Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Reality as Narcissistic Injury (Grandiosity Gap)

1. 00:02 There is an inherent dichotomy, an innate contradiction in psychology and in self-help literature. On the one hand, we are told that we should expand our horizons. We should explore our potentials. We should be spontaneous and in many ways unbridled. We should strive uh to kind of
2. 00:30 experiment, to try things, to step out of our comfort zone, to be ourselves by becoming different at different times, in different settings and circumstances and environments. to interact with other people and establish interpersonal relationships in order to
3. 00:51 enrich ourselves and introduce new things into our lives. All this is a growth strategy. It’s about having a life plan. It’s about expanding. It’s about subsuming. It’s about integrating the environment and other people into our lives. So this is message number one.
4. 01:18 And then there’s message number two. Don’t do certain things. Certain things are wrong. If you do certain things, if you act in certain ways, you’re evil. You’re misguided in the best case. And so there is an emphasis on inhibitions on boundaries on self-limitation, self-control,
5. 01:44 self-discipline. So which is it? Should we expand like in the big bang or like a supernova? Or should we constrict ourselves into some kind of neutron star, a black hole, red dwarf? Enough with the cosmological metaphors. You get my meaning. One
6. 02:07 message is expand, consume, subsume, explore, discover, experiment, be adventurous, be spontaneous. The other message is stay at home, limit yourself, discipline yourself, control yourself and don’t do wrong, only good. That’s the voice of the conscience.
7. 02:36 And these conflicting messages do not go well together. They create dissonance. They create anxiety, especially in modern and postmodern societies. where moral code codes and social norms and conventions and mores have all but evaporated and disintegrated. There are
8. 02:58 no rigid scripts. You’re not told what to do. You have to discover it for yourself. You had to re you have to reinvent yourself. You have to negotiate every relationship separately time and again. There are no rigid cod cod codices. there no rigid codes of or of how to do
9. 03:18 things and how to be with other people. And so in this fluid environment which creates a lot of uncertainty and indeterminacy and anxiety, in this fluid environment, not only are we told that we should be all over the place, but at the same time we are told that we
10. 03:38 should be nowhere, that we should constrict This is the topic I want to explore today in the context I’m sorry of pathological narcissism. My name is Sandakin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I’m a professor of psychology this benited subject
11. 04:01 discipline adulthood maturity are about life constriction and behavioral constriction. We are told that to be an adult, to grow up, to attain milestones of maturity, all these require inhibitions, constraints on behavior, boundaries, learning from experience what to avoid,
12. 04:30 what to not do, adhering to norms and conventions and mores which are inculcated and internalized in us as the voice of conscious or um a artifact of socialization and all this of course as I said creates a lot of anxieties because our natural tendency is to be to
13. 04:53 exist to experiment to to go through the adventure of life with joy and cheer and this is frowned upon by society because society is terrified of losing control. Social control is a major feature especially of modern societies but you know major feature of human history and
14. 05:13 societies, organized societies especially the elites. They are petrified at the idea that one might become bigski a slacker they are petrified at the idea that their values or the values they’re trying to impose on the masses are not going to work. the people are
15. 05:32 going to give up on money, career and that they are going to simply be. And so these are the dual messages. Grow up by exploring and becoming yourself and grow up by limiting yourself, inhibiting yourself, disciplining yourself and controlling yourself and avoiding monopoly of
16. 05:58 possible actions, decisions, choices and behaviors. And of course this conflict, this inherent contradiction, they are most pronounced in pathological narcissism. You see, reality including social reality is about constriction. It’s about limitation. It’s about
17. 06:21 control. It’s about manipulation. It’s about behavior modification. That’s what reality is all about. Reality pushes back. Reality is harsh, uncompromising, impersonal, and very often random. Reality is not considerate. Reality doesn’t take one’s needs and
18. 06:40 wishes and hopes and dreams and fantasies into account. Reality is just there. A reality cannot be negotiated with. It can be of course um modified, mitigated, amilarated, reconstructed, changed, impacted upon. It can be subject, it can be kind of raw material subject to one’s
19. 07:04 will and action. But that’s in the fringes. That is a veneer because the core of reality, the nucleus of reality is untouchable, immutable, non-malleable, impermeable, invulnerable. And so when one is confronted with reality, one is confronted with one’s own limits,
20. 07:30 with one’s own inadequacies, with one’s own minimization, with one’s own to some extent self- negation. One is confronted with one’s finitness with the fact that one’s power is very constrained that one’s knowledge is highly partial and biased. These are the
21. 07:54 messages from reality that emanate from reality and shape all of us. And these are exactly the messages that the narcissist rejects vehemently, voseiferously, violently, aggressively and abusively. The narcissist refuses to accept that he or she is limited in any sense.
22. 08:15 Social reality which is a part of reality, larger reality. Social reality constricts. Social reality informs the individual. This is where you stop. This is what the world begins. And the narcissist rejects reality because it challenges and undermines. is in infinitely inflated,
23. 08:38 counterfactual, unreal and unrealistic fantastic self-concept. Reality is the narcissist greatest enemy and he chooses to renounce it at every turn by opting for fantasy by collaborating with others in creating in engendering and in propagating and in imposing fantasies.
