Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Why Narcissist Couldn’t Care Less About YOU: Cancel Reflex, Romantic Distancing

1. 00:02 I’ve just returned from a fascinating two-hour conversation with Antoan Pavan. I hope I’m pronouncing it correctly. He maintains the largest YouTube channel on narcissism and narcissistic abuse in France. And we have met, as you see behind me, not in my bedroom, but in a
2. 00:22 studio in Paris, gay par when gay was still something. Okay, shortly you will see the conversation that we have had on his channel and then later on on my channel. It’s been a pleasure and Olivier and Alfie join him and ask questions and it was a jolly
3. 00:47 occasion. Today I’m going to discuss the cancel the narcissist cancel reflex and the process of romantic distancing. Remember, narcissists don’t care. Psychopaths dare. Now, very often you see online self-styled experts and others, especially victims, attributing to the
4. 01:12 narcissist an evil intent, malice. That’s more common with psychopaths. Narcissists are not evil, malicious, or malevolent. They couldn’t be bothered. They are simply flawed flooded with contempt. They’re contemptuous and they are indifferent, especially indifferent
5. 01:35 to your suffering. Now, there’s a case to be made that if someone is overtly uh contemptuous and is indifferent to other people’s suffering, then this person is evil. I leave it to philosophers, theologians to discuss and to debate. What is important is the narcissists are
6. 01:54 unlike psychopaths. They are not cunning. They’re not scheming. They’re not goal oriented. All they want is their daily fix of narcissistic supply. They’re junkies. They’re addicts. There’s not so much malice, malevolence, a full thought here. There’s more a
7. 02:13 reflex or a compulsion. So the narcissist is indifferent. Most narcissists are also contemptuous. They regard other people as inferior to them which upholds the and butresses their sense of grandio supremacy and superiority because they regard others as inferior.
8. 02:38 They have to convince themselves that other people are not special in any sense. They’re not special to as people and they’re not special as sources of supply and they’re not special as participants in the shared fantasy and they’re not special in any way. In other words, the
9. 02:57 narcissist creates a narrative whereby other people are totally dispensable, interchangeable, funible. The narcissist commoditizes people. He regards people as a kind of commodity. so many grains of rice or grains of salt if you wish. Now, of course, people have
10. 03:19 what the narcissist needs. The narcissist is dependent upon other people for narcissistic supply for sex, for services, and for a sense of safety and stability, object constancy. But the narcissist would never admit to this need or neediness.
11. 03:36 The narcissist would never cast himself as essentially codependent. The only way for the narcissist to convince himself that he is above above this addiction is by devaluing other people by reducing them to completely interchangeable objects. The
12. 03:56 fungibility of others. People are NPCs, non-player characters in the narcissist fantasy, the equivalent of a video game. Other people to the narcissist are unreal. The unreality of others contributes to the narcissist’s ability to completely ignore other people’s
13. 04:17 wishes and dreams and fantasies and fears and pains and hopes and smiles, other people’s overures, other people’s empathy or compassion or love. In short, to completely ignore other people requires rendering them an abstract. The narcissist converts other people into
14. 04:37 what I call a snapshot and introject. And this allows the narcissist to be completely um detached, completely aloof, completely devoid of any effective resonance or effective uh response. Narcissists also have aloplastic defenses. People are nuisances. People
15. 05:02 are threats. People are obstacles. There are many things but they’re never people. I’m trying to explain to you the narcissist cancel reflex. Narcissist cancel people the way we cancel people in walk culture. Canc Nar Narcissist can cancel people automatically,
16. 05:25 reflexively, unthinkingly, instinctually. Whereas cancel cancel culture focuses on highly specific alleged transg transgressors, the narcissist cancels everyone immediately. The narcissist needs to cancel people in order to allow the narcissist to convert
17. 05:43 them from three-dimensional flesh and blood breathing, hoping, loving uh people into two dimensional cardboard cutouts, animated figure within the narcissist playground of a mind. Narcissist converts people into figments, into fictional elements in a script or in a
