Paranoid ideation. The narcissist’s deep-rooted conviction that he is being persecuted by his inferiors, detractors, powerful in-wishers and critics.

Paranoid ideation serves two psychodynamic purposes. It upholds the narcissist’s grandiosity, but equally important, it fends off looming, threatening intimacy.

Let’s discuss these two functions.

So we start by grandiosity enhancing paranoia.

Being the target of relentless, ubiquitous and unjust persecution proves to the paranoid narcissist how important he is, how feared he is, how hated he is, how envied he is. In short, he is the center of the world.

Being hounded by the mighty and the privileged validates his pivotal role in the scheme of things. Only vital, weighty, crucial essential principals, only important people are bullied and intimidated the way he is, followed, harassed, stalked, intruded upon.

The unconscious inner dialogue is, if I’m sufficiently important to be plotted against, if I am sufficiently important to be the focus of conspiracies, I’m important. The narcissist consistently baits authority figures, contumacious, he baits authority figures into punishing him.

And so by being punished, he upholds his delusional self-images worthy of attention and of punishment. This provocative behavior is what we call projective identification.

The paranoid delusions of the narcissist are always grandiose, they’re always cosmic, historical. His pursuers, his detractors, his critics, his persecutors, they’re influential, they’re formidable. They’re never inferior. They’re equals or superior. They are after his unique possessions, how to exploit his expertise or special traits. They want to force him to abstain and refrain from certain actions, or they want to goad him into certain actions, or they steal his ideas and plagiarize or something. The narcissist feels that he is at the center of intrigues and conspiracies of colossal magnitudes.

Alternatively, the narcissist feels victimized by mediocre bureaucrats and intellectual dwarves who consistently fail to appreciate his outstanding, really unparalleled, revolutionary talents, skills and accomplishments. Being haunted by his challenged inferiors, being haunted by people who can’t appreciate what he has to offer, it substantiates a narcissist’s comparative superiority. Driven by pathological envy, these pygmies, these dwarves, these midgets collude to defraud him, badger him, envy him is due, denigrate, isolate and ignore him unjustly.

The narcissist projects onto this second class of lesser prosecutors, his own deleterious emotions and transformed aggression, hatred, rage, seeding jealousy. Those are his qualities, but he attributes his qualities to the people who conspire against him.

The narcissist’s paranoid streak is likeliest to erupt when he lacks narcissistic supply. When narcissistic supply runs short, the narcissist becomes paranoid.

The regulation of his labile sense of self-worth is dependent upon external stimuli. He needs adoration, adulation, affirmation, applause, notoriety, fame, infamy, something. He needs attention of any kind to feel that he’s alive, that he exists. And when such attention is deficient, the narcissist compensates by confabulating, by lying to himself, by self-deluding.

Narcissists don’t do reality faking. When they fake, it’s real.

The narcissist constructs underground narratives in which he is the protagonist and he uses these narratives to force his human environment into complicity.

Put simply, the narcissist provokes people to pay attention to him by misbehaving or by behaving oddly.

And then there’s a second type of paranoia, which is intended to fend off, to defend against intimacy. Paranoia is used by the narcissist to ward off, to reverse intimacy, to create this intimacy.

The narcissist is threatened by intimacy because it reduces him to mediocrity and ordinariness. It makes him common. Intimacy exposes his weaknesses and shortcomings. It causes him to act normally and to seem normal.

The narcissist also dreads the encounter with his deep buried emotions, hurt, envy, anger, aggression. And he believes that it is the intimate partner with an intimate relationship which foists on him these emotions or triggers them at least.

The paranoid narrative legitimizes intimacy repelling behaviors, legitimizes conduct that destroys intimacy, such as keeping one’s distance, keeping secrets, aloofness, reclusion, aggression, intrusion of privacy, spying, lying, desultoriness, itinerancy, unpredictability, idiosyncratic or eccentric reactions, sex withdrawal, emotional absence, etc.

Gradually, the narcissist succeeds to alienate his intimate partner, to wear down all his friends, colleagues, well-wishers, inmates, spouses. Even his closest, nearest and dearest, his family, feel emotionally burned out, detached.

The paranoid narcissist ends life as an oddball recluse, as a schizoid, derided, decried, feared, loathed, hated in equal measures. His paranoia, the narcissist’s paranoia, exacerbated by repeated rejections, by injuries, mortifications, aging, and life circumstances, such as the pandemic, his paranoia pervades his entire life, diminishes his creativity, constricts his existence, reduces his adaptability and function. The narcissist’s personality, buffeted by paranoia, becomes ossified and brittle, and finally atomized and useless. Even the paranoia succumbs. It disappears and leaves a great void behind.