24. 09:02 Fantasy is a refuge and sanctuary of the narcissist. Narcissism is escapism. But there’s a problem with this solution. And the problem is that reality intrudes. Reality insists on being known, being noticed. Reality is inexurable. And reality is a bit like water. It
25. 09:27 permeates every nook and cranny and crack. There’s no way to prevent water from being everywhere and there’s no way of preventing reality from imposing its will from making itself known. And so this creates what I call the grandiosity gap. the gap between the
26. 09:52 self-concept, self-image, self-esteem and sense of selfworth which are often bloated and inflated and crazy and inane and detached from reality. So the gap between this self-concept which is fantastic and reality itself, reality informs the narcissist.
27. 10:15 The way you see yourself, the way you believe yourself to be is nonsensical. It’s not true. It’s wrong. Reality keeps sending messages and messengers onto the narcissist to inform the narcissist that everything he thinks he knows about himself. Everything he believes to be true,
28. 10:36 everything he fully is fully convinced is factual is actually all wrong. And this is a very injurious message. It’s a very dissonant message. It renders reality a constant state of ambient narcissistic injury. The narcissist is constantly narcissistically injured by the mere
29. 11:01 existence of reality. Reality doesn’t have to do anything. It just has it’s it just has to be there. And every time the narcissist gets in touch with the rough edges of reality, with the contours of reality, with the fabric and texture of reality, every time this happens, the
30. 11:19 narcissist is narcissistically injured. And these injuries accumulate. They fester. They they um they’re inside the narcissist and they they’re like seeds. They they grow. They and so they take over the narcissist and they lead to a to frustration and frustration as we know
31. 11:41 from Dalard’s work in 1939 frustration leads to aggression. So this is the sequence. A grandio fantasy, cognitive distortion, push back by reality, intrusion, frustration, narcissistic injury, rage, frustration, aggression. But frustration and aggression
32. 12:06 are not pointlike events in the narcissist life. They are the clinical features of narcissism. They permeate the entire narcissistic space. They characterize pathological narcissism. And this is what is known as narcissistic abuse. The narcissist abuses people because
33. 12:26 people are real. Because they are figments of reality, not of his fantasy. because people keep reminding him of his real station in life, his real location, his real standing, his real wealth or lack thereof is real education. Real or or imagine lack of education.
34. 12:50 And so they keep reminding him that he is essentially an actor in the best case or a clown in the worst case. That he’s pathetic. That is incredible. Not in the good sense, but in the bad sense. Incredible not to be believed. This constant messaging um render the narcissist highly
35. 13:15 aggressive, sometimes violent, but always verbally abusive and and put put all of these together and you get narcissistic abuse. And sometimes when this delusional fantasy dome, this paracosm when they crumble, especially if this happens abruptly because of some event, some
36. 13:38 occurrence, some disaster, some um criticism, some public humiliation and shaming, some something exposure. When there is a an abrupt or sudden change from delusional fantasy to unmitigated, unrefined, unfineted reality. At that point, the narcissist loses all his or her defenses.
37. 14:05 Um this is known as decompensation and the result is narcissistic motification and a borderline state a borderline like state of emotion dysregulation self-destructiveness which can culminate in self harm and suicidal ideiation or even suicide.
38. 14:25 So it is this battle between reality and fantasy that is the core feature by far of the narcissist. everything else stems for it. If you renounce reality, you renounce everyone else in reality. You renounce the externality and separateness of other people because
39. 14:44 they’re not real. Why are they not real? Because you reject reality as an organizing principle. You reject reality as an explanatory interpretative principle, hermeneutic principle. You reject reality because it’s real and you are not real. You have chosen as a
40. 15:02 narcissist to not be real. You’re embedded and immersed in an all-consuming all pervasive fantasy. And everyone else around you keeps reminding you that it’s a fantasy, that your false self is false, that your grandiosity is laughable. And so this derision
41. 15:23 um this mockery this criticism and disagreement this rejection and shunning and avoidance by people this uh hatred of the narcissist and the fact that he’s obnoxious to others. All these gang up on the narcissist and so he rejects reality and people in
42. 15:42 it because they’re real. And obviously the outcome is that he’s incapable of empathy. Because how can you empathize with non-existent entities? If people are not real, one cannot empathize with them. So you see that even a very important feature of narcissism, the lack of
43. 16:02 effective empathy is a derivative of the narcissist’s reluctance, inability, vehement rejection and renouncing of reality. It is this choice, this extended rabbid fantasy defense. This is a clinical feature from which one can derive all the the other
44. 16:26 clinical features of pathological narcissism. First and foremost, as a child in early childhood, as an infant, as a toddler, the narcissist to be has rejected reality, has rejected his mother. has rejected the world and has rejected first and foremost himself. His or her
45. 16:49 true self and has become a falsity, a falsehood, has become a story, a movie, a script. The false self is a narrative. And the narcissist chooses to transition from a real three-dimensional object to a symbolic entity, to a story, to a narrative, to a piece
46. 17:18 of fiction. The narcissist fictionalizes himself or herself as a child and continues throughout life as a piece of fiction. And as a piece of fiction, the narcissist has no place in reality and reality has no place in the narcissist. And yet the narcissist is furious when
47. 17:38 he is rejected or she is rejected by reality. And this is the paradox in narcissism. And this is the dissonance that I started with at the beginning of the video. This constant messaging of be yourself on condition that you are never yourself. Be yourself fully to the
48. 17:56 maximum on condition that you’re inhibited and limited and boundaried. And these two messages can go together. And in pathological narcissism, we see the culmination of this conflict, of this dissonance, of this contradiction, of these two mutually exclusive propositions.