Everyone knows a narcissist, but not everyone has a narcissistic parent. My mother is the definition of narcissism – she makes everything about herself, and the comfort of others is none of her concern.
She recently injured her back and called the ambulance (at 4 am) when the pain became unbearable. However, my mother didn’t like being in the hospital, so she checked herself in the next day and asked my niece to come pick her up. It was fine…except she wasn’t fine; Her back still suffers from four fractures, and she needs medical care.
For everything (including a potential stay in rehab) to be covered by my mother’s insurance, she needed to return to the hospital and stay for three nights. My mother lives alone and has never driven, so she needed to call the ambulance again to take her back to the hospital.
A family member, who had come to care for her, offered to take her in. But by then my mother had become upset with a family member and had kicked her out of the house.
One of my mother’s most vivid traits is that she hates driving on the highway; It’s back roads for her. So, instead of calling the ambulance during the day, I deliberately called them at 4 a.m. – that way I avoided driving in any traffic on the highway.
Of course, the fact that my nephew woke up at 4 a.m. when Life Alert called, or that my mother called my niece at 6 a.m. — and that it might have been good to take other people’s feelings into account — never crossed my mind.
Like my mother, people with narcissistic personality disorder believe that the world revolves around them. This condition is characterized by the inability to empathize with others and the desire to maintain focus on them at all times.
Related: 5 Steps To Finally Heal (And Move On) From Your Narcissist Parent
This is why I was (not so) surprised when I found a study from Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. The study found that narcissists may speak and act confidently, but their brains don’t lie. On a neurological level, narcissists are needy.
A research team, led by David Chester at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, recruited 50 college students and had them complete a standard measure of narcissism. Participants who agreed with statements such as “I think I’m special” scored high on narcissism.
Next, the researchers had the students lie in a special brain scanner that uses diffusion tensor imaging, a technique that measures the amount of connectivity between brain regions, and the amount of conversation between different functional centers of the brain.
Chester and his team were particularly interested in the density of white matter tracts between an area in the front of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which is associated with thinking about ourselves, and another, deeper area known as the ventral striatum. Associated with reward and satisfaction.
They found that narcissists may say they have high self-esteem, but brain scanning evidence suggests that narcissists have an internal deficit in connecting to self-reward. In other words, narcissists have to seek validation from others to compensate for the lack of it in their subconscious.
