The ‘game’ cannot be stopped.
It starts with fantasy and ends in psychosis.
Narcissists are born with a strong preference for fantasy over reality.
As their young minds developed, instead of observing reality around them, gathering memories as life experience, and building paradigms to model the world around them, they fantasized.
Their fantasies led to dissociation from reality.
(I recognize that children naturally fantasize a lot. That’s not what I’m talking about. A narcissist child fantasizes much more than a normal child, but most importantly, values the delusions of their fantasy over reality itself. The divergence starts at a young age, the choice is quietly made between tentatively choosing the truth of the reality out there, or the falsehoods and delusions from the dark room of the mind. This initial tentative choice will have great repercussions into the future, as initial conditions are highly important in feedback systems like our minds and character.)
Now fantasies become their ‘experiences’, not life itself. Memory formation is stunted. Skill in processing life experiences is never learnt. Observation and honest perception is never developed. No paradigm formation takes place.
The young narcissist is well along in their way to arrested development, even at such a young age.
Arrested development starts young. By age 12, narcissists start to become discernible in how they lag behind others in maturity. The maturity gap will simply keep growing with age. All this is started and sustained by fantasies. The narcissist fails to stop fantasizing compulsively. The narcissist simply fails to experience reality. And so they missed out on reality. Fantasy replaced reality, age for age, for every year of their lives, growing worse with age.
And, as they grew into physical maturity, and the need to explain things around them grew, while most people are resorting to sharpening and deepening their perceptive powers, the narcissist is busily developing their delusion powers. Delusional perception, or reality twisting itself becomes a skill set, growing ever more potent with age and practice. It is a skill to be reckoned with. We cannot do what narcissists do. We cannot twist reality and believe falsehood like how they can. It’s a powerful skill, very useful for some professions like grifters, scam artists, politicians, cult leaders, business leaders, etc. It can yield undying optimism in the face of incontrovertible evidence of failure, the un-moveable conviction of being right despite overwhelming proof of being wrong.
The strange, perverted tendency of narcissists to misperceive and misinterpret everything does not come by accident. It’s the result of a lifetime of growing their delusion powers instead of their perceptive powers. You can liken a narcissist to the opposite of a Sherlock Holmes if you will, they mis-observe everything and mis-perceive everything, arriving at the most wrong conclusion possible from examining the evidence. It’s all about being locked in from the inside. The outside world doesn’t get through. Not just anyone can do this.
From fantasy, they became dissociated from reality, and from there, it’s onto delusion.
From delusion, they move onto compartmentalization. This simply means that they start developing multiple wills or agents within them. Their personality starts splitting itself because of the pressure of persistent lies, falsehood, inconsistencies, contradictions, hypocrisies, and the patent refusal to reduce cognitive dissonance honestly through processing life experiences (self-reflection). Their refusal to handle life itself and the pressure that builds up is leading to the narcissist becoming different persons for different situations to ‘deal’ with things or better put, to ‘get away’ with things. Accountability is avoided, conscience, true and honest memory, a coherent identity, honesty all die at this stage. The narcissist, at this stage, has failed to become a coherent person. Instead they come up with a dishonest personal narrative that they use to sell and upsell themselves to everyone, including themselves. That’s why some narcissists are so obsessed with their victimization narrative. Their narrative, not their memories, becomes who they think they truly are.
Excessive compartmentalization is dangerous because … it’s hard to explain it in words, watch this clip instead
From excessive compartmentalization, we move on to sub-clinical multiple personality disorder, truly having multiple agents in the narcissist.
This is a point of no return. It’s also what allows the narcissist to do things other people cannot, like vehemently deny something they’ve just done. Normal people can’t do that because they know when they are lying, and it gives them away. Also, as the pressure of lying builds up excessively, it produces excessive stress in a normal person that is very unpleasant to bear. Normal people will reach a stage where they will do anything to get rid of that pressure, which automatically leads to confession or repentance. The narcissist does not, because there are multiple personalities in them, you caught Agent A with the wrongdoing, but you are accusing Agent B of the crime. Agent B didn’t do it, and argues back with full conviction. Meanwhile, Agent A has left the building and is nowhere to be found. That’s not something normal people can do. Trying to make narcissists accountable is an act of insanity, because you are not dealing with the same person, there are multiple agents in there.
At this point, it is already psychotic.
From here on, there is only the question of becoming more and more psychotic or not.
The word ‘psycho’, meaning psychotic person has all sorts of negative connotations. It shouldn’t have them. Psychosis just merely refers to losing contact with external reality. Their reality testing is permanently damaged and dysfunctional. It’s not that bad, and it doesn’t necessarily lead to crazy knife wielding behavior, it just merely leads to familiar crazymaking, usually lies and falsehood, typical narcissist activities.
Psychosis is an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not.
Symptoms may include false beliefs (delusions) and seeing or hearing things that others do not see or hear(hallucinations). Other symptoms may include incoherent speech and behavior that is inappropriate for the situation.
Psychosis — Wikipedia
A psychotic person cannot be not psychotic. To be not psychotic relies on functional reality testing, which is no longer available to the narcissist.
Medication can reduce the compulsive thoughts, but it cannot give functional reality testing, that can only be arrived at painstakingly, by living correctly, experiencing correctly, remembering correctly, and processing things correctly over at least two decades, maybe even more. That’s too many years, there is no more catching up that can be done.
By the time you meet your narcissist, it’s already too late for them.
Narcissists cannot be cured, because you cannot impart reality testing onto anyone.
Without functional reality testing, there is only a lifetime of psychosis. If we don’t like the word psychosis, we can use its milder cousin, delusion. If we don’t like the word delusion, we can use its even milder cousin, fantasy.
Narcissists live in fantasy, they don’t live in reality.
And they cannot break out of their fantasy, because their fantasy is not perceived as fantasy, it’s reality to them. It only appears not real to you, an outside observer.
Narcissists cannot stop their game.
Narcissists cannot be cured.
You cannot make them perceive reality.
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