Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Controlling, Abandoning YOU: Neglectful vs. Fretful Narcissist Passive-aggression

1. 00:01 When we say that someone is fretful, we mean he or she is anxious, distressed, irritated, annoyed, catastrophizes. Someone who always sees the worst in people, in situations, and predict the most abominable adverse outcomes. This is the fretful person. Now many
2. 00:28 narcissists are fretful because pathological narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder is often comorbid or there is a co-occurrence with anxiety disorders. This is especially true with communal pro-social narcissists. These people who are essentially
3. 00:50 narcissists, grandiose narcissist, these people pretend to worry about, for example, your health. They become pseudo hypocchondrics. They summatize your symptoms. They surround you and circle you with advice, with reminders. You should take your
4. 01:12 pills. You should do this. You should do that. They worry about your finances. They’re very protective. They’re all over you. They’re busy bodies. They’re nosy. And all of this is for your own good. Of course, this is the fretful narcissist. The fretful narcissist
5. 01:32 um directs his anxiety, externalizes it if you wish, projects it onto other people, especially within the space of the shared fantasy. And when the narcissist is pro-ocial and communal, the fretfulness will manifest as activism, social activism, victimhood activism,
6. 02:00 some type of activism. It’s all about claiming to sustain the greater good, claiming to be emotionally and otherwise invested in the well-being of other people. That is the fretful narcissist. The other type of narcissist is the neglectful narcissist. It’s a
7. 02:22 type of narcissist who abandons you, neglects you, ignores you. You might as well not exist. He sees right through you. You are transparent. Now, narcissists are delusional. They’re selfdeceiving. So both the fretful narcissist and the neglectful narcissist perceive their
8. 02:46 behaviors as manifestations of love. The fretful narcissist would say, “I’m worried about you. I’m concerned about your welfare and health. I just want to help. I’m here to protect you.” The neglectful narcissist would say, “I’m not jealous. I’m not intrusive. I’m not
9. 03:08 imposing. I’m not coercive. I let you live your life. I don’t get involved in your affairs. Whatever you do is acceptable to me. Look how much freedom I’m giving you. Freedom that borders on anarchy and complete disinterest or lack of interest.
10. 03:27 And so the neglectful and the fretful narcissist perceive their behaviors as signs of love, as the only legitimate way to express love. If you love someone, you care about them. If you love someone, you give them freedom. These are the two narrative
11. 03:47 self-justifying narratives of the fretful and the neglectful narcissist respectively. But the partner of the narcissist does not perceive it the same way. The experience of the partner of the narcissist is very different. Whereas the fretful narcissist is all over the partner,
12. 04:09 the partner perceives it as control, as a form of coercion, control freakery. And the neglectful narcissist is perceived as abandoning and rejecting. And so the experience of the partner and the experience of the narcissist diverge. They are dichotoous. the
13. 04:34 contradictory, the mutually exclusive. They have nothing in common. And it is this lack of commonality. This absence of common ground or common denominator that renders interpersonal relationships with narcissists highly antagonistic. Whereas the partner might pro might
14. 04:54 protest, you’re controlling me, the narcissist would answer, I’m only doing this for your own good. I’m only protecting you. I’m only making sure that you behave in the right way for your own welfare and well-being. And whereas a partner might complain, you
15. 05:09 never pay attention to me. You ignore me. You abandoned me. You’ve abandoned me. You’ve rejected me. I feel at a loss. The neglectful narcissist would answer, “But I’m giving you all the freedom. I’m not in your hair. I’m I’m not controlling. I’m not jealous. you can do
16. 05:30 anything you want and so there is a clash of narratives which gives rise of course to adversity and conflict within the relationship. The truth is that both forms of behavior, the neglect and the fretfulness, the overworing, the being over concerned, both forms are
17. 05:56 both uh attitudes are forms of passive aggression. The narcissist, especially the covert narcissist, expresses his aggression or her aggression, by becoming passive by withdrawing on the one hand or by doineering and mastering and overpowering and
18. 06:19 overtaking and and subsuming the partner on the other hand. These are two forms of passive aggression. Whereas the fretful narcissist is more commonly a communal pro-social narcissist. The neglectful narcissist is more commonly a covert narcissist.
