 My new concepts are now being shamelessly, plagiarized, pilfered, pillaged, and stolen, and not for the first time. Snapshotting, confusing external and internal or introjected objects. The dual mothership principle, regression to infancy in intimate relationships, the shared fantasy space, among many other concepts. Rather than get angry, I took this as an opportunity to explore the psychology behind such sordid behavior. You see, every silver lining has a cloud, especially on YouTube. One disclaimer, I found a single exception, a member of an extinct species, the honest person. One, unfortunately, only one. And that is Shadow de Angelis on Instagram or Cyber Viking on TikTok. Amazingly, shockingly, he attributes these concepts to me in his short videos, giving credit where it's due. I don't know what's wrong with this guy, but I hope he never changes. Why does the covert narcissist steal your life? Three hints, psychosis, rivalry, and envy. Before I proceed, watch yesterday's video about malicious envy and narcissistic rivalry and what they do to the covert narcissist. How they drive him to behave or misbehave, actually, in certain ways. The video went a bit viral and for good reason, because it is founded on the most recent cutting-edge research. Conducted of all places, in Italy, the birthplace of the Cosannostra and the mafia were covert narcissists proliferate, I should assume. Okay, let's get serious. Guys and gaiets, dudes and do-dates, why does the covert narcissist steal your life? Covert narcissists steal from you habitually. The covert narcissist steals your ideas. He steals your life's work. He steals your girlfriends and your wives. He steals your job. He steals your money. He steals anything he can. It's almost reflexive. It's as if he doesn't even bother to think about what he's doing, as if there's no analysis involved. Just a knee-jerk reaction, like a frog, a dead frog, electrocuted in a biology laboratory. And the covert narcissist acts this way for three reasons. But before we go to the reasons, let us remind ourselves, what is a covert narcissist? A covert narcissist is someone who believes himself to be a genius, unrecognized genius, of course. Outstanding, godlike, superhandsome, amazing, omnipotent, fascinating, omniscient God's gift to humanity. And yet, no one recognizes this. The covert narcissist fails to obtain supply. So what the covert narcissist does, he steals the personality and the life of an overt narcissist. And then, under the guise of the overt narcissist, he succeeds to obtain supply. It's as if the covert narcissist annihilates himself, shape-shifts, metamorphosizes into an overt narcissist, a specific overt narcissist. Someone he envies, someone he regards as a rival, someone who is far superior to him intellectually or bodily or in some way, maybe richer, I don't know, someone superior to him. And then the covert narcissist deletes himself, erases himself and reappears, reinvents himself in the shape of the envid overt narcissist. It's a form of inverted narcissism. It's a form of codependency. It's a form of covert narcissism. Now, the covert narcissist steals your life, your accomplishments, your money, your wealth, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your everything, your ideas, your work, and he does it publicly, shamelessly, bold-facedly, amazingly oblivious to his inherent evil acts. And he does it for three reasons. Number one, self-aggrandizement. The covert narcissist is a collapsed narcissist. It's a narcissist who has failed, who has failed in obtaining supply. So to aggrandize them himself, he self-supplies by becoming someone else. It's as if the covert narcissist's original false self has failed him, and so he needs to adopt someone else's personality in lieu as a substitute for the failed false self. If every narcissist, overt or covert, develops a false self in early childhood, but in the case of the covert narcissist, the false self is dysfunctional. It's not working. The narcissist, the covert narcissist doesn't have sufficient intelligence, usually, to pull it off. He fails even as a con artist. So what he does, he suspends his original useless false self, and he adopts someone else's false self, or someone else's life, or someone else's personality. It's as if he imbibes the essence of people around him and becomes, in a smoke and mirror act, becomes these people, not himself. Self-aggrandizement. That way, he feels that he is superior. That way, he can garner and generate narcissistic supply from gullible people who don't bother to look deep and who don't do their research. The second reason, one upmanship, the covert narcissist, is extremely competitive. He's seething with malicious envy, malevolent resentment, rage at his own failures, repeated failures. He looks around him, and everyone seems happy. Everyone has money, everyone has fame or celebrity. Everyone comes up with 10 ideas a minute when he fails to come with a single idea in a lifetime, and he can't tolerate this. The harsh inner critic inside him wants to annihilate him, wants to vitiate and negate him, wants to destroy him. He is a very powerful, bad object that keeps informing him, you are a failure, you are a loser, you are a nobody, you are not good. You can't come up with a single original thing, you are a zero, and he wants to be a hero. The only way open to him, to become a hero, is