 My name is Sam Bachnitz and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revested. Narcissistic injury is an occasional or circumstantial threat, real or imagined, to the narcissist's grandiose and fantastic self-perception, known as the Narcissist Forced Self. Narcissist perceives himself to be perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to special treatment and recognition, regardless of his actual accomplishments or lack thereof. Any threat to this self-perception is narcissistic injury. Narcissistic wound is a repeated or recurrent, identical or similar threat, real or imagined, to the narcissist's grandiose and fantastic self-perception Forced Self. It's perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to special treatment and recognition, regardless of actual accomplishments. So a narcissistic wound is repeated narcissistic injuries, repeated blows to the narcissist's inflated ego. And a narcissistic scar is a repeated or recurrent psychological defense against the narcissistic wound. Such a narcissistic defense is intended to sustain and preserve the narcissist's grandiose and fantastic self-perception as perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, etc. to preserve the Forced Self. So multiple narcissistic injuries create a narcissistic wound, which provokes defenses in the narcissist, which generate a narcissistic scar. So the base of all this process is narcissistic injury. Narcissistic injury, as we said, is any threat, real or imagined, to the narcissist's Forced Self. The narcissist actively solicits narcissistic supply, adulation, compliments, admiration, subservience, attention, or even being feared or notorious. He elicits this narcissistic supply from other people in order to sustain his fragile and dysfunctional ego. Thus, the narcissist constantly courts possible rejection, criticism, disagreement, or in extreme cases, mockery. The narcissist is therefore dependent on other people. He is aware of the risks associated with such all-pervasive and essential dependence. He resents this dependence, he resents and hates his weakness, and he dreads possible disruptions in the flow of his drug, narcissistic supply. The narcissist is caught between the rock of his habit and addiction, and the hard place of his frustration, hatred of people, and feeling of superiority. No wonder the narcissist is prone to raging, lashing, acting out, and to pathological or consuming envy. All these are expressions of pent-up aggression, which cannot be expressed. The narcissist's thinking is magical. In his own mind, the narcissist is brilliant, perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and unique. Compliments and observations that accord with this inflated self-image with the false sense are taken for granted as a matter of course. Having anticipated the phrases fully justified and in accordance with his reality, the narcissist feels that his traits, behavior, and accomplishments have made the accolades and kudos happen. They have generated them. They have brought them into being. He annexes positive input. He feels irrationally that the source of positive input from the outside is actually internal, not external. He feels that he generated this positive feedback, that it is emanating from inside himself, that he is fully responsible for it. The narcissist therefore takes positive narcissistic supply lightly and for granted there's nothing surprising about it, nothing shocking. He deserves it 100% or maybe 110%. But the narcissist treats this harmonious input, criticism, disagreement, or data that negates his self-perception completely differently. He accords a far greater weight to these types of countervailing, challenging and destabilizing information because these data are fed by him to be more real, coming verily from the outside. Obviously, the narcissist cannot cast himself as the cause and source of a problem, castigation, mockery, criticism or disagreement. So if he is not the source, someone else is the source. Positive input is the narcissist doing. Negative input is someone else is doing. He's really coming from the outside. This sourcing and weighing asymmetry is the reason for the narcissist's disproportionate reactions to perceived insults. Narcissist simply takes any slide or insult as more real and more serious. Narcissist is constantly on the lookout for slides. He is what we call hyper-vigilant. He perceives every disagreement and criticism and every critical remark as complete and humiliating rejection of his entire force-self. It's nothing short of a threat. Gradually his mind turns into a chaotic battlefield of paranoia and ideas of reference. Most narcissists react defensively. They become conspicuously indignant, aggressive and calm. They detach emotionally for fear of yet another narcissistic injury. They give you the silent treatment. They devalue the person who made the disparaging remark, the critical commonly unflattering observation or even the innocuous joke at the narcissist's expense. By holding the critic in contempt, by diminishing the stature of the discordant interlocutor and conversant, the narcissist minimizes the impact of the disagreement or criticism on himself. If the source is stupid, lowly and inferior, then whatever the source says does not merit any consideration. This is a defense mechanism known as cognitive dissonance. But most narcissists react with narcissistic rage. Narcissists can be imperturbable, resilient to stress and sound form. Narcissistic rage is not a reaction to stress. It is a reaction to a perceived slight insult, criticism or disagreement, in other words to a narcissistic injury. Narcissistic rage is intense and completely disproportional to the offense or the trigger. Raging narcissists usually perceive their reaction to have been by an intentional provocation with a hostile intent and purpose. Their targets, on the other hand, invariably regard raging narcissists as incoherent, unjust, arbitrary or even insane. And so narcissistic rage is different to anger, normal anger, functional anger. Narcissists often vent their rage at insignificant people. They yell at the waitress, they curate the taxi driver, they publicly chide and underling or subordinate. Alternatively, they sulk, they give him the silent treatment, they feel anhedonic or pathologically bored, they drink or do drugs. All these forms, all of these are forms of self-directed aggression that has no outlet. From time to time, none of them are able to pretend to suppress their rage. Narcissists have it out with the resource of their anger. Then they lose all vestiges of self-control and they rave like lunatics. They shout incoherently. They make absurd accusations, they distort the facts. And they air low suppressed grievances, allegations and suspicions. These episodes are followed by periods of saccharine sentimentality and excessive flattering. It's a dissidents towards the victim of the latest rage attack. Driven by the mortal fear of being abandoned or ignored, the Narcissist repulsively debases and demeans himself. He compensates for his temper tantrum by acting subservient, by acting as though he loves the target of his rage, as though he regrets and harbors remorse towards what he did. It's all acting. It's all part of the Narcissist's Fespian repertoire. Most Narcissists are prone to be angry. The anger is always sudden, raging, frightening and without an apparent provocation by an outside-edge agent. It's flesh anger. It would seem that Narcissists are in a constant state of rage, which is effectively controlled most of the time. The rage manifests itself only when the Narcissist's defenses are down, incapacitated or adversely affected by circumstances, inner or external. Pathological anger as opposed to functional anger, healthy anger, is neither coherent nor externally induced. It emanates from the inside. It is diffuse. It is directed at the world at large, in the context of the subject, injustice in general. The Narcissist is capable of identifying the immediate cause of his fury, but still, upon close scrutiny, we see that the cause is likely to be found lacking though, the anger accessing disproportionate and incoherent. It might be more accurate to say that the Narcissist is expressing and experiencing two types of anger simultaneously and always. The first layer of superficial hire is directed at an identified target, the alleged cause of the eruption. But the second layer, much more important than the mental one, incorporates the Narcissist's self-aimed wrath. The Narcissist's rage has two forms, exclusive, when the Narcissist flees up, attacks everyone in his immediate vicinity, acts out, lashes out and causes damage to objects, people, verbally and psychologically abusing. And then there is the pernicious, passive-aggressive rage, when the Narcissist's self gives a silent treatment, plots how to punish the transgressor and put her in her proper place. These Narcissists are vindictive. They often become stalkers. They harass and haunt the objects of their frustration. They sabotage and damage the work and possessions of people who then regard to be the sources of their mounting rage. Narcissists are walking, talking, timers.