 yesterday I ate moldy yogurt, yogurt with mold, as green as the greenback. It was very dark in the kitchen, I pick up the first yogurt canister and I just ate it and it was moldy. I thought that being a narcissist was the piece, it was a bad experience. Let me tell you, it's moldy yogurt and it's aftermath. It beats narcissism hands down. Poor Mini, she's been staring at me all day from her mug, coffee tears running down her cutie pie cheeks. Okay I'm getting soft, I don't like it. Enough sentimentality for one video. Mini is of course nothing but a delusion, a coffee mug. And today this is precisely what we're going to discuss. The narcissist's delusion, his cult, his twilight zone, his lullaland, of which you, you comprise a central pillar, a central part. You see, it's not that you have entered the narcissist matrix. You are the narcissist matrix. When you have exited your relationship with a narcissist, you need deprogramming. Cult members who are abducted by their families from cults require a period of deprogramming in order to recover and regain their perception of reality, rational thinking and so on. It's the same with victims of narcissistic abuse. Narcissism of course is founded on a delusion, the false self, which in turn is founded on a fantasy of perfection, of brilliance, etc. Which in turn relies on a confirmation bias, in other words filters out information that contrasts with a delusion, which in turn is based on a cognitive deficit, grandiosity, Dunning-Kruger and other deficits. So what do we have? A delusion founded on a fantasy relying on a bias that is constructed upon a deficit, a cognitive deficit. Get it? That's the narcissist. And into this black hole, you in most cases willingly and voluntarily have stepped. You found yourself trapped beyond the event horizon, like a ray of light which cannot exit the black hole once it had entered. And those of you who are physicists, you know that when an object, even a ray of light, enters the black hole, it contributes to the information inside the black hole. It reconstructs the black hole. And a similar process is happening between you and your narcissist. I will dedicate the second half of this video to your mind, what's happening to you. Many, many victims describe the experience as brainwashing, as hallucination. And there's a lot of truth to it. Something is happening to your mind and to your brain having been exposed to such a mega, mega delusional setting. And we will discuss it, as I said, a bit further. The narrowest definition of psychosis according to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is restricted to delusions or prominent hallucinations with the hallucinations occurring in the absence of insight into their pathological nature. So in this sense, the narcissist is not psychotic. He does not have auditory hallucinations. He does not have visual hallucinations. He doesn't imagine all kinds of entities and beings, supernatural or otherwise, who talk to him, who communicate with him, who instruct him what to do, give him commands. He doesn't lose control to any external manifestation or emanation or apparition. But he does confuse his internal state, his internal self state, his internal objects with external ones. And he does it in two ways. He internalizes external objects, makes them, converts them into internal objects, and he externalizes the internal objects. And in this sense, to a very large extent, the narcissist is psychotic, as I've been saying through the last few videos. But let's narrow it a bit. Let's talk about delusions. What is a delusion? Let me quote from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Edition 5, which was published in 2013. That's the latest authoritative text on mental health disorders, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And so the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual defines delusion as a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof of or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture. For example, it's not an article of religious faith. When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility. Delusional conviction can sometimes be inferred from an overvalued ID, in which case the individual has an unreasonable belief or ID, but does not hold it as firmly as is the case with a delusion. Delusions are subdivided according to their content, and there are several common types. These are the common types which are typical of delusional disorder, the most extreme form of delusion. There's the erotomaniac type or erotomanic type, and this is when someone believes that another person is in love with them. So if you believe that someone is in love with you without any proof or evidence or even in the face of proof and evidence to the contrary, then you have an erotomanic type of delusion. Another type is the grandiose type. It's a subtype where the central theme of the delusion is the conviction of having some great but unrecognized talent or insight or having made some important discovery. There is a jealous type of delusion when the delusion is that a spouse, a lover, a girlfriend, a mate, an intimate partner is unfaithful, again flying in the face of all evidence or connecting some flimsy bits and pieces into apparent evidence when actually any normal, any any rational person would say it's far from being evidential or evidentiary. There's the persecutory or paranoid delusion when the central theme of the delusion involves the individual's belief that he or she is being conspired against, cheated, spied on, followed, poisoned or drugged, maliciously maligned, harassed or obstructed in the pursuit of long-term goals. Then there is a somatic time when the central theme of the delusion involves bodily functions, bodily sensations or a body dysmorphic disorder, misperception of one's organs and bodies. There are many other types, many other types, for example there's a delusion of being controlled, but I would like to comb in on one more and that is the delusion of reference, also known as referential ideation. I'm quoting from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, it's a DSM, it's a delusion in which events, objects or other persons in one's immediate environment are seen as having a particular and unusual significance. These delusions are usually of a negative or pejorative nature, but also may be grandiose in content. A delusion of reference differs from an idea of reference in which the false belief is not as firmly held nor as fully organized into a true belief. So there's referential ideation upon which a delusion of reference can occur. So this is a general introduction to delusions and suffice it to say at this stage that narcissists suffer from four major types of delusions. First of all the paranoid or persecutory delusion, the belief that one is being controlled or persecuted by all kinds of powers or conspiracies, co-workers, the government, one's own spouse, one's family etc. Then there is a grandiose magical magical thinking or grandiose magical delusion, the conviction that one is important, omnipotent, omniscient, genius, possessed of occult powers or a historic figure in the making. That's a grandiose magical and then there is the referential delusion, as we just mentioned, the belief that external objective events or objects or people carry hidden or quoted messages or that one is the subject of discussion, derision or problem, even by total strangers. And then there is the erotomaniac or erotomanic delusion which we again mentioned before, that's the belief that someone is in love with