one upmanship. I'm going to steal everything from someone and then I'm going to become, by extension, that someone. I'm going to find someone who is successful at what I wish to accomplish, and I'm going to take over that person, I'm going to render them an extension of myself, I'm going to subsume them, consume them, or I'm going to erase them. I'm going to destroy them and steal everything they've ever created, everything they've ever done, and everyone who's ever been in their life. It sounds unbelievable, but it's happening daily, including to me. Okay, one upmanship. The third reason is passive aggression. Passive aggression, because the covert narcissist's constant failure grates on him, erodes him, corrodes him, his inhibitions, behavioral inhibitory control, his inhibitions are down, he can't tolerate himself anymore, and he can't control his behavior, and especially his misbehavior, his beginning to act out, his beginning to fall apart, disintegrate, decompensate, his body health, his somatic health deteriorates, his mental health deteriorates, he feels like he is on the verge of the abyss, he is about to lose it in every possible way, and this generates gigantic amounts of rage, anger, and aggression, and you can see it in their faces, in the faces of covert narcissist, at this stage 4 cancer of the soul, the terminal phase, you can see it in their faces, they can barely smile. They're furious at the world for having denied them their due, because they are superb and unique and amazing, and irresistible and fascinating. They are the world, and yet, who recognizes this, nobody, unless and until they succeed to imitate someone, mimicry, mimesis, unless and until they become someone else, but even then, when they have successfully become someone else, the praise, the narcissistic supply, doesn't feel real, it feels fake, because they are being praised for what they haven't done, for ideas they've never had, for a girlfriend they've stolen from someone, they are not being praised for who they are and what they've accomplished, they are being praised for who they pretend to be, and for what they would have wanted to accomplish and failed. This is a bittersweet state of existence, where you know, as a covert narcissist, that everyone who gives you a compliment, everyone who praises you, everyone who holds you in high regard and high esteem, is actually holding the original in high regard. You are just a faded and fading copy, that's who you are, that's how the narcissist feels, the covert narcissist, so it's never enough, and this creates a normal amount of aggression, but because most covert narcissists are co-dependent, they depend on other people for obtaining supply, and because they are also, in some cases, people-pleasers and so on and so forth, their aggression is passive, passive aggression. Passive aggression in this case is a symbolic consuming of the frustrating object of narcissistic rivalry and malicious envy, the covert narcissist envies someone, it could be some individual, it could be a group of people, by the way, the elite, or the upper classes or whatever, so the covert narcissist envies someone, and then he wants to destroy that someone, he wants him to disappear, he wants the object that keeps frustrating him, he wants the person that keeps provoking in him, bouts of uncontrollable malicious envy, he wants the individual or the group or the population that causes this grief, because he grieves his own inadequacy, he wants them gone, and one way to kill them symbolically is to steal their lives, to steal everything they have, because if you steal from someone, his girlfriend or his wife, and then you steal his money, and then you steal his work, and then you steal his ideas, and convince people that all these are yours, you have eliminated that person, haven't you? There's no more reason for rivalry or envy, because now he is gone symbolically and you have become him, you've become that object of envy and rivalry, this is a dynamic so, so profoundly sick that it can only be described as psychotic, because it involves a mechanism called hyperreflexivity, hyperreflexivity is when an individual who is profoundly mentally ill, confuses internal objects with external objects, when this kind of individual consumes other people, steals their life work, their ideas, their partners, their money, their identity, identity theft in effect, this is identity theft, I mean, when they do this, they merge and fuse with that other person, it's a process of becoming the world, and that's a great description of psychosis, this is exactly what's happening in psychosis, the psychotic person confuses internal processes with external reality, so if he has a voice in his mind, he thinks his voice is coming from the outside, if he imagines something, he sees it out there, the same with the covert narcissist, when the covert narcissist hijacks another person's identity, kidnaps that person's life, property, loved ones, work, ideas, when the covert narcissist commits this grand larceny, the covert narcissist annexes, consumes, digests and subsumes that person whose life they have taken over and stolen, and this is of course completely psychotic, these people are really, really seriously ill, require urgent intervention and medication on a regular basis, they're able to pull off a facade of normality, what Clackley called, Harvey Clackley