Before I continue with the work of Loftus, Miller, Burns, many others, I want to tie it in to the narcissist.

The misinformation effect is a huge problem for the narcissist, much bigger than for normal people.

And you have seen that even normal people react to the misinformation effect by falsifying their memories.

Simply falsifying their memories big time, big percentage of the people falsify big time.

With the narcissist, it’s even bigger problem because the narcissist you remember is dissociative.

The narcissist has severe problems with his memory. In other words, the narcissist doesn’t remember what he remembers. He’s never sure. He’s never certain what had really happened and what was only his fantasy or his imagination. Everything is mixed. It’s a God awful chaos in his mind. And he needs all the time to breach the memory gaps, the missing time.

So he creates narratives and stories which are essentially fictitious. The works of fiction, they’re confabulated and the idea is to kind of present a plausible, normal, probable facade to the world.

Yeah, my memory is intact here. I remember, but these are not memories. These are inventions.

So the narcissist has islands of memory, islands of memory, bridged, bridged with confabulations and outright lies sometimes. Very rare, but definitely fantasies.

So when the narcissist is confronted with an event or a person or a speech act statement that challenge his memory, he is much more likely to believe the outside source than his own memory. He is much more likely to go outside for veracity and truth and fact than inside.

The narcissist knows that he cannot trust his mind, that there are memory, this abyss where memory should have been, the memory gaps, there’s lost time, dissociation, amnesia. He knows it’s a mess. It’s a mess over there in his mind. He knows his mind is a mess.

So what he does instead, he relies on other people to provide him with reality testing, with facts, with analysis, with judgments and opinions.

And this is, of course, the process of narcissistic supply.

Now, he filters all this information via his grandiosity, but that’s topic for another video, another lecture.

What is important to understand that the narcissist is an external locus of control, also in the sense that he positions himself in the world.

He gauges his coordinates. He gains reality, feeling for reality from other people.

It doesn’t come from inside. There’s nothing inside. Just an empty schizoid core fumbling in the dark, trying to recall what the hell has happened yesterday or two years ago.

What did I do wrong? What did I say?

I mean, it’s total, total, the narcissist is in a state of total confusion all the time.

And so he needs other people to calibrate him, to channel him, to contain him, to provide him with truth and fact and opinions he can trust.

And when these external inputs are humiliating, shameful, hurtful, challenging, undermining, the narcissist tends to adopt the emotional content of the input.

Because the narcissist cannot trust himself. He doesn’t have a benchmark. He doesn’t have a standard. He doesn’t have a yardstick. He cannot vet or analyze the input that he is getting from the outside.

He cannot say, well, she thinks I’m stupid, but I know I’m not stupid.

He cannot say this because the second part of the sentence, I know I’m not stupid doesn’t exist. There’s nothing there.

So if someone says he’s stupid, he is forced to adopt her point of view.

Any input that he gets, positive or negative, impacts the narcissist extremely disproportionately, catastrophically, I would say, precisely because there’s no counterbalance inside his mind.

The narcissist doesn’t balance his self-knowledge and self-awareness and memories and identity against input from the outside because he has none of these.

He has no identity, at least not core identity. He has no memories, only dissociative states and self-states. He has nothing to fight back any negative input. There’s no balance there.

So anything and everything, this balances him, unbalances him, and he falls off the wall like empty dumpty, and he breaks up, mortification.

So the narcissist is actually extremely suggestible, extremely suggestible, and he has problems with attribution.

Input from the outside, he feels that input from the outside is actually coming from the inside.

Why?

Because the narcissist is not interacting with external objects. He’s interacting with internal objects.

Remember snapshotting? He internalizes external objects and he continues to interact only with the internal objects, never with the external objects.

So when there is input from an external object, it is perceived, misperceived by the narcissist as coming from inside.

And that could be utterly shocking.

If the narcissist comes across someone who hates him, derides him, decries him, shames him, humiliates him in public, cheats on him, betrays him, someone who destroys his grandiosity, not only that, there’s a problem in countering this hateful input.

The narcissist doesn’t have any weapons against this kind of negating, vitiating, vicious malevolent input. He has no tools against it because he has no memory. He has no identity. He has nothing. He’s not there. There’s nobody there.

So he cannot fight it, not only there, but he feels that it’s coming from inside.

Now, don’t forget, many of the narcissist’s introjects, the internal objects in his head, the voices of mother, the voices of the voice of father, the voices of teachers, peers, society, many of these internal objects are sadistic, they’re malevolent, they’re vicious.

The narcissist’s parents conditioned their love on performance, or they told him that he’s bad and unworthy when he had failed, or they tortured and abused him in more classical ways.

So the internal objects in his head all the time generate negating input, humiliating input, all the time putting down, all the time criticizing sadistically, cruelly, pushing him in effect to commit suicide, which he never does.

He’s not a borderline, but still.

So he has many enemies inside.

And when someone from the outside says something bad, humiliates him, disgraces him, puts him down, sadistically tramples on him, this outsider is working hand in hand with the same input from the internal objects.

So if someone tells the narcissist, you’re ugly, there is an internal object in the narcissist’s head that is saying the same.

And there’s a resonance.

The narcissist, anyhow, has an internal object that keeps telling him, you’re ugly.