you. Narcissists very often mistake other people's kindness, other especially women's kindness and gestures, and they think the woman is in love with them. They also have what we call sexual over-perception, they tend to interpret behavior by other people as an invitation to have sex, any behavior by the way, a good morning, how are you today? Anything is interpreted as you see, she's attracted to me inexorably, I'm utterly irresistible. Now in the study of delusions, some scholars, not everyone by a long mile, but some scholars distinguish primary versus secondary delusions. I want to read to you at length, I'm afraid, from a book titled Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders, DSM 5 and Beyond. It was edited by Paul Dell and John Neal, two scholars of this association, and it's still in my view by far the best book of the topic. Here it is, I hope the camera somehow captures it, because I can't see myself, I see the text. So this is the book and I want to read from you from page 527. What about non-bizarre delusions, such as paranoia or grandiosity, could dissociative processes underlie the formation of such delusions too? These questions are best addressed by consideration of just persons concepts of primary and secondary delusions. Jaspers spent about five decades of his work and life on the study of these delusions, and in 1963 he published, his work on delusions was republished, and it was suggested then that there is a distinction between primary and secondary delusions. Jaspers considered secondary delusions to be delusional interpretations of preceding stimuli, so first there's a stimulus and then the interpretation of a stimulus is delusional, that's a secondary delusion. In contrast, primary delusions have no apparent precursors that just happen. Jaspers considered primary delusions to be psychologically irreducible to any precursors without reason. The clinical distinction between primary and secondary delusions requires careful inquiry. For example, a psychotic individual may report that there are snakes in his bed. Absent inquiry, one might conclude that this is a primary delusion, arising the novel out of nowhere, but if we inquire why the individual feels that there are snakes in his bed, we may discover that while there are no snakes, no snakes were seen, the delusional idea of snakes was preceded by a sensation of something slithering over his skin as he lay in bed. Further inquiry might reveal a history of childhood sexual abuse by an older sibling who regularly crawled into bed. Given this information, the clinician might deduce that the patient's delusion was a secondary delusion that arose from a tactile hallucination. The tactile hallucination could be understood as a decontextualized somatic memory of the patient's abuse experiences triggered by bedtime stimuli. Indeed, tactile hallucinations have also been linked to experiences of childhood abuse in other studies, for example, read in 2003. Lacking awareness that this tactile experience was in fact a memory, the patient generated the delusional explanation of the tactile stimulus. In other words, the patient went to bed, then something happened, he rubbed against something by mistake or there was some tactile stimulus triggered and this brought to his mind, reminded him of the childhood sexual abuse, but because he couldn't face the abuse, there was too much for him, he converted it into a delusion that there are snakes in his bed. In this example and in similar situation, the spatial temporal context of the memory would be either lost, and these are studies by Nadel and Jacobs in 1996 of such cases, or split off from the emotional and procedural aspects of the experience. As decontextualization is typical of both traumatic memories and schizophrenia, secondary delusions such as this one may derive from sensory and emotional flashbacks that are so dissociated from their spatial temporal context as to be unknowable as memories. In other words, the patient doesn't realize that these are memories. The same situation to a large extent is with the narcissist. Many of the delusions of the narcissist are actually attempts to contextualize, to create context, to interpret, to understand, to explain to himself, repressed traumatic memories of childhood abuse, breach of boundaries having been treated as an object, having received conditional love, bed and good mother, frustration. These are extremely traumatic memories for a child who is trying to separate from the mother and individuate, and as the child becomes an adult, well at least chronologically, never mentally, in the case of the narcissist, the person tries to understand what has happened, what is this trauma, what is the source of all my discomfort and unease and depression and anxiety and so on. And the narcissist's solution is delusional, is to create delusional context and explanations. The validity of the concept of primary delusions has been challenged by Roberts in 1992 who accurately noted that jaspers did describe an antecedent to primary delusions, namely the particular anxiety state that he called delusional atmosphere or delusional mood. Roberts's position is consistent with free men and guarantees in 2003, that essentially all delusions arise from pre-existing mood states. The question then becomes where do these mood states, where do these affective states come from? Nadal and Jacobs have argued that disembodied event memories are conflated with the ongoing spatial temporal frame in anxiety disorders. We wonder if delusions may have a similar genesis. That is, do delusions which are often preceded by intense anxiety states, do they arise as an effort to make sense out of an overwhelming affective experience? If so, then perhaps the secretary delusions, for example, might involve feelings of danger that intrude without the patient recalling the original source of these feelings. Now, this is a very obstruous and complex text, but it's extremely crucial to the understanding of narcissists. In the narcissist, the delusional state is preceded by moodlability, very similar to the borderline. But while the borderline reacts to moodlability with emotional dysregulation and then with secondary psychopathy, which includes acting out, the narcissist reacts to moodlability and to emotional triggers by becoming more delusional. He sinks deeper into the neverworld and underworld of his own contortions and lies and confabulations, and he simply withdraws and retreats into a dissociative state, just trying to forget reality inside his own fantasies. In other words, narcissists have a natural preference for fantasy life over reality life, what Freud would have called pleasure principle over the reality principle. To substantiate what I'm saying, I'm referring you to cutting and done, 1989, Jaspers, therefore mentioned, Young and McGory in 1996, Moskowitz, Nadel, Watson, Jacobs in 2008 and so on. And many studies that actually substantiate what I've just said. Mellon was aware, Theodor Mellon, the one of the grandfathers of the field of personality disorders, and to my taste at least, still the number one authority. Theodor Mellon was aware that narcissism can be construed quite easily as a dissociative delusional state, and he has written this in his book, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, page 303. When he explains the narcissistic personality, he says, when narcissists are faced with recurrent failures or adversities too severe to deny, in other words, when narcissists become collapse narcissists, they naturally attribute such events to the operational forces external