 Hello Shoshanim, if you want to have a truly terrible day, here's my advice, go to Skopje in North Macedonia and open an account with NLB Banka, that's NLB Banka, I took all my money and ran as fast as I could, wow, talk about a nightmare, okay Shoshanim, today we're going to discuss a very complex topic, why can't the narcissist think straight, why isn't he like us, I mean like you, why doesn't he simply move from point A to point B, why doesn't he recognize causes and effects, well we all know that narcissists have cognitive distortions, for example, grandiosity, the narcissist falsifies reality in order to conform to his grandiosity to buttress his inflated self-image, we also know that narcissists have dissociation memory gaps and they invent all kinds of stories and narratives and scripts to paper over the abyss of their own absence, we know all this, I've dwelt upon all this in previous videos, there's also a video called the narcissist cognitive deficits etc etc but today I want to offer you the reason, I want to offer you a netiology, I want to describe to you the inner landscape of the narcissist, what goes on in this battle zone, in this civil war which is the narcissist psyche and who is better qualified than me, Sam Vaknim, the author of Malignant Self-Love, narcissism revisited the Bible of narcissism published in the 1990s, the book that coined most of the language in today's use and consequently I'm a professor of psychology inflicting myself upon hapless and hopeless and happy-less students all over the known universe, resistance is futile and apropos futile resistance, let us delve right into the narcissist soul, before I start again for the nitpickers and the hair splitters, the genders are interchangeable, half of all people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are women so why do I use he? Because in good literature we use the male gender pronoun, is this fair? Of course it's not, is this sexist? By all means does it mean that there are only male narcissists? No, there is an equal number of male and female narcissists today, not 40 years ago mind you but today there is. Okay, I hope we have some mounted this obstacle and calm down the rampant anxiety of the hundreds of you who have written to me about female lurking malevolent malicious emanations of female narcissists. We know that all narcissists are binary, they all have a covert component and an overt component. Now I've been saying it for decades and it has recently been accepted in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a text revision published two or three months ago, they say it openly that the narcissist pendulates, oscillates and vacillates between overt and overt in a covert state. The covert state involves a collapse when the narcissist is unable to obtain narcissistic supply, he sometimes becomes covert, he also develops dysphoria and depression and so on. So all narcissists are overt and covert and these components of narcissism, pathological narcissism somehow interact and they interact constantly. However, one of the components is dominant, is public facing, is the facade and one of them is lurking in the background, is recessive. So an overt narcissist would be mostly overt and then when he collapses, when he can no longer secure the uninterrupted flow of supply, he will become covert. A covert narcissist who is unable to obtain supply vicariously by proxy through others or through passive aggression can become sometimes an overt narcissist. It's a similar situation with somatic and cerebral narcissists. There is no type constancy, however there is type dominance. Okay, what triggers the transitions from overt to covert, back to overt and so on, circumstances, the environment, other people. But all this has to do with four things, constructs, interjects, memories and identity and defenses. The interplay between these four elements in the narcissist psychology, the interplay is so intricate, so exceedingly complex that this is what renders the narcissist essentially crazy making in a way. This is why it's hard for neurotypicals, normal healthy people to grasp the narcissist and this is why the narcissist behavior is not necessarily anti-social as it is alien. When we try to conceive of the narcissist or to recall the narcissist we came across, we usually think of the narcissist as an extraterrestrial, an alien emanation, if you wish, a reptilian. It's not human or not fully human and this is because the psychology of the narcissist is indeed discernibly different to the psychology of a healthy person. To decipher, decode and understand the way the narcissist thinks and what causes the narcissist to be subjected to cognitive deficits, cognitive biases, cognitive deficiencies and cognitive distortions, we need to start with some academic background. Constructs. A construct is a stable method of organizing raw internal data in a meaningful form. It is a way of organizing and making sense of the world, of oneself and of one's life. A construct allows you to make predictions, a construct structures your experience. Now, everyone has constructs. A construct is a little like a museum. It is a structure and within the structure everything is organized either chronologically or thematically. Your emotions, your cognitions, your memories, your identity, your experiences, they all follow a kind of timeline or a kind of logic and it is this internal organization within