Narcissists can’t deal with reality because it contradicts what they want to be true, and this creates painful emotions. As a coping mechanism, they learn to delude themselves that what is real is actually not real, and however they see the situation is real, even though it isn’t.
Sometimes they truly see it that way. Other times it’s just a story they tell themselves and others. And often the longer you tell a story, the more you believe it, even if initially you know it’s not true. And so eventually they may start truly believing it.
Either way, the first step is to create a version of events that is an alternative to what actually happened or what’s going on.
Lying
While delusion is more of an internal process, lying and denial is often in the context of other people...
Narcissists simply want to know that they are in the right. For that, they need other people’s false validation to regulate their shaky self-esteem. They need to find people who would agree with them. And in order for others to agree with them, these other people either need to be terribly unhealthy and unable to recognize their toxic tendencies, or the narcissist needs to lie and present a different story than what is actually true.
Here, they tend to flip the roles where they are good, noble, caring, virtuous and the other person is evil, cruel, selfish, and immoral. Which brings us to the next point….
Projection
The most common way narcissists create alternative narratives is by projecting. We’ve talked about narcissistic projection in a separate article but to extract the main point, narcissists love to project.
If they say that the other person is jealous of them, then you know that the narcissist is jealous. If they say that the other person was cruel to them, then you know that the narcissist was cruel to the other person. If they say that the other person was lying and cheating, then you know they were the one lying and cheating.
