Narcissistic Fantasy | Grandiose vs. Vulnerable Narcissism Fantasy Themes

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel oh this is dr. Grande today's question is can I describe the difference between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism in terms of the fantasies so are there fantasy based differences between these two types of narcissism so this is really an interesting question because it gets into kind of the complex relationship between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder and it also kind of makes the argument that you can in some sense distinguish the grandiose and vulnerable narcissism just by looking at fantasies now I don't know if that's possible but I have throughout my career seen a lot of differences in the fantasies so there are certain themes I've seen with grandiose that you just don't see with vulnerable very often and themes with vulnerable that you just don't see in grandiose too often now of course there is some overlap and I'll talk about kind of these fantasy themes in this video so first I want to cover what the differences are between grandiose and vulnerable and narcissistic personalities were so NPD narcissistic personality is a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual it's a cluster B personality look at the symptom criteria for that disorder it's mostly grandiose but not necessarily all grandiose so we see a grandiose sense of self-importance fantasies of wealth power and success the DSM says unlimited success but it can really just be even exaggerated success we see that somebody feels like they're special or unique they require excessive admiration they have a sense of entitlement they tend to manipulate other people they have a lack of empathy they're jealous and arrogant so those are the symptom criteria we see for NPD and again most of those relate to grandiose narcissism now grandiose narcissism we see characteristics like being extroverted socially bold self-confident having a superficial charm which is similar to what we see with psychopathy being resistant to criticism and being callous and unemotional which is also similar to psychopathy as we move over to vulnerable narcissism we see shame anger aggression hypersensitivity a tendency to be introverted so low on extraversion defensive avoidant being anxious depressed and generally under distress and also being socially awkward and shy so grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are usually conceptualized as sub clinical presentations so they don't rise to the level of requiring treatment they're not pathological NPD of course by definition is pathological now if we look at vulnerable narcissism and we start to think okay is it related to some personality sorter obviously with that description borderline personality seems like it could be a correlate but with vulnerable narcissism again we're talking about something that subclinical we wouldn't expect to see self-harm we would necessarily see impulsive behavior with vulnerable narcissism so it is a bit different than borderline personality now it is important to note too that I'm talking about grandiose versus vulnerable sometimes grandiose is called overt and sometimes vulnerable is called covert narcissism so there are some really interesting distinctions between the pathological side of narcissism and the subclinical so with NPD two-person alias order we see overlap again between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism and we seen individuals who have NPD it's not unusual that they go from having grandiose narcissistic traits over to vulnerable traits and sometimes they go from having vulnerable traits over to grandiose so there seems to be oscillation there between the two states between grandiose and vulnerable now in both components in both grandiose and vulnerable even in the personality disorder we see self-centeredness that seems to be a symptom that's shared between those two different types of narcissism now the sub clinical level we see something a little different we see that the constructs of grandiose and vulnerable narcissism seem to be somewhat distinct and really the major difference seems to be on that extraversion trait so we see again with grandiose we see something's extroverted I was vulnerable we see somebody low in extraversion or introverted so here's one of the theories about how narcissism forms like how the types form and this is important for understanding the fantasy themes I'm going to talk about in a moment extraversion as a trait develops before narcissism that's one of the theories so it could be that the same stressors that cause narcissism in general like poor parenting and bullying cause different types of narcissism based on the level of extraversion so really grandiose and vulnerable narcissism come from the same stressors but these stressors are being put on somebody with a different level of extraversion if somebody's extroverted it turns into grandiose if somebody's introverted it turns into vulnerable and one last key point here with these two types of narcissism vulnerable narcissism research has shown that it can turn into narcissistic personality which again is mostly grandiose now this is actually a really important feature that we see with pathological you know potentially pathological vulnerable narcissism and this will tie in later on with the fantasy themes and kind of I think a really interesting way so let's now talk about the fantasies how are the fantasies different between vulnerable and grandiose narcissism well again this is an informal theory this is just what I've noticed over the years although there is some research to support kind of my theory here I've seen some key differences in the fantasy themes now narcissists in general like talking about fantasies I actually viewed as a way to help people that have vulnerable narcissism to kind of talk to kind of get past the shyness