 Okay, Shoshanim Chavivotumetukot Sheli, you thought I would not intrude on your days of rest? You think I will give you a respite from the Sam Vaknin horror show? No way! I'm worse than Netflix! I'm more ubiquitous and, in mental terms, more expensive. So, today we are going to discuss various neglected angles in narcissism. Yes, believe it or not, after well over 26 years of work in the field preceding all the self-styled experts by like 15 years, I still have a lot to say about many topics not covered by everyone, myself included. So stay tuned, it's going to be a bumpy ride and you're not going to be the same if you listen to this video to the end. So we start with the issue of learning. Narcissists never learn. They never learn because they know everything already. Of course, this is a grandiose defense known as omniscience. Narcissists never learn because no one knows anything anyhow. That's a form of defiance. Both psychopaths and narcissists are characterized by a profound lack of curiosity about themselves and about others. They are not curious. Narcissists construct penitentiaries of the mind, kind of prisons, they are known as pathological narcissistic space. And then they try to break out of these self-imposed prisons. They try to demolish these fantastic spaces. It doesn't occur to the narcissist to repurpose the prison, to render the prison a tourist attraction or a hotel. Alcatraz, for example, Alcatraz was the worst prison ever and now it's a tourist attraction. There's a similar prison conversion experiment going on in Sweden. Narcissists is incapable of repurposing and reconceiving of his life, his self-imposed fantastic penal colony, because he is more generally incapable of change. Why is that? Why is the narcissist so averse to change? We have to go back a bit, as usual. With the narcissist, you have to go two steps backwards in order to go three steps forward. And even that gets you nowhere. The narcissist outsources important ego functions to his environment. In other words, healthy people regulate their internal environment by definition internally. Regular people, for example, maintain reality testing, which is grounded in themselves, in their sense of self and being. Regular people regulate their sense of self-worth. They have a stable sense of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth, related to the world and internal working more. In healthy people, everything takes place inside. But with the narcissist, all these functions are externalized, they outsource from the environment from other people. And consequently, the narcissist confuses and conflates his internal landscape with the external world. He doesn't have a self or a constellated self. He doesn't have an ego. But he does have a kind of internal universe of internal objects, kind of a playground at Disneyland, a theme park of introjects, voices, internal objects, avatars, and so on and so forth, I discussed it in other videos. And he tends to confuse this self-contained universe with reality. One of the narcissist is trying to effect a change in the external world when he tries to change something in his environment. He perceives it as the destruction of his internal world. He perceives it as self-destructiveness. Now, follow this intricate and ingenious argument. How do I know it's an ingenious argument? Because I came up with it, of course. Follow it. The narcissist confuses internal and external, inside and outside, objects out there and objects in here. In this sense, the narcissist, to some extent, is the mirror image of the psychotic. He doesn't have hyperreflection, but he has inverted hyperreflection. The world is contained in himself. So the narcissist totally confuses what's going on in his environment and what's going on inside himself. So when he tries to change the environment, when he tries to transform people around him, circumstances, events, when he tries to extract outcomes from his milieu, from his workplace, from his marriage, from his interpersonal relationships, from his friendships, from church, from any setting when he tries to operate in reality, act upon reality, he perceives it as self-destructiveness. Changing the environment to the narcissist is equal to changing himself because he confuses his internal environment with his external environment. Any change in the external environment is perceived as deleterious, dangerous, and threatening to the internal environment. So everything, every alteration, every modification, every transformation, every effort at consensus building, every compromise, every negotiation, everything that has to do with anything in the outside, is perceived as impacting adversely on the inside as self-destructive. And so narcissists avoid change because they experience it as self-annihilation, petit more, small diff. Narcissists convert everyone they are in constant or intimate touch with into persecutory objects, enemies, and then they construct counterfactual narratives, narratives which are not based on fact, not evidence-based. And these narratives are both paranoid and grandiose. The narcissist is effectively saying, they're out to get me because they made them behave this way. I forced them into malevolence. I had converted them into enemies. This of course sustains his sense of omnipotent control. And so the narcissist's world is hostile and dangerous, and because he confuses the external environment with his internal environment, he perceives himself as hostile and dangerous. He perceives the universe of internal objects, the universe of introjects. In other words, he