How Narcissist is Mortified (Empathy Aphantasia)

Summary

The video explored the immutable nature of pathological narcissism, emphasizing that while behaviors and attendant disorders can be treated, the core narcissistic self remains unchangeable. It introduced the concepts of mortification and modification, linking them to aphantasia and the misinformation effect, which disrupt the narcissist's memory and self-perception, leading to catastrophic internal collapse. Additionally, the discussion highlighted the narcissist's extreme suggestibility, reliance on external validation, and the complex interplay between false memories, grandiosity, and identity defense mechanisms. How Narcissist is Mortified (Empathy Aphantasia)

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  1. 00:00 what can be done with narcissism certain behaviors can be modified
  2. 00:06 we call it behavior modification using certain treatment modalities we can modify behaviors
  3. 00:12 i recommend that you watch the video i’ve made about 12 ways 12 treatment modalities 12 therapies which are
  4. 00:19 applicable to narcissism and other personality disorders so we can modify behavior we can also
  5. 00:26 regulate moods if there is an attendant dual diagnosis or mood disorder
  6. 00:33 we can tackle the mood disorder usually with medication same goes for obsessive compulsive
  7. 00:39 features same goes for substance abuse and so on so anything that is attendant upon the
  8. 00:46 narcissism anything that comes with the narcissism can be treated in the usual manner but
  9. 00:52 narcissism pathological narcissism is there to stay untouchable immutable unchangeable and to death until
  10. 01:04 death as do part says the narcissist to his disorder
  11. 01:10 i hope i made this statement as loud and clear as it should be made because
  12. 01:17 there are a lot of very very irresponsible people online with and
  13. 01:23 without academic degrees people who have never heard of narcissism and suddenly became experts okay
  14. 01:31 the only case when the narcissist comes face to face with himself the only window of
  15. 01:37 opportunity for anything that resembles normalcy and some glimmerings of healing is mortification in the case of
  16. 01:49 modification and i’ve dealt with it in many other videos i’m not going to repeat it here if you
  17. 01:56 want to know what is modification please go and watch the previous videos i’ve made including most most recently
  18. 02:03 but generally speaking modification is when the grandiose search perception
  19. 02:09 of the narcissist crumbles and collapses because the narcissist
  20. 02:15 is challenged from the outside in a humiliating shaming manner so when the narcissist
  21. 02:23 grandiosity is undermined when someone or something exposes the narcissist
  22. 02:31 for what he really is when he can no longer maintain his defenses in the face of bruising
  23. 02:40 hurtful painful reality when his ideal self-perception is
  24. 02:46 inflated view of himself no longer can withstand the attack of countervailing information mockery derision humiliation insults
  25. 02:58 slides at that point there is decompensation all the narcissist defenses are deactivated and then the narcissist crumbles to dust
  26. 03:10 or breaks up like humpty dumpty falls from the wall from the very high
  27. 03:16 wall of his divinity self-imputed divinity
  28. 03:22 and now i have described modification in in many ways and today i would like to
  29. 03:28 add two weapons to the arsenal i would like to discuss mortification in its connection to aphantasia aphantasia and i would like to discuss
  30. 03:40 modifications as a form of misinformation effect fantasia misinformation effect um are two clinical constructs
  31. 03:53 and we’re going to discuss them now a fantasia um a
  32. 04:01 p h a n t a s i a a fantasia or a fantasia depending
  33. 04:07 on which country you are is congenital you’re born with it but in some cases you can acquire it a fantasia is the inability
  34. 04:21 to conjure up mental imagery in the mind’s eye when i tell you for
  35. 04:27 example chair somehow you see a chair or at least chair-ness the essence of a
  36. 04:34 chair in your mind usually you see actually a picture of a chair
  37. 04:40 if i tell you a woman it’s the same anything i tell you even non-objects conjures up images
  38. 04:47 this mental imagery is very important for processing cognitions cognitions and emotions and so some
  39. 04:55 people are born or develop an incapacity to access this library of mental images
  40. 05:03 they have no mind’s eye so to speak a fantastic people can think of an object can conceive of an object but can never imagine it it remains a word it remains
  41. 05:17 a concept it remains a symbol but never an image narcissus of course i like this they have people-centered fa phantasia
  42. 05:29 in other words they cannot evoke conjure up access
  43. 05:36 images of people they have empathy a fantasia
  44. 05:43 they can analyze people i do for a living they can understand other people i do
  45. 05:49 for a living but they can never visualize they can never visualize them as multi-dimensional fellow human beings
  46. 05:58 they have no mental imagery or not empathic imagery corresponding to the concept of a human
  47. 06:05 being while congenital aphantasia has to do with actual images in the narcissist the euphantasia is limited to empathy they don’t have an empathic resonance or an empathic response they cannot visualize other people in an
  48. 06:23 empathic way or using empathy what they have is only called empathy called empathy is
  49. 06:29 combination of reflexive and cognitive empathy you heard me cold empathy is not
  50. 06:35 cognitive empathy it’s not the same cognitive empathy is a component of cold empathy
  51. 06:41 there’s another component reflexive empathy but both of these cognitive and reflexive don’t have the
  52. 06:47 emotional component they miss the emotional component so the narcissist cannot create an
  53. 06:55 empathic map an empathic representation an empathic image of
  54. 07:02 other people he is a fantastic when it comes to other people he fails to construct a mentalist
  55. 07:10 or mentalization theory of mind a theory about how the how other minds operate narcissists are
  56. 07:17 not privy to the inter-subjective agreement inter-subjective agreement is the unspoken correspondence
  57. 07:25 between sentient human consciousnesses all healthy people have our
  58. 07:32 parties to adhere to collaborate in creating and maintaining the
  59. 07:38 inter-subjective agreement it’s the agreement that informs people on what it is to be
  60. 07:44 human what it is what it feels like what are the likely effects and cognitions
