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The narcissist split

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The narcissist split

Postby addx » Sun Oct 20, 2013 3:51 pm

Fears can run so deep they can split personalities.

In the case of the narcissist the primary fear was created by invalidating the narcissists possibly overemotional state. The narcissist grew a fear "of himself", of his emotions and what they cause and started to deny himself as the source of these negative emotions. The emotions would be deemed negative because they would result in his suffering. In this denial he lost himself and in losing himself he lost the ability to relate events to himself. Each fear is met as a death fear and the response is equally dramatic.

The narcissist since the denial of himself, has had his ego grow into millions of fragments - fear-desire pairs that are all directly bound to the death instinct instead of being bound together into an ego and related to each other through this ego. This an extreme situation of a split personality of millions of individual extreme personalities which work and transfer control from each other in fluid motion all triggered by the flow of external cues.

The ability to find himself, his ego and to bind them to his ego would provide him a context(him, his emotional state as part of the situation would be a new part of the context which he never considered before causing him inability to properly extinct fears, he doesn't know which bad situations are caused by him and which by others, he can't differentiate this because he is denied, so he can't detect this difference in cause) that would enable him to consolidate/weigh these fear-desire pairs into normal ambivalent memory tied to his ego. It would also enable him to react properly to criticism and sleights etc.

The narcissists experiences a split right down the middle to the good and bad and all bad is deflected to the outside and all good to the inside as the paranoid-schizoid state describes. The ego is completely missing from these relations which causes them to be extremely unambivalent in relation to each other and thus extreme and directly connected to survival instincts, providing constant irresolveable conflicts.
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Re: The narcissist split

Postby addx » Sun Oct 20, 2013 5:17 pm

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Re: The narcissist split

Postby addx » Sun Oct 20, 2013 5:41 pm

Rapid merger of splits

http://www.psychforums.com/dissociative-identity/topic112969.html

Notice how he says one alter is manic the other is depressed.

Fear and desire sides playing hide and seek.

Apply this to the million personalities of a narcissist. That's why he gets caught up in his own lies and self-defeat, his million personalities are all formed as half personalities, ran by desire or ran by fear.
None of them are intergrated. These halves can hide stuff from each other. The brain can only focus on one side at a time if they're not integrated.
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Re: The narcissist split

Postby tribeofone » Tue Oct 22, 2013 1:53 pm

Hi,

I keep bumping into your posts as much as you into mine it seems. Looks like we have some parallel thought processes going on :-)

I’ve been hanging around the NPD board lately because I’m trying to understand the connection between DID and NPD. I have heard it say often that Narcissists are essentially split, similar to DIDers – I believe Vaknin says something to that effect, however much of a reference he may be. Also, this person, although they identify as a sociopath:

http://www.sociopathworld.com/2011/07/c ... izing.html

It made me wonder how much difference there really is between these disorders. When you look at discussions over on the DID board where Nons ask for advice with their DID SOs, you could in most cases simply substitute NPD for DID and things would make as much sense. My own ex is no exception – I used to think of him as a Narc until I learned about DID which for a number of reasons seemed to fit better. But his outward behaviour is 100% what people on here describe.

I’ve come to think that NPD (or PD in general) and DID are simply two explanatory models for much the same mental processes. The difference seems to be mainly the moral content of the respective narratives. It is generally assumed that being a Narc is a bad thing, Narcs are described as selfish, unempathic, thoughtless and sometimes outright “evil”. DID, by contrast, is a morally ‘pure’ condition – since it is assumed to be a trauma condition, DIDers are victims or survivors, whatever they put other people through is understandable from the perspective of that victimisation and they are seen as hurt rather than evil.

The entire discourse works like that: a Narc who changes his mind dramatically is ‘delusional’ or ‘rewriting the past’ while a DIDer has ‘amnesia’. A Narc lies and ‘gaslights’, a DIDer ‘switches’ and causes confusion. A Narc wants to be in control because he wants to secure supply, a DIDer because he is traumatised and scared of abandonment. A Narc has a ‘false self’ a DIDer has many true selves who happen to take turns. Most importantly, a person who is identified as a Narc is assigned accountability for their actions, and thus their ‘victims’ have something to be angry about. A DIDer elicits understanding and caregiving behaviour even when they behave like a total prick because it is somehow not their fault.

I’m wondering if these ‘diagnoses’ aren’t much more in the eye of the beholder than anywhere else. For people who got hurt by such a person it seems to be an important step in the healing process to demonise the evildoer, and NPD as a concept works miracles in that regard. If the guy who hurt you is so evil he is basically hardly human, it is ok to hate them (and saying someone has no empathy at all IS essentially saying they are not fully human). I am no exception, I engaged in this for quite a while with my ex. Then, as my initial hurt and anger faded, I looked at DID and found understanding and compassion for him on that basis – he hadn’t changed an inch, just my interpretation of him.