18. 06:06 theater production. And to do that, the narcissist needs to cancel them first. He cancels their reality. He cancels their personal autonomy, their independence, and their agency. He cancels them as um agents, agents of autonomous will. He cancels their
19. 06:27 agendas. He cancels their inputs. He cancels them. The narcissist has a cancel reflex. And so whenever something bad happens, whenever the narcissist fails and so on so forth, he does blame other people. But he blames other people the way you would blame um a table if you were to
20. 06:50 stub your toe or the way you would blame your refrigerator if it were to stop functioning and spoil all the food. It blames other people’s objectivity. It blames other people as objects. They’re supposed to function. They’re supposed to fulfill roles and yet when they don’t
21. 07:08 they are blamed and everything bad that hap that happens in a narcissist’s life is definitely the outcome of these passive aggressive objects also known as people. Narcissists have called empathy. Cold empathy is comprised of cognitive empathy, the ability to recognize the
22. 07:27 states of mind and effective states of other people and reflexive empathy, the bodily reactions to these states of mind of other people. And yet there is no effective component. There’s no emotional resonance or emotional reaction to this newly gained
23. 07:43 information to these realizations. And consequently, there’s never regret or remorse. That is true for narcissists. That is true for psychopaths. Consequently, the narcissist goes through life alienating and estranging people, hurting them, damaging them, breaking
24. 08:03 them, discarding them as so many plastic bottles. The consequences of this behavior are antagonism and recklessness. The narcissist allows himself to engage in endless loops of conflict. That is even more true for the psychopath. and he engages in conflict because he’s
25. 08:25 un unable to predict the consequences and the outcomes of his actions. He does not believe in consequences and outcomes. Other people don’t exist. So antagonizing them, conflicting with them, fighting with them, arguing with them, debating with them, damaging them,
26. 08:43 breaking them, hurting them, harming them, none of this, none of this is real because people are not real. And when something is not real, when something is just a figment of a fantasy or a line in a script, obviously there are not going to be any any adverse consequences.
27. 09:00 This leads to recklessness behavior which is potentially self-defeating, self-damaging and self-destructive. But it goes even deeper. Many victims have noted correctly that the narcissist rejoices in your suffering and resents your joy and happiness.
28. 09:22 I mentioned the lack of effective empathy, but it needs to be coupled with another trait. Narcissists not only lack emotional empathy, they’re also virulently envious. If you combine a lack of empathy, a lack of effective empathy with virulent envy, what you get is entitlement,
29. 09:46 exploitiveness, and what most people would call evil, an indifference to the to the suffering of other people and a resentment of their joy and happiness. When you cannot empathize with other people and yet you envy them for what they accomplish or for what they possess
30. 10:03 or for who they are, this leads you to try to take them down a peg, to try to reduce them to size, to try to sabotage and undermine everything they’ve accomplished, to take away from them their possessions, prized possessions or dear ones. And so
31. 10:26 this is a really bad mixture or cocktail of traits that combined with the narcissist cancel reflex, combined with the narcissist’s inability to perceive the externality and separateness of other people lead the narcissist to behave in ways which very often are
32. 10:45 indistinguishable from the psychopath. ways which are antisocial or in the language of the is ICD desocial.
33. 10:58 So narcissists are envious. Your downfall, your failure, your defeat, they validate the narcissist supremacy. Your success, your accomplishments challenge it. Narcissists regard themsel themselves as the the sole exclusive source of emotions and effects in other people. Only the
34. 11:24 narcissist can make you happy. Only the narcissist can make you sad. Only the narcissist can bring you joy. And only the narcissist can cause you depression. Narcissists are the found of everything that happens to you internally, let alone externally.