  61. 07:52 of a human being the intersubjective agreement is like a huge book of specifications coupled with the
  62. 07:58 user’s manual on how to be human and when we internalize this this huge
  63. 08:04 manual when we internalize the huge book this inter-subjective agreement we develop empathy because by
  64. 08:10 internalizing it and assimilating it and experiencing it we know what it means to be human we experience our humanness masters don’t have this they’re like
  65. 08:21 extra extraterrestrial observers who had crashed our planet dazed and been used
  66. 08:28 by the native variety of intelligence a fantasia or empathic a fantasia a new
  67. 08:35 coinage if you wish empathic advantage the inability to evoke empathic imagery is a core
  68. 08:45 core issue leading to mortification because of empathic effentesia the
  69. 08:51 narcissist is unable to decipher cues social cues sexual cues language cues lingual cues
  70. 09:00 even body language the narcissist is not human in this sense because he’s not human because he shares he has nothing in common with other human beings he’s not partying to this
  71. 09:11 agreement in the subjective agreement it’s like a hidden code some conspiracy so human
  72. 09:18 human beings baffle him and when because he cannot predict
  73. 09:27 he cannot understand he cannot foresee he cannot theorize on what to be human
  74. 09:35 is on the experience of being human he can also he is also often shocked
  75. 09:42 and surprised by other people’s behavior and reactions it is this shock
  76. 09:50 that triggers modification in extreme cases the narcissist develops unrealistic
  77. 09:58 not reality grounded expectations he develops he misreads
  78. 10:05 other people’s intentions motivations emotions moods cognitions he is lost
  79. 10:13 he’s baffled he’s puzzled he’s perplexed and then suddenly something happens
  80. 10:19 suddenly someone behaves in ways which affect the narcissist and it’s totally totally out of the blue totally discombobulating and shocking
  81. 10:30 and the narcissist falls apart he was not ready he had his army
  82. 10:36 somewhere else like the germans in on v-day on a d-day you know so the narcissist can engage in a social
  83. 10:47 interaction and suddenly someone humiliates him or shames him or insults him or criticizes him heavily or uh cheats on him
  84. 10:59 ostentatiously or betrays him horribly or and then the narcissist falls apart
  85. 11:05 it is this process of falling disintegrating slow motion disintegrating which is
  86. 11:11 which we call modification as his defenses shut down one after the other like a nuclear
  87. 11:17 reactor in trouble one one defense after another shuts down compartments are sealed his his his essence his
  88. 11:28 psyche is compartmentalized in a desperate attempt to contain the damage he closes he shuts down cell after cell compartment of the compartment drawer
  89. 11:39 after drawer category after category narrowing his world constricting his existence
  90. 11:47 to the point of vanishing he becomes a black hole at that point this black wholeness
  91. 11:53 is mortification when nothing else is left when all the defenses are gone and when suddenly nothing
  92. 12:03 nothing that he thought he knew makes sense anymore which leads me to the
  93. 12:09 misinformation effect now before we apply the misinformation effect
  94. 12:15 to modification misinformation effect is when someone’s recall
  95. 12:22 someone’s recollection of memories especially episodic memories
  96. 12:28 becomes less accurate or even totally wrong because of information after the event
  97. 12:35 let me explain you experience something you have an adventure you have sex
  98. 12:42 something happened you bought something you sold something an event and you have a memory of this event and
  99. 12:48 the memory includes your cognitions of the time your emotions at the time environmental data like smells and tastes i mean all these put together create a
  100. 12:59 scheme and create a kind of a coherent memory and this memory is deposited for later
  101. 13:07 for later retrieval when and if needed but misinformation effect is when in unrelated information or
  102. 13:19 related information later on changes the content of the original
  103. 13:25 memory so you went through something you created a memory then something else happened and then something else changed the original memory now this was
  104. 13:38 discovered by elizabeth loftus and it shocked shocked
  105. 13:44 the psychological community because everyone had assumed until about 1978
  106. 13:50 when loftus published her works everyone had assumed that memory was kind of a fixed thing
  107. 13:56 people were even saying that memories are proteins in the brain they’re like pathways filled with proteins they try
  108. 14:04 to find equivalence physical physiological equivalence to memory they were discussing memory storage like you would be shocked if the memory
  109. 14:15 your hard disk or your usb for your flash drive would suddenly
  110. 14:21 contain files that you’ve never put there or the contents of files there would have would change it would be shocking
  111. 14:27 wouldn’t it so there was this metaphor of human memory as a hard disk or hard drive
  112. 14:34 or flash drive you know but of course it’s it’s loftus discovered that it’s utterly wrong there’s no such thing
  113. 14:40 as a fixed memory everything is flowing everything is fluid there was a study in
  114. 14:47 in 1994 where students were shown a series of slides and there were objects in these slides and then they were they were shown other slides and then
  115. 14:59 they were read they were subjected to narratives they were subjected to speech
  116. 15:05 which misinformed them about the object that they had actually seen with their own eyes in the
  117. 15:11 slides later in the third stage of the trial they adhered to the narrative in other words if they saw for example a screwdriver
  118. 15:22 and then they were told later you did not see a screwdriver they saw a screwdriver and someone told
  119. 15:28 them for example the professor you did not see a screwdriver at a later stage when they were asked
  120. 15:34 did you see a screwdriver they were denied they said no we did not see it so post event information the professor’s injunction you did not see a screwdriver affected the actual memory of having seen a screwdriver
  121. 15:50 that’s how bad it is in other experiments loftus and others had created
  122. 15:57 out of thin air out of whole cloth
  123. 16:04 events childhood events that had never happened so they had convinced people a big
  124. 16:11 number of people like about 35 40 of the participants they had convinced them
  125. 16:18 that they had experienced an event in childhood that actually had never happened