the museum of your construct that renders the world comprehensible and even reasonable. The constructs shape and mediate experience. I can rephrase this sentence and say that experience is mediated through the constructs and is shaped by them. There is no such thing as direct experience. Everything is indirect, starting with your sensor, your sensory inputs which are processed in special algorithms in the brain filtered and changed beyond recognition and ending with your experiences, memories, events in your life, circumstances, the environment, other people. Everything is filtered through the membrane of the constructs. Everything is shaped by the constructs, sometimes beyond recognition. Everything is made to fit in with prior data in order to avoid dissonance. Experience is mediated through the constructs also because the constructs are hermeneutic exegetic mechanisms. Now this is a very fancy way of saying that constructs interpret new data. Constructs are interpretative mechanisms. When new information comes in via the sensors, via the sensors, in other ways, when new information comes in, the construct takes over and interprets this information and the construct interprets this information to conform to the construct. The construct is self-preserving. The construct is self-maintaining and self-reinforcing. So the construct filters out countervailing, contravening information. Construct is a kind of echo chamber. It's a kind of confirmation bias machine or engine. So the main role of the construct is to choose to select which data, which information will penetrate, will reach you and then to arrange this bits of information, to arrange this data into coherent frameworks, coherent arrays, so that everything remains glued together. There's no dissonance, there's no conflict and there's no anxiety. Indeed one can say that constructs are actually anxiolytic mechanisms, anxiety controlling and anxiety reducing mechanisms. Now in all people multiple constructs are active. There are multiple active constructs in everyone, healthy and mental but the active constructs are not or never mutually exclusive. They're never contradictory. They don't contradict each other. There's a principle of non-contradiction, of course. If the main aim of constructs is to create consonance, the opposite of dissonance. If the main aim of the construct is to reduce anxiety and allow you to function better or more self-efficaciously, of course the main function of the constructs would be to not contradict each other, to not create dissonance and anxiety. There's a principle of non-contradiction. Now examples of constructs are the persona, Jung's persona or Govman's mask, the public face, the public personality that you show your colleagues or when you walk the street or when you're among strangers or when you're in social settings. That's a construct, this social facade. Covert narcissism is a construct. Overt narcissism is a construct. These are all constructs. Incompatible constructs compete for scarce resources in binary narcissism, in schizophrenia, in psychotic disorders. So what I'm trying to tell you, if your constructs are active and disagree with each other, you're in serious trouble. You're about to disintegrate. You're about to act out. You're about to lose touch with reality. You're about to mistake hallucinations, delusions and fantasies for reality. The compatibility of constructs is essential, a prerequisite for your mental sanity. Insane people have competing constructs. Insane people confuse the constructs that have to do with the external and the constructs that have to do with the internal, the constructs that have to do with the world out there and the environment in here. This confusion between external and internal underlies many mental health conditions, maybe actually the unifying principle of all mental illness and definitely explains well mental health phenomena such as pathological narcissism and psychotic disorders and all of these emanates emerges from a war between constructs, constructs which contradict each other, disagree with each other, fight with each other, battle each other for scarce resources, try to take over. Now if this is reminiscent of self-states, it is because self-states are closely identified with specific constructs. A psychopathic self-state would be identified with a psychopathic construct. A narcissistic self-state would be identified with a covert or an overt construct, narcissistic construct and so on and so forth. So the self, not as a unitary proposition but the self-state, the dominant self-state, the self-state that is in charge at any given moment uses constructs to interact with experience and mediate it. We are beginning to see the overall picture. There are several self-states. They emerge in response to environmental cues including social cues, sexual cues, circumstantial cues. So the self-states emerge and when they emerge they make use of specific constructs, constructs which are specific to the self-state and that's why the constructs are segregated, they're demarcated, they lie in wait for a self-state to activate them. Now move on from constructs to introjects, there's often a confusion between the two. As I said constructs are stable, they make sense of the world, they are an organizing principle, they are an interpretative principle and they are total, the construct is total. The minute a self-state makes use of a construct, the