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1. 00:00 Anyone who has ever worked with a narcissist, shared his or her life with a narcissist, came into the narcissist proximity and companionship, has been in social settings with a narcissist. Anyone who has come across a narcissist would confirm that narcissists are inordinately,
2. 00:26 insanely stubborn, obstinate, willful, pigheaded, bullheaded, and just headed their own way. Why is that? Watch this video for the answer. My name is Svaknin. I am the exceedingly stubborn author of malignant self-love, narcissism revisited, and a very
3. 00:53 obstinate professor of psychology. Why is a narcissist so stubborn? Why is a narcissist not aminable to any change or modification induced by feedback and input from the environment? Why is the narcissist so rigid? Well, to start with, one of the
4. 01:16 distinguishing clinical features of personality disorders is rigidity. Personality disorders limit the degrees of freedom and the space, the operational space, functional, executive space open to um people who suffer these conditions. So, personality disorders by definition
5. 01:42 um cause the narcissist to ignore most
6. 01:48 options, to discard most alternatives, and to regard with panic, anxiety, and dread transformation and change. Even when stubbornness is self-deeating, even when obstinency is self-destructive, the narcissist will insist and persist to the bitter end.
7. 02:15 There are several psychological reasons for that. Number one, the narcissist absolutely has to be right. He has to have the last word come ups. So I suggest that you watch a video titled one upmanship why the narcissist must win must be right and the psychopath
8. 02:42 too. So go to the description there's a link click on the link and shockingly you'll be exposed to the video. Narcissist the narcissist has to be right. The narcissist must win. The narcissist world is competitive and one upmanship is the or its organizing principle.
9. 03:03 And the reason is that the narcissist cannot be proven wrong. The narcissist believes himself. He has a self-concept which is inflated and fantastic and grandiose and godlike. One of the key elements in this self-concept is omniscience. Know all, knowing everything. a godlike
10. 03:24 um treasury or repository of information that is synoptic and all-incclusive and all permeating and all pervading. So the narcissist cannot admit to ignorance. The minute you um concede that you had been wrong, it means that you were lacking some information or you got some
11. 03:48 information wrong or and that means you're not omniscient. That means you're not all knowing. That means you're not godlike. And of course, this is a challenge to self-concept that is very demoralizing and threatening and could lead to narcissistic injury or even
12. 04:04 worse if it is also humiliating and in public to narcissistic motification. These narcissistic injury and narcissistic motification threaten the precarious house of cards that is the narcissistic personality organization. So narcissists are very defensive and
13. 04:22 very aggressive in protecting this inflated, counterfactual, unrealistic, frankly demented self-concept, self-image, self-confidence, self-esteem, and sense of selfworth. Number two, change usually comes about via interacting with other people. When
14. 04:46 you talk to other people, they present a different point of view. They contribute information that you were not aware of. And by doing so, they induce change in your thinking. Stubbornness simply means the opposite of open-mindedness. You're close to the possibility that
15. 05:07 other people may possess information or ideas or a point of view that are different to yours and that could be even more valid because they conform much more closely to reality or they yield predictions which are more easily verifiable or falsifiable. In
16. 05:26 other words, you are as the narcissist cannot countenance and refuses to contemplate the possibility that the theories and hypotheses generated by other people are superior somehow or more valid than his advice. The change that advice induces, they're humiliating is they challenge
17. 05:52 omniscience. They challenge omnipotence. If you were to listen to other people, if you were to modify your behavior accordingly, if you were to accept transformative change in yourself, if you were to be more malleable, more mutable, more open to other
18. 06:14 possibilities, to other scenarios, to other alternatives, to other options, to other potentialities, to the fact that reality is in flux. and in large part the outcome of a consensus that is fostered and engendered via interacting interaction with other people. If the narcissist
19. 06:37 were to accept all this, then this rigid self-concept, this rigid self-image that is godlike, omnipotent, all powerful, omniscient, all knowing, brilliant would crumble, simply crumble. So the narcissist must proclaim ostentatious superiority.
20. 07:00 And by doing so, the narcissist rejects any attempt and any possibility at negotiation, compromise, forging a consensus, changing, considering other options, and so on. It's another found, another source of the narcissist very visible stubbornness. Narcissists
21. 07:27 are proud of their stubbornness. They herald their obstinency as some kind of evolutionary advantage. They think that their gut instincts, their intuition should pre prevail over science, even over objective data, over other people's experiences and
22. 07:47 contributions, over any advice and so on. They narcissists render themselves the ultimate authoritative fountain and source of knowledge. Anything that come emanates from the inside, anything that is founded on gut, gut instinct and intuition is right. Anything is coming
23. 08:07 from the outside must therefore be wrong. There is a lot of contempt here. The narcissist perceives himself or herself to be so vastly superior to other people that the outcome, the inevitable emotional effective outcome is disdain. The narcissist holds other people to be
24. 08:30 so inferior that they are undeserving of respect or consideration or compassion or empathy the way one would for example consider insects or low low-life animals. Other life forbes do not deserve the narcissist attention, concessions, modifications,
25. 08:52 behavioral change. They don't deserve any of this because the narcissist is on another plane. The narcissist is godlike, a divinity. And so this is another source of stubbornness, the contemptuous attitude towards other people. And it comes with defiance, an element of reactance.
