Narcissist’s Beloved Paranoia

Uploaded 7/7/2011, approx. 3 minute read

Summary

Narcissists feel victimized by those who fail to appreciate their talents and accomplishments, and project their negative emotions onto others. Their paranoid streak is likeliest to erupt when they lack narcissistic supply. Paranoia is used by the narcissist to ward off intimacy, which they dread because it exposes their weaknesses and shortcomings. The narcissist's paranoia, exacerbated by repeated rejections and aging, pervades their entire life and diminishes their creativity, adaptability, and functioning.

Tags

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.

I am the author of Cold Therapy.

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Cold Therapy.

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Cold Therapy.

My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Cold Therapy.

My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Cold Therapy.

My name is Sam Vaknin. And in cutting-edge with med I and in they are there to force him to abstain and refrain from certain actions which endanger them or their interests.

The narcissist feels that he is at the center of intrigues and conspiracies of colossal worldwide magnitudes. Alternatively, the narcissist feels victimized by mediocre bureaucrats and intellectual dwarves who consistently fail to appreciate his outstanding really unparalleled talents, skills and accomplishments.

Being haunted by his challenged inferiors substantiates the narcissist’s comparative superiority. Driven by a pathological envy, these pygmies collude to defraud the narcissist, badger him, deny him his due, denigrate, isolate and ignore him.

The narcissist projects onto this second class of lesser persecutors his own deleterious emotions and transforms aggression. He attributes to them the very negative emotions that see the inside himself. He says that they are hateful, they are rageful, they are teeming and seething with jealousy, but actually this is exactly what is happening inside him.

The narcissist’s paranoid streak is likeliest to erupt when he lacks narcissistic supply.

The regulation of his lab, in sense of self-worth is dependent upon external stimuli, adoration, adulation, affirmation, applause, notoriety, fame, infamy and in general attention of any kind. When such attention is missing, lacking, deficient, the narcissist compensates by confabulating. He constructs ungrounded narratives in which he is a protagonist and he uses these stories, these narratives, these fictions to force his human environment into complicity.

Put simply, the narcissist provokes people to pay attention to him by misbehaving or by behaving oddly or eccentrically or by claiming that he is the victim of conspiracies.

And then there’s the intimacy retarding paranoia. Paranoia is used by the narcissist to ward off something he dreads, which is intimacy.

The narcissist is threatened by intimacy because it reduces him to ordinariness by exposing his weaknesses and shortcomings and by causing him to act like everyone else, normally.

The narcissist also dreads the encounter with his deep buried emotions hurt, envy, anger, aggression likely to be foisted on him in an intimate relationship.

So he seeks to reverse intimacy once it has happened or to avoid it altogether.

The paranoid narrative legitimizes intimacy repelling behaviors such as keeping one’s distance, secrecy, aloofness, reclusion, aggression, intrusion on privacy, lying, desultoriness, itineracy, unpredictability, idiosyncratic or eccentric reactions. All these are fully justified when one finds himself at the center of a conspiracy or persecution.

Gradually, the narcissist succeeds to alienate and wear down all his friends, colleagues, well-wishers and mates.

Just precisely what he wanted. The narcissist wants to be left alone. Even his closest, his nearest and dearest, his family, feel emotionally detached and burned out after a certain period of time.

The paranoid narcissist ends his life as an oddball recluse, derided, feared and loathed in equal measures.

The narcissist’s paranoia, exacerbated by repeated rejections and by the process of aging, pervades his entire life and diminishes his creativity, adaptability and functioning.

The narcissistic personality, buffeted by paranoia, becomes ossified and brittle.

Finally, atomized, isolated and useless, this personality succumbs and gives way to a great void. The narcissist is consumed and is no more.

Facebook
X
LinkedIn
WhatsApp

Summary Link:

https://vakninsummaries.com/ (Full summaries of Sam Vaknin’s videos)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html (My work in psychology: Media Kit and Press Room)

Bonus Consultations with Sam Vaknin or Lidija Rangelovska (or both) http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/ctcounsel.html

http://www.youtube.com/samvaknin (Narcissists, Psychopaths, Abuse)

http://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings (World in Conflict and Transition)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html (Biography and Resume)

Summary

Narcissists feel victimized by those who fail to appreciate their talents and accomplishments, and project their negative emotions onto others. Their paranoid streak is likeliest to erupt when they lack narcissistic supply. Paranoia is used by the narcissist to ward off intimacy, which they dread because it exposes their weaknesses and shortcomings. The narcissist's paranoia, exacerbated by repeated rejections and aging, pervades their entire life and diminishes their creativity, adaptability, and functioning.

