse narcissists and histrionics avoid or social contact except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people from falling in love, from having sex from encouraging intimacy, from talking to others, or even from correspondingly. In short, they become schizorids not out of social shyness or social anxiety, but out of what they feel to be their choice. This evil, hopeless world does not deserve me goes the inner refrain, and I shall waste none of my time and resources on it. The next solution is the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution. Other narcissists who develop the secretary delusions, histrionics with the same result in aggressive stats, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. They become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and very rarely physically abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, derate, demean and derive the nearest and nearest. Often well wishes, often loved ones. These these narcissists and histrionics explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, spite, condemnation and blame. There is the exegetic bedlam. They interpret everything even the most innocuous, inadvertent and innocent comment, as designed to provoke and humiliate them.  They flame against the windmills of reality, apathetic, for law and side for sure, but often they cause really and lasting damage. They hurt people and sometimes they hurt themselves. The next solution is the masochistic avoidance solution. The collapsed narcissists and collapsed histrionics are angered, is angered by the lack of narcissistic supply or attention or admiration or being desired. The collapsed narcissists and collapsed histrionics direct some of his or her fury inwards, punishing himself or herself for his or her failure. This masochistic behavior has the added benefit of forcing the narcissists or histrionics closest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators, spectators or persecutors and thus either way to pay him the attention that he creates. So he forces people around him to observe what's happening and to pity him or to pity her or to persecute him or her. Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicaping masochism, the narcissistic or histrionic cobalt. By undermining his work, his relationship and his efforts the increasingly fragile narcissists and histrionics avoids additional criticism and center negative supply. Self-inflicted failure is the narcissist of the histrionics doing and thus proves that he or she is the master of his or her own fate. Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating circumstances which render success impossible and an objective assessment of their performance improbable to quote Millen, Theodore Millen. They act carelessly, withdraw in mid-effort, are constantly fatigued, bored or disaffected and thus passive-aggressively sabotage their lives. Their suffering is defined and by deciding to abort they reassert their omnipotence. The narcissists the collapse narcissists and histrionics pronounced in public misery self-pity are compensatory. Again Theodore Millen says they are intended to reinforce his or her self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness. The collapse narcissists and histrionics tribulations of anguish render him or her in his or her eyes unique, saintly, virtuous, righteous, resilient and significant. They are in other words self-generated narcissistic supply. That's paradoxically the worse the anguish and unhappiness of the collapsed narcissists or the collapsed histrionics the more relieved and elated such a narcissist or histrionic feels. It feels good to feel bad in extremis when all these default behaviors and solutions fail or when only negative fake, illogical and static narcissistic supplies to be had. The collapsed narcissists or histrionics falls apart in a process of disintegration known as de-compensation it's the inability to maintain psychological defences in the face of overwhelming and mounting stress. And this is a company by the next stage which is acting out. It's when an inner conflict most often translation translates into aggression it involves acting with little or no insight or reflection and in order to attract attention and disrupt other people's cozy lives. The dynamic forces which render the narcissists and the histrionic paralyzed in fake ease of her vulnerabilities, weaknesses and fears. These are strongly exposed as his or her defences crumble and become dysfunction. The narcissists or histrionics extreme dependence on his or her social milieu for the regulation of his or her sense of self-worth is painfully and pitifully evident as he or she is reduced to begging and cajoling or to threatening. At such times the collapse narcissists or the collapse histrionic acts self-destructively and antisocial. The mask of superior equanimity is pierced by displays of impotent rage, self-loathing self-pity, passive aggressiveness and cross-attempts at manipulation of friends, family loved ones and colleagues. The narcissists, collapse narcissists or collapse histrionics, ostensible benevolence and caring evaporate suddenly and shockingly the mask falls evil erupts and emanates or maliciousness. The collapse narcissists and collapse histrionic seek to destroy the source of frustration to punish it to punish loved ones to ruin other people's lives to cause enormous emotion of havoc and anguish and pain. The collapse narcissists and collapse histrionic feel caged and threatened and they react with as any animal would do by striking back at their perceived tormentors at their hitherto nearest and dearest. There is no sight no sight on God's given earth more unsettling than this transition from caring empathic loving tender person the acting from acting to acting out the vicious cornered malicious animal that strikes out at anyone and everyone around her and causes the maximum possible damage pain and blood both figurative and literal. Today I am having a Donald Duck moment or is it a Donald Trump moment lately I and the rest of the world am not so sure at any rate today we have a core new copia core new copia looking upon life very interesting and fascinating things from all corners of cyberspace plus a central theme a central topic and then this will be followed by quotes from books as had become a tradition my new Instagram channel is called Narcissism with Vakny one word