5 Weird Things a Narcissist Does when they hit Collapse

Number two: they gaslight themselves. They convince themselves that they do not exist or what is happening to them is not real. This is what we call mitigation in the terminology of trauma, psychological trauma. This is one of the extreme forms of coping mechanisms that get activated when adaptation does not work. When adapting to the situation does not work, then one tries to escape so that they don’t have to face or feel the pain. As a form of this, the narcissist tries to escape their reality by turning it around, by gaslighting themselves into believing that it’s not happening or they are not a real person, which you can call another form of dissociation. While convincing themselves they are not a real person, they are completely denying their true self and the existence of it. Now that the false self has been removed from the equation and they are left alone with the fragments of who they were originally, they don’t want to face it. So they increase the gap by stepping into extreme forms of denial, which can be as extreme as totally neglecting the current state they are going through and jumping into different situations to seek supply and to repeat the same cycle again and again.

They experience extreme paranoia.

Number three: they experience extreme paranoia. I’m not talking about just any paranoia; I’m talking about existential crisis-triggering type of paranoia. This paranoia tells them that everybody and everything out there is trying to get you, they’re trying to hurt you, they’re trying to deceive you, they are trying to fool you. You can’t trust anybody. A narcissist doesn’t trust anybody generally, but during this phase, it becomes extremely worse, which is why you will see they hibernate a lot. It looks like they’re extremely depressed. They’re worried about their health, they’re paranoid about their money, they’re paranoid about their children. Everybody becomes a threat, and that is also the reason why they become angrier than ever before. All their fears come up, the fears they have suppressed all along now reveal themselves to the narcissists. But the narcissist never tries to face them or tries to understand what the origin is, and why they are coming up. These fears are possibly the fears of a narcissist’s childhood when they probably were being traumatized, abused, whatever, and they never wanted to face the fragility. They suppressed it. But now that they are coming up, popping up all of a sudden, they extremely feel these fears. The severity is beyond what one can imagine.