What are the factors that make the fortress of the false self stand strong or crumble to dust?

Protecting the Squishy Core

At the core of pathological narcissism, they say, lies the core shame. This painful experience of being unworthy of love or belonging, a weight, fear, blame, or disconnection.

For some people this description is obvious, others are confused. One source of the confusion is that it’s not the same as feeling ashamed but rather comes in many guises, like the above.

Another source of confusion is that some people with narcissistic personality disorder are so well defended against this core shame that they either never experience it or don’t remember experiencing it because they experienced it in a very different mood state from the one they’re in when I ask them. After all, memories are somewhat tied to the moods you’re in when you form them. That’s the fortress – the false self – doing what it’s designed to do.

Say, someone was always praised for being oh so “well-behaved” and “perfect,” which translates to having no preferences or needs other than the ones the parent can tolerate or wants to see. Maybe the child is interested in playing the harp and learning chess. Harp is bad but chess is good according to the parent. One child may play the harp after all and feel either guilty or defiant about it, or do it in secret because they’re ashamed. Another child may say, “I would never play the harp, but I can be friends with people who do.” Yet another child may be like, “Playing the harp is so stupid, I would never associate with anyone who does that!”

I’ve described these differences in my section on introjects in my article on the sadism spectrum. Introjects can be friendly, but the ones relevant here are persecutory ones that form an “alien self.”

The second and the third person may never directly experience how shameful they feel about playing the harp because it’s easy for them to fully avoid it. They’ve developed a false self to defend against their introjects at the cost of living a very restricted life.

Some things cannot be fully avoided – like making mistakes or getting sick or tired – so if someone was taught that those are shameful, they need more than pure avoidance to fortify their false self against them.

That’s where various stabilizing and destabilizing factors come into play that result in a fragile false self (a glass fortress) or a robust false self (a granite fortress).

Factors That Stabilize the False Self

The narcissistic self-image, the false self is a fortress, built with meticulous care to protect a squishy core from a world of perceived threats. But this fortress is built on a fault line of deep-seated shame. Its stability is not a given; it’s the result of a constant, exhausting battle between forces that reinforce its walls and seismic shocks that threaten to bring them crashing down.

To truly understand the experience of our castellan – the governor of the fortress – we must look at the psychological architecture involved, the pillars that hold the structure up and the tremors that weaken it from within.

These are the active, energy-consuming processes that keep the false self intact, functional, and insulated from the harsh light of reality.

External Reinforcements

• An unsafe environment. An environment that recapitulates the same traumas from childhood reinforces the need and legitimacy of the defenses that the castellan developed to survive it.
• Success & avoidance. A fleeting fortification of the fortress walls – they need constant protection and repair.
  • When the world provides the castellan with praise, promotions, wealth, public admiration, or even fear, it bolsters a grandiose self-image.
  • When the world absolves the castellan from taking responsibility by providing a passive income, shielding them from having to test themselves, giving them a quiet life without any projects or aspirations that could fail, it protects a vulnerable self-image.
• The enabling system. Some fortresses have a garrison – partners, family, or colleagues who play along with any reality distortions out of short-term empathy, agreeableness, convenience, self-interest, preoccupied attachment, to protect their own reputation, or because they’ve learned to “walk on eggshells.”
• Individualistic culture. Societies that mostly reward “teleological non-mentalizing,” i.e. visible individual success, create no reason for someone to train genuine mentalization or genuine awareness of their desires, attitudes, and feelings. That parallels how parents with NPD, with their penchant for teleological non-mentalizing, create no reason for the child to learn genuine mentalizing. (This is related to collective effervescence below.)

