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1. 00:01 In the video you're about to watch, I'm using the term narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply is just a fancy way of saying attention, both negative and positive. The narcissist solicits input and feedback from other people. And then the narcissist uses this
2. 00:24 feedback, this input, this attention, uses them in order to regulate his or her internal environment to regulate moods, effects, especially negative effects, negative emotions such as anger or envy or hatred. And in order to self-enhance narcissistic supply helps the narcissist
3. 00:51 to maintain a grandio, fantastic, inflated, counterfactual, unrealistic self-concept, self-concept which is comprised of self-image, self-esteem, self-confidence, a sense of selfworth. Narcissistic supply therefore is a critical regulatory function. The
4. 01:16 narcissist uses narcissistic supply to maintain a stable fixed immutable unchanging internal environment. That is very important to understand. Narcissistic supply is not a motivating force. It does not cause the narcissist to behave in any specific way. It
5. 01:41 doesn't induce the narcissist to action. It doesn't motivate the narcissist to move on. On the very contrary, narcissistic supply is about maintaining the status quo ante about maintaining the self-concept in a completely frozen state, invulnerable, impermeable,
6. 02:04 unchangeable, unmodifiable. Ouritic supply is therefore a stabilizing influence, an integral part of what we call self-enhancement. Enjoy the video. In the late 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, when you were all just a glimmer in your parents' eyes,
7. 02:31 I was toying with the phrase narcissistic fuel. I was coming up with a whole new language to describe the internal world of the narcissist and the way the narcissist interacts with other people now known as narcissistic abuse a phrase which I also coined. So I I was
8. 02:50 coming up with all kinds of neologisms and coinages and new phrases and new words and for a while I was using narcissistic fuel and then I decided that it's wrong. Narcissistic fuel is seriously wrong, very misleading. I'll explain in a minute why. I went back to the
9. 03:09 psychoanalytic literature of the 1930s and I found another phrase, narcissistic supplies, not supply, supplies in plural. In the early literature of psychoanalysis, narcissistic supplies simply meant the way the child interacts with his or her parents during the
10. 03:33 narcissistic phase of ego development. It had nothing to do with pathological narcissism. So I borrowed this phrase narcissistic supply. I changed supplies in plural. I changed it. I transformed it into narcissistic supply. I linked it to pathological narcissism and I infused it
11. 03:57 with new meaning. The way narcissistic supply is used nowadays is 100% my work.
12. 04:06 But in the process, I have devalued and discarded normally the phrase narcissistic fuel. Why did I give up on it? because I think it's exceedingly misleading. What is what do we do with fuel? When we put fuel in the car, it's because we want it to do some work.
13. 04:29 Fuel is intimately connected with motion, with movement, with action, with labor, with work. When we put fuel rods in a nuclear reactor, it's because we want to bring about a nuclear chain reaction which would lead essentially and ultimately to the production of
14. 04:49 energy. Similarly, when we put fuel in a car, we want it to move forward. When we eat, food is a form of fuel and we eat in order to be able to make YouTube videos for example. Fuel therefore is intimately, irretrievably, irreversibly, ineluctibly, absolutely, 100%
15. 05:11 ultimately, completely connected to work. Whereas narcissistic supply is completely the opposite. Narcissistic supply, the input and feedback that the narcissist solicits from other people. It has nothing to do with motion, action, work, labor,
16. 05:33 change, or transformation. Exactly the opposite. Narcissistic supply is about self-enhancement. It's about preserving the grandiose, inflated, fantastic self-concept of the narcissist. It's about not making any changes. It's about convincing the narcissist that he
17. 05:55 doesn't need to change. He doesn't need to do any work because he is perfect. So you see narcissistic fuel is completely wrong because it gives the impression that the narcissist is on some mission, some quest, some enormous labor, herculan labor, some toil, and he needs
18. 06:15 fuel all the time to maintain this endeavor, this effort, this enterprise, this project. That's not the case at all. It's actually the exact opposite of what's happening. The narcissist consumes and absorbs input and feedback from other people in order to be able to
