 Today I'm having a Donald Duck moment, or is it a Donald Trump moment? Lately I and the rest of the world am not so sure. At any rate, today we have a core new copia, core new copia, looking up online. Many many interesting and fascinating things from all corners of cyberspace plus a central theme, a central topic. And then this will be followed by quotes from books as had become a tradition. My new Instagram channel is called Narcissism with Vakny, one word, Narcissism with Vakny. That's my new channel because my old channel has been blocked by Facebook. And I've been asked on this channel, I've been asked by one of my followers, why did you delete your Jerry Springer video? I thought it was honest and ballsy. First of all, I did not delete it, I had moved it to the playlist section. All the videos you think, well most of the videos you think had disappeared because YouTube had deleted a few of my videos. Haters complained about hate speech and other things and YouTube had deleted a few of my videos. But all those who survived and you can't find them on the main screen, they are in the playlist. There are seven or eight, I don't remember, nine playlists on my YouTube channel. Just go there and you will find the missing videos. Okay, scan the page, you will find it. Playlists are mentioned in a variety of places. Okay, but what struck my interest in her comment was the use of the word ballsy. She connected honesty with courage. And I wrote back to her, ballsy is a particular choice of words to describe an infantile non-man. And she responded, well it takes courage to be that honest with strangers and with yourself, also known as ballsy. And my response was, you are confusing courage with impulsive recklessness. An infantile narcissist is never courageous. He is just oblivious. He is indifferent to the consequences of his actions. Sometimes if he's antisocial, he's defined. Also if you hold people in contempt, if you don't care what they think about you, it takes no courage to be honest and open. The potential consequences, the court of public opinion, don't matter. Finally, negative supply is preferable to no supply. The narcissist will go to any length and distance, even self-degradation, even self-humiliation, even self-destruction, self-shaming and self-trashing in public in order to secure supply. You can see this on the Jerry Springer show in Dollops. The C word here is not coverage, it's compulsion. The narcissist can't help it. Okay, today, later, the second half of the video, I'm going to read to you book excerpts from three books. One of the excerpts will provide a very unusual view of empathy. The second excerpt, that's Martin Luther King Jr. about love, what he had to say about love. And the third excerpt is about fear. And now we had become a culture of fear, risk averse, danger averse, thrill averse, novelty averse, how we cocoon ourselves and how we socially distance long before the age of the pandemic. Fear had become the defining, motivating factor in our civilization. But before we go all there, I want to read to you a quote, a surprising quote, is from a book called Cattle Kingdom. Cattle Kingdom, the Hidden History, the Hidden History of the Cowboy West. It was written by Christopher Nolton, and it was published in 2017. And there's a sentence there caught my eye. The long-awaren bull was notoriously ornery, sullen, morose, solitary and pugnacious. As one cattleman put it, the longer he lived, the meaner he became. I thought this applies to the long-awaren bull, as well to one of our acquaintances, the narcissist. I've been asked, aren't you ashamed to not be a man? Aren't you ashamed to admit in public that you're not a man? And to this I responded, aren't you ashamed to not be an astrophysicist? Aren't you devastated by the fact that you're not a psychologist? I am both. I learned to be both. I acquired the skill set of an astrophysicist, and the skill set of a psychologist. You didn't, aren't you ashamed of it? I didn't learn to be a man. You did. Should I be ashamed of it? To be a man is to play a role known as gender role. It's to act in a highly specific manner, according to a script provided by society and the culture we're embedded in. So they teach you in college or university to be a physicist, to be a medical doctor, to be a psychologist, and at home, much earlier, they teach you to be a man, if you're lucky or unlucky, I'm not sure anymore. I had been taught from age four to read, to write. I finished devouring my first encyclopedia at age seven, 30 volumes almost. So I didn't have time to learn how to be a man, and I don't play this role well. I also, I have another shameful, disgraceful disclosure. I don't play football. I don't play baseball. And you know why? Because no one taught me how. I don't drive. I don't do many things. I'm not a father. I don't have children. Why should I be ashamed of any of this? On the other hand, you can only dream, can only dream of to do what I'm doing. I have so many skills that you can only dream to possess. And yet I don't shame you for not being a physicist, or not being a psychologist, or not being a medical doctor. Why are you shaming me, trying to shame me, for not being a man? Response to another misif. I want to explain to that eternal professional victim, because she was very proud of the fact that she's a victim, that she'd been purely victimized, that she can't find any fault in herself, any fault in her behavior. She is the