Narcissist: Word Salad or Machiavellian Speech? (Compilation)

Summary

They constitute I don't know 3% of the total speech acts of a healthy normal individual with the narcissist 100% of the language 100% of the speech acts 100% of the utterances 100% of the sentences and the statements and the declarations and the promises 100% is intended to get you to do something or to agree with the narcissist's way of seeing in reality or to collaborate to collude with the narcissist in his fantasy or to serve the narcissist somehow. When the narcissist experiences injury, real, imagined, anticipated, or incipient, when the narcissist experiences motification, for example, when there's a public and the public prefers you to the narcissist, prefers your input to the narcissist, agrees with you.

Abuse, narcissism, narcissist, Personality, Psychology, Reality, Sam Vaknin, Trauma, Vaknin, Vaknin Summaries

July 8, 2025

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00:01 My name is Sam Vakni. I'm the author of Malignant Self Love Narcissism Revisited. In the narcissist suralistic world, even language is pathologized. It mutates into a weapon of self-defense, a verbal fortification, a
00:19 medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous
00:25 vocables. the narcissist and often by contagion his unfortunate victims. He doesn't talk. He does not communicate. He fends off. He hides and
00:39 evades and avoids and disguises. In the planet of capriccious and
00:47 arbitrary unpredictability that the narcissist inhabits, there are only shifting semantic and
00:54 semiotic dunes. The narcissist perfects the ability to say nothing in lengthy
01:01 Fidel Castroike speeches. The narcissist speech is impregnated and dense with
01:08 first person pronouns. I, me, my, mine. I call it pronoun density.
01:16 The ensuing convoluted sentences are arraabisks of meaninglessness, acrobatics of evasion, lack of commitment elevated to an ideology. The
01:27 narcissist prefers to wait and see what waiting brings. It is the postpone postponement of the inevitable that
01:35 leads to the inevitability of postponement as a strategy of survival. It is often impossible to really understand the narcissist. The evasive syntax fast deteriorates into ever more
01:47 labberin structures. The grammar is tortured to produce the verbal doppler shifts essential to disguise the source of the information, its distance from reality, the speed of its degeneration
02:00 into rigid official versions. Narcissist is completely incomprehensible most of
02:06 the time. Buried under the lush flora and fauna of idioms without an end, the language
02:13 erupts like some exotic skin rash, an autoimmune reaction to its infection and contamination by the narcissist. Like vile weeds, the narcissist language spreads throughout. uh strangling with absent-minded
02:29 persistence the ability to understand to feel, to agree, to emote, to disagree, to debate, to present arguments, to compare notes, to learn, to teach. The narcissist makes all these completely
02:41 impossible because of his abuse of language. Narcissists therefore never talk to others. Rather, they talk at others or they lecture them. They
02:53 exchange subtexts. camouflage wrapped by elaborate flory texts. They read between the lines,
03:00 spawning a multitude of private languages, prejudices, superstitions, conspiracy theories, rumors, phobias,
03:07 and hysteras. This is the world of the narcissist. Paranoid, soypistic, where communication is permitted only with oneself and the aim of language is to throw others off the scent or to obtain
03:20 narcissistic supply. Of course, this malt treatment of language has
03:26 profound implications. Communication through unequivocal, unambiguous, informationrich simple
03:33 systems is such an integral and crucial part of our world that its absence is not postulated even in the remotest
03:41 galaxies which grace the skies of science fiction. In this sense, narcissists are nothing short of aliens,
03:48 extraterrestrials. It is not that they employ a different language, a code to be deciphered by a
03:54 new Freud or a supercomput. It is also not the outcome of upbringing or social
04:01 cultural background. It is the fact that language is put by narcissist to a different use. Not to communicate, but to obscure, not to share, but to
04:12 abstain, not to learn, but to defend and resist. not to reach out, but to
04:19 persevere over lessenable monopolies. To disagree without incurring wrath, to
04:25 criticize without commitment, to agree without appearing to do so. Thus, an
04:31 agreement with a narcissist is a vague expression of intent at a given moment rather than a clear listing of long-term
04:38 ironclad and mutual commitments.
04:45 The rules that govern the narcissist universe are a loophold, incomprehensibles, open to
04:52 interpretation so wide and so self-contradictory that it renders them meaningless. The narcissist often hangs
04:58 himself by his own verbose goric knots, having stumbled through a mindfield of logical fallacies and having endured
05:05 self-inflicted inconsistencies. Unfin unfinished sentences hoover in the
05:12 air like vapor above a semantic swamp. In the case of the inverted narcissist
05:18 who was suppressed and abused by overbearing caregivers, there is the strong urge not to offend. Intimacy and
05:26 interdependence are great. Parental or peer pressure are irresistible and result in conformity and self-deprecation. Aggressive tendencies strongly repressed
05:38 in the social pressure cooker team under the veneer of forced civility and violent politeness. Constructive
05:45 ambiguity, a non-committal everyone is good and right, an atistic variant of
05:51 moral relativism and tolerance bred of fear and contempt. They are all at the
05:57 service of this eternal vigilance against aggressive drives at the disposal of an a neverending in inner
06:06 peacekeeping mission. This is the inverted narcissist, a suppressed narcissist.
06:13 But with a classic narcissist, language is used cruy and ruthlessly to ensnare
06:19 one's enemies, to sow confusion and panic, to move others, to emulate the narcissist. This is called projective
06:26 identification. To leave the listeners in doubt, in hesitation, in paralysis, to gain control, to punish. These are
06:33 the uses of the language. Language is enslaved and forced to lie. The language
06:39 is appropriate and expropriate. It is considered to be a weapon, an asset, a piece of lethal property, a traitorous mistress to be gang raped into submission. With cerebral narcissist,
06:52 language is a lover. The infatuation with its very sound leads to a pyrochnic
06:59 type of speech sacrifices its meaning to its music. Its speakers pay more attention to the composition than to the content. They are swept by the language,
07:10 intoxicated by its perfection, inebriated by the spiraling complexity of its forms. Here, language is an
07:18 inflammatory process. It attacks the very tissues of the narcissist relationships with artistic fierceness.
07:25 It invades the healthy cells of reason and logic and communication of cool-headed argumentation and level-headed debate. Language is a leading indicator of the
07:37 psychological and institutional health of social units such as the family or the workplace. Social capital can often
07:44 be measured in cognitive and hence verbal lingual terms. To monitor the
07:50 level of comprehensibility and lucidity of texts is to study the degree of sanity of family members, co-workers,
07:57 friends, spouses, maids, and colleagues. There can exist no hail society without
08:04 unambiguous speech without clear communications, without the traffic of idioms and content that is an inseparable part of every social contract. Our language determines how we
08:16 perceive our world. It is our mind and our consciousness. The narcissist in
08:22 this respect is a great social menace undermining language itself.
08:34 Narcissists use words and you use words. Narcissist even use sentences and you use sentences.
08:45 The speech of narcissists is comprised of grammar and syntax. And shockingly, your speech sometimes is comprised of grammar and syntax.
08:58 So what's the difference between the narcissist's speech acts and your speech acts? What's the difference between the way the narcissist communicates and the way you
09:10 communicate? Now the difference is very simple. The narcissist does not use words and
09:17 sentences and language to communicate. The narcissist leverages language in
09:24 order to impress you, manipulate you, coersse you, and so there's never a
09:33 dialogue. Narcissists actually use speech in five
09:39 ways. There are five types of the narcissist speech. Narcissists speechify,
09:47 they lecture, they hector, they ramble, they go off on tangents, and they rant, they never dialogue, they never listen.
10:00 And so whatever it is that they're doing with their mouth does not constitute communication in any meaningful way or any way known to humanity,
10:11 non-narcissistic humanity. Speechify. I'm going to read to you the dictionary
10:17 definitions from a variety of dictionaries. Speechify is to deliver a speech,
10:24 especially in a tedious or pompous way. Sounds familiar? These videos for
10:31 example. Next lecture. An angry or serious talk given to
10:39 someone in order to criticize their behavior or to establish the superiority
10:47 the supremacy of the speaker. That is a lecture. The narcissist also hectors.
10:55 to Hector is to talk and behave towards someone in a loud and unpleasantly
11:02 forceful way, especially in order to get them to act or to think the way you
11:08 want. It's a kind of moralizing pro-social narcissist, a communal
11:14 narcissist, usually Hector. Next, narcissists ramble.
11:22 To ramble is to talk or to write at length in a confu in a confused or
11:29 inconsequential way. Narcissists go off on tangents.
11:36 To go off on a tangent is to to start talking about something that is only slightly or indirectly related to the original subject. And finally, of
11:47 course, narcissist rant. To rant is to speak or shout at length in an angry
11:56 impassioned way the way some vaknin does. Okay. These are the five ways the
12:03 narcissist uses speech and language. The narcissist speechifies,
12:10 lectures, hectors, rambles, goes off on tangents and rants, never dialogues,
12:18 never listens. This is called in psychology eloccutionary act.
12:26 There is a theory of speech by the way. It's known as the theory of speech acts.
12:32 An illocutionary act is the act that is performed by saying something
12:39 as opposed to the act of speaking itself. So when you say something, when
12:45 you ask something, when you order something, when you threaten people, when you convey information, you're
12:52 engaging in an illocutionary act and you're doing this by speaking and the
13:00 speech itself is a loutionary act. Okay?
13:06 So elocutionary acts are intended to cause to impact other people to cause an
13:14 effect on others to persuade people to amuse people to inspire people to inform
13:20 people. Illocutionary acts are directional. They are directional speech
13:28 acts. In this sense they're very reminiscent of emotions. And so
13:35 there is a connection between looututionary acts which is the anatomical physiological
13:42 speech, eloccutionary acts which is what you're trying to do when you speak and
13:49 perlocutionary acts the results of the speech. Okay, this is the theory of
13:55 speech acts. Now in practice among normal and healthy people most utterances involve the performance of all of these three acts sim simultaneously. That's why we say that speech acts are performative. They involve performance
14:13 but not so with the narcissist. Not so with the narcissist. The narcissist engages in illocutionary
14:21 acts. acts that are performed by saying something.
14:27 So the narcissist of course uses speech which is a looututionary act. But the narcissist engages in illocutionary acts with a mind to the plocutionary act. In
14:39 other words with a mind to the results. The narcissist uses speech as an
14:47 instrument, uses language, leverages language in order to secure outcomes.
14:54 Language becomes an integral part of the narcissist self-efficacy.
15:00 Whereas people communicate and talk and speak and laugh and whereas people
15:07 engage in all these speech acts simply in order to express themselves or maybe
15:13 to communicate someone to someone else. The narcissist uses all these in order
15:19 to secure highly specific consequences in his listeners. It's a machavelian instrument, machavelian tool and part of a strategy
15:31 of manipulation. Now this was first described all this theory of illocutionary acts and so on so forth
15:37 was first described by British philosopher John Longo Austin um about um half a century almost a century ago actually
15:48 and Austin emphasized the performative aspect of speech. He said that
15:55 performative speech denotes an utterance, a sentence, a statement whose
16:01 very delivery accomplishes the stated intention of the speaker. So when you
16:07 say for example, I apologize or I promise or I declare this business open.
16:14 All these are performative acts because the very statement, the very delivery of
16:21 the statement establishes the intention of the speaker and communicates it to
16:27 the listeners. The nature of performative speech acts um has been a
16:33 mainstay of linguistic philosophy in the 20th century. The main topic then the narcissist speech is performative but in a highly specific way. I would call it manipulatively performative.
16:49 Whereas people use performative speech. They perform the speech and sometimes
16:55 they even act a bit. They perform the speech with flourish or with some
17:01 emotional tint or with some with some um direction, body language or whatever.
17:08 Normal people do this, healthy people do this, but the intention, the motivation
17:14 counts. People perform speech acts. People engage in performative speech acts
17:21 because they're trying to say something about themselves. When you say I apologize, what you're saying actually I'm in a state of mind of sadness. I'm sorry. When you say I
17:34 promise, what you're trying to say is in my mind I'm planning to do something.
17:40 It's performative speech acts convey information about the speaker. The
17:46 narcissist uses performative speech acts in an entirely entirely different way.