And then a woman comes and tells him, you’re ugly.

And this resonates powerfully with the already existing internal object.

So negative input is multiplied and amplified in the echo chamber of internal objects that is the narcissist’s mind.

And such amplification can reach a crescendo, which results in mortification.

A point where the vibrations of negativity are such that they crack open, destroy the metal of the narcissist’s mind and psyche.

That’s very important to understand.

The misinformation effect in the case of the narcissist is doubly and triply and contoupled, and I know what exponential, stronger, much stronger.

It drives the narcissist to distrust himself even more.

It enhances and patrices and amplifies and magnifies his own internal negativity as manifested and expressed by his own internal objects.

It undermines his grandiosity, self-perception and self-image, his fantasy of himself.

It devalues him, countering his co-idealization.

It reduces him to smithereens.

It’s utterly destructive.

It’s like a nuclear bomb exploding within the empty schizoid core.

And the narcissist is all over the place, in shattered, in shards.

And can he be put together like humpty-dumpty?

Mortification is the closest that a narcissist gets to his true self.

It’s a glimpse of what he is without all the defenses that he had constructed over the many years, without his grandiosity, without his omnipotence, without his omniscience, without anything, is suddenly reduced by mortification, back regresses to a childhood state when he was a helpless, tormented, wounded, injured, abused, traumatized child, whipping in the corner, bleeding sometimes.

So the misinformation effect colludes in creating the mortification.

For example, let’s take the example of someone telling the narcissist, you are ugly and unattractive and no one will have sex with you. You’re repulsive.

So the first thing that happens is this external input is immediately perceived as valid because there’s no balance inside the narcissist.

There are no structures inside the narcissist that would oppose this assessment that would say, I’m not ugly, I am attractive.

Even his rationality is disabled where he could have told himself, wait a minute, but I’ve had many women.

I mean, that’s not true. It’s factually untrue.

No, the external input is immediately validated as 100%, 1,000%, true.

And that’s it.

Now, this external input colludes, collaborates with similar input from other internal objects because the narcissist may have been told by his mother the very same thing.

You’re ugly, you’re unlovable, you’re unattractive, no one will ever want to be with you.

And so the introject of the mother is saying the same things from inside that the external object, the external source, is saying from the outside.

And there’s a confluence, there’s a combination.

The two inputs congeal and become one, much bigger, much harder to resist, if at all.

So at that point, the narcissist had internalized the negative input and had attributed it to an internal object.

He had already snapshotted the external source, and now he takes this input and puts it, amalgamates it with the internal representation of the external source.

And now he has two voices that keep telling him you’re unattractive, you’re not lovable, you’re not sexy, you’re disgusting, you’re impulsive, no one will want to be with you, etc., etc.

There are two voices, the same is.

Given a multiplicity of such voices, it can become a fixture.

In other words, what we call in cognitive behavior therapy, it can become a negative automatic thought, a kind of sentence that defines the narcissist’s self-awareness and cognition and dictates behaviors and moods.

So this is the first process.

Now, having created an internal object for the external source, having taken the negative input of the external source and amalgamated it with the internal object, at that point, the narcissist has to reassess, reevaluate, revisit, revise and reframe all his history, because it’s kind of a new input.

Admittedly, his mother told him this, but his mother is his mother. He is a woman telling him the same, a woman he’s interested in, a woman he wants, telling him the very same.

So that’s new information.

And he has to rewrite all his memories, such as they are, and there are not many, but he has to rewrite them in view of this new information, which remember, he considers 100% correct.

So here’s new information, you’re ugly, you’re unattractive, you’re not sexy, no woman would ever want to sleep with you or to be with you, and he has to take this information.

And now what he does, he goes back in time and he revisits all the previous occasions that he had interacted with the woman, let’s say, all previous occasions that women looked at him, paid some attention to him or whatever, and then he rewrites these memories. He revises them, he revises them to conform to the new negative information.

So even if he had slept with a woman, he would try to find moments in the encounter where she might have looked repelled or she might have been disgusted or she might have found him unattractive or she might have criticized his sexual performance or the fact that she left immediately thereafter and didn’t want to be in touch with him anymore.

So he is kind of gathering incriminating material. He is revisiting each event, each encounter, each circumstance, each moment in time and rewriting it in a way that will conform to the new negative input by isolating incriminating material and amplifying it.

So if he tried in the past to court a woman and she said no, that’s added fuel to the conflagration, confirms the new negative input.

If she said yes, but, you know, it was just a date and nothing happened, that proves that he’s not sexy and not attractive. If they did go to bed, he did not perform, she was disgusted, she left, she criticized him.

He would utterly revamp his view of himself because the two, up until the moment that he had received the negative input, he thought of himself as irresistible, as sexy, as attractive, as handsome, as amazing.

This new input forces him to dismantle his grandiosity and rewrite his history, create effectively new fake memories. He creates fake memories to conform to and support the new negative information about his attractiveness or lack of attractiveness.

And what happens to the previous grandiose defense? I’m irresistible, I’m handsome and so on. It’s gone, it’s dead.

So if a sufficient number, if there is a critical threshold of negative inputs, all the memories are revised and all the grandiosity defenses are dismantled and he’s left naked, skinless, in direct touch with reality, abrasive and bruising as it is.