utter, perfect, unadulterated victim. So I want to tell you something. To refuse to victimize is also to victimize. Some victims are so invested in their victimhood, it had become a determinant of their identity. And if you refuse to victimize them, they resent it. They consider it abusive. To refuse to victimize them is to victimize them. So they sublimated, they converted somehow. They tell you, you don't pay me any attention. Some victims consider even negative attention, like physical abuse, verbal abuse, as a form of caring, as a form of sharing, as a tenuous connection. And when it's absent, they regard themselves as having been rejected, having been abandoned. Abuse is what assures them and reassures them that they have a place in their intimate partner's lives. They complain that the partner doesn't read, doesn't read, she complains that the partner didn't read her mind, didn't foresee her needs, was not sensitive enough. She complains that he didn't pay her any attention. And when you go through the letter, the email, you realize she's talking about negative attention. She complains of gas lighting because he refused to accept her version of reality. Projective identification and introjective identification are techniques used by perpetual professional proud victims to force other people to abuse and victimize them. Why? Because they love to be victimized. They feel good only when they feel bad. Victimhood, abuse is their comfort zone. They had been conditioned from early childhood to identify abuse with love, to identify victimhood with care, to identify battering with attention. So pay attention. Search your souls. Are you this type of victim? Okay. Lydia Angelowska in one of our endless exchanges suggested a new concept, which I found very, very fascinating. She said the same way a narcissist collapses and the same way a histrionic collapses, the same way perhaps a borderline collapses. Sources of narcissistic supply can also collapse. Sources of narcissistic supply can suddenly stop providing narcissistic supply. They can turn off the faucet. They can go away. They can break up. They can upset themselves emotionally or physically or both. And at that moment, they stop providing the narcissist with what he needs most, secondary supply. We'll talk about it in a minute. And they become collapsed sources of narcissistic supply. And it occurred to me that Angelowska's innovation, because it's a totally new concept to the best of my ability, Angelowska's innovation fits well with the collapse of other elements in the narcissist's eternal quest for the holy grail of narcissistic supply. The source of supply can collapse, as Angelowska had suggested, but also the pathological narcissistic space can collapse. Sources of primary supply can collapse. Intimate partners are sources of secondary supply, never primary supply. So sources of primary supply can collapse. And how does the narcissist cope with this? He copes with this via something called auto supply or self-supply. He uses auto supply or self-supply to create an equilibrium. Let me give you a simile or in some ways a metaphor. Those of you who remember your school days, if you had studied physics, I don't know, in Europe, physics is mandatory. I don't know, in the United States, with what's left of their education system is physics, if physics is mandatory. But we were taught about communicating vessels. Communicating vessels are containers, containers which are interconnected with pipes. And when you fill one of them with fluid, the fluid goes through the pipes to the other containers. And the level of the fluid in all the containers is the same. This is known as Stevin's law, Stevin's law of communicating vessels. Stevin was a fascinating character, Simon Stevin. He was Dutch, which already makes him interesting. In Latin, his name was Stevinus. He was actually Flemish, to be more precise. He was a mathematician, physicist, military engineer. He did amazing things. For example, he created a yacht, a land yacht. Kind of a yacht with sails, but on land. I mean, he was a bizarre character. He translated many texts and so on. He said, his famous quote is, a man in anger is no clever dissembler. So Stephen Simon, Stevinus was the guy who came up with the idea of the communicating vessels. And it's a perfect simile to narcissistic supply. Because you pour narcissistic supply into the first container, into the first vessel. Jar, jug, glass, doesn't matter. You pour narcissistic supply and it spreads equally. Across the various emotional and psychological needs of the narcissist. If you pour an insufficient amount of supply, the level will be very low in all these areas of psychodynamic functioning. The narcissist needs a constant infusion of supply to maintain the level across all communicating vessels high and the same. When there's not enough supply, when supply is missing, the narcissist administers supply to himself or asks his intimate partner to administer supply to him. When the intimate partner administers supply to the narcissist, that's secondary narcissistic supply. And when the narcissist does it to himself, when he fulfills these vessels with narcissistic supply by himself, it's called auto supply or self supply. To refresh your memory, there are two categories of narcissistic supply and consequently two categories of narcissistic supply sources. Primary narcissistic supply is attention, both in public forms like fame, notoriety, infamy, celebrity and in a private interpersonal form, adoration, adulation, applause, fear, repulsion. It is important to understand the attention of any kind, positive or negative, constitutes primary narcissistic supply. Infamy is as sought after as fame, being notorious is as good as being renowned. To the narcissist, his accomplishments can be imaginary, can be fictitious or only apparent as long as others believe that he is an achiever. Appearances count more as far as a narcissist is concerned, count more than substance. What matters is not the truth, but the perception of the truth. It is impression management on steroids. Narcissistic supply comes in two forms, animate, animate, direct and inanimate, indirect. Inanimate supply is composed and comprised of all expressions of attention which are communicated impersonally, not personally. For example, in written form via third parties or as views on a YouTube video. Inanimate supply also includes aggregate measures of popularity and fame, number of friends and likes on Facebook. As I said, number of comments on YouTube, numbers of readers and a blog, statistics. That's inanimate supply. It has no face, it's faceless. Animate supply requires an interpersonal interaction with the source of the narcissistic supply usually in the flesh. To sustain his sense of self-worth, the narcissist requires both types of supply, inanimate and animate, but especially the animate variety. He needs to witness firsthand the impact his false self has had on living, breathing, flesh and blood human sources and on his immediate environment. That's why isolation, quarantine and social distancing are very, very difficult on narcissists. Now, triggers of primary narcissistic supply include being famous, being a celebrity, having notoriety, fame, infamy, I mentioned that. Or having an air of mystique when the narcissist is considered to be mysterious, inaccessible. Or having sex and deriving from it a sense of masculinity, virility or femininity. Or being close or connected to political, financial, military, spiritual, movers and shakers, power, authority, or yielding and wielding this power. All these are triggers of primary supply. But who provides the supply? Sources of primary narcissistic supply are all those who provide the narcissist with narcissistic supply on a casual, random basis, not so secondary narcissistic supply sources. Secondary narcissistic supply includes leading a normal life. Normalcy, just being able to present yourself to appear to be normal is a source of great pride for the narcissist. Having a secure existence, economic safety, social acceptability, upward mobility and obtaining companionship. And so having a mate, having an intimate partner, possessing conspicuous wealth, being creative, running a business, and of course the business is transformed into a pathological narcissistic space, possessing a sense of anarchic freedom, being a member of a group or a collective, having a professional or other reputation, being successful, owning property, flaunting one's status symbols. They are all secondary narcissistic supply. But this source of secondary narcissistic supply is the narcissist intimate partner. She has a very important function. She records his moments of glory. And when he's down, when he cannot obtain supply, when his supply is deficient, she reminds him of these moments of glory. She's like an external hard disk, external memory. And she stores supply. She witnesses the supply and she stores it. And then when the narcissist needs it, she releases. It's like a slow release pill. She releases the supply. This way, she regulates the supply. That's her main function. The main function of the narcissist intimate partner is regulatory to regulate the flow of supply. When there is a collapsed source of narcissistic supply, again, suggested originally by Lidia Wengerowska, when there's a collapsed source of narcissistic supply, the narcissist will try to compensate for this. So when the source of secondary supply had collapsed, the narcissist will try to obtain more additional primary supply. The narcissist will also try to provide himself with supply, auto supply, self supply, which we're going to discuss in a minute. When there is a collapsed source of primary supply, primary narcissistic supply, when the sources of primary supply vanish, disappear, mock the narcissist, when they create external modification and so on. When the narcissist remains bereft of all sources of primary supply, he's going to put the onus and the pressure on the source of secondary supply to regulate the deficiency, to cover up for the deficiency, to release memories of past moments of glory, past moments, past accomplishments, so as to compensate for the deficiency. And again, he's going to use auto supply, self supply is a regulatory tool. And finally, when the entire pathological narcissistic space collapses, to remind you, pathological narcissistic space is the physical place, places narcissists go to in order to obtain supply, the local pub, the library, the church, the narcissist family is a pathological narcissistic space usually. So when the pathological narcissistic space collapses, the narcissist tries to compensate by obtaining more primary supply. What's the role of auto supply or self supply in all this? Again, it has a regulatory role. And in this sense, it's the exact equivalent of an intimate partner. Again, we see auto eroticism, libidinal investment in the self. Auto supply, self supply are as good as having an intimate partner. They're interchangeable. Don't have an intimate partner, supply yourself as a narcissist. You can't supply yourself as a narcissist. You look for an intimate partner. It's all investment in the self. You can supply yourself in really dire straits when, you know, when as a last resort. So it's a regulatory mechanism. It is tied to schizoid states where the narcissist is isolated, withdrawn. I refer you to the previous video that I made. And so he has no access to people. He has no access to an intimate partner. He may have divorced. She may have abandoned him, cheated on him, betrayed him or whatever. So he's in a schizoid state, isolated, withdrawn, recluse, lone wolf. And so at that moment, he will try to compensate via self supply or auto supply. Now, what is self supply? What is auto supply? It's anything, anything that grants the narcissist narcissistic supply, but is not dependent on any input or feedback from other people. In other words, you remember that in narcissism, there is a God of confusion between internal objects and external objects. The narcissist misconstrues and considers external objects as totally internal. So it worse comes to worse. Rock bottom. What the narcissist does, he begins to relate to some of his internal objects as actually external. And he derives from these internal objects narcissistic supply as though and as if they were external. He may uplift himself with positive automatic thoughts. He may tell himself that he's great, that he's a genius, misunderstood, but still a genius. So he will give himself pet talks and so on. Not in a healthy way. Most of us, almost everyone does that from time to time, but in a sick compulsive way, repetitive and something that occupies the bulk of his time. So he's going to have a dialogue. He's going to establish a dialogue with his internal objects, thereby estranging himself from his internal objects to the point of psychosis almost, almost to the point that he mistakes his internal objects as external. He still maintains a modicum, a measure of reality testing. And he knows that he's talking to himself. He knows that these objects don't exist out there. But he tends to identify them with external objects that had existed in his life from his past. And he tends to kind of, in a process that I call twinning, he tends to twin in a current contemporary internal objects with the past external objects. So he would identify, for example, an internal object with his ex, with his ex-wife. He would identify an internal object with his teacher, who admired him, he would etc. So he would kind of twin, twin the past with the future, with the present. And so this leads to several types of auto supply. The most prominent by far is paranoid or persecutory ideation. Think about it. Paranoid ideation, the belief that you are at the center of some kind of collusion or conspiracy theory, aggrandizes you, makes you appear important, at least to yourself. If you believe yourself to be at the core, or at the crux, or to be the pivot and the axis of processes around you, that is the kind of magical thinking that elevates you, that renders you the center and the focus of attention. So paranoid and persecutory ideation are highly narcissistic, and they are a form of auto supply, self-supply, because you don't need anything, and anyone to buttress, prove, substantiate your paranoid and persecutory ideation on the very contrary. Paranoia is a very solitary, very solitary kind of state of mind. The second type of auto supply or self-supply is delusionality. You can simply develop a delusion or a series of delusions. Some people develop a delusion that God himself is interested in their lives to the minutest details. He micromanages their lives. Others believe, others develop a delusion that, yeah, my wife had left me 46 years ago, but she will be back one day. I mean, there's no end. There's no way to specify all possible content of delusionality. But delusions are a very crucial, important mechanism for self-supply and auto supply. Actually, there is even a therapeutic technique. It's called anchoring, like anchor of a ship. And it is when we reorient the narcissist towards self-supply, we push the narcissist to sort of win himself off narcissistic supply and to substitute for it, to replace it with self-supply. Rather than resort to figal and ephemeral external sources of narcissistic supply, the narcissist is taught in the anchoring technique he's encouraged to resort to himself for supply, to look forward with excited anticipation to the structured pursuit of, let's say, hobbies, vocations, to develop certain traits and skills and reward eliciting behaviors. And this self-mastery is a major source of supply. And this approach leverages the narcissist's grandiose solipsism and his fantasy defense mechanism, especially fantasies of omnipotence. And it renders the narcissist emotionally self-sufficient and proud of healthy progress. So here's an example of a therapeutic technique that uses knowingly, consciously, mechanisms of self-supply and auto-supply. But let's elaborate a bit on delusions, because delusions, delusionality delusions, that's the family of coping strategies that the narcissist had his most acquainted with. When the narcissist is a child subjected to trauma and abuse, nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape, he's being instrumentalized, parentified, ejectified, beaten, sexually molested