The narcissist had been consumed into nothingness, in the bad sense, into emptiness. He had become a black hole, swallowing even itself.

Counterintuitively, with paranoid intimate partners, it is better to share everything and to utterly and unmitigatedly be honest. No matter how bad and hurtful, reality always comforts the paranoid because it is so much less egregious and menacing than their own fantasies, suspicions, paranoid scenarios, and hypervigilance. What goes through the paranoid’s mind is much worse than any possible reality. The paranoid’s best friend is reality. His worst enemy is his own rampant, morbid, catastrophizing imagination.

Let me give you an example. The paranoid is married, and his spouse comes to him and says, I like this new guy at work. I like him a lot. I’m attracted to him.

The paranoid’s inner dialogue is going to be, inner monologue is going to be, she’s honest. She’s telling the truth. So she’s trustworthy.

If something happens with this guy, she will also tell me it is only human to be attracted to other people. I’m also telling her when I find other women attractive.

Sharing honestly makes me feel safe, secure, and good, makes me feel that I’m on top of the situation. I’m in control. I will never be hurt and surprised because I will always know everything in advance and anticipate everything.

Let’s take another example. The spouse is attracted to someone at work, guy, corresponds with him, chats with him, but doesn’t reveal any of this.

And then the paranoid finds out. His monologue in this case is, she’s human and therefore she’s probably attracted to this guy. But she’s not telling me. She’s not sharing with me her attraction to this guy. She’s being dishonest with me. Who knows what else she’s not telling me. She’s probably having sex with some of these men that she’s attracted to and not telling me. I feel threatened. I feel unsafe. I feel insecure, deceived, cheated. I feel stabbed in the back. I feel betrayed. Things are getting out of control. I must end this relationship. He catastrophizes.

Share. If you’re with a paranoid partner, on the contrary, share everything.

Paranoia, I said, is a reaction to deficient narcissistic supply.

When the narcissist cannot obtain supply, he resorts to self-delusion.

Unable to completely ignore contrarian, countervailing opinion and data, the narcissist transmutes them. Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially withdraws from reality.

To soothe himself, he administers a mixture of lies, distortions, half-truths and outlandish interpretation of events around him. And he has quite a few solutions and I’m going to focus on two of them, which have to do with paranoia.

The paranoid schizoid solution.

When the narcissist lacks narcissistic supply, sometimes he develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slights and insults where none were intended. He becomes subject to ideas of reference. People are gossiping about him, mocking him, prying into his affairs, spying on him, cracking his email, etc.

The narcissist becomes convinced that he’s the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, demote him, abscond with his property, delude him, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor him, impose on his time, force him to action, prevent him from action, frighten him, coerce him, surround and beseech him, change his mind, usurp with his time, part with his values, even bother him.

So these are some of the reactions to deficient supply. And they’re so frightening, they create a reality that is not reality, it’s delusional and it’s terrifying.

So some narcissists withdraw completely from a world populated with such menacious and ominous objects. These objects, of course, are projections of internal objects and processes in the narcissist, but they are still felt and perceived as external.

Remember that narcissists confuse external and internal objects. This is a psychotic process. The narcissist now externalizes internal objects, projects them.

And so some narcissists withdraw from the world, they refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, they don’t talk to others, they don’t even correspond with people. In short, they become schizoids, not out of social shyness, not because they prefer to be alone, like the classic schizoid, but out of what they feel to be a choice to avoid threats.

The world, they say, threatens me. The world is dangerous. It’s a risk I’m not willing to take, or the world does not deserve me.

The inner refrain is, I shall waste none of my time and resources on such a world.

And this is the paranoid schizoid solution.

Another solution is the paranoid aggressive or explosive solution.

Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions when narcissistic supply is lacking, they resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. They become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and rarely physically abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean, humiliate, and deride, especially their nearest and dearest, often well-wishers, loved ones.

These kind of narcissists explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, condemnation, and blame. It’s an exegetic bedlock.

They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, innocent, inadvertent remarks. They interpret such remarks as designed to provoke and humiliate them.

These kind of narcissists sew fear, revulsion, hate, and malignant envy anywhere they go. They flail and fight against the windmills of reality.

It’s a pathetic forlorn side, like Don Quixote.

But often, these narcissists cause real and lasting damage to themselves and to others.

The narcissist is the center of the world. He’s not merely the center of his world. As far as he can tell, he is the center of the world. And this is an Archimedean delusion. It’s one of a narcissist’s most predominant and all-pervasive cognitive distortions.

The narcissist feels certain that he is the source, the prime mover and shaker, prima causa, primum movens, of all events around him. He is the origin of all the emotions of his nearest and dearest. The moods of everyone depend on him. He is the fount of all knowledge. He is the first and final cause. He is the beginning as well as the end. Yes, Alpha and Omega, God.

And this is understandable. The narcissist derives his sense of being, his experience of his own existence, and his sense of self-worth from the outside, not from the inside.

He mines people for narcissistic supply the way many people mine for Bitcoin. His Bitcoin, his cryptocurrencies, adulation, attention, reflection, fear, their reactions stoke his furnace. They are the coal in the mine.

Absent narcissistic supply, the narcissist disintegrates, he self annihilates. When the narcissist is unnoticed, he feels empty and worthless, or not at all. He feels he is not there. He feels transparent, invisible.

The narcissist must delude himself into believing that he is persistently the focus and object of attentions, intentions, plans, conspiracies, feelings, stratagems of other people. The narcissist faces a stark choice, either be or become the permanent center of the world, or cease to be altogether.

This constant obsession with his locus, with his centrality, with his position as a hub, this obsession leads to referential ideas, ideas of reference. This is the conviction that one is at the receiving end of other people’s speech acts, behaviors, even thoughts. The person suffering from delusional ideas of reference is at the center and focus of the constant and confabulated attentions of an imaginary audience in most cases.

When people talk about anything at the corner of a room, the narcissist is convinced that he is the topic of discussion. What other topic can there be? When people quarrel, fight, he is most probably the reason for the fight. When they smirk, he is the victim of their ridicule. If they are unhappy, he made them unhappy. If they are happy, he made them happy. If they are happy, they are egotistical for ignoring his contribution to their happiness, decisive contribution.

He is convinced that his behavior is continuously monitored, criticized, supervised, compared, dissected, approved of, or imitated by other people. The narcissist deems himself so indispensable, so crucial, such a critical component of other people’s lives, that his every act, his every word, his every omission is bound to upset, hurt, uplift, or satisfy his audience, some reaction.

To the narcissist, everyone is an audience. It all emanates from him, and it all reverts to him. He is the be-all and end-all. The narcissist has a circular, enclosed universe. He is the world. His ideas of reference are a natural extension of his primitive defense mechanisms, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.

Being omnipresent, being present everywhere, explains why everyone everywhere is concerned with him and talks about him. Being omnipotent and omniscient excludes other, lesser beings from enjoying the admiration, adulation, and attention of people.

And yet, the energy depletion and the attrition afforded by years of tormenting ideas of reference inevitably lead to paranoid or paranoiac thinking. If you constantly believe that people are talking about you, concerned with you, monitor you, supervise you, if you are in a constant state of self-imputed surveillance, you become paranoid.

And to preserve his egocentric cosmology, the narcissist is compelled to attribute fitting motives and psychological dynamics to other people.

And such motives and dynamics have little to do with reality in all cases. They are projected by the narcissist onto others, so as to maintain his personal mythology.

Let me put it simply, or more simply, the narcissist attributes to other people his own motives and motivations, his own psychological processes and psychodynamics.

And since narcissists are mostly besieged by transformations of aggression, since mostly they experience rage and hatred and envy and fear, these emotions they often attribute to other people.

The narcissist is envious, so other people are envious. The narcissist is hate-filled, other people are hateful.

And so the narcissist tends to interpret other people’s behavior as motivated by anger, fear, hatred, or envy, and is directed at him, revolving around him, because he is the axis.

The narcissist often erroneously believes that people discuss him, gossip about him, hate him, defame him, mock him, libel him, berate him, underestimate him, envy him, fear him, steal from him.

He is, sometimes rightly by the way, convinced that he is to others the source of hurt, humiliation, impropriety, and indignation.

And the narcissist just knows that he is a wonderful, powerful, talented, and entertaining person.

But he only explains why people are envious of him, why they seek to undermine and destroy him, because he is perfect.

And so the since the narcissist is unable to secure the long-term positive love, admiration, or even attention of resources of supply, because of his misbehavior, because of his abuse, people end up hating him, people end up deriding him, people end up decrying him, people end up walking away, abandoning him, women end up cheating on him. I mean, people end up betraying him, stabbing him in the back because of his of his abuse. He knows this.

And he knows that long-term, he cannot rely on people, on their love and commitment and investment.

So he results to a mirror strategy.

In other words, the narcissist becomes paranoid, better to be the object of often imaginary and always self-inflicted derision, scorn, and bile than to be ignored.

He says to himself, if I cannot be loved, let me be hated. If I’m about to be betrayed, let me betray first, or let me prepare myself.

Being envied is preferable to being treated with indifference. If he cannot be loved, the narcissist would rather be feared or hated than be forgotten.

And there you are in the midst of this whirlwind vortex about to be swallowed into the deepest abysses of this so-called man or woman that you’re with.

Extricate yourself, no contact.