Inverted World of Narcissistic Victimhood

As many of you know by now, narcissists of all stripes and colors like to present themselves as victims. Many of them actually believe that they're victims. They experience their victimhood. They feel that they are the scapegoats of other people, society at large, specific conspiracy, the maligning intentions of envious colleagues, or whatever. Victimhood plays a central role in the narcissistic pathology, and I've dealt with it in multiple videos. The problem with narcissistic victimhood is that it's narcissistic. All the clinical features of narcissism manifest through the victimhood facade, or the victimhood filter, or the victimhood interface. It's as if the narcissist imbues victimhood with narcissistic hue. It's as if victimhood itself is malignantly transformed into some kind of narcissistic mutation. This is the topic of today's video. What narcissists do to victimhood when they declare themselves to be victims. My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. Before we proceed, I'd like to remind you there's a free seminar in Ohrid, North Macedonia, in November. Borderline personalities and borderline personality disorder is the topic of the seminar, and there's a bonus lecture on sexuality in cluster B personality disorders. The seminar is free. Ohrid is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, a world heritage site, and you're welcome to have a lot of fun with the roller coaster of the borderline condition. To reserve your seat, few are left, please write to me at samvaknin gmail@gmail.com. That's samvaknin@gmail.com. Victimhood is not limited or confined to narcissists. Many people adopt an identity of a victim. Many people render victimhood the central tenant of their existence, the core of their identity. Victimhood, or the state, the victim stance, is who they are. Many people become professional victims because victimhood has its benefits. You can make money out of being a victim. You definitely can impose obligations on other people. You can self-impute all kinds of rights. You can garner sympathy and empathy. You can manipulate people. You can compete with other victims. This is known as competitive victimhood. Victimhood can be ostentatious, a kind of spectacle or display. Victimhood feel feeds well into moral crusades and morality plays. You are all good, the and your abuser or victimizer is all bad. Victimhood is infantile in many ways because it makes use of a primitive defense mechanism known as splitting, [snorts] black and white thinking. And so, victimhood is not the reserve of narcissists. Many people who are otherwise mentally healthy end up adopting a a identity, a victimhood cover, if you wish, and present themselves first and foremost as victims. And yet, when narcissists do that, and just to remove doubt, all types of narcissists do that. The overt narcissist, the covert narcissist, the prosocial narcissist, definitely. All types of narcissists do that, even malignant narcissists. So, when narcissists present themselves as victims, they tar and tarnish the construct of victimhood with their own brush. So, they imbue their alleged or ostensible victimhood with, for example, entitlement. They feel entitled. Their victimhood is aggressive and demanding. The victimhood of narcissists is hypervigilant, lacks empathy. This kind of victims are actually very abrasive and harsh and obnoxious. The narcissistic The narcissistic victim or the narcissist as a victim is someone who actually ends up victimizing everyone else, leveraging their alleged victimhood. And that's the joke. Empaths, anyone? Okay. Let's take a few examples. Narcissists, when they declare themselves victims, they invert everything. Everything suddenly is a mirror image of what it should be. Values, beliefs, code of ethics, morality, um norms, mores, sexual and social scripts, everything is completely reversed and inverted as if through a mirror. It's a wonderland with no malice. And so, I'll give you three examples. There's a narcissistic histrionic woman. She gets drunk. And she aggressively attempts to have sex with someone. That person, man or woman, declines her advances. For whatever reason, the reason doesn't matter. For some reason, the other party is not receptive to her advances and to her signaling and to her to her clumsy attempts to impose herself, physically or otherwise, on the chosen partner. Now, normally, the day after, a healthy person would say, "Wow, thank you very much for not taking advantage of me. You know, I appreciated that you were a gentleman and you refused to have sex with me. That was mighty nice of you. You could have easily have taken advantage of me. You could have easily leveraged my inebriety, my lack of sobriety against me. You could have, you know, but you didn't. You insisted on boundaries and so. Thank you very much. That's the healthy response. But a narcissistic histrionic woman would regard the whole event as narcissistic injury because it challenges her sense of her own irresistibility. She would find this event humiliating, sadistic, aggressive. She would hate She would hate the man who had rejected her. She would be furious at the selected partner for having insisted on boundaries, for having respected