to the self, the foundation of paranoid or delusional disorder. Already prone to grandiose fantasies and unwilling to accept the verdict of reality, narcissists sometimes isolate themselves from the corrective effects of shared thinking from other people. Running scared through their private fictional world, narcissists may lose touch with reality and begin thinking along peculiar and deviant lines. Because narcissists see themselves as both brilliant and superior, obviously the success could be blocked only by some entity equally gifted but malevolent. Narcissists may find hidden and hostile meanings in the incidental behavior of others, and become convinced that innocent behaviors hide malicious motives and intricate schemes. Such persecutory delusions represent the last ditch effort to protect the grandiose self from total collapse and establish continuity between pathological narcissism and paranoid and delusional disorders. Indeed, in some cases, says Theodore Miller, the paranoid presents as a narcissist, something I've been saying for a very long time. Paranoia is a form of narcissism. If you are sufficiently important to be persecuted by the CIA, then you are important, it's a grandiose defense. So the paranoid presents as a narcissist whose inflated sense of self-esteem, says Miller, has been repeatedly or profoundly flattened, perhaps through ordinary encounters with reality or perhaps by colleagues who have secretly decided among themselves to undo an insufferable supervisor or coworker. Here, paranoid symptoms represent a defensive adaptation to a hostile environment that threatens the narcissist at a fundamental level. The paranoid quality may be expressed through a belief that others are conspiring to deprive these individuals of their sense of specialness or somehow cheat them out of a momentous accomplishment, testament to their brilliance. For example, the individual may assert that co-workers have stolen the seeds of an invention that will provide the world with a clean source of unlimited energy or very common among narcissists who accuse each other of plagiarism, of ideas, of tapes. The difference between believing that others are envious of you and believing that others are actively trying to undo you, the subtle difference. You can believe that people are jealous of you, envious of you, but to believe that they are acting on their envy in order to destroy you, sometimes this difference becomes rather thin as stressors mount and the stress pushes the narcissist to become delusional with such a reality. We can imagine this happening to a narcissist who already believes that the stuff in his workplace is jealous of him and wants to have him fired. This is Milan. It's a rare case where I don't entirely agree with Milan or actually I think Milan is incomplete. Usually Milan covers every conceivable base, including many bases no one has thought of, but in this case I think he missed a point. Narcissists react with enhanced delusionality that become more and more delusional, not only to failure but also to success. Anyone who has been with a narcissist when he had just been successful, when he succeeded at something, knows what I'm talking about. A narcissist who has been successful is puffed up, he's pompous, he's grandiose, he's verbose, he's aggressive, he's defiant, he's antisocial, he can do their devil, devil may care, happy go lucky. Narcissists are inflated by their success. They become a bit psychopathic. It's like alcohol myopia. Some people when they drink they become grandiose. They can do anything. They're totally disinhibited. Success and failure have identical effect on the narcissist which implies that as far as the narcissist is concerned, success is a form of stress, puts him under stress. And of course he puts him under stress because he's a perfectionist. He's afraid to be unable to replicate the success in the future. He's afraid of other people's criticism once he had succeeded and cannot do it again. So one of the most important symptoms and again to remind you that the second half of the video I will discuss what all this does to you as a victim, how it f with your mind, f's with your mind, how it changes you, how in some respects it is a post trance or post hypnotic state, kind of a dissociative, induced dissociative state. I'll come I'll come to it a bit later. But right now we have to understand the narcissist's delusional universe because you have entered this universe. It's another universe. It's another universe, another planet, it's another galaxy far far away. One of the most important symptoms of pathological narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, is we all know grandiosity. Grandiose fantasies, megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur, permeate every aspect of the narcissist's personality. They are the reason that narcissists feel, for example, entitled to special treatment, which is typically incommensurate with the narcissist's real accomplishments. Many narcissists are losers and failures, but they treat themselves as the best thing since sliced bread, including sliced bread. The grandiosity gap between the narcissist's ego ideal, the narcissist's idealized image of himself, because narcissists remember core idealizes. He never idealizes someone. He idealizes someone, idealizes other people in order to idealize himself. So the narcissist idealizes himself and then there's reality. And often there is a huge gap between them and abyss. This is the grandiosity gap. It's the abyss between the narcissist's self image as reified by false self and reality. So when narcissistic supply is deficient, unable to bridge this gap, the narcissist decompensates and acts out in a variety of ways. Narcissists often experience psychotic microepisodes, for example, during therapy. This therapy is reality, end of story. Narcissists cannot escape. The therapist probing questions and, you know, implied criticism. Or when they suffer narcissistic injuries in a life crisis, I don't know, divorce, having been cheated on, bankruptcy of a business. But can the narcissist go over the edge? Do narcissists ever become psychotic, fully psychotic, irredeemably psychotic, clinically psychotic? The narcissist's hold on reality is tenuous. Narcissists sometimes fail the reality testing. Admittedly, narcissists often seem to believe in their own confabulations. They are unaware of the pathological nature and origin of their self delusions. And technically, therefore, they are delusional. They don't have hallucinations. They don't have disorganized speech, disorganized or catatonic behavior. So they're not schizophrenia. And they are not on the schizoaffective or schizotypal spectrum, which leads to schizophrenia. They're not there. In the strict sense of the word, narcissists are not psychotic. There is a qualitative difference between benign, though well-entrenched self-deception, or even malignant con artistry, and losing it. Narcissists don't lose it. They opt. They opt out of reality. It's very similar, I think, to a drug addict or an alcoholic. They imbibe or they inject or they sniff and they snort. And these are the ways that they opt out of reality. The narcissistic supply is a drug. Pathological narcissism should not be construed as a form of psychosis because the narcissist is usually fully aware of the difference between true and false, real and make-believe, invented and extant, right and wrong all the time. The narcissist consciously chooses to adopt one version of the events, as the Trump administration would call it, alternative facts. An aggrandizing narrative, a fairytale existence, a what-if counterfactual life. Narcissists emotionally invested in his personal myth. The narcissist feels better at fiction than as fact, but he never loses sight of the fact that it is all just fiction. Throughout all this mess, the narcissist is in full control of his faculties, his cognizant of his choices, his goal orientated. That's why I am dead set, dead set against using narcissistic personality disorder as a defense in the court of law, against claiming that it creates diminished capacity, or that it is not guilty by reason of insanity, absolutely not. Narcissist behavior is intentional, it's directional, he's a manipulator, his delusions are in the service of his stratogens and subterfuges, subterfuges. His chameleon-like ability to change his guises, his conduct and his convictions, I mean he flips on a dime. Narcissistic delusions rarely persist in the face of blanket opposition and reams of evidence to the contrary. I mean in prison, forget it, the narcissist suddenly becomes a model citizen in prison. No one would tolerate his nonsense in prison. He may end up very badly or sexually satisfied in unnatural ways. The narcissist usually tries to convert his social media to his point of view. He attempts to condition his nearest and dearest, to positively reinforce his delusional false self. But if he fails, no problem, he modifies his profile on the fly. He plays it by ear. His false self is extemporaneous, improvised, a perpetual work of art, permanently reconstructed in a recursive process designed around intricate and complex feedback loops from the environment. Whatever works. Though the narcissistic personality is rigid, its content is always in flux. It's like Mini, Mini is rigid, trust me, try to live with her. She's very rigid, but her content is in flux. She has less content now. Narcissists forever reinvent themselves. They adopt the consumption of narcissistic supply to the marketplace. They are salesmen attuned to the needs of their suppliers, like the performers that they are. Performers, you know, actors, thespian, they resonate with their audience. Giving the audience what it expects and wants. They are a constant off of Broadway production. They are efficient instruments for the extraction and consumption of human reactions. As a result of this interminable process of fine tuning, narcissists have no loyalties, no values, no doctrines, no beliefs, no affiliations, no convictions, nothing. In borderlines, this would be called identity disturbance or identity diffusion. It's the borderline wants to have a core. She wants stability. She wants to feel grounded, not the narcissist. He doesn't. He's pretty happy with the way he is. He's eco-syntonic. He's proud of who he is. He's self-aware. Don't listen to the nonsense online. Most narcissists are self-aware. But they're happy with it. Their only constraint is their addiction to human attention, positive and negative. Psychotics by comparison. Joker. Think of Joker in the movie. They are fixated on a certain view of the world and of their place in the world. They ignore any and only information that might challenge their delusions. They don't modify their delusions. Gradually, they retreat into the inner recesses of their tormented minds and become dysfunctional. Narcissists cannot afford to shut out the world because they so heavily depend on the world for the regulation of their labile sense of self-worth. Owing to this dependence, narcissists are hypersensitive actually. They're hyper-vigilant. They have cold empathy. They scan you and they know everything about you. Alert to every bit of new data long before you are. They are continuously busy rearranging their self-delusions to incorporate new information in an eco-syntonic manner. This is why the narcissistic personality disorder is as I said insufficient grounds as a core defense. Narcissists are never divorced from reality. They crave reality. They need reality. They consume it in order to maintain the precarious balance of their disorganized borderline psychotic personality. But they take what they can from reality and then organize this information, this input into delusional frameworks. In other words, they have engines of interpretation. They are in full touch with reality, but they don't have a good reality testing. They gather the information. They gather all the data and then they process it internally in engines of transformation which are delusional. All narcissists, even the freakest ones, can tell right from wrong, act with intent and are in full control of the faculties and actions. But all of them without exception, see the world their own way, my way or the highway. I'm the greatest. So it's like you have all the info, you have all the data, but you have the wrong program to interpret it, the wrong computer app, wrong smartphone app to interpret the data that you had collected. The narcissist is the center of the world. He's not merely the center of his world. As far as the narcissist can tell, he is the center of the world. And this Archimedean delusion is one of the narcissist's most predominant and all pervasive cognitive distortions. The narcissist feels certain that he is the source of everything that happens around him. He's the prima causa as they used to say about God in the Middle Ages. He's the primum movements. He's the main force that moves the origin of all the emotions of his nearest and dearest. If they are said, they are said because of him. If they are happy, they're happy because of him. If they are happy not because of him, he would make them sad. He's the fount of all knowledge and all knowledge is inside him. That's why he doesn't have to acquire, you know, academic credentials. He doesn't have to listen to experts or authorities because he knows everything already. Knowledge is internal, not external. He's very proud of saying. So he's the first and the final cause. He's like God, the beginning and the end or like Jesus Christ, the beginning and the end. The narcissist derives his sense of being, his experience of his own existence, his self-worth from the outside. He minds other people for narcissistic supply, adulation, attention, reflection, even being feared. Their reactions stoke his furnace. Absent narcissistic supply, the narcissist disintegrates, self-annihilates. When he is unnoticed, the narcissist feels empty, feels worthless. Narciss must dilute himself, dilute himself, lie to himself into believing that he is persistently the focus and object of attentions, intentions, plans, feelings, strategies, even malevolent malice of other people. Everything is like a vortex and he's at the center. He's the eye of the hurricane. The narcissist faces a stark choice. Either be or become the permanent center of the world or cease to be altogether. And this constant obsession with one's locus, with one's centrality, with one's position as a hub, it leads to referential ideation, ideas of reference. And this is the conviction that one is at the receiving end of other people's behaviors, speech, even thoughts. The person suffering from delusional ideas of reference is at the center and thoughts of the constant and confabulated attentions of an imaginary audience. So the narcissist walks into a room. There are two people laughing 20 meters away. They're laughing about him. They're laughing at him. People are talking in hushed voices in the other corner. They're talking about him. It's all about him. His wife cheated on him. She cheated on him because of him, not because she had her own needs. He made her cheat. He converts external modification into internal modification. The narcissist is constantly torn because on the one hand, this creates an external locus of control. It's like impersonal malevolent forces, vicious people are conspiring to destroy him, to deny him his right, his recognition, his life. His life is dictated by outside forces, with external locus. On the other hand, he feels that he is the reason and cause of the whole universe. He feels that it's Godlike. That's the false self. How the false self experiences itself is Godlike. It's Godlike. It's a divine entity. And this creates dissonance, of course. What kind of divine entity are you? If people, for example, can frustrate you. If they can hurt you, if they can steal your ideas, if they can sleep with your wife. What kind of divine force are you? When this creates modification, it's the internal modification. When people talk, the narcissist is convinced that he is the topic of discussion. When they quarrel, he is most probably the cause. This even has a name, clinical name, quarrels some paranoia. When they smirk, he is the victim of their ridicule. He is mocked. If they are unhappy, he made them unhappy. If they are happy, they are egotists because they are ignoring. He is convinced that his behavior is continuously monitored, criticized, compared, dissected, approved of, imitated, etc. He deems himself so indispensable, so important. Such a critical component of other people's lives that is every act, is every word, is every utterance, and is every omission, is bound to upset or hurt, uplift or satisfy some audience. This is, of course, utterly delusional. In 99% of the cases, people do whatever they do because of their own reasons, which have very little to do with other people. You know, maybe in some respects, we are all delusional this way. Because, for example, we believe in the delusion of love. We believe that our loved ones and intimate partners do things because they love us. It's not true. People do things because they do things, because they need to do things. You just happen to be there, and sometimes they help you beneficially. And to the narcissist, everyone is but an audience. It all emanates from him, and it all reverts to him. Narcissus is a circular and closed universe. His ideas of reference are a natural extension of his primitive defense mechanisms, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. Being omnipresent explains why everyone, everywhere, is concerned with him, because he's everywhere. Being omnipotent and omniscient excludes other lesser beings from enjoying the admiration, adulation, and attention of people. And yet the attrition, attrition and exhaustion and depletion afforded by years of tormenting ideas of reference inevitably yields paranoiac thinking and bitter, bitter narcissists. Narcissists, older narcissists, my age, ask me, are bitter. They're bitter, they're disappointed, they're broken, they're collapsed even when they're not collapsed. They're internally collapsed. If I'm introducing a new concept here. Internal collapse and external collapse. Narcissus can be externally extremely successful, but internally collapsed, because he ran out of reserves, he ran out of battery, he needs to recharge, to preserve his egocentric cosmology. The narcissist is compelled to attribute fitting motives and psychological dynamics to others. Such motives and dynamics have little to do with reality, of course. They are projected by the narcissist onto others, so as to maintain his personal mythology. In other words, the narcissist attributes to others his own motives and psychodynamics. And since narcissists are mostly besieged by transformations of aggression, narcissists rage, they hate, they envy, they fear. He attributes these emotions, these negative emotions to others as well. So the whole world becomes a hostile, frightening jungle. And so the narcissist tends to interpret other people's behavior as motivated by anger, by fear, by hatred, by envy, and is directed at him, or revolving around him. The narcissist often erroneously believes that people discuss him, gossip about him, hate him, defame him, mock him, berate him, underestimate him, envy him, fear him, is convinced that he is to others the source of hurt, humiliation, impropriety, and indignation. And he very often is, precisely because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think people hate you, you will hate them back. If you think they're angry at you, you'll avoid them. I mean, this delusional, misconstrual of reality is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The narcissist knows internally that he's a wonderful, powerful, talented, and entertaining person. But he's only explains why people are jealous, envious, why they seek to undermine and destroy him. And so since the narcissist is unable to secure the long-term positive love, admiration, or even attention of his sources of supply, he resorts to a mirror strategy. In other words, the narcissist becomes paranoid. Better to be the object of an imaginary and always self-inflicted derision, scorn, and bile than to be ignored. Better to be hated and feared than not to be. Being envied is preferable to being treated with indifference. If he cannot be loved, the narcissist would rather be feared or hated than forgotten. The narcissist is therefore a prophet of doom, a Jeremiah. He hates the world and the world hates him back. And sometimes he converts his hate, he structures it, and introduces other people into his hatred. Hate speech, hate actions, hate perceptions, hate interpretation, exegetic framework, hate hermeneutic framework, depotative framework, hate scriptures. He creates a cult, a cult of hatred, a death cult. A death doesn't have to be physical, an emotional death cult. And you are inducted. You as his intimate partner, you are inducted into this Hall of Mirrors, Hall of Dark Mirrors through a glass darkly. The narcissist is the guru at the center of this cult. And like other gurus, he demands complete obedience from his flock. His spouse is offspring, other family members, friends, colleagues. Narcissist feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by his followers. He punishes the wayward and the strained lens. He enforces discipline, adherence to his teachings, common goals. The less accomplished the narcissist is in reality, the more stringent his mastery, the more outlandish and incredible his mission and message, and more pervasive the brainwashing. So you could say that cults are person-centered organizations compared to other impersonal bureaucracies. And this is the ironic paradox at the heart of cults. Even as cult leaders dehumanize and objectify their followers, they do it with a human face, the face of the cult's charismatic founder and chieftain. Cult leaders are narcissists, failed now, I mean collapsed narcissists. Narcissists who were defeated by reality in life, who failed in their quest to be someone, to become famous, to impress the world with their uniqueness, talents, traits and skills. A such disgruntled, collapsed narcissist withdraws into a pathological narcissistic space that assumes the hallmarks of a cult. The often involuntary members of the narcissist mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of his own construction. He imposes on his followers, on his cult members, an exclusionary or inclusionary shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, enemies everywhere, mythical grandiose narratives, apocalyptic scenarios if he's flouted, if the rules are broken, calamity, cataclysm. It is a mental enclave of