because when they're talking about fantasies they usually will tell you a lot of information although I have noticed that sometimes they regret it later on they feel self-conscious about revealing the fantasies now grandiose narcissist they typically get excite when explaining the fantasy kind of intense and excited we see that sometimes with vulnerable narcissism as well so hard the difference is just in how somebody communicates the fantasy so how about the fantasy theme so I'm gonna start with grandiose and I'll take a look at vulnerable so what I've noticed with grandiose narcissism is a lot of the fantasies are really expansions of pro-social goals so they're like pro-social goals taken to the extreme now I've also noticed that the fantasy themes in grandiose narcissism share a few important characteristics with vulnerable narcissism and one of these is having access to sex this is a popular fantasy theme regardless of the type of narcissism the fantasies have something to do with having access to sex and romance so again that's shared between grandiose and vulnerable so what distinguishes grandiose from vulnerable will have noticed that there's more of a future orientation with grandiose narcissism so their fantasies are about something that they want to happen in the future now that might seem a little strange because you'd think all fantasies are about something the future but it turns out they're not and I'll get to that when I talk about vulnerable narcissism now kind of building on the pro-social goals again we see the grandiose narcissist want to achieve things that could be achieved but they might be very unrealistic for whatever circumstances that person is in so they may want to be the CEO of a company or a famous athlete or exceedingly rich or be a celebrity or obtain a higher rank in the same system where they are but again it's kind of unrealistic right so maybe if somebody's like a paralegal they have a fantasy of being a judge or if they're in lower management in the company they have a fantasy of being the owner of the company is it possible sure is it likely in many circumstances probably not so that's why I think it's not really about unlimited success especially with grandiose narcissism it's about a great amount of success that's unrealistic here's another important point with grandiose narcissism in a sense the grandiose narcissist is already living their fantasy not the ultimate fantasy but they're already kind of living a fantasy because of the high level of self-deception they already view themselves as more successful talented and attractive so in a sense they're already living the dream so the fantasies again are just expansions of what they already believe they have in terms of abilities and acquisitions and all that they really just want more usually the fantasies aren't really divergent in a sense of like a different theme like they want something completely different than what they have they're usually lined up with what's going on with the narcissist at that time now we also see the grandiose narcissist are actually often successful in terms of their career and in other aspects and social aspects so it's not a stretch to think that they could be more successful at least for them it makes sense that if they have some level success some of its self-deception some what's real that there would be more success so why why do people have grandiose narcissism tend to do so well well I think part of it is they make good first impressions I think another part is that socially dominant trait that can actually help people to succeed high extraversion is associated with different types of success we see this resistance to criticism so somebody who has grandiose narcissism they kind of look at criticism and just discard it even though that doesn't seem to be a great way to develop as a human being and develop as a professional a lot of ways it could still be helpful in some industries in some fields under some circumstances being able to ignore criticism is an advantage also they tend to manipulate people I mentioned that so that could lead to success even though it's not pro-social that part's not pro-social and we also see a lot of self-confidence and I think this is one of the big keys of success with grandiose narcissism just an abundance of confidence more than enough to handle a lot of situations and impress people there's an actor named Woody Allen and I'm not necessarily a fan of Woody Allen but he has a quote that I like 80 success is showing up well somebody has grandiose narcissism they're very confident they are going to show up they're gonna be there they're going to go for the interview try get the interview they're gonna apply for the job they're going to pursue an education they're gonna show up they may not be good necessarily or whatever they're doing but they will show up and again that's 80% of success so that covers the grandiose narcissism fantasy themes what about the vulnerable what about in the vulnerable sighs well here one of the major kind of themes that I see is a theme of rejection and redemption so this can occur in the past the present and just like grandiose narcissism it can also be future-oriented one of the common things I see with vulnerable narcissism they don't tend to see with grandiose isre scripting events in the past so having fantasies about what they could have done for example again we know bullying tends to lead to vulnerable narcissism and of course it can lead to grandiose narcissism so the vulnerable narcissist might have a fantasy where they go back to when they are bullied except this time they beat up the boy right so they they Reese crypt it almost like might occur in therapy of course that wouldn't be a therapeutic goal any type of violence but some therapeutic goals involve kind of Reese crypting the past with certain modalities that's kind of what these fantasies do in a sense now