17:52 He uses performative speech acts in order to induce change in the listener,
17:58 to modify the listener's behavior, to engage the listener in a fantasy, to
18:05 alter the listener's perception of reality because the narcissist's
18:11 perception of reality is different. So the narcissist wants the listener's perception of reality to conform to his
18:18 or her own. So it's a it's a tool. It's the language
18:25 is weaponized and instrumentalized at the service of obtaining favorable
18:33 outcomes at the service of sustaining self-efficacy. And this is not this is
18:40 not something that healthy and normal people do by and large. Of course there are exceptions. the moments in one's life when one is trying to influence other people, their moods, their
18:52 perceptions, their reality testing, their their their effects, their cognitions. Normally, political speech is such an example. Propaganda is such an example. When you're trying to negotiate a business deal, you engage in manipulative performative speech. But
19:10 these are highly limited enclaves. They constitute I don't know 3% of the total
19:18 speech acts of a healthy normal individual with the narcissist 100% of the language 100% of the speech acts 100% of the utterances 100% of the
19:30 sentences and the statements and the declarations and the promises 100% is intended to get you to do
19:39 something or to agree with the narcissist's way of seeing in reality or
19:45 to collaborate to collude with the narcissist in his fantasy or to serve the narcissist somehow. It's all about
19:53 changing you. Whereas normal healthy speech is mostly about conveying
20:00 information regarding the speaker. The narcissist speech is about changing your
20:07 identity, making you a new version of yourself, more compatible with the
20:13 narcissist's goals and self-concept. And there are several clinical reasons
20:19 for this. Narcissists do it automatically, unconsciously. Narcissists are not
20:27 psychopaths. Psychopaths leverage language, use language in order
20:33 to con you, to swindle you, to scam you, to steal something from you, or to obtain a goal. Now, psychopaths are goal oriented. So, the the psychopath is
20:44 fully aware of the performative quality of the language. He's fully aware. The
20:50 psychopath is fully aware that he's abusing language, molesting language. The psychopath does
20:58 exact the narcissist I'm sorry does exactly the same but unconsciously. There's no cunning, no scheming, no
21:05 deliberation and premeditation. That's the difference between psychopath and narcissist. A psychopath, you could say,
21:11 is a self-aware narcissist. A narcissist who knows what he's doing. The psychopath can tell apart fantasy and reality. The psychopath's reality testing is intact. And yet the
21:24 psychopath would use fantasy to delude you, to deceive you. The narcissist would do the same, but the narcissist would be unaware of his or her motivations. So what are the
21:37 reasons for the narcissist convoluted convoluted leveraging of speech? What
21:44 are the reasons for the metastatic or cancerous way the narcissist introduces
21:52 speech into interpersonal interactions? Why, in other words, does the narcissist
21:59 use speech just in order to manipulate rather than communicate, just in order to impress
22:06 rather than communicate? Why do narcissists give up on communication
22:13 actually? And there are several several reasons, several clinical reasons. Number one, narcissists are incapable of perceiving
22:24 the externality and separateness of objects. When they're faced with other people, they are incapable of perceiving other people as separate, as autonomous.
22:37 as agentic, as independent. Narcissists don't perceive other people as out
22:43 there. They perceive other people as internal objects. There's a confusion
22:49 uh between internal and external. It's a bit psychotic. So, the narcissist engages in inner dialogue,
22:58 internal dialogue among internal objects. All the narcissist speech is
23:04 internalized, interiorized so that actually the interaction takes
23:10 place between the narcissist and your representation in the narcissist's mind.
23:16 When the narcissist talks to you, when the narcissist communicates with you, when a narcissist uses language in his interaction with you, he is not talking to you. He is not communicating with you. You don't exist. you're not there.
23:33 What the narcissist is doing, he is verbalizing an internal dialogue with the inner
23:41 object, with the internal object, with the introject that represents you in the narcissist mind, with your avatar. So that's why the narcissist speech is
23:54 so bizarre in many ways because it's as if you're not there, as if you were
24:01 transparent or something. The narcissist doesn't talk to you, he talks at you.
24:08 And I would even say that the narcissist talks through you.
24:14 That's clinical reason number one, the inability to perceive other people as out there, external.
24:20 Reason number two, as I mentioned, narcissists seek to impress and seek to
24:26 manipulate, not to communicate. And the reason is that narcissists
24:32 devalue interlocutors. Narcissist regards you as a threat. If
24:39 you're more intelligent than the narcissist, more knowledgeable than the narcissist, more sociable than the
24:45 narcissist, more qualified, more trained, more educated, more skilled, more anything, you're a threat. And
24:52 because the narcissist always takes into account that you might constitute a
24:58 threat, his defense or her defense is to devalue you. The minute the narcissist
25:06 starts to talk to you, there's a process in his mind that devalues you,
25:12 denigrates you, demeanes you, criticizes you, degrades you somehow. When a narcissist starts to talk to you, and you could be anyone, you could be a bank teller, you
25:24 could be a taxi driver, you could be a waiter, a waitress, you could be a spouse, you could be a child, the
25:30 narcissist's own child, you could be a pastor, you could be the prime minister. The minute the narcissist starts to talk
25:37 to you, he generates an internal object which represents you in his mind and
25:43 then he proceeds to devalue this internal object. He says to himself, "My interlocutor,
25:51 the person I'm talking to, is inferior to me because I'm godlike
25:58 and I'm infinitely superior. So the opinions of my interlocutor, the knowledge of my interlocutor, the contributions of my partner to this conversation, contributions, the opinions, the knowledge are inferior
26:16 to my own. So there's a narrative which devalues
26:23 the part the other participant in the conversation. The partner in the dialogue devalues the other person. the
26:30 interlocutor and elevates by comparison the narcissist into a position of
26:36 uncontested superiority. And finally, narcissists overvalue their
26:42 time and their contributions. They overvalue themselves.
26:48 This is known as overperception. The narcissist has an over perception of his own inputs, an underperception of other people's inputs.
27:00 A conversation is a series of verbal inputs, linguistic inputs into a common pool,
27:08 the pool of communication. So the narcissist says, "Whatever it is that I'm saying, whatever it is that I'm
27:14 contributing to the conversation is vastly superior to anything my interlocator can offer."
27:22 And so because of this over perception and underestimation or devaluation of the other person's inputs, the narcissist is not interested in
27:33 communication. Regards it as a kind of waste of time
27:39 by positioning himself as a teacher, as a guru, as a the narcissist is not interested in what other people have to say. He is even irritated and irked when they
27:50 insist on saying so or when they offer criticism even constructive criticism or
27:57 when they provide an alternative point of view another angle a fact the narcissist was unaware of it triggers
28:04 the narcissist infuriates the narcissist. Consequently, the narcissist's responses
28:11 and speech acts have little to do with what you have to say with interlocutors.
28:19 This is known as irrelevancy. You become irrelevant in the conversation. Whatever you contribute, whatever you say, whatever you you promulgate, whatever you announce, whatever you declare,
28:30 whatever you promise, whatever you convey, whatever you communicate, all your speech of whatever nature is
28:38 utterly irrelevant. The narcissist is having having a conversation with himself
28:46 mediated via your representation in his mind. He's using you kind of using your
28:53 presence in his mind to talk to himself. And so his responses
29:00 strike you as bizarre. His speech is has nothing to do with
29:07 what you have just said. Narcissists are focused on self-enhancement. They're totally soypistic. Sometimes the narcissist part of the
29:18 dialogue appears to be disjointed coming out of nowhere
29:25 having nothing to do with what you've just said or what you've just asked. Even
29:31 the narcissist speech can sometimes on rare occasions degenerate into what is
29:37 known as disorganized speech, word salad.
29:43 When the narcissist experiences injury, real, imagined, anticipated, or
29:49 incipient, when the narcissist experiences motification,
29:55 for example, when there's a public and the public prefers you to the narcissist, prefers your input to the
30:02 narcissist, agrees with you and disagrees with the narcissist. When this is happening in public or among your
30:08 peers, the narcissist experiences mini motification or mini collapse. When the narcissist cannot obtain any positive input, any
30:19 positive reaction to what he has to say in all these situations of injury, collapse, motification, and so on so forth, the narcissist coherence,
30:30 the the coherence and the cohesiveness of the narcissist speech deteriorate dramatically. The narcissist begins to stutter, to fumble, to fidget, to mumble, to rumble,
30:43 to ramble, to and to go off on very eccentric and schizotipal tangents.
30:51 Narcissist organization totally crumbles. the precarious balance of the narcissist's inner world collapses and a variety of internal objects begin to
31:03 interact with each other in a highly unstructured manner. It's total chaos.
31:09 And so on rare occasions, the narcissist would resemble someone with schizophrenia actually, but that is
31:17 rare. In the vast majority of cases throughout the narcissist's corpus of
31:24 communication with other people, the narcissist would be talking to himself using the presence of other people as an excuse
31:35 and his speech would be intended to mold you, to shape you
31:41 into something or someone that coheres, adheres
31:48 and conforms to your representation in his mind. The masses speech would attempt to take away from you any
32:00 demonstration or evidence of independence, personal autonomy, agency,
32:07 the ability to interact with other people. So try to isolate you somehow,
32:13 modify your behaviors or eliminate them altogether, paralyze you in effect.
32:21 So narcissist speech is a is an awesome weapon, very dangerous weapon.
32:27 And it is through language that the narcissist coerces you into becoming
32:34 what you have never been into losing your identity. Into introjecting the narcissist, inviting this hostile presence into your
32:45 mind like a Trojan horse or a fifth column. And then from within your mind,
32:51 the narcissist uses language to stage a hostile takeover, a merger
32:59 that has never been wanted. And gradually you dissipate and dissolve and
33:06 disappear in the narcissist aciduluous acidic asserbic speech. A speech that is
33:16 that never strays too far from bullying.
33:26 Hello kiddos and cadets. My name is Sam Baknin. I'm your favorite
33:33 author of malignant self-love narcissism revisited and a professor of psychology. And today we have a very interesting topic. Narcissists
33:44 of all stripes. Overt narcissists, covert narcissists, somatics and
33:50 cerebrros, narcissists who are passive aggressive and narcissists who are not. All narcissists, they use code. They use a cipher.
34:01 What you see, what you hear is not what you get. And today I'm going to teach
34:07 you to decipher the code to decode the narcissist speech act to understand that
34:15 he is not trying actually to communicate. He's trying to conceal and
34:21 the various multifarious techniques that he uses in his attempt
34:28 to manipulate you via this concealment. It's very pernicious. It's very
34:34 insidious. It's very subterranean. It's invisible to all other people. And
34:41 when you try to communicate this to others, family members, friends, your
34:47 lawyer, your therapist, they think something's wrong with you because they can't see it for the life of them. There's the text and there's the hidden
34:59 text. I've made another video on the difference between the difference between manifest text, the difference
35:07 between the master text and the difference between the hidden text. When the narcissist communicates with you, he
35:15 is sending you a manifest text. But underneath it, there's always an occult
35:22 arcane coded message encrypted.
35:28 And only you have the key. you and the narcissist and nobody else. So, this is
35:34 today's topic. But before we go there, something critical it seems because it
35:40 bothers a lot of you. Why do I keep saying love bombing when I should say
35:47 love bombing? The correct pronunciation is of course love bombing, not love bombing. Well, the reason is my thick accent.
35:58 Thick accent is a serious curse. Narcissism is a serious curse. And I have both. You can imagine where I am. So at the beginning in my earlier
36:10 videos, I try to use the correct pronunciation. I used to say love bombing and people kept asking me love
36:17 bombing, love booming, love beaming. I understood that something's wrong. So I
36:23 decided to mispronounce the word just to be in order to be understood. And so now
36:29 I'm saying love bombing to leave no place for doubt. Apologies for my accent. I am not responsible for it, you know. Okay. I would like to read to you two quotes, two comments posted on on one of
36:45 my videos and then we proceed to the topic. Sunny Days had
36:52 uh written the following. This is a quote at the beginning of the movie American Psycho based on the book
37:00 by Brett Eston Ellis. And so at the very beginning of the movie, Patrick Baitman,
37:07 the psycho in the movie says the following. There is an idea of a Patrick
37:13 Baitman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me.
37:19 No real me, only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold
37:26 gaze and you can shake my hand and feel the flesh gripping yours and maybe you
37:32 can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable. I simply am not there. Great quote about the inner empty schizoid core of narcissists and
37:44 psychopaths. M. Wars W A RZ whoever she is had
37:50 written a wonderful encapsulation of the borderline condition. Here's what she had written. Here's what she wrote. I have BPD, borderline personality
38:01 disorder. And you explain this very well. When I go into psychopathy, I
38:08 ignore people and plot into future revenge and am comfortable being alone
38:14 for months. When I'm grandiose, I switch into narcissism tendencies. I feel
38:20 empty. No emotions left of my own. I can't be alone. I need validation to
38:26 breathe. I am not good with any sexual rejection. I go into BPD rage. My
38:33 narcissism will not allow rejection. When I go into my fragile BPD self, I'm
38:39 like a burn victim filled to the top with empathy. And when it's not returned, I go back to psychopathic
38:47 tendencies, then histrionic for attention, and then back to narcissism because I can't accept that I'm simply not the best. You may not be the best,
38:58 but this is the best description of BPD I've ever come across, honestly. Now, these are the self states of BPD. you realize I encourage you to watch the videos on
39:09 my channel regarding the various self states in borderline personality disorder. And now to the topic of today's video, not a minute too too early, and it is speech. When the narcissist communicates with you, there
39:24 is what I call an envelope message, a manifest text, an overt text,
39:32 uh, and a hidden occult coded message. It's always two messages.
39:40 Always two. The envelope message and the hidden message. It's exactly like a virus. The virus is an envelope and
39:47 within the envelope there is the RNA. There is the genetic material. The
39:54 genetic material is the coded message. The virus needs a live cell to translate
40:00 the coded message into new viruses, new proteins.
