Do I care for these people?

Usually i try and imagine how easily a person can be replaced.

It's not that hard to imagine.


I guess caring, is something else? I don't know.


I think......it's upto you to define for yourself............if you care or not. How you care or don't.....and what that means to you.


Because, in the end..........it's all mind juice. It's all supply. It's all caring. Love or whatever you want to call it.


Ummm.........I'm not a narc. But that shouldn't matter.



The real question is..........should you care for these people. And what is the most beneficial way for you (and them) for that caring to manifest itself.

I don't think any non narcs can determine if they care for someone by the presence of warm fuzzy feelings.. I can't. There are however countless ways that we can determine if and how much we care. I know I care for someone if I worry about them (as I do my sons), I know I care for most people because I treat them decently, consider their feelings, and make a lot of effort when purchasing a gift (without regard for the perception being created of myself). I am gregarious, I get excited when I'm around loved ones, they add to my quality of life and I value them for this.

PaulKersey wrote: I suddenly realize that I wouldn't want to lose them from my life, that I need to stop the temptation of treating them horribly and revealing my true self because I genuinely would feel... lost without them.

Maybe there is more than one true self? or maybe the self that treats people horribly is a protective shell of a self, and your true "caring" self is trapped behind that protective shell self?

PaulKersey wrote:What I can't understand is whether this feeling is because I would feel lost without their "supply" or if it's something more, if it's because of a sort of genuine connection I've made with them. I like to think it's the latter, and it feels like it could be. Has any other narc experienced this?

Why does it have to be one or the other? Is it really something so dichotomously opposed? Could it not be a bit of both?

Maybe there is more than one true self? or maybe the self that treats people horribly is a protective shell of a self, and your true "caring" self is trapped behind that protective shell self?

Or maybe this is just useless babbling that will drive you insane some day because it doesn't refer to anything real?

Speaking from experience.

You are your behavior. If you behave normal, you are normal - or at least, as normal as you can get. So just behave normal. That's going to be hard as ###$ as is, so don't make it worse by driving yourself insane by obsessing over that armchair psychological #######4 about true and false selves.

unreal wrote:
You are your behavior. If you behave normal, you are normal - or at least, as normal as you can get. So just behave normal. That's going to be hard as ###$ as is, so don't make it worse by driving yourself insane by obsessing over that armchair psychological #######4 about true and false selves.

And there's your recipe for covert narcissism. Behavior's the first step and the last step and most of the steps in between, but you still also actually have to explore your inner world to get at narcissism. No way around it. Not that I'm a big believer in true and false selves either.

lol. I maintain that narcissism + normal behavior is the closest we can get to, but it's not the same as covert narcissism. Normal behavior includes empathy and morality. Covert narcissism doesn't. Their behavior is also just as mask-like as ours, which I believe can be turned off.

And turning off the masks and developing empathy and morality of course makes a very deep exploration of your inner life highly necessary. I never meant to deny that. I mean I do that every day.

But seriously...?
"more than one true self?"
"the self that treats people horribly is a protective shell of a self?"
"your true "caring" self is trapped behind that protective shell self?"

To produce such obvious #######4 is to completely turn your back on psychology and to reduce it to idle, speculative, babbling.

There isn't more than one true self by DEFINITION - at least in the common vocabulary of psychology of the self.
The self that treats people horribly is BY DEFINITION not the protective shell of a self, but of nothingness because the narcissist's true self is gone. BY DEFINITION. It's also called "false self".

Blah. Sorry but I get allergic reactions when people say stupid things about topics which are important to me. And narcissism is a fücking important topic to me.

This kind of #######4 can become really, really dangerous, too. Let me explain what I mean.

Suppose you ignore the fact that psychological theories are just highly elaborate interpretations of behavior that lack predictive power and are therefore not the way to healing, but only to awareness. Suppose you're also as misinformed as Simon who seems to think that narcissism means that your "caring" self is covered by a "self that treats people horribly". Now you read a little Vaknin and learn that the "self that treats people horribly" is called "false self", and that it is kept alive with narcissistic supply.

You could then reach the conclusion that the way to cure narcissism is to take away the supply, so the false self "dies" and the true self can be revealed. So you just isolate the narcissist until he goes insane from supply withdrawal and retreats into a fantasy world where he can satisfy his need for supply with hallucinations. Because this is what would happen. You wouldn't "cure" them, you'd completely destroy them.

Careless playing with psychological half-truths is fücking dangerous and that's why I'm going to correct it when I notice it. Period.

OK, I admit I get a migraine when I hear about true selves and false selves and generally ignore the whole topic. I also ignore Sam whatsit. So, I think I'm on your side in that I generally believe there's one self. I certainly - and just empirically looking inward - have not experienced a warm cuddly inner self that I'm protecting. I have looked hard for the warm and cuddly and it ain't there.

But you're going to have to guide me through the difference between a mask and a false self. It's obviously important.

