The Narcissist’s X-Ray Vision: Seeing Through Your Defenses

The narcissist is endowed — or afflicted — with psychological X-ray vision. He perceives individuals’ emotional barriers, their little falsehoods, their lamentable defenses, and their extravagant illusions. He is aware of their deviations from the truth and the extent of those deviations. He instinctively comprehends their self-serving objectives and precisely anticipates the strategies and techniques they would use to get them.

The narcissist detests arrogant, egotistical, pretentious, prejudiced, sanctimonious, and hypocritical individuals. He expresses fury towards the inept, the indolent, the unfortunate, and the feeble.

This may be due to the narcissist seeing themselves in others. He attempts to shatter the painful mirror of his own shortcomings in theirs.

The narcissist targets the vulnerabilities in their well crafted defenses. He identifies their vulnerability and exploits it. He punctures the inflated egos that characterize most individuals. He depresses them. He compels them to own their limitations, vulnerability, and ordinariness. He undermines their feeling of individuality. He adjusts their dimensions and proportions while offering a viewpoint. The narcissist executes these actions with cruelty, abrasiveness, sadism, and fatal efficiency. He has neither sympathy nor compunction. He exploits their flaws, no matter how minute or well-hidden.

The narcissist reveals their contradictory rhetoric and ridicules their inconsistent principles. He refuses to engage in their games of prestige, rank, and hierarchy. He removes them from their refuges. He undermines them. He analyzes their tales, myths, superstitions, concealed assumptions, and corrupted language. He speaks plainly and directly.

The narcissist compels people to respond, therefore confronting their authentic, deteriorated selves, their stagnant jobs, their monotonous lives, the demise of their aspirations, and their fractured ambitions. He continually studies them with the fervent animosity of the ostracized and the downtrodden.

Their concealed facts, particularly those they strive to hide from themselves. The truths are rejected, making them unpleasant and distressing. Those subjects that remain unspoken in respectable circles, the politically incorrect, the personally injurious, the concealed, overlooked, and obscured truths, the lurking skeletons, the taboos, the anxieties, the primal instincts, the pretensions, the societal deceptions, the distorted life narratives — sharp, bloody, and merciless — constitute the narcissist’s retribution, the reckoning of grievances, the equalization of the arena.

The narcissist targets those who are esteemed, accomplished, and content — individuals who possess what he believes he deserves but has never attained, the subjects of his envy. The narcissist disrupts them, prompting introspection over their own suffering and leading them to dwell on its deleterious consequences. He compels them to face their zombie-like existence, their inherent sadism, their terrible actions, and their indelible omissions. He excavates the depths of their psyche, bringing to light long-repressed feelings, often hidden anguish, their dreams, and their phobias.

He feigns selflessness, claiming it is “for their own good.” The narcissist lectures, admonishes, and delivers caustic tirades, while revealing and enforcing his views, all under the guise of promoting the greater good. He is exceedingly virtuous, really sincere, very motivated to assist, and quite commendable. His intentions are evident. He is consistently chillingly rational and algorithmically exact. The narcissist embodies repressed fury. He participates in their extraterrestrial game according to their own regulations. His foreignness renders him invincible to them. They are unaware of it at now.

Afterword: Apathy of Emotion

The narcissist’s capacity to breach the defenses of their victims is instinctive and intuitive, rather than the result of deliberate study. He exploits others’ vulnerabilities akin to a tiger attacking a weakened gazelle; he manipulates his target’s fears and insecurities as a virus infiltrates cellular defenses and utilizes the cell’s mechanisms for replication; and he mocks, mistreats, torments, harasses, and stalks his victims for enjoyment, which grants him a sense of pleasurable omnipotence. This behavior is inherent to the narcissist; it is an essential aspect of their identity.

The narcissist’s “x-ray vision” is confined to identifying the features, attributes, and behaviors of potential and current victims that facilitate their subjugation and transformation into sources of narcissistic sustenance. The narcissist’s stunted personal growth, extensive psychological barriers, inadequate reality testing (exemplified by grandiose and persecutory delusions), and cognitive impairments inhibit his ability to attain genuine, deep, and holistic understanding of others and the human situation.

Contrary to prevalent beliefs, narcissists and psychopaths may really exhibit empathy. They may possess hyper-empathy, sensitive to the subtlest cues from their victims and equipped with acute perceptual insight. They often use their empathetic abilities only for personal benefit, the acquisition of narcissistic supply, or the pursuit of antisocial and sadistic objectives. They see their capacity for empathy as an additional tool in their armory. Two potential pathological responses to childhood abuse and trauma are codependence and narcissism. Both scenarios use fantasy as a protection mechanism: the codependent has a somewhat realistic self-assessment, while her perspective of others is fantastical; conversely, the narcissist’s self-image and self-perception are deluded and grandiose, while his incisive view of others is chillingly precise.

I propose labeling the narcissistic psychopath’s kind of empathy as “cold empathy,” similar to the “cold emotions” experienced by psychopaths. The cognitive aspect of empathy is there, but its emotional counterpart is not. It is, thus, a sterile, dispassionate, and intellectual kind of invasive observation, without empathy and a sense of connection with others.

Narcissists and psychopaths seem to exhibit “empathy” towards their belongings, including things, pets, and sources of narcissistic supply or monetary advantages, which typically include their closest relationships, significant others, or colleagues. This does not constitute genuine empathy; rather, it is a simple projection of the narcissist’s or psychopath’s own anxieties, worries, wants, desires, fantasies, and priorities. This kind of shown “empathy” often dissipates after its recipient no longer serves a purpose in the narcissist’s or psychopath’s life and psychodynamic mechanisms.

Cold Empathy invokes the notion of the “Uncanny Valley,” a term introduced in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. Mori proposed that people respond favorably to androids (humanoid robots) as long as they exhibit significant and recognizable differences from actual humans. However, when these devices closely, however poorly, mimic human appearance, spectators often encounter feelings of disgust, revulsion, and other unpleasant emotions, including terror.

Psychopathic narcissists exhibit near-perfect human mimicry; nonetheless, their absence of empathy and emotions renders them fundamentally deficient. Psychopaths and narcissists seem to their interlocutors as if they are “alien life-forms” or “artificial intelligence,” like humanoid robots or androids. When individuals encounter narcissists or psychopaths, the Uncanny Valley phenomenon occurs, eliciting feelings of revulsion, fear, and repulsion. They are unable to identify the cause of these adverse responses; yet, after a few first interactions, they generally maintain their distance.