Narcissism with Vakny that's my new channel because my old channel has been blocked by Facebook and I've been asked on this channel I've been asked by one of my followers why did you delete your Jerry Springer video I thought it was honest and ballsy well first of all I did not delete it I had moved it to the playlist section all the videos you think well most of the videos you think had disappeared because YouTube had deleted a few of my videos haters complained about hate speech and other things and YouTube had deleted a few of my videos but all those who survived and you can't find them on the main screen they are in the playlist they are 7 or 8 I don't remember or 9 playlists on my YouTube channel just go there and you will find the missing videos okay scan the page you will find it playlist I mentioned in a variety of places okay but what struck my interest in her comment was the use of the word ballsy she connected honesty with courage and I wrote back to her ballsy is a peculiar choice of words to describe an infantile non-men and she responded well it takes courage to be that honest with strangers and with yourself also known as ballsy and my response was you are confusing courage with impulsive recklessness an infantile narcissist is never courageous he is just oblivious he is indifferent to the consequences of his actions sometimes if he is antisocial he is defined also if you hold people in contempt and care what they think about you it takes no courage to be honest and open the potential consequences the court of public opinion don't matter finally negative supply is preferable to no supply the narcissist will go to any length and distance even self-degradation even self-humiliation even self-destruction self-shaming and self-trashing in public in order to secure supply you can see this on the Jerry Springer show in Donalds the C word here is not courage it's compulsion the narcissist can't help it ok today later the second half of the video I'm going to read to you book excerpts from three books one of the excerpts will provide a very unusual view of empathy the second excerpt that's Matthew Luther King Jr about love what he had to say about love and the third excerpt is about fear and how we had become a culture of fear risk averse danger averse thrill averse novelty averse how we cocoon ourselves and how we socially distance long before the age of the pandemic fear had become the defining motivating factor in our civilization but before we go all there I want to read to you a quote a surprising quote is from a book called cattle kingdom cattle kingdom the hidden history of the cowboy west it was written by Christopher Nolton and it was published in 2017 and there's a sentence that caught my eye the longhorn bull was notoriously ornery morose solitary and pugnacious as one cattleman put it the longer he lived the meaner he became I thought this applies to the longhorn bull as well to one of our acquaintances the narcissist I've been asked aren't you ashamed to not be a man aren't you ashamed to admit in public that you're not a man and to this I responded aren't you ashamed to not be an astrophysicist aren't you devastated by the fact that you're not a psychologist I am both I learned to be both I acquired the skill set of an astrophysicist and the skill set of a psychologist you didn't aren't you ashamed of it I didn't learn to be a man you did should I be ashamed of it to be a man is to play a role known as gender role it's to act in a highly specific manner according to a script provided by society and the culture we embedded in so they teach you in college or university to be a physicist to be a medical doctor to be a psychologist and at home much earlier they teach you to be a man if you're lucky or unlucky I'm not sure anymore I had been taught from age 4 to read to write I finished devouring my first encyclopedia at age 7 30 volumes almost so I didn't have time to learn how to be a man and I don't play this role well I also I have another shameful disgraceful disclosure I don't play football I don't play baseball and you know why because no one taught me how I don't drive I don't do many things I'm not a father I don't have children why should I be ashamed of any of this on the other hand you can only dream can only dream of to do what I'm doing I have so many skills that you can only dream to possess and yet I don't shame you for not being a physicist for not being a psychologist or not being a medical doctor why are you shaming me trying to shame for not being a man response to another missive I want to explain to that eternal professional victim she was very proud of the fact that she's a victim that she had been purely victimized that she she can't find any fault in herself any fault in her behavior she is the utter perfect unadulterated victim so I want to tell you something to refuse to victimize is also to victimize some victims are so invested in their victimhood it had become a determinant of their identity and if you refuse to victimize them they resent it they consider it abusive to refuse to victimize them is to victimize them so they they sublimated they converted somehow they tell you you don't pay me any attention some victims consider even negative attention like physical abuse verbal abuse as a form of caring as a tenuous connection and when it's absent they regard themselves as having been rejected having been abandoned abuse is what assures them and reassures them that they have a place in their intimate partner's lives they complain that the partner doesn't read she complains that the partner didn't treat her mind didn't foresee her needs was not sensitive enough she complains that he didn't pay her any attention and when you go through the letter, the email you realize she's talking about negative attention she complains of gaslighting because he refused to accept her version of reality projective identification and introjective identification are techniques used by perpetual professional proud victims to force other people to abuse and victimize them why? because they love to be victimized they feel good only when they feel bad victimhood abuse is their comfort zone they have been conditioned from early childhood to identify abuse with love to identify victimhood with care to identify battering with attention so pay attention to the rules are you this type of victim? ok Lydia Angelowska in one of our endless