If a Narcissist Could Rewrite History… This Would Happen

Grandiosity gets underestimated all the time. People hear the word and imagine arrogance, attitude, a bit of vanity turned up too high. The reality can feel much bigger, almost mythic in scale. The fantasy is not just admiration or status. It reaches for total significance, total control, total importance. The whole inner world starts orbiting around the need to be seen as exceptional, untouchable, above ordinary rules.

That hunger has to be fed constantly. Attention, praise, intimidation, control, winning, being the center of the story — all of it becomes fuel. When that fuel weakens, the structure starts shaking. Then you see the injury, the rage, the blame, the frantic need to force reality back into line. There’s often a strange desperation underneath the performance, a pressure that never fully switches off.

Once you really see the scale of that internal drama, the behavior stops looking random. It starts to look like a collapsing empire still trying to call itself a kingdom.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If a narcissist could time travel and had the power to change human events, I think what we would see is something staggering and something at the at the mythic level. Because it's narcissistic disorder, um it's boundaryless and it's infantile. So if a narcissist could time travel and had control of human events, I think, and there was no there was no limits to what they could do, I think they would make themselves a god on earth. I think, and it wouldn't be enough to be a dictator or the dictator of earth, they would need to experience life on earth at a godlike level. Now, there's nothing in the sci-fi question that I've received that says that they can break the laws of biology or physics. So, whatever the most godlike position or goddess-like position they could acquire, they would. There was actually a really good episode of Black Mirror about this, where somebody who'd been bullied at school brutally ends up with the ability, uh I don't know, she's she's an amazing genius-level quantum physicist. And I think she creates a machine where she can control which alternate realities she can slip into. And uh she makes she makes herself a goddess, she makes herself the the queen of the entire earth. And you might watch that and think, oh, that's quite funny, and obviously, because we're doing a TV show, you've got to make it as outlandish as possible. But if you did think that, I think possibly there's naivety there around how grandiose the disorder is. So this is this actually is an it's an inter it's an interesting question because what it highlights is people who have real insight, and I'm not saying necessarily like clinicians, therapists, coaches, uh, and everybody else, but some victims uh know this perfectly well. When we use the term grandiose, actually, grandiose is not a very everyday term, it's kind of a pompous term. I I wouldn't use grandiose outside of the context of discussing uh diagnostic criteria now that I think about it. It's not a normal everyday term, so it's quite a pompous word, and maybe people don't grasp what that means. So it's grand as in large, so larger than life. The biggest, the best it's always gotta be um my PP bigger than than your PP. My PP, big PP, my PP, the biggest, the most beautiful. Ask anybody, they'll tell you. And you might say, okay, but that's men. But if a woman has grandiose narcissism, it's the same thing, it's it becomes the same thing, and it is as though you say, so so I've just alluded there to a bit of Freud and uh the phallus. So where would the phallus be? Uh the the the phallic, the in Freudian theory, this would be the fetishized phallic icon, let's bring Kernberg in, that represents an extension of the false grandiose self. The false self is Big PP, is the phallus. This is my stick, this is my gun, this is my uh yang embodiment of power. You can see it, it exists in the world, and you'd say, but where where would where is that thing? What is that thing psychologically? I would make a claim that it's the it's the false self.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Look at my life, it's beautiful, the best, ask anybody, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

It the the narrative, what's the false self? Who I am, how amazing I am, the narrative, the story, the novel that I'm constantly writing in my delusional head about how amazing I am. Yes, it changes, it's uh been updated, new edition this year. Uh, it's different to the one you read five years ago because I needed more. I needed, it wasn't quite enough, so now I'm making even more grandiose, grand, large, larger than life, huge, the hugest, huge claims, and it's a thirst in me, it's um it's a hunger in me. It's never big enough. I don't know if I could publish this. This is ridiculous, but it works quite well, it's never big enough. Oh my god, it works even better. So, you know when we say uh narcissistic elation, so the narcissist wins, they receive their narcissistic supply. P uh big. Um what's that word? Um, tumescent, tumescent. Urg, it's a pompous word for saying fool and girthy. P big, narcissistic elation, I'm winning. The false self is male or female, sexuality doesn't matter. That's not relevant here. This is all in the realm of uh we're back in psychoanalytic theory, we're hanging out with Freud, we're hanging out with Jung, and Kernberg's come over for tea and scones. Narcissic depletion, depletion is a word that's adjacent to deflation. I receive narcissistic injury. People say you're not the cleverest man alive, you're not the most beautiful woman alive, you're not the wealthiest man alive, you're not the most innovative uh uh woman in your scientific field anymore. There's a new one, and she's even cleverer than narcissistic injury, damage to uh the big inflatable pee-pee, little pin pricks, it's just gonna get more and more avoidant. Tiny little pricks, so just roll with it. Tiny little pricks uh start to oh, it's not, it's not, it's not strong now. It's it's it's curved over, it's kind of flopping. And then depending on what happens, more and more air could go out, and then I'm in narcissistic deflation, which is narcissistic depletion. I don't have the big strong turgid weapon against my own introjects that are shaming me, that are telling me I'm useless, that are telling me I'm worthless. I don't have the big strong weapon to go out into the world and say, do as I say, or look at me, or um obey me, give me what I want. Look, big pee pee, big, huge, strong, turjured, pee-pee. I don't have it because it's this is me, this is me strong pee-pee. This is me deflated, pee-pee. I'm 90% sure I can't release this. I can, but nobody's gonna take me seriously ever again. This is me strong pee-pee. Elation. I'm huge, I'm the best, everything is me. And then deflated. Oh, everything sucks. I hate life, I'm so worthless, everybody, and then you hear that um which reflects uh grandiosity and vulnerability, right? Um you know what's the story when I'm deflated? I'm still a narcissist.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Just because I'm deflated, I'm so they they all knew I was the greatest, they all knew I was a genius, and they turned against me, and now my life is ruined.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

Um, I'm a genius, they were jealous of me, I'm the victim of a conspiracy, I'm the victim of a smear campaign, uh they they they they I flew, I was like Icarus, and I flew too close to the sun, but it wasn't the sun that melted my wax, it was the evil, jealous degenerates trapped down on earth. They did this to me. And if you say to them, well, you you you did make a couple of impulsive decisions there, sir.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Silence!