40:06 And the envelope carries the coded message into the live cell in a way
40:12 deceiving the life cell. So the envelope of the narcissist message is always reasonable, always flexible, always compromising, always socially acceptable, always
40:25 common sensible. The narcissist envelope message is something any reasonable,
40:32 rational um person would write. something somebody with impulse control, mature, adult, responsible, reliable.
40:45 This is the envelope message. It conveys this image of the narcissist, the appearance of the narcissist. It's an
40:52 external facade. But deep inside the envelope message, there is the viral
40:58 genetic material. There is the hidden occult coded message which triggers you,
41:04 pushes your buttons and the coded message is based on your shared past
41:11 experiences with the narcissist on previous speech acts. It's like a train
41:17 of train of thought or train of speech. The message seems to be standalone,
41:23 seems to be self-sufficient, but actually the message is intimately connected to
41:29 previous messages, previous exchanges, previous fights, previous arguments, previous disagreements, previous gaslighting, and previous manipulation. So, the message is intended to push your buttons in order to manipulate you. And
41:45 it is based on information that only you and the narcissist share. No one else.
41:52 This is privileged access information. These are experiences you've had together when you were alone. These are things he had told you and things you had told him that no one has ever become
42:05 privy to. So the hidden message uses several
42:11 leverages deploys several techniques and let's review them one by one. The first
42:19 technique is counterfactuality or non-facticity. In other words, the hidden message assumes that you had agreed on something
42:31 that you had never agreed upon. The hidden message pretends that you have a
42:37 compact, that you have a contract, that you have decided on a course of action, that you have concluded something, that there is a decision already made, that there is a choice already adopted, but none of it is true.
42:55 It's counterfactual. It's against the fact. The hidden message implies that the big picture is totally agreed upon. Now let's go to the details and that is
43:07 of course an element of shared fantasy or shared psychosis. So counterfactuality is the first
43:13 technique. The second technique is the victim stance, the victim language. The narcissist
43:21 always always pretends to be the victim. He's actually not pretending. He truly believes that he had been victimized. Victimhood provides him with moral justification for his misdeeds and mis
43:36 misconduct on the one hand and with social approbation and support on the other hand. Victimhood in other words is
43:44 useful. And so he maintains the victim stance and language well into his hidden
43:50 messages. And never mind what you say and never mind what you do and never mind how you behave. You will always be cast. You will always be described as
44:01 the abuser. The abuser is your role in the hidden message. And the narcissist
44:07 insists ferociously, vehemently on his victimhood position. He is a victim and
44:14 you will not deny him is victimhood. It's his comfort zone. And he uses projective identification. Projective
44:22 identification is when the hidden me message pushes you, manipulates you into
44:29 abusing the narcissist, elicits from you an abusive reaction. The narcissist
44:36 forces you to become an abuser because when you're an abuser, he's a victim.
44:42 When you're the villain, he has the moral moral upper hand. So, he needs you
44:48 to be the abuser. He needs you to be the villain. He needs you to act narcissistically and psychopathically.
44:54 And indeed, most victims of complex trauma
45:00 develop narcissistic, psychopathic, and borderline traits and behaviors. And these are reactive to the narcissist's constant messaging, constant signaling. I'm a victim. You're an abuser. I'm a victim. You're an abuser. It's brainwashing.
45:15 The the third technique is projection. Because the narcissist victimhood is
45:21 imagined, it's confabulated. The narcissist has to project his own traits and misbehaviors onto you. The narcissist as a victim needs to feel
45:34 that he is pure, unadulterated, innocent, honest, good, upright,
45:43 sanctimonious, self-righteous is the way to describe it. He is falsely modest if
45:49 he's covert. So the narcissist, he has pseudo pseudo humility. So the narcissist needs to believe that you are the opposite of all these things. And what he does, he takes the traits and
46:01 the behaviors that do not sit well with his state of victimhood and he projects
46:08 them onto you. And this encourages in you a feeling of
46:14 ego destiny. You absorb these emanations, these myasma, these vapors from the
46:23 narcissist. This process is called entraining. The narcissist entrains you to become an abuser to become a villainous villainous character in his
46:34 movie or in his theater production and you adopt the role. This process is called emergent roles within family a family system. This is the clinical term. So you adopt the emergent role. You do become abusive, provocative,
46:51 malicious, malevolent, impulse, impulsive, reckless, defiant,
46:58 consummacious, hateful. You become everything the narcissist wants you to become. And you become and then you feel
47:05 ashamed and you feel guilty. The narcissist guilt trips you, sows in your
47:11 mind the seeds of self-doubt. Maybe he is right. Maybe I am the abuser. Maybe I
47:18 am the narcissist. And the narcissist accomplishes this incredible feat of reversal of roles
47:27 via his hidden messages. These hidden messages contain the projection. And then there is gaslighting via equivocation. The narcissist never
47:38 commits, never says yes or no. He says maybe or
47:45 really or if you say so or I could have agreed had you know it's always
47:51 equivocal. It's always ambiguous. It's always in the air. It's always a maybe.
47:58 And in this way he challenges your reality testing. He makes you feel that
48:04 you're crazy, that you're not grasping what's happening correctly. He rewrites history and he rewrites your mind in the process. The hidden messages are usually
48:16 very hostile. The more appropriate, proper, formal the messages, the more
48:24 hostile it is. This is passive aggression. Passive aggression masquerades as civility and good manners and formality. While underneath the surface there is enmity, hostility,
48:40 hatred and the wish to destroy the recipient, the frustrating object. So
48:46 there's a lot of hostility and you pick up on it. Your senses, your seismic
48:52 senses via empathy pick up on this hostility and it destabilizes you
48:58 because being hated is an abnormal state and you you kind of ask yourself, why am
49:04 I hated? Is it justified in some way? And it unsettles you,
49:11 disbalances you, ruins your equilibrium and homeostasis and your view of the world is essentially benign benign place with good people.
49:22 The next technique is manipulativeness. Manipulativeness and coercion via provocation. The narcissist provokes you exactly into acting the way he wants you
49:33 to act. The narcissist is a puppet master and his m hidden messages convert you into a marionette into a puppet. The narcissist, for example, ignores
49:45 your input or your requests as though you had never spoken. He renders you
49:51 invisible and transparent. Mini break.
49:58 And feeling invisible and transparent is the worst fear in the human mind. To not
50:05 be seen is the most rudimentary primordial and first terror in the
50:13 baby's mind. The baby needs to be seen by his mother just in order to survive.
50:19 Babies who are not seen are not fed. Babies who are not fed die. To be seen
50:26 is a survival strategy. The narcissist by ignoring things you say, by ignoring
50:32 your requests, your wishes, your preferences, your priorities, your emotions, cognitions, by rendering you invisible by not seeing you as a
50:44 strategy threatens your survival, at least your mental survival.
50:51 The narcissist also malingers, procrastinates, delays, postpones
50:58 endlessly, wears you down. This is passive aggression. It's another technique borrowed from passive
51:04 aggression. He promises and he promises to promise
51:10 and then he promises that his promises to promise were real promises and he is going to promise to promise you and then he promises you and it never happens.
51:21 Nothing ever transpires. Nothing reaches conclusion or closure or result or
51:27 outcome or anything. It's like waiting waiting through a swamp. It's like, you
51:34 know, swimming in jam. It's never it's it's sooner or later it becomes
51:40 quicksand and you drown in it. Inexurably pulled down by his constant
51:48 procrastination. Some narcissists procrastinate because they're perfectionist. They insist on a
51:55 perfect outcome. And but the majority of narcissists procrastinate in order to frustrate you.
52:02 Their procrastination is actually a transformation of aggression. The same
52:09 thing with forgetfulness. Narcissists forget. They forget as a habit. They are
52:15 professional forgetters. They forget what you had asked. They for forget your requests. They forget arrangements and agreements. They forget promises. They keep forgetting dates and
52:27 hours and times and schedules and everything. Forgetting is another form
52:33 of aggression together with procrastination and truency. The narcissist is absent physically or mentally, emotionally or both. In most
52:44 cases, both. He is truent. He's not there. And he's not there. He makes sure
52:51 to not be there in the most crucial moments when you really really need his presence for something. in order to decide something, in order to conclude something, in order to move on, in order
53:02 to, you know, establish a schedule, in order to meet someone, in order to do business. At the very crucial moment,
53:10 you can count on the narcissist's sudden inexplicable absence with some stupid excuse. And neglect, forgetfulness, procrastination, and truency are the
53:23 four horses of the narcissistic apocalypse. They are intended to inflict upon you are mugged to destroy you
53:31 totally. There is intentional inefficiency, stubbornness, pseudo stupidity, faking it. I didn't understand. I'm sorry. And outright
53:42 sabotage. And all these are passive aggressive techniques. The key to communicating with a narcissist effectively is to ignore the hidden message. to ignore all this, to not respond to the occult message, to the
53:58 hidden message, to not allow the narcissist to push your buttons and triggers. But some people find it very
54:06 difficult to accomplish. Some people are still in the throws of the of a
54:12 relationship with the narcissist or the narcissist still has some hold over them via his introject. For example, the narcissist is inside your head. Even when he is long gone physically, he's
54:24 still inside your head. You can get yourself out of the narcissist, but you can cannot get the narcissist out of
54:31 yourself. So, the best solution is to use professionals to communicate with the narcissist. If you can help it, never ever communicate with the narcissist directly. Force him to communicate with with your
54:47 lawyers, with your accountants, with your best friend, with your family member, with your father, with with someone. Forces force him to communicate with people who are oblivious to the
54:58 hidden message. You remember that the hidden message is based upon shared
55:04 experiences, shared past, a shared past, shared communication in the past. And so people from the outside, outsiders, they simply don't spot, they don't detect the hidden message. And so
55:20 they're going to respond to the overt, open, reasonable, socially acceptable, common sense sensical envelope message. And that's what you want. You want to keep the communication surface on the
55:33 surface. You do not want to go deep with the narcissist into the rabbit hole of his communications. So if you refer the narcissist to other people who are
55:44 constitutionally incapable of even detecting the hidden message,
55:51 the communication will devolve into envelope communication, surface communication, and you will not be
55:59 triggered into actions that you're bound to regret later. If at all possible, go no contact. any communication
56:10 refer to an intermediary to a buffer to a firewall and this buffer or firewall
56:19 will ignore the hidden message and convey to you only the open one and so
56:25 it's a filter. The narcissist engages in something called palindroic speech.
56:32 The communication of narcissists is either inward facing. They verbalize
56:38 their inner dialogues conversing aloud sometimes with themselves with the audience as a mere foil to their stream
56:45 of consciousness. So this is the inwardlooking communication or it could be outward facing. When the narcissist communicates with himself,
56:57 you are just an observer. You're an audience. He's bouncing thoughts off
57:03 you. You're like a blank screen upon which he can project anything. That's his inner communication. Actually,
57:09 you're witnessing his inner communication. And I repeat, some narcissists do it aloud. I mean, they
57:15 verbalize it. And then there's outward facing communication. Narcissists talk in order
57:22 to impress their interlocators in order to evade actually providing information
57:28 to obfuscate vulnerabilities. So what they do is they are not communicate they don't communicate they impress they manipulate
57:39 they obfiscate. They obscure they evade. narcissist in the nar language is a
57:48 narcissistic weapon in the narcissist arsenal. Pay attention to several
57:54 warning signs. Number one, the use of indefinite pronouns and modifiers like
58:01 this or someone or that. When the narcissist does not specify,
58:07 does not clarify any of the other parts of the speech, leaving the listener
58:13 guessing as to what had occurred to whom, when, where, and why.
58:19 So, indefinite pronouns and modifiers are a major sign of palindromic speech.
58:25 By the way, many self-styled experts and coaches and so on online, they use the
58:31 phrase word salad. Word salad is strictly limited to schizophrenics.
58:37 Schizophrenics have something called disorganized speech and this is a word salad. Narcissists do not engage in word
58:45 salad. No one actually engages in word salad except schizophrenics or people with psychotic disorders. So it's a
58:51 misuse of the phrase borrowed from clinical literature wrongly by ignorant
58:57 people. Number two, so we are not discussing warning signs. When you when
59:03 you listen to the narcissist or communicate with him verbally or in writing, there are warning signs of palindroic speech. Polyromic speech is
59:10 the hidden message. So number one, indefinite pronouns and modifiers. Number two, if the narcissist is
59:17 addressing an audience or you demand the truth and accountability from him, you
59:24 can safely assume exaggeration, confabulation, reframing, and outright
59:30 lying on his part. This is done partly also to cover up the narcissist's
59:36 pervasive dissociation. Number three, when the narcissist expostates on his motivation for doing
59:43 something or when he recounts what had happened, he is either wrong refraraming
59:49 to justify his misbehavior or res or or to restore ego syntic
60:02 gaps and he's trying to bridge them with a confabulation. He tries to sell you on what makes sense rather than on the truth. If he doesn't know know the
60:13 truth, he will provide you with a plausible replacement substitute or alternative. You remember alternative
60:19 facts. If you keep reiterating the question, if you insist on an answer, if you insist on the truth, if you persist,
60:27 he often contradicts himself and comes up with conflicting versions of the same events.
