Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Narcissist’s Impostor Syndrome and Hypervigilance

1. 00:11 Narcissists are strange like really oddballs. They’re bizarre. And today we’re going to discuss one such aspect of eccentricity and you know outlier behavior. My name is Svaknin. I’m the author of Malignance of Love, Narcissism Revisited, and the bizarre professor of
2. 00:31 psychology on this channel. Today, we’re going to discuss the fact that sometimes narcissists perceive compliments as slides. You give them a compliment, they become they bristle, they become hypervigilant and suspicious. They are insulted. They become aggressive.
3. 00:55 And all you’ve done is give them a compliment. Well-ment meant compliment, innocuous compliment, and more to the point, relevant compliment, something they’ve accomplished or something they’ve done or something they’ve said that merits compliment a compliment. But
4. 01:09 no, they immediately analyze the compliment, break it apart, recombine and reframe it. And this recombinant compliment becomes an insult or a slight. In other in other situations, your compliment might be perceived as a crude attempt to manipulate the narcissist.
5. 01:32 Narcissist would say, “That’s not a real compliment. This flattery is intended to manipulate me. This person who is giving me the compliment is implying that I’m stupid or that I’m gullible. And that’s of course an insult. Hypervigilance is always there. It’s like background
6. 01:54 noise in in narcissism. All narcissists are hypervigilant all the time. In more extreme cases, there’s overt paranoid ideiation and suspiciousness and compliments are mispersceived as either slides or attempted manipulation and this triggers aggression.
7. 02:13 Why is that? Why is a narcissist incapable of receiving compliments at face value, accepting them and moving on, gratified? Obviously, because all narcissists have what we call colloquially an impostor syndrome.
8. 02:35 There’s a hidden sometimes unconscious belief that the narcissist has that he is fooling fooling everyone that sooner or later he’s going to be exposed. He’s going to be shamed. it’s going to be humiliated. There’s a sense of imminent doom, a sense of
9. 02:57 catastrophizing. The narcissist believes deep inside that it’s all an act that that it’s all a fabrication. It’s all a confabulation. The narcissist in in many ways and very often gaslights himself or herself. Half of all narcissists are women. And it is this background of
10. 03:17 imposttor syndrome that renders every compliment suspect. Every attempt at flattery machavelian every innocuous comment about the narcissist accomplishments or so on so forth a a form of so on and so forth a form of hidden occult um criticism.
11. 03:40 Narcissists reject and resent um all these because they bring to the surface the imposter syndrome. They remind the narcissist that his accompl that his accompl accomplishments are fake that all his claims about himself may be dubious. That his past is questionable.
12. 04:04 That his fantasies and his narratives are con concocted. They’re fictional. And compliments bring this to the surface because they’re reminders. People cannot maintain two personality styles. It’s a common myth online propagated and perpetrated by who else?
13. 04:24 Self-styled experts. You cannot maintain two personality styles. You would often hear victims say, “At home, my nar my narcissist was cold, impersonal, efficacious, and rigidly boundary.” Um, while with with strangers, the narcissist was warm, empathic, funny, and inviting or
14. 04:49 vice versa. Among strangers, the narcissist was detached and indifferent and impervious and invulnerable. While at home, the mask fell and the narcissist allowed himself to expose his vulnerabilities, his needs, his neediness. He was warm, empathic, and
15. 05:07 inviting and so on so forth. Like strangers is one thing. Friends, family or romantic interests are another thing. And a person can have two personality styles or two personalities even with different groups of people. That is expressly untrue. that is untenable and undoable and
16. 05:30 unsustainable. Granted, most people deceive themselves into believing that there is no problem to make such a separation to put on alternating masks or what Goffman and Jung called personas. So some people say I’m I’m different in different settings to the point that one
17. 05:59 could say that I’m different persons in different settings. I’m not the same person. But in reality, no one can sustain such a facade and such a charade for long. If you try to maintain a duality of coterminus dichotamous personality styles, one of these facads will crumble.
18. 06:23 One of these charades, one of these acts, one of these theater productions, one of these movies will begin to feel like disingenuous acting, like faking, like an abrogation of authenticity. Such a split between two sets of behaviors, two sets of personal traits,
19. 06:46 such a pronounced split in different settings would create ego destiny, a sensation of all perervasive awkwardness, discomfort and unease in multiple settings. In time, this constant need to switch between the modes between the personalities would engender anxiety.
20. 07:11 And the only way to reduce this anxiety is to eliminate one of the two personality styles and to become a unitary personality with a single outward-facing public-f facing behavioral and emotional interface. The longer the longer this um dual or split personality persists,
21. 07:34 the longer the damage and the longer the deeper the confusion and the more profound the dysfunction. And this is why narcissists in the long run are not self-efficacious. their personas, their masks bleed into each other and people say the mask falls, the mask has fallen
22. 07:57 because it’s impossible to maintain it forever. Now granted, we don’t behave the same way in the workplace as we do at home and we don’t behave the same way in a police station or in court as we would in a kindergarten. Of course, there are different scripts,
23. 08:15 sexual scripts, social scripts which dictate to us how to behave in different settings, in different environments with different people and under different circumstances. These scripts include some kind of acting and some kind of a public mask or public persona.
24. 08:35 But these scripts should not be confused with personality. These scripts should not be confused with identity. These scripts are, as the name implies, algorithmic. They’re sets of instructions on how to behave for a very limited period of time with highly specific individuals,
25. 08:56 strangers or or intimates. And these scripts and and they don’t tr truly impact the core traits and the core identity of the individual and acting the script. If they do or when they do, we have a psychopathology.