construct exclusively is the exclusive interface with reality. Not so the introjects. Introjects are voices of meaningful others, voices of your parents, voices of your teachers, your peers, media, society, thought leaders, gurus, mentors etc. So for example if you have listened to my videos long enough you're likely to develop a some vaknin introject and you're likely to need help in an emergency room. Okay enough nonsense vaknin, move on. So these are introjects, internal voices, if you shut off, shut out all the stimuli in your environment, if you're in a deprivation tank or the desert or mid ocean alone in a boat you're likely to hear these voices talking to you because they talk all the time, there's no interruption, it's useless. So because these voices keep communicating with you, keep sending you missed messages, keep signaling to you, keep criticizing you, keep praising you, they always interact with you these voices and there is a multiplicity of them, a multitude, a cacophony, a cacophony of voices, it's a whole orchestra, symphonic, philharmonic, harmonic. So it's a huge ensemble of voices. You must make peace with these voices, you must reconcile yourself to these recurrent voices, to avoid conflict, inner conflict and dissonance. You must lie to yourself, deceive yourself and say to yourself these voices are me, I am talking to myself, there's nobody else there, these are not my parents, these are not my teachers, these are not my peers, it's me, I appropriate these voices, I identify with them, they became an essential part of my identity, they are my identity, this is wrong of course, it's self-deception, Sartre the great existentialist philosopher made note of this, he distinguished between the authentic self and all the rest, the interjects. So this is an attribution error to say the interjects are me, the interjects are my voice this is an attribution error, you are attributing the voices to yourself and that is wrong, it's a mistake. Now you remember that the self states triggered by the environment use constructs to interact with the environment. So they use constructs to interface with reality and to interpret the information from reality to filter out challenging and undermining and unsettling data and so on. So the construct is like the graphic user interface, it's like your laptop screen, that's the construct and the self state is the operating system. So the self state activates the screen and the screen interacts with reality. So what's the role of the interjects in all this? We know that some interjects are positive, some interjects negative, interjects always interfere with daily functioning, they're always on, they don't stand by. So we have for example a cluster or community of interjects known as conscience, yes your conscience is an interject actually, these are the voices of your mother, father, society, teachers, religious leaders and so on, that's your conscience. Your conscience is always on, if you do something bad you will hear it, you will hear what it says, what it has to say, says to you your bad what you're doing is wrong, you should not do this, this is conscience, it is actually an integral part or the outcome of the process of socialization, mother and father as socialization agents and so are teachers and role models and sometimes peers. Society embeds itself in your mind through the interject or the group of interjects known as conscience. So we know all this about interjects and we know that we have constructs. What's the interaction between them? The self state activates the construct, the construct is in touch with reality, the construct filters out and modifies data from reality but what about the interjects? What do they do and how do they interact with the constructs? You see the construct is in charge of reality, the construct is public facing, the construct brings information from reality and then arranges it in a way that is palatable and doesn't create dissonance and anxiety the interjects act from inside, the interjects provide information and data from inside so while the construct goes out there, has a job so to speak and comes home with a bacon, comes home with the data, the interjects operate from the inside to produce the own input, produce their own info, produce their own data. These data are known as automatic thoughts. The speech of the interjects, what the interjects have to say, these are automatic thoughts. Constructs use external input mainly from people but not only from people. Introjects provide internal input. The constructs combine the external input that they have gathered from reality, from the environment with internal input provided by the interjects. The interjects are the soldiers of the constructs. They work hard in factories underground to produce automatic thoughts, to produce messages, such as the messages from your conscience. Constructs activate interjects in response to environmental cues and data. You remember that the experience of reality is mediated via constructs. So what happens is when the construct is exposed to reality, the construct chooses to activate specific interjects in order to generate specific automatic thoughts. Again let's take a pause and recap. You're in a certain environment. The environment provides you with stimuli, with information, with data. This provokes in you a specific self-state. And now the self-state chooses a series of constructs to interact with reality. The constructs take in the information from reality, they harvest the data from reality, and they arrange all this in a way that makes sense, organize everything, to yield meaning. So the experience of reality is mediated via constructs. But in order to make sense of reality, the constructs need to activate interjects. You could say that experience reality interacts with the interjects via constructs. The construct is like a bridge between reality and the interjects. Constructs rearrange experience, reframe it to make sense of it. They need to communicate the new information and how to do that. They do it by selectively activating specific interjects. So think of it this way. The construct gathers raw material. It's raw material, the info from the environment, data, stimuli, all these things are raw material. And then there are factories for making sense. Factories for producing meaning, these factories are the interjects. The construct gathers all the information, all the data, all the stimuli, and then the constructs go to the interjects. And they activate relevant specific interjects, the kind of interjects that conform to the self-state and are not likely to produce dissonance and anxiety. So there is a selective process of interject activation. Constructs modify reality via behavior, and they select and reframe memories. But these are functions we will discuss a bit later. Let us summarize the sequence. The world is out there, big and large and so there's a lot of external raw data, numerous experiences, these huge amounts of information out there. This environmental information triggers self-states. The self-state triggers the constructs. So state selects specific constructs which are better suited to cope with a specific environment. The constructs activate interjects and the output of these interjects, their input into the process, is automatic thoughts. And then the constructs modify behavior in order to affect reality in specific ways. We'll discuss it in a minute. Then they reframe memories and they select specific memories and they repress other memories. That's the sequence. Let's take a construct as an example, covert narcissism. So there's someone, there's a person, and he's embedded in a specific environment and let's assume that this environment is very critical of him, harsh, demanding, disagrees with him, humiliates him, etc. This triggers the covert narcissist or covert narcissism construct. Remember that the covert narcissism construct is about a failure to obtain supply, the collapse of the narcissist, the inferiority complex of the narcissist, the dysregulated sense of self-worth and self-esteem of the narcissist. Work hand in hand to render the narcissist covert after a state of collapse or even modification. There's a failure to secure a regular line of supply. Very often, narcissists become covert or they are already covert. At any rate, covert narcissism is another name, another name for supply disruptions, collapse, failure, being a loser. So the covert narcissism self-state which leverages or uses the covert narcissism construct makes sense of the world by informing the narcissist that he is a failure, that he is widely hated, that he is discriminated against, a passive-aggressive stance, that he is unworthy, unlovable, unattractive, stupid, ugly, and so on. The covert narcissism self-state in cahoots in collaboration with the covert narcissism construct affirms, buttresses the covert narcissists feelings of collapse and failure. Covert narcissism is not compensatory, it's reinforcing. The main message of the construct, the main message of the introjects activated by the construct because you remember the self-state activates the construct, the construct activates introjects. So the main message from these introjects are you are not self-efficacious, don't even try, you will fail, you will never extract positive outcomes from the environment, you will never succeed. Now of course, such a message in covert narcissism conflicts heads on with the urges and the drives of the covert narcissism. And so this creates dissonance, anxiety, internal conflict, how to ameliorate this, how to mitigate these unfavorable outcomes, the information reaches the construct. The construct of covert narcissism anticipates failure and pain. The self-state of covert narcissism wants to fail, it feels very uncomfortable with success. So the self-state selects constructs which will guarantee failure and the constructs then activate introjects which will inform the covert narcissists that he should fail, will fail, is a failure, failure and pain. These are the anticipatory expectations of the covert narcissism set of constructs. And so, but this creates, as I said, this creates a conflict with the covert narcissists dreams and wishes and fantasies and urges and drives. Somehow this conflict, these dissonance, must be prevented in order to prevent overwhelming generalized anxiety. Somehow the world must make sense in a way that will not threaten the covert narcissists. So what the construct does, it reaches out to introjects and it activates them. What the construct does, the construct of covert narcissism does, it activates introjects that are guaranteed to prevent success. I want you to understand that the covert narcissists feel threatened by success, not by failure. Failure is ego consummate. Failure in covert narcissism is feeling good. Failure in