  126. 16:25 was totally invented a lie and yet these people had recalled the
  127. 16:32 event described the event and defended the veracity of the event so yeah of course i i went through this of course it happened to me you’re wrong because they were told after that listen
  128. 16:42 it’s all invented it’s all it never happened and this is not true it did happen i remember it clearly
  129. 16:49 every detail so you see that the misinformation
  130. 16:56 effect is is what we call retroactive interference retroactive interference there’s new information new event new circumstances new something that goes back boomerangs catapults back and changes
  131. 17:14 memories that preceded the information or the event so later information
  132. 17:22 interferes with the ability to retain previously encoded information the new
  133. 17:28 information works backwards and distort memories of original events and the misinformation
  134. 17:35 effect had been studied at length i mentioned elizabeth loftus but there were numerous others anything in there were
  135. 17:42 studies about the connection between misinformation event and suggestibility suggestibility is your tendency
  136. 17:49 to to react to the influence of other people’s expectations by changing your memory
  137. 17:56 or by changing your beliefs or by changing your knowledge your cognitions so some people
  138. 18:04 are essentially kind of people pleasers and they would go they would go the whole nine yards they would change what they remember they would change what they think they would change what they feel
  139. 18:14 they would change their moods everything and this is suggestibility it’s reaction to other people’s
  140. 18:20 influence which is heightened and unusual there’s also misattribution information attributed to it to an incorrect source in correct place incorrect date inquiry
  141. 18:31 correct set of circumstances preceding circumstances so there’s a lot of research on the misinformation effect and it cost great this research cast huge doubt
  142. 18:43 on the permanence and reliability of memory before i continue with the work of loftus miller burns and many others i
  143. 18:54 want to tie it in to the narcissist the misinformation effect is a huge
  144. 19:00 problem for the narcissist much bigger than for normal people and you have seen
  145. 19:06 that even normal people react to the misinformation effect by falsifying their memories
  146. 19:13 simply falsifying their memories big time big percentage of the people falsify big time
  147. 19:20 with the narcissist it’s even bigger because the narcissist you remember is dissociative the narcissist has
  148. 19:27 severe problems with his memory in other words the narcissist doesn’t remember what he remembers
  149. 19:34 he is never sure he’s never certain what had really happened and what was only his fantasy or his
  150. 19:40 imagination everything is mixed it’s a god awful chaos in his mind and he needs all the time to
  151. 19:48 breach the memory gaps the missing time he so he he creates narratives and
  152. 19:55 stories which are essentially fictitious the works of fiction they’re confabulated and the idea is to
  153. 20:02 kind of present a plausible normal probable facade to the world yeah my memory is intact here i remember but these are not memories these are inventions so the narcissist
  154. 20:15 has islands of memory islands of memory bridged bridged with confabulations and outright lies sometimes very rare but our definitely fantasies so when the narcissist is confronted
  155. 20:31 when the narcissist is confronted with an event or a person or a speech act
  156. 20:37 statement that challenge his memory he is much more likely to believe the outside source then his
  157. 20:49 own memory he is much more likely to go outside for veracity
  158. 20:56 and truth in fact than inside the narcissist knows that he cannot
  159. 21:02 trust his mind that their memory there’s this abyss where memory should have been
  160. 21:08 the memory gaps there’s lost lost lost time dissociation amnesia
  161. 21:15 he knows it’s a mess it’s a mess over there in his mind he knows his mind is a mess
  162. 21:21 so what he does instead he relies on other people to provide him with reality testing
  163. 21:28 with facts with with analysis with judgments and opinions and this is
  164. 21:35 of course the process of narcissistic supply now he filters all this information via
  165. 21:42 his grandiosity but it’s topic for another video another lecture what is important to understand that the
  166. 21:48 narcissist is an external locus of control also in the sense that he
  167. 21:55 positions himself in the world he gauges his coordinates he gains
  168. 22:02 reality feeling for reality from other people it doesn’t come from inside
  169. 22:09 there’s nothing inside just an empty schizoid core fumbling in the dark trying to recall what the hell has happened yesterday or two years ago what did they
  170. 22:21 do wrong what did they say what didn’t i mean total thought the nazis in a state of
  171. 22:27 total confusion all the time and so he needs other people to calibrate him
  172. 22:33 to channel him to contain him to provide him with truth and fact and opinions he can
  173. 22:42 trust and when these external inputs
  174. 22:48 are humiliating shameful hurtful challenging undermining
  175. 22:57 the narcissist tends to adopt the emotional content of
  176. 23:03 the input because the narcissist cannot trust himself he doesn’t have a benchmark he doesn’t
  177. 23:09 have a standard he doesn’t have a yardstick he cannot he cannot vet
  178. 23:16 or analyze the input that he is getting from the outside he cannot say well she thinks i’m stupid but i know i’m not stupid he cannot say this because the second part of his sentence i know i’m not stupid doesn’t
  179. 23:32 exist there’s nothing there so if someone says he’s stupid
  180. 23:39 he is forced to adopt her point of view
  181. 23:45 any input that he gets positive or negative impacts the narcissist extremely
  182. 23:52 disproportionately catastrophic catastrophically i would say precisely because there’s no counterbalance inside
  183. 23:59 his mind the narcissist doesn’t balance his self-knowledge and self-awareness
  184. 24:06 and memories and identity against input from the outside because he has none of these he has no identity at least not core identity he has no memories only dissociative
  185. 24:19 states and self-states he has nothing to fight back any negative input there’s no balance there so anything in everything disbalances
  186. 24:31 him and balances him and he falls off the wall by completed and he breaks up mortification so the narcissist is
  187. 24:39 actually extremely suggestible extremely suggestible and he he has problems with attribution
