Narcissist: Reality is MINE and FLUID (Clip: Narcissism Summaries Channel)

Feedback from other people regulates the narcissist's sense of identity, sense of self-worth, boundaries, and even his reality test, his correct awareness of the world around him. The narcissist needs this constant input to maintain a sense of continuity. Thus, the narcissist's nearest and dearest is sources of secondary narcissistic supply. They serve as external memories and as flux regulators. Their function is to maintain a regular, stable flow of affirming affirming data, which leads to coherence. Having invented himself, the narcissist sees no problem in reinventing that which we that that which he had designed in the first place. The narcissist is his own creator, his own god. Hence, his god-like grandiosity. Moreover, the narcissist is a man for all seasons, forever adaptable, malleable, constantly imitating, constantly emulating, a human sponge, a perfect mirror, a non-entity that is at the same time all entities combined, a chameleon, or in Woody Allen's language, a zelig. His personality is very primitive, disorganized. Living with a narcissist is a nauseating experience, not only because of what he is, but because of what he is not. He is not a fully formed human, but a dizzyingly kaleidoscopic [clears throat] gallery of mercurial images, which melt into each other seamlessly. It is incredibly disorienting, a shape-shifting experience. To the narcissist, every day is a new beginning. Every day is a hunt, a new cycle of idealization, or devaluation, a newly invented self. There is no accumulation of credits or goodwill, because the narcissist has no past, and he has no future. He is eternally present. Narcissists and psychopaths dissociate. They erase memories, and they do it a lot. They are, in some ways, amnesiac, because their contact with the world and with others is via a fictitious construct, the false self. >> [clears throat] >> Narcissists never experience reality directly, but through a distorting lens, darkly. They get rid of any information that challenges their grandiose self-perception, and the narrative they had constructed to explicate, excuse, and legitimize their antisocial, self-centered, and exploitative behaviors, choices, and idiosyncrasies. Narcissists are one-man silos, one-man confirmation bias bubbles. In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps in memory, narcissists and psychopaths confabulate. They invent plausible plugins and scenarios of how things might, could, or should have plausibly occurred. To outsiders, these fictional stopgaps appear to be lies. But the narcissist fervently believes in the reality of these concoctions, these pieces of fiction. He may not actually remember what had happened, but surely it could not have happened any other way, he tells himself and others. These tenuous concocted fillers are subject to frequent revision revision, as the narcissist's inner world and external circumstances evolve. This is why narcissists and psychopaths often contradict themselves. Tomorrow's confabulation often negates yesterday's. The narcissists and psychopaths do not remember their previous tales, because they are not invested with the emotions and cognitions that are integral parts of real memories. In contrast, the narcissist has no private life, no true self, no domain reserved exclusively for his nearest and dearest. His life is a spectacle with free access to all, constantly on display, garnering narcissistic supply from his audience. In the theater that is the narcissist's life, the actor is irrelevant. Only the show goes on. The false self is everything the narcissist would have liked to be, but alas, cannot. It is omnipotent, it is omniscient, invulnerable, impregnable, brilliant, perfect, in short, godlike. Reality intrudes on it, and a yawning abyss opens between the narcissist's self-imputed divinity and his drab, pedestrian existence and attributes. I call this abyss, this gap, the grandiosity gap. Additionally, meaningful figures around the narcissist often refuse to play the parts allotted to them. They rebel, they abandon the narcissist. The narcissist copes with this painful and ineluctable realization of the divorce between his self-perception and this less-than-stellar state of affairs delusionally, ignoring and filtering out all inconvenient truths. Then, if this coping mechanism, if this coping strategy of denial fails, the narcissist invents a new narrative, which accommodates and incorporates the very intrusive data that served to undermine the previous, now discarded, narrative. He even goes to the extent of denying that he had ever he that he ever had another narrative except the current, modified, one, or that he ever denied um countervailing information. An eerie sensation sets in and pervades the psyche of the narcissist. At times of crisis, of danger, of depression, of failure, and of narcissistic injury, the narcissist feels that he is watching himself from the outside. This is not an out-of-body or astral experience. The narcissist does not really exit his body. It is just that he assumes, involuntarily, the position of a spectator and observer, a polite observer, mildly interested in the whereabout whereabouts of one Mr. Narcissist, and with efficacy. Perspectively, he assigns his very life, decisions he had made, judgments to be passed, agreements to be reached, to the false self. Retroactively, he reinterprets his past life in a manner consistent with the current needs of the false self. It is no wonder, therefore, that there is no connection between what the narcissist did feel in a given period of his life or in relation to a specific event, and the way he sees or remembers these later on. The narcissist may describe certain occurrences, certain phases in his life, as tedious, painful, sad, and burdening, even though he experienced them entirely differently at that time. The same retroactive coloring occurs with regards to people. The narcissist completely distorts the way he regarded certain people and felt about them. This rewriting of his personal history is aimed to directly and fully accommodate the requirements of his false self. In sum, the narcissist does not occupy his own soul, nor does he inhabit his own body. He is the servant of an apparition, of a reflection, of an ego function. To please and appease his master, the false self, the narcissist [snorts] sacrifices to it his very life, his very self. From that moment onwards, the narcissist lives vicariously through the good good offices of the false self, exclusively. Throughout all this, narcissist feels detached, alienated, and estranged from his false self. He constantly harbors the sensation that he is watching a movie with a plot over which he has little control. It is with a certain interest, even fascination, that he does the watching of the movie. Still, it is mere passive observation. There's an external locus of control, and consequently, alloplastic defenses, blaming the world for everything that happens to the narcissist. The perception that the narcissist's life is ruled and controlled from the outside. Thus, not only does the narcissist relinquish control of his future life, the movie, he gradually loses ground to the false self in the battle to preserve the integrity and genuine genuine-ness of his past experiences. Eroded by these two processes, the narcissist gradually disappears, vanishes, and he's replaced by his disorder to the fullest possible extent. Thank you for listening.