JennJennRN 🇺🇸

NARCISSISTIC MORTIFICATION: It's not surprising that in his recent 60 Minutes interview, Trump again began speaking about "getting into heaven" versus the alternative. I've had a week to observe his behavior following the nationwide beatdown of him during the midterms. I believe he is officially undergoing Narcissistic Mortification. Narcissistic Mortification is when a narcissist like Trump crosses over to a place where he sees visions of his own demise (thus 'getting into heaven'). Age and ill health play a role, but it's deeper than that. It's what happens after extreme fear morphs into dread and dread morphs into terror - LOSING - and humiliation. As Trump's polling kept tanking leading up to the midterms, his fears became extreme and then "dread." And the results were as bad as they could be for him. It's not just that the GOP lost, it's that HE was so clearly responsible. HE was at fault. HE told people to vote as if he is on the ballot, and they did. It led to a terrible reality FOR HIM, one that was forced UPON HIM, not of HIS making. He can't have that! For a malignant narcissist, THE most extreme fear of all is ultimate irrevocable humiliation - borne of one's faults. In more psychological terms, narcissistic mortification is when one with a rigidly grandiose pathology sees his sense of self as exposed, defective or inferior. It was coined by Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism. It's described there as deep injuries to ego/self, triggered by ONE'S OWN compulsiveness (aka insisting on Paxton as a candidate) and ONE'S OWN weaknesses (being insensitive to voter issues during rallies). THIS is where I think he is. He's become his own worst enemy, and this squarely conflicts with his pathology of being unable to admit fault. It's a very severe and very dissonant conflict. Because ... malignant narcissists NEED their grandiosity. For them to become exposed and weakened, is narcissistic injury - that happens. BUT - for them to become SO weakened to the extent of being able to visualize their own demise and know it's partly due to their own frailties - frailties they spend a lifetime avoiding and denying - this is irreconcilable. For a malignant narcissist like Trump, it's hell. It causes him to become even more sensitized ("that was a stupid question"), more defensive (like he is about "crowd size" - now the symbol of his fading grandiosity), and more defiant (hiring Miller as COS). It has made him physically haggard (he looks gaunt and hunched, with swollen eyes and stiff facial muscles). Trump lives in such a bubble, it's hard to predict how he processes things. Freud suggested that narcissistic mortification can be a precursor to panic or to narcissistic collapse. fyi: There actually IS a wiki page for narcissistic mortification (which surprised me) and here's an interesting sentence from it, that I thought I'd echo here: Narcissistic Mortification is "the primitive terror of self-dissolution, triggered by the sudden exposure of one's sense of a defective self ... to a narcissist, it is death by embarrassment."