26. 09:15 The narcissist defies other people, especially the authorities. This is known as consumaciousness. This in yourrface my way or the highways psychopathic antisocial element in narcissism is a major building block and cornerstone of the narcissist
27. 09:33 strongheaded pigheaded bullheaded and otherheaded types of obstinacy and stubbornness. This willfulness that just won't go away. This renders the narcissist punitive and very often in circumstances where the narcissist cannot be overt passive
28. 09:56 aggressive. So narcissists are punitive and passive aggressive they sabotage things they undermine. They challenge they mock they ridicule with sarcasm. They take down people values, beliefs and so on and they punish people. This again renders narcissists very
29. 10:18 rigid and unable to consider other people's point of view some other angle some other aspect of the situation. And finally the narcissist stubbornness renders you invisible. When the narcissist says, "I know best, there's nothing you can contribute to
30. 10:40 me. I do not need your advice or point of view. Your experiences or your experiential contributions are far inferior to mine because my intellect, for example, is superior. When the narcissist is saying all these things to you which are the the outward me which
31. 10:59 is the outward messaging and the outward signaling of obstinacy, the narcissist is actually rendering you invisible. The narcissist says, "I don't see you or I see through you. You're transparent to me. Your words are meaningless. Your attempts to meddle and interfere, I
32. 11:20 reject them. I know best. I know best in advance and there's nothing that can change my mind. Reminds me of a lawyer I had, Ram Kaspki, one of the greatest lawyers in Israel. And Ram used to tell me, "Sam, I've made up my mind. Don't confuse me with the facts."
33. 11:40 Stubbornness is al also linked, as I said, to invisibility, your invisibility, but to neglect, indifference. The narcissist stubbornness, the narcissist's willfulness, the narcissist's headstrong muish attitude render you not only invisible but unimportant. This contrarianness
34. 12:08 being contrary is a message. And the message is I couldn't care less about you. I'm going to neglect you. I'm going to abandon you. I'm going to see through you. I'm going I'm indifferent to your existence, to your needs, to your priorities, to your preferences, to your wishes, to
35. 12:27 your dreams. I'm indifferent to all this. The narcissist tries to convince people that he is act or she is actually compassionate. This profound lack of interest in other people's lives, hobbies, so social and sexual leazones, whereabouts, this profound indifference is cloaked,
36. 12:49 disguised as benevolent altruism. So a husband may say about his wife, I give her all the freedom she could wish for. Then this kind of narcissistic husband would protest. He would say, "I'm the opposite of controlling. I don't spy on her. I don't follow her. I don't nag her
37. 13:09 with endless questions. I don't interrogate her. I don't bother her. I let her lead her life the way she sees fit. And I don't interfere in her affairs." So this kind of narcissist makes a virtue of his or her emotional truency, absentism, neglect, and abandonment.
38. 13:28 This kind of narcissism misleadingly equates indifference and neglect with freedom, liberty, and liberal open-mindedness. This is all very commendable. But when taken to extremes, which is with most narcissists, such allegedly benign neglect, ostensibly benign neglect,
39. 13:49 turns malignant. It signifies the voidance of true love and attachment. The narcissist's emotional and often physical absence from all his relationships is a form of transmuted aggression. It's a defense against his own thoroughly repressed feelings.
40. 14:10 In rare moments of self-awareness, some narcissists may realize that without their input, even in the form of faint emotions, people will abandon them. So then they swing from cruel aloofness to modelin lacrimos and grandio gesture g gestures sentimental gestures intended to
41. 14:31 demonstrate the larger the life romantic or or friendly nature of the narcissist's sentiments. And this is a bizarre pendulum. It only proves the narcissist's inadequacy at maintaining adult relationships. It convinces no one and repels many. And
42. 14:51 the narcissist is very stubborn about this. The narcissist says, "I am perfection raified. There's nothing I can or should learn." And this inability to learn, this inability to evolve and to grow and to develop, this stagnation in a swamp of his own making.
43. 15:15 This is the core of the narcissistic pathology. As the self was being formed in early childhood, something interrupted, something disrupted the process and the narcissist froze forever for the rest of his natural life.