Why Narcissists Believe Their Own Lies

This goes beyond lying, falsehood, or trying to get away with doing bad things.

It comes from their sub-clinical multiple personalities.

Narcissists grew up dissociating.

Dissociation is why they find it so easy being inauthentic, and why being authentic is impossible for them.

Over time, excessive dissociation leads to ease of compartmentalization.

Compartmentalization simply means what is true in one situation or one sub-personality is not true with another sub-personality.

For example, someone can be gracious and generous at work, but mean and selfish with family. This contradiction can be explained by the extremeness of their compartmentalization. They are literally different people in different settings.

Excessive compartmentalization then further leads to fragmentation. This means the sub-personalities within them become autonomous and divorced from each other, largely becoming unaware of each other’s activities, perhaps even each other’s existence.

So a narcissist has multiple agents, unlike a normal person, who has only one agent. They have fragmented wills.

When you catch Agent A doing the passive aggressive thing, the narcissist switches agents, and Agent B immediately takes over. Agent B has not done that passive aggressive thing. Agent B is indignant that you would so falsely accuse it. Agent B defends themselves with full vehemence. Agent B’s convictions are solid, because it truly believes and knows it never did what you accused it of doing.

Meanwhile, Agent A who has done the passive aggressive deed hides in the back somewhere, and doesn’t have to answer to you. Agent B took care of everything.

When you are trying to uncover a narcissist for their wrongdoing, you are not dealing with a plain simple liar. You are dealing with a highly sick individual who has compartmentalized themselves so hard that they are effectively fragmented and have the sub-clinical version of multiple personality disorder.

When they deny ever having done that thing, they are able to summon forth so much conviction because they TRULY believe they haven’t done it. To be able to do that, you need more than one person in them.

Because, try this for yourself, do something wrong or bad, get accused for it, try to lie through your teeth to avoid accountability, and attempt to match the performance of the narcissist in your convictions.

You can’t can you?

Why not?

It’s because you have only one agent, and that sole agent of yours knows whether you did it or not. It keeps track of the truth. It keeps track of your memories. It’s in touch with what’s happening with you all the time. And when you lie, you know you are lying.

To be able to lie to yourself, you need more than one you, one who told the lie, and the other to believe it. Then use the one who believed but didn’t lie to face the accusers, and you will get exactly the kind of vehement denial a truly innocent person would give.

When you are trying to uncover a narcissist for wrongdoing and they fight you to the death, till the end to avoid admitting it, you are not just dealing with a liar, you are not just dealing with unholy stubbornness.

You are dealing with someone so pathologically compartmentalized that you are no longer talking to the same person who did the deed. You are accusing an innocent agent for something another agent did.

In the same way that you cannot righteously get an innocent person to admit to a crime, you cannot get an innocent agent to do the same.

Scary isn’t it?