suspended judgment which fuss becomes the disciples' comfort zone, where devoid of all responsibilities and the guilt attendant on failure, devoid of performance anxiety, the followers of the narcissist feel calm and assured of the master's unconditional acceptance and love. Nazi Germany, the Nazi party, think. What went on there? What went on there is that Hitler told his followers, listen guys, I take all the responsibility and I take all the guilt if there's failure and you don't need to be anxious, because all the performance is mine. You just need to follow the partiture, you just need to follow the rules and my instructions and you don't need to think, this thinking is onerous and depleting and you can't be assured of your own success. And so, why don't you relegate the harrowing and frightening potential of failure to me, the shocking and disturbing and discombobulating effects of defeat to me? Let me be the repository of your toxic fear of your own selves and feel calm and assured. It's a reenactment of the followers' early childhood, only this time with an ideal benevolent parent, as he is perceived. And so, exclusionary church psychosis involves the physical and emotional isolation of the narcissist and his flock, spouse, children, fans, friends, from the outside world, in order to better shield them from imminent threats and hostile intentions. Inclusionary church psychosis revolves around attempts to spread the narcissist message in a missionary fashion, among friends, colleagues, coworkers, fans, churchgoers, anyone else who comes across the mini cult. When the narcissist tries to obtain supply from other people, narcissistic supply, he is spreading his religion, he is a missionary, like in Africa, in the 19th century, you know? He's telling everyone, I'm godlike, can't you see? It worships me. The narcissist's control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, ambient abuse. He's ever shifting whims exclusively defined right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued, what is to be avoided. Narcissed alone determines the rights and obligations of his disciples, and he alters them at will, capriciously, arbitrarily. The narcissist is a micromanager. He exerts control over the minutest details and behaviors. He punishes severely and abuses with holders of information, and those who fail to conform to his wishes and goals. The narcissist does not respect the boundaries and privacy of his reluctant adherents. He ignores their wishes, he treats them as objects or instruments of gratification. He seeks to control both situations and the people in these situations compulsively. He strongly disapproves of other special autonomy and independence, even innocuous activities such as, I don't know, meeting a friend, visiting one's family, reading a book, they require his permission. Gradually, he micromanages. He isolates his nearest and dearest until they are fully dependent, only on him, emotionally, sexually, financially and socially. That's the greatest delusion of all. He acts in a patronizing and condescending manner and criticizes often. Intermitted reinforcements. He alternates between emphasizing the minutest faults, the values, and exaggerating the talents, traits and skills of his followers. Idealizes the members of his cult. And in all of this, the narcissist is wildly unrealistic in his expectations, which legitimizes, of course, his subsequent abusive conduct. He sets people up for failure. The narcissist claims to be infallible, superior, talented, skilful, omnipotent and unishie. He often lies and confabulates to support these unfounded claims. Within his cult, he expects all admiration, adulation, and constant attention, commensurate with his outlandish stories and assertions. He reinterprets reality to fit his fantasies. The narcissist is thinking is dogmatic, rigid, doctrinaire, disciplinarian. He does not countenance free thought, pluralism, free speech, argumentation, debate. He doesn't broke criticism or disagreement. He demands and often gets complete obedience, trust, and the relegation of his capable to his capable of all decision making. Narcissus forces the participants in his cult to be hostile to critics, to the authorities, to institutions, to his personal enemies, to the media, if they try to uncover his actions and reveal the truth. Remember Jim Jones? He closely monitors and sends us information from the outside, exposing his captive audience only to selective data and analysis, the Kool-Aid. The narcissist cult is missionary and imperialistic. He is always on the lookout for new recruits, his spouse's friends, his daughter's girlfriends, his neighbors, new colleagues at work. He immediately attempts to convert them to his creed to convince them how wonderful and admirable he is. In other words, Narcissus tries to render everyone a source of supply. And often his behavior on these recruiting missions is different to his conduct within the cult. In the first phases of wooing, wooing new admirers and proselytizing the potential conscripts, the narcissist is attentive, compassionate, empathic, flexible, self-effacing, unreasonable, and helpful, which just proves to you that he can be this way whenever he wants to. At home, among the veterans, among the already recruited, those he takes for granted, he is tyrannical, demanding, willful, opinionated, aggressive, and exploited. As the leader of his congregation, Narcissus feels entitled to special amenities and benefits not accorded the rank and file. This is very common in parishes and churches. He expects to be waited on, hand on foot, to make free use of everyone's money and dispose of their assets, even their bodies, liberally. And to cynically exempt from the rules that he himself established himself. If the violation of the rules is pleasurable and gainful, Narcissus is going to violate the rules. In extreme cases, the narcissist feels above the law, any kind of law. This grandiose and haughty delusional conviction leads him to criminal acts, incestuous or polygamous relationships, and recurrent friction with the authorities. Hence, the narcissist panicking and sometimes violent reactions to dropouts from his cult. There's a lot going on that the narcissist once kept under wraps. You know the famous phenomenon? That a child lives the family and the narcissist refuses to talk to their child, never mind what happens. I mean, the child grows up as a family, the narcissist refuses to meet them, to talk to them, to see them, and would not allow them to visit home. Why? Because they dropped out of the cult. They did disobeyed him. Moreover, the narcissist stabilizes. He's fluctuating sense of self-worth by deriving narcissistic supply from his victims. Abandonment threatens the narcissist, precariously balanced personality. And add to this, his paranoid and schizoate tendencies, his lack of introspective self-awareness, his stunted sense of humor, except me, of course, I have a sense of humor, his lack of self-deprecation, and the risks to the grudging members of his cult, quite clear. The narcissist sees enemies and conspiracies everywhere. He often casts himself as the heroic victim, the martyr of dark and stupendous forces. In every deviation from his tenants, he espies malevolent and ominous subversion. He therefore is bent on, hell bent, I would say, on disempowering his devotees by any and all means. This is dangerous. And then you have the members of the cult, and you talk to them, and hear sentences like, my husband is a misunderstood and much envidgenious when really he is an object failure and loser. Or you