In the same way, I could think of myself as a (recovering) Narc if I wanted and it would make a lot of sense. I was raised by narcissistic, abusive parents and adopted many of their traits by default. For a large part of my life I was a grandiose, self-absorbed d*ckhead and didn’t see anything wrong with that. I do have empathy and I am (increasingly) in touch with my real feelings, but I can still do a really good impression of a Narc (both cerebral and somatic). Your observation about my two alters is correct – they probably corresponded to the ‘true’ and ‘false’ selves you would find in a Narc. It was no coincidence that the more ‘manic’ (and grandiose) one was also male (I am female). My NF hates women and I always felt I had to be a boy to get him to love me. I realised this on Iboga and it facilitated the merger.

The point is, regardless of what I in fact ‘have’, a DID framework gives me a LOT more leeway in terms of my chances at healing – of course NPD is said to be ‘incurable’ whereas DID has fairly good chances to be overcome. Who wouldn’t pick the latter. I am not even sure if DID (i.e. full blown emergence of alters with distinct personalities and such) is even an illness. Maybe it is just what happens when an aspiring Narc like me finally crumbles and falls to pieces – maybe the brain then jumps in and creates a social narrative that facilitates healing.

I also relate to your desire/fear model. In order to integrate, I used a similar model coming from dialectics, so essentially a systematic way of relating and overcoming opposites. Once you realise where the split comes from, i.e. what caused it, you can un-split it. For example, if you have trouble reconciling the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ object, you may create a split around that – to make the split conscious is to see that in fact the object is both good and bad and the contradiction lies in them, not your own self. This way you push the contradiction outwards, out of your own system, and where it belongs, there is no more need to keep up the split within yourself (not sure if that makes sense :-)

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Re: The narcissist split

Postby addx » Tue Oct 22, 2013 3:38 pm

Hi, it's good to see you and I've been wondering still how you're doing.

I can't really understand what you mean by creating a split to understand a split.

I have written an extensive PM on the subject to someone which I will quote here:

(fear/desire learning is explained in the thread 'NPD roots (again) :)' it will explain the first sentence in detail if you find it hard to understand like it is)

Threats to executing intention with learned certainty(moving hand, going somewhere) invokes the fear response.

This causes the memory schema tied to the fear response to become "labile" and the fear response is active. The above study estimates the fear memory is "labile" for a window of approx. 6 hours.
That means, if the fear is exctincted during the 6 hours the memory of the event will settle down without the fear component - fear will be extincted - completely - they even tried reintroducing it.

I tied this to all my own knowledge and came up with this:

The fear response is activated by dynorphin/kappa opioids. They seem to associate memory schemas to the fear instinct. Once the fear is cued the dynorphin causes the fear memory to "recall" to the conscious to provide the fear response. The recall causes the memory to be "volatile".

While the fear is active - so is the paranoid-schizoid challenge mode. The animal/person desires to escape the fear and enters the challenge mode of focusing on cues that are relevant to fear or desire to escape.

Getting closer to the desired causes reward(endorphin) because a method to getting closer is learned.
Getting closer to the feared state causes more fear(more dynorphin).

It is quite interesting to know that endorphins actually antagonize dynorphins.

So it seems quite simple, you activate the fear memory and then, during the 6 hour "challenge" window beat the fear. The fear is beaten by success which causes, as said, endorphins to release. The endorphins probably antagonize dynorphin and at some point remove all of it from the activated memory schema causing the memory schema to "settle back" without connecting to the death instinct through dynorphin and kappa opioids.

Now interestingly, Ibogaine is a two stage drug, hitting kappa opioid receptors and mu opioid receptors in stages and it also hits the serotonin psychedelic/subconscious receptor (to which LSD and others hook). Ibogaine causes rapid fear exctinction.

So, IMO it starts lifting the entire fear memory into "lability"(by kappa opioid action), the conscious only processes the biggest one, one by one. The mu opioid action clears the fears from the fear component allowing them to settle immediately causing the conscious to focus on the next biggest fear. Many people have described the ibogaine experience as having emotional scenes from past get somehow beautifuly resolved in a rapid matter in front of their eyes so fast that they can't even keep track.

The true fear of the narcissist is himself. I know that know. This is the thing I'm 100% sure.