exchanges suggested a new concept which I found very very fascinating she said the same way a narcissist collapses and the same way a histrionic collapses the same way perhaps a borderline collapses sources of narcissistic supply can also collapse sources of narcissistic supply can suddenly stop providing narcissistic supply they can turn off the faucet they can go away they can break up they can upset themselves emotionally or physically or both and at that moment they stop providing the narcissist with what he needs most secondary supply we'll talk about it in a minute and they become collapsed sources of narcissistic supply and it occurred to me that Angelowska's innovation because it's a totally new concept to the best of my ability Angelowska's innovation fits well with the collapse of other elements in the narcissist's eternal quest for the holy grail of narcissistic supply the source of supply collapse as Angelowska had suggested but also the pathological narcissistic space can collapse sources of primary supply can collapse intimate partners are sources of secondary supply never primary supply so sources of primary supply can collapse and how does the narcissist cope with this he copes with this via something called auto supply or self supply he uses auto supply to create an equilibrium let me give you a simile or in some ways a metaphor those of you who remember your school days if you had studied physics I don't know in Europe physics is mandatory I don't know in the United States with what's left of their education system if physics is mandatory but we were taught about communicating vessels communicating vessels are containers containers which are interconnected with pipes and when you fill one of them with fluid the fluid goes through the pipes to the other containers and the level of the fluid in all the containers is the same this is known as Stevin's law Stevin's law of communicating vessels Stevin was a fascinating character, Simon Stevin he was Dutch which already makes him interesting in Latin his name was Stevinus he was actually Flemish to be more precise he was a mathematician, physicist military engineer he did amazing things for example he created a yacht, a land yacht kind of a yacht with sails but on land I mean he was a bizarre character he translated many texts and so on he said his famous quote is a man in anger is no clever dissenter so Steven Simon Stevinus was the guy who came up with the idea of communicating vessels and it's a perfect simile to narcissistic supply because you pour narcissistic supply into the first container into the first vessel jar, jug, glass doesn't matter, you pour narcissistic supply and it spreads equally across the various emotional and psychological needs of the narcissist if you pour if you pour an insufficient amount of supply the level will be very low in all these areas of psychodynamic functioning the narcissist needs a constant infusion of supply to maintain the level across all communicating vessels high and the same when there's not enough supply when the supply is missing the narcissist administers supply to himself or asks his intimate partner to administer supply to him when the intimate partner administers supply to the narcissist that's secondary narcissistic supply and when the narcissist does it to himself when he fulfills these vessels with narcissistic supply by himself it's called auto supply or self supply to refresh your memory there are two categories of narcissistic supply and consequently two categories of narcissistic supply sources primary narcissistic supply is attention both in public forms like fame, notoriety, infamy celebrity and in a private interpersonal form adoration, adulation, applause fear, fear, repulsion it is important to understand the attention of any type positive or negative constitutes primary narcissistic supply infamy is as sought after as fame being notorious is as good as being renowned to the narcissist's accomplishments can be imaginary can be fictitious or only apparent as long as others believe that he is an achiever appearances count more as far as a narcissist is concerned count more than substance what matters is not the truth but the perception of the truth it is impression management on steroids narcissistic supply comes in two forms animate direct and inanimate indirect inanimate supply is composed and comprised of all expressions of attention communicated in personally not personally for example in written form via third parties or as views on a YouTube video in inanimate supply also includes aggregate measures of popularity and fame number of friends and likes on Facebook as I said number of comments on YouTube numbers of readers and blog statistics that's inanimate supply is more face it's faceless animate supply requires an interpersonal interaction with the source of the narcissistic supply usually in the flesh to sustain his sense of self-worth the narcissist requires both types of supply inanimate inanimate but especially the animate variety he needs to witness firsthand the impact his false self has had on living breathing flesh and blood human sources and on his immediate environment that's why isolation, quarantine and social distancing are very very difficult on narcissists now triggers of primary narcissistic supply include being famous, being a celebrity having notoriety, fame, infamy I mentioned that or having an air of mystique when the narcissist is considered to be mysterious inaccessible or having sex and deriving from it a sense of masculinity, virility or femininity or being close or connected to political, financial military, spiritual movers and shakers, power authority or yielding and wielding this power all these are triggers of primary supply but who provides the supply sources of primary narcissistic supply are all those who provide the narcissists with narcissistic supply on a casual random basis not so secondary narcissistic supply sources secondary narcissistic supply includes leading a normal life normalcy just being able to present yourself to appear to be normal is a source of great pride for the narcissists having a secure existence economic safety, social acceptability upward mobility and obtaining companionship and so having a mate having an intimate partner possessing conspicuous wealth being creative running a business and of course the business is transformed into a pathological narcissistic