Is It Paranoia or Is It Narcissism?

On psychosis as self-aggrandizement... and life being a dream.

In October of 2022, one of my closest friends, who I confided in about appallingly personal things — deep traumas, fears, insecurities — had a psychotic break.

I saw it coming a mile away, and yet, having this head-start did nothing to help me help her.

As her mental coherence deteriorated, I wasted time trying to find
the perfect way to tell her to stop consuming so many psychoactive substances (or “plant medicines,” as she naively called them),
the nicest way to suggest that she relies too much on divination methods like tarot and runes (which only amplified her confusion with complex symbolism),
and the most polite way to tell her it hurt my feelings when she called me a demon, especially after all I’d confided in her about my abusive church upbringing.

When I finally did tell her all this, she snapped.

“I see you for what you are,” she wrote sinisterly, along with something about how I’m a vampire-demon draining her energy. Then she blocked me.
Years of friendship and trust, gone in an instant.

And then she sent the same message to everyone — including her landlord, who she still lived in the same house with — before blocking us all and isolating herself for months.

When she re-emerged online, she announced that she could finally see “the truth” that 3,000 “covert narcissists” in her life were all “keeping her inside of a Truman Show-like dimension” for the sole purpose of laughing at her misery. Where she couldn’t prove that she was physically or emotionally being harmed, she convinced herself that we were spiritually torturing her on the astral plane. We were evil dark wizards and witches, spying on her in the liminal spaces between realities.
The “magic” mushrooms told her so.

This was what she now believed about me and everyone who’d ever shown her love in myriad forms: helping her find her runaway daughter, encouraging all her grifty “business” endeavors, giving her hundreds or thousands of dollars to stay afloat over the years, and one man even laying down his life to shield her from gunfire.

In the end, none of this true love was enough to satisfy her vacuumous hunger.

In the end, everyone in her life was a narcissist.

Everyone…

…but her.

Hmmmm.

Even at the time, as I parsed through complicated grief for a friend who wasn’t dead but also wasn’t “here” anymore, something niggled at my brain:

She must’ve been awfully full of herself to think that the entire world was obsessed with her, to the point where we’d devote all our astral energy to spying on her? What the fuck?

But it felt wrong to think this. How could I think these mean thoughts about her? After all, she was clearly mentally unstable and in desperate need of professional help, right? Narcissists were big bullies but she was a helpless little lamb… right??

And yet…

She wasn’t the first paranoid person I’d seen insisting that everyone — from passing strangers to news anchors to the capital-G Government — was obsessed with them specifically.

Now, months later, it’s happened twice more. I’ve been dragged into 2 separate situations wherein a person becomes increasingly paranoid and attempts to get me to validate their narrative.
But then, when I dare to simply perceive things differently, they flip instantly, maligning and discarding me before moving on to try to convince some other impressionable target that they’re just ~so fucking powerless.~

Being accused of being an A.I. robot, or a CIA accomplice, or an Illuminati member, might be funny… if it wasn’t so bleedingly transparent that these accusations only come AFTER I’VE DARED TO CHALLENGE THEIR IDEAS.

Like this:

“Help! I think government agents are spying on me!”
“Respectfully, I think your fear is unfounded.”
“THAT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE ONE OF THEM!!!! 👀”

Wanna know what’s really funny? This is exactly how narcissists act.

It’s actually called a narcissistic discard.

Basically, the narcissist’s over-inflated ego cannot cope with being criticized or disagreed-with at all. So when you deviate from their mandated perspective, they cut you off like it was nothing.

They lack empathy, after all.

Honestly, I’m tempted to wield the word “narcissist” like an insult right now, because yeah, I’m still mad as hell that someone I trusted for years discarded me so easily. It hurts.

But ultimately, that’s not productive. Because the truth is, narcissism is actually a sickness — one that can be healed.

I know this isn’t a popular perspective. Let’s face it: narcissists are polarizing. Most of us have been hurt by one at some point, or might be in the future. So after being harmed by that particular type of ruthless insanity, it’s very hard to find the motivation to give a fuck about why the narcissist is a narcissist.

Understandable.

But if we are to heal from narcissistic abuse, we must understand what creates a narcissist:

It’s shame.

While narcissists are usually described as having an “inflated ego,” this is actually just a flashy but hollow projection designed to conceal their fragile, tiny sense of self. Overcompensation at its finest, like “the man behind the curtain” in the Wizard of Oz.