Unfortunately this causes the "memory of self" to never settle because the self is always present and feared. Having no settled memory of self causes one to be unable to discern self as an discernable object of relevance in fear/desire situations. For example, there is a fear of heights, but you can learn a context where you do not feel the fear - for example having a parachute. The narcissist can never see himself as responsible/discerning in any situation because he doesn't exist. This causes his fears and desires to all link directly to the death instict without being bound and resolved into an ego and related to each other through the memory of an ego. The narcissist is like a million different personalities that flow into each other according to external cues or internal representations of external cues. This is because the memory of 'self' is still up in the air and always adapting it never settles.

This causes the narc brain to see everything through the desire to be better 'self and fear of being worse. None of the challenges after this NEVER resolve. The narcissist is unable to extinct his "new" fears everything he encounters simply links up (as helpful of unhelpful) to the fear of being bad and constantly keep this root fear of self alive and unsettled and growing. They are all "in the air" and so are also subject to constant "history changing perspective" of the narc.

Now, if this doesn't explain narcissism, I don't know what does. And it also proves why it is untreatable. It is impossible to extinct the complex social fears of the narcissist which keep his fear of self constantly present and extincting the fear of the bad self is thus impossible as well.




I would also like to add that I see DID is created by intense acute trauma which gets processed, due to strength by the subconscious. The trauma creates a fear of being the person who remembers what happened to it and the subconscious resolves it by desiring to be a person who doesn't remember the trauma. The person is created as are dreams.

Since then the new alter is probably triggered by any memory associating to the traumatic fear memory. The fear causes the compulsion of the desire to not be that person and causes the switch.
This causes both alters not to remember the event. Remembering the event causes the compulsive switch. The new alter is probably manic as is made out of desire to deny a fear, every second he is "alive" is actually success of being able to pretend to be the new person. The old alter is probably depressed because the subconscious trauma fear inhibits dopamine(depression) unless denied by the alter.

It is quite possible to form multiple alters like this and if it is an alter within an alter the switching order will probably be important.

The narcissist however is a similar but different beast. He has millions of alters that flow into each other according to external cues. And none of the alters is the true self, this doesn't exist at all. As desire and fear can play hide and seek with each other this causes the primary narcissistic pattern of self defeat. Intense desire to be something completely hides the fear of consequence of how you will feel after that. If the narc realizes this desire it puts him into a new position, which triggers a different fear-desire personality. This new personality again doesn't like the position and is sorry for getting to the position but can't feel at fault for this since there is no 'self' to be responsible, the new "alter" wouldn't make that decision that the old "alter" did. The new "alter" doesn't feel responsible for what the old "alter" did. There's a new alter every milisecond and it doesn't feel responsible for what the old alter did but it feels the emotions of the moment and since not feeling responsible - the narc must deflect any blame for the how the chain of events got him where he is. He can't see himself to blame because there is no self, it is just a bunch of alters with no true self and they can't blame each other. From this phenomenon the narcissist malice and self-defeat is born. Also the lack of connection, lack of attachment, unattachment to history etc.

The narcissist doesn't feel attached to his history - his alters did it. He doesn't feel like he every really accomplished anything - his alters did it. He never feels like he is at fault, his alter was at fault. And he changes alters from second to second compusively with each new reality cue/trigger, always desiring the best outcome and fearing the worst outcome but since unable to make tie together the alters into a coherent ego where all the "traits" are related to each other the narcs traits/alters/fear-desire pairs/however-you-wanna-call-it the narc often selfdefeats not being able to truly forsee how his future alter will feel. He is thus able to sacrifice to much for the now and then has to deny later because he truly didn't see it coming.

I'd like to see someone beat this explanation of NPD and DID both. Or give me a nobel prize. :mrgreen:

Heh, don't kick me, this is the only fun I get :)
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Re: The narcissist split

Postby tribeofone » Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:57 am

Hi,

I’m doing very well, thank you! I am still amazed at how this is even possible, but my DID symptoms have been gone for months now after the Ibo and I’m becoming confident they won’t come back.

Re externalising splits, here is an example of what I mean: my father has a deep fear/hatred of women. So when I was a child, he would often mock the women in our family for anything he deemed feminine while rewarding anything he deemed worthy of a ‘real man’. This of course comes from his own upbringing in which he was required to repress all his ‘soft’ or feminine features to become ‘tough and manly’. Because he hates the feminine in himself, he projects it on other people and punishes it there.