covert narcissism is the comfort zone. So the covert narcissists would be terrified by success, not by failure. And so the main job of the covert narcissism self-state, the main job of the constructs at the service of the covert narcissism self-state, and the main task of the introjects activated by the constructs at the service of the self-state, all of them will operate together in harmony to produce failure and to avoid success, because success would threaten the self-state. Success would undermine the constructs, because they are founded on collapse and failure. The constructs want to survive and they drive you to behave in ways which will uphold them, not challenge them. So if there's a construct founded on failure, it will drive you to fail. If there's a construct founded on success, for example, overt narcissism, it will drive you to succeed. If there's a construct founded on pain, it will drive you to seek pain. Constructs are self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing, and they activate only the introjects, which support the message of the construct. The introjects are conformant to the constructs. The constructs activate introjects that produce automatic thoughts that support the construct. So if you have a construct based on failure, the construct will trigger introjects that will tell you that you are a failure. That way, the construct will continue to exist, and there will be no discrepancy, no conflict, there will be no dissonance, there will be no anxiety, because you expect to be a failure, you know that you're a failure, your introjects are telling you that you're a failure, your construct is filtering out realities so that you believe yourself to be a failure and your self-state is founded on failure and collapse, and everyone is happy. This is consulance, this is actually contentment, it's the comfort zone. The constructs use introjects, as I mentioned, the introjects use or produce automatic thoughts, this is their output and their input to the process, and these automatic thoughts shape behavior. If you think you're ugly, you will never approach women, it would shape your behavior, but the thought, I'm ugly, I will always fail with women, is an automatic thought. It is produced by introjects, maybe your mother introject. So, introjects use automatic thoughts to shape your behavior, to ensure that you conform to the construct. So if the construct is a construct of failure, if the construct is founded on failure, founded on being a loser, the introjects will use automatic thoughts to shape your behavior, to ensure failure, to affirm and buttress and strengthen the construct. I'm going to repeat this because even I did not understand it, I'm kidding. If, for example, you are in a covert narcissism self-state, covert narcissism is founded on failure, covert narcissism emanates from collapse, it's about being a loser, then the constructs that are affiliated with a covert narcissism self-state will trigger introjects, activate introjects, that will generate automatic thoughts, that will shape your behaviors, then in a way that will ensure self-defeat and failure. Why? Because when you fail, when you defeat yourself, when you even destroy yourself, you are upholding, you are strengthening the covert narcissism self-state. You are not in conflict with the constructs, your anxiety is reduced, that's why some people feel great when they fail, that's why some people feel good only when they are being abused, they feel good only when they feel bad, because this reduces anxiety, it conforms to their self-perception, to their self-image, to their self-state, to the constructs inside them and to the introjects. So, construct affects your behaviors, modifies and changes it through the introjects and the messages from the introjects, which are the automatic thoughts, it's a little like toxoplasmosis, you know this virus that invades your brain and then changes your behavior. Now, the construct organizes output, the output from introjects, in other words, the construct organizes the automatic thoughts according to your identity, the construct observes the principle of ego congruency, the output from the introjects coupled with the filtered data from reality, must conform to reality and must conform to self-identity. What is an ego? The ego is reality testing plus your memories, the ego navigates you, calibrates you in reality, the ego warrants you of consequences to your actions, for example. So, ego congruency means that whatever the self-state may be, whatever the constructs used by the self-states are, whatever the introjects activated by the constructs and whatever automatic thoughts are generated by the introjects, all of these must conform to reality and must conform to your self-identity based on your memories. And so, the construct, as I said, using automatic thoughts from the introjects modifies your behavior, inhibits certain behaviors, encourages other behaviors in order to secure outcomes from the environment that support your view of yourself. If you regard yourself as a failure, the construct will use automatic thoughts from the introjects to cause you to behave in a way that will guarantee self-defeat and failure. You got that, I hope. So, but all this process must somehow conform to reality. You must fail in reality and they must conform, all this process must conform to how you see yourself, to your memories of yourself. Automatic