We start with modeling.

Modeling is by far the most pervasive and powerful means of transmitting patterns of behavior.

Observers extract rules and structure underlying the model activities. Observers generate new patterns of behavior that conform to these properties, but they go beyond what they have heard and seen. They expand their knowledge and skills and they don’t all the time go through the process of learning by response consequences.

In short, modeling is like a launch pad or even better a catalyst.

You watch people around you, you observe how they react, how they behave, and then you use them as a model.

But the model is just a part of it because you superimpose on the model who you are, your essence, your identity, your character, your temperament, your personality, and other experiences, life experiences and so on.

And so finally you diverge and deviate from the model to a large degree, but it’s still kind of the nucleus of who you become.

The narcissist has a problem with this because the narcissist does not perceive separateness.

The narcissist cannot be modeled. The narcissist cannot enjoy the benefits of modeling.

In order to experience modeling, in order to use modeling to shape your behavior, you need to recognize that there is a distinct entity out there, an external object that is your model.

Narcissists cannot do this. Narcissists remain stuck in the symbiotic phase. They remain enmeshed, infused, and merged with “mummy.”

We don’t use the phrase “symbiotic phase” anymore, but I love it because I think it captures the essence of what’s happening to the narcissist in early childhood.

So “mummy” and later “father” cannot be a model, cannot be models.

How can you be your own model?

If the child is one with a mother, then it is the child who is his or her own model.

If “mummy” equals “child,” then “child” equals “mummy.” There’s no one out there to emulate, to imitate, to copy, to observe. No one out there who can serve as a model.

The term “modeling” is associated with the work of Albert Bandougin and Julian Rotter, for those of you who want to learn more.

Bandouin came up with a variant of social learning theory known as social-cognitive theory. It is an extension of the original theory, and it includes the effects of cognitive processes, such as conceptions, judgment, motivation, ideas, even to some extent values and beliefs, anything that can be translated or is experienced as cognition, as distinct from emotions.

Now, there are schools that say that emotions are types of cognition, but put it aside. Cognitions as we know them classically.

So cognitions affect the individual’s behavior and the environment that influences the individual.

So cognitive processes change not only the individual, but also the environment in which the individual operates and the way this environment acts upon the individual, in other words, the interaction.

I refer you to my video on IPAN, intrapsychic activation model.

Also there were some academic articles published on my new theory. It’s a new theory I came up with and incorporates actually social-cognitive theory.

Anyway, coming back to Bandura.

So according to Bandura, you don’t absorb knowledge passively for environmental inputs. You actively influence the process of learning by interpreting the outcomes of actions.

And then this affects the environment.

So your actions affect the environment and you learn from this via cognition. You learn how to influence the environment.

This leads to what we will later discuss, something called self-efficacy.

And so you’re not a passive container or a passive recipient or a sponge of knowledge from environmental input.

Individuals actively influence their learning by interpreting the outcomes of their actions.

And these outcomes, these affect the environment and also personal factors are involved, which ultimately inform and alter subsequent behaviors.

So it’s much more complex than just sitting there and waiting for the environment to tell you what to do. It’s much more complex than just observing a model and becoming that model.

No, numerous other factors are at play. All of them mediated cognitively.

The emphasis on this interaction of behavioral, environmental and personal factors is a major development, a breakthrough.

Julian Rother, which is an Austrian born, US now personality psychologist, another psychologist, Walter Mission, many others, they propose alternatives.

But Bandura’s work, 1986, is the main social cognitive theory.

So to recap, people seek to develop a sense of agency. They seek to exert control over important events in their lives.

And this sense is affected by factors such as self-efficacy, outcome expectations, goals and self-evaluation.

I’ll define self-efficacy and then I will apply all this to the narcissist.

Self-efficacy, which I kept kept using this phrase in many videos, people were complaining that that’s not a $10 word, it’s a $100 word, it’s too much.

So let me define self-efficacy finally. It’s a subjective perception. So it’s not an objective thing, cannot be measured. It’s a subjective thing. And it’s when you gauge, when you evaluate, appraise your capability to perform in any given setting or any given environment and to attain desired results.

Again, Albert Bandura came with this idea and he said it’s the primary determinant of emotional and motivational states and behavioral change. He called it perceived self-efficacy. It’s more accurate.