her, for having ref- for having declined to take advantage of her condition. She wouldn't see this as a service. She would see it as a disservice. She would experience it as rejection. And so we see here a situation where this kind of woman would present herself as a victim. She would adopt a victimhood stance. But her victimhood would rely on having been rejected by someone when she was inebriated or drunk. Her victimhood would have to do with the undermining of her self-concept as sexually irresistible. And she would hate the person who did this to her. She would present herself as his victim. And of course you see that it's completely inverted, completely insane in some ways. It's crazy-making. I mean, here's someone she's drunk. She wants to have sex. The other partner correctly, appropriately refuses. And that's an insult. That's humiliating. That's sadistic. That's rejection. That's hateful. And the other person is an abuser. It's an example of narcissistic victimhood and its inversions. Let's take another example. Two friends. One of them is a narcissist. The other is not. And then the non-narcissistic friend says something to the narcissist to his narcissistic buddy. He says something which is truthful. The narcissistic person will perceive this as sadistic and cruel criticism. He would react with a temper tantrum, with rage, with sulking, with silent treatment, aggressively. In a way that would communicate displeasure and worse. Why is that? Because the narcissistic friend immediately assumes a position of victimhood. Having been told the truth by his friend, he would interpret this as an attack, as abuse, as victimization. In the twisted world of the narcissist, telling the truth is an act of aggression. Telling the truth is victimization. Sharing insights is abuse. That's the inversion of narcissistic victimhood. Narcissists become victims on a dime, instantly. You're rejected sexually because you're drunk, that's victimhood. You are being told the truth about yourself in in a well-meaning way in order to help you, that's victimhood. What should a friend do? Shouldn't a friend tell you the truth? Isn't Isn't this what friends are for? Why are you angry at your friend for having told you the truth? It's helpful. It's a way of sustaining your well-being. It's a way of ensuring that you don't make mistakes. It's a way of of rendering yourself aware. Why be angry and rage at this? Unless you're a narcissist and any any type of truth is perceived as criticism, the undermining of your fragile, brittle uh self-concept, an attack, a form of aggression, and even sadistic. It's another example of narcissistic victimhood and its inversion. Truth-telling, generally speaking, and the study of objective data is perceived by narcissists as offensive, threatening, and aggressive. And this kind of narcissism masquerades masquerades as sensitivity, as non-discrimination. This is kind of woke narcissism, politically correct narcissism. It suppresses speech because narcissists cannot tolerate the truth. It suppresses research because some things should never be spoken, some things are taboo. Victimhood movements nowadays are mostly narcissistic, as multiple studies have shown. And so we have entered a society, we've we've created a society where the very act of studying the truth, communicating it, and accumulating and gathering objective data, these acts are perceived as offensive, as intrusive, as hurtful, as sadistic, as obstructive, as threatening, and aggressive. There are things you should never talk about. There are some words you should never use. There are some questions you should never ask. There are some opinions you should never express. Censorship, self-censorship is a form of narcissistic victimhood. I've given you various examples, romantic, intimate settings, friendship, and general society, just to illustrate that the minute there is this unholy marriage between narcissism and victimhood, the world turns topsy-turvy. upside down. From that minute on, everything you thought you knew about human behaviors and about what's right and what's wrong with it, it's all it's all unsettled and disrupted. That moment on when the narcissist enter the picture, right is wrong, wrong is right. Respecting someone is abusive and sadistic. Telling someone the truth is the same. And even communicating, communication itself becomes an aggressive, abusive, victimizing, traumatizing act. Until we all sink into a low common denominator of non-communication or bland communication, meaningless communication. >> [clears throat] >> Meaningless interactions, and then ultimately we avoid each other all together. Narcissistic victimhood results in atomization, solipsism, loneliness, the loneliness pandemic, and the disintegration of society at large. Gender relationships, sexual relationships, social movements, everything falls apart. Everything disintegrates because everyone is on the alert, everyone is hyper-vigilant, everyone is constantly offended and insulted, everyone is aggressively seeking to avoid other people and their inputs, everyone is regarding every conceivable behavior as shaming and humiliating, and there's no end to that. People reach a conclusion that they're better off alone. And the harrowing fact is they are.