perceives his own mind as the enemy. And he perceives himself as the prima causa, as the first mover and shaker, the first cause, the person who had made all this happen, the person who had brought upon himself devastation and destruction and annihilation and extermination. He perceives himself, in other words, as his own worst persecutory object, his own worst enemy. They're out to get me because I made them behave this way. I created this enmity. I created this hatred. I created this aversion to me. I misbehaved. I mistreated or I was myself, but they entry me. So the narcissist is in a bind. This on the one hand, he tends to interpret everything around him as a potential menace and people around him as secretary object, as persecutors and prosecutors. And on the other hand, he feels that he had created this environment. He is Godlike. This is his creation. Genesis is omnipotent. So he feels somehow responsible for his own persecution and prosecution. And of course, catastrophizing becomes a rational and often self-fulfilling expectation within such a view of others and the world. And this, of course, is one of the two pillars of the aversion to change. Every change in the external environment is perceived as change in the internal environment. Then every change in the external environment is the destruction or at least the deconstruction of the internal environment. It's threatening. And it's threatening because it through it, it unleashes a host, a hoard of enemies from within a fifth column, a Trojan horse of the secretary objects. Everything is so precariously balanced. Everything is so hostile. Everything is so dangerous. Everyone is so such an enemy that better live things as they are better freeze. It's essentially an internal freeze response analysis is so traumatized, mainly in early childhood that he had developed a freeze response grounded in grandiosity omnipotence and so on, which are compensatory. He froze when faced with the trauma with the early trauma. He chose to freeze. Then he chose to freeze everyone around him through the process of snapshotting, which I will describe a bit later. Then he chose to freeze the world around him and anything, anything and anyone that threatens to unfreeze the situation, to defreeze the situation is threatening the internal precarious balance of the narcissist. So the narcissist is shocked, for example, when his victim gives him a taste of his own medicine. He accuses her of being a narcissist. Of course, the gender pronouns are interchangeable. Many narcissists are women. So the narcissist is shocked. He tends to victimize and abuse, for example, his intimate partner and then suddenly she gives him a taste of his own medicine. He cheats on her. She cheats on him. He abuses her. She abuses him. She mirrors him and he's shocked. He then says she's a narcissist. I don't know what happens to her. And this partly has to do with the persecutory object that I had mentioned before. She is a persecutory object in the narcissist's mind. She is the enemy. And so he's not surprised. He is not surprised that she is a narcissist or she's a psychopath in his mind. He is just shocked that she had dared to stand up to him. But it also has to do with another process. So there are two pillars to the aversion to change. The first pillar is, everyone is such an enemy, the environment is so dangerous, better not rock the boat, better not change anything, better freeze. The second pillar is snapshotting, the twin processes of snapshotting and core idealization. At the commencement of every interpersonal relationship, the narcissist introjects the insignificant other and converts her into a stable, inert internal object. He snapshots her. This helps him to overcome his abandonment anxiety and establish object constancy, because while he may be abandoned by the real object out there, he is very unlikely to be abandoned by a snapshot in his own mind. So converting an external object to a snapshot makes the narcissist feel safe, makes the narcissist feel stable. So hence, snapshotting, remember, we are talking about the narcissist's propensity and proclivity to avoid change, to thwart change, to undermine and sabotage change, to shun change. And this, there are two reasons for this. The first one is the persecutory object mechanism, where the narcissist prefers to freeze than to experiment with change, because change can unleash storm, a hurricane, a twister of persecutory objects, which will then, as enemies, destroy the narcissist. And the second reason is snapshotting. So once a narcissist had snapshotted, for example, the intimate partner, a source of supply, role model, an important influencer, or peer, once a narcissist snapshotted the person, he proceeds to Photoshop the snapshot. He idealizes, for example, the intimate partner, and by idealizing her, he aggrandizes himself, because now he is the owner of the intimate partner, he is the proprietor of such an ideal position, position. So now, the idealized position renders the narcissist, this idealized property renders the narcissist ideal, his grandiosity is gratified this way, and this is co-idealization. snapshotting, photoshopping, idealization, co-idealization, this is an inexorable process, inevitable, happens all the time. When the other party, the intimate partner, for example, diverges from this inner rendition or this avatar, by becoming, for example, agentic, autonomous, defined, self-efficacious, assertive, and resistant, when this happens, there is a divergence, there is a break, a schism between the real objects, object out there, and