  188. 24:47 input from the outside he feels that input from the outside is actually coming from the inside
  189. 24:54 why because the narcissist is not interacting within external objects he’s interacting with internal objects remember snapshotting he internalizes external
  190. 25:07 objects and he continues to interact only with the internal objects never with the external objects so when there is input from an external object
  191. 25:18 it it is perceived misperceived by the narcissist as coming from inside
  192. 25:24 and that could be utterly shocking if if the narcissist comes across
  193. 25:30 someone who hates him derides him decries him shames him
  194. 25:36 humiliates him in public cheats on him betrays him someone who destroys his
  195. 25:43 grandiosity not only not only
  196. 25:49 there’s a problem in countering this hateful input you know the narcissist doesn’t
  197. 25:56 have any weapons against this kind of of negating vitiating vicious malevolent input
  198. 26:04 he has no tools against it because he has no memory he has no identity he has nothing he’s not there there’s nobody there so he cannot fight it not only that but he feels that it’s
  199. 26:15 coming from inside now don’t forget many of the narcissist introjects the internal objects in his
  200. 26:23 head the voices of mother the voices of the voice of father the voices of teachers peers society many of these internal
  201. 26:30 objects are sadistic they’re malevolent they’re vicious the narcissist’s parents
  202. 26:38 conditioned their love on performance or they told him that he’s bad and
  203. 26:44 unworthy when he had failed or they tortured and abused him in more classical ways
  204. 26:50 so the internal objects in his head all the time generate negating input humiliating input all the time put him down all the time
  205. 27:02 criticizing sadistically cruelly pushing him in effect to commit suicide
  206. 27:08 which he never does he’s not a borderline but still so he has many enemies inside
  207. 27:14 and when someone from the outside says something bad humiliates him
  208. 27:21 disgraces him puts him down sadistically tramples on him this
  209. 27:27 outsider is working hand in hand with the same input from the internal objects
  210. 27:35 so if someone tells the narcissist you’re ugly there is an internal object in the narcissist’s head’s
  211. 27:41 head that is saying the same and there’s a resonance the narcissist
  212. 27:47 anyhow has an internal object that keeps telling him you’re ugly and then a woman comes and tells him
  213. 27:53 you’re ugly and this resonates powerfully with the already existing internal object so negative input
  214. 28:04 is multiplied and amplified in the echo chamber of internal objects that is the narcissist
  215. 28:11 mind and such amplification can reach a crescendo
  216. 28:17 which which results in motification a point where the vibrations of
  217. 28:24 negativity are such that they crack open destroy the metal or the metal of the narcissist mind and psyche that’s very important to understand the
  218. 28:36 misinformation effect in the case of the narcissist is doubly and triply and quantuply and i know
  219. 28:43 but exponential stronger much stronger it drives the narcissist
  220. 28:49 to distrust himself even more it enhances and mattresses and amplifies
  221. 28:55 and magnifies his own negative internal negativity as manifested and expressed by his own
  222. 29:03 internal objects it undermines his grandiosity self-perception and self-image his fantasy of himself it devalues him countering his co-idealization it
  223. 29:15 reduces him to smithereens it’s utterly destructive like a nuclear bomb exploding within the
  224. 29:22 empty schizoid core and the narcissist all over the place in shattered in shards and can can he be put together
  225. 29:35 like humpty dumpty um mortification is the closest that the narcissist gets
  226. 29:42 to his true self it’s a glimpse of what he is without all the defenses
  227. 29:50 that he had constructed over the many years without his grandiosity without his omnipotence
  228. 29:56 without his omniscience without anything he’s suddenly reduced by mortification
  229. 30:02 back regresses to a childhood state when he was a helpless tormented wounded
  230. 30:10 injured abused traumatized child weeping in the corner bleeding sometimes
  231. 30:18 so the misinformation effect colludes in creating the modification because for
  232. 30:25 example let’s take the example of um someone telling the narcissist
  233. 30:32 you are ugly and unattractive and no no one will have sex with you you’re
  234. 30:39 repulsive okay so the first thing that happens
  235. 30:45 is this external external input is immediately perceived as valid valid
  236. 30:52 because there’s no balance inside the narcissist there are no structures inside the narcissist that would oppose
  237. 30:59 this assessment that would say i’m not ugly i am attractive even his rationality is disabled where
  238. 31:07 he could have told himself wait a minute but i’ve had many women i mean that’s not true it’s factually untrue no
  239. 31:13 the external input is immediately validated as 100 000 true and that’s it now
  240. 31:21 this external input colludes collaborates with similar input from in other
  241. 31:28 internal objects because analysis may have been told by his mother the very same thing you’re ugly you’re unlovable you’re
  242. 31:34 unattractive no one will ever want to be with you and so the introject of the mother is saying the same things from inside that the external object the external source is same from the
  243. 31:46 outside and there’s a confluence there’s a combination the two inputs congeal and become one much bigger much harder to resist if at all so at that point
  244. 32:02 at that point the narcissist had internalized the negative input and had attributed it
  245. 32:09 attributed it to an internal object he had already snapshotted the external source and now he takes
  246. 32:17 this input and puts it amalgamates it with the internal representation of the external source and now he has two voices that keep telling him you’re unattractive you’re not lovable you’re
  247. 32:29 you’re not sexy you’re disgusting you’re repulsive no woman want to be with you et cetera et cetera et cetera that two voices are
  248. 32:35 saying this given a multiplicity of such voices it can become
  249. 32:41 a fixture in other words what we call in cognitive behavioral therapy it can become a negative automatic
  250. 32:48 thought a kind of sentence that defines the analysis of self-awareness
  251. 32:54 and cognition and dictates behaviors and moods so this is the first process now having having internal having created an