19. 06:35 not change, to not do any work, to not move on. It's exactly the opposite of fuel. Okay, but this is only one example of several um phrases and words and so
20. 06:53 on so forth which are very common online inevitably and are very misleading. Consider for example narcissist magnet. Yes, I shame I am ashamed to admit that I coined this one as well. Narcissist magnet is again a very mis evokes a very misleading imagery because a magnet is
21. 07:18 passive. A magnet is just there. A magnet is not responsible, not accountable for its own magnetism. A magnet therefore is the hapless recipient and in many ways victim of external outside forces, the force known as magnetism. So when you say I'm a
22. 07:41 narcissist magnet, it means I've been victimized by a narcissist. I teamed up with a narcissist. I married a narcissist. I had children with a narcissist. I collaborated with a narcissist. But none of this is my fault. I'm not responsible for any of
23. 07:57 this. I'm not I should not be held accountable. I've had no contribution to any of this. I was the absolutely 100% passive recipient of the narcissist's attentions and the narcissist's delterious actions. None of it has anything to do with me. I'm a magnet, which of course is
24. 08:17 counterfactual. That's not the way it happened. Victims contribute to their predicament. Victims are responsible. should be held accountable for some of their decisions and choices. There's no excuse for abuse. Narcissistic abuse and is is an egregious form of maltreatment and of
25. 08:36 course should be penalized one way or another. But the victim is there. The victim has agency. The victim has made choices and decisions. The victim got involved. So it's not the victim is not a magnet. And it's very misleading to describe victims as narcissist magnets because
26. 08:58 they helplessly attract narcissists to them and then just stand back and allow the narcissist to destroy their lives and take away their identities. That's very excalpating. It's very aggizing, but it's not the truth. Consider another simile. the vampire.
27. 09:22 Everyone and his dog, self-styled experts, of course, would tell you that narcissists are vampiric, that they are vampires. But if you delve into the 19th century literature about vampires and the 20th century and the 21st century, cinema, for example,
28. 09:40 vampires love. They're capable of experiencing attraction, sexual, romantic. They're capable of falling in love. Some vampires are actually altruistic. They want to save people. They want to give people an eternal life. Of course, they harm people. They hurt
29. 10:01 people. They kill people before they revive them. It's all very true. But many many vampires in literature and cinema actually are doing all this because they believe that to be a vampire is far preferable and far superior to being a human. So they're trying to convert humans into
30. 10:25 vampires thereby improving their eternal lives later on. So that's not exactly a narcissist. A narcissist is incapable of experiencing love. Narcissists have no access to positive emotions, not in themselves and they're unable to recognize positive
31. 10:44 emotions in others. Narcissists are not altruistic. They're not concerned with the welfare, well-being, and happiness of other people even when they claim to be so. When they claim to be charitable and altruistic, they do it ostentatiously as a way to obtain
32. 11:01 narcissistic supply. Pro-social narcissists, communal narcissists are absolutely the worst type of narcissist in my view because you don't see them coming. And so narcissists are not vampires. The motivations of vampires are in most cases pure. Their methods
33. 11:22 leave a lot to be desired. But they experience desire, they experience passion, experience love, they experience attraction. And they want to better, they want to improve, they want to transform and transmute people into a form of into a life form which they
34. 11:43 perceive to be far better, far preferable, far superior to the human condition. Now that is not to say that all simileies and metaphors are wrong. Take for example Ross Rosenberg's self-love deficit which I think is a wonderful coinage or consider for
35. 12:01 example first's black hole when she described the black hole in autistic children. Um today we use black hole to describe what's happening inside the borderline inside the narcissist this allconsuming emptiness uh within them. So some metaphors
36. 12:22 capture reality, capture the essence and quiddity of mental illness and convey them in a way that is much more easily communicable and much more recognizable to laymen and to normal and healthy people. But some simileies and metaphors are very misleading. They teach us the
37. 12:41 wrong things. Narcissistic fuel, narcissist magnate, narcissist as vampires are just three examples. Unfortunately of