could read something like, the CIA is really spying on us. Why would they waste resources on a couple of sedate, third-rate accountants? Or my wife is good-hearted and kind when she's in fact a harridan. A delusion is a false belief. We said it before. Sometimes the member of the family, especially spouses or lovers, they share the delusion and they aid and abet each other in sustaining the delusion in a cult-like setting. There's always a primary inducer in a suggestible acceptor, in shared psychotic disorder, also known as foliadud, which is unfortunately no longer a diagnosis in the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 5, should have been. The delusions of the secretary, paranoid, grandiose, narcissistic, or manic, you hear these people saying, we're going to make big money soon. So let's splurge now, let's spend money now. The line between steadfast support for your partner and believing in him and shared psychosis is not very clear. In many ways, all long-term intimate relationships end up incorporating pronounced delusional elements, which are firstly defended by the couple. Shared psychosis are also common in other settings involving emotional intensity and stress, business, political activism, ideological movements, even in academia. Many self-styled empaths, my most hated word in the universe. Many self-styled empaths are actually codependent enablers or covert narcissists. There is a difference between being compassionate, being empathic, and enabling. Enabling is a pernicious variant of empathy. Compassion means that you hold a realistic view of your partner, but refuse to participate in his shared psychosis. Refuse to succumb and collaborate with his paranoia, his mind gates, his power place. It's still compassionate. Enabling means that you aid and abet your significant other. Together with him, you descend into his madness. His personal haters, his mental pangatory, and his fantasies and ideation. Is this a good thing to do? Are you a good intimate partner? Of course you're not. Of course you're not. You're like his pusher. If you enable your partner, you're like his pusher. You're enhancing his drug habit. Compassion is about providing your counterpart with external boundaries, checks and balances, control, feedback, realistic feedback. Enabling involves fusing and merging with the up, erasing all the boundaries, helping to fend off hurtful reality by becoming delusional together, jointly. When a couple is in a state of shared psychosis, they uphold a common delusional or paranoid or narcissistic narrative about themselves and about the world, and they settle on a code of conduct which conforms to this delusion, which is very counterproductive, self-destructive, self-defeating. Shared psychosis require departments to fuse and merge and therefore present psychodynamic aspects of both dependent and borderline personality disorders. When one of the partners opts out of the shared psychotic disorder, the other half feels annulled, annihilated, incomplete, amputated, cast out. She or he reacts with depressive episodes, whose severity and duration can be extreme. The depression resolves into two solutions or orientations. So when there's a breakup of the shared psychosis or the mega delusion, there's depression. This depression can lead to one of two paths. Some rejected partners react by utterly repressing the past. They dissociate. They live solely in the present, like there's no yesterday or tomorrow, carpeting and mindfulness. They act out recklessly, antisocial, promiscuously. Other discarded partners in the shared psychotic disorder, they get stuck in the past. They are debilitated. They are rendered dysfunctional by nostalgia and abandonment anxiety. They live like there is no today or tomorrow or yesterday. And both types usually end up enmeshed in a new shared psychosis, in an attempt to recreate and recapture the magic of being one with another person. Organism with two heads, soulmates, twins and the overwhelming sensations of safety and acceptance is such an arrangement provides. By the way, psychopaths know this. The grooming process of the psychopaths involve simulated shared psychosis. In some couple, where one member is a failure and a loser, the other member fails to thrive. She doesn't want to challenge him. She just doesn't want to humiliate him. She just wants to remind him what a failure is. So one member is a failure. The other one is a failure and a loser as well, engages in self-destructive, so defeating behavior. She doesn't want to humiliate the less accomplished intimate partner by being too successful. Similarly, when one of the members of the diet is challenged or threatened by intimacy or sexuality, the other member often agrees to suppress her femininity or his masculinity in order to avoid conflicts and hurt. You don't want intimacy. You don't want sex. Okay, then I will stop existing as a sexual object and as an emotional object. I will suppress my emotions. I will suppress my sexuality as I love you. Narcissists prefer to be right than to be happy. It is a self-defeating, even self-destructive propensity. The narcissist pushes people to prove his judgment and prognostications infallible, even at a life-threatening traumatic cost to himself. Narcissists very often will induce life-threatening modification just to prove that they're right. For example, the narcissist may predict a dire, painful future and then preemptively make it happen in order to avoid dissonance, to avoid a challenge to his grandiosity, to his omniscience, and the excruciating shame for having been wrong and having misread the tea leaves. The narcissist prevaricates, deceives, confabulates, gaslights. Although most narcissists limit themselves to confabulation, narcissists who gaslights, narcissists who lies knowingly, manipulatively is usually an antisocial narcissist, psychopathic narcissist. But they do all these things in order to preserve ego-syntony by always being right. Narcissists undermine intimate relationships, his own accomplishments, values, priorities, you name it, to preserve his fantastic godlike grandiosity. When confronted with incontrovertible evidence that is wrong, the narcissist reacts by retreating to delusions, denying reality. He decompensates, he acts out, he rages, he becomes passive-aggressive. What all this is doing to you as his victim in intimate talk? What all this engenders in you? How does it transform you? And you know what? A very interesting question. Why do you feel so bad when he leaves? Why so many of you are heartbroken by the breakup? Why aren't you happy and relieved, exalted and elated? Why are you sad that your narcissists had left or that you had left your narcissists? Why are you mourning? What are you grieving? And so the thing is that at the commencement of the relationship, the narcissist and even most of the psychopath is a dream come true. He is often intelligent, he is witty, he is charming, he is good-looking, he is an achiever, he is empathic, empathetic, he is in need of love, he is loving, he is caring, attentive, everything, you name it. He is a perfect bundled answer to the nagging questions of life and every wish you've ever had come true in one bundle of joy and happiness. You want to find meaning? You want companionship, compatibility, happiness? It's him. He is the reification of all this. He is ideal. At first the narcissist is too good to be true. Then he is too true to be good. It is difficult to let go of this idealized figure. Relationships with narcissists inevitably and invariably end with the dawn of a double realization. The