is what to do. Well, the narcissist as a child escapes to delusionality. He develops a delusion, which is essentially the false self, a god-like entity, totally delusional, an imaginary friend, a comfort object that is delusional. So the narcissist's default when there isn't enough supply, the narcissist's default is delusion. Unable to completely ignore contrarian opinion and data from reality, he transmutes them. Unable to face the dismal failure that he is, the narcissist partially withdraws from reality. All together, he loses reality testing to soothe and to solve the pain of disillusionment. The narcissist administers to himself a mixture of lies, confabulations, distortions, half-truths, and outlandish interpretations of events around him. And these solutions, these delusional solutions, we can classify them into groups. Let's start with the delusional narrative source. The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as a hero, he's brilliant, he's perfect, he is irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, kind-hearted, wealthy, the center of attention, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He is the protagonist of his own novel of fiction. The biggest strain on this delusional charade, the greater the gap between fantasy and reality, the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies. That's the irony. Delusion is a defense against reality. The more reality challenges the narcissist, the more delusion he becomes. That's why it's very wrong in therapy to challenge the narcissist's delusions, to introduce him, to force him to accept reality. Because when you do this, it entretches him. It becomes even more truculent, obstinate, resistant to treatment. And finally, if it is sufficiently protracted, this delusion replaces reality altogether. And the narcissist's reality testing deteriorates. He withdraws, he draws, he withdraws bridges and may become schizotypical, catatonic, or schizoid. Again, I'll refer you to the previous video I made. Then there is the antisocial solution. The narcissist, all these solutions to remind you are in case the narcissist is unable to obtain supply. So here's the second family of solutions, the antisocial solution. The narcissist renounces reality to his mind. Those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, his innate superiority, his overarching brilliance, his perfection, his benevolent nature, his entitlement, his cosmically important mission. These people do not deserve consideration. They are, you know what? They are intervention. They are not human. They are subhuman. Anyone who can gaze at the face of the narcissist, he is the sun. You can look at his face because he is glowing. There's an aura. He is saintly and godlike and he is an amazing genius and he is unprecedented in the annals of humanity. If you can't grasp this, if you disagree with this, if you're stupid enough to not realize it instantly, then something's wrong with you. What's wrong with you? You're not fully human. You're indistinguishable for monkeys and apes. So you don't deserve. You have no rights. You don't deserve any consideration. And the narcissist has no obligation towards you. The narcissist's natural affinity with a criminal is lack of empathy, lack of compassion, deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws, social morals. Now this affinity with a criminal erupts. It blossoms. It flourishes. Now this becomes a full-fledged anti-social psychopath. He ignores the wishes and needs of others. He breaks the law. He violates all rights, natural and legal. He holds people in contempt at this day. He derides and decries society in its codes. He punishes the ignorant ingrates he becomes, consummations. And that, that is because these people, to his mind, drove him to this state of deficient supply. They acted criminally. They are the criminals. They had acted criminally, but and so he's just reciprocating. He's jeopardizing their safety, their lives, their property, their happiness, their mental health, because they've done it to him first. Defiance, tit for tat, quid pro quo. That's the second family. Now the third family is, I mentioned before, the paranoid schizoid solution. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives, self-directed confabulations, which place him at the center of others allegedly malign attention. Intention and attention. The narcissist becomes his own audience, self-sufficient as his own, sometimes exclusive, source of narcissistic supply. The narcissist develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slights and insults where none were intended. This is known as hypervigilance. He becomes subject to ideas of reference, referential ideation. He believes that people are gossiping about him, mocking him behind his back, prying into his affairs, cracking his email, and that reminds me of Donald Trump so much that I'm going to take another seat from the Donald Trump, Donald Duck. Come on. The narcissist is convinced that he is the center of malign and malintentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, to punish him, to restrict him, to abscond with his property, to prevent him from realizing his potential and self-actualizing, to delude him, to impoverish him, to confine him physically, to dwarf him intellectually, to censor him, to impose on his time, to force him to action, to force him to inaction, to threaten him, to curse him, to surround him, to besiege him, to change his mind, to part with his values, to victimize, to murder him, and so on. Knowledge, escalation to the end. And all this, the narcissist is the center of this universe of collusion, conspiracism, and inanity. Some narcissists withdraw completely from a world, from a universe populated with such menacious and ominous objects. But these objects are really projections of internal objects and processes, as you realize. And these narcissists avoid all social contact, except the most necessary. They refrain from meeting people, falling in love, having sex, talking to others, or even corresponding with others. In short, these narcissists become schizoids, not out of social shyness, but out of what they feel to be their choice. The schizoid doesn't have a choice, the real schizoid. Schizoid simply dislikes people, doesn't need sex, and is utterly a social, a social, not antisocial, a social. Here, the narcissist makes choices to let go, to give up certain proclivities and predilections that he has, certain tendencies and inclinations. He gives them up knowingly. But he gives them up, gives them up in his view, in his distorted mind, in self-defense. The evil, hopeless world does not deserve me, they say to themselves. I shall waste none of my time and resources on it. grandiose exit left. Now the next family is the paranoid, aggressive, explosive solution. The previous family was the paranoid schizoid solution. There's another variant, the paranoid explosive solution. Other narcissists who develop their secretary delusions resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. They become verbally, psychologically, situationally, and very rarely physically abusive. The insult, castigate, humiliate, chastise, parade, demean and deride their nearest and dearest, often their well wishes and loved ones. They explode in unprovoked displays of rage, indignation, righteousness, condemnation, and blame. There's is an exegetic bedlam. They interpret everything, even the most innocuous, inadvertent, and innocent comment. It's designed to provoke and humiliate. They sow fear, revulsion, hatred and malignant envy. They flail against the windmills of reality, pathetic, forlorn sight. But often they cause real and lasting damage, fortunately, mainly to themselves. And there's a middle ground version between the paranoid schizoid and the paranoid aggressive, and that's the paranoid passive aggressive. I refer you to videos on this channel which deal with passive aggression or negativistic personality disorder. Another family is the masochistic action, masochistic, self-harming, avoidant solution. Some narcissists, when they cannot secure a supply, they are angered by the lack of narcissistic supply. Such a narcissist directs some of this fury inwards, punishing himself for his failure to secure a supply. And this is masochistic behavior and it has the added benefit of forcing the narcissist closest and nearest and nearest to assume the roles of dismayed spectators or of persecutors. And so either way, to pay him the attention that he craves. It's like he's shouting from the rooftops. I'm about to commit suicide. I'm about to harm myself. I'm about to hurt myself. It's a cry not for him. It's a cry for attention. Self-administered punishment often manifests as self-handicapping masochism, a narcissistic copout. By undermining his work, his relationships, his efforts, the increasingly fragile and vulnerable narcissist avoids additional criticism and censure, avoids negative supply. Self-inflicted failure is a narcissist doing and so proves that he is the master of his own fate. He is in control. This is a technique very often used by covert narcissists. Masochistic narcissists keep finding themselves in self-defeating, self-destructive circumstances, which render success impossible. Millen wrote in 2000 that masochist narcissists do this. They sabotage everything. They undermine everything. They do this to prevent an objective assessment of their performance to render it improbable. They act carelessly. They withdraw in mid-effort. They are constantly fatigued, bored, sick, disaffected, and so passive-aggressively they sabotage their own lives. Their suffering is defined in your face, suffering, conspicuous victimhood, ostentatious self-reignation. They get drunk. They do drugs. They overspend. They overeat. And so by deciding to abort their lives, to reject their lives as gladly put it, they reassert actually their omnipotence. Not only am I in control of myself, I'm in control of your emotions because I make you sorry for me. I make you sad. I make you depressed. I'm going to induce a state of mind in you. I'm going to play with your emotions. I'm going to sacrifice myself to f-up your mind. The narcissist pronouns and public misery and self-pity, they are compensatory. And again, as Milon said, they are intended to reinforce his self-esteem against overwhelming convictions of worthlessness. The narcissist's tribulations and anguish render him, in his eyes, unique. I am suffering. So I never heard anyone of anyone that suffered like me. I mean, what he did to me, I think no one else had ever experienced this. It makes him saintly. He's suffering. This victimhood is virtuous. It's righteous. It's resilient and significant. He becomes an empath. Then he graduates and he becomes a super empath. Then he graduates and he becomes a supernova empath. This empath label is grandiose. It's highly narcissistic. These are narcissists who had chosen the