19. 06:36 And so these are forms of passive aggression. One of the reasons narcissists cannot find a middle ground, one of the reasons they display this approach avoidance pendulum is because their emotions, including negative effects, are highly diffuse.
20. 06:55 They’re robing emotions. their emotions looking for a pretext, looking for a reason. The narcissist experience anger. He labels it as anger. Whatever it is that’s happening inside the effective landscape nar probably angry and then he looks for a reason to be angry. The
21. 07:17 narcissist experiences anxiety. He labels it identifies it as anxiety and then he asks himself why am I anxious? So there are these diffused generalized effects kind of cloud emotionality that the narcissist that suffuses the narcissist the narcissist is immersed in
22. 07:38 it and is looking for an explanation an interpretation some meaning to attach to these emotions. Generally the narcissist of course is entitled. So for example, he believes himself to be entitled to justice, to equal treatment or superior treatment
23. 07:59 actually. And when the narcissist does not get what he considers to be justice, what she considers to be superior treatment, the narcissist gets angry, frustrated, and the frustration is converted to aggression. The dollar hypothesis 1939. So the sequence is this a diffuse all
24. 08:24 permeating all pervasive sense of anger coupled with anxiety of course because anger is a form of self-directed aggression sometimes so there’s a lot of anxiety attached to it and then scouting or scanning the area other people circumstances the environment for
25. 08:45 reasons justifications and pretexts for the anger which is I remind you diffuse generalize and then saying I’m probably angry because I’m being mistreated. I’m being discriminated against. I’m being abused. There there is a malevolent conspiracy against me. I’m being injured.
26. 09:10 I’m frustrated because things are not as they should be. The narcissist feels that he is entitled to justice and denied justice. The narcissist becomes angry and the anger is often expressed as a form of sabotage, passive aggression, doineering, controlling
27. 09:31 behaviors and so on and so forth. Similarly, the narcissist feels entitled to safety, to stability, to predictability because it gives him a sense of mastery, a sense of control. In the absence of safety, stability, predictability, and determinacy, the narcissist becomes
28. 09:52 frustrated and this gives rise to anxiety. So the narcissist is on a constant quest to render himself comprehensible to himself first and foremost. What the hell is happening with me? He keeps asking and then he creates a narrative. He generates a narrative on the fly and you
29. 10:17 are supposed to fit into it. You’re supposed to become a figment of this narrative. And the only way to secure this is to take control over you. And in the absence of control, to let go of you, which are the two sides, the fretful versus the neglectful narcissist.