  252. 33:06 internal object for the external source having taken the input of the the negative input of the external source
  253. 33:13 and amalgamated it with internal object at that point the narcissist has to
  254. 33:19 reassess re-evaluate revisit revise
  255. 33:25 and reframe all his history because it’s kind of a new input
  256. 33:31 admittedly his mother told him this but his mother is his mother here’s a woman telling him the same
  257. 33:37 a woman he’s interested in when he wants telling him the very same so that’s new information and he has to
  258. 33:44 rewrite all his memories such as they are and they’re not many
  259. 33:50 but he has to rewrite them in view of this new information which remember he considers 100 correct so here’s new
  260. 33:58 information you’re ugly you’re unattractive you are not sexy no woman would ever want to sleep with you
  261. 34:04 or to be with you and he has to take this information and now what he does he goes back in time and he revisits all the previous occasions that he had interacted with the woman let’s say
  262. 34:16 over all previous occasions that women looked at him paid some attention to or whatever and
  263. 34:22 then he rewrites these memories he revises them he revises them to conform to the new negative information so even if he had slept with a woman he would
  264. 34:35 try to find moments in the encounter where she might have looked repelled or
  265. 34:42 she might have been disgusted or she might have found him unattractive or she might have criticized his sexual performance
  266. 34:49 or the fact that she left immediately thereafter didn’t want to be in touch with him anymore etc so he is kind of gathering
  267. 34:56 incriminating material he is revisiting each event each encounter
  268. 35:02 each circumstance each moment in time and rewriting it in a way
  269. 35:09 that will conform to the new negative input by isolating incriminating material
  270. 35:17 and amplifying it so if you tried in the past to court a
  271. 35:24 woman and she said no let’s add fuel to the conflagration
  272. 35:30 confirms the new negative input if he if she said yes but you know it was
  273. 35:36 just a date and nothing happened that proves that he’s not sexy and not attractive if they did go to bed he did
  274. 35:42 not perform she was disgusted she left she criticized him he would he will all he will utterly
  275. 35:48 revamp his view of himself because he the two up until the moment that he
  276. 35:56 had received the negative input he thought of himself as irresistible as sexy
  277. 36:02 as attractive as handsome is amazing this new input forces him to
  278. 36:09 dismantle his grandiosity and rewrite his history create
  279. 36:16 effectively new fake memories he creates fake memories to conform to
  280. 36:23 and support the new negative information about his attractiveness or lack of
  281. 36:29 attractiveness and what happens to the previous grandiose defense i’m irresistible i’m handsome and so on
  282. 36:35 it’s gone it’s dead so if a sufficient number
  283. 36:42 if there is a critical threshold of negative inputs
  284. 36:48 all the memories are revised and all the grandiosity defenses are dismantled and is left naked skinless
  285. 36:57 in direct touch with reality abrasive and bruising as it is and this is
  286. 37:04 motivation now back to misinformation effect [Music] i said that misinformation effect has been studied for at least
  287. 37:15 four or five five decades and they discovered that certain things precondition people to
  288. 37:23 to the misinformation effect in other words some people react very strongly to the misinformation effect so when they receive new information they revise previous memories they fake them they dismantle them and reassemble them
  289. 37:35 in wrong ways they deny their own memory and so on and this is what the
  290. 37:41 narcissist does so they discovered certain behaviors and certain traits that predispose people to do this
  291. 37:48 susceptibility not everyone reacts the same to the misinformation effects
  292. 37:54 some traits and some qualities increase or decrease one’s susceptibility to recalling
  293. 38:01 misinformation and so age for example working memory capacity personality traits and the ability to to conjure and deal with imagery you remember how
  294. 38:13 we started this lecture when we were both much younger a fantasia inability to process imagery so imagery or inability to process imagery is
  295. 38:24 intimately connected to the misinformation effect which leads essentially to modification narcissists cannot
  296. 38:30 process imagery empathic imagery he has no imagery of people
  297. 38:36 the myers-briggs type indicator is a kind of test that assesses
  298. 38:42 personalities i personally i i personally like it a lot it’s frowned upon in academia if you
  299. 38:48 talk to stodgy professors they will tell you no it’s this is i disagree completely thing is one of the hugest it is one of the hugest databases of personality tests in the world
  300. 39:01 and it was among the first to suggest a dimensional approach so it was much ahead of its time i am
  301. 39:07 all for the mbti myers-briggs type indicator so
  302. 39:13 um when mars when the mbti was applied to people who were exposed to the mis information effect they discovered that introvert intuitive participants
  303. 39:25 were more likely to accept both accurate and inaccurate post-event information extrovert
  304. 39:33 sensate participants were much less likely to accept both accurate
  305. 39:40 and inaccurate post-event information introverts are more likely to have lower
  306. 39:46 confidence in their memory more likely to accept misinformation in this sense never mind how gregarious
  307. 39:55 how sociable how outgoing how how life of the party the narcissist is the narcissist is an introvert that’s not some vaccine that’s carl jung
  308. 40:06 carlion was the first to link introversion with narcissism i recommend that you watch the video i’ve made about jung’s perception of narcissism narcissists are introverse they’re
  309. 40:17 introverted because they are schizoid and schizoids by definition are introverted
  310. 40:23 schizoids are not sociable they don’t they don’t like people they don’t want people people give them no pleasure they don’t want even sex and all narcissists have a schizoid core
  311. 40:34 and they’re introverted they go out of their way to socialize and and so on because they need constant
  312. 40:41 narcissistic supply it’s a compassion but at the core they’re introverted and yes
  313. 40:47 they they do not trust they do not have confidence in their memory and they are more likely to accept
  314. 40:53 misinformation individual personality characteristics including empathy