Because I wanted to please him, I initially did the same as a child – tried to split my ‘masculine’ from my ‘feminine’ side and repress the latter. This way I ended up with a female and a male alter who were entirely separate entities, one happy and upbeat (because he was the ‘right’ sort of person), one depressed and full of self-hatred because she was ‘wrong’. All the while I saw my father as a coherent person and myself as split. When Ibo showed me this I could suddenly clearly see how the rift between the masculine and feminine runs through HIM, how I had replicated HIS split in my own psyche. Then I could say to him in my mind “you can have your split back now, I don’t need it any more” and my alters could merge. If my father ever chose to do the same (unlikely), he might turn around to his own father and give him back his split, and his father to his, etc., handing that BS all the way back through the generations til Adam and Eve or so.

Of course, my father was only a representative of the male/female split that dominates our whole society. I could just as well have said, there is a patriarchy out there that teaches that male and female have to be separate and I refuse to embody this idea on political grounds – that would be another example of externalising the split. The point is recognising that the split was imposed from the outside at some point, for a particular reason, and it should go back outside (this is what my signature means as well)

Threats to executing intention with learned certainty(moving hand, going somewhere) invokes the fear response.


Interesting – is that why Narcs react so badly to anything they deem to be a threat to their autonomy?

So, IMO it starts lifting the entire fear memory into "lability"(by kappa opioid action), the conscious only processes the biggest one, one by one. The mu opioid action clears the fears from the fear component allowing them to settle immediately causing the conscious to focus on the next biggest fear. Many people have described the ibogaine experience as having emotional scenes from past get somehow beautifuly resolved in a rapid matter in front of their eyes so fast that they can't even keep track.


Yes, this happened to me. I would have my eyes closed and suddenly out of nowhere popped an image accompanied with a startle response, like a jumping scene in a horror film. In a flash it was gone. I have gone from being so socially anxious I could not even go for dinner with friends to lecturing in front of 100 people in 6 months – talk about fear extinction :-)

The true fear of the narcissist is himself. I know that know. This is the thing I'm 100% sure.



Yeah. That’s why most proper Narcs I know are scared shitless of even the idea of Ibo (and not because of the physical dangers). My ex reacts almost phobic when you mention it, and he’ll take any other drug ever invented by man. The irony is that if he actually did it, he would be able to meet himself without fear, because Ibo simply shuts down the fear response (similar to MDMA, I think it has sth to do with serotonin).
Not sure if you saw my post in your other Ibo thread about that guy Sebastian Horsley – Ibo actually gave him this gift but he still ###$ it up…

Since then the new alter is probably triggered by any memory associating to the traumatic fear memory. The fear causes the compulsion of the desire to not be that person and causes the switch.


Yes. At the core of DID is the desire not to be a victim. Trouble is, somebody has to take that job, i.e. there will be one alter who IS the victim. Most DIDers are preoccupied with pushing that alter down and grouping the stronger ones around them so the traumatised alter cannot be further hurt. Sometimes we also split and project, i.e. instead of acknowledging our own victimhood we victimise others. Healing means acknowledging that the victim is a part of you and welcoming him home instead of pushing him away. This is where I find religion comes in handy (even tho I’m an atheist, I like it as a metaphor) – the figure of the crucified Christ is the embodiment of the victim, the beaten, tortured, helpless human body. ‘Accepting Jesus’ for me means embracing this victim part. Once this has happened, healing and thus ‘resurrection’ and salvation can occur.

Is this not the same for Narcissists? Do they not avoid having to embrace their 'bad' self and thus construct a fantasy of omnipotence? I.e. they only want Jesus with the flaming sword, but not Jesus on the cross?

This causes both alters not to remember the event. Remembering the event causes the compulsive switch. The new alter is probably manic as is made out of desire to deny a fear, every second he is "alive" is actually success of being able to pretend to be the new person. The old alter is probably depressed because the subconscious trauma fear inhibits dopamine(depression) unless denied by the alter.



For me it wasn’t quite like that – my ‘manic’ alter was the sum total of everything good about myself that I did not believe I was allowed to be because I’m a useless girl – among them was being successful in a career. The male alter was the one who did our job (being an academic) and he was brilliant at it, I just could not own this brilliance because girls are stupid, so it had to be him. The female alter was depressed because she accepted that she would never amount to anything because she was a flawed woman. Once I accepted I did not have to be a man to do all the good things I wanted to do, the two could merge.

Re trauma tho, there always is one alter who remembers the trauma. They may hide it from the rest of the personality system, but they have the memory. Healing for me was a process of asking alters to come forward and show the trauma they were holding. We (all alters) then thanked them for holding on to this so the rest of us didn’t have to. They made a sacrifice for the good of the whole and acknowledging this was a step in welcoming them back. One often finds in DID that the meanest, most destructive alters hold the most traumatic memories. They literally have taken not one but dozens of bullets so the rest of the system can be happy. Once you give them credit for that they come around like nothing else.