called in the 1940s, the mask of sanity, but it's just a mask, behind this mask of sanity, there is gaping unprecedented, unbelievable and unbridled, inner sanity, these are the most insane people I know, now, to be able to face himself in the mirror, and also to allay his justified fear of retribution, because not everyone is going to tolerate this, peacefully, of course, so knowing that retribution might be coming, and realizing that what he's doing is shameless, evil, wicked, and horrible, morally unsustainable, ethically repulsive, repugnant, realizing all this, the covert narcissist deploys a host of good object, infantile, primitive defenses, now that's not an insult, primitive simply means early childhood, so what the covert narcissist does, he regresses to the narcissistic stage of early childhood, what is known as primary narcissist, and then he lies to himself, he creates a narrative, he convinces himself that he is a good object, that he is a good person, and to accomplish this unbelievable counterfactual feat of self-deception, the covert narcissist uses four defense mechanisms, number one, denial, he says to himself, whatever it is that I'm stealing, pilfering, plagiarizing, this theft, the things I'm stealing, the ideas, the work, the concepts, the loved ones, the girlfriends, the wives, the money, the car, the house, whatever it is that I'm stealing, these things don't really belong to the other guy or to the other girl, they don't really belong to them, actually what I'm doing, I'm doing for the greater good, not for my own sake, yeah, in the process I'm making a load of money and I'm becoming a celebrity and I have access to beautiful girls, more than normally, more than I would have had I been just myself, so yeah, there are benefits and perks, but I am on a mission, I'm on a crusade, I'm a good person doing good things, and that's my only motivation, all the rest is incidental and whatever it is that I'm stealing from this guy or from this girl, it doesn't belong to them, they got all these things in a dishonest way, and so I have a full right to take it away from them and to attribute these things to myself and to own these things from now on. The second defense mechanism is repression, so the first one is denial, denying that what he's doing is actually theft, the second mechanism is repression, the covert narcissist says, I don't recall that these stolen goods, stolen money, stolen ideas, stolen work, stolen concepts, stolen husband, stolen wife, stolen girlfriend, stolen boyfriend, I don't recall that they used to belong to someone else, I thought they were free, I thought they were available, I thought they were, you know, I didn't realize I was stealing, I didn't realize I was absconding with someone's belongings or property or including intellectual property, I didn't know that. I wasn't cognizant that what I'm doing is wrong, neither do I think to this very day that what I'm doing is wrong. So this is repression. The third mechanism is splitting, yeah, it's true, I am plagiarizing, I am stealing, I am absconding with someone else's property, I am doing all these things, but I'm doing all these things because he is a bad person, he deserves what I'm doing to him. So my acts of pure, unadulterated, very often criminal theft are punitive and they are morally upright, I'm restoring cosmic justice because I'm a superhero fighting supervillains. This is splitting, all good, all bad, all black, all white and of course the pilfering thief covert narcissist presents himself as or believes himself to be all good and the target of his criminal activities is all bad, so he deserves, he has it coming, he deserves what the covert narcissist is doing to him. The covert narcissist cloaks his inadmissible and unacceptable activities in a mantle in a guise of effusive morality is the guardian of values. This is a morality play or he is the leader of the forces of all good against the devilish and demonic other party. And of course, a la guerre comme la guerre in a war, it's inevitable, there's always loot and the other guy's property, ideas, concepts, life's work, girlfriend, wife, you name it, money, this is loot, this is the loot of this war, but this war is a just war, in a just cause and he is the good guy, never mind what he's doing. And finally, the final mechanism is projection, covert narcissist says, yeah, I stole all these things, I plagiarized, I pilfered, I did all these things, but it's because this, all these things belong to me. He stole these things from me, because for example, I paid for them, I paid for this work, I paid for this production, I paid for this, for his wedding, I paid for his, I helped him with his car, I gave him a loan to buy the house, so these things belong to me, I paid for them, or morally they belong to me. I should have been the one who came up with this original idea, or he actually plagiarized from me, or I served as the catalyst and the trigger that led him to this discovery, or this innovation, or this enterprise, or these profits, or I have been without me, had I not been there, none of this would have happened, so it's all mine by right, I'm just reclaiming what's mine. You see how contorted, convoluted, and again, profoundly deranged and demented these defenses are. These are really dangerous and sick people. They're snakes in the grass, they're sheep, they're sheep in wolves