35. 11:45 And so when suddenly you’re happy, suddenly you’re joyful, and the narcissist cannot trace it back to anything he has said or done, this threatens the narcissist’s perception of himself as omnipotent. This reminds a narcissist that you are not an internal object, that you have a
36. 12:02 life of your own, that you are independent, that you are autonomous, that you’re a genetic. And this threatens the narcissist’s view of the world is precarious internal balance. And his ability to regard continue to regard internal objects as internal, controllable, manipulable,
37. 12:22 unthreatening. And so narcissists cancel people. It’s a strategy that works for the narcissist because it removes the other person’s potential to somehow undermine the narcissist. Yet when you cancel other people as a habit, especially if you do it ostentatiously, contemptuously,
38. 12:49 if you do it with marked indifference, off-handedly, if you treat people this way, they cancel you back in return. And so all all the narcissist interactions are adversarial. They devolve into power plays and retribution. Ultimately, karma is a Payback
39. 13:15 always comes. You spit on society, society gets wet. Society spits on you, you drown. This is a lesson that narcissists seem to never learn. Part of the problem is the narcissist’s immaturity. The fact that the narcissist mentally and psychologically is a 2-year-old,
40. 13:39 three year old, maximum 9year-old, but usually two or three years old. A two or year old or a threeyear-old is incapable of conceiving of the world as the complex machine that it is. A 2year-old or a three-year-old engages in splitting. Things are all bad. People
41. 13:59 are all bad. Things are all good. People are all good. A 2-year-old or a three-year-old is unable to perceive or digest or contemplate nuances, subtleties, shades of gray. So when healthier people come across narcissists, they often struck by the narcissist rigid immaturity and
42. 14:21 childlike vibe. There is clearly an infantile entity where an adult or a person should have been. At the same time, the narcissist makes them feel infuriatingly inferior by establishing his or her grandio delusional superiority, intellectual superiority, pecuniary,
43. 14:46 biographical or otherwise. Narcissist proclaims and promulgates his superiority. He insists on it. It’s not only ostentatious, it’s coercive. And this discrepancy between the narcissist’s mental age, which is so evidently young, infantile, immature,
44. 15:05 underdeveloped, and the narcissist’s claims for supremacy and superiority. There’s a discrepancy here. There’s a gap. And this discrepancy creates a jarring dissonance in people. Children are not supposed to make us feel inferior or bad. Children are not
45. 15:21 supposed to have the power to hurt us and harm us or break us apart or damage us or induct us into their fantasies. And we are not supposed to feel aggressive, envious and competitive towards kids. On the contrary, we should find children endearing. We should
46. 15:38 protect them. Narcissists are like aliens as they were depicted in old sci-fi movies. They have a slight build mentally speaking, but giant babylike eggheheads. They are inaccessibly alien or foreign. Less grandio narcissists, goal oriented psychopaths tried to redress this
47. 16:01 offensive, dissonant, and inongruent power asymmetry by pretending to need and desire the other party. These are mostly pro-social or commu communal types. Narcissists and narcissistic and psychopathic men would tell women how charming, intelligent, and irresistible they are.
48. 16:22 They would idealize them and how much they earn for their company and sex. They would let men know that they find them shrewd and super intelligent and reliable and knowledgeable and they would like to hang out with them. One could therefore regard the process of idealization
49. 16:38 as defensive in nature. Idealization allows the narcissist to idealize himself. When when the narcissist idealizes others, he also is also idealizing himself. This is the process known as co idealization. By idealizing other people which he possesses, other people which are
50. 16:57 figments of his mind, other people which are internal objects, by idealizing them, the narcissist also ends up idealizing himself. So this is one major function of idealization. Another function of idealization is a narcissist needs to convince himself of of the
51. 17:13 veracity of the idealized version of the other of his intimate partner for example. So repetition makes it habit and makes it convincing. But the third function which is often neglected in literature is a defensive posture. Idealizing other people reduces their aggression,
52. 17:34 mitigates and amilarates the antagonism and diffuses the conflict. Some narcissists though or I would say majority are too full of themselves to play this game. They’re utterly self-sufficient. They self-supply. They’re solypistically self-contained. They’re superior and
53. 17:55 they’re not ashamed to communicate it. Nor do they intend to am ailarate the impact of this natural imbalance. They care little what people the lesser specimens think about them. For example, people may think that they are unattractive or asexual or gullible or
54. 18:13 whatever. They couldn’t care less. They couldn’t care less about what they do to to the what people do to them in retribution. This apparent sanua, this apparent invulnerability serves to frustrate their interlocators even further and it renders people in
55. 18:32 the narcissist’s ambit and environment even more aggressive, devaluing, vindictive, a vicious circle of hurtful escalation and ultimately adversarial conflict. people. Narcissists cancel people overtly, ostentatiously and contemptuously or implicitly and so
56. 18:56 people cancel them back. Narcissists are aggressive. People are aggressive. Narcissists are hurtful. People hurt them. Narcissists break people and damage them. There’s retribution and a price to pay. What comes around, what goes around comes around always for the narcissist.
