Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. How Narcissistic Abuse Destroys the Narcissist

1. 00:02 When I first described narcissistic abuse in the 1980s, coining the phrase in the process, my view of it was somewhat limited. It has evolved over time. Initially, I thought of narcissistic abuse as a power play for dominance and subjugation, negation of the partner,
2. 00:25 divisiation of the partner’s autonomy, personal autonomy, agency, independence, and kind of the equivalent of what today is called coercive control, which by the way is a crime. And then the next stage in my thinking, I began to realize that narcissistic
3. 00:46 abuse reflects internal very deep dynamics. And still I associated it mostly with emotion dysregulation kind of whenever the narcissist is exposed to stress and tension and anxiety including abandonment anxiety. Whenever the narcissist is criticized
4. 01:08 and disagreed with, whenever the narcissist confronts reality and so on so forth, narcissistic injury, the narcissist emotionally disregulates, becomes clinically a borderline and that results in narcissistic abuse. Later on, I began to grasp that narcissistic abuse is a kind of
5. 01:30 maternity test. The narcissist pushes the envelope, tests your boundaries, inflicts pain on you, and the aim is to test you to see whether you qualify as a mother, a maternal figure. Are you able to provide unconditional love regardless of the narcissist’s egregious misconduct?
6. 01:56 So, there we had it, the unholy trifecta. Narcissistic abuse as a power play, which is the psychopathic antisocial aspect, as emotion dysregulation, which is essentially the borderline aspect, and as a kind of maternity test, a kind of verify your
7. 02:17 credentials as a substitute mother. you’re able to afford the narcissist compassion and empathy and sakur and love and acceptance regardless of the way the narcissist abuses you and they’re interested for a very long time. A major dimension of narcissistic
8. 02:40 abuse has been neglected by me and inevitably by everyone who followed me and that is the mazoistic dimension. Now ironically in the 1940s there was an amazing clinician and a writer by the name of Hervy Kleley. Hervvic Kleley in his seinal book, a
9. 03:06 masterpiece titled the mask of sanity suggested that what he called psychopaths and today we call narcissists actually are in the process of rejecting life. He said that they behave abusively in order to destroy themselves and in order to assertain that they would never
10. 03:29 have a life. That was a very profound insight that went neglected and was completely ignored by generations of scholars who followed the footsteps of Kle people like Robert Hair for example. Narcissistic abuse is self abuse. Narcissistic abuse apart from all
11. 03:54 the aforementioned functions is also a form of self-destructiveness. Narcissistic abuse is about the rejection of life, the constriction of life, the elimination and limitation of life. Narcissistic abuse is the expression of hostility towards life,
12. 04:13 the loathing of the elements of life. It is as if the narcissist casts himself, pits himself against the totality of creation. No wonder people are talking in terms of demons and antichrists because the narcissist truly rejects everything that is human.
13. 04:34 This rejection of life, this constriction of life, this negation of life and obnigation of existence simply reflects the fact that the narcissist is not fully fledged and fully formed being is not an entity. narcissist. The narcissist is an absence masquerading as
14. 04:56 a presence. It’s a void. It’s a hollow
15. 05:02 hollow kind of um negation of reality, the fabric of reality. It’s what tasting called the black hole. And because a narcissist does not exist, whenever the narcissist comes across existence, he feels threatened. He feels negated. Existence threatens the narcissist
16. 05:27 because it is the anti antithesis. It is the exact opposite opposite of narcissism. You could divide the world of phenomena into existent and non-existent. And the non-existent pole would qualify as narcissistic. Narcissism is the non-existence pole. So whenever the
17. 05:49 narcissist comes across life, its manifestations, its expressions, its exuberance, whenever he is forced to interact with reality without defenses or masks, without narratives or fantasies, without delusions and selfdeception, the narcissist recoils, recoils in horror.