I don't think it's again in a healthy way but it is what we see we see this Reese crypting we also see a theme of revenge like righting the wrongs which is kind of like the Reese crypting part but not necessarily in a violent way so I'm going to give an example here of a vulnerable narcissistic fantasy that I think really kind of ties this together ties in the rejection the redemption but also kind of a desire for revenge at the same time so when people are younger it's not unusual of course that they date and of course people of any age can date but we know that dating is strongly associated with being young like late teens 20s early 30s and during dating a lot of rejection occurs a lot of people are rejected and a lot of people do the rejecting and normally this is somewhat balanced normally and some is dating they're going to go on dates and they're gonna get rejected and other dates they're gonna be the one that would reject somebody now some of the decisions that younger people make in terms of dating might be different than we see with people who are middle-aged or older not necessarily but sometimes for example we see this theory that younger individuals focused more on attractiveness popularity and convenience right so on a convenience part they might not have a car for example so they have to date who they can get to now as people grow older things that may have mattered when they're younger tend to matter less by law those factors tend to change in terms of mate selection and what becomes more important might be something like a good personality match finding somebody who's sensitive or financial security so the criteria that someone who's young uses when dating again in some circumstances seems to change as they grow older and this sets up an interesting situation for the vulnerable narcissists as they have fantasies about rejection and redemption they can think back to the people that rejected them when they were younger and again thinking about the criteria that they used for mate selection and they know that this could be five years later ten years later or even forty or fifty years later they know that the criteria for mate selection now would be different and that potentially the person that rejected them when they were younger may regret that rejection if they knew a kind of person that the vulnerable narcissist turned into so this fantasy is kind of based on one of these people that rejected the narcissist encountering them in some situation and seeing how great they are seeing how wealthy they are think they have expensive automobiles or an expensive house or a great job or whatever something so they can kind of think to themselves well I have proved them wrong or I'll show them right they rejected me and now I'm successful and now they regret that decision and of course we know that's not usually how people look at it even moving into the future even if somebody did reject someone else they're young they would still likely reject them in the future even if circumstances have changed but again we're talking about fantasies here and this is a fantasy to kind of weaves in again rejection Redemption and revenge now I think this is a really interesting fantasy because we kind of see this fantasy played out at a lot of movies right you'll see for example a guy who's shy and gets bullied and has all kinds of social awkwardness and by the end of the movie he beats up the bad guys and he saves the town right and the love interest or the potential love interest that had rejected him now those love interest liked him a lot so in a sense we see kind of ivona boleyn arses 'im fantasy themes played out in a lot of movies and this isn't really surprising to me because we're talking about subclinical multiple narcissism and we know that characteristics like hypersensitivity and shyness and being socially awkward are distributed among the population so a lot of people can connect with the vulnerable narcissistic fantasy-themed so again that kind of explains why we see it in the media now the last fantasy theme I'll talk about here ties back to a point I made earlier I think this is really particularly interesting another fantasy I see with vulnerable narcissism is a fantasy of changing their personality traits to be more outgoing dominant and confident so in a sense one of the fantasy themes is becoming a grandiose narcissist now I think this is so interesting because we know that when somebody has extreme vulnerable narcissism sometimes that converts over to grandiose narcissism in the form of narcissistic personality sorter I mentioned that before so when I observed kind of through clinical practice in terms of these fantasy themes actually connects back to what the research has indicated so I think it's kind of an interesting loop that was closed there in terms of narcissism and when I was thinking about for this video it really struck me as something that was really interesting and made a lot of sense as I put the pieces together now I know whenever I talk about narcissism and fantasy themes other areas there gonna be a lot of different opinions if you agree or disagree with some of the comments I've been in this video or have other opinions please put those in the comment section for this video as always I hope you found this description of narcissism fantasy themes to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 100,572

Keywords: Fantasy, fantasies, narcissistic, narcissism, grandiose, vulnerable, narcissistic personality disorder, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM, special or unique, sense of entitlement, manipulate, lack of empathy, arrogance, extraverted, socially bold, superficial charm, resistant to criticism, callous, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, introverted, defensive, avoidant, anxious, depressed, socially awkward, shy

Id: Sl-zC4olU3k

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2019