the snapshot, snapshot is stagnant, it's inert, it never changes, it's immutable, and so this creates a gap, and the narcissist experiences panic, frustration, and then aggression, he projects his own narcissism onto the culprit, for example the intimate partner, and using a defense mechanism called reaction formation, the narcissist devalues her, and decries her as abusive, is likely to present himself as a victim who is being abused, in his mind he is being abused, because remember every change in the narcissist mind is perceived as persecution via the agency of the persecutory, objects, so when the partner behaves in ways which undermine and challenge the snapshot, this is a change, it's a change in the external environment, it threatens the narcissist, he feels persecuted, he feels prosecuted, he feels that he is under a cloud, he feels bad things are going to happen, catastrophizes, and so the freeze mechanism no longer works, his grandiosity is compromised, and he has no defenses, some people who get in touch with the narcissist who are in an interpersonal relationship with the narcissist, for example the narcissist spouts children, intimate partners, business partners, associates etc etc, some people aware of the narcissist's delusional mindset, aware of his need to compensate with fantasy for deficiencies and failures and defeats in reality, aware that he has a pronounced fantasy defense, aware in other words that he is not fully with us, that he is a bit divorced from reality, so some intimate partners of the narcissist, or business associates, or friends, they tend to lie to the narcissist, they tell him what he wants to hear, they deceive the narcissist, they obfuscate, they stonewall, they refuse to communicate in extreme cases, so the narcissist feels that he cannot gain access to critical bits of information, and what the narcissist does, he tries to deduce, he tries to extrapolate, not always successfully, actually in most cases not successfully, because he has impaired reality testing, and because the narcissist is grandiose, owing to his grandiosity, he perceives his deductions, his hypotheses, his speculations, and his extrapolations as facts, he cannot, he can never be wrong, if he thinks something, it becomes reality, that's magical thinking, and so the narcissist reacts to these internal cognitive processes as if they were, as though they are, facts out there in reality, again there's confusion of internal and external, but this is also a form of change, because it's like the information rearranges itself and produces new, new outcomes, new results, new conclusions, anything that's new by definition is changed, so the narcissist feels very threatened, and this can lead to hair-raising situations and conflicts, narcissists can become defensive, frustrated, and aggressive, the solution is do not lie to the narcissist, do not deceive the narcissist, do not stonewall, do not obfuscate, do not avoid communication with the narcissist if you are forced to be in touch with him, always communicate clearly, fully, and truthfully with the narcissist, you do not want the narcissist to deploy his fantasy delusional imagination and impaired reality testing to fill in the gaps that you had created, now this aversion to change that relies as you remember on the feeling that the world is hostile and any change is threatening on the one hand, that there are many persecutory objects and enemies are waiting such a change in order to sort of jump the narcissist, so it's one pillar, the second pillar, the snapshotting, the freezing of other people as snapshots, idealized snapshots, both these are critical to the functioning of the narcissist, and both of them negate and vitiate change, they are both of them creating the narcissist change aversion, any process internal or external, any actual change in the environment, any need to make deductions and analyze and anything, any motion, any movement, any life, any divergence from the snapshot, creating the narcissist enormous anxiety and he's trying to ameliorate this anxiety in a variety of dysfunctional ways, anything from substance abuse to overt aggression, one of the main ways that narcissists try to reduce and control anxiety is sex, the psychosexuality of narcissists and psychopaths is very often non-native, it's unusual, some people would say deviant, perverted but I don't use these terms, they're not clinical and they're not used anymore even in the literature, it's unusual, the sexuality, psychosexuality of narcissists and psychopaths is unusual, atypical, extreme, rare, people with kinky or paraphernalia psychosexuality often repress or curb their sexual preferences unless and until a loving partner, loving quote unquote partner, real partner, imaginary partner in fantasy legitimizes the psychosexuality with his presence or with his active cooperation and so helps to resolve the dissonances and egotistony involved in these sexual practices, narcissists and psychopaths are no exception, aware that their psychosexuality is problematic at least in social sense, what they try to do, they try to couple it with an intimate partner, now the intimate partner could be as I said a physical real bear intimate partner or an imaginary intimate partner, the narcissists or psychopaths project intimacy and love and romance on an unsuspecting stranger in the environment and render that stranger for a night, for an hour, for a year, for a month, for a week, render that stranger a romantic love partner, it could be a fantasy partner, an imaginary friend in a way, in a paracosm or it could be a real life partner but the role of that partner is to legitimize either as an observer or as an active participant to legitimize the kink and the paraphilia elements in the narcissists and psychopaths psychosexuality, the narcissists and psychopaths need to legitimize their psychosexuality and need to act on it in order to reduce anxiety but it's very difficult to find such partners, such intimate partners, very few people would care to legitimize and participate in such sexual practices so consequently, narcissists and psychopaths go through long stretches of involuntary celibacy or unsatisfactory sex simply because their partners either don't love them to start with or are more likely and more commonly are totally turned off by the narcissists and psychopaths attitude to sex, love and relationships and this self-denial is especially complicated when we have types of narcissists who are also prone to addiction because the narcissist's addictive personality manifests in everything, in substance abuse, in workaholism, in pathological gambling, in shopaholism, I mean addiction, in alcoholism, addiction is a kind of catch-all phrase, it's a way of relating to the world and most narcissists are actually addicts, indeed pathological narcissism is a form of addiction, it's an addiction, it's an addiction to narcissistic supply so the narcissist has a very complicated, unusual, typically frowned upon, socially frowned upon, unacceptable psychosexuality, he tries to find a partner to legitimize this psychosexuality and participate in the sexual practices, it's very rare to find such a partner almost impossible so most narcissists and psychopaths go through periods of celibacy and unsatisfactory sex, now some narcissists are addicted to what they consider to be love but actually is shared fantasy, so many narcissists actually are addicted to shared fantasies, they need a shared fantasy to function, craving for love, craving for this shared fantasy, renders these narcissists tenacious and stockish, they stock, they give up and sort of move on only when they receive incontrovertible proof that they are not loved, in other words that their partner is not embedded in the shared fantasy and that they are not desired sexually etc etc, they even then they are likely to cheat rather than to break up honestly and outright and so the narcissist's propensity, the narcissist's need for a shared fantasy which is the equivalent of love addiction in healthier view, the narcissist's addiction to the shared fantasy is an organizing principle which imbues the world and his world with meaning and direction and hope and emotional energy, this addiction to the shared fantasy causes him to kind of become a stalker or become tenacious in his attempts to revive the shared fantasy up to the point of bargaining and I've dealt with it in other videos, the narcissist would tend to identify sex with love of course within the shared fantasy, remember that sex is one of the three s's because he needs sex, he requires sex in order to reduce anxiety, he would tend to identify what he calls love which is actually addiction and attachment to the shared fantasy, he would tend to identify love with reduction in anxiety, so for the narcissist love addiction to the shared fantasy is an anxiolytic and so he needs it because the alternative is extreme all-consuming anxiety, such dysfunctional strategies and behaviors are common not only to narcissists but to everyone who has outlier psychosexuality coupled with a burning desire to be in a traditional intimate love relationship, alas these two rarely go together, you can either satisfy or gratify your atypical psychosexuality or you can be in a relationship rarely goes together, there are two other solutions of course to this predicament, one is to find a loving part with a psychosexuality similar or complementary to one's own and who is aroused by such sexual preferences to the point that he or she is eager to incorporate these practices into the couples common sex life on a permanent basis, many narcissists are keep hunting for this holy grail, they keep looking for this kind of bug and ultimately they end up teaming up with other narcissists and psychopaths just in order to be able to exercise their paraphernalia or kinky psychosexuality so as to ameliorate anxiety and the second solution is to pursue one's psychosexuality and pretend that one is with a loving intimate partner in a relationship that's a fantasy defense and that's actually one of the main roles of the shared fantasy, one of the main roles of the shared fantasy is to convince the narcissists that he had found the right intimate partner in a loving bond within which he can freely express his unusual psychosexuality and reduce his anxiety so in the long run most narcissists gravitate to this second solution it's the most feasible and the most common. Ideologically in all these cases there is an unresolved conflict between sexual preferences, emotional preferences, craving a loving partner and socialization, the need for legitimacy and acceptance but in the case of the narcissists as usual it's even more complex the sexual preferences are socially unacceptable sometimes even bordering on you know illegitimate or illegal the emotional preferences have nothing to do with real love they have to do with object constancy with abandonment anxiety and with the need to maintain a fantastic space the shared fantasy and the socialization of the narcissists lives a lot to be desired the narcissist seeks legitimacy and acceptance but only on condition that his grandiosity is