Narcissists don’t actually love themselves — they hate themselves. The “big ego” that they project to the world is actually what they wish they were, because they want to be as far away from their shame as possible. They invent an entirely false persona and wear it as both mask and shield, and spend their lives avoiding the excruciating shame at the core of their being.

So it may look like the narcissist wants “all eyes on them,”
but what they actually want is “all eyes on their false perfect persona,”
like a big distraction to ensure that their true self — their vulnerable self — never gets exposed to the light.

It’s… kind of sad, actually.

“Metamorphosis of Narcissus” by Salvador Dali

Now, I’m not saying that this justifies the narc’s abusive behavior. I’m simply saying that a problem can’t be fixed until you know what the problem is.

So I’m proposing the radical notion that paranoia and narcissism have a lot of overlap. They’re not the same, but understanding one can help us understand the other.

And I do believe that my former friend exemplifies this, when she talks about feeling “trapped in a Truman Show dimension” by people who love her.

Think about it:

Just as a dream offers the dreamer symbolic clues about the state of their inner world to interpret and integrate, psychosis offers symbolic clues too.

Let’s take the delusion and interpret it like a dream:

If someone had a dream about “being trapped in a Truman Show-like dimension by people I love,” they might interpret their dream as follows: “My subconscious mind is showing me that I deeply fear being seen by people I love because I’m convinced they’re all secretly laughing at me, and I feel powerless to this shame.”

Let’s take another common paranoid delusion: “The government put a tracker under my skin.”

If that was a dream, you might interpret it as follows: “I fear the feeling of being invaded and tracked, because I desperately want to feel free and independent, but I don’t believe that the world supports me in creating this freedom. I feel like all my efforts to become independent are useless, because whenever I take the tracker out, ‘they’ just put it back in. I feel stuck and controlled by forces beyond my control and I don’t know how to break free.”

See?

Life is but a dream.

We all have a subconscious mind that attempts to speak with our conscious mind through symbols and signs. What makes it psychosis is when the person can no longer distinguish between their subconscious’s symbolic messages and waking reality.

Psychotics live in a permanent dream-state, wandering aimlessly through symbolic landscapes with no idea how to wake themselves up, or even just go “lucid” within the dream.

So how can somebody recover their discernment?

By remembering their agency.

Here’s the thing:

I do believe that the government spies on people.
I do believe they weaponize frequencies, covert technologies and subliminal messaging against the populace.
This is some well-documented shit.

“Govern-ment” means “control of the mind,” after all.

So unfortunately, a lot of “paranoia” might actually be justified.

BUT.

EVEN IF the government was spying on you personally,

the good news is that no weapon formed against you shall prosper.

A person in their power knows this.

Better yet — a person in their power gnos this.

So once you realize “Life is but a dream,” and that all the stories you tell yourself are exactly that — stories — you can take your power back by choosing to tell yourself a different story.

The first step, is to realize you’re dreaming.

The second step, is to listen to what the dream is telling you. Integrate it.

The third step, is to choose what happens next in the dream.
This is lucidity.
This is sovereignty.
This is True Power.

Stand up.

To illustrate how this is done, let’s use the Truman Show example:

“Thank you, psychosis/dream of life, for showing me that I subconsciously fear being humiliated by people I love. Now that I’m aware of this fear, I choose to lucidly transmute it into the belief that I am genuinely loved. And even if people do laugh at me, I will be okay, because I love myself.”

Or the tracking device example:

“Thank you, psychosis/dream of life, for showing me that I subconsciously fear being controlled. Now that I’m aware of this fear, I choose to lucidly transmute it into an appreciation for my freedom. Even if I am being tracked, I will not let that stop me from doing the things I want to do, because while I may not have control over what others try to do to me, I can control my responses to perceived threats. May my living example inspire others — including ‘the controllers’ — to live more freely, too.”

Underneath these two examples is a strong insinuation:

To heal from shame, we must take radical responsibility for our lives.

We cannot continue to blame others for our fears and failures, and expect to feel empowered. It doesn’t work that way.

A choice must be made — lucidly.

Will we choose to meander haplessly through the strange symbolic landscape of our own subconscious mind,

or will we accept the responsibility of choosing which “signs” we follow?

Because no matter what government spy may be trying to control you,

the only person who can make this choice

is you.

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And now, for some dark humor: