And so he forces you to be an abusive monster because then he can ignore the fact that he is hateful, aggressive, and destructive.

And it also allows him to continue to maintain the fiction that he’s special.

Remember that all this has to do with the narcissist’s delusionality. And so one of the core elements of his delusionality is that he is special.

But of course narcissists are anything but special. You’ve seen one narcissist, you’ve seen them all. You’ve got to know one narcissist, you know all of them. They’re cast in a mold. They’re cloned. They’re not human beings, they’re stereotypes. They’re archetypes. Jung’s divine child.

So the narcissist needs narcissistic supply, counterfactual, not factual statements to buttress his sense of uniqueness.

Healthy people have a sense of self-worth. And part of the sense of self-worth of healthy people is that, yes, I’m special, no one is like me. It’s called idiosyncrasy. But not special in the sense that I’m superior, it’s simply there’s no other me. There‘s no doppelganger. There’s no other person like me.

But the narcissist has a sense that he’s superior. His specialness, his uniqueness, his separateness, his differentness is also superior.

And this is where narcissists differ from healthy people.

So, this again leads to the need to traumatize you, because only a superior person can traumatize an inferior person. Two inferior people cannot traumatize each other, but a superior one can traumatize an inferior one.

It’s the ancient power play. It’s the ancient power matrix between the narcissist and his primary object, usually the mother, but could be the father.

So ,you see the circles, within the circles, within the circles, within the circles which all lead to the epicenter. And the epicenter is that the narcissist absolutely cannot do or survive without traumatizing.

He is not traumatizing you in order to cause trauma bonding, that’s another myth. Trauma bonding is the inevitable byproduct, side effect, and outcome of the narcissist behavior. But it’s not a goal. Most narcissists don’t even know what is trauma bonding.

The goals are the ones I’ve mentioned, to feel whole, to feel superior, to feel that you are the bad, that all the bad resides with you, all the evil is yours, all the trauma is yours.

The narcissist is cleansed. It’s a process of almost religious cleansing, catharsis. Going to the mikveh in Judaism. It’s like the narcissist immerses himself in the bath of your pain, your pain is like cleansing water, the Ganges River.

And very often narcissists will use metaphors of immersion, and cleansing, and water when they talk to you, and when they describe you, when they talk about you.

And some people say, okay, if the narcissist feels he’s so special why are so many narcissists I know not ambitious, they’re slackers, or satisficers to use the phrase from the previous video?

Narcissists often strike people as laid-back, or less charitably as lazy, indolent, parasitic, spoiled, self-indulgence. Many narcissists are.

But as usual with narcissists, appearances deceive. Narcissists are either compulsively driven over-achievers, or chronic underachieving wastrels, satisficers. Most narcissists fail to make full and productive use of their potential and capacities.

Many narcissists avoid even the now standard path of an academic degree, having a career, or family life, and that’s because they are afraid of pain, afraid of failure. They are suffering-averse.

To use Jordan Peterson’s insight in his book 12 Rules, suffering is an integral part of life. And many psychoanalysts long before Peterson suggested that suffering is the only path for growth. There was actually in the 70s also even the belief that puer aeternus, eternal adolescence, which was another name for narcissists, the only way to get them to become human and to heal is to subject them to a lot of pain.

And so it was a precursor of Cold Therapy. Cold Therapy is the same philosophy.

The narcissist needs to suffer egregiously. He needs to decompose in suffering in order to be reconstructed and reconstituted as a full-fledged functional human being.

But narcissists are averse, pain averse, failure averse, hurt averse, and suffering-averse. They want you to experience all this, they want you to go.

It’s like a good mother, you know, a good mother would take a bullet for her child. A good mother would suffer illness, would die for the child.

They want you to do this. They want you to be the good mother. They want you to suffer for them like Jesus. Jesus is an androgynous, father, mother figure. He is godlike. So Jesus suffered for our sins. It’s a religious thing, the narcissist wants you to be Jesus. He wants to crucify you so that you can take on his sins, expunge his soul, cathartically cleanse him.

And so this is a main reason why narcissists reject life, as Cleckley noted about psychopaths. They reject life, they avoid life, they avoid life, they can live only through you.

You become the conduit, the conveyor belt, the access point, the portal to existence. The narcissist’s world narrows like a laser beam and becomes you.

And this is very intoxicating for you, as you feel that you are maximally needed, that no one ever paid such attention to you, that you’ve never been the focus, so determined focus of another person’s being, that you are his being.

Many women find this irresistibly addictive. They crave this feeling again and again.

And the disparity between the often meager accomplishments of the narcissist and his grandiose fantasies and inflated self-image, that’s the grandiosity gap.

It’s staggering in the long run, it’s, of course, unsupportable. It imposes onerous exigencies on the narcissist grasp of reality, his social skills.