My only point is - and this is a topic that's dear to my heart - covert narcissism, by my interpretation - and I am one - is basically squelched overt narcissism. Covert narcissists do have morals - we have harsh consciences which try to crush the narcissistic behaviors, but the narcissism will out anyway, because - and here I think agree with you - there's only that one narcissistic self, and you can only crush so much, before you're like a toothpaste tube with narcissism squeezing a different direction. Bad metaphor, but you get the idea.

In other words, I feel like a person who has tried all their lives to squelch the narcissistic behaviors - granted, when I see it, which isn't easy. And I'm possibly a bigger, sicker narcissist than when I started. So I'm only left with giving up (a possibility to seriously consider), or finding some internally transformative solution - which I'm not sure you buy.

I dunno. Say more.

angelina3 wrote:OK, I admit I get a migraine when I hear about true selves and false selves and generally ignore the whole topic. I also ignore Sam whatsit. So, I think I'm on your side in that I generally believe there's one self. I certainly - and just empirically looking inward - have not experienced a warm cuddly inner self that I'm protecting. I have looked hard for the warm and cuddly and it ain't there.

Well, it seems like you need to dig really, really deep to understand what the true/false self stuff really means. Digging also becomes harder as you get older and your personality becomes less flexible. You're most probably older than me, and it took me about 8 months of most intensive self-analysis. At first I accepted it because Vaknin said it, then I dug deeper and decided that it was #######4, but lately I believe I've understood how it makes sense by digging even deeper.

(By the way, a healthy side effect of the entire process of analyzing myself has been that I'm forced to constantly revise my opinions on stuff. As a narcissist, I was used to thinking that I'm right all the time. But in self-analysis I've had to constantly tell myself that I was actually wrong because of something new that I'd discovered, and that has helped me a lot in getting rid of my sense of omniscience and realizing that you can never be perfectly sure of anything - this means that I'm not always right. Self-analysis wasn't the only thing that contributed to it, but realizing this fact was a major breakthrough for me)

Look at the normies. Normies are somebody. A normie has personal tastes, habits, convictions, beliefs, morals. They can say something about themselves, like "I like you." or "I hate soccer" or "I like roses", "I like summer rain", "I don't like the noise of traffic", "I like chess more than I like baseball" or whatever, and that is accurate. It's not a lie. They mean it. I call such statements "self-references". And they know that these things do not apply to other people. They can accurately describe themselves, they know that there are accurate descriptions of other people, and that they're all the same in that regard, but that the exact values of these variables differ among all of them: Every one of them has a different favorite color, different favorite foods, different manners, different habits, different plans, different tastes... but because they know that they're all the same (in that they have roughly the same sets of variables) they don't feel special even though every one of them is unique, and that enables them to develop empathy for each other.

The gist of all this is that normies have a functioning self. And only one of it, therefore the true-false dichotomy obviously doesn't apply to it.

Now, we (and I'm going to describe classical NPD here, because that's what I am and therefore it's the only one I feel comfortable describing. Maybe not all of the following applies to you.) are obviously different. We have serious troubles in producing self-references if we try to be truthful. I don't have a favorite food, I just hate fish. I don't care about colors or movies. I listen to every kind of music as long as it's rhythmic and not annoying. I basically have no favorite anything. I have no manners, I can just fake them reasonably well if I feel that it's absolutely necessary but I have to force myself to even say "please" or "thank you". I have no habits, there's nothing I do regularly except my daily supply hunt. I have no plans for the future except some very foggy ideas that change every couple of weeks.

In a word, we are nobody. This is what psychology means when it says that our "true self is dead", it's a metaphor for the above. When Vaknin says that there are remnants of the true self, he refers to self-remnants such as the fact that I hate fish. If my true self were totally gone, I could eat fish to impress, if necessary, but I can't.

But of course, the human mind needs self-reference to work. Whenever we appear in our thoughts - when we think about short-term plans (you appear in your thoughts whenever you think about what you're going to do next), when we see ourselves in mirrors, when we have fantasies of unlimited power/success, when we imagine any kind of situation that involves us, etc. Basically no meaningful thought would be possible without self-reference, but because there is no true self, we come up with a replacement: The false self.

So, if you just think about the above examples, this is when the false self appears. What am I going to do tonight? Get wasted and have sex with a random slut because I'm an irresistible womanizer. Oh, a mirror - I look pretty good today, don't I? In 20 years, everybody will respect me for my awesomeness. Later when I see that guy, I'm going to KILL him.

This is how we think, when we have enough supply. This is what the false self means. It's a metaphor for our delusions about ourselves. Because what you're referring to when you think "I" in such a context, isn't you. You're just a robot built from organic material. You're referring to an invincible, invulnerable, omnipresent and omniscient fantasy. It's this illusionary figure that is an irresistible womanizer. It's this fairy tale character that looks pretty good. It's this invention that is universally respected for its awesomeness. It's this invincible superman who wins in every conflict.

When we don't have supply (a metaphor for reasons to keep the illusion of grandeur alive - usually behavior of other people) the false self becomes "weaker". But that doesn't enable us to make accurate self-references of course because it's impossible to refer to something that just isn't there. It just allows our underlying self-hate to surface.