masochistic solution. These narcissists are, in other words, self-generating what they do. They replace narcissistic supply from the outside. Or they react to narcissistic injuries and modifications by generating supply from the inside, self-generated narcissistic supply. And they generate the supply by playing the victim, by becoming the victim, by identifying with victimhood, not only as a state of mind, but as an identity. And so paradoxically, the worst is anguish. The more horrible is unhappiness, the more relieved and elated such a narcissist feels. He feels good. He feels really good. What he feels really, really bad. So a narcissist reacts to a deficient narcissistic supply very much as a drug addict reacts to the absence of a particular drug. The dwindling or absence of supply is a trauma and the narcissist experiences post-traumatic stress. The narcissist constantly consumes praiseable, adoration, admiration, approval, applause, attention, other forms of narcissistic supply. When lacking, when they're deficient, a narcissistic deficiency dysphoria sets in. The narcissist then appears to be depressed. His movements slow down. His sleep patterns are disordered. He becomes insomniac, sleeps too much. His eating patterns change. He gorges on food or avoids it all together. The narcissist is constantly dysphoric when he doesn't have supply. He's unhedonic, so he's sad and he finds no pleasure in anything, including his former pursuits, hobbies, professions and interests. The narcissist is subjected to violent mood swings. He becomes mood-lap-lapile. Mainly, he has rage attacks and he has visible and painful kind of emotional dysregulation. So in a way, deficient supply pushes the narcissist to become a borderline. The scholar Rothstein suggested that borderline personality disorder is failed narcissistic. When the child fails to develop narcissistic personality disorder, the child ends up being in a midway house and that is borderline personality disorder. It's a failed narcissist. So when the narcissist fails, when he collapses, he reverts to a borderline state and you see these extremely anguishing efforts at self-control and they fail. He compulsively and ritually resorts to some addiction, alcohol, drugs, reckless driving, shopaholes. He develops obsessive-compulsive rituals. This gradual disintegration is the narcissist's futile effort, both to escape his predicament and to sublimate the aggressive urges that he has. He's frustrated. Dulland in 1939 suggested the frustration-aggression hypothesis. He said frustration becomes aggression. So the narcissist is frustrated. He cannot obtain supply. He becomes aggressive. His whole behavior seems constrained, artificial and effortful. The narcissist gradually turns more and more mechanical, detached and unreal. His thoughts constantly wander or become obsessive and repetitive. His speech may falter. He appears to be far away in a world of his narcissistic fantasies, where narcissistic supply is a plenty. So the narcissist withdraws from his painful existence where others fail to appreciate his greatness, his special skills, his talents, his potential, his achievements. Narcissus seizes to bestow himself upon a cruel, indifferent universe. He is punishing humanity for its shortcoming, its inability to realize how unique he is and what a gift he is. When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid delusions, as we said, self-directed confabulations, which place him in the center of others' legendally malicious intention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own sometimes exclusive source of supply. And again, to remind you, some narcissists go into a schizoid mode. I refer you to the previous video I made. Narcissistic or schizoid withdrawal. This kind of narcissist isolates himself. A hermit in the kingdom of his heart. He minimizes his social interactions and uses messengers, flying monkeys, to communicate with the outside, devoid of energy. The narcissist can no longer pretend to succumb to social conventions. His former compliance gives way to open withdrawal. It's a rebellion of sorts. Smiles are transformed to frowns. Courtesy becomes rudeness. Emphasized etiquette is used as a weapon, an outlet of aggression, an act of self-righteous sanctimonious violence. The narcissist, blinded by his pain, seeks to restore his balance, to take another sip of the narcissistic nectar that his narcissistic supply. And in this compulsive quest out of his control, the narcissist turns both to and upon those nearest to him. His real attitude emerges. For him, his nearest and dearest are nothing, nothing but tools. One-dimensional instruments of gratification, functions, sources of supply, extensions, pimps of supply catering to his narcissistic lust. Having failed to procure for him his drug, narcissistic supply, the narcissist regards friends, colleagues and even family members as dysfunctional, frustrating, potentially hostile objects. He develops what we call persecutory objects. In his wrath and fury and unmitigated rage, he tries to mend these people, to fix them by forcing them to perform again, to function again. He's very adamant about it, relentless, callous, reckless. This is coupled with merciless self-flagellation, a deservedly self-inflicted punishment the narcissist feels. In extreme cases of deprivation, the narcissist entertains suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation. This is how deeply he loathes his self and