60:34 Never trust what the narcissist says. Do not let his gaslighting undermine your trust in your senses, your judgment, your observations, your memories, your
60:45 identity, and your common sense. Make sure that only what you see is what you
60:51 get. Observe the behaviors and reactions of the narcissist and everyone around the narcissist for clues as to what had
60:58 really transpired. Don't let the narcissist club you on the head and
61:04 don't wake up in his platonic cave of shadows of an alternative reality.
61:10 Palind palindromic speech is any kind of statement about facts or inner mental
61:16 states that intentionally often or inadvertently more rarely creates
61:23 confusion and disorientation in the listener. Gaslighting,
61:29 lying. These are examples of crass and malicious pelindromic speech acts.
61:35 Confabulation and illogical co incoherent discourse. These are benign varants intended to
61:43 bridge dissociative gaps in memory or to patric grandiosity. And palindroic
61:49 speech which I I'm I'm saying again that's the core of the hidden message. Palindroic speech makes use of various
61:57 semantic devices. Pay close attention. When you talk to the narcissist, you need to be hypervigilant. You need to analyze any and every word,
62:08 every phrase, every syntactical choice. Why did he put the words in this order?
62:14 Why did he choose to say something? Why did he choose to not say something? That's the hidden text, the manifest
62:20 text, the hidden text. So you're all the time on your toes. You're all the time analyzing when you you can't just take it for granted. And the narcissist makes use of several semantic devices. Number one, number one, referential shifts.
62:37 Referential shift is when the words refer to one thing while appearing to be
62:43 actually referencing another thing. It seems that he's talking about A when actually he's talking about B. He means to talk about B, but he's
62:54 talking about A because talking about A disguises his real intentions, opinions, and
63:00 judgments and manipulation with regards to B. So this is referential shift
63:06 double and tandra word when he uses words or phrases which
63:13 are open to two sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations or meanings.
63:19 So the same word can mean this thing, can mean A or can mean B. But A and B
63:25 can't be together. They're mutually exclusive. They contradict each other. And yet he uses a word that can be can
63:31 be interpreted in several ways or a phrase that can be can be interpreted in several ways. This is double and double
63:38 meaning. The next one is contextual drift. Contextual drift is when the narcissist
63:45 subtly subterraneanly uh imperceptibly alters changes the context of the conversation and by changing the context
63:56 of the conversation he changes the message and he changes the reality test.
64:02 He reframes the whole thing even as you are listening and you're not aware of it because he's very good at what he does.
64:09 So suddenly you find yourself discussing something you had no intention to discuss and you ask yourself how did I
64:16 get here? That's contextual drift. Next one is manipulative speech. Goal
64:22 oriented utterances intended to impress or to accomplish aims not to
64:28 communicate. There is misattribution or attribution errors
64:34 suggesting or preferring the wrong connections, the wrong links between alleged or ostensible motivations and intentions and actual actions. So he
64:45 interprets actions in terms of wrong motivations, wrong intentions. And in
64:51 this way he deflects blame for example or he casts his own actions in the best
64:57 possible light or he casts your actions in the worst possible light. He assigns
65:04 roles and he assigns roles by misinterpreting very often deliberately
65:10 intentions and motivations. Some narcissists small minority are paranoids. So attribution errors are
65:17 very common in paranoia and among conspiracy theorists. They have psychological trait called conspiracism.
65:26 The next semantic device used in polyroic speech and hidden messages is
65:32 circumstantial mitigation. An external locus of control. A victim stance.
65:39 Events conspire. people collude to yield the misconduct.
65:46 And so he says, "I misbehaved. What I did was wrong, but you're guilty. It's
65:52 your fault. You pushed me to do it." Or circumstances made me do it. Or I
65:58 couldn't help myself or something overcame came over me. So there's an external locus of control and there's a victim stance. events conspired, people colluded and this gave rise to the misconduct and he abrogates personal
66:14 responsibility. He assumes the passive voice. And finally, there's logical fallacies. Simply very famous example is post hawk elophawk.
66:27 In other words, if B had followed A, it means that A had caused B, which is
66:33 absolutely wrong. I mean, it could be, but it doesn't have to be. or correlation is causation or reference to authority or adominum attacks and so on.
66:45 Narcissist uses logical malapropisms and fallacies to support
66:51 his palindromic speech and paladromic speech is efficacious. Efficacious because the base rate of the base rate cognitive bias. The base rate rate cognitive bias states in one of its renditions that people automatically
67:07 fully believe 95% of what they they are told sight unseen.
67:13 People don't bother to verify. They don't bother to crosscheck. They don't bother to confirm in 95% of the cases.
67:20 They just take it for granted. They assume that most people are good, well-intentioned. They assume that most
67:27 people are good, that the world is benign, that people are not evil and malevolent and malicious. So they have a
67:33 base rate cognitive bias. They accept and palindroic speech uses this this
67:40 vulnerability, this this weakness uh and that renders palindroic speech
67:47 very efficacious. And polyroic speech mitigates the inelectable hurt and pain
67:54 associated with truthtelling. Honestly, no one likes to hear the truth. People
68:00 hate truth tellers, which is why I'm hated. I'm kidding you not. I think I'm hated because I'm a truth teller. So,
68:07 people hate truth tellers. And palindroic speech caters to this bias. I
68:13 don't want to I've made up my mind. Don't confuse me with the facts. And so palindroic speech colludes with
68:21 psychological defense mechanisms such as denial and with behaviors such as reframing and avoidance. It is powerful, very powerful psychonamic allies inside
68:34 you. The narcissist co-opts the narcissist works with leverages
68:41 your own psychological defenses. That's what makes the narcissist speech
68:47 so um irresistible, so hurtful,
68:53 so accomplished. There are two other obstructive speech patterns. The hypothetical speech pattern and the counterfactual speech pattern. The narcissist borderline
69:06 psychopath. They use hypothetical speech to test the waters to see how their interlocutors would react to certain
69:13 information. So sentences like maybe or possibly or
69:19 it could be that or I think that or I thought so but wasn't sure. These are all forms of exploratory excursions that the narcissist and borderline
69:31 psychopath they're testing the waters. How are you going to react if they were to convert these sentences
69:38 into certainties? How would you take it badly if they say
69:44 something? So, so they say maybe I should have done this. Maybe you should have done this. The maybe is kind of
69:50 deniable plausible deniability. I, you know, I
69:56 said it, but it just said maybe. You know, it's like someone insults you, humiliates you online, and then at the
70:03 end they write just saying, you know, so maybe X in the narcissist speech,
70:12 maybe X means X had actually happened. X is the truth, but how do you feel about
70:18 it? Maybe X. I'm testing. Counterfactual speech is a lie or misinformation
70:26 disguised as either a rhetorical question or a statement of settled and universally accepted fact. For example,
70:34 maybe she flirted with me at the restaurant, but she didn't come to my room later that evening now, did she?
70:40 Well, that's a strong indicator that she did visit his room that night.
70:46 And so, this is counterfactual speech. There are three types of manipulative speech. Victim speech. Entitled, demanding, dependent, transparent, whining, whining, grievances, grudges. That's
71:02 victim speech. It's a manipulative type of speech. Codependence and border lines engage in this speech a lot and so do narcissists. Then there is child speech.
71:14 entitled, demanding, dependent, transparent, manipulative, naive, immature, fantastic. Narcissists have this. And then there is a psychopathic
71:25 speech entitled envious, competitive, malicious, opaque, coded, dense, and
71:32 multi-layered. Let's discuss a bit lying and confabulation.
71:39 If the mouths are moving, they're lying. histrionics, border lines, psychopaths,
71:46 narcissists. They move their mouth. They're lying. They lie all the time. Their lies may be
71:54 goal oriented to secure money, to secure sex, to secure narcissistic supply or the presence of the intimate partner. The lies may be intended to regulate grandiosity or a labile sense of
72:06 selfworth to butress a stance of victimhood or simply because the forbidden and the illicit and the risky are thrilling and novelty and this is in
72:17 case of serial uh cheaters who lie and deceive promiscuous
72:23 um attention u addicted people and so on. So when you communicate with these
72:29 types, what they say is largely irrelevant. The
72:35 only relevant information is why they had chosen to say what they had said. So
72:42 don't pay attention what they are saying. Ask yourself why are they saying it. The selection of lies, the choice of
72:49 of confabulations is revealing, telling and informative. And the same applies in psychotherapy. By the way, the anomnetic, the intake phase. In the intake phase, most patients confabulate.
73:02 They offer narratives that are egoonic, self-justifying. So what the patient says is not nearly
73:10 as important or crucial or edifying as to why the pa patient had chosen to say
73:17 what the patient had said. The choices they make in telling their stories are much more important than the stories.
73:24 Narcissists lecture. They never talk. They seek to impress. They never
73:31 communicate. They ignore other people's input. They actively suppress such input rather than listen. The narcissist is so invested, so immersed in extracting
73:42 narcissistic supply from his interlocutors, so so um so concerned with dazzling them
73:50 with his brilliance or with his sexual irresistibility that the narcissist is oblivious to his body language, to his verbal cues, to his interjections, to
74:01 events around him, or to the environment at large. It's a compulsion. It's obsessive. The narcissist expostates, hectors, pontificates, opines, defines, edifies,
74:15 rectifies, rants, and raves and rambles for hours on end ceaselessly and
74:21 breathlessly. All of you have been exposed to the narcissist to the narcissist monologues, unending
74:28 monologues like this lecture. and always from a position of pompous self-importance and verbose superiority
74:36 and for authority. Yeah. People
74:42 his mum and numb audience find the narcissist exhibitionistic delusional
74:49 and coercive grandiosity so repellent so offputting that they shun his unilateral
74:56 company altogether at the end. That's why most narcissists are left alone. The people can't stand them anymore. But
75:03 what about speech acts which are abusive? When what happens when the narcissist,
75:10 psychopath, borderline, never mind, abuse speech? Not only use speech but
75:16 abuse speech. There are three examples. Let's start with big picture
75:22 evasiveness. It's my mini day. Let's start or it's
75:29 min day with me. Let's start with big p big picture evasiveness. Narcissists hate details. Narcissists are too self-important.
75:40 The narcissist life is too cosmically significant to be wasted on frivolous trivia and trifles. Narcissists are above the fray of the cotian, of the
75:51 daily, of the pedestrian. They concern them. They concern themselves only with strategy, never with tactics. Narcissists lay out in sweeping synoptic
76:02 terms the big picture. They leave it to lesser inferior mortals like you to fill
76:09 out and fill in the yawning gaps and to iron out the glaring inconsistencies in
76:16 the narcissist big picture and hairbrain schemes. Any attempt to involve the
76:22 narcissist in the minutia of decision-making and the give and take of human endeavor is perceived by the
76:28 narcissist as coercion, a humiliating, ill-intentioned and deliberate challenge
76:34 to his grandio self-perception, his false self. The narcissist's unwillingness to dirty his hands with
76:41 the routine, the mundane, virtually guarantee that his his herin schemes,
76:48 hastily laid plans, convoluted strateg guarantee that they will go all right,
76:54 they will end in failure. The narcissist coercive delegation of tasks, the
77:02 cascade of often contradictory instructions, the grandiosity, the aggressive superiority that characterizes expectations, his fantasies, his so-called planning, all
77:14 these alienate and infuriate his bosses, his underlings, his employees, his
77:21 collaborators, his partners, his suppliers, his customers, is intimate
77:27 partners. Some of some narcissists end up acting
77:34 all alone because of that. And some of the victims of the narcissist, the recipients of his harangs and his hectoring and preaching and
77:45 tyrates and vitriol and diet tribes. Some of these victims end up acting
77:52 passive aggressively and spitefully undermining the joint enterprise. Others, worn by the narcissist's
77:59 aloofness and god-like detachment from reality, simply give up on him. They go through the motions robotically, awaiting the inevitable meltdown of the narcissist.
78:10 Then a second abusive speech act is aloplastic defenses and shifting the
78:16 blame. Narcissists are hypervigilant and consequently they mispersceive rejection
78:23 and insults everywhere. Not being sexually desired, not
78:29 occupying the center of attention, not garnering narcissistic supply, not being
78:35 the alpha male in the room or the most intelligent person in the group. All these constitute grave narcissistic
78:42 injuries to the false self. The psychopath as distinct from the narcissist is goal oriented. So he regards the very same rejections as mere
78:54 obstacles, challenges to be overcome. He says to himself, I am not desired.