The narcissist however is a similar but different beast. He has millions of alters that flow into each other according to external cues. And none of the alters is the true self, this doesn't exist at all. As desire and fear can play hide and seek with each other this causes the primary narcissistic pattern of self defeat. Intense desire to be something completely hides the fear of consequence of how you will feel after that. If the narc realizes this desire it puts him into a new position, which triggers a different fear-desire personality. This new personality again doesn't like the position and is sorry for getting to the position but can't feel at fault for this since there is no 'self' to be responsible, the new "alter" wouldn't make that decision that the old "alter" did. The new "alter" doesn't feel responsible for what the old "alter" did. There's a new alter every milisecond and it doesn't feel responsible for what the old alter did but it feels the emotions of the moment and since not feeling responsible - the narc must deflect any blame for the how the chain of events got him where he is. He can't see himself to blame because there is no self, it is just a bunch of alters with no true self and they can't blame each other. From this phenomenon the narcissist malice and self-defeat is born. Also the lack of connection, lack of attachment, unattachment to history etc.



This is fascinating. My ex would often show genuine remorse/guilt when he realised he had hurt someone. At the same time he seemed completely incapable of seeing this coming, even if it was glaringly obvious. He once cheated with his best friend’s girlfriend and was really distraught when the friend was pissed off, but somehow he had managed to genuinely not anticipate that this would happen. Your model would explain this.

It ties into what I’ve been thinking about empathy – to me, there are two types of empathy, one immediate (e.g. you see someone crying and immediately feel sad for them) and one I call anticipatory. Anticipatory empathy means having a mental model of other people’s minds that allows one to think: if someone did x to me I would feel bad. Other people feel much the same as me. So if I do x to another person, they will feel bad – then I won’t do x.

In order to perform this mental operation, one has to first and foremost be in touch with one’s own feelings, i.e. one has to know that one hurts when x happens. The Narc seems to fall at this first hurdle – he cannot feel his own pain, and so he is not able to project it onto others to gauge their probable future reactions.

The narcissist doesn't feel attached to his history - his alters did it. He doesn't feel like he every really accomplished anything - his alters did it. He never feels like he is at fault, his alter was at fault.



This can happen in DID too, when a system is very disorganised (“I swear officer, it wasn’t me who didn’t pay her taxes last year, it was last year’s me” :-)). The difference seems to be that DID alters are in themselves coherent over time, i.e. an alter can come out with months or even years between and they will be still pretty much the same. This is what enables them to form a social structure among each other, a kind of collective consciousness that eventually leads to full integration. In a Narc, according to what you say, there would be an ongoing fragmentation where there are not even continuous alter states, they have always only just come around. They cannot form a collective consciousness because their individual consciousnesses don’t contain enough information for them to be actual entities, they are more like a swarm of nano-bots (forgive the geeking).

I’m curious (if you don’t mind), I read in one of your other posts that you at some point overcame this for a short while – how did you do that? What made you fall back?
It shows an excessive tenderness for the world to remove contradiction from it and then to transfer the contradiction to reason, where it is allowed to remain unresolved.

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Re: The narcissist split

Postby addx » Wed Oct 23, 2013 11:36 am

Short answer for now, don't have time, thanks for answering. I'm interested in DID as well, what I wrote down there is guesswork based on NPD and my idea how the brain works.

tribeofone wrote:Hi,

I’m doing very well, thank you! I am still amazed at how this is even possible, but my DID symptoms have been gone for months now after the Ibo and I’m becoming confident they won’t come back.

Re externalising splits, here is an example of what I mean: my father has a deep fear/hatred of women. So when I was a child, he would often mock the women in our family for anything he deemed feminine while rewarding anything he deemed worthy of a ‘real man’. This of course comes from his own upbringing in which he was required to repress all his ‘soft’ or feminine features to become ‘tough and manly’. Because he hates the feminine in himself, he projects it on other people and punishes it there.

Because I wanted to please him, I initially did the same as a child – tried to split my ‘masculine’ from my ‘feminine’ side and repress the latter. This way I ended up with a female and a male alter who were entirely separate entities, one happy and upbeat (because he was the ‘right’ sort of person), one depressed and full of self-hatred because she was ‘wrong’. All the while I saw my father as a coherent person and myself as split. When Ibo showed me this I could suddenly clearly see how the rift between the masculine and feminine runs through HIM, how I had replicated HIS split in my own psyche. Then I could say to him in my mind “you can have your split back now, I don’t need it any more” and my alters could merge. If my father ever chose to do the same (unlikely), he might turn around to his own father and give him back his split, and his father to his, etc., handing that BS all the way back through the generations til Adam and Eve or so.

