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-centred and exploitative behaviors, choices and idiosyncrasies. Narcissists never experience reality directly but through a distorting lens darkly. Narcissists and psychopaths dissociate (erase memories) a lot (are amnesiac) because their contact with the world and with others is via a fictitious construct: The False Self. The narcissist hates kiwi one day-and devours it passionately the next. The narcissist does not keep agreements, does not adhere to laws and regards consistency and predictability as demeaning traits. He is a fossil caught in the frozen lava of a volcanic childhood. He occupies an eternal and timeless present. There is no accumulation of credits or goodwill because the narcissist has no past and no future. To the narcissist, every day is a new beginning, a hunt, a new cycle of idealization or devaluation, a newly invented self. Thus, to invest in a narcissist is a purposeless, futile and meaningless activity. Most narcissists have one island of stability in their life (spouse, family, their career, a hobby, their religion, country, or idol)-pounded by the turbulent currents of a dishevelled existence. Promises made by the narcissist are easily disowned by him. He is not a fully formed human-but a dizzyingly kaleidoscopic gallery of mercurial images, which melt into each other seamlessly. Living with a narcissist is a nauseating experience not only because of what he is-but because of what he is not. His personality is very primitive and disorganized. By definition, the narcissist has at least two selves. Pathological narcissism has been compared to Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly the Multiple Personality Disorder). To an observer, the narcissist appears to be fractured or discontinuous. Into this reflective vacuum, this sucking black hole, the narcissist attracts the Sources of his Narcissistic Supply. The narcissist is best described by Sartre's phrase: "Being and Nothingness". Moreover, the narcissist is a man for all seasons, forever adaptable, constantly imitating and emulating, a human sponge, a perfect mirror, a non-entity that is, at the same time, all entities combined. Having invented himself, the narcissist sees no problem in re-inventing that which he designed in the first place. He was trained to deny his True Self and nurture a false one. His was a world in motion where (sometimes sadistically) capricious caretakers and peers often engaged in arbitrary behaviour. The narcissist was conditioned-from an early age of abuse and trauma-to expect the unexpected. Thus, the narcissist’s nearest and dearest-his sources of secondary narcissistic supply-serve as “external memories” and as “flux regulators” whose function it is to maintain a regular, stable flow of affirming and cohering data. The narcissist needs this constant input to maintain a sense of continuity. PAPERįeedback from other people regulates the narcissist’s sense of identity, self-worth, boundaries, even his reality test (his correct awareness of the world around him). The narcissist and psychopath do not remember their previous tales because they are not invested with the emotions and cognitions that are integral parts of real memories. Tomorrow's confabulation often negates yesterday's. This is why narcissists and psychopaths often contradict themselves. These tenuous concocted fillers are subject to frequent revision as the narcissist's inner world and external circumstances evolve. But the narcissist fervently believes in their reality: He may not actually remember what had happened-but surely it could not have happened any other way! To outsiders, these fictional stopgaps appear as lies. In an attempt to compensate for the yawning gaps in memory, narcissists and psychopaths confabulate: They invent plausible "plug ins" and scenarios of how things might, could, or should have plausibly occurred. Narcissists and psychopaths dissociate (erase memories) a lot (are amnesiac) because their contact with the world and with others is via a fictitious construct: The false self.
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