 We must distinguish romantic jealousy from humiliation. All narcissists feel humiliated and they feel humiliated because of their inability to lead normal lives in which they are not compelled to share their women or to give their women up to other men. It's humiliating to never have an intimate partner who is only yours, an intimate partner you don't have to share with other men. It's a very humiliating thing because you know you're crippled, it's like you are quadriplegic, you're an invalid. There's nothing you can do about it, chronic illness generally. You know in medicine how we call illness, chronic illness, insult. It's called insult, serious. The clinical term in medicine is insult. It's insulting to be incapacitated, to be disabled to the point that you can't have anything that is exclusively yours or anyone that is only yours that you have to share with others. These are the unavoidable outcomes of the narcissist's disability and ubiquitous dysfunction. He can't, for example, provide for the needs and requirements emotional and physical of his intimate partners or he has to let them share herself with other men. He can't in business behave as another. So ultimately everyone steals his ideas or he's replaced by someone else. It's a form of cheating. You know when your boss picks up someone to replace you, to substitute for you at work and then fires you. That's cheating. It's exactly equivalent of infidelity or unfaithfulness. The Nazis go through this kind of humiliation daily. The Nazis switch from internal to external mortification real fast. But they do first, at first, experience agonizing trepidation and mayhem. Internal mortification is a very bad feeling. It's like in internal monologue, I'm defunct, I'm deficient, I'm deformed, I'm disabled, I'm incapacitated, I'm invalid. I can't be normal. I can't have happiness. I can't have a partner who would be only mine. I can't keep my job. People will always prefer others to me. My intimate partner will prefer other men to me because I'm not a man. My boss will prefer other employees to me because I'm not an employee and not an adult. I refuse to be an adult. I refuse to grow up. Peter Ben says it openly in the book. I don't want to grow up. And being cheated on that I keep mentioning, it's only the tip of an iceberg. And I'm mentioning it because being cheated on recreates the original conflict with the mother. So it's really, really bad. It's like an echo chamber of all the previous pain that the Nazis had experienced with his mother. So only infidelity, only sexual cheating or emotional cheating with men has this resonance within the narcissist and only this can lead him to modification. All other forms of humiliation lead to narcissistic injury. Cheating, infidelity and faithfulness with men leads to modification because it recreates the original environment, ambience of painful and hurtful childhood. And the narcissist is in a constant state of humiliation. Women cheat on him. Women abandon him. Businesses he creates go bankrupt. Projects he initiates fall apart. His long-term self-efficacy is zero. He's an imposter and he suffers from the imposter syndrome, Helen Deutch. There's a sense of lost agency, a sense of external, total external locus of control. And faced with such transient failure. If you were faced with such inexorable, repeatable, recurrent, inevitable, ineluctable, unavoidable failure, like guaranteed failure and loss of guaranteed. If someone were to tell you, listen, from now on, here's a letter from God guaranteeing that everything you try to do. You try to make a family. You try to fall in love. You try to have an intimate partner. You try to publish a business. You try to publish a book. And whatever you try to do, guaranteed, you will fail and you will lose. And even when you succeed, internally, you will consider it a failure because your standards are perfection. Your false self is unremitting. It's grandiose, unrealistically grandiose. And you have the super ego who tortures you, the inner critic. So you always fail, guaranteed. What would you do? What would you do if you were faced with such an internal environment? Well, there are two options. The first option is, the first option is suicide. It's a form of internal, taking internal modification to its logical conclusion. I'm so impaired. I'm so disabled. I'm so effed up. I'm so good for nothing. I better put an end to it all. It's suicide. That's the first rational, frankly, option. And then the alternative is to say, what causes me pain is reality. And everyone and everything in reality, simple. I'm going to divorce reality. And I'm not going to divorce reality by becoming psychotic. That's too extreme. I'm going to divorce reality by becoming delusional, fantastic, grandiose. And that will move me from internal modification. I am corrupt. I am decadent. I'm disabled. I'm imperfect. It will move me to an external modification. Everyone is malicious. Everyone is envious of me. The world is hostile. It's a jungle out there. It's a win-lose. It's a zero-sum game. So these are the two options of the narcissist. Suicide or grandiosity. It's a no-brainer. Of course, you would choose grandiosity. But it's also a catch-22. Because to defend one's fantastically inflated view of oneself, to defend one's grandiosity from challenges, from stark reality, from the lack of patience and malice of other people, this brings with it its own set of humiliations, betrayals, abandonments, derision, slides, challenges, and put-downs. When you try to defend your grandiosity, you look like a buffoon. You look like a fool. And people treat you disrespectfully. Whichever way you turn, you're humiliated. You're humiliated by your intimate partners, by your recurrent failures and everything, constantly defeated. You're in the defeated state of mind. So you try to compensate for it by pretending that you are a winner, not a loser. You're a winner. You lie to yourself, especially to others, and you force others to lie to you, narcissistic supply, that you're the greatest, the most amazing, the most perfect, and so on and so forth. But this also brings humiliation, defeat, failure, betrayal, abandonment. There's no escape. And this is where I want you to understand. Narcissism, similarly to the chronically sick or addicts, narcissists are their disorder. You can't separate the narcissists from his narcissism. Chronically sick people have gradually become their sickness. Addicts become their substance. Narcissists become their narcissism. The disorders displace these people. Narcissism displaces the narcissists. The narcissist transmogrifies, changes shape shifts, and is consumed and digested by his dysfunction from individual to dysfunction. Only the disease is left behind, having consumed and sped out the person that used to be. It's a second death. First time around, the true self dies. It's sacrificed, like human sacrifice, to the new God, the false self. Then the false self proves to be not efficacious. False self proves to be not the solution. And then the disease takes over, and it's the second time the narcissist dies, in a process known as modification.