Of course, my father was only a representative of the male/female split that dominates our whole society. I could just as well have said, there is a patriarchy out there that teaches that male and female have to be separate and I refuse to embody this idea on political grounds – that would be another example of externalising the split.

Threats to executing intention with learned certainty(moving hand, going somewhere) invokes the fear response.


Interesting – is that why Narcs react so badly to anything they deem to be a threat to their autonomy?

So, IMO it starts lifting the entire fear memory into "lability"(by kappa opioid action), the conscious only processes the biggest one, one by one. The mu opioid action clears the fears from the fear component allowing them to settle immediately causing the conscious to focus on the next biggest fear. Many people have described the ibogaine experience as having emotional scenes from past get somehow beautifuly resolved in a rapid matter in front of their eyes so fast that they can't even keep track.


Yes, this happened to me. I would have my eyes closed and suddenly out of nowhere popped an image accompanied with a startle response, like a jumping scene in a horror film. In a flash it was gone. I have gone from being so socially anxious I could not even go for dinner with friends to lecturing in front of 100 people in 6 months – talk about fear extinction :-)

The true fear of the narcissist is himself. I know that know. This is the thing I'm 100% sure.



Yeah. That’s why most proper Narcs I know are scared shitless of even the idea of Ibo (and not because of the physical dangers). My ex reacts almost phobic when you mention it, and he’ll take any other drug ever invented by man. The irony is that if he actually did it, he would be able to meet himself without fear, because Ibo simply shuts down the fear response (similar to MDMA, I think it has sth to do with serotonin).
Not sure if you saw my post in your other Ibo thread about that guy Simon Horsley – Ibo actually gave him this gift but he still ###$ it up…

Since then the new alter is probably triggered by any memory associating to the traumatic fear memory. The fear causes the compulsion of the desire to not be that person and causes the switch.


Yes. At the core of DID is the desire not to be a victim. Trouble is, somebody has to take that job, i.e. there will be one alter who IS the victim. Most DIDers are preoccupied with pushing that alter down and grouping the stronger ones around them so the traumatised alter cannot be further hurt. Sometimes we also split and project, i.e. instead of acknowledging our own victimhood we victimise others. Healing means acknowledging that the victim is a part of you and welcoming him home instead of pushing him away. This is where I find religion comes in handy (even tho I’m an atheist, I like it as a metaphor) – the figure of the crucified Christ is the embodiment of the victim, the beaten, tortured, helpless human body. ‘Accepting Jesus’ for me means embracing this victim part. Once this has happened, healing and thus ‘resurrection’ and salvation can occur.

Is this not the same for Narcissists? Do they not avoid having to embrace their 'bad' self and thus construct a fantasy of omnipotence? I.e. they only want Jesus with the flaming sword, but not Jesus on the cross?

This causes both alters not to remember the event. Remembering the event causes the compulsive switch. The new alter is probably manic as is made out of desire to deny a fear, every second he is "alive" is actually success of being able to pretend to be the new person. The old alter is probably depressed because the subconscious trauma fear inhibits dopamine(depression) unless denied by the alter.



For me it wasn’t quite like that – my ‘manic’ alter was the sum total of everything good about myself that I did not believe I was allowed to be because I’m a useless girl – among them was being successful in a career. The male alter was the one who did our job (being an academic) and he was brilliant at it, I just could not own this brilliance because girls are stupid, so it had to be him. The female alter was depressed because she accepted that she would never amount to anything because she was a flawed woman. Once I accepted I did not have to be a man to do all the good things I wanted to do, the two could merge.

Re trauma tho, there always is one alter who remembers the trauma. They may hide it from the rest of the personality system, but they have the memory. Healing for me was a process of asking alters to come forward and show the trauma they were holding. We (all alters) then thanked them for holding on to this so the rest of us didn’t have to. They made a sacrifice for the good of the whole and acknowledging this was a step in welcoming them back. One often finds in DID that the meanest, most destructive alters hold the most traumatic memories. They literally have taken not one but dozens of bullets so the rest of the system can be happy. Once you give them credit for that they come around like nothing else.

The narcissist however is a similar but different beast. He has millions of alters that flow into each other according to external cues. And none of the alters is the true self, this doesn't exist at all. As desire and fear can play hide and seek with each other this causes the primary narcissistic pattern of self defeat. Intense desire to be something completely hides the fear of consequence of how you will feel after that. If the narc realizes this desire it puts him into a new position, which triggers a different fear-desire personality. This new personality again doesn't like the position and is sorry for getting to the position but can't feel at fault for this since there is no 'self' to be responsible, the new "alter" wouldn't make that decision that the old "alter" did. The new "alter" doesn't feel responsible for what the old "alter" did. There's a new alter every milisecond and it doesn't feel responsible for what the old alter did but it feels the emotions of the moment and since not feeling responsible - the narc must deflect any blame for the how the chain of events got him where he is. He can't see himself to blame because there is no self, it is just a bunch of alters with no true self and they can't blame each other. From this phenomenon the narcissist malice and self-defeat is born. Also the lack of connection, lack of attachment, unattachment to history etc.