79:01 I will render myself irresistible and I will make her jealous by triangulating
79:07 or I will just just move on to the next target. I am not the center of attention, says the psychopath. If I want to, I will make sure that I am and
79:18 so on. So both narcissists and psychopaths are competitive. They are both hellbent on winning and prevailing,
79:26 but for different ends and reasons. The narcissist seeks narcissistic supply. The psychopath seeks power, money,
79:33 connections, position, sex, and so on. The narcissist seeks to secure an
79:40 uninterrupted flow, regulated flow of narcissistic supply. The psychopath simply aims to accomplish and achieve goals. Another facet shared by narcissist and psychopath is their
79:52 aloplastic defenses. They are never fully fully responsible. They're never to blame. They're never guilty
79:58 accountable. They they their misconduct is never their own. They don't own their misconduct. Narcissists who cheat on their spouses, for instance, they're likely to say, "I
80:10 was drunk. I was taken advantage of." or you made me do it or I had no choice
80:16 under the circumstances but to act the way I did. The psychopath will use the theory of just desserts. Psychopath will say they deserve it. They had provoked
80:27 me. They mistreated me. They acted stupidly so they had it coming. Or I deserved it so I took it. Or this is the way of the world and I had to do what I
80:38 did just in order to survive. A man has to do what a man has to do. The third abusive speech act is much more famous.
80:49 Um I was the first to incorporate gaslighting into narcissistic abuse in 1995. Gaslighting preceded of course my work in 1995. Um you have descriptions
81:01 of gaslighting as early as 1968 using the term gaslighting. But I was the first to introduce gaslighting into the discourse of narcissistic abuse when I coined the phrase narcissistic abuse. So
81:14 passive aggressive gaslighting is an abusive speech act. Nothing is more infuriating than the passive aggressive
81:21 evasiveness or gaslighting of the narcissist or or psychopath. It's like trying to hold on to a slimy goldfish. It's you can never
81:32 catch, you can never kind of settle. There's no fixed point. Everything is in
81:38 flux. Everything is kaleidoscopic. You can't get a straight answer. You can't get to the truth of what had happened.
81:44 If anything had happened, the narcissist and the psychopath denies that anything at all had happened. Then
81:52 he parades a kaleidoscopic array of protein contradictory versions of what may actually have happened or occurred. Then he minimizes the meaning of what finally he grudgingly acknowledges had
82:04 transpired. Throughout this teeth extracting process, the narcissist implies that to
82:12 dispute his claims or to doubt him is a sure sign of mental derangement and
82:19 prove positive of an impaired reality testing or else it's malicious. Having admitted wrongdoing, the narcissist axiologically reframes the transgression. In other words, he misattributes it to some values.
82:36 He did nothing wrong in his book. The values of the injured party are old-fashioned, possessive, plain irrational. The other party is insanely jealous. The narcissist's misconduct is common or
82:53 accepted where he comes from. It's a question of culture. He could not have acted differently under the
82:59 circumstances and constraints of the moment. Isn't this understandable? Why do you keep harping at it? Can't we
83:06 let go? He had no premeditated intention to act the way he did. It just simply
83:12 happened. It just happened because he was drunk or high or stressed or angry
83:18 or sad or disappointed or lonely or miserable or something. It's not it's never his fault. Things happen to the
83:25 narcissist or or the psychopath or the borderline. Things happen to them. They are the
83:31 passive receptacles and recipients of fate, destiny, institutions, other
83:37 people. And finally, the narcissist shifts the blame. A loplastic defense with an external locus of control. He
83:44 ships the blame. He shifts the blame. You're guilty. He guilt trips you. The
83:50 narcissist and psychopath was drunk, for example, was high. He was forced into acting the way he did. He was co-opted. He was he got taken advantage of. He was
84:01 raped or she was raped. He he was taken by surprise. He was gullibly taken advantage of. He's been abused. He's the victim. And then there's the perennial. It is
84:13 all the victim's fault. It's all the fault of the party that was hurt.
84:19 She made him do it. She misbehaved. She had abused him and provoked him and pushed him to misbehave, to misdeeds, to
84:27 the brink of insanity, to the point of no return where he could no longer recognize himself. She drove him insane.
84:35 Usering the victim role is a surefire sign that the narcissist or psychopath has done something truly rotten or truly dangerous. When the narcissist goes out
84:46 goes all out on the offensive, you you know that he did something really really bad. Gaslighting by
84:53 narcissists and psychopaths is surreal. It's disorienting. They lie reflexively
84:59 with a straight face and without missing a bit. The psychopath's prearication frequently involves very convincing mimicry of other people's behaviors and effects. And this engenders an
85:11 alternative almost hallucinatory or nightmarish reality.
85:17 So I'll give you two simple rules. Number one, the psychopath is never said. He's always mad.
85:25 Not sad. Mad and sometimes bad. He's mad at you.
85:32 And number two, when the psychopath says, "I'm bad," when he's ostensibly contrite and repentant, what he means to
85:39 say is, "I'm afraid. I'm afraid of the consequences of my action." Or, "I'm
85:45 pissed off that I was found out. I I'm very angry that I I I allowed myself to
85:51 be caught red-handed, inflantr." So, when the nar when the psychopath and
85:58 the narcissist say, "I'm bad. I'm sorry. It's my fault. I regret it. I'm remorseful.
86:04 They don't mean this. They mean to say, "Too bad you found out."
86:10 As Cleley wrote, Hervik Hervvic Kleley wrote in his masterpiece, The Mask of Sanity, actions and behaviors are the
86:18 psychopath's only true forms of communication. Actions and behaviors are the narcissist language. We should therefore pay attention exclusively to what the psychopath and the narcissist do.
86:30 and utterly ignore absolutely everything they say. So why do we often believe and trust narcissists and border lines psychopaths
86:41 when they tell us what had happened? Why do we fall for their lies? Because they're not lies. Psychopaths prearicate to secure goals. Narcissists
86:53 and border lines rarely do. Most commonly they confabulate. Refabulation is a desperate attempt to bridge dissociative memory gaps, lost time,
87:05 blackouts. Narcissis is borderline desperate to make sense of a discontinuous,
87:11 disjointed, fragmented world. And to do this, they accomplish this.
87:18 They build these bridges by extrapolating from past experiences and creatively generating a fiction, a narrative. so as to what probably
87:29 plausibly might have happened in the missing hours or minutes or days.
87:35 Confabulating is intended to both restore identity continuity and cohesion
87:41 and to hide the missing segments in the narcissist or borderline personal histories. Confabulations effectively a form of false recall or false memories.
87:54 Confabulations are irresistibly convincing and alluringly reassuring because the narcissist or borderline honestly and firmly believe that they are true and confabulations have the
88:07 power of memories and they appear to be objective and authentic. They're always
88:13 very likely, very plausible, even highly probable. So they're easy to accept by
88:19 all people, by all parties. In many cases, there's a fourth reason. The confabulation allows everyone involved to negate and efficaciously ignore a painful reality or an uncomfortable alternative scenario or set of facts. We
88:35 all, including the confabulator, want to believe the contabulation because it affords us comfort, secur peace of mind.
88:43 Narcissists and border lines dissociate and then confabulate ceaselessly. It is easy to be drawn into their counterfactual alt alt reality or universe. The twilight zone of their
88:56 inventive probabilities, the psychotic realm of their discontinuous existence.
89:02 Confirmation bias does the rest. Having committed ourselves to the narcissist or
89:08 border lines version of events, having entered the alternative universe, we filter out, we suppress all counterveailing information and contradictory or challenging facts or
89:20 possibilities. Now I want to find out online, so bear
89:26 with me for a minute. I want to find online something I had written
89:32 a while ago and read it to you because it's u
89:40 because it's it's an example of what I'm saying.
89:46 And here's what I wrote. Your wife dorms up. She grabs a bottle
89:52 of liquor, excited, and she rushes out the door at 9:30 p.m. She says that she
90:01 had been invited for a late dinner by a friendly couple. Do you believe her?
90:07 Belief is not the same as trust. Belief is purely cognitive, not emotional.
90:15 First, you have to care enough to scrutinize and contemplate the issue. If the outcome is of no importance to you, the resource efficient path of least resistance is is to believe.
90:29 Next, the facts must align with the belief. The facts cannot be blatantly
90:36 counterfactual, contradict the belief. If the facts match a possible benign interpretation,
90:44 you're likely to adopt this interpretation in order to reduce dissonance and hurt owing to the deceit of your wife. So, you're likely to adopt confirmation bias.
90:55 If you wish or if you're forced to maintain the status quo
91:01 the way things are, turning a blind eye, selfdeception is actually the only
91:07 viable option. And finally, awareness and even vigilance are inversely proportional to
91:15 the extent of idealization, splitting, projection, reframing, and other defense mechanism. You are far more likely to believe your wife if you're still idealizing her. For
91:27 example, eyes wide shut are conducive to belief.
91:33 So this is an example of gaslighting and why we believe gaslighting and lies and
91:39 confabulations. I want to end with a general statement. There's no reasoning with the mentally
91:46 ill. Mentally ill people cannot be reasoned with, cannot be analyzed with any rationality. This is because
91:52 mentally ill people are capable of harboring opposing dissonant and contradictory cognitions and emotions at
91:59 the same time. This is called paradoxical thinking, hyperflexibility.
92:06 So the the mentally ill person can at the same time
92:14 believe two contradictory things, think two mutually exclusive things, feel
92:20 ambivalently two conflicting emotions. You can't.
92:26 Bateson called it the double bind. laying dubbed it the incompatible not
92:33 the speech acts and decisions of mentally ill people need to be deconstructed not merely observed from the outside people with psychiatric or psychological
92:44 problems appear to be impulsive erratic labile unpredictable antisocial disregulated disempathic dangerous heartless menacious and egotistical but
92:55 the truth is mentally ill people are simply meandering along the conflicting
93:01 paths of their psyche. This fragmentation of the alienated
93:07 self. This cathffecting emotionally investing in internal rather
93:13 than external objects may have to do with what giddens call ontological insecurity.
93:20 Even in patients with milder s syndromes such as personality disorders, there is
93:26 a glaring absence of order, structure, continuity, cohesive identity, meaning,
93:35 emotional stability, reduce anxiety, and consistent positivity or negativity.
93:42 There's no consistency. It's not the balance that matters. It's consistency.
93:48 And such epic forklines fracturing fragmenting
93:54 impedes the evolution of a theory of mind. A world life and a worldview
94:00 destroys logic itself undermines it. We base our perceptions, our
94:06 understanding of other people on inter subjectivity and we use empathy.
94:12 It's mentalization theory of mind. We place ourselves in other people's shoes.
94:19 But it is a speculative system. Of course, it is founded almost entirely on trust. It is based on honest
94:26 self-reporting by other people regarding their inner mental states. It is based
94:33 on correlations of these self-reports with observ observable actions and behaviors.
94:39 Dishonest self-reporting leads to discrepancies with observables and these
94:45 engender disorientation, anxiety uh induce dysfunctional responses in us.
94:52 People with cluster B personality disorders, dramatic, erratic. These people consistently mislead,
95:00 misrepresent their psychological self- states, their emotions, their cognitions. Their self-reporting is
95:08 fellacious. This prearication has to do with identity disturbance,
95:15 dissociative amnesia, contabulation and manipulative lying and gaslighting. And consequently, it's hopeless. There is no point in trying to grasp, analyze, comprehend,
95:28 understand, retrodict, predict these personalities. These person personalities do not
95:34 possess a stable core and in many respects don't exist. There's an empty schizoid core there.
95:42 There's emptiness. It's like negotiating with a void. It's like howling into deep space. They're either subjected to and
95:49 at the mercy of labile and disregulated whims of their moods or emotions or they
95:55 are no longer with us steeped in delusions of grandeur with fantastic landscapes pseudocychotic impaired
96:03 reality testing and in many cases they're simply lying through their teeth. So why bother?
96:12 And every word I said here is the truth. Maybe
96:22 if you scroll down to the description of this video, you will find links
96:29 to other videos which analyze and decode the secret speech patterns of overt grandio narcissist.
96:42 Now, I know it's a lot to ask to scroll down to the description.
96:48 It's honorous and so on, but I think you will be rewarded.
96:55 Today, we're going to discuss the secret speech patterns and speech acts
97:02 and the hidden texts of the covert narcissist.
97:08 Covert narcissists are not the same as overt grandio narcissists. A covert narcissist is a is
97:16 a collapsed narcissist. It's a narcissist who keeps failing to
97:22 obtain a regular flow of highquality narcissistic supply.
97:29 But it is still a narcissist. It's a narcissist in dire straits in
97:36 circumstances which are highly injurious that cause repeated narcissistic injury
97:43 or even narcissistic motification. But the core of the pathology of
97:50 narcissism remains. For example, the covert narcissist still
97:57 feels entitled. He still feels unique and special and godlike and omnipotent and omniscient. He still has this inflated fantastic
98:10 grandio counterfactual self-concept. The problem with a covert narcissist is
98:17 the inability to obtain feedback or input from the human environment which would somehow butress sustain maintain uphold and
98:31 affirm this totally delusional and magical
98:37 self-concept. Now collapsed narcissists go through covert
98:45 phases and then revert to the pure original form of overt grandio
98:52 narcissism. But if the failure is persistent,
98:58 repeated, and there's no way out, no strategy works,
99:04 then this kind of narcissist will remain immorted and immersed in a permanent
99:10 state of resentment and bitterness and seething envy and suppressed rage and displaced
99:22 an anger. This is known as negative affectivity. And this kind of narcissist is what we
99:29 call the shy or fragile or vulnerable narcissist. Now when you say shy and
99:35 fragile, you have in mind a puppy with puppy eyes, a cute little creature.