You can’t maintain this fiction and facade for long. It pushes the narcissist to seclusion, or to a frenzy of acquisitions, cars, women, wealth, friends, power.

No matter how successful the narcissist is, and many of them end up as pillars of the community, many of them end up in positions of power and authority, and others are abject failures. But no matter how successful the narcissist is, the grandiosity gap can never be bridged.

The narcissist’s fantastic false self is so demanding, so unrealistic, his super ego, his inner critic, is so sadistic, that there is nothing the narcissist can do to extricate himself from a kafka-esque trial that is his life.

The narcissist is constantly in front of a tribunal, a tribunal that says you’re not good enough, you’re a failure, you could have done more, look at yourself.

The narcissist explains away the yawning abyss between his omnipotent and omniscient self-image and his drab pedestrian life by attributing it to outside forces.

So he becomes a conspiracy theorist. He says that people, some forces, some people some institutions, they’re conspiring to keep him down. He says that whatever happens to him is an ineluctable phase, unwelcome but inevitable phase, where he’s opposed and he’s resisted.

But he’s going to ascend. He’s going to self-actualize. He’s going to succeed. He’s going to make it.

You see, narcissists spend most of their lives in fantasy, in storytelling, in narrative construction, in the movie, the endless movie. And you are an actress and your role is to suffer.

Your role is to embody all these impersonal forces, unnamed, anonymous, faceless people who are out to get the narcissist, to obstruct him, to put him down, to reduce him to size, to f up his life.

You are the stand-in, you are the placeholder, stellvertreter in german. You the one who stands in for all the others.

So he’s punishing you because he’s punishing humanity. He’s torturing you because you’re human. The very fact that you’re human, and the more human you are, aggravates him, provokes him into feats of rage, uncontrollable rage, because he hates humanity. He hates humanity, and you’re a human.

It’s the same way you hate narcissists and you take it out on me. I didn’t do anything to you, I don’t know even who you are. But here you are sending me comments and emails wishing me dead in the pandemic just because I’m a narcissist. So I represent all narcissists to you, so you hate me. And you represent all humanity to me, so I hate you.

The narcissist is a slave to his own inertia. Some narcissists are forever accelerating on the way to ever higher peaks, ever greener pastures, and other narcissists succumb to numbing routines, expenditure of minimal energy, and to preying on the vulnerable. I discussed this in the previous video about satisficing.

But either way the narcissist’s life is out of control, at the mercy of merciless inner voices, internal forces, as well as external ones. Narcissists are one state machines programmed to extract narcissistic supply from other people, end of story.

And to do so, they develop, early on, a set of routines. And most of these routines are set in stone, immutable.

And this propensity for repetition, this inability to change, this rigidity, they confine the narcissist, they stunt his development, they limit his horizons. Add to this his overpowering sense of entitlement, his visceral fear of failure, his invariable need to both feel unique and to be perceived as such.

And you end up with a recipe for inaction or for hurtful, even sadistic action. But sadistic not in the classical sense, action that is perceived as sadistic, hurtful, pain-causing.

What does the narcissist have left? What does he have?

He has nothing left but to torture you.

He’s a constant failure in his own eyes. Even if he is the President of the United States, he’s a failure. He’s a constant failure in his own eyes.

His only success is at failing, his only success is you, because he owns you, he controls you, he causes you pain, he brainwashes you, he makes you do what he wants. You are living proof of his abilities and capacities, however violent, evil they may be.

Your pain and agony are his accomplishments.

The underachieving narcissist dodges challenges, he loses tests, shirks competition, sidesteps expectations, ducks responsibilities, evades authority because he’s afraid to fail. Because doing something everyone else is doing endangers, undermines his sense of uniqueness.

And so this is why people say narcissists are lazy and parasites. His sense of entitlement with no commensurate accomplishments, no investment aggravates people, aggravates his milieu. People tend to regard such narcissists as spoiled rats.

And the overachieving narcissist he seeks challenges, he seeks risks, he provokes competition, embellishes expectations and raises them, aggressively bleats for responsibilities and authority, and seems to be possessed with an eerie self-confidence. And people tend to regard such specimen of narcissists as entrepreneurial, charismatic, daring, visionary, or in extreme cases, tyrannical.

Yet these narcissists too are mortified by potential failure. They’re driven by a strong conviction of entitlement, they strive to be unique and to be perceived as such, but they anticipate the worst.

All narcissists catastrophize. All of them expect the worst. All of them are tense, muscularly tense, anticipating the other shoe to drop, the trauma to hit, the mortification. they all are awaiting the moment.

And their only way out of this anxiety, the only anxiety reducing mechanism, their only anxiolytic is you, because they bring on the trauma that they’re expecting.