Cognitive Distortions

• Primitive defenses. Most people learn in the first few years of life to sort their sense experiences into those that relate to their self and those that relate to other minds and other objects. They learn that their access to their own mind and especially to others’ minds (through cognitive and emotional empathy or mentalization) is tentative, but that others have minds of their own while objects don’t. It’s an interpretation that is invaluable to learn to exist and interact socially. But when people are still organized at the borderline or psychotic levels of personality (a prerequisite, unrelated to BPD, for the diagnosis of any personality disorder in psychodynamic theory), this idea of selfhood is not fully clarified yet in the person’s mind. It’s incomplete or fleeting.
  • Splitting. This is a phenomenon where the self splits into multiple selves, e.g., because one self holds all the aspects of the person that the person approves of while the other holds all the aspects that the person hates. The person cannot yet tolerate ambiguity. A child – and an adult who hasn’t had a chance to fully mature – can’t bear the life and death uncertainly that comes with an imperfect parent, and when they’re on their own, they can’t bear the uncertainty of an imperfect self. But note that perfection is in the eye of the beholder (or in this case the inner critic or introject), so for one it might mean perfect honesty, for another perfect cruelty. Just as one can split on oneself, one can split on others. In NPD there are neat regularities, like idealization of another when you want to absorb them into your self, and devaluation when they resemble or come in touch with your negative split.
  • Projection. Projection has come to mean everything and the kitchen sink, and I have a separate article forthcoming on that. Here’s a draft. In this context, it’s mostly about failures of mentalization: Rigidly assuming that your feelings about the world and other people are universally true and shared (psychic equivalence mode); rigidly assuming that your interpretations of others’ minds are true (teleological mode); and rigidly assuming that the narratives that give cohesion to your experiences are true (pretend mode). You live in a fantasy reality thanks to splitting, and your experience of the real world gets selectively interpreted and amplified to match your fantasy. When the goal of the selective interpretation and amplification is to repress something else, it’s perhaps better described as denial, your mental White-Out or Tipp-Ex.
• Impaired reality-testing. Part and parcel with projection and splitting, which focus more on minds and beliefs about minds, is the more general idea of reality-testing. At the lowest end, people will behave in obviously psychotic ways, perhaps experience hallucinations. But they can be more subtle too, like someone who holds on to their belief that they can pay back their debts any time by becoming an astronaut even though they’re in their 50s and have never worked in the field. Not impossible, but more speculative than they realize. Someone else might think that if they have a self-confident thought, and someone finds out, that there’s a 10% risk that they’ll report it and they’ll be declared outside of the protection of the law and expelled from society. They’d have to fail to hide their self-confident thoughts more than ten times to realize that the risk is vastly lower. Better reality-testing can mask projections: If you trick people into coercing you to do things you want to do, you can plan to blame any of your mistakes on them only if pressed. If you were to blame them outright, they’ll challenge your projections. With better reality-testing you can predict this, and avoid the challenges. Chances are you’ll never be pressed, so no one will notice that you secretly blame them.
• Hypomanic temperament. Some individuals have a biological predisposition towards a chronically upbeat mood – high energy, high self-esteem, racing thoughts, and a reduced need for sleep. This hyperthymic state acts as a natural fuel source for grandiosity, making it feel effortless and authentic. It also comes with irritability and impatience with the slowness of the rest of the world, which can foster a dismissive attitude akin to avoidant attachment.
• Substance use (short-term). Drugs and alcohol can be potent, fast-acting stabilizers. Stimulants can directly induce feelings of omnipotence, while depressants can numb any intolerable feelings like emptiness and shame.

Emotional Firewalls

• Impaired emotional empathy. The inability to feel what another feels is an invaluable fortification. It is often meted out fairly in that it also comes with impaired empathy for oneself. The result is an objectification of the self and the other – you feel about yourself and others like dead objects, machines, built not to be but to fulfill a purpose. Most people will be able to tap into what this is like if they consider how they treat literal objects – buy them, trade them, discard them. But also the primitive defenses from the previous section are easier with objects because we assume that they have no internal experience that could contradict whatever fantasy we project on them, e.g., when we blame a door frame when we clumsily bump into it. For most people empathy is a constant or cuts out only in moments when our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response is activated. For others it’s almost universally absent. Others again have empathy for themselves and experience it for “others” when they integrate them into their own identity. That’s easiest for non-threatening others like companion animals or kids. Sometimes life partners make it in too.
• Alexithymia (emotional muteness). Alexithymia is a condition where you cannot identify or verbalize your own emotions. Unpleasant feelings like shame or envy don’t register as such, but rather as vague, uncomfortable sensations, which are easily dismissed or misinterpreted. It’s hard to be wounded by an emotion you don’t even know you’re having, or flat out assume it must be anger or humiliation. Maybe you need to think of yourself as perfectly honest, but you’ve lied. You feel guilty for having lied. But it’s a vague discomfort, not recognizable as guilt. So you interpret it as anger that you’ve been accused of lying when you didn’t ask for such feedback. You double down on the anger, ignorant of the guilt, and reject the criticism on principle. It’s a risk factor for low mentalizing – see above.
• Intellectualization. This is related to “pretend mode” non-mentalizing. Being able to understand emotions, at least on the level of cognitive empathy, is useful. If at the same time one needs to steer clear of actually experiencing them or at least needs to dissociate from them sufficiently to keep them at arms length, intellectualization comes in handy. That doesn’t mean that the intellectualized trains of thought are necessarily wrong – there’s no way to tell without the lived experience of emotions to test them against. An example is this article.
• Avoidant attachment. Avoidant (or dismissive-avoidant) attachment is one of the four attachment styles that I’ve explained more in my article on the Cycle of Trauma and Tyranny.
  • If a close friend or partner criticizes me, I feel it strongly. If a random stranger does the same, I feel almost nothing. This (second) posture of separateness, independence, and emotional self-sufficiency can be universalized to all relationships with other people. It’s a robust protection against vulnerability and shame that comes at the cost of love and connection.
  • It can even be universalized to your relationship with society as a whole. If someone criticizes me on the grounds of socially liberal norms, I feel it strongly. If someone criticizes me on the grounds of the Sharia, I feel nothing. That’s because the first is the law of my peers, and the second is a law so foreign that my peers (except for a few) barely know it by name. Feeling the same distance and strangeness for any set of norms and laws is another great protection against vulnerability and shame. It comes at the cost of trust and connection, or at the cost of hypervigilance. Sometimes at the cost of freedom.