So you ask yourself, am I able to perform or to what degree am I able to perform in this environment in this setting? And what will happen to my performance if I were to be dislocated or relocate to another environment or other settings?

Question number one.

Question number two, can I obtain favorable outcomes, desired results by acting in and on this environment in these settings?

And then you kind of calibrate the answers and you get your sense or your perception of your own self-efficacy, subjective thing.

Okay.

Again, narcissists are totally disabled when it comes to all these, totally disabled.

Narcissists are passive containers. They are recipients. They are not active.

This is why narcissists have an external locus of control and cannot learn. They’re incapable of learning. They have an external locus of control because they just sit there and they are totally regulated via and through external inputs, inputs from the outside.

Narcissists are passive recipients of inputs from the outside, which then these inputs define them. These inputs regulate them. These inputs motivate them. These inputs modify their behaviors. They’re like substrates. They’re like platforms. They’re like nothing. They’re like raw material.

And so they are incapable of learning. They’re incapable of learning because they are passive absorbers. They’re sponges.

They don’t interpret the outcomes of their actions. They are also highly dissociative. So they fail to see the connection between actions and consequences. They have no personal identity or core or ego, if you wish.

So there are no personal factors at play. They don’t even have an identity disturbance like borderlines because they don’t have an identity. They are chameleons.

Those of you who have watched the wonderful, who’ve seen the wonderful film, Zellick, Woody Allen’s film. Zellick is the perfect reification of what’s going on, what goes on inside the narcissist.

In short, the narcissist is passive and reactive and static.

So he develops an external locus of control.

The narcissist justly believes that his life is determined from the outside.

If he’s so inclined, he develops paranoia. He says, there’s a malevolent conspiracy against me. He’s the center of malign attention.

It’s also a form of narcissism.

So in all these cases, the narcissist perceives himself as a plaything, as a toy, as an object. He self-objectifies and he defines himself through the gaze of other people.

Ironically, the narcissist tries to do this to his intimate partners.

Everything that happens to the narcissist, the narcissist tries to impose on his intimate partner.

He couldn’t separate from money. He doesn’t want her to separate from him. He has abandonment anxiety. He wants her to develop one.

He cannot learn. He wants her to not learn. He depends on external inputs for self-regulation. He wants her to become dependent on him. He defines himself through other people’s gaze. He wants her to define herself through his gaze as an ideal object, etc.

In short, he wants her to become an extension of him, another narcissist.

So narcissists do not learn, are incapable of personal growth, development, evolution and learning. They’re stuck at an early age.

Most narcissists are anywhere between two and nine years old. A nine-year-old narcissist is seriously mature and adult. Most narcissists are two years old.

And so it’s very difficult to apply social learning theory to narcissists because they don’t have most of the requisites.

Nasties also don’t feel very self-efficacious. Narcissists pretend to be dominant, pretend to be self-efficacious, pretend to be dangerous, pretend to be efficient, pretend to be everything. But actually they’re not. This is all make-believe. It’s all fake it till you make it. It’s all facade. It’s all a compensatory layer intended to hide the reality of shame, inadequacy, anxiety, terror inside.

Now this is true for covert narcissists mostly and for some overt narcissists.

And this is one of the main reasons why there’s a debate nowadays in the profession, whether the only true narcissists are actually covert narcissists because overt narcissists don’t have, they’re less motivated by shame and so on. They feel less inadequate. They are less compensatory.

And so they’re much closer to psychopaths.

Okay, we’ll leave this aside.

Now, social learning is learning that is facilitated through social interactions with other individuals. This includes local enhancement, emulation, imitation, mimicry. These are the mechanisms involved in social learning.

The narcissist is exactly like someone with autism. The narcissist has serious difficulties with other people, is unable to develop long-term relationships, anything from intimate relationships to friendships. He goes through cycles of separation, individuation that push people away and he’s subject to approach avoidance, repetition, compulsion.

So all the social interactions and so-called pseudo relationships of the narcissist are insufficiently deep, insufficiently intense and insufficiently prolonged to induce or to be conducive to learning.

Narcissists cannot learn from others because they don’t have others in their lives. Whoever enters the narcissist’s life is immediately converted to an internal object, which is static, immutable and can teach you nothing.