26. 09:18 That’s exactly the case in narcissistic personality disorder. But not only that, similarly in borderline personality disorder and so on. Most mental health pathologies involve this kind of identity disturbance or identity diffusion where there is no stable manifestation or
27. 09:42 expression of an underlying con set of constructs or underlying structure that could be pointed at as the core of continuity. the engine of continuity in the individual. People with different personality styles with with different groups they have they do not maintain this
28. 10:05 sense of continuity. They they feel disjointed. Many of them are also dissociative. They have memory gaps. So no, it’s not true that anyone and everyone has different personalities in different in different situations with different people, different groups.
29. 10:22 That’s completely a true. When this does happen, it requires help. It’s a pathology.
30. 10:34 And still we should distinguish between an imposter syndrome, which is common to all narcissists, and the imposter phenomenon, which is a completely different thing. Allow me to read to you the definitions from the American Psychological Association’s dictionary.
31. 10:52 Here’s what they say. Imposter syndrome, a personality pattern characterized by pathological lying which takes the form of fabricating an identity or a series of identities in an effort to gain recognition and status. Essentially, a form of impersonation.
32. 11:14 An impersonation is defined as the deliberate attempt of another per deliberate assumption of another person’s identity, usually as a means of gaining status or other advantage. The imitation of another person’s behavior or mannerisms, which is sometimes done
33. 11:33 for its corrective or therapeutic effect on one’s own behavior to gain insight or in order to obtain or secure advantage or status. So this is the core of the imposter syndrome which is essentially u um a misleading behavior a behavior that is intended to mislead a behavior
34. 11:56 that is manipulative machavelian in many ways and when unconscious the imposttor syndrome is a tension between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem a core a repository of shame a sense of inferiority and coupled with a compensatory
35. 12:22 narcissistic display ostentatious display of superiority and supremacy and grandiosity. So the imposter syndrome can be explicit and then we are talking about charlatans and corn artists and swindlers and these are usually psychopathic people or it
36. 12:40 can be internalized imposter syndrome and then we are talking about a gap between the person’s self-perception which is essentially as a bet object unworthy unlovable inferior a failure and so on inadequate and the person’s behavior, the person’s
37. 13:02 broadcasts which say I am all knowing or I’m omnipotent. I’m I’m a genius. I’m perfect. I’m I’m amazing. I’m I’m I’m godlike. uh in both cases in in the first case we’re talking about psychopaths and in the second case we’re talking about narcissists with the imposttor
38. 13:24 syndrome is so internalized so buried and so denied and so repressed that it becomes essentially unconscious. The narcissist walks through life feeling constantly ill at ease because he understands that he is a fake, that is unreal, and that at the core where a person should have
39. 13:48 been, there is an absence. And perhaps this is the greatest imposture posture. Imposter posture. The narcissist is an impostor first and foremost by claiming to exist by claiming to be a human being a person and that’s the greatest impersonation in the case of the
40. 14:09 narcissist. Now we should not confuse imposter syndrome which as the name implies is a syndrome is a pathology with the imposter phenomenon. Imposer phenomenon is a situation where highly accomplished, actually accomplished, successful individuals
41. 14:26 paradoxically believe that they are frauds who ultimately will fail and be unmasked and exposed as incompetent and inadequate. The phenomenon originally was described in relation to a group of female college students who despite stellar grades and test scores
42. 14:43 nonetheless nonetheless felt that most or all of their achievements had somehow been the result of chance or error. Follow-up studies showed that men as well as women are susceptible to imposter feelings and that early family conflict and lack of parental support
43. 15:02 may play an eeological role. Clinical symptoms often are associated with the phenomenon as well, including generalized anxiety, depression, and diminished self-esteem and self-confidence. There are actually several instruments, several psychological tests that we use
44. 15:22 to diagnose the imposter phenomenon. We have the Harvey imposter phenomenon scale developed in 1981 by US clinical psychologist Joan Harvey. We have the liyker scale. We have the clans imposter phenomenon scale. we have the perceived fraudulent scale and so on so forth
45. 15:42 developed in 1991 by um US psychologist John Colligian and Robert Sternberg and so on and uh so the the the imposter phenomenon is well recognized and well tested for it was first described or introduced by US clinical psychologists Paul Colleen Rose Clans and Suzan
46. 16:05 gradually there’s a conflation of the imposter phenomenon and the imposter syndrome. And today we tend to believe that the imposter syndrome is a justified imposter phenomenon imposter phenomenon. So whereas the pure imposter phenomenon is counterfactual,
47. 16:27 the individual feels as an impos that he or she is an imposter and a fraudster when they’re not. The imposter syndrome is justified. the individual’s feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, fraudulence, and so on are fully justified. They’re real. And this is
48. 16:46 where in the case of pathological narcissism, the what I call the grandiosity gap kicks in. The grandiosity gap is the gap between the narcissist inflated fantastic counterfactual agendized well grandio self-concept and reality. There’s a gap. Reality pushes back.
49. 17:06 Reality falsifies the false self. Reality undermines and challenges the self-concept. Reality bursts the bubble. Reality uh deflates the fantasy. And this grandiosity gap enhance enhances and and exacerbates the imposter syndrome of the feeling of that I’m an imposter. The gap
50. 17:30 between implicit and explicit self-esteem. uh the fact that the narcissist person personality is compensatory narcissist personality is actually what Jung called a persona a mask it’s not real but when you strip the narcissist’s so-called personality his false self there’s
51. 17:51 nothing behind nothing left behind it’s a total black hole it’s a void with howling winds it’s an emptiness and the narcissist somewhere on some level knows it. Hence the feeling I’m a fraud. I’m an imposer because I don’t exist, says the narcissist. And yet I pretend that I am.