57. 19:15 Narcissists would tell you that they’re flourishing, they’re thriving, they’re happy, golucky, they’re lying. Even if narcissists appear to be externally successful, internally they’re decaying, they’re corroding, they’re falling apart. One of the defenses against this
58. 19:34 inexorable process is romantic distancing. Romantic distancing is when people who used to have a full-fledged relationship remain in the confines of a diet, share living and business quarters, and become essentially functional roommates or business partners, but they’re
59. 19:52 emotionally or sexually avoidant and absent. They keep on keeping on owing to inertia or habit, community property, common interests, common children, peer pressure, social expectations, low self-esteem, economic, legal or other dependence, pessimism regarding the
60. 20:09 dating pool, for example. Sometimes good sex and other reasons they can think of. The narcissist encourages romantic distancing, precisely the kind of relationship that caters to his needs and wishes. It allows him to withdraw into himself, to isolate himself, to self-supp.
61. 20:31 And it allows them to pursue alternatives outside the bond or outside the diet. But many of these disgruntled spouses or intimate partners, six sek sex or intimacy or love elsewhere. A small minority do so openly, ostentatiously, often with their official primary partner present,
62. 20:54 observing as they flirt with other people. And so the narcissist council reflex within intimate romantic relationships can lead to effective abandonment by the narcissist partner. losses his partner would resort to extra diadic alternative outside the couple
63. 21:24 and would often do so in a way that the narcissist would be present and observe as the flirting with another person evolves into much more. But why flaunt the extra diadic affair? Why be cruel and so egregious? There are three successive phases in such radical misbehavior.
64. 21:45 Number one, triangulation, attempting to rekindle the relationship by provoking jealousy. It’s a cry for help. Really, a signaling of distress and dysphoria. If this fails and the partner couldn’t care less, there is number two rage and a wish to hurt the partner’s feeling by
65. 22:05 defined in your face overt disempathic and disrespectful cheating that he is forced to witness. The third phase is gradually being unfaithful becomes a way to self soothe and cater to emotional and sexual needs not met by the narcissistic primary partner. There is little effort to
66. 22:25 conceal the succession of new lovers because the cheater no longer bothers about his or her partner’s emotions and whe whether she is hurt or not. Emotional absence and utter indifference as well as unrelenting and driven selfishness replace love, friendship or
67. 22:44 even common courtesy. The rationalization is he or she they don’t care. They don’t mind. So why bother to hide it? This is the end result. This is the end point of the narcissist council reflex in intimate relationships. But the same applies to
68. 23:04 the workplace to friendships and so on. Ultimately the narcissist is abandoned. Ultimately the narcissist is the target of retribution. passive aggressive or aggressive, implicit or explicit, hidden or overt. Ultimately, the narcissist pays a price for cancelelling other people,
69. 23:25 distancing himself from other people, holding them in contempt, ignoring them, reducing them to abstract internal objects, two-dimensional, taking away from them their joy, their happiness, the life, their core identity, their agency, personal autonomy and independence, social
70. 23:46 network and family. In short, everything. When you take everything from someone, they’ve got nothing to lose and you become a prime and only target. And this is the end life for all narcissists.