upheld in the process by society by his environment by his friends colleagues etc if there is any challenge to his grandiosity many I mean most narcissists would become a bit psychopathic defined aggressive impulsive and reckless and so in a narcissistic increasingly more narcissistic society and civilization people hate to go deep because they don't want to face who they really are and they don't want to affect change remember narcissists are change averse society is more narcissistic society as a whole and its members would be change averse so people today inhabit shimmering surfaces punctuated with dismissive grunts defensive empty one-liners superficial hilarity and cliched emojis this is called social networking intimacy relies heavily on privacy and uniqueness on being special to your partner and this is why sexual exclusivity is still the dominant practice but narcissists are incapable of intimacy and so most narcissists gravitate either to fantastic spaces like shared fantasy where ultimately they become sexless or to rapid fire one not one night fantasies which they can sustain and within which they can be sexual both cases they're trying to reduce anxiety and so the narcissist places his body and sex in the public domain via rampant casual sex and public self-phonography the narcissist creates a legacy that renders intimacy between himself and future partners all but impossible if you share your sex with everyone casually you ruin your ability to integrate sex with intimacy you destroy the linkage between sex and intimacy the very capacity to associate them instead you're likely to compensate with fantasies of sex and intimacy which is precisely what narcissists do it's a narcissist fantasy is a narcissistic defense and so this would explain why in an increasingly more narcissistic and psychopathic civilization there's a tsunami pornography and self-phonography a precipitous decline in one-on-one face-to-face dating minus 60 percent collapse in intimate relationship formation minus 40 percent and even a decline in sexual activity minus 20 percent all these since 1998 I refer you to studies by twinge Wade Zimbardo Campbell and others these indicators these indicators of this intimacy these indicators of the decline and collapse of intimacy in sex in relationships in dating pornography is the least intimate conceivable activity self-phonography takes intimacy out of the personal realm so it's like everyone is hell bent on avoiding intimacy if not destroying it out right because they are incapable of intimacy they have had lost the intimacy skills and relationship skills because because they had become more narcissistic and they prefer fantasy to reality intimacy is not possible in fantasy because most fantasies are actually addictive and auto erotic the history of casual sex your history of casual sex leads inexorably to a deficiency in intimacy and in relationship relationship skills but this propensity or proclivity for casual sex in fantastic spaces as substitute for real intimate sex this increasing dominant hegemonic sexual practice has effect on the ability to team up with partners in the future and also has effect on such partners your future partners are affected by your current sexual practices if your partners know that you had shared your body and sex with so many random persons they cannot regard your choice to have sex with them as special after all you did it with everyone even with people you don't you didn't know anything at all about intimacy is not possible when the partners feel that they are just numbers statistics the next conquest in the queue next in line when the world becomes somatic everything loses its meaning a partner with a history of casual sex as a dominant practice also creates pervasive insecurity is not a safe base it is difficult to feel safe and be safe when your partner takes sex so casually and flippantly and as a meaningful motionless activity this commodification of body and sex makes future partners feel that when you offer and grant them access to your body and sex this is meaningless because you had offered exactly the same to dozens of total strangers for many years your partners do not feel special they do not feel that they stand out from others they might as well be among the countless strangers to whom you had granted exactly the same privileges your partners do not feel chosen because you had selected so many before so indiscriminately including anonymous strangers sex with with you cannot be intimate cannot be special only clinically arousing sex with you is phonographic not lovemaking and without lovemaking there's no intimacy and i say sex with you i mean sex with a narcissistic person the thing is that in a narcissistic civilization we would all tend to adopt narcissistic practices narcissistic choices narcissistic traits and narcissistic behaviors even if and when we are not clinically narcissists and this is very confusing because people behave as though they were narcissists as if they are narcissists as if they were narcissistic but they are not one of the most moronic bits of politically correct advice online is your partners sexual social and psychological histories your partners past they're not relevant and you have no right to inquire about them only present choices of your partner decisions she makes and behaviors matter don't be retroactively jealous this is an idiotic advance because by far the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior recidivism defaulting to past misconduct is rife almost inevitable more than 80% of alcoholics restart to drink