Attack is the Best Defense

• Paranoia. If regular avoidant attachment is merely a posture of self-sufficiency and dismissiveness toward others, paranoia goes a step further and assumes that others are actively hostile. You’re not just alone amongst a crowd of people who don’t matter to you – you’re amongst a crowd of cannibals!
• Sadism & Machiavellianism. For some castellans the last line of defense is to rage to intimidate others into keeping their reality to themselves or to gaslight them into believing your reality. But it’s the last line of defense for a reason, because it’s destabilizing in itself for anyone who tries to uphold a belief in their own goodness. It’s like using pepper spray indoors. Except: If you really enjoy the sting of pepper spray! People who enjoy sadism and the duper’s delight from Machiavellianism are in a strong position to use very aggressive defenses with no harm to themselves, quite the opposite.

Factors That Destabilize the False Self

These are the events and internal states that breach the defenses and damage the fortress. They are the reason it requires constant repair and additional layers of defenses. If it breaks down, the shame comes to light, at which point it can be recognized and deconstructed. A process that is best undertaken with the help of a therapist.

Ideally, you should start therapy when your false self is still well intact so you and your therapist can scaffold it and augment it with all the other aspects of your self. That way you never have to go through a painful collapse. Sadly, most castellans only seek therapy when their castles have already all but collapsed.

Many of the opposites of the stabilizing factors feature in this list, but I’ll keep the descriptions brief because they’re already clear from the ones above.

External Realities

• Safety. A safe environment that is almost free of the dangers from childhood makes the defenses redundant and causes them to gradually atrophy.
• Collective effervescence. A sociological concept developed by Émile Durkheim that describes the intense emotional energy and sense of unity experienced when a group of people shares a common purpose and participates in shared rituals or behaviors. It creates a feeling of being swept up in something larger than oneself, fostering un-self-conscious connection and belonging.
  • It’s the opposite of the feeling of intense isolation that comes with living in a fortress – be it just feeling like an alien, or feeling like everyone else is an interchangable NPC, or even that everyone else is a hostile. If someone can stay in a feeling of collective effervescence, they are shielded from all of that.
  • I suspect that personality disorders usually take their final form in puberty because absent strong social support such as collective effervescence, it’s an intensely self-conscious experience. If someone has suffered the sorts of developmental arrests that cause personality disorders, collective effervescence can shield them from that.
  • Later disruptions in collective effervescence – moving to a distant place where you don’t know anyone, isolation due to Covid lockdowns, etc. – can cause a late onset of the same personality disorders. Or that’s my latest pet theory anyway.
• Failure & rejection. This is any event that presents an undeniable contradiction to the false self: being fired, public humiliation, being abandoned by a partner, or a major financial loss. It’s a direct confrontation with the shame that will have you believe that you’re unworthy, unlovable, broken, or evil.
• Loss of an enabling system. Without the garrison, the fortress is exposed to more attacks; without the repair crew, the damage can’t be mended as swiftly.

