How Narcissists Grieve Their Collapse

Stages of grief in the wake of collapse:

shock and numbness, denial, anger, fear, panic and disintegration, guilt and soul-searching, isolation, searching or fantasy, bargaining, depression, testing, acceptance, new narrative (meaning or hope)

Entitlement is the flip side of unconditional love

Collapse is perceived as loss of (maternal) love and engenders grief.

Collapse is a form of internal mortification owing to self-audiencing and because the signs of its imminence are denied.

Narcissists are 2 year old infants who are trapped in a post-traumatic condition characterized by a perpetual prolonged complicated grief coupled with depression.

Already in 1942 Hervey Cleckley hypothesized that narcissists and psychopaths may be actually emotionally hypersensitive and inordinately intelligent.

Their disorders are defensive attempts to wall off emotions that were so profound that they threatened to overwhelm and dysregulate them.

Theirs is a post-traumatic state that can best be described as complicated grief or prolonged grief reaction.

A later scholar, J. S. Grothstein suggested in 1984 that Borderline Personality Disorder was the outcome of a failed effort by the child to deploy pathological narcissism to avert and forestall ominous emotional reactions to extreme abuse.

Kernberg called narcissism a defense against the emotional dysregulation of the borderline.

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