  315. 41:00 absorption self-monitoring have also been linked to greater susceptibility and here
  316. 41:08 both heightened empathy and no empathy actually lead to the same
  317. 41:15 results if you had watched my previous videos i cited many studies several studies that had demonstrated that they have if you have very high empathy
  318. 41:26 you misjudge people badly the higher your empathy the less well you read people the less
  319. 41:34 well you understand people it’s counter-intuitive and i explain it in these videos these are the recent studies i’m sorry
  320. 41:41 um to um i’m sorry to rain on your parade but these are the recent studies so
  321. 41:48 heightened empathy and no empathy are the same in both conditions you cannot read proper people properly
  322. 41:54 self-absorption is of course narcissistic self-monitoring is definitely narcissistic masters is self-monitors all the time positions himself sculpts himself he is an actor he’s like
  323. 42:06 in a theater play maximum self-monitoring that’s the irony analysis are actually hyper hyper when it comes to self-awareness they have too much self-awareness which
  324. 42:17 in itself is a fascinating topic one could describe narcissism very well and derive it
  325. 42:23 from excess or pathological self-awareness but again it’s a topic for another lecture at any rate these traits disturbances in empathy fluctuations in equity dysregulated empathy no empathy uh self-absorption and
  326. 42:39 self-monitoring we’re linked in studies to the misinformation effect there’s also evidence that the misinformation effect
  327. 42:51 is much bigger in social groups when people are together
  328. 42:57 probably because they influence each other’s memories and probably because of peer pressure of of some kind there is a phenomenon which is like a hive mind
  329. 43:09 memories blend misinformation diffuses it seems that when we’re in a group or
  330. 43:15 when we’re when another person for example in intimate setting we derive part of our memories or we reframe and
  331. 43:22 reshape our memories according to input from the other person which is pretty amazing because it means
  332. 43:29 that our minds melt become one when it comes to memory and we process memory together when you’re with an intimate partner on a date you process memories together
  333. 43:41 human that’s why i’m dead set against the concept of individual i don’t think there’s such a thing what we call individual is a node a node in a network is a bid
  334. 43:53 in indra’s net it’s it’s interconnected to define a person
  335. 44:00 you need a relational approach even something highly intimate highly special
  336. 44:06 highly idiosyncratic highly personal like memory is manipulated influenced
  337. 44:13 by other people in the room you shape your memories according to input
  338. 44:19 from these people and they shape theirs simultaneously the same way
  339. 44:27 so the misinformation effect operates in a very interesting way which
  340. 44:34 ties it intimately to modification first of all when you have experienced an event or
  341. 44:41 something you store it you don’t rehearse it you don’t actively rehash it and go
  342. 44:47 through it if you do it’s a problem it’s called rumination and it’s considered a pathology it’s a problem the longer the delay between the presentation of the original event and the post-event information the more likely it is that individuals will incorporate the
  343. 45:04 misinformation into the new memory the longer so this is the analysis problem there’s
  344. 45:11 usually a huge delay between the
  345. 45:17 countervailing negative humiliating shaming information and the array origin original memories
  346. 45:25 that he’s revising so he has memories from childhood for example and then 40 years later someone tells
  347. 45:31 him something which is very humiliating and disturbing and so on and because it’s such an enormous delay
  348. 45:38 the misinformation effect is almost total the longer i repeat the longer the gap
  349. 45:44 in time between the original memory and the misinformation provided later the longer the gap the more the original memory is revised
  350. 45:58 more time to study the original event if you dedicate more time to study the original event leads to lower susceptibility to the misinformation effect because of increased rehearsal time
  351. 46:11 loftus coined the phrase called discrepancy detection principle she said that a person’s recollections
  352. 46:18 are more likely to change if they do not immediately detect the discrepancies between misinformation and the original event
  353. 46:26 sometimes people recognize some discrepancy between the memory and what they’re being told but uh
  354. 46:33 not always this doesn’t always have effect and if the discrepancy is spotted much later people tend to doubt their memory people might recollect i
  355. 46:44 thought i saw something i saw i saw this and this uh but the new information
  356. 46:50 mentions another thing so i guess i must have been wrong it was that other thing people generally
  357. 46:56 don’t trust their memories um people in in many cases
  358. 47:03 in about half the cases actually people would adopt uh later information which contradicts
  359. 47:10 their memories they would adopt the later information and drop their memories now imagine the narcissist who has no
  360. 47:18 intact memory has notice has no continuity in memory imagine how frightened he is how
  361. 47:24 terrified he is that his memories may be completely wrong the dissociation renders the
  362. 47:30 narcissist totally doubtful he doubts his own memory he can’t trust
  363. 47:37 himself at all and and so whenever there are
  364. 47:43 discrepancies the narcissist would adopt the new information is real and would attribute what we call source reliability social reliability in other words
  365. 47:54 as healthy people they grade they great sources of information according to reliability they say
  366. 48:01 well the mainstream media is not reliable fox news is reliable or something so people grade sources of
  367. 48:09 information the narcissist is a problem with source reliability the narcissist grades everyone on the
  368. 48:16 same same level of reliability there there are differences in the
  369. 48:22 quality of narcissistic supply that’s true but not in the reliability and we should not confuse the two issues when the narcissist receives input from the outside
  370. 48:34 he analyzes two things reliability and quality so as far as reliability
  371. 48:40 everyone is the same everyone is the same the chambermaid and the hotel manager the same they are
  372. 48:47 both reliable 100 percent reliable why because the master system is zero percent reliable