clothing, and with an overclock of a tiger, they are wolves in sheep's clothing, so sometimes they're predators, sometimes they're prey. When it's convenient for them, they're the latter, sheep in wolves clothing, when they are out to attack or to counterattack, then they are wolves in sheep's clothing, so they play both sides of the game. The problem is, not the transgressions themselves, criminals abound, the problem is the inner conviction of the rightness of the acts, and the total suspension of reality. These people are not only covert narcissists, they have crossed the line in the sand first drawn by Otto Kemberg, they have become fully psychotic. I think that this model and this understanding is critical to understand the abuse you are suffering, have suffered, or how to move forward from it as a bedrock layer to what's kind of happened. So we all know idealization, devalue, discard. Well, this goes much deeper because this is the dual mothership model. Let's start here. Let's go back to childhood with the narcissist. We know that the narcissist never completes a developmental process called individuation. So you start out life, they become an extension of their parent, they merge, they fuse, and they get trapped there. They never get to individuate through their lifetime. So deep subconsciously, they're going to pick relationships and they're really interviewing for a mother. And this isn't gender specific. Man, woman, whatever it is, they're trying to merge and fuse is what he refers to it as. To become one with the targets. This happens. This is the point where nothing you can do is wrong. You're idealized. It's called co-idealization because it's becoming ideal as one part of the shared fantasy. Now, after that, merge and fuse, and they succeed at becoming one with you and getting you enmeshed that deeply with them. It's when they're going to start doing the devaluation. Because that devaluation deep down is an attempt for them to complete a developmental process called individuation. They're trying to individuate. And so to do that, they're going to levy every insult. They're going to demean. They're going to break you down. They're looking to try to separate and individuate, leaving you in a state of mind where you're confused and you're trying to reconcile out. How can I be? I was just perfect. Why was I treated like that? And now I can't all be bad. But to the narcissist in order to individuate, they need to make you into a bad object, completely bad, right? To be able to separate and complete that process. And this is my opinion, not Sam Vakman's what I'm about to mention. But I think it's a fundamentally a sense of satisfaction comes from that punishment and that rejection from what's suppressed in their psyche and deep developmental process that never could happen to become an adult, which is why they're like a child trapped in an adult's body. So research it for yourself, the dual mothership model. Narcissistic snapshotting. It's a term that Professor Sam Vakman coined and most of the terms around narcissism today were actually coined by him back in the 90s. So if you're not familiar, Professor Vakman is basically my primary resource for going way deeper into the mind of a narcissist, a narcissistic relationship, abuse, borderline, psychopathy, the sub variants of each highly recommend if you if you are interested to have the time is going to do a much better job than I am. But what I aim to do is distill little nuggets and be the bridge to him. One of those nuggets is narcissistic snapshotting. Narcissistic snapshotting. Very quick explanation is from the moment that a narcissist identifies a potential intimate partner. They create a mental snapshot and idealized perfect version of that person and idea and an apparition of that person. From that moment forward, you do not exist as an individual to them. You exist as an internal object. What what Professor Vakman calls an introject. An introject is like a model, an apparition, an idea of somebody that you've internalized to mean something in relation to yourself. And an interject or like the voices that go through life with you for that person living in your head. We all have interjects, but narcissists basically only have interjects. And so these internal objects, aka you have to stay in alignment with this grandiose perfect idealized snapshot they've made of you because it's yet another way for them to idealize themselves and you just become an accessory, so to speak. So that's what snapshotting is. And what happens when we deviate from that snapshot that idealized image, we get punished, aka devalued or discarded because the narcissist is actually experiencing injury from that. Almost like a little crack in the psyche, very uncomfortable for them. That's why if you act out of character, it will throw them off. It will make them very uncomfortable and anxious. And so as we look to the delusion of true narcissism, right, not just narcissistic traits, but a true NPD. What we're talking about is delusion so deep where the world to them is only objects. You are simply but an object to them in their head. An idea that if you don't live up to or deviate from what they need you to be for them for their own delusion, you will then be discarded, devalued, ultimately punished. It goes much deeper. I recommend you do your own research, but that's snapshotting in three minutes.