18. 06:13 What terrifies normal healthy people is death. What terrifies the narcissist is life. And so this rejection and constriction of life is at the core of narcissistic abuse. The narcissist tries to deanimate everyone around him or her. Half of all
19. 06:37 narcissists are women. The narcissist tries to take away your life. Not in the classical physical sense. Narcissists rarely actually commit these kind of crimes or violent crimes. But in the metaphorical sense, the narcissist tries to abscond with what the French call your vital,
20. 07:01 your life force. The narcissist tries to reduce you into an inanimate object which can be manipulated, which can be internalized, which can be interacted with safely, which can be controlled. So it is this trajectory of coming across something that is or
21. 07:23 someone who is alive and then taking away their life force. It is this trajectory that came to be known as narcissistic abuse. The narcissist rejects life not only in himself and of himself. The narcissist rejects life the life of the lives of others. He does not want others to be
22. 07:46 alive because that is a reminder of his or her own extinction. And so the narcissist rejects love. He rejects intimacy, friendship, closeness. Narcissists regard intimacy as a form of imminent allervading menace as something that is about to take over.
23. 08:15 In this sense, narcissists have a mutated form of engulfment anxiety which is very common in borderline personality disorder and borderline personality organization. And yet whereas the borderline when she feels engulfed runs away, the narcissist when he feels engulfed seeks
24. 08:36 to destroy the source of the engulfment. The narcissist regards life as frustrating and reacts inevitably with aggression to the frustration, attempting to annihilate and eradicate and obliterate the very sources of the frustration. And the frustration is existence itself,
25. 09:02 being life, entities. The narcissist idealized fantasy, narcissist ideal fantasy is a fantasy of a dead planet. Narcissism is a death cult. At the core of the narcissist, there is death internalized. The death drive if you wish. Narcissists are dead inside
26. 09:28 and they seek to export death. They seek to imbue with death. They seek to disseminate death wherever they are. It is it is as if the narcissist is embedded in a cloud of death, a cloud of extinction, a cloud of negation, a cloud of obliteration. Wherever he goes, this
27. 09:51 dark pregnant cloud consumes everyone around the narcissist. And so no love, no intimacy, and no friendship, of course, because there’s no recognition of the externality and separateness of other people. But at the same time, no ability to experience joy and cheer and
28. 10:10 happiness and contentment. Do not confuse narcissistic elation with any of these. Narcissists are incapable of joy, happiness, and cheer. Narcissists go through life denied the basics of love and happiness, joy and intimacy, friendship and cheer, contentment. They denied all this
29. 10:41 and largely it is a denial of their own making. They self-deny. No one is quite sure why. Is it because they catastrophize and they anticipate a horrendous ending to every love affair? A catastrophic cataclysmic outcome to every intimacy? A friendship that ends in betrayal? Joy,
30. 11:04 happiness, and cheer which only accentuate the underlying depressive sadness of pathological narcissism. The grief, the everlasting prolonged grief. Is it this? Is this the reason they reject all everything life has to offer? Or is it simply that they know no other way? They have
31. 11:27 no alternative experience. They were denied the possibility as children to develop and evolve a self. They are selfless. They have no what Freud called ego. There’s no core identity there. There’s nothing there. And perhaps someone who has never experienced existence
32. 11:49 is also incapable of experiencing other people by definition would find love, intimacy, friendship, joy, cheer and happiness, contentment as suspect. They would suspect them. He would find these things nonbelievable. He would even suspect. He would even
33. 12:10 convince himself hyper vill vigilantly that these are manipulative things like people are trying to be his friends because they want to manipulate him. They’re offering intimacy because they want to manipulate him. Love is just a way of taking from him. Joy, happiness,
34. 12:26 and cheer are faked. None of this is real. Because a narcissist subsists and exists within a realm of falsity and fantasy. He tends to doubt reality and other people all the time. That is his modus operandi and modus vivventi. And of course all this results in self-deeat,
35. 12:49 self-defeat, self-sabotage, selfharming, selfrashing and recklessness. The narcissist constantly destroys himself, his accomplishments, his future and does not allow himself to become. His the basic experience of the narcissist is the failure to become. And
36. 13:14 so he keeps repeating it. Repetition, compulsion as Freud called it. He keeps repeating this early childhood experience of craving separation and individuation and failing time and again. By rejecting life, the narcissist minimizes these horrific experiences. And so
37. 13:41 narcissistic abuse is self-destructive because look at it from this point of view. The narcissist abuses you. The narcissist mistreats you. The narcissist horrendously maltreats you. He ruins your life. He takes away your energy. He attacks you, criticizes you incessantly.