Tags

If you enjoyed this article, you might like the following:

How You BEHAVE is NOT Who you ARE (Identity, Memory, Self)

Sam Vaknin argues that core identity (the self) is distinct from behaviors: identity is an immutable, continuous narrative formed early in life, while behaviors, choices, and roles can change across time. He discusses clinical, legal, and philosophical implications, including dissociative identity disorder, concluding that even when behavior changes dramatically the

Read More »

Unconditional Love in Adult Relationships (Family Insourcing and Outsourcing)

Professor argues that ‘unconditional love’ means accepting a person’s core identity, not tolerating all behaviors, and distinguishes loving someone as they are from trying to change or control them. He traces modern misunderstandings to Romanticism’s idealization of partners and the outsourcing/insourcing shifts that hollowed family functions while turning the home

Read More »

Sociosexual Narcissist: CRM vs. Agency Models (Clip Skopje Seminar Opening, May 2025)

The speaker opened with multilingual greetings and briefly noted living in the Czech Republic and Poland. The main content summarized models of narcissism: sociosexuality and the contextual reinforcement model (narcissists seek novelty, destabilize stable contexts, and prefer short-term interactions), and the agency model with five elements—focus on agency, inflated self-concept,

Read More »

Baited, Ejected: YOU in Narcissist’s Shared Fantasy (CLIP, University of Applied Sciences, Poland)

The speaker explained Sander’s concept of the “shared fantasy”—a mutual, addictive narrative created by narcissists and their partners that becomes a competing reality and relates to historical notions like mass psychogenic illness. The talk detailed how narcissists recruit and bind targets through stages—spotting/auditioning, exposure of a childlike self, resonance, idealization

Read More »

Psychology of Fraud and Corruption (Criminology Intro in CIAPS, Cambridge, UK)

Professor explained financial crime as a white-collar subtype, focusing on fraud and corruption and arguing that many offenders show significant psychopathology rather than ordinary greed. Key psychological features include magical thinking, impulsivity, entitlement, narcissism, psychopathy, impaired reality testing, dissociation, lack of empathy, grandiosity, and compulsive behaviors (e.g., kleptomania) that make

Read More »

Abuse Victims MUST Watch This! (with Psychotherapist Renzo Santa María)

Professor Sam Vaknin argued that narcissistic abuse causes distinct, reversible trauma by imposing the abuser’s deficits on victims—eroding identity, agency, reality testing, and inducing internalized ‘introject’ voices that perpetuate suffering. He recommended initial self-work (identifying and silencing alien internal voices, rebuilding an authentic internal friend, body-focused interventions, and delaying therapy

Read More »

“Bad” Relationships Are Opportunities (with Daria Zukowska, Clinical Psychologist)

Professor Sam Vaknin discussed dysfunctional relationships and reframed them as learning opportunities rather than “lost time,” emphasizing that growth requires emotional insight and embodiment in addition to cognitive understanding. He explained that negative self-concept arises from internalized hostile voices, can be countered by developing an authentic, supportive inner voice, and

Read More »

Narcissism: BIBLE Got There FIRST! (FULL VIDEO in Description)

The speaker discussed narcissistic traits as described in the Bible, emphasizing its detailed characterization predates modern diagnostic manuals like the DSM and ICD. They highlighted the diagnostic criteria from the DSM and the lack of narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis in the ICD, noting regional variations in terminology usage. The lecture

Read More »

Why Narcissists MUST Abuse YOU (Skopje Seminar Opening, May 2025)

The seminar, organized by the Vaknin Vangelovska Foundation, provided an in-depth, research-based exploration of pathological narcissism, its impact on victims, and the complex dynamics of the shared fantasy between narcissists and those they manipulate. Key topics included the distinction between narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic style, the contagious nature of

Read More »