Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist Talks AT You – Not TO You (Clip) (Vaknin Narcissism Summaries YouTube Channel)

1. 00:00 Let me teach you a trick in therapy or counseling or consultation or whatever it is whenever someone talks to another person with intention to help. And this is a trick. Never focus on what people say. Focus on why they say the motivation behind the speech act, the
2. 00:26 intention behind the communication. They matter much more, much much more than the overt explicit content. We call this the hidden text method and it’s studied deeply in philosophy and in the theory of psychotherapy. This applies doubly, triply, quadruply,
3. 00:52 infinitely more to any communication with the narcissist. And the reason is the narcissist never communicates. It’s an illusion. Whenever the narcissist says something to you, ignore what he says. Never mind what he says or what she says. Yes. Half of all narcissist is
4. 01:12 the winner. Never mind what they say. Ask yourself why is he saying this? Why did she choose the words she has chosen? What is behind the overt communication the open text? And the reason is that as I said narcissists don’t communicate unless they have goals and goal oriented
5. 01:39 exactly like psychopaths and narcissists interact with you condescendingly patronizingly unwillingly reluctantly but still sometimes they have to communicate. They communicate with you in in order to accomplish one of four goals. The communication has a name, has a purpose,
6. 02:04 and these are the goals. These are also the answers to the question, why is he saying this? Why did she choose to communicate this way? Reason number one, the narcissist is trying to impress you, not to communicate with you, not to talk to you, not to listen to what you have to
7. 02:25 say. He’s not interested. He couldn’t care less. You don’t exist. You’re an external object. But the narcissist is trying to impress you, to convert you into a source of narcissistic supply or into a potential intimate partner in a shared fantasy or or into a best friend
8. 02:44 which could be taken advantage of. Impression management is critical in narcissism. Narcissism place an emphasis on appearance rather than substance. And so the first possible answer is not communicating with me. She is not talking to me. They’re trying to impress
9. 03:05 me and they’re trying to convert me to the cause to the private religion where they have a god, the false self. The second reason is confabulation. Narcissists, as you may recall, suffer memory gaps. They have a problem with memory. Their memories are not
10. 03:25 continuous. Consequently, they don’t have a core identity. In a desperate attempt to paper over the memory gaps, to bridge them, to bridge the abyss, somehow the narcissist confabulates, he creates short stories, narratives of what might have happened, what possibly
11. 03:47 could have happened, what plausibly had happened, etc., etc. And then he believes his own concoctions, his own inventions, his own narratives, his own storylines, and his own scripts. And he begins to regard them as facts because they emanated from him and he is God.
12. 04:07 Narcissists contribulate in order to make sense of their own lives and to create a semblance of continuous memory, continuous working memory, and consequently a fake identity. So one the second reason a narcissist would communicate with you is that he is
13. 04:26 trying to confabulate. He is trying to explain to you what probably had happened what could have happened or what was what’s the most plausible explanation for his behavior and choices and decisions and temper tantrums and outbursts and whatever. So
14. 04:45 confabulation. The third reason is to support the narcissist’s grandiosity and or shared fantasy. Narcissists use speech. They interact with you. They communicate with you. They talk at you. They never talk to you. They talk at you. They lecture. They’re not there to
15. 05:05 listen. They’re there to lecture. So, and they do all this in order to butress their self-perception um and their self-image as perfect in order to somehow uphold and substantiate their grandio inflated sense of self. So, the speech is structured and it aims
16. 05:29 to elevate the narcissist. It aims to deify the narcissist, a form of verbal apotheiois. And the speech is also intended to inculcate in you the belief that the narcissist’s false self is not false, that the shared fantasy is not a fantasy, that the narcissist’s grandio
17. 05:50 claims are actually the truth. These are facts and so on and so forth. This leads to the fourth reason. The fourth reason is manipulation. Mchavelian narcissist and psychopaths of course use speech use communication in order to alter modify your behaviors, your choices and your
18. 06:15 decisions in ways which are palatable and helpful to the narcissist or the psychopath. In short, they use speech and communication to manipulate you, to do their bidding, to cater to their needs, to fulfill their expectations, to support them somehow, to provide them
19. 06:36 with what they’re looking for. Could be sex, could be money, could be access, could be power in the case of the psychopath, narcissistic supply in the case of the narcissist. You’re beginning to see that the narcissist communication, the narcissist speech has
20. 06:51 nothing to do with the communication, speech acts and speech patterns of normal, healthy people. The narcissist communication and speech are weaponized. These are weapons. weapons in an arsenal intended to provide the narcissist with the capacity to manage impressions,
21. 07:13 to confabulate, to support his grandiose fantastic self-image, to introduce you or induct you or kidnap you into the shared fantasy and ultimately to manipulate you so that you become compliant, submissive, obedient and match fully your representation in the narcissist mind.
22. 07:42 [Music]