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1. 00:02 Do you remember the folktale about the boy who cried wolf? He cried wolf so many times falsely that when he was confronted, he ended up confronted with a real wolf. No one came to his aid. No one believed him. And he was, I must assume, devoured.
2. 00:25 Ended up as a lunch item on the wolf’s menu. Today we are going to discuss when the narcissist cries wolf because sometimes the narcissist ends up confronting real wolves and no one believes him. No one comes to her aid. Half of all narcissists are women to
3. 00:50 remind you. My name is Saknin. I’m the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a sheep in wolf’s clothing as a professor of psychology. Okay, first an announcement or two. How can we without um I’m going to spend the entire month
4. 01:11 of October in Paris. Paris is still, last time I checked, the capital of France. I’m going to be there throughout the month of October. If you want a face-to-face consultation with me or and or if you want to arrange a free seminar or free lectures, I do
5. 01:32 not charge speakers fees. Please contact me at sambakin@gmail.com. The um email address is in the description. svaknmail.com. Similarly, I’m going to be in Croatia, Zagreb and Dalmatia. in November. If you want a face-to-face consultation with me, it’s a paid consultation. And
6. 01:59 if you want to organize a seminar or lecture free of charge, please contact me at the same email address. Destinations change. My email address never does. And now to narcissists and wolves. A match made in heaven.
7. 02:22 We tend to demonize narcissists. We never give them the benefit of the doubt. We assume automatically that they are lying, gaslighting, manipul manipulating, that they are uh nefarious and insidious and punitious, that they’re evil and wicked and malevolent and so on so
8. 02:44 forth. And in the vast majority of cases, we would probably be right. However, narcissists also come across real wolves. Narcissists sometimes are actually telling the truth. Their grievances and complaints and alarm are justified. And today we’re going to discuss four such
9. 03:10 situations. The first one is the discard phase. Narcissist discard people. They treat them as interchangeable, funible, dispensable articles or objects. And all this is true of course. But sometimes the people that narcissist discard, the people whom they discard, they are
10. 03:32 actually toxic people. They are evil people. There are friends who have betrayed the narcissist, spouses who have cheated on the narcissist, and so on and so forth. Narcissists discard people, some of whom are actually toxic people and should have
11. 03:55 been discarded in the first place. This is especially true when it comes to the narcissist because narcissists tend to attract people who are initially broken and damaged people who suffer from mental health issues such as mood disorders, stuff substance use
12. 04:18 disorders or personality disorders. Narcissists, for example, are notorious for teaming up with borderline border lines people with borderline personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder aka in extreme form psychopaths. So the narcissist finds himself very frequently
13. 04:40 surrounded by people like border lines, like psychopaths, like codependents who manipulate and control from the bottom. surrounded by people covert narcissists who are by definition and by clinical description who are manipulative, who are toxic, who
14. 05:02 are aggressive and problematic and sometimes dangerous. So the narcissist doesn’t have a choice but to discard them. And when he does, people say, “Oh, that’s a narcissist. Of course, he has discarded this poor person.” But the poor person might well have been a covert narcissist
15. 05:24 or a borderline or even a psychopath. It’s a common confluence and coorbidity. These disorders often come together as a kind of delectable package deal. And so don’t always assume that the narcissist discard is unjustified. that all the people the
16. 05:47 narcissist discards automatically and by virtue of having been discarded are angels. That is not the case. Narcissists attract to themselves an inordinate percentage and number of people who are bad people, evil people, wicked people, disregulated people,
17. 06:09 dangerous people, aggressive people, psychopathic people, narcissistic people and so on. And because there is this confluence of the maimed and the disabled, the narcissist very frequently has no other choice but to discard these toxic presences in his or her life.
18. 06:35 Number two, we keep describing the narcissist as a predator and everyone around him or her as victims or in the best case survivors. That is not always true. Sometimes the narcissist falls prey to predators. Don’t forget that narcissist are extremely gullible.
19. 07:01 They are gullible because they are grandiose. They are gullible because they assume that they are godlike. That they are immune to the consequences of their actions. That they are omnisient. They know everything. That they are omnipotent. They’re all powerful. Their
20. 07:21 the self-concept of the narcissist is so distorted. His perception of himself is as a divine entity, as a perfect being. And so the narcissist is incapable of learning. And the narcissist always assumes that he is invulnerable, untouchable owing to or due to his amazing hyper
21. 07:47 intelligence or other features. It is this dramatically or comically distorted self-concept that renders the narcissist very susceptible, very malleable, very suggestible, very aminable to manipulation. Flattery, for example, is works with the
22. 08:14 narcissist. It’s a form, it’s a way to manipulate a narcissist without fail. And so the narcissist depends on other people for narcissistic supply. And at the same time he opens himself or she opens herself to numerous vectors of attack. And this gullibility means that
23. 08:38 narcissists often actually fall victims to predators. They fall victims to psychopaths and con artists and charlatans. they fall victims to other narcissists, malignant narcissist for example. So don’t always assume that it is the narcissist who is the predator. He may
24. 09:00 be telling the truth when the narcissist claims to have been victimized. He may be telling the truth. She may be describing something that has really happened to her. Narcissists are often victimized. So their grievances and claims of victimhood are sometimes definitely justified.