If they expect a breakup with you they will make the breakup happen, preemptively abandon, or mistreat you.

So you are the instrument that allows them to fast forward, to get it over with, to let the other shoe drop. And you are also the repository of their trauma their pain as I mentioned before. You’re a perfect solution.

This is why narcissists keep looking for intimate partners.

People ask me, why do narcissists get married, why do they need intimate partners if they have no emotions? For this: to channel their inner monster, to experience the pain and the trauma vicariously, to let someone else suffer and to feel unique in the process and in control.

The hyperactivity of narcissism is merely the flip side of the underachiever’s inactivity. It is fallacious, it’s empty, it’s doomed to miscarriage and disgrace, it is often sterile, illusory smoke and mirrors rather than substance.

The precarious accomplishments of such narcissists invariably unravel. They often act outside the law, outside social norms, outside science. Their industriousness, workaholism, ambition, and commitment are intended to disguise the essential inability to produce and to build anything long lasting. Theirs is the whistle in the dark, a pretension, potemkin life. It’s all make believe. It’s all thunder and bluster.

The grandiose fantasies of the narcissists inevitably and invariably clash with his drab, routine, mundane reality. We call this constant dissonance the grandiose gap.

Sometimes the gap is so yawning that even the narcissist, however dimly, recognizes its existence. And still, this insight into his real situation fails to alter his behavior. The narcissist never learns, never changes.

He knows that his grandiose fantasies are incommensurate with his accomplishments, with his knowledge, with his status, with his actual wealth, or lack thereof, with his physical constitution, sex appeal, you name it.

And yet he keeps behaving. He keeps behaving as though these grandiose fantasies were reality, were true.

And the situation is further exacerbated by periods of relative success in the narcissist’s past.

Nothing worse can happen to the narcissist than to succeed, than success. Has-been and also-ran narcissists suffer from a grandiosity hangover.

They may have been once rich, famous, powerful, celebrities, brilliant, sexually irresistible. That’s history. That’s ancient history. But they no longer are any of these things.

They are old. They’re poor. They are not famous. No one heard of them. They’re has-beens.

But still they continue to behave as though little has changed. No change, no learning.

The balding, potbellied narcissist still courts women aggressively. The impoverished tycoon sinks deeper into debts trying to maintain an unsustainable and lavish lifestyle. The one novel author, one miracle, one discovery scholar still demands professional deference and expects attention by media and superiors. And the once potent politician maintains regal heirs, holds court in great pomp and circumstance. The wisened actress demands special treatment and throws temper tantrums when she rebuffed. The aging beauty wears her daughter’s clothes and regresses emotionally as she progresses chronologically.

They’re all in denial and this is not limited to individuals. Human collectives, firms, churches, religions, nations, clubs, you name it, develop grandiosity hangovers as easily and as frequently as do individuals. It is not uncommon to come across a group of people who still live in a bygone, glorious past.

This mass pathology is self-reinforcing. Members feed on each other’s delusions, pretensions, and lies. Ostrich-like they bury their collective head in the sand of time, harking back to happier moments of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.

The grandiosity hangover, the grandiosity gap, are the two major vulnerabilities of the narcissist. By exploiting them the narcissist can be effortlessly manipulated.

This is especially true when the narcissist is confronted with authority, finds himself in an inferior position, he’s manipulated by a psychopath, or when his narcissistic supply is deficient or uncertain.

And one becomes aware of one’s place in various hierarchies, some implicit, some explicit, dominance hierarchy. We interact socially to establish these hierarchies, of course.

One learns that one is not alone in this world. One gets rid of solipsistic and infantile I’m the center of the world point of view.

The more one meets people, and the more people one meets, the more one becomes aware of one’s relative skills and accomplishments and limitations.

In other words, one develops empathy.

But the narcissist’s social range and repertoire are often limited. The narcissist alienates people, no one wants to spend time with him, to be in his company.

Many narcissists are schizoids as a result. They’re hermits, they never go out, they never meet anyone.

Their interactions with others are stunted, partial, distorted, and misleading. They learn the wrong lessons from the dearth of their social encounters. They are unable to realistically evaluate themselves, their skills, their achievements, their rights, privileges, expectations where they have gone wrong, what they’re doing wrong.

And they retreat to fantasy, to denial, to self delusion. They become rigid, the personality becomes disordered.

And you, you become the external memory, the external hard disk of their glorious moments and of their pain and trauma. And it is precisely this dichotomy.

Precisely the fact that you embody both the best moments of the narcissist and the worst moments of his life, his most positive emotions and his most negative ones, his elation and his pain, his success and his failure. You are there you are a witness. You are a witness.

And in the regime that the narcissist establishes, witnesses, dissidents, and opposition figures, are often invited to tea and silenced.