38. 14:05 He’s harsh and sadistic and everything. Granted, it’s all true. I was the first to describe this. But at the same time, what what does narcissistic abuse accomplish? What what does a narcissist get out of narcissistic abuse? A barren wasteland, a life denuded and denied everything
39. 14:31 that’s beautiful, everything that’s worth living for. A lunar landscape where a life should have been. The narcissist destroys everything and everyone around him and then he has to continue to live, continue to exist among the devastation that he himself, he himself has wrought.
40. 14:57 What kind of life is this? When you push away and you alienate your loved ones, your nearest and dearest. When you never experience love or intimacy or friendship, when you’re never happy or joyful, what kind of life is this? And why indeed would you continue to pursue such life?
41. 15:20 Self-sabotage may be the way out of such a life that has been sterilized. Sterilized and put into a vegetative state. Pathological narcissism is a lifelong comma and so who would want to live like that and that might explain the self-sabotage
42. 15:42 and self-destructiveness which are very extreme in narcissism. So narcissistic abuse is a way to punish oneself. The narcissist punishes himself by creating the kind of life that is much more common in prison or in in a concentration camp. And so he creates this kind of life. He
43. 16:05 tailors it meticulously. He invests in his own devastation and destruction. And he does all this because he feels that he should be punished. The narcissist internalizes a bad object, a cluster of introj voices that keep informing the narcissist, you’re
44. 16:25 worthless, you’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re a loser, you deserve to be punished. you’re a mistake. You’re utterly unlovable. And these voices inside the narcissist push him to punish himself by narcissistically abusing other people. Narcissistically abusing other people is
45. 16:47 a surefire way to ascertain that you end up alone, that you end your life all alone and so and that you die alone. And so this form of self-sabotage is at the same time punitive or self-punitive. It’s a way to validate the internalized bed object.
46. 17:12 In many cases, the internalized bed object which used to be known as primitive super ego is just parental voices. So because mommy is always right and and daddy is always right, you have to prove them right by validating what the voices are saying. They’re saying you’re a
47. 17:33 loser, you will become one. They are saying you’re ugly and stupid. You will act this way. Unworthy of love, you will never be loved. You will never experience love. And you would hate people who love you. This is the most extreme form of self-sabotage.