  373. 48:53 because the narcissist considers himself as totally unreliable he trusts everyone is totally reliable
  374. 49:00 however the quality of course is different information coming from the chambermaid would be weight weighted differently to information coming from the hotel manager dord and bradshaw in 1980
  375. 49:13 they conducted an experiment and they demonstrated that this misinformation was rejected by those who received information from the unreliable source and adopted by those who received information from reliable sources but that’s not a defense in the case of
  376. 49:29 the narcissist because as far as cause is concerned everyone is equally reliable
  377. 49:37 so what the narcissist does the minute is exposed to mortifying mortifying information or
  378. 49:43 potentially modifying information he begins to conduct a furious debate a free furious conversation within
  379. 49:51 himself with inside his mind and all the internal objects participate and all the fragments of memory are thrown into the cauldron you know like the four witches of macbeth and it’s a bloody mess
  380. 50:04 immediately after exposure to such triggers what goes on in the narcissist mind can
  381. 50:10 be described as some kind of cataclysmic earthquake tsunami and volcano eruption
  382. 50:17 at once and there’s a conversation going on and and the conversation is actually not helpful because the core
  383. 50:28 of the conversation is this i’ve just received information that challenges everything i knew about
  384. 50:34 myself but because i’m an unreliable source and the information came from a reliable
  385. 50:40 source i am bound to trust this information and not to trust myself i cannot trust myself
  386. 50:49 my view of myself is fantastic is wrong i must revise it urgently someone just
  387. 50:56 told me that i’m completely wrong about myself someone forced me to look in the mirror and what i saw in the mirror was had nothing to do with what i had thought about myself until until
  388. 51:09 right now until recently so this conversation actually is detrimental
  389. 51:16 to the integrity of the narcissist’s remaining memory he challenges
  390. 51:22 everything his self-perception his self-image his ideal image his grandiosity his defenses his his his memories of his childhood his everything simply everything
  391. 51:35 it’s like remembrance of things past garbled in a shredder it’s a it’s a huge
  392. 51:41 mess and and this discussion this inner discussion results in a rewriting of the narcissist’s personal history
  393. 51:52 and self-perception in ways that mortify him he is reduced
  394. 51:59 he goes back to childhood because he cannot trust any memory from childhood onwards so he finds himself suddenly a child again but without all the defenses that he had
  395. 52:10 developed and abused and traumatized as he had been when he was a child
  396. 52:21 this is the misinformation effect now there are many many factors that
  397. 52:28 affect the misinformation effect and have nothing to do with narcissism for example for example substance abuse alcoholism
  398. 52:36 hypnosis all these increase the misinformation effect
  399. 52:43 i refer you to studies by acefi and gary about 20 years ago leading questions
  400. 52:51 narrative accounts falsify memory arousal immediately after learning um
  401. 53:00 if you’re aroused immediately after you learn something there is less um source confusion memories that are
  402. 53:08 created after arousal are more difficult to falsify more difficult to tamper with they’re temper proof because of the arousal it’s like in printing it’s like everyone remembers where they were
  403. 53:20 on 9 11 or when jfk was assassinated because there was arousal which was connected to the memory still by the way studies have shown that a year later half of the people
  404. 53:33 misremembered remembered wrongly where they were at the moment that the towers collapsed
  405. 53:40 on 9 11 half remembered wrongly when i say wrongly i mean totally wrongly every detail was wrong memory is extremely unreliable
  406. 53:53 anticipation of misinformation can reduce the efficacy of misinformation but the analysis here is a hostage he doesn’t anticipate misinformation
  407. 54:04 he gives reliability veracity and credibility to every bit of information they’re all of equal of equal measure sleep psychotropic medication etc etc
  408. 54:17 so the misinformation effect is amenable and sensitive to many
  409. 54:25 other influences but this kind of misinformation effect doesn’t interest us because it has to do with other
  410. 54:31 population groups other cohorts we’re interested of course in in narcissism um one of the problems that we deal with in
  411. 54:43 the misinformation effect is very complexity of human memory it’s the influence of information
  412. 54:52 whether the information is legitimate or falsified and now we are faced with the problem of fake news for example yes conspiracy theories the intro of information
  413. 55:04 uh generally would support false information now this
  414. 55:10 is something that we kind of sweep under the carpet because uh it’s a bit politically incorrect to say that most people are not the brightest stars in the galaxy they have base rate fallacy they trust 95
  415. 55:26 what they hear without confirming or checking and one of the problems is uh
  416. 55:33 again information fake information falsified information
  417. 55:39 is very powerful especially if the messages are confirmed uh and validated in a variety of ways from various sources never mind that all
  418. 55:51 these sources are allied that might all collaborate but if you get if you get exposed to the same message
  419. 55:58 several times it becomes much more difficult to to fight the false information so modification in narcissism occurs
  420. 56:05 after multiple explosion exposures multiple exposures to the same person
  421. 56:11 who had assaulted the narcissist in various ways or multiple explosions to multiple
  422. 56:17 people or in multiple circumstances but at some point there’s a critical mass like a nuclear bomb it’s a critical mass and when the critical masses
  423. 56:28 is reached then the mortification takes place
  424. 56:36 and it’s very difficult to reverse misinformation and it’s very difficult to reverse mortification although the narcissist defenses are
  425. 56:48 gradually rebuilt gradually his masses simply cannot survive exposed to reality as it is he doesn’t have the tools he doesn’t have a self self is an organizing principle he doesn’t have reality test he cannot make sense of the world he cannot make
  426. 57:03 sense of other people because he lacks sympathy so he has no he’s not privy to the human
  427. 57:09 condition and he suffers grievously from the misinformation effect and he’s sufficiently confident in the