Internal Realities

• Mature object relations. There is at least some kind of bridge between all the aspects of someone’s self, an awareness of all the other parts, regardless which one is active. This attenuates splitting. There is also a more robust understanding of the distinction between experiences that are one’s own and those that are projections on another.
• Mentalization. Being in touch with one’s own intentions, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings is like exposure therapy against dissociation. It’s also harder to be paranoid when you can understand the actual intentions of others (unless they are hostile – see safety).
• Physical illness & aging. These are chronic, unavoidable injuries. They are irrefutable proof of vulnerability, dependency, and a loss of control that often start with the mid-life crisis or even earlier. The decline of youth, health, and physical prowess is a terrifying, daily reminder that (so far) none of us are exempt from the frailties of the human condition.
• Depressive temperament. A biological tendency toward depression constantly works against the grandiose defense, fueling the very feelings of worthlessness and anhedonia that the grandiosity is meant to conceal. When the fortress is breached, these individuals don’t just feel sad; they plunge into a profound, empty despair.
• Consequences of addiction (long-term). The short-term chemical scaffolding inevitably collapses. Addiction leads to a profound loss of control and generates the very real-world failures (job loss, health crises) that become undeniable injuries to the false self.

Values

• Self-compassion. Self-compassion is the anathema of every persecutory introject (see above) – those voices that tell you that it is pathetic to cry, to be tired, to make mistakes, to disappoint. Turns out it’s okay to cry, to be tired, to make mistakes, and to disappoint – even seven times before breakfast. Persecutory introjects hate it!
• Faith in humanity and secure attachment. You cannot generally be paranoid if you can trust others. You cannot generally dismiss others when you respect them. These values contradict two powerful defenses, so if you espouse them, the defenses will always backfire on you to some extent and create additional cognitive dissonance.
• Kantianism and humanism. These, along with faith in humanity, are parts of the Light Triad. If you don’t instrumentalize people against their will toward your goals, and you respect their dignity and autonomy, you can’t use the Machiavellian and sadistic defenses without incurring some cognitive dissonance yourself.
• Honesty and rationality. Honesty overlaps with the respect for another’s autonomy. But it goes beyond that, especially when combined with rationality. Lower borderline-level defenses rely on veritable reality distortions while higher borderline-level defenses rely more on cherry-picked narratives – rationalization. Honesty with oneself and actual rationality counteract them.

The Return of the Repressed

• Emotional attachment. Relationships can be destabilizing in several ways. The partner is not as much under one’s control as one’s own mind. The castellan lets them into the fortress where they might expose them to aspects of reality they had meant to lock out. A partner who is particularly experienced, such as a therapist, might also be able to show them the acceptance for their disowned parts that they’ve never known. If it doesn’t cause the castellan to withdraw in projected disgust or for reasons of feeling exposed, it can have a healing effect.
• Parenthood. Parenthood, especially early on, comes with hormonal changes (e.g., more oxytocin) that can be destabilizing. For people with immature object relations, i.e. ones that don’t feel a strong difference between beings and objects, the only way to care about someone deeply is to add them to their identity. That is easy with a partner so long as they idealize the partner, but it’s probably difficult for babies with their lack of prestigious achievements. That might also create cognitive dissonance. Someone might also have children in the hope of creating beings who will unconditionally love and adore the parent. But that is something that might never happen, and certainly not in the first few years when the child is still extremely needy.
• Emotional upset. Relationships are also difficult because they can be uncorrelated with professional success. A false self that’s bolstered by professional success may be under attack at home or vice versa. Different split off aspects of the self are associated with different mood states, but if they change twice a day rather than once a year, it’s much more likely that the stark separation breaks down and each part becomes aware of aspects of the other.
• Societal attachment. Caring about some social norms or expectations prevents the avoidance that might shield the castellan from shame. Once the shame has come to light, it can be recognized and deconstructed.
• Moments of self-awareness. Sometimes, despite all the defenses, some thoughts that were meant to be unconscious might bubble up into one’s consciousness. This can be a profoundly confusing or destabilizing experience.

To Be Continued

I hope this article has given you an overview of all the storms and earthquakes and besieging armies that constantly threaten (or appear to threaten) the fortresses of our castellans, and the range of defenses that they can mount to keep them at bay.

In the next article in this series, I’ll sketch a spectrum of different presentations of pathological narcissism – with six examples along the spectrum – that use different defenses to different degrees.