This is fascinating. My ex would often show genuine remorse/guilt when he realised he had hurt someone. At the same time he seemed completely incapable of seeing this coming, even if it was glaringly obvious. He once cheated with his best friend’s girlfriend and was really distraught when the friend was pissed off, but somehow he had managed to genuinely not anticipate that this would happen. Your model would explain this.

It ties into what I’ve been thinking about empathy – to me, there are two types of empathy, one immediate (e.g. you see someone crying and immediately feel sad for them) and one I call anticipatory. Anticipatory empathy means having a mental model of other people’s minds that allows one to think: if someone did x to me I would feel bad. Other people feel much the same as me. So if I do x to another person, they will feel bad – then I won’t do x.

In order to perform this mental operation, one has to first and foremost be in touch with one’s own feelings, i.e. one has to know that one hurts when x happens. The Narc seems to fall at this first hurdle – he cannot feel his own pain, and so he is not able to project it onto others to gauge their probable future reactions.

The narcissist doesn't feel attached to his history - his alters did it. He doesn't feel like he every really accomplished anything - his alters did it. He never feels like he is at fault, his alter was at fault.



This can happen in DID too, when a system is very disorganised (“I swear officer, it wasn’t me who didn’t pay her taxes last year, it was last year’s me” :-)). The difference seems to be that DID alters are in themselves coherent over time, i.e. an alter can come out with months or even years between and they will be still pretty much the same. This is what enables them to form a social structure among each other, a kind of collective consciousness that eventually leads to full integration. In a Narc, according to what you say, there would be an ongoing fragmentation where there are not even continuous alter states, they have always only just come around. They cannot form a collective consciousness because their individual consciousnesses don’t contain enough information for them to be actual entities, they are more like a swarm of nano-bots (forgive the geeking).



It's a fluid flow of fears and desires/always fresh alters that never allow the notion of self to build. The self is constantly kept "unsettled", "in the air", "adapting to circumstances". The self can not be attached/related to any other object in the brain memory because 'the self' didn't settle as a notion/concept in the brain. Each new "alter" is not really a personality, just a new emotional state that results from the idea/desire one is perfect and the new notion of reality that directs whats is perfect in that reality. Each new alter/emotional state is created by the new moment of reality. All the alters have access to all the memory but they keep accessing it through the need of the emotional state of the new moment of reality - changing the meaning of history to explain the disparity between the emotional state that was supposed to happen and the emotional state that happened after a wrongly calculated action.

The moment of reality for example is, they're arrested. The constant is that they're perfect. Since they're arrested they feel bad, trapped, wronged. They can't be at fault because they were perfect yesterday when they got arrested. It must be someone else's fault, because yesterday I did what yesterday wanted me to do. And now today is wronging me for it. This is how the mind of the narc works basicly. He can't connect himself as the cause, neurologically. He can become aware of it like a fact but he can never get the memory reconsolidation this fact would produce if he processed it through a ready built 'self' object.

So, delay of gratification, especially for covert narcs is an obvious issue. Not having the system that keeps tracks of self-ego states and their causes one to learn hard about delayed gratification.




I’m curious (if you don’t mind), I read in one of your other posts that you at some point overcame this for a short while – how did you do that? What made you fall back?


I had an episode of something akin to hypomania. I was on top of a project for 2 months being the genious running it, it kept me as far away from my bad self as possible.

At one point I developed a UTI and wass pissing blood for 3 days and at 4th day a fever started to rise but also some strange sensations in my stomach or prostate, waves of weird energy, similar to when coming down from cocaine.

It caused me to suddenly start becoming "agitated" in the sense that I had to leave the place I'm at. But not consciously, it's like something possesed my body and kept causing me to leave, go, avoid. I also had the same ability to go against it so it was light fighting some invisible force or like I was taken over by something but still had the same control at the same time. My thoughts were perfectly normal.