  428. 57:20 misinformation so that he restructures rewrites rephrases his memories and even acts on
  429. 57:28 the on the misinformation so ironically it’s his grandiosity and his narcissism
  430. 57:35 um that push him to stick to his guns and you know refuse any contrary input
  431. 57:42 after that the misinformation sets in poisons his system alters his memories and then this
  432. 57:49 becomes the new status quo the new consensus among the internal objects in his mind
  433. 57:55 and he’s emotionally invested in it he has sunk costs he has invested so much in it now to
  434. 58:02 revise everything no way plus he can never be wrong he’s never wrong he’s infallible he never makes mistakes so now that he had rewritten everything
  435. 58:13 that’s the new gospel it’s a new truth it’s a new bible that’s why it’s very difficult when you when the narcissist had devalued you initially it’s very difficult to change his mind because he’s invested in the
  436. 58:25 new in the new status quo he’s invested in the new newfound
  437. 58:31 knowledge or actually wrong knowledge but doesn’t matter so there’s a problem because
  438. 58:38 narcissism feeds the narcissist investment in wrong data
  439. 58:45 in misinformation and it works against him because the misinformation coming
  440. 58:51 from outside in the case of mortification is self-negating he’s humiliating his shaming
  441. 58:57 but his narcissism won’t allow the narcissist to cast this information aside his
  442. 59:03 narcissism is grandiosity informed analysis tell the narcissist
  443. 59:09 your processing of the negative information was right you’re always right you’re never wrong
  444. 59:16 even when you had adopted a shaming humiliating inferior view of yourself
  445. 59:24 you are still superior in your ability to get it right so you got it right you are inferior you
  446. 59:31 got it right you’re shameful you got it right you’re an idiot you got it right you are disgusting you got it right you
  447. 59:37 are repulsive you got it right you got it right you got it right you’re evil you got it right
  448. 59:43 and this is called external modification in order to revive his defenses to resuscitate them
  449. 59:49 reactivate them and reboot the whole narcissistic process the narcissist transitions from external
  450. 59:55 modification to internal modification and i describe this process in in previous
  451. 60:03 in previous videos the problem with narcissism and with the narcissist is that his
  452. 60:09 false information is what we call rich false memories rich false memories is when entire segments of personal biography and personal history are false
  453. 60:21 are written from scratch our inventions are fiction never happened the
  454. 60:28 narcissist reacts to misinformation by creating rich false memories not regular false memories but rich false memories
  455. 60:35 because he has a victim stance and he has a view of himself which is grandiose he’s very limited he’s very rigid in his
  456. 60:43 ability to rewrite or reframe his memories so he must adhere to very strict rules on how to
  457. 60:50 rewrite his memories and these rules mean that sometimes very often actually
  458. 60:56 he has to invent totally invent confabulate i don’t know what word to
  459. 61:03 use simply conjure up out of thin air whole segments of biography and and personal history and this is where the narcissistic presence resistance
  460. 61:14 kicks in this is where the problem is is once he had invented these
  461. 61:20 segments of an unlived life he experiences them as memories
  462. 61:26 and so he will fight tooth and nail to defend the veracity of these memory
  463. 61:32 fake memories so first he creates a fake memory about something that had never happened
  464. 61:38 and then he experienced it as a real memory and then he defends it as a real memory
  465. 61:45 he’s gonna become very aggressive if you dare to tell him listen uh honey this never happened you know it’s all in
  466. 61:52 your hand it’s never happened it’s gonna attack you it’s gonna project it’s gonna become aggressive
  467. 61:58 and this is why multiplication is very transient and the only way to reverse modification
  468. 62:05 is to ignore all the question of memory and actually to assimilate the guilt and
  469. 62:12 the shame and the humiliation is integral components of the personality
  470. 62:18 in other words the narcissist’s only way to cope with the modification is not to preserve the integrity of
  471. 62:26 his original memories is not to reverse the falsification of memories he is incapable of both these things
  472. 62:34 his only way to find the motivation is to adopt it to assimilate it to say yes i am
  473. 62:42 i am evil and ugly and shameful and stupid and i don’t know what but having said that i am the one who makes everything happen
  474. 62:53 it’s my because i’m evil these people humiliated me and shamed me because i
  475. 62:59 made them humiliate me and shame me my girlfriend cheated on me because i
  476. 63:06 abused her i made her cheat on me so it restores the narcissist’s grandiosity
  477. 63:12 when the narcissist says i’m evil i’m corrupt i’m a misfit he’s proud of it
  478. 63:18 because his his viciousness his evilness his abuse his
  479. 63:26 misconduct makes the world go around everyone is reactive to him he’s in control of everything so bad things that people do to him bad
  480. 63:38 things that people say to him he made them do it he made them do these things he made them say
  481. 63:44 these things he controls their they’re his puppets they’re his pawns he he convinces himself that he had what
  482. 63:51 he wanted them to do this thing and he wanted them to say these things to him and that’s the extent of the narcissistic insanity there’s never winning with the gnosis he
  483. 64:04 will always find a way for a stratagem to put himself at the center the controller the mover the shaker the prima causer and
  484. 64:17 god in effect
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Summary

The video explored the immutable nature of pathological narcissism, emphasizing that while behaviors and attendant disorders can be treated, the core narcissistic self remains unchangeable. It introduced the concepts of mortification and modification, linking them to aphantasia and the misinformation effect, which disrupt the narcissist's memory and self-perception, leading to catastrophic internal collapse. Additionally, the discussion highlighted the narcissist's extreme suggestibility, reliance on external validation, and the complex interplay between false memories, grandiosity, and identity defense mechanisms. How Narcissist is Mortified (Empathy Aphantasia)

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