thoughts that conflict with reality that are not upheld by reality. Automatic thoughts that negate or clash on with memories are not effective. If you have an automatic thought, if I have an automatic thought, for example, I'm stupid. It's very difficult for me to accept this automatic thought because I have 190 IQ. Makes it difficult for me, but if I have an automatic thought, I'm ugly, it's much easier for me to accept it because unfortunately I have a mirror. So, automatic thoughts must conform to my reality. My automatic thoughts must conform to my reality, must conform to how I remember myself. Automatic thoughts must conform to what I know about myself. Otherwise, they are moot. They are ineffective, dissonant, provoke the suspicion of manipulation, create a strangement for myself, make me feel weird, and lead finally to the rejection of the automatic thoughts, and the disabling or inactivation of the constructs because constructs operate, can operate only with interjects. If I disable the interjects, I disable the constructs as well, and then I have a problem with reality because I fit a reality only through constructs. It's a dangerous state. So, the construct has to solve this problem. Imagine that you have a self-state of a covert narcissist, and this self-state of covert narcissist chooses covert narcissism constructs, and these covert narcissism constructs activate interjects. And these interjects tell you that you're a failure and a loser and you'll never make it unlovable and worthy, stupid, etc. So far, so good because the covert narcissism self-state and the covert narcissism construct are founded on failure and collapse. So, you're still within your comfort zone. The messages from the interjects conform perfectly to your reality because you really fail in reality, you keep failing, and they conform to your memories of yourself because you've always perceived yourself as a loser, or a failure, or a collapse. But the construct needs to make sure, needs to ensure that there is no challenge to this cozy arrangement between everyone and everyone. In other words, the construct needs to make sure that you never succeed, because if you self-state and construct the interjects, they're all founded on failure. If failure guarantees consonants, if failure reduces your anxiety, ensures that you're not dissonant, in other words, if failure makes you feel good because it's familiar, it's your comfort zone. The construct's main job would be to make sure that you will never succeed, because if you succeed, it challenges your self-state as a failure. If you succeed, it disables the constructs. If you succeed, it silences the interjects, and then you're going to feel bad, you're going to feel anxious, so the construct must falsify reality. The construct must cause you to behave in a way that will alter your environment. For example, the construct must make you fail, keep you in a state of collapse if you're a covert narcissist, because success is a threat, success is ominous, success renders everything incompatible with the automatic thoughts. Your automatic thoughts as a covert narcissist are self-defeating, self-subortaging, self-undemining, self-destructive. So if you succeed, if you're self-affirming, if you suddenly love yourself, if you're congruent, if you're cohesive, if you're coherent, if you accomplish things, if you're self-efficacious, you're in trouble. You're in trouble because these conflicts with your self-state, with your constructs, with your interjects, and with your automatic thoughts. So the construct will cause you to behave in self-defeating, self-subortaging, self-undemining, and even self-destructive ways, because it's the only method, only path, and only trajectory to secure, that there will be no conflict between reality and your self-state. There will be no conflict between the environment and constructs, and there will be definitely no conflict between the world and your automatic thoughts. The construct causes you to alter reality, makes you behave in ways which modify reality, to yet again reinforce your self-perception, be it negative or be it positive. The second job of the construct is to falsify memories. The construct uses memories in a selective way to conform to the automatic thoughts. There are three methods. The first is dissociation. The construct dissociates incongruent memories. The construct shells away, buries memories that challenge the automatic thoughts. That's one. Two, the construct changes the emotional content of memories by reframing them and by attributing them. So the construct can, for example, tell you, nobody loves you. Nobody loves you, and those who pretend to love you, they're just pretending. So the construct attributes motivation to people. Paranoia or persecutory delusions are a form of such misattribution and reframing. It's often used by, paranoia is often used, or paranoid ideation is often used by constructs. So the construct changes how you see your memories, what you remember about your memories, the emotional content of your memories. It falsifies it. It says, for example, you think you were happy, you would not have. You think she loved you, she just wanted your money. You think your friends thought you were attractive, but actually they were just using you. So it changes, it reframes. The construct reframes and attributes motivations and other things to people. That's the second way that the construct