– In this article, I’m gonna teach you three things that you need to know about narcissistic abuse and narcissism that nobody seems to be talking about. I’ve been doing this since 2012, so I’ve been doing this for 10 years. And over the last 10 years, I’ve learned a thing or two about narcissistic abuse and narcissism, and I wanna share them with you now.
The first thing
What you very rarely hear people say is that narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, is actually a response to trauma. So, it’s defensive. A narcissistic personality disorder is a shield that is used to keep a painful reality at bay. So when you are seeking to understand like, why when I am arguing with my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my husband, and wife, and I suspect they’re on the spectrum for narcissism, why do we get into these weird arguments? Why do they spend so much time denying, deflecting, reframing? Why can we never argue about the subject at hand? Why are we always focused on something else? It’s infuriating.
You try to have an adult-to-adult conversation that leads to some kind of reconciliation, which is what you would do with any other adult in a situation of conflict in any other environment if you were arguing in good faith. But here, you’re never arguing in good faith and they can’t help it. It’s a defensive response to trauma. So that is, effectively, you can think of it like this, it’s a defensive response to reality itself. Very, very important. Why do they constantly deny, deflect, reframe, and focus on something else? Because this is what they’ve been doing with reality itself since childhood.
A narcissistic personality disorder is typically formed in highly abusive scenarios in childhood. So they deny, deflect, reframe, and focus on something else or refocus, turn it back onto the person who’s accused them of something because this is what they do with reality itself and have been doing since they were kids.
If you take a conflict to them and you point out that they’ve done something wrong, or they’ve done something immoral, or they’ve done something humiliating, or even done something that makes them look stupid, you are risking inflicting narcissistic injury ’cause you’re affecting their narcissistic false self that they hide behind because it’s a defense. So the defense is the false self.
This is why as people, they are very defensive, they’re very thin-skinned, they’re full of ideas of reference, they think everything is all about them, they’re prone to think in terms of conspiracy theories against them, they’re prone to be paranoid and think that people are out to get them to ruin their reputation, to ruin who they are. Because the stance with which they’re living life is life and reality is bad, it’s aggressive, it’s out to get me.
Because that was what they experienced in their childhood, I’ve gotta defend against that. You come to them and you say, “Hey we need to talk about the thing that you said yesterday in front of those people. Like, it wasn’t cool.” Instantly, bang, you’re gonna get hit with 10 different levels of defense that you are gonna try and walk down. You won’t win because they’ve abandoned reality.
You’re stoically trying to do a therapy session with them or come to do this session with them, and you are walking along with your sincerity in one hand and you’re dumb facts in the other. Ho, ho, ho, ho. Let me keep going through their defensive lines and you will get mowed down every time because they don’t care about reality. They’re not interested in reconciliation one bit.
They don’t want peace, they don’t want equality, they don’t want reconciliation, and they don’t want things to be stable and sane. What they want is dominance. – I don’t want peace. I want problems always. – They want dominance. They want their false self to dominate them because that establishes narcissistic supply and it reinforces their narcissistic fantasy of who they are, that’s the false self. This is why they’re so defensive. This is why they deny, deflect, reframe, and focus on something else. They’ve spent their whole lives doing this. This focuses on something else, this is one of their tactics for dealing with pain.
So you are bringing them pain, so they use this tactic. They reframe it, put the blame back on you, deflect it back on you, deny that it ever happened, or start arguing about something else. That’s a dissociative tactic. That’s actually a trauma response, but it’s playing out in an argument, focusing on something else is how they dealt with the pain of reality itself. Reality and truth are no friend to the narcissist, so stop bringing it to them, they’re not interested. They’re interested in fantasy and lies. Self-aggrandizing fantasy, self-aggrandizing lies.
The second thing
that I’ve learned that I think is very important that nobody seems to be talking about is that the personality structure itself is delusional. Now when you say delusion, typically in psychology you would say that, hey this person’s on the spectrum for psychosis. But you very rarely hear the term psychosis used in the literature, it’s not there. It’s not there very much in the literature either, nor is it in the normal parlance on Facebook forums, Reddit threads, and YouTube threads. People aren’t talking about the psychotic elements of this disorder.
Why not? Why aren’t we talking about how intrinsically delusional this is when we all know this is not like a person, this is not some weird guy on YouTube going, “This is my personal belief, the narcissist has a false self.” This is orthodoxy. This is mainstream psychology and orthodoxy. But we never go from, the narcissist’s lives inside of fantasy in denial of reality. Every day, every second of every minute of every hour of every day they’re alive, they deny, deny, deny. ‘Cause reality is attacking them all the time, reality keeps trying to come through, reality keeps trying to break in.
If you’re so godlike and special, you know, why do your knees hurt? Why do your knees not work? If you are so amazing and sexy, why are these men that you’re attracted to, why are they not looking at you? If you are so rich and powerful, why this, why that? Reality is constantly breaking through, they’re constantly in denial, and they hide in the false self. It’s delusional. So if we know that a person, in any other context by the way for any other mental health issue, if I just said to you, “Hey, I have a client.
” If I didn’t use the N-word because narcissism now is such a heavily loaded word. That when you say it, people get triggered and they start thinking a whole load of stuff. Even academics, I claim. Even psychologists, I claim. Because it’s such a controversial topic now. Anything else? So if I don’t say narcissism, I don