25. 09:24 Next we assume that somehow the narcissist is a kind of impermeable, invulnerable, nonsusceptible entity. The narcissist cannot truly experience shame or remorse or guilt or fear or pain. It’s quite true when it comes to remorse and guilt. Narcissist exactly like
26. 09:53 psychopaths are basically incapable of experiencing remorse and guilt because they have very powerful reframing mechanisms. They tend to rewrite history and rearrange the situation in a self-justifying manner. However, it is not true that narcissists are incapable
27. 10:14 of experiencing shame, deep, molesting, overwhelming, shame, pain, hurt, fear. All these negative effects overpower and overwhelm the narcissist and render the narcissist in effect a borderline with emotion dysregulation. When the narcissist experiences a
28. 10:40 narcissistic injury, let alone a narcissistic motification, all the narcissist defenses crumble, a process known as decompensation. And then the narcissist is skinless, exposed to harsh reality, devoid of the protections of the facious, grandio self-concept. At that point, the
29. 11:06 narcissist gets gets in touch with a reservoir of overpowering all-consuming shame. There’s a lot of hurt, a lot of pain and a lot of fear because the narcissist starts to emotionally disregulate and he is not experiencing this. It’s a new experience and there is
30. 11:27 the terror of suicidal ideiation and worse. When the narcissist devolves into a borderline state, nothing could be more horrifying. Similarly, when the narcissist endures a long period of narcissistic collapse, he doesn’t perseverate. It doesn’t persist. He doesn’t persevere.
31. 11:50 On the very contrary, narcissistic collapse corrods the narcissist, erodess the narcissist defenses, demolishes and eradicates and obliterates the narcissist, elaborates, laboriously constructed and precariously balanced self-concept. The narcissist remains utterly defenseless,
32. 12:14 open to the invasion of reality and other people, including people with malevolent intent. So no, it’s not true that narcissists are constantly egoonic and happy golucky and untouchable and always feel superior and hottily arrogant and so that’s
33. 12:33 completely untrue even when it comes to overt narcissists. That’s why all narcissists go through covert phases because they do experience negative effects that threaten to unbalance and disintegrate them to reduce them to rubble. And finally, another example. I promise
34. 12:56 four. So the fourth example is the way that the narcissist gaslights himself or herself. Gaslighting is often attributed to narcissists. Erroneously, narcissists do not gaslight. Psychopaths do. Gaslighting requires an ability to tell apart reality from fantasy, something
35. 13:20 the narcissist cannot do. When the narcissist engages in confabulations, in a fantasy, in daydreaming and so on, he truly believes. He believes the fantasy. He denies and renounces reality. He puts stock and is committed to his own promises and his own vision of the
36. 13:42 future. So narcissist do not gaslight. But the fantasy itself gaslights the narcissist. The narcissist is gas lit by his own fantasy. And the fact that the narcissist loses his reality testing, fact that the narcissist is unable to tell reality apart from fantasy, renders the
37. 14:06 narcissist very very susceptible and vulnerable and gullible and dangerously exposed. So narcissists gaslight themselves in a way by believing in the fantasy by committing themselves to the fantasy and giving up on reality something known as impaired reality testing. At that point
38. 14:30 they become a play thing. They become prey to numerous predators. They become vulnerable and susceptible to the whims and malevolence perhaps malice and and dysfunctions of people around them. A narcissist who is with a borderline opens himself up to the
39. 14:53 border lines very often externalized aggression and devaluation. a narcissist who is with a psychopath would fall prey to some kind of con or some kind of strategy or scheme. Narcissists therefore are childlike in this sense. If we want to capture the essence of the
40. 15:19 narcissist, both the negative and the positive aspects or shall I say the negative and the vulnerable aspects, then I think comparing them to children does the job. Narcissists are children, very young children, infants, toddlers, and exactly like toddlers. They are
41. 15:41 self-centered. They’re exploitative. They’re disempathic. They’re envious. They’re possessive. They’re jealous. Exactly like children. They’re aggressive and not fully able to perceive other people as external and separate and exactly like children. They live in
42. 16:05 fantasy in a dream world in a paracosm. And all these all these childlike dimensions and childlike aspects of the narcissist render the narcissist prey to numerous predators on the one hand and on the other hand do not allow the narcissist to engage with reality and with people
43. 16:29 in reality in any meaningful way. It is a prison constructed by the narcissist’s own hands and devices. It is an incarceration, a solitary confinement from which a narcissist never exists. There’s no parole and the narcissist is doomed to spend his life
44. 16:55 in this cell until the very day he or she dies.