Learning is about change, the observation of change, the experience of change and the lessons we derive from change.

Narcissists don’t change, not externally and not internally.

Narcissism is a grief reaction, frozen in time. Narcissist is a stalactite or a stalagmite, depending where you come from, and therefore is a fossil, is fossilized.

There has been life there once, but it’s long gone. The false self is a kind of entity that is all devouring and all consuming because it’s very much like a black hole. There’s no life inside a black hole. Even light cannot escape, only tiny amounts of deadly radiation.

So social learning, there are many mechanisms.

Social enhancement is the first mechanism. It’s when one or more individuals engage in behavior with an object or a particular location.

So this draws your attention. You see other people doing something somewhere, it draws your attention to this location or to this object, and then you acquire similar behavior.

If they play with the ball, you join the game. If they are all focused on a specific thing in the ground, you join them and look down.

So you emulate the behavior, you imitate the behavior because you have been locally enhanced. Your attention has been attracted to a particular place in the environment or to a particular object.

It’s not specific social interaction. There’s not social interaction between the demonstrators, if you wish, and the observer, but it leads to learning.

Leadership is a different thing. It’s the ability to comprehend the goals of a model.

So first, in order to emulate, you need to have a wrong model. It could be mother, could be father, could be an older brother or sister, sibling, could be your peers, could be teacher, could be someone from the media or show business or sports, doesn’t matter.

The ability to comprehend the goals of your model and to engage in similar behavior in order to achieve similar goals.

You don’t necessarily replicate the actions of the model, but you adopt the values of the model. You adopt the aims and purposes of the model. You adopt what gives the model’s life meaning.

In short, you enter the same meaning space. You share the same space of meaning with the model and this facilitates social learning.

Emulation is not the same as imitation.

Imitation is a process of actually copying behaviors.

So emulation is sharing the same values, beliefs, goals, aims, purposes, and so on and so forth.

But not the same actions in emulation.

In imitation, you copy the behavior. You copy the actions of another person or group or object and you do it intentionally and sometimes unintentionally or even unconsciously.

It’s a very basic primitive form of learning.

But it accounts for most human skills, gestures, interests, attitudes, raw behaviors, social customs, sexual scripts, verbal expressions. They are all the outcomes of imitation which starts very early in life.

Some theories, some scholars propose that true imitation requires that an observer is able to take the perspective of the model and that calls for empathy.

Imitation actually calls for a rudimentary form of empathy known as reflexive empathy, later on cognitive and then emotional. These are the three layers of empathy.

The narcissist has reflexive empathy. He has cognitive empathy, but he has no emotional empathy. So he has what I call empathy.

Called empathy is cognitive plus reflexive plus cognitive.

So according to these scholars, if you don’t have empathy, you’re unable to put yourself in the model’s shoes. You’re unable to take the perspective of the model and you are unable to imitate the model, at least not efficiently.

So you’re unable to learn.

It’s a debate, it’s a disagreement, controversy, whether true imitation occurs in animals also or whether animals just emulate the actions of others or just attracted to location or we let it aside.

In humans, it definitely exists. And it should be again, emulation and imitation should be distinguished from mimicry.

Now I have a whole video dedicated to mimicry on this channel because mimicry is the only form of social learning that the narcissist engages in, but he abuses it.

He abuses mimicry in order to deceive people, coerce them and then mistreat them, abuse them.

So the only mechanism of learning via social interactions available to the narcissist is mimicry and the narcissist thwarts it, corrupts it, defigures it, deforms it into, weaponizes it into a tool of subjugation, subjection, psychopathic coercion and so on and so forth.

Here is a form of social learning in which people without conscious awareness or intent automatically copy other people’s physical movements, postures, gestures, mannerisms, facial expressions, speech patterns and emotions during personal interactions. This is called behavioral mimicry and it probably arises out of the need to belong or to be affiliated. It facilitates a way to establish rapport with others.

Masters abuse this. They pretend to be someone they are not. They pretend to be you. They pretend to be like you. And then they penetrate your defenses. They invade, they colonize, they take over, they entrain and they coercively force you to regress to infancy and to adopt a view of you which is unrealistic, is fantastic.

And all this is done via mimicry. I will not go into details. There’s a whole video dedicated to it. Watch it.