I was at work and working 300 hours a week, guys were waiting on my to finish something which they build on(software) so I programmed like that fighting this urge to. I first had to stand up, couldn't resist any more, in the end I climb the chair and typed on the keyboard bend down and constantly resisting moving away from where I am. After about an hour I finished what I had to and drove hove. While I was walking to the car or moving the urge was completely peaceful. Even when driving home. Only when standing still I had to move, something similar to when you need to piss only without any pain. Anyway, I explained it to my wife while pacing the appartment and told her we'll go to the ER becuause I took a temp readout and it said 38.5 celzius(I should have been shivering and cold). I took a shower, pacing inside the shower and then took a whiff of a left over joint and proceeded to have my wife drive me. As I got into the car and we started driving the marihuana, probably in combination with the other circumstances suddenly flipped the switch.

The feeling of tension suddenly dissipated completely and was replaced by something I never ever felt - content. My face broke into a slight serene smile, I suddenly felt connected to everything, I gazed around and saw familiarity, I felt meaning in things, security, beauty. Beauty which I did not feel the need to take but just felt happy to see it and that it is there. There was no euphoria, I was just, experiencing, there was nothing much in my head.

I came to the ER and talked to the reception nurse. There was no observer in my head, no desire to come out smart, witty, funny, polite, charming, not mess up, not say something strange, not get delayed, whatever. There was no anticipation. I talked to her and this is the first time I ever felt I communicated with someone. *I* communicated. I felt compelled to listen to her until she finished and didn't have a single thought during her talking. As she finished out of me immediately came a very nice or charming or witty answer without ever going through the "sandbox testing"/autocensorship to see if it will be ok to say what I intend to say. It was like I was out of control, completely uncontrolled but at the same time a feeling of being content with who I am and what my world, not just content but feeling like an individual on this planet, equal to the person I talked to and with no bad intention, like we were children of god kind of thing but without any kind of delusions or anything, I did not behave weird in any way. I was honestly interested in what she had to say, I listened every word.

There was nothing drugged about how I felt, I used many drugs from marihuana(daily) to ketamine and mdma. This was very probably a state similar to what nirvana is supposed to be IMO. When contrasting my memory of that state against how I normaly am I get a description of buddhism.

Something happened, with the fever causing immunologic circuit activation which in close relation to opioids and cannabinoids.

Interestingly, a whiff of a joint ended the 2 month hypomania. It was kinda running out of steam but the whiff ended it abruptly within 30 seconds, collapsing me on the sofa with body temperature running 35.5 for 2-3 days and then slowly recovering energy... That was the only time I could claim I had hypomania.

When I think of this state now I feel like I will be out of control and I am actually scared of it, but I also remember it to be beautiful but the most important thing I remember is being in this world connected which caused me to see other people as same as me. It happened instantly in 30 seconds. I'm not sure the state I was in would allow me to do what I normally do in life - this is what I am scared of. IT development is a self-absorbing job. This state I experienced seems completely immersed into reality and its beauty and for my job you need exactly what NPD gives you, almost unlimited resources for imagination of desire - which from young age I used for creativity, I am a narcissist of product.

I find the experience I had unique and providing insight into what other emotions exists and how the world can be. You can understand how it bugs me now what I have seen and felt and can't replicate any more.
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Re: The narcissist split

Postby crystal_richardson_ » Wed Oct 23, 2013 6:05 pm

addx wrote:Fears can run so deep they can split personalities.

In the case of the narcissist the primary fear was created by invalidating the narcissists possibly overemotional state. The narcissist grew a fear "of himself", of his emotions and what they cause and started to deny himself as the source of these negative emotions. The emotions would be deemed negative because they would result in his suffering. In this denial he lost himself and in losing himself he lost the ability to relate events to himself. Each fear is met as a death fear and the response is equally dramatic.

The narcissist since the denial of himself, has had his ego grow into millions of fragments - fear-desire pairs that are all directly bound to the death instinct instead of being bound together into an ego and related to each other through this ego. This an extreme situation of a split personality of millions of individual extreme personalities which work and transfer control from each other in fluid motion all triggered by the flow of external cues.

The ability to find himself, his ego and to bind them to his ego would provide him a context(him, his emotional state as part of the situation would be a new part of the context which he never considered before causing him inability to properly extinct fears, he doesn't know which bad situations are caused by him and which by others, he can't differentiate this because he is denied, so he can't detect this difference in cause) that would enable him to consolidate/weigh these fear-desire pairs into normal ambivalent memory tied to his ego. It would also enable him to react properly to criticism and sleights etc.

The narcissists experiences a split right down the middle to the good and bad and all bad is deflected to the outside and all good to the inside as the paranoid-schizoid state describes. The ego is completely missing from these relations which causes them to be extremely unambivalent in relation to each other and thus extreme and directly connected to survival instincts, providing constant irresolveable conflicts.


this is a great post.
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