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Get out of my court, behead him, behead her. You've done the few things that didn't make sense, sir. You've made promises that you haven't kept, sir, so on and so forth. All that that does is it generates even more narcissistic injury to somebody who's gone into narcissistic depletion. And if it goes on long enough, what do we have? We have the full narcissistic collapse. There's nowhere in the inflatable, it's now not big pee pee, it's small, sad-looking, underwater sea creature-looking uh peepee, and it's not very impressive. It's small, it's sad. The ego, but it's strictly speaking. Okay, let's let's let's use the term that everybody uses. Their ego was strong and now it's deflated. When it was strong, I was I was cocky, I was smug. What do they call that that little smile that people do when they're they're conning people? Jupiter's delight, you know, and they're they're so smug and they're so full of themselves, they're even confessing what they do. But it's a joke, right? Yeah, I destroy people's lives, but it's just a joke. They can't do that anymore because the mirror is people's attention, the mirror is the reflection of what people think about them. And looking through the mirror, the mirror is giving negative feedback now. So I never look, I never introspect and look at a mirror and look at myself as I am. I convince other people that I'm a certain way. They applaud me and feed back a distortion of myself, and I look in the magic mirror. I want to look in the magic mirror in which people see me as clever, smart, funny, wealthy, sexy, the most beautiful, the biggest, they're this, they're that, and that's gone. Because people aren't. Narcissists can't do this alone. They can't, we've said, you know, I'll go all the way and say I think it's a delusional personality disorder, but clinically, clinicians would, they're right to push back because that's not the clinical consensus. I say it's delusional. I say full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. Uh delusional, psychotic, dissociative. By strict clinical standards, it doesn't qualify as a psychotic delusion disorder. I think it should, uh, in some cases. Dissociative, it doesn't qualify. Uh delusional, dissociative, and psychotic. And it doesn't quite qualify. But I think for certain cases, we should, we should consider that's exactly what it is. They can't do it alone. That's why they can't leave you alone. That's why they can't leave other people alone. They're constantly fucking poking and dabbing and controlling and forcing and coercing and um what is it, uh mugging and posturing and posing, and I must come on, come on, guys, keep keep giving me. And that's why some clinicians will say, hey, you know, can we talk about the the simple fact that this is a personality disorder that's marked by anxiety? Because um, without going into this whole rant, you know the DSM, you know what I've said about the DSM. Other people were saying it about the DSM 15, 20 years before I said this. In the DSM diagnostic criteria, the diagnostic and statistical manual of the diagnostic criteria, the the nine diagnostic criteria for narcissism, all of them are externally observed. They're like it's like a series of irritating things that will piss off your clinician. Things that irritate the clinician and irritate the staff and irritate your family members. A haughty demeanor, you're exploitative, you think you should always be at the front of the queue. You only ever want to talk to people who you see as being high up and you're, you know, cozying up to them and kissing their bottoms, and you only ever want to think of yourself in this way. It's annoying, but it doesn't tell us anything about what's happening externally. Not one of the diagnostic criteria says anything, offers any insight about what's happening to the narcissist at an internal level, which makes it unusual as a diagnosis. Because we're not we're not describing anything. Nothing internal, nothing, nothing. There's no there's nothing that says where the clinician can say, um, oh, the one yes, there's one that you could say is internal, which is it's internal, external, it's on the boundaries, which is that they're very, very attached to a vision of themselves that is that is fictional. They're very, very attached to a vision of themselves that is grandiose, that is delusional. So other clinicians have said, hey, um, excuse me if I could be so bold, can we talk about the fact that it's clearly marked by anxiety? And that's not just the um insight of a few clever clinicians dotted around here and there, because we can we can go, oh, we we don't want to know what a clinician thinks or intuits is happening for the narcissist. Let's say we're this type of psychologist. We're behavioral, we're only interested in what we can observe, and we're only interested in raw data. Your insights are interesting and they're of use to you clinically. Maybe we don't believe in it at all. Yes, yes, it's very good. We respect you. We don't at all. Joking, fully joking. There's massive respect um in interdisciplinarily inside of psychology.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

It's huge, huge, the biggest, the most.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Well, we can then say to the behavioral psychologist, we could say, okay, um, have you ever looked up what the highest rate of uh comorbid diagnosis is with narcissistic personality disorder? Because bear in mind, narcissistic personality disorder is almost never diagnosed on its own. It's most of the time, overwhelmingly, across countries, across the world, across time, it's usually diagnosed with something else. One of the top things it's diagnosed with is um substance abuse and alcohol abuse. And another thing, very, very high up that's diagnosed with is called uh affective disorders, mood disorders. Huh. So I'm not saying this is the case because I don't have enough data to say that this is the case. I'm just conversationally reflecting back to you. Do you see how it makes sense that if the highest level of comorbidity clinically, when they say this these human beings, let's say there's a hundred human beings and they they have narcissistic disorder, my goodness, 70 of them also had substance and alcohol-related issues and mood disorders. Do you see how possibly an explanation of that would be massive internal anxiety? I don't acknowledge it. And I, as a narcissist, I genuinely think that they don't feel it. They just think that's life. But there is actually huge anxiety. Look, here's another way. I'm trying to build up my own position here. Haven't you noticed how machine-like they are? They're on all the time. It's exhausting. The one thing that I found, I'm speaking personally, I think I've I uh out of like 15 relationships, only two were with people who I think would would be anywhere close for a clinical or just subclinical diagnosis for a narcissistic disorder. Exhausting, constantly looking. Where's the argument? Where's the antagonism? Where's the slight? Have you disrespected me? Have you failed me? What's this? What's that? When you say this, what do you mean? And you just think, God, is there no off-switch here? Is there no off-switch? Think of the number of people who've experienced um uh uh not being allowed to sleep, being drawn into arguments. I've told the story, I wrote about it in A Cult of One of um being asleep at night. Literally, I'm I'm asleep, it's three o'clock in the morning, and then somebody standing over me screaming because she's been having an argument with me inside of her head in the living room, and then bursts into the bedroom and starts off from for wherever she left off in the living room. In this story, I'm not in the living room. The image of me is in the living room, and she just carries on from where she left off. So I'd be deep asleep, and somebody be standing over me with spit hitting me on the face and a finger pointing in my face, didn't even have the decency to turn the bedside lamp on, and another thing, I just just venom, just rage pouring out. And I think what we've got to do is we've got to sort of say, okay, there are multiple things happening here at once, but can we acknowledge or start to work towards a view of what could be happening internally? And my point here, with my rambling tales and so on, is we underestimate how grandiose they are. We use the word grandiose, but we don't realize it's all-encompassing, it's it's global, it's the world. If it could be the universe, I'll take the universe. Do you have anything bigger than the universe?