space possessing a sense of anarchy freedom having a professional or other reputation being successful owning property flaunting one's status symbols they are all secondary narcissistic supply but this source of secondary narcissistic supply is the narcissists intimate partner she has a very important function she records his moments of glory and when he is down when he cannot obtain supply when his supply is deficient she reminds him of these moments of glory she's like an external hard disk external memory and she stores supply she witnesses the supply and she stores it and then when the narcissist needs it she releases, it's like a slow release pill she releases the supply this way she regulates the supply the main function of the narcissistic intimate partner is regulatory to regulate the flow of supply when there is a collapsed source of narcissistic supply again suggested originally by Lidia Wengerowska when there is a collapsed source of narcissistic supply the narcissists will try to compensate for this so when the source of secondary supply had collapsed the narcissists will try to obtain for additional primary supply the narcissists will also try to provide himself with supply auto supply, self supply which we're going to discuss in a minute when there is a collapsed source of primary supply primary narcissistic supply when the when sources of primary supply vanish disappear mock the narcissistic when they create external modification and so on when the narcissist remains bereft bereft of all sources of primary supply he's going to put the onus and the pressure on the source of secondary supply to regulate the deficiency to cover up for the deficiency to release memories of past moments of glory past moments, past accomplishments so as to compensate for the deficiency then again he's going to use auto supply self supply is a regulatory tool and finally when the entire pathological narcissistic space collapses to remind you, pathological narcissistic space is the physical places narcissists go to in order to obtain supply the local pub the library the church the narcissist family the narcissistic space usually so when the pathological narcissistic space collapses the narcissist tries to compensate by obtaining more primary supply what's the role of auto supply or self supply in all this again it has a regulatory role in this sense it's the exact equivalent of an intimate partner again we see auto eroticism libidinal investment in the self auto supply self supply are as good as having an intimate partner they're interchangeable don't have an intimate partner supply yourself as a narcissist you can't supply yourself as a narcissist you look for an intimate partner it's all investment in the self you can supply yourself in really dire straits when as a last resort so it's a regulatory mechanism it is tied to schizoid states where the narcissist is isolated withdrawn I refer you to the previous video that I made and so he has no access to people he has no access even to an intimate partner he may have divorced she may have abandoned him, cheated on him, betrayed him or whatever so he's in a schizoid state isolated, withdrawn, recluse, lone wolf and so at that moment he will try to compensate via self supply or auto supply now what is self supply what is auto supply it's anything that grants the narcissist narcissistic supply but is not dependent on any input or feedback from other people in other words you remember that in narcissism there is a god-off with confusion between internal objects and external objects the narcissist misconstrues and considers external objects as totally internal so worse comes to worse rock bottom when the narcissist does he begins to relate to some of his internal objects as actually external and he derives from these internal objects narcissistic supply as though and as if they were external he may uplift himself with positive automatic thoughts he may tell himself that he's great, that he's a genius misunderstood but still a genius so he will give himself pet talks and so on not in a healthy way, most of us almost everyone does that from time to time but in a sick compulsive way and something that occupies the bulk of his time so he's going to have a dialogue, he's going to establish a dialogue with his internal objects thereby estranging himself from his internal objects to the point of psychosis almost to the point that he mistakes his internal objects as external objects he still maintains a modicum a measure of reality testing and he knows that he's talking to himself he knows that these objects don't exist out there but he tends to identify them with external objects that had existed in his life from his past in a process that I call twinning he tends to twin a current contemporary internal objects with the past external objects so he would identify for example an internal object with his ex with his ex-wife he would identify an internal object with his teacher who admired him, etc so he would kind of twin the past with the present and so this leads to several types of auto supply the most prominent by far is paranoid or the secretary ideation think about it paranoid ideation the belief that you are at the center of some kind of collusion or conspiracy theory aggrandizes you makes you appear important at least to yourself if you believe yourself to be at the core or at the crux or to be the pivot and the axis is around you that is the kind of magical thinking that elevates you that renders you the center and the focus of attention so paranoid and the secretary ideation are highly narcissistic and they are a form of auto supply self-supply because you don't need anything in any one to buttress prove, substantiate your paranoid and the secretary ideation paranoid is a very solitary very solitary kind of state of mind the second type of auto supply or self supply is delusionality you can simply develop a delusion or a series of delusion some people develop a delusion that God himself is interested in their lives to the minutest details he macro manages their life others believe that my wife had left me 46 years ago but she will be back one day there's no end there's no way to specify all possible content of delusionality but delusions are very crucial important mechanism for self supply and auto supply actually there is even a therapeutic technique it's called anchoring like anchor of a ship when we reorient t