modifies behaviors or even falsifies memories or even falsifies them. So to remind you, the construct needs to falsify memories so that they don't challenge the self-state and the automatic thoughts. And the first way to do it is dissociation, simply bury, repress, forget memories. Second way, change the memories, reframe them so they conform. And the third is selectivity. The construct accesses only memories that conform to the construct and do the automatic thoughts and represses memories that don't. The construct paints memories, paints them with a brush, retroactively with elements that were not necessarily there. I call it memory plus. The construct reinterprets memories and experiences, leverages cognitions and emotions all at the service of maintaining internal consonants and congruence, all at the service of reducing ego-distony, all at the service of avoiding dissonance and anxiety. These are the main roles of the constructs. They need to allow the self-state to function efficaciously. If you are anxious, if you are dissonant, if you are unhappy, if you are doubtful, your self-state will be not efficient. Your self-state will not be able to secure beneficial outcomes from the environment. So the constructs are there to prevent any civil war, any disagreement, any incongruence, any misfit, misfitting, any situation where there's a battle or a disagreement between voices, between reality and memories, between memories and automatic thoughts, between automatic thoughts and reality, etc. The constructs modify, falsify, change, alter, repaint, retouch, rehash, photoshop, this is the main job, to create a false internal environment, to conform to an external environment, which is acted upon to produce specific outcomes. The construct therefore provides actually a wrong picture, wrong data, it keeps you ill-informed about reality and about your memories. The construct interprets and filters external experience and internal experience, including memories, cognitions and emotions, but only in a highly specific way, a biased way. The construct in other words is a bias. Constructs exert absolute control, absolute mastery over the way that you experience yourself, your life and the world. The construct tells you what to remember, how to remember it and how to make sense of what you remember, how to change your behaviors to affect reality in a way that will support the self-state and the construct and the automatic thoughts. Ultimately, the construct isolates you from reality in order to protect you from reality. The construct manipulates reality to render reality palatable. And another tool, another tool at the disposal of the constructs is of course defense mechanisms. Psychological defense mechanisms modify the perception of reality to allow you to survive in reality. They are important tools of the constructs. When the self-state takes over, a specific self-state takes over, triggered by an idiosyncratic unique environment, the self-state mobilizes constructs. Their role is to affect your behavior, to secure outcomes, to filter data, to reframe and rearrange information, to manage the projects, activate them and gather automatic thoughts. These are the roles of construct in order to create an environment which will prevent dissonance and anxiety. One of the other tools at the disposal of the construct is the famous psychological defense mechanism. All these operate on steroids with the narcissist, because the narcissist also has cognitive distortions as I mentioned in the beginning. The narcissist constructs a helmet on eliminating actually reality by internalizing it. That's why the narcissist is unable to perceive external objects, you. The narcissist constructs obey the self-state and the self-states of the narcissist are very confused about external versus internal objects out there and objects in here. And so the constructs are mobilized to secure that this confusion between external and internal never comes to your consciousness, never rises to the surface. The constructs are busy suppressing the realization that something is wrong with the narcissist. The narcissist constructs are busy suppressing his realization, his possible realization that something is wrong with him. The narcissist constructs in conjunction with his introjects and the automatic thoughts generated by the introjects. All of these operate to secure a single outcome, the integrity of the narcissist's fantasy life and convincing the narcissist that his fantasy is real. There are problems with memory, problems with identity. The constructs of the narcissist work overtime because they're faced with extreme gaps in memory, dissociative gaps including amnesia, depersonalization, derealization. They're faced with fluctuations in identity, a kind of identity disturbance. They're faced with numerous obstacles and problems. And so they are forced to be extreme. The constructs of the narcissist are radical when they falsify reality, they falsify totally when they cause the narcissist to behave in ways which are uncompromising and extreme because only extremes can accomplish any outcomes in an environment that is discontinuous and founded on a black hole of absence and void. To a very large extent this applies to borderline, but in a different way. Enough for today, wouldn't you agree? This is your construct, your introject, some Wagner speaking. The automatic thoughts for today's keep watching my channel.