Maybe it’s the current political season, and maybe it’s our obsession with the #selfie generation, but as a psychologist, I’m aware of just how narcissistic and self-involved these days. I have always had a special curiosity about this personality structure and the people who display its satisfactory expression.
There are people who have been able to exploit these qualities, these deep developmental fractures, as an engine to achieve greatness and influence the world on a global scale. But the vast majority of people who mature into what we call a narcissist are unable to compensate for their personal weaknesses with this type of transcendent behavior. For most of them, they remain mired in developmental fractures that ultimately lead to emotional crippling of the person, unable to achieve true intimacy. Narcissists, when we explore the evolutionary origins of personality structure, are actually very sad and fragile, despite an outward appearance of courage and self-confidence.
Exactly what is narcissism?
Narcissism is characterized by the presence of these personality traits:
greatness.
Fantasies of power, beauty, greed, etc.
Hunger for excessive admiration.
Exploitation of people.
Weakened ability to empathize.
envy of others.
arrogance.
Believing that they are special and that only people of a certain status can understand them.
merit
Only people who embody the majority of the traits will be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). For reasons we don’t fully understand, men are (statistically speaking) more likely to develop these traits.
While this descriptive list of behaviors is useful for identifying people we may know who display these traits, it does not help us better understand the emotional and psychological workings of the narcissist. This list does nothing to advance our understanding of the developmental fractures that predispose one to manifest this type of disease in adulthood.
A common misunderstanding about narcissism.
The most common misconception is the assumption that the narcissist has confidence and is “full of himself.” The narcissist is not full of himself. He’s not sure. It looks that way. But this is just a presentation. interface. Narcissists mimic what they perceive as confidence, but at their core, they are fragile, neglected, and often abused souls. It is not confidence or self-confidence that drives them to be reckless in dealing with others. It comes from a place of powerlessness, loss, anger, emotional hunger, and shame.
Where do you start?
I encourage people to study narcissism as an attachment disorder. The presence of these traits reflects ruptures in early attachment modeling in which the infant is forced to revolve around an unreliable, abusive, or absent primary attachment form (the mother). For an infant, this failure to attach has severe developmental consequences. It is physically and emotionally stressful for an infant. It creates an emotional tsunami of fear, shock, and awe, even though the infant is too young to even have the words to describe his experience.
In the truest sense of the word, the infant absorbs its environment holistically, like a sponge absorbs liquid. Once this pattern is fixed, the child struggles to achieve authentic connection with others, experiences significant deficits in empathy, and the anchoring of a true sense of self becomes chronically impaired. The defense mechanism used to avoid emotional annihilation is to appear confident, boastful, and arrogant. They imitate what they perceive as confidence, but they don’t have the basic support structures to be authentically confident.
Developmentally, there is an important stage of development where normal/healthy narcissism governs our developmental needs. This is why children are often so draining and demanding of so much of our emotional energy. The long arc of this stage of development begins at birth and takes shape around the age of seven, depending on the emotional nuances of the child. This is why children between the ages of 7 and 9 will begin to show a much greater sense of empathy and consideration for the needs of others. These developmental achievements are a direct reflection of the child emerging from what we refer to as “normal narcissism” childhood.
During the normal narcissistic stage of development, a decisive emotional foundation is formed, on top of which all future attachments are formed. For the narcissist, there were tears in this foundation and fault lines began to form, weakening the basic sense of self. Failure to attach disrupts important developmental milestones (such as reflection, object fixation, object permanence, and ultimately the reinforcement of empathy).
Life with a narcissist
Because of the failure to empathize, the narcissist always projects a poor sense of remorse. This is why narcissists often act in ways that show disregard for how they affect others. If pressed later to address the personal injury, they will lash out at you, make excuses, and/or blame you. Again, we can understand the relative time period in which a particular developmental injury occurred by looking at the person’s current emotional landscape. Given that we know that children achieve the ability to experience empathy between the ages of 6-9, we can hypothesize that the narcissist’s critical injuries occurred up to and around this inflection point in their developmental arc.
Like geological fault lines, these internal fractures often go unnoticed for decades. In this regard, I would encourage people to view narcissism as a developmental disorder, not fully apparent to outsiders until a person is twenty or thirty years old. It is only through the passage of time and the emotional demands of maturity that the narcissist begins to show a pervasive and destructive personal rupture of the person(s) caught in the storm drain.
“The pain of turning around a narcissist is most acute for those who love them and are emotionally invested in them, most notably a spouse/partner/etc. and children.
The narcissist’s affection is always hollow and self-serving. His emotional scaffolding can only bear the weight of one person’s needs. Partnership in the true sense of the word is far from him. You are a pawn in his life. He will walk you around fulfilling his needs and wants. If you dare act out of your own emotional resonance, you will be shut out. Often without warning. And you may wonder if the narcissist feels bad or regrets his treatment of you. he did not do. He does not have this ability. He will only think about how you affect him. The focus will always be on how to serve or fail his needs. This kind of behavior is painful and baffling to anyone who doesn’t experience the same emotional helplessness.
You will crave reciprocity. You might think it will come one day if you wait long enough. It won’t. There is no day on the road. People who tend to stay with a narcissist will inevitably begin to show pathological adaptation. This is done as a way to make the narcissist appear more healthy and socially acceptable. This inevitably results in the narcissist blaming others for his own shortcomings. Chronic blaming and externalizing plausibility is the glue that binds you to the narcissist. The narcissist will ignore responsibility and with a heightened sense of entitlement ignore. He will then brag about his accomplishments, leaving others to clean up any messes made in the wake of his behavior.
The narcissist’s child often develops an extreme attunement to the needs of others. This is often expressed through hypervigilance towards the environment and a people-pleasing pattern that reflects a hunger that the narcissist must see and validate. They are geared toward meeting the parent’s needs versus meeting the parent’s needs. This interpersonal dynamic, once crystallized, creates clear long-term commitments as the child progresses into adolescence and beyond and begins to experience emotional and sexual intimacy. This archetype of interpersonal relationships is doomed unless it is closely examined for its one-sided and exploitative nature. It’s also how we pass on to our children patterns of relating to others, that will define and shape how they experience the elusive concept of “chemistry,” that heady feeling of being drawn to people for reasons we can’t easily explain. Chemistry is often described in romantic, flowery language, such as “It was fate” or “We were soulmates.” But it is often the emergence of unconscious patterns of attachment that affect the subtext of our minds.
Can they change?
People who are married to or work for pathological narcissists always ask me if a person can change, and I always make the same observation when asked:
The truth is, for reasons of the underlying helplessness that fuels narcissism, change is difficult and often unlikely. To change, the narcissist must begin a long and exhausting process of healing the wounds of growth that serve to reinforce the traits of grandiosity, entitlement, lack of empathy, and arrogance. For most people, this task is very daunting.