48. 17:50 Negating others by negating yourself. Punishing others by punishing yourself. Letting them letting other people experience your own desolation and devastation. Inflicting on others your internal conflicts, struggles, and pains. Writhing in agony even as you torture
49. 18:16 and torment everyone. And the victims empathize with the self-destructive narcissist. The victims of of narcissist of narcissist, the victims of narcissistic abuse, they actually feel pity and compassion and they want to save the narcissist and
50. 18:38 rescue the narcissist and and they lie to themselves and to the narcissist. And we know all this. We’ve been through all this in many other videos. I think that victims actually they do understand that narcissistic abuse is self-punitive. That narcissistic
51. 18:59 abuse is self-abusive. That narcissistic abuse is the narcissist way to destroy himself, his love, his life, his loved ones, everything around him. They know this. They realize that narcissistic abuse is the narcissist self punishment, self-sabotage. They know this. They’re
52. 19:20 trying to extricate the narcissist from this morass, from this quagmire, from this conundrum and predicament, from this inevitable repetition compulsion. And victims do it in two ways. And I’m going to use German, of course, when we discuss victims. No other language is as
53. 19:39 capable as German. So uh vlimbasone in German is an attempted improvement that ends up making things much worse. So when you try to improve things, when you try to make things uh great again, if you wish, when you try, so this is some victims react by constantly
54. 20:08 tinkering with the relationship, changing this, introducing this, uh modifying their behaviors, uh suggesting things, uh I don’t know, cooking, sewing, I mean constantly involved in the relationship in a desperate attempt to change the contours of the couple of
55. 20:30 the diet of the relationship and to allow the narcissist uh in some ways to love himself and there thereby become less self-destructive. It is a form of malignant optimism or what Shadow D’Angelus calls pathological hope. The victims empathize with the
56. 20:51 self-destructive narcissist. They feel pity. They feel compassion. They feel empathy. They want to afford or provide sakur. They want to be there for the narcissist. They want to create an environment where the narcissist would feel finally happy.
57. 21:06 Where the narcissist would feel finally at home. They want to create a home for the narcissist.
58. 21:16 I love German. Okay. for is the outcome. When the victim attempts all these um all these all these modifications, the end result is usually much worse. The narcissist resents the victim’s uh constant attempts to re revitalize the relationship, to resuscitate it.
59. 21:41 Narcissist regards this as an extreme form of manipulation. He begins to become paranoid and is suspicious and the end result is an even an escalation of the narcissistic abuse rendering it a lot more aggressive to the point of violence. So this is one tactic, one strategy
60. 22:01 and the other strategy is vidmahung. Vidmahung in German means making it good again like it’s bad now the situation is bad the relationship is horrendous but they’re going to make it good again and the emphasis is on the word good in German which means good. Soon
61. 22:23 is when you try to to change the situation or to change the relationship with the hope of obtaining a different outcome. It’s like the famous apocryphal definition definition of craziness. You keep doing the same thing hoping for a different outcome. While vidmahu
62. 22:41 is a different strategy or set of strategies intended to somehow restore an a usually fantastic or imagined initial state. It’s like it’s a form of nostalgia. It’s like saying initially we used to be so close, so happy together. He loved me so much. I’m going to try to
63. 23:04 restore this initial condition, this initial boundary. I’m trying to go back to the to the future. I’m going I’m trying to revive the past. I’m trying to find a way I’ll try as a victim, I’ll try to find a way to remind the narcissist how much he loved me and how
64. 23:24 much he idealized me. And so these are the two strategies. Accepting and admitting and acknowledging that something is wrong and attempting to somehow solve the problem. this is because it ends badly or plugging into the shirt fantasy and saying all I need to do is go back from
65. 23:47 devaluation to idealization and love bombing that’s all I need to do I need to reverse to reverse the mechanism to reverse the engine the machinery of the shared fantasy and go back to the very beginning when we were inseparable in limrance infatuated And so this is vidmahu.
66. 24:09 Both these strategies fail completely and the victim finds itself caught even deeper in the cobweb, the spiderweb of the narcissist shared fantasy. The more the victim attempts to demonstrate love, compassion, intimacy, friendship, empathy, affection, the more the victim offers
67. 24:33 sakur and support and advice, the more it enrages the narcissist because the narcissist has an agenda and the agenda is to destroy himself and the way to destroy himself is by destroying everyone around him. Now, sometimes in overt narcissism,
68. 24:55 you don’t see this happening. Say, “What are you talking about? Here’s a narcissist. He’s happy golucky. He’s super accomplished. He’s successful. He’s constantly happy. He’s he’s laughing. He’s cheerful. He’s joyful. He has many friends. He’s surrounded by
69. 25:10 friends. He has a wife uh for decades. Is I mean, what are you talking about? It’s all wrong. There are many narcissists who are not self-destructive, who are not like that.” And my answer is, give it time.