within a year from rehab almost 70% of criminals repopulate their erstwhile cells go back to prison having cheated once your three times is likely to cheat again promiscuous women sleep around extra diatically outside the couple much more often than the regulated boundary sort of woman so by all means interrogate your new potential intimate partner to the greatest possible extent don't be shy about it it is your only protection against future nasty surprises this narcissistic civilization where all of us are infected by the virus of narcissism it's a contagion we need to defend ourselves against a narcissistic past in our intimate partner's history more generally people tend to link narcissistic behaviors and psychopathic behaviors and traits to empowerment they say i'm empowered i'm emancipated i'm strong i'm resilient they talk about defiance and recklessness as though these were virtuous impulsiveness as spontaneity women have never been less empowered sexually than nowadays and i'm saying women because narcissistic and psychopathic behaviors are exploding mainly among women that is the segment women and people under the age of 25 these are the two population cohorts the two population segments where narcissism and psychopathy are absolutely in a state of supernova so i want to talk about women because women keep saying i'm empowered now i'm strong i'm resilient i do what i want and so on so forth women are defiant they're contumacious they're impulsive they're reckless they're aggressive and they think they're cool they think this this demonstrates the world the new woman it's not cool women have never been less empowered sexually than nowadays as sexual screeds and gender roles crumbled phenomenon known as gender vertigo they have been replaced exclusively by male stereotypes of women as slots yes you heard me correctly the current more is the current ethos is a male stereotype of a woman work by lisa wade for example and kerry cohen among many others supports this counter-intuitive claim that women are less empowered and more subject to male stereotypes that women had adopted male stereotypes the exclusive growth of female objectifying pornography is proof of that because women participate in this pornography they make it many women produce self-porn place it online for the benefit of men they are addicted to male attention the male gaze they seek validation they want to prove to themselves that they are desirable capable of seduction many of them misconstrue or misidentify this with love being liked with being loved and rather than resist this typecasting women have conformed they post online as i've mentioned self-pornography to dozens of leering men they sleep around promiscuously often inebriated they hook up they subject themselves to multifarious degradations by individual men and sometimes by groups of predatory males the male gaze came to define women more than ever women are defining themselves through male stereotypes and this is called the stalled revolution in the literature to resolve the inevitable cognitive dissonance that such object submission creates women had convinced themselves that they're actually choosing this state of things it's their choice they claim to be agentic endowed with selective powers and decision-making powers they claim to actually enjoy what they are made to do in order to conform to male expectations and to garner male attention some women call themselves proud sluts but slut is a male stereotype of a female if you're proud slut you are a doormat because you had conformed a thousand percent to the male gaze to the way chauvinistic male men see you it's a oxymoron and so we've come full circle marcesis abhor and dread change there change averse they misidentify the external environment with their internal environment they're afraid that any change and any transformation in the external environment is the equivalent of self-destruction destruction of the self because the environment is the self they outsource ego functions and their own self to the environment and so because of that this creates anxiety they begin to identify everyone as a per-secretary object and then they try to convert everyone into snapshots that they can control and manipulate and this creates a lot of anxiety because external objects other people always diverge from this natural to reduce this anxiety narcissists and psychopaths engage in kinky and paraphernalia psychosexuality they try to co-opt partners they try to find intimate partners to go along with this kind of psychosexuality and usually they fail when they fail they react dysfunctionally as our civilization culture societies become more and more narcissistic and more and more psychopathic we are beginning to see these behaviors permeate and pervade become ubiquitous everywhere especially among women and women had convinced themselves that this is their own doing because narcissists always lie to themselves always deceive themselves into believing that they are in control they are responsible they've made everything happen they're the prime movers and shakers women are no exception but actually what is happening is women conform more and more to male stereotypes which are essentially chauvinistic narcissistic and even psychopathic and so women become more and more psychopathic in order to garner male attention to secure the male gaze there is a tsunami of narcissism and psychopathy because there's a vicious circle expectations generate behaviors and behaviors generate expectations everyone feels anxious about this total total or pervasive loss of control