30. 10:39 This obsession with control is because narcissists are highly impulsive. They’re not impulsive the same way a borderline is. A borderline is likely to decompensate and act out repeatedly. They’re not impulsive the way a psychopath is. Psychopath transitions to
31. 10:58 violence or aggression on a dime. But there still there is a question of impulsivity in narcissism, especially in the more malignant forms, the more psychopathic forms. And so this lack of or compromised impulse control is very problematic. The narcissist is aware of it because
32. 11:22 the narcissist realizes that certain decisions and choices and actions he’s taken in the past have led to adverse negative outcomes and he knows that they involved impulse control problems. Impulse control in narcissism is compromised by negative affectivity. The
33. 11:42 narcissist’s negative emotions, for example, his rage, his aggression, his envy, his hatred, his fear, all these negative emotions, they compromise the narcissist’s ability to exert control, to exert mastery over his own um executive functions. The narcissist feels ruled from the
34. 12:07 outside by his emotions. He externalizes the locus of control. Even when it comes to his own effects, to his own emotions, everything in in the in narcissism, in pathological narcissism, everything seems to be coming from the outside. People, other people, the environment,
35. 12:27 they are responsible for the narcissist’s decisions and choices, mishaps and misfortunes, defeats and failures and successes. And so everything is coming from the outside. And the narcissist’s emotions are triggered by outside forces. They are reactive. As far as a narcissist is
36. 12:46 concerned, someone provoked him. Someone made him angry. He hates people for good reason because they hate him. He is envious because he is being mistreated unjustly and so on. So even the narcissist’s emotions seems to be emanating from the outside and he feels ruled by them
37. 13:10 driven inexurably to act. This is known as external locus of control. Narcissists are used to being controlled from the outside as far as their selfnarrative is involved. There is a conflict between the narcissist self-concept which is godlike, omnipotent,
38. 13:30 omniscient, genius, and the narcissist self-narrative. I’m a play thing of malevolent, malicious, envious forces. And this conflict between self-concept and self-narrative gives rise to many inexplicable, inconsistent behaviors. All this harks back or has to do with
39. 13:52 the narcissist childhood. Of course, the narcissist’s abusive parents or neglectful parents, the overbearing and all pervasive and infinitely demanding false self. The only defense the narcissist has had has had against the traumatizing childhood environment, the
40. 14:15 adverse childhood circumstance. So what the narcissist does, he internalizes the bad parents. He becomes the bad parents. This is the essence of the false self. And the false self is demanding, harsh, allervasive, controlling. The false self is a deity, a divinity to
41. 14:41 which the narcissist sacrifices his true self. There’s human sacrifice there. And there is also addiction to narcissistic supply and to the sources of narcissistic supply which are usually other people. Addiction of course is irresistible. It’s inexurable.
42. 15:01 The narcissist feels downtrodden, trampled upon, controlled from the outside, automatic, robotic. And one way to rebel against this intolerable, burdensome, unbearable state is to externalize aggression.
43. 15:23 To indulge in negative emotions, in short, to hurt other people, to do to them what is being done to the narcissist, for example, to control them or to neglect them, to be fretful or to be neglectful. It’s a projection of the narcissist’s inner state.
44. 15:45 Narcissist feels more at home and more at ease with negative emotions. He finds them way more accessible to him or her than positive ones. Ironically, it is a narcissist who considers himself godlike and omnipotent, who is a slave to external circumstances
45. 16:06 and feedback from his human environment. He derives his very sense of being from his own impotence, not omnipotence. And so when narcissists try to somehow modify their environment, somehow control it, they know only of two ways. The two ways they have
46. 16:30 experienced as children. They either try to control from the bottom, control by worrying, control by being anxious, control by being inquisitive, control by surrounding the prey of the victim with questions and concerns and so on. That’s the fretful narcissist. Or
47. 16:54 the other way is to neglect and abandon and reject and instrumentalize and parentify the partner. These are the two ways, the two pathways open to the narcissist. And most narcissists swing between the two. So you could have the same narcissist worried to death about you one week
48. 17:16 protective of you and this would be perceived by him as a sign a sign senior of love and the next week totally ignores you. Um can’t be bothered with you. You’re annoying and irritating him. and he’s um very rejecting the same narcissist one week after the other
49. 17:39 approach and avoidance. But unlike the borderline where the approach and avoidance are connected, they are a repetition compulsion. There’s a narrative there which has to do with the approach and avoidance. With a narcissist, this the approach avoidance
50. 17:55 are totally internally generated and they’re disjointed. They’re disconnected. There’s no continuity. There’s no unifying narrative. It’s just the way the narcissist feels at the moment. And you just happen to be there. You’re a prop. You’re an object. You’re an accident
51. 18:17 waiting to happen maybe. And so you are incidental to the narcissist. And any victim who tells herself that this is not true, that she has been chosen and is special is self aggrandising. She is infected with narcissism because narcissism is contagious.