his dependence on others. Throughout this mess, the narcissist is beset by a pervading sense of malignant nostalgia, harking back to a past which never existed, make America great again, except in the thwarted fantastic grandiosity of the narcissist. The longer the lack of supply, the longer supplies missing, the more the narcissist glorifies, rewrites, reframes, misses and mourns a totally invented past. This nostalgia serves to enhance other negative feelings, mounting to clinical depression. The narcissist proceeds to develop paranoia. He concocts a prosecuting world, a persecuting world, I'm sorry, a prosecuting world, incorporating in this world his life's events and his social milieu. He creates a giant game of thrones and gives everyone a room, every place, every person, every event, all his personal history. This gives meaning, this online virtual game, this MMOG multiple player game. This gives meaning to what is erroneously perceived by the narcissist to be a sudden shift from oversupply to no supply. In this imaginary paranoid universe, there's a reason he's not getting supply. It's a conspiracy. It's a collusion. There's no other explanation. He's so self-evidently superior. He's so much to offer. He's so much to offer. He's such a gift. He's such an endowment. He's so perfect. He's so brilliant. He's so handsome. He's so smart. All narcissists have 100 and 90 acute. Didn't you know? And yet he's rejected. He's ignored. He's mocked. He's ridiculed. He's abandoned. He's disrespected. And it grates. And in extremes, it modifies, creates modification. And so he needs to concoct to create external modification. He builds a paranoid theory, a paranoid theory of the world. It's all, it's everyone against him. It's malicious, malevolent intent, working behind the scenes to deprive him, to discriminate against his injustice, writ large. It's institutional. It's individual. It's individuals acting within institutions. Everyone, everywhere is against him. Otherwise, he would have received much more supply. Proof that this paranoid ideation is not a delusion is that he's not getting supply. Does it stand to reason? Of course, he should have received supply. Plenty. Those, these theories of conspiracy account for the decrease in narcissistic supply. The narcissist then frightened, in pain, in despair, embarks upon an orgy of self-destruction intended to generate alternative supply sources, alternative attention at any cost. The narcissist is poised to commit the ultimate narcissistic act, self-destruction in the service of self-advertisement. When he's deprived of supply, both primary and secondary, the narcissist feels annulled, nonexistent, hollowed out, mentally disemboweled. This is an overpowering sense of evaporation, disintegration into molecules of terrified anguish, dissolution, helpless and inexorable. Without narcissistic supply, the narcissist crumbles. Crumbles to dust, like the zombies of the vampires one sees in horror movies. And the only, the only sustenance is not blood. It's supply. It is terrified. The narcissist will do anything to avoid this fate. Think about the narcissist, consider him as a drug addict. He's withdrawal symptoms, he's called turkey, are the same like a drug addicts, like a junkies, delusions, physiological effects, irritability, emotional ability. In the absence of regular supply, narcissists often experience brief decompensatory psychotic episodes. This also happens while in therapy or following a life crisis accompanied by major narcissistic injury. And these psychotic episodes may be closely allied to another feature of narcissists, magical thinking. Narcissists are like children in this sense. I keep saying it in all my videos. Many narcissists, for instance, fully believe in two things, that whatever happens, they will prevail and that good things will always happen to them. It is more than mere belief. It's magical thinking that is experienced as reality. Narcissists just know it the same way one knows about air or gravity directly, immediately, assuredly, unthinkingly, automatically. The narcissist believes that no matter what he does, no matter what he does, he will always be forgiven, always prevail in triumph, always come on top. I call it narcissistic immunity. The narcissist is therefore fearless in a manner perceived by others to be both admirable and insane. The narcissist attributes to himself divine and cosmic immunity. He cloaks himself in this immunity. It renders him invisible to his enemies and to the power of evil. The narcissist is a comic strip. It's a Marvel movie, not Marvelous, Marvel. It is a childish phantasmagoria, but to the narcissist is very real. The narcissist knows with religious certainty that good things will always happen to him. With equal certainty, the more self-aware narcissists, and there are quite a few of them, this kind of narcissist, self-aware, knows that he will squander this good fortune time and again. It's a painful experience best avoided. He knows that. So no matter what serendipity or fortuity, what lucky circumstance, what blessing the narcissist receives, he always strives with a blind fury to deflect them, to deform them, and to ruin his chances. And this is his only success, self-destruction. Now, the next video, I'm going to read three excerpts from three books, a very surprising excerpt about empathy. Martin Luther King's words on love, which should resonate through the ages, and an excerpt about the cultural fear.