I'm pretty sure that lots of details about the false self don't apply to covert NPD, though. You're not even really grandiose, are you?

But you're going to have to guide me through the difference between a mask and a false self. It's obviously important.

First of all, the concepts do overlapp. But I guess basically the false self is on the inside, and the masks are on the outside. What you display to the world isn't your false self, that would be ridiculous. You don't insist on being basically divine when you're with people - that certainly wouldn't give you supply, just ridicule. No, among people you're modest and charming, of course. That's a mask. When you fake empathy, it's a mask. Basically every interaction with other human beings is filtered through some kind of mask because honesty is almost never a good idea, only with therapists or other self-awares.

If you observe a narcissist talking to many different people in a row, you'll notice that their facial expressions, their self-references, their manners, the tone of their voice and basically EVERYTHING will change according to context. That's what I call mask-like behavior - they switch masks. They have one mask for everybody. The masks are often very similar - because people would notice if we completely reinvent ourselves for everybody, but everybody gets their own mask. Lately I've started to notice that when I get to know people for the first time, I first put on a "neutral mask" that I'm confident will work with everybody, and then I analyze them within a couple of minutes in order to create a special-made mask that I will wear for them. I can't quite understand how that works yet - like, I don't know what criteria I'm looking for and how they influence the mask, but it's highly intriguing.

Now the masks are of course connected to the false self because they are used to elicit (I first wrote "produce", but that's wrong because others produce it for us) supply. A couple of months ago, my false self was basically a guy who is more intelligent than everybody else. That was what I took most pride in. Apart from that, I also considered myself basically omnipotent, very good looking and whatnot. So what I needed most, was supply for my intelligence. Therefore I showed it off whenever I could, and I even made up stuff just to appear intelligent. So my masks were almost always very intelligent, unless I was around people who don't value intelligence, which always made me really uncomfortable. No supply in them. Like empty bottles. I just used a generic "cool and funny" mask around them. So basically every narcissist creates different masks according to what his specific false self looks like, and because they're connected this way, Vaknin for example treats them as one and the same, ignoring the obvious contradictions that this causes. Because the big difference between the false self and the masks is that the narcissist blindly believes in the false self, but he is fully aware that his masks are confabulations. A mask can be modest, but the narcissist will always be aware that he's just faking modesty because he "knows" himself to be superior. When I made stuff up to appear educated, I always knew that I was lying (or making educated guesses at best since it had to sound credible). When I elicited supply with my supposed experiences, of course I could distinguish truth from lies, but it never even occured to me that I could make an error, that my intelligence wasn't unlimited, that there are things that I'll never be able to accomplish.

So, this is the overt narcissistic perspective. I'd be very interested to hear yours, so we can compare commonalities and differences, since I've always felt that the usual comparisons between overt and covert narcissism don't go deep enough.

My only point is - and this is a topic that's dear to my heart - covert narcissism, by my interpretation - and I am one - is basically squelched overt narcissism. Covert narcissists do have morals - we have harsh consciences which try to crush the narcissistic behaviors, but the narcissism will out anyway, because - and here I think agree with you - there's only that one narcissistic self, and you can only crush so much, before you're like a toothpaste tube with narcissism squeezing a different direction. Bad metaphor, but you get the idea.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm trying to achieve. I'm trying to develop a sense of morals - not only by forcing myself to act moral until I do it without having to think about it, but also by brainwashing myself into believing in them.

I'm also working on demolishing the three main illusions (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence - there are also two secondary illusions of invulnerability and invicibility, which follow from the first three) that are described by the metaphor of the "false self" - I've managed to get rid of the illusion of omniscience, but that causes serious disturbances in my way of thinking. Omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence could be called a "narcissistic triad" because they are like three facets of the same thing, and to believe you can do everything without believing that you know everything is painfully paradoxical. And even without progress, I'm pretty sure that enough self-awareness screws your false self up for good because as soon as you know about it, you include it into your illusions about yourself and the world, and that way, it starts to refer to itself like a mirror in a mirror if you know what I mean. I had some really weird psychotic episodes in February and I believe that this was the reason.

In other words, I feel like a person who has tried all their lives to squelch the narcissistic behaviors - granted, when I see it, which isn't easy. And I'm possibly a bigger, sicker narcissist than when I started. So I'm only left with giving up (a possibility to seriously consider), or finding some internally transformative solution - which I'm not sure you buy.

I do buy it. See above.

I dunno. Say more.

I've said a lot. OMFG I've said like SO MUCH, and all of it is SO GOOD - this was the first time I actually structured and systematically presented the thoughts I have about this all the time, so I'm pretty surprised by what this has turned into. I mean I knew it, but to see it structured and spelled out feels weird to me. This has to be my best post ever.

Ugg.......i want to read all that, but not today. It's late.


I just love this bit at the end:

I've said a lot. OMFG I've said like SO MUCH, and all of it is SO GOOD - ............ This has to be my best post ever

I don't know why, but it makes me happy. And a little hard....

Makes me happy too! Excellent, excellent post! I’m impressed! You’ve given me a lot to think about and you’ve increased my understanding even further!