Are YOU Dead Inside or Self-sufficient?

Self-sustaining self-sufficiency within firm personal boundaries is a sign of a stable sense of self-worth, maturity, resilience, and inner strength: the ability to spend time with yourself, productive and content is a gift.

Self-sufficiency is intimately link to a sense of agency and personal autonomy (internal locus of control): a distinct, demarcated self; smooth, seamless, assured self-governance; and the capacity to act independently, based on free choice. These are the hallmarks of and the prerequisites to self-efficacy (Bandura): "how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations" and extract beneficial outcomes from one’s environment, human or physical.

But self-sufficiency is often confused with insecure, fear-based, hurt-averse attachment styles: avoidance and withdrawal. Other mental health problems masquerade as self-sufficiency: the narcissist’s grandiosity, the psychopath’s defiance, the schizoid’s essential emptiness and solipsistic reclusiveness, and the borderline’s dysregulated emotions and mood lability. These are all forms of counterdependency, the exact opposite of self-sufficiency.

Accustomed to “normal”, mentally healthy people, the intimate partners of narcissists and psychopaths keep probing, attempting with growing desperation and disbelief to pry open their inscrutable mates.

Move on, folks, there’s nothing to see here.

The psychopath and the narcissist are shimmering surfaces. They have no depth. Behind the alluring facade, there is only an empty, self-abandoned schizoid core. No ego and self can ever form without object relations (meaningful interpersonal interactions).

Narcissists and psychopaths are goal-oriented two-state impersonal automate, gleaming metal swamped by primitive defenses and drowning in negative emotions.

The harder one tries to get to the know the essential core of the narcissist and psychopath, the more ruinous the descent into the black hole that is their quiddity. They are entities made of all-consuming absence, a form of carbon-based antimatter.

And you can’t wrap your head around this realization that your narcissist or psychopath, the man you love with all your heart just isn’t there, he is a mere apparition, a simulacrum and simulation, not human in any possible sense of the word. You are attached to an ever-receding mirage of an oasis, shape-shifting to mirror you ideally.

Ultimately, this deep space emptiness infects and permeates you and you find yourself tumbling head over heels in the dark void of this absent soul, tethered to nothing but your impending doom.

“How can I keep my cerebral narcissist sexually active throughout our relationship?”

Answer: Approach-avoid all the time, keep him on his toes, guessing, anxious, expecting the next blow to fall. Intermittent reinforcement. Imminent abandonment. Hints at triangulation (but not actual misbehavior). He will remain hypersexed as long as you remain halfheartedly committed. Make sure you are never taken for granted and never fully and irrevocably there. Keep your suitcases packed at all times.

“Is it true that cerebral narcissists do a lot of casual sex and cheat?”

Cerebral narcissists are asexual, so they do not cheat. But even when they are in a somatic phase, they are sexually active only during the lovebombing stage of the shared fantasy.

More generally: like all narcissists, cerebrals need to feel unique. Casual sex implies that the cerebral is just one of many, about to be discarded once the sex is over, and stripped of the locus of his superiority (his intellect), having been transformed into a mere sex object.

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