first is that one has been abused by the narcissist and the second is that one had been regarded by the narcissist as a disposable, dispensable and interchangeable instrument, an object. The assimilation of this new gained knowledge is an excruciating process often unsuccessfully completed. Why? Because you are as delusional as the narcissist. He made you delusional. He made you not only integrate into his own delusions, he made you his main delusion. People get fixated at different stages. They fail to come to terms with their rejection as human beings, most total form of rejection there is. Look, we all react to this. Loss makes us feel helpless and objectified. Even when we lose, you know, small thing. I lost my goldfish a few years ago. I was heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken for Deweyka, her name was Predush. So even small losses make us lost. When our loved ones die, we feel that nature or God or life treated us as playthings. When we divorce, especially if we did not initiate a breakup, we often feel that we have been exploited and abused in the relationship, that we are being dumped, that our needs and emotions are ignored. In short, we again feel objectified. Losing the narcissist is no different to any other major loss in life. It provokes a cycle of bereavement and grief, as well as some kind of mild post-traumatic stress syndrome, in cases of severe abuse, CPDs. And this cycle has four phases, denial, rage, sadness and acceptance, constructed roughly on the Kubler-Ross cycle of grief. Denial can assume many forms. Some go on pretending that the narcissist is still a part of their lives, even going to the extreme of interacting with the narcissist by pretending to communicate with him or to meet him, through others, via social media stalking. Others develop a secretary and it's a delusion, of course. It's like the narcissist is omnipresent and all you need to do is reach out and touch him. And that's delusional. So, victims react with delusions to the dissolution of the master primary delusional state. Other victims develop a secretary delusions, incorporating the imaginary narcissist into their lives as an ominous and dark presence. And this ensures his continued interest in them. If the narcissist is pursuing you, persecuting you, stalking you, threatening you, using the children against you, treating you unjustly, suing you in court, at least he's there. It means he is present in your life. It means he is still interested in you. This is, you know, many, many victims say, I went no contact, but yesterday I checked his social media and he's doing this with that. I mean, victims don't let go. They don't let go. They are obsessed with their narcissists. And one way of ensuring that the narcissist remains in your life is by converting the narcissist into a secretary object, a demonic or godlike entity that persecutes you, malevolent, threatening, better malevolent and threatening than not present, than gun. And these are radical denial mechanisms, which border on the psychotic and often disorient into brief psychotic micro episodes, paranoid. More benign and transient forms of denial include the development of ideas of reference. The narcissist's every move or utterance is interpreted to be directed at the suffering person, his ex. So if he said something, he was actually talking about you. If he made a video on YouTube, it was actually about your affair or your relationship. Everything we interpret to carry a hidden message, which can be decoded only by you. And that's of course, in the Rotomanic delusion. Others deny the very narcissistic nature of the narcissist. They attribute his abusive conduct to ignorance, mischief, lack of self-control, impulse control, childhood abuse and trauma, benign intentions, you name it. I call this malignant optimism. And this denial mechanism leads the victims to believe that the narcissist is really not a narcissist, but someone who is not aware of his true being, someone who merely and innocently enjoys mind gains and toying with people's lives, someone who is in the process of recovery or healing, unwitting part of a dark conspiracy to defraud and abuse gullible victims, or I don't know what. Do you know how many comments I get telling me that I'm actually not a narcissist? Or that I'm healing, or that I'm recovering, or that I'm changing? What the hell are you talking about? What's wrong with you guys? What's wrong with you is malignant optimism. You want to believe the good in people. This is something called the base-rate fallacy. The base-rate fallacy or base-rate bias is a well-documented psychological tendency to believe people, to believe the best about people, believe people are good. Danieli studies, I recommend. Often the narcissist is depicted as obsessed or possessed, imprisoned by his invented condition and really deep inside. Nice, gentle, lovable person, the inner child. I see the inner child in you. He's so lovable inside. It's all delusions, self-delusions. The pain is too much for you. You are retreating from reality. And at the healthier end of the spectrum of denial reactions, we find the classical denial of loss, the disbelief, the hope that the narcissist may return, the suspension and repression of all information to the contrary. Denial in mentally healthy people quickly evolves into rage. There are a few types of rage. Rage can be focused and directed at the narcissist, at other facilitations of the loss, such as the narcissist lover, or at a specific circumstance. It can be directed at oneself, which often leads to depression, suicide ideation, self-retolation, in some cases, suicide. It can be diffused, or pervasive, or encompassing. So you just feel that you're angry and bitter and you don't know at what and why. And it's engulfing. Such loss-related rage can be intense and in bursts or osmotic and permeate the whole emotional landscape. Rage gives place to sadness. It is the sadness of the trapped animal, an existential angst, a combination with anxiety mixed with acute depression. It involves dysphoria, the inability to rejoice, to be optimistic, cheerful, expectant, and unhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure or to find meaning in anything. It's a paralyzing sensation which slows you down and enshrouds everything in the gray veil of randomness and arbitrariness. Everything is meaningless. It all looks meaningless, empty. And this in turn gives place to gradual acceptance. Suddenly your energy reserves are renewed. There are bouts of activity, new friends enter your life, maybe new lovers. The narcissist is gone both physically and increasingly more mentally. The void left in his wake still hurts. Pangs of regret and hope still exist. But on the whole, the narcissist is transformed into a distant memory, a narrative, a symbol, another life experience through a tedious cliché. Narcissus is no longer omnipresent. His former victim entertains no delusions as to the one-sided and abusive nature of the relationship, or as to the possibility and desirability of its revival. And this is the best-case scenario. It's a healthy development. Of course, many victims of narcissistic abuse have their own mental health issues. And they can't progress through these phases. They don't reach acceptance. They get stuck in one of the phases, rage or depression or delusion, self-delusionality. And we'll discuss it in one of the future videos. So thank you very much. The lesson of this video is do not eat moldy yogurt. It's not worth it. And always drink coffee from a mug with a beautiful girl on it, like me.