unknown 18:22

I'll take it. You can hand that over to me.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

It's boundaryless, it's limitless, which of course, once you've got that, you're not going to sit there anymore going on the 16th of May at four o'clock in the afternoon, he said to me, but I have photographic evidence or an audio recording or an email that he said the opposite, you'll give up on all that. Because you'll see, grandiose at that scale is delusional. And the engine that's running the delusion that keeps them you ah, look at me, ah, I'm amazing. Ah, uh, who said that about me? Oh, a slight, oh, kill them, all this fucking energy is uh fueled by anxiety. Now, then we will have an argument about semantics. Ish is when we refer to shame, when we talk about a narcissist, is it the shame of a neurotypical? I think we can probably close this argument neatly by saying it's not the same shame. It's something that operates like shame, it's a shame-like um quality or or driver inside the engine. But it's it's not shame as you as you and I might experience it. Similarly with anxiety, are they anxious that oh, um something bad may happen? Well, yes, I suppose they are. But say if you get stuck in an anxious loop that something bad may happen, your anxiety is still neurotypical anxiety, and it's still sane person's anxiety. I better be careful what I say here. You're worried that the family member didn't call you because they're in a car crash and you catastrophize, and that's the source of your anxiety. Or, like me, you get anxious around large crowds of people. You just have this generalized anxiety about being around, you just don't like large crowds of people, and it makes you have the physiological experience of anxiety. So that's a neurotic response. Your response over your family member is neurotic, you know it, you're catastrophizing. I'm also catastrophizing a little bit, it's kind of neurotic, but it's not delusional la la land. Their anxiety is I'm not convincing people, and people and self for a narcissist is a very poorly boundaried um mechanism because I'm drawing my sense of self from people. I don't experience others as others, I experience them as um, I'd sound so clever if I could rattle this off. I'm gonna bluff it. I think it's cohoot, and I think it's called a self-object. It's one of the things in narcissism that we haven't discussed yet, but we need to. So those people are people, but they're people who exist within me, if that makes sense, because I'm grandiose. I uh whether, you know, I'm God here. I am the all powerful, I'm at the center of everything. So you're all sort of I'm the sun and you're all the planets and moons and stuff, you all orbit me. So there are people, but they're not people as a neurotypical person would have them. They're They're internalized objects, they're I'm almost certain it's cohoot. Let me know if in the comments if I'm clever or not. Look up who said self-object, if I got it wrong, then I'm not clever, if I got it right, then I'm super clever, and I'll get some narcissistic supply. I'm less confident every time I say it that it was cohoot. Kohoot, or I'll take yeomans. Y E O M A N S. Maybe it was Frank Yewman's, maybe. Um, but self-objects. So I need people and I need to convince them so that I have my narcissistic supply so I can look in the magic mirror and see myself as wonderful, so PP stay tumescent. If I fail to do that, PeePee goes soft and everything is ruined. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that that was useful. I'm sorry. I hope that was useful. Uh, thank you for your time, for your attention, and I look forward to speaking to you again very soon. Thank you.