99:43 So these epithets, these descriptions of the Nazis are very misleading. We are not talking about a shy, fragile, vulnerable sweetheart. We're talking a predator. This we're we're dealing with a predator who simply failed has failed or is failing to secure prey but is hellbent
100:06 and intent on making it right on victimizing other people as a way to
100:14 elevate his sense of selfworth regulate and stabilize his internal environment.
100:22 No difference in principle between overt, grandiose, psychopathic, callous,
100:29 ruthless, cruel, vicious, disempathic narcissist and the covert variant.
100:36 No difference clinically with one exception. The inability to
100:42 obtain narcissistic supply, the failure to garner attention and recognition and
100:48 adulation and admiration or even being feared or hated. No attention, being ignored. And this drives the covert narcissist
100:59 beyond the edge. And it alters and has an impact on the way the covert narcissist uses language and
101:12 speech. And this is the topic of today's video. My name is Sam Bakn. I'm the
101:18 author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I'm a professor of psychology.
101:24 The covert narcissist speech is divided in five types in there's a
101:31 classification that's divided in five categories. There's a passive aggressive speech. The pseudo humil pseudo humility and pseudo stupidity type of speech also known as solicitation speech. There's a
101:46 machavelian or manipulative speech, the controlling speech and the and the envious speech.
101:53 I'll discuss each one of these. I'll deal with each one of these in turn. Let's start with the most visible and
102:00 ostentatious display of the darkness at the covert narcissist core.
102:09 this penumbal recesses of a cauldron of sthing negative effects, envy, anger,
102:19 hatred, rejection, resentment, and so on so forth. The most visible sign of all these is known as passive aggression. Passive aggressive speech is a speech
102:32 that masquerades as pro-social, communal, empathic,
102:38 caring, compassionate, and attentive speech while subverting
102:44 the hidden text. Subverting the real meaning of the speech. So what you see
102:50 or what you hear is not what you get. The passive aggressive speech is under
102:56 underhanded. For example, a backhand a backhanded compliment is a subversive passive
103:04 aggressive speech. You know, a speech that sabotages and undermines,
103:11 a speech that diverts and misleads. All these kinds of speech acts are
103:19 passive aggressive. Passive aggressive is defined in the dictionary of the American Psychological Association as characteristic of behavior that is seemingly seemingly
103:30 innocuous, accidental or neutral, but that indirectly displays an unconscious
103:38 aggressive motive. For example, a person who constantly
103:44 keeps people waiting and then is baffled at why they resent this behavior. This
103:51 kind of person is passive aggressively disavowing an unconscious wish to be special and to provoke those who fail to acknowledge the specialness. So this is the definition in the dictionary and passive aggression is typical not only
104:07 of the covert narcissist speech but also of covert narcissist behaviors. The
104:14 behavior patterns of the covert narcissist are intended to subvert,
104:20 to undermine, to um ruin the foundations,
104:27 to render interpersonal intercourse and relationships and interchange and
104:33 exchange impossible. It is speech.
104:39 This passive aggressive aspect, the speech and the behavior are actually nihilistic.
104:45 They are intended to eliminate, to negate, to silence, to destroy, to hurt.
104:54 And all the time without accepting responsibility,
105:00 disavowing accountability, pretending not to know what you're doing, what
105:08 denying any any awareness. And this duplicity, this these mixed signals are the core of the the pain and the
105:22 hurt and the discomfort and the egoistony uh experienced by the recipients of the
105:30 passive aggressive discharge. So when you're exposed to passive aggressive speech or passive aggressive
105:36 behavior, you feel highly uncomfortable and you don't know why.
105:42 On the surface, on the face of it, superiliously, the speech is innocuous, innocent,
105:50 well-meaning, friendly. And yet you you feel you have this nagging intuition that underneath it there is envy and
106:03 hatred and rejection and resentment and the wish to somehow hurt you and damage
106:09 you and undermine you and take you down and push you back.
106:16 And it is this discrepancy between what is called the hidden text, the occult
106:23 text and the overt text. This discrepancy between them is what gives rise to the discomfort and upset caused by passive aggressive speech acts.
106:36 They're very typical of covert narcissists. The second category is solicitation. This is a speech that is intended to trigger, elicit and provoke highly
106:48 specific reactions in the recipients of the speech in those who listen to the
106:54 speech or hear what has been said. So take for example pseudo humility.
107:01 Pseudo humility is when the covert narcissist pretends to be humble,
107:07 modest, claims to own his mistakes
107:14 when he admits or confesses to having done wrong. And all the time the
107:21 intention is to elicit from you a countervailing reaction. So if the if
107:28 the covert narcissist says, "Oh, I'm so ugly." You are supposed to say, "You're
107:34 not ugly at all. You're actually handsome." Or if the covert narcissist says, "I'm so stupid. I keep doing these
107:41 mistakes." You're supposed to say, "You're not stupid at all. Actually, you're highly intelligent. You're an
107:48 intellectual. You're wrong about that." So you're supposed to negate the pseudo
107:54 humble speech. Pseudo humility is intended to trigger its own
108:00 contradiction and negation. It is a way of eliciting narcissistic supply,
108:07 however indirectly and manipulatively. So the covert narcissist would make claims that appear on the surface to be self-deprecating, self-negating,
108:18 hu se self humbling, humbling, modest, humble would eat humble pie
108:26 ostentatiously. And yet all the time throughout the speech act, the covert narcissist fully
108:34 expects you to disagree with him, to contradict him, and to tell him how great he is and how much to what extent he conforms to his fantastic inflated
108:47 grandio self-concept. Another technique in within the solicitation
108:56 speech acts is pseudo stupidity. The covert narcissist is going to pretend that he's stupid, that he's helpless, that he's ignorant, nicient,
109:10 in need in need of enlightenment and education and elucidation
109:16 and triggering you, the listener, trigger triggering you to
109:23 assume the mantle of a guru or a teacher or a patron.
109:30 and thereby assume responsibility for the covert narcissist mistakes and defeats. Covert narcissist misbehaves, fails, tries to accomplish something and
109:43 then fails and then you come into the scene. The covert narcissist admits and confesses to his own shortcomings and errors of
109:54 judgment and so on. And you're supposed to say it's okay. Um, everyone is like
110:02 that. You've done nothing wrong. And so on. Thereby assuming the ownership of the mistake and the failure and absolving the covert narcissist of any
110:13 responsibility and any accountability for the misdeeds, any misjudgments.
110:21 So these are the soliciting speech acts. The third category would be familiar to
110:27 you. It's a Machavelian manipulative speech.
110:33 Mchavelian manipulative speech is intended to modify your behavior. Manipulation is a way to modify behavior. All human beings, normal and healthy, narcissists or not, psychopaths
110:45 or not, all human beings manipulate the behavior of other people via speech
110:51 acts, body language, and displays of behavior. It's totally normal, totally
110:57 healthy. What is different with the covert narcissist and and the overt narcissist is that the manipulation is
111:06 not benign, is not innocuous. The manipulation is intended to
111:12 accomplish some goal which is deletterious and detrimental
111:18 to the manipulated person. Whereas a healthy person or a normal person would manipulate the behaviors of
111:25 people around him or her in a way that is not damaging to these people, in a
111:31 way that would not hurt them, would not cause them pain, would not set them back, would not take them down. The
111:37 manipulation, the machavelian manipulation of the covert narcissist is intended to hurt you, to damage you, to
111:45 render you inferior and suffering, to inflict on you pain.
111:51 So the manipulation is about modifying your behaviors
111:57 so as to render you selfdefeating and self-destructive and self-trashing and
112:05 self-molesting and self-mutilating and self harmful. So a covert narcissist for example may catastrophize and by catastrophizing induce in you
112:19 anxiety which would then modify your behavior in a way which is counterproductive, self undermining and wrong.
112:30 Or the covert narcissist may act helpless, needy and and thereby trigger in you protective instincts or a savior,
112:43 healer, fixer, rescuer complex and force you into the carpman drama triangle
112:52 wherein you would act a certain role which is alien to you which is not you.
113:00 So one major test of unhealthy pathological manipulation compared to healthy normal manipulation is that unhealthy pathological manipulation
113:12 changes you in a way that is alien to your essence and to your core identity.
113:21 This process is known as estrangement. This kind of manipulation induces in you
113:27 estrangement. You feel that you're a stranger to yourself. You can't explain to yourself why you're
113:34 behaving in certain ways. You have been head. You have been pawned. You've been manipulated.
113:41 The fourth category are the controlling be uh speech acts or controlling speech.
113:48 Controlling speech can take myriad forms and it's impossible to make an
113:55 exhaustive list of how the covert narcissist controls you verbally via
114:01 speech acts. So it could for example be a form of surveillance. Surveillance like uh spying on you, intruding on you, monitoring you, supervising you, being
114:14 ever present, omni omnipresent, never leaving your space, not allowing you to
114:21 have your own territory, diminishing or undermining your agency and independence and personal autonomy
114:28 and so on so forth. So this is one category of controlling speech. Then there is the fantasy speech. The fantasy
114:35 speech uh impairs your reality testing, deranges you. You become divorced from
114:44 the world as it is. Your ability to gauge and evaluate reality is undermine
114:51 a form of gaslighting. And so you are drawn into an alternative virtual
114:58 reality, the fantasy of the covert narcissist. You find yourself drowning
115:04 in the swamp of his lurid and and wicked imagination. This is the fantasy speech.
115:12 Then you have the coercive speech. The speech that includes intimidation and threats and uh combined with promises, intermittent
115:23 reinforcement like uh hot and cold. And so the coercive speech is an integral
115:30 part usually of uh situation which is known as coercive control. And then there's control from the bottom. I mentioned neediness and cling clinginess and helplessness. It's a form
115:42 of codependent control. Covert narcissist imitates and simulates people
115:49 with borderline personality disorder and people with dependent personality disorder, codependence.
115:55 And the covert narcissist feains, fakes helplessness,
116:02 neediness. I can't do it without you. I need you. If you're gone, if you leave me, I will die. and so on. This is a form of emotional extortion and is known as
116:15 control from the bottom. And finally, the last category of speech is the envious speech. Envy is the fuel of the
116:23 covert narcissist. If I had to isolate a single most prominent and most dominant
116:30 effect emotion within the covert narcissist's mind, it would be envy. The second would be resentment. But the resentment is coupled with envy. The covert narcissist is resentful because
116:43 he or she is envious. Envy is the name of the game. And of course, it seeps
116:50 into by osmosis. It permeates the covert narcissist speech. Covert narcissist
116:57 often displays envious speech. He compares himself to others. He complains
117:05 of having been discriminated against. There's a lot of relative positioning,
117:11 smearing other people, taking them down, uh
117:18 uh focusing on their reputation, uh doubting their accomplishments,
117:25 creating frameworks where everything that other people have achieved is either plloined and plagiarized and stolen or relatively
117:37 unimportant. important within the context. So the covert narcissist tries
117:44 to diminish other people other people and their accomplishments and by diminishing them by devaluing them by rendering them inferior
117:55 or facious fakes. He accuses other people of being
118:01 fakes and frauds. He does all this in order to elevate himself by comparison, render himself or herself superior. There's a lot of that
118:13 going on in the covert narcissist speech. Convert narcissist needs to kind of denigrate other people, doubt
118:25 them, question their accomplishments, prove that they have misbehaved, um that they have stolen or absconded
118:39 with other people's property, including intellectual property. That is the need of the covert narcissist. This is the
118:46 last category of speech. One very important thing about covert
118:52 narcissists. Whereas the overt or grandio narcissist is capable of normal healthy speech.
118:59 Speech that does not require deciphering. The covert narcissist is not. Covert
119:06 narcissist is not capable of normal daily communication.
119:12 The totality of the covert narcissist speech with not a single exception is
119:18 goal oriented, agendadriven and the agenda is
119:25 negative effects, envy, hatred, resentment, the wish to punish other
119:32 people, undermine them, take them down, destroy them, the the machavelian need
119:39 to manipulate the control the everything is is imbued
119:45 and infused with these psychopathologies. This sense covert narcissism
119:52 is a much deeper pathology more pervasive more profound than overt
119:58 narcissism and the speech of the covert narcissist proves this to us.
120:08 I'm often asked what is the difference between covert narcissistic abuse and overt narcissistic abuse both in terms
120:16 of impacts on victims and the process of healing and recovery. I'm going to dedicate a few videos to this question but today I would like to start from the topic of language because language is a
120:29 very critical instrument in the arsenal of the narcissist. Narcissist uses
120:35 language, verbal abuse, repetitive rhythmic iteration of utterances.
120:42 Narcissist uses all these sounds basically to entrain the target to
120:49 penetrate the victim's mind to install and introject there and to continue to
120:56 control and manipulate the victim sometimes from afar remotely. The role
121:02 of language is critical. I've dedicated to it several videos. You can find the links in the description. But today I'm going to attack this issue from a
121:13 different angle. My name is Sambaknin. I'm the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and therefore very
121:20 adapt adept with languages and I'm a professor of psychology. Whether you
121:26 choose to believe it or not, that's entirely your problem. Remember, there's a 3day seminar in
121:35 Scopia, the Republic of North Macedonia, May 22nd to May 25th, free completely
121:44 in order to reserve a seat. Please write to me at samvaknin, one word, gmail.com
121:54 or contactrfoundation.com.net, net. I'm sorry. Contactvrfoundation.net.
122:01 You can find the email addresses in the description. Just write to me and I'll
122:07 reserve a seat for you. Okay, let's delve right in. Both overt
122:14 and covert narcissistic abuse. In other words, narcissistic abuse metered out by the overt narcissist and narcissistic
122:20 abuse metered out by the covert narcissist. Both types of abuse have a lot in common. the shared fantasy
122:29 introjection entrainment all the mechanisms are actually the same but
122:35 there's there are a few major differences and perhaps the first core
122:42 difference I would like or distinction I would like to tackle is that of language
122:48 covert verbal abuse in the shared fantasy the overt narcissist is usually grant in your face, defiant. You see them
123:01 coming. What you see is what you get. In many respects, the use of language is
123:08 instrumentalized. The language is transparent. The narcissist uses language mainly. The
123:15 overt narcissist uses language mainly to subjugate and subdue other people, to
123:22 harass them, to bully them, to stalk them and so on. So the language in the
123:29 case of overt narcissism is a form or at least allied with externalized
123:36 aggression. But as I said, the language is transparent in the sense that you
123:42 don't have to second guessess, decode, decipher a lot of the communication,
123:48 except of course in some cases which I've dwelt on in my videos.
123:55 So, but the covert narcissist is different. The covert narcissist uses language in
124:03 surreptitious subtle ways, nuanced ways. Even language
124:10 is an art form in covert narcissism because nothing much else is available.
124:16 The covert narcissist is a collapsed narcissist. It's a narcissist who fails or has failed and is failing to obtain
124:25 narcissistic supply in any other way. The covert narcissist is seething with
124:32 animosity and hostility and antagonism. Is passive aggressive is on the one hand
124:40 pretends to be modest super humumil pseudo humumility. Pretends to be
124:47 altruistic and charitable. Covert many covert narcissists are ostentatiously pro-social and communal. But deep inside the picture is completely different. And
124:59 because of this discrepancy between the covert narcissist's implicit self-esteem, the covert narcissist
125:07 inferior inferiority complex to use Adler's term, and the covert narcissist
125:14 explicit self-esteem, which is essentially self-esteem based on resentment, on
125:23 bitterness, on contempt for others, on the rejection
125:29 of in many ways social mores and conventions. Covert narcissist is much closer to psychopathy uh in some ways than the overt narcissist. It doesn't
125:40 qualify. Covert narcissist does not qualify as a psychopath for a variety of other reasons. But these elements are
125:47 common with the psychopath. This hatred of society. The psychopath detests society because
125:54 he regards society as inferior. Because the covert narcissist deplores and
126:01 abhores society because he believes that he has been dealt a raw hand that is being discriminated against that is being overlooked and that is being treat is being treated unjustly.
126:13 Okay. So the covert narcissist, covert narcissism is about disguise, is
126:22 about camouflage, is about pretention, is about faking. And of course the language is responsive to these exigencies and constraints. The
126:34 language similarly must be underhanded, under the radar, camouflaged,
126:42 disguised. What you see or what you hear is not what you get. The language has a double
126:49 meaning. And we call this situation hidden text and overt text. There is a
126:57 hidden text in the speech of the covert narcissist. And there is the overt text
127:04 which usually has nothing to do with the hidden text. The hidden text is authentic, is real, is reality. Whereas
127:12 the hidden text is manipulative and machavelian or the hidden text the aim of the overt
127:19 text is to disguise the hidden text. Somehow
127:25 the covert narcissist therefore has multiple layers of meaning, multiple
127:32 hermeneutic layers, multiple layers of organization and meaning. Not only in speech but also in behavior. There is
127:41 covert behavior, hidden behavior, occult behavior, and there is overt behavior.
127:47 And the aim of the overt behavior is to camouflage and disguise the covert behavior. The aim of the overt behavior
127:55 is to manipulate people, to modify their behaviors, to get them to do what the covert narcissist wants them to do. And in overt narcissism that this this
128:07 gap, this abyss, between hidden and and open, between real and fantasy, between
128:18 um authenticity and display, they exist in all types of narcissism.
128:25 But in overt narcissism, the abyss, the cousin, the gap usually
128:34 rises to the surface sooner or later. The overt narcissist is so contemptuous,
128:40 feels so superior and so godlike that most of the time he doesn't bother.
128:46 He doesn't bother. He takes for granted that he's entitled to other people's
128:55 property, other people's attention, other people's admiration and adulation, other people's help and so on. Collaboration. So this sense of entitlement in the overt narcissist usually renders the need to disguise and to
129:13 camouflage and to hide quite unnecessary. Whereas in covert narcissist it is
129:20 intact. The covert narcissist is lacks self-confidence and self-esteem. Covert
129:27 narcissist is unable to regulate his or her sense of selfworth either from the
129:33 outside with with narcissistic supply.
129:39 Time for my tea or from the inside. So
129:47 the covert narcissist uses language not to communicate but opposite to
129:53 discommunicate to avoid communication at least meaningful communication.
130:00 Communication which is a revelation. Whereas the overt narcissist uses
130:06 language to manipulate to impress and to create a shared fantasy and so
130:12 on. The covert narcissist uses language to avoid, to withhold, to withdraw, to
130:20 constrict. One could say that the overt narcissist uses language to be in order to become in order to be in order to become or to
130:31 to merge with an inflated grandio fantastic self-concept.
130:38 So the overt narcissist uses language to become whereas the covert narcissist
130:45 uses language to unbecome, to not be. And perfect example of this is dog whistling. Dog whistling is way more common among covert narcissists. Overt narcissist um would use dog whistling mainly in
131:04 order to humiliate or subdue someone. The covert narcissist would use dog
131:10 whistling for literally the entire communication. Now dog whistling is a situation where words or phrases have a meaning that is private, a
131:23 meaning that is limited to two people or a group of people. But the same words
131:29 and the same phrases would be interpreted and understood completely differently by outsiders. So dog
131:37 whistling in dog whistling there is an in inroup a semantic inroup.
131:45 This semantic or in rare cases seiotic inroup is one or two or three or four or nine
131:53 people or hundreds of people but a limited group. an ingroup where words
131:59 and phrases have a meaning known only to the members of the ingroup
132:06 and outsiders who observe the ingroup would never be able to make full sense
132:14 of the language used by the members of the ingroup. Now the narcissist abuses
132:20 this mechanism. The overt narcissist uses dog whistling,
132:27 as I said, to shame or guilt trip or humiliate his
132:35 target or his victim or his intimate partner or his friends or his colleagues.
132:41 So the overt narcissist would use words or phrases which induce in his targets
132:50 what we call negative effects or negative affectivity. He would make them feel bad and egoistonic.
132:57 Whereas the covert narcissist would use dog whistling almost exclusively as the
133:03 only form of communication. The language of the covert narcissist is
133:09 highly idiosyncratic, highly privatized. Wiggenstein would disagree with me. Leadwig with Widgenstein, the famous philosopher, he said that there's no such thing as private languages. I think this was perhaps the only case in his
133:26 entire career that he said something that is manifestly stupid. Of course, there are private languages. The covert narcissist is one proof of that. Private languages, idiosyncratic languages are pseudocysychotic. People with psychotic disorders
133:43 very often have their own type of disorganized speech. Word salad. Word
133:50 salad is a schizophrenic um clinical feature. Um and so in covert
133:56 narcissism, the language is organized. It conveys information. It is communicative. It is reactive and responsive. And in this sense, a covert narcissist is not
134:08 psychotic. But the language has layers of meaning
134:14 which are obscured. Layers of meaning which are inaccessible to anyone except the members of the inroup, the covert narcissist inroup.
134:25 Layers of meaning which are motivational. They cause action. They modify behaviors in other people. Layers
134:33 of meaning which are used to not only manipulate people but and not only to
134:39 shame them or to guilt trip them the way the overt narcissist does but actually
134:45 to create an ambiance the equivalent of a linguistic shared fantasy
134:51 within which communication is cultish cultlike. So covert covert narcissist use of verbal verbal abuse, dog whistling, and so on
135:02 so forth, is highly instrumentalized, much more so than the overt narcissist,
135:08 and much more idiosyncratic and private than the overt narcissist.
135:15 In this sense, the language of the covert narcissist is the functional
135:22 equivalent, operational equivalent of gaslighting in psychopaths. Now you know that I keep teaching you that narcissists do not gaslight. They do not gaslight because they cannot tell the
135:33 difference between reality and fantasy. Whereas gaslighting requires the ability
135:39 to know what is real and what is fantastic and then to lie. This is not
135:45 the case with narcissist. But the practical implications of the narcissist's behavior
135:52 and language, choice of language or use of language, these implications are such
135:58 that actually the victim or the target is being gaslit, experiences
136:05 gaslighting. In other words, develops the victim develops impaired reality testing. victim begins to doubt her ability to gauge, appraise and evaluate
136:16 reality. She begins to doubt herself. She asks herself, "Am I going crazy? Do
136:22 I see things correctly?" And so on so forth. And this renders her dependent on the narcissist. Okay. The covert
136:29 narcissist gaslights even when he or she does not gaslight.
136:38 Whereas the overt narcissist imposes on the victim or the target a shared
136:44 fantasy which is the functional equivalent of gaslighting.
136:50 The covert narcissist uses language to construct a total reality that is essentially in its entire in its
137:03 entirety in its totality in its completeness and wholeness gaslight gaslighting. So with a overt narcissist, gaslighting
137:15 is or gaslighting like behavior is actually instrumental and has to do with the shared fantasy with the covert narcissist. The the gaslighting is built into the fabric of the covert
137:34 narcissist experience life and interpersonal shared relationships.
137:41 That's a massive difference. It's a very important difference. Again, let me emphasize narcissists,
137:48 covert or overt, do not gaslight. They cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy. And they don't use gaslighting as a manipulative machavelian tactic the way a psychopath
138:00 does. But the outcome sharing a life with with a with a
138:06 narcissist interacting with the narcissist the victim or the prey or the
138:12 target are being gaslit experience gaslighting. Even though the narcissist had no intention to gaslight, he ends up gaslighting. And whereas the overt narcissist
138:24 gaslights occasionally, instrumentally, functionally, and in relation with the shared fantasy,
138:30 the covert narcissist's entire being, entire existence is one big gaslight
138:36 experiment, one big gaslighting experience. And the victims who are exposed to overt narcissism
138:44 react differently than the victims who are exposed to covert narcissism. In overt narcissism, the overt narcissistic abuse
138:55 has ramifications and consequences on the victim which are harrowing and
139:03 terrible. But the victim,
139:09 sorry, but the victim
139:17 loses herself much less with the overt narcissist than with a covert narcissist. When the victim is with a covert
139:28 narcissist, her dissolution, the loss of her core identity,
139:36 her disorientation, sense of dissipation, one could even say
139:42 dissociative reactions like amnesia, derealization, depersonalization are much higher,
139:50 much more dominant and prevalent than in an exposure to an overt narcissist.
139:57 With an overt narcissist, the impacts again are very very
140:03 pervasive and very problematic and troublesome.
140:09 The same impacts occur when the victim is exposed to a covert narcissist, but
140:15 much more so like the the impacts are not attenuated and but they are
140:22 amplified and magnified and maximized. Being with a covert narcissist is like
140:28 being with an with someone who is 10 times the overt narcissist.
140:34 The damage, the trauma with a covert narcissist is much more insidious
140:41 permeates the victim's existence much more fundamentally
140:47 and much more persuasively than with the overt narcissist. Being with the overt narcissist
140:55 can be is the equivalent of spending time with a psychopath or spending time
141:01 with a child, a temper tantrum child, a spoiled brat,
141:08 being with a covert narcissist. is spending time with
141:14 a figment, spending time with a non- entity, spending time with a true black hole that is about to consume you.
141:26 In my opinion, covert narcissistic abuse is far more dangerous and penicious than
141:33 overt narcissistic abuse. And one of the elements that create this
141:41 immersive environment with the case of covert narcissism is the covert narcissist use of language. I
141:48 will deal in future videos. I will deal with other elements but we are starting with language. Covert narcissist uses
141:55 language to construct a world which is immersive, all consuming
142:02 and dissolving. feel that you're dissolving. It's not regression. The overt narcissist
142:08 regresses you, infantilizes you, renders you dependent and addicted,
142:14 and then proceeds to take away your identity, infiltrate your mind, and gain
142:20 control over you. And that's bad enough. The covert narcissist dissolves you, eliminates you by reducing you to
142:32 molecules, dissipates you, evaporates you. And the feeling is of course much
142:38 more much more horrible than when you are with an overt narcissist. Now I
142:44 mentioned that every person, every human being healthy and unhealthy,
142:50 we all have an inner text and we compare every information and
142:57 every stimulus emanating from the environment to this inner hidden text.
143:05 We could conceive of ourselves as walking talking carbon-based narratives. This is called narrative theory. And so there's the inner narrative which is an organizing principle the kind of structure provide structure provide order and predictability and so on so
143:22 forth based based on experience. It's a kind of theory, a theory of one's own mind. And so, and so this inner text is there
143:33 and whatever happens in the environment, you compare it all the time. Compare this information all the time to your
143:41 theory, theory of your own mind, theory of other people's mind, theory of relationships
143:48 known as internal working models. this library of theories it these are all hidden texts these are
143:55 all occult texts and everything that's coming from reality from the universe is
144:01 the overt text your behavior which is also observable in the known universe is
144:09 also an overt text when there is no discrepancy between your internal hidden
144:15 text and the overt text you're a healthy mentally healthy person. When there is a
144:22 discrepancy, it's an indication of pro a problem with mental health or maybe even
144:29 mental illness. And so we determine what is missing
144:35 and we determine what has been purposefully omitted by using this mechanism of by using this
144:44 comparative mechanism by constantly comparing. What the overt narcissist does to you?
144:52 The overt not the covert. What the overt narcissist does to you? He falsifies
144:59 the overt text. He falsifies the environment. The input, the stimuli, the
145:05 information you're getting from the environment is wrong, is fake, like fake
145:11 news, like misinformation. Consequently, the process of comparing this
145:17 environmental knowledge to your internal text inner text yields erroneous outcomes, misguide, it misguides you. It misleads you
145:32 and then you make the wrong decisions and choices which are actually beneficial to the overt narcissist. So
145:38 the overt narcissist focuses uh on
145:44 reconstructing or reordering or refraraming or falsifying the external environment via the shared fantasy.
145:51 The covert narcissist falsifies mostly your internal text, your inner
146:00 text. If the covert narcissist falsifies who you are, not only the external
146:08 environment, but also who you are. So whereas the the overt narcissist, the classic grandio phallic overt narcissist, the in-your-face, defiant, pseudocysopathic,
146:21 antisocial, overt narcissist, grandio type, you know, obnoxious, unbearable,
146:27 arrogant. This kind of narcissist would impose on you a shared fantasy which is
146:33 cultlike, cultish and which has very little to do with reality. It's counterfactual, is not grounded, is
146:39 unrealistic. Thereby falsifying the input from the environment and
146:46 causing you disorientation which allows then the narcissist to take over, control you and manipulate you. But the overt narcissist
146:59 rar rarely reaches into your mind and touches it. He installs an introject.
147:05 The introject speaks to you. But the overt narcissist is a surface is on the
147:12 surface. He's very shallow and superilious and superficial. That's a good definition of overt grandio narcissism. So he's more interested in using the environment to
147:25 manipulate you. Whereas the covert narcissist is deep running water. It's
147:31 much more dangerous. So the covert narcissist falsifies, reframes, changes,
147:37 transforms both the external environment
147:43 by via the shared fantasy and the internal your internal environment. The the covert narcissist falsifies both the in inner the hidden text and the overt
147:55 text. Whereas the the overt narcissist falsifies only the overt text but not
148:01 the hidden text. The damage in the case of covert narcissism is much much uh more extensive. In overt narcissistic abuse,
148:12 the overt text, the falsified overt text and the hidden text seem to conform.
148:20 This is the power of the covert of the overt narcissist. The overt narcissist convinces you that the shared fantasy that he has created for both of you,
148:31 actually is responsive to who you are, to your needs, reflects you,
148:37 incorporates you seamlessly, is good for you. You should be a part of it. It's
148:43 something you've dreamt of your entire life. So the overt narcissist creates a
148:51 semblance of resonance and conformity between your internal
149:00 text, your inner text, your hidden text and the overt environmental external text convinces you that that the shared
149:11 fantasy he's offering you is actually your idea. your shared fantasy, your you
149:18 you were your dream, your wish and so you adopt it. You adopt it and you're
149:24 egoonic about it. You feel good about it. So in this case there's not much
149:30 need for trying to decode or decipher or deconstruct
149:36 the nar the narciss the overt narcissist hidden text and overt text. In the case
149:42 of exposure to an overt narcissist, there's not much need for deconstruction
149:48 of the messages emanating from the overt narcissist. I call it thin
149:54 deconstruction. You need thin deconstruction. The narcissist speaks to you and of
150:01 course his speech is convoluted, symbol symbol laden and has hidden strata and
150:08 meanings. It's all true. And it is true that you do need to dedicate some time and attention to what
150:15 an overt grandio narcissist is telling you. And you need to decipher it and decode it and analyze it and think about it and deconstruct it. This is all true
150:27 but much less so than with a covert narcissist. So in the case of the overt
150:34 narcissist, you would need thin deconstruction. Whereas in covert narcissistic abuse, the overt text, the
150:43 environment, the shared fantasy has little to do with the covert text with with the hidden text with you has little to do with you in effect. And the reason you feel otherwise is because
151:00 the covert narcissist has falsified you as well. The overt grandio narcissist for creates
151:09 a shared fantasy but does not falsify you. So you fit into the shared fantasy. He shapes he
151:17 makes the shared fantasy in your shape. Whereas the covert narcissist reaches into your mind, arranges the furniture, renders you unrecognizable to yourself.
151:29 You feel a strange alien to yourself. And that's why you feel comfortable with
151:37 the environment that is engendered by the covert narcissist with the shared fantasy of the covert narcissist because you are no longer you. The covert
151:48 narcissist shared fantasy does not reflect you. It reflects the covert
151:54 narcissist. The overt narcissist shared fantasy reflects the overt narcissist but also
152:03 you. It takes into account who you are. It caters to your needs and wishes and
152:09 dreams. It misleads you. It's a cult. It's facious.
152:15 is likely to end in heartbreak. But initially in the love bombing phase, idealization phase of the overt, not
152:23 covert, overt narcissist there, the narcissist pays attention to you. It
152:29 tailor and customizes everything to make you feel at home, cozy, comfortable, fitting. That's not what the covert narcissist does. The covert narcissist gets rid of
152:41 you first and foremost. He gets rid of you. He gets rid of you by poisoning you, by
152:48 entraining you, by brainwashing you, by dissipating you, by dissolving you as if the covert narcissist was some kind of
152:55 an acid bath. You dissolve in it. Nothing is left, not even your bones.
153:01 Having gotten rid of you, the covert narcissist then creates a shared fantasy
153:07 which is 1,00% about himself and 0% about you because you don't exist
153:13 anymore. And he gives you then a false identity,
153:19 a fake for identity and tells you this is the new you.
153:26 This has always been you in you just did not realize it. You were not self-aware.
153:32 Now there's an awakening. You woke and now says the covert narcissist that you
153:38 have found yourself, that you have discovered yourself through me. Now you can fit into the overt text, the
153:46 environment, the shared fantasy that I've created for you. So the overt
153:52 narcissist, the grandio classic phallic overt narcissist tailors the shared fantasy, the overt text to conform to your hidden
154:03 text, to your internal text because the shared fantasy is facious
154:10 and fake and wrong and unreal and not ground and so on. This in due time has a
154:16 massive ad adverse deletterious aspect on your internal text in due time as
154:25 time passes as exposure continues. So initially
154:31 in the initial phases of the shared fantasy of an overt narcissist the
154:37 fantasy is going to fit you handing glove. You're going to feel very comfortable in the shared fantasy only
154:43 gradually because the shared fantasy is not is counterfactual
154:50 is a fantasy is nonsense. It's nothing to do with reality. Only gradually you
154:56 will discover that if you want to remain within the shared fantasy, if you want to have the narcissist in your life, you
155:03 need to suspend yourself. You need to deceive yourself. You need to lie to yourself. you need to become
155:10 someone else. So this is the process in with an overt narcissist. With a covert narcissist,
155:17 the process is exactly reversed. In with a covert narcissist, the first
155:23 thing you have to do is disappear, lie to yourself, deceive yourself, pretend,
155:29 fake, not be you, suspend yourself. This is the ticket, the entry ticket.
155:35 This is a precondition for then becoming a part of the covert narcissist shared fantasy. So with the overt narcissist is from A to B. With
155:47 the covert narcissist is from B to A. The overt narcissist, the Fustian deal
155:53 of the overt narcissist is I'm going to give you a shared fantasy which would make you feel in heaven, would make you
155:59 feel wonderful, would make you feel that you are being motherthered, that you are a perfect being, that you are, and I'm
156:07 going to give you this fantasy, but gradually you will disappear. Gradually you will
156:14 become not you. Whereas the covert narcissist message is you need to become not you. you need to disappear if you wish to enter my shared fiscal.
156:25 And so in the case of covert narcissism, there's a dire need for deconstruction
156:32 of language, a dire need for unearthing and mining the meaning behind
156:39 the sentences and utterances and statements of the covert narcissist. And this requires a lot of heavy work and I
156:45 call it thick deconstruction. In the case of covert narcissism,
156:52 from the very get-go, there is disorientation. Disorientation is defined this way in
156:59 the dictionary of the American Psychological Association. An impaired ability to identify oneself
157:07 or to locate oneself in relation to time, place, or other aspects of one's surroundings. Long-term disorientation can be characteristic of neurological and
157:18 psychological disorders. Temporary disorientation can be caused by alcohol or drugs or can occur in situations of
157:25 acute stress such as fires or earthquakes. Disorientation of course.
157:31 So this is the definition and I'm adding disorientation of course can be induced
157:37 by exposure to uh environments which conflict somehow with one's
157:44 reality testing. When one thinks one one knows reality, when one believes in
157:50 one's ability to gauge reality and suddenly reality changes in ways which undermine or or challenge or um our
157:59 perception of reality that's very disorienting. That's what the narcissist does. It creates totally fake fantastic
158:05 environments that challenge our perception of reality.
158:11 And this creates confusion. Confusion according to the dictionary is a mental disturbance
158:17 characterized by bewilderment, inability to think clearly or act decisively and
158:23 disorientation for time, place, and person. It's also called mental confusion.
158:29 I propose that the mental disorientation of victims of narcissistic abuse, especially covert narcissistic abuse, extends not only to one's core identity. Who am
158:42 I? There's disorientation. There's confusion about one's identity. Who am I? But I think it extends to everything.
158:50 You see, our memory is like a topographical map. We have we our memory is spatial. It's
158:57 like space where you have all kinds of object which serve as benchmarks and
159:04 milestones. And so when we try to imagine or reimagine our memories, we use spatial
159:12 space related metaphors. And so
159:18 when uh when the narcissist induces in the victim disorientation,
159:24 the disorientation is also topographical. But it's not topographical in the
159:31 classic objective sense. topographical in real in the real world on the street
159:37 or on in the countryside. No, it's not topography in the physical sense, but it
159:43 is a topography of memory. The narcissist induces in the victim a topographical mental disorientation which has to do with a spatial metaphor
159:55 of memory. The the dictionary defines um topographical disorientation this way. A disorder of spatial
160:07 visualization, space vis visualization exemplified by difficulty in recalling
160:13 the arrangement of rooms in one's house or of the furniture in a room within
160:20 that house. Individuals with topographical disorientation also may be unable to recall or describe the
160:27 location of landmarks or other familiar objects in their neighborhoods. The condition is typically associated with
160:34 impairment of the right parietal lobe. It's also called topographnosia.
160:41 Okay. I claim that the narcissist induces in you topographia. In other
160:49 words, he induces in you a topographical sense of disorientation because the
160:55 landscape of your memory becomes alien to you. Your memory is like a space
161:01 internal space and it's full with landmarks and milestones as I said. Then
161:07 when the narcissist takes this away, falsifies it, you you begin to regard
161:13 your own memory which is a core core feature of your identity. You begin to regard your memory and identity as an
161:19 alien planet and you feel like an extraterrestrial in your own internal
161:26 planet. He takes the sense of comfort and familiarity with yourself away from
161:32 you. We all have this comfortable sense that we are familiar with who we are,
161:40 that we are intimate with ourselves. The narcissist takes it away from you. And
161:46 the covert narcissist way more than the overt narcissist induces in you
161:52 disorientation, sense of disorientation way more in covert narcissism than
161:59 with the overt narcissism. In the next video, we will discuss other impacts of covert narcissistic abuse versus overt narcissistic abuse.

Summary Link:

https://vakninsummaries.com/ (Full summaries of Sam Vaknin’s videos)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/mediakit.html (My work in psychology: Media Kit and Press Room)

Bonus Consultations with Sam Vaknin or Lidija Rangelovska (or both) http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/ctcounsel.html

http://www.youtube.com/samvaknin (Narcissists, Psychopaths, Abuse)

http://www.youtube.com/vakninmusings (World in Conflict and Transition)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com (Malignant Self-love: Narcissism Revisited)

http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/cv.html (Biography and Resume)

Summary

Abuse, narcissism, narcissist, Personality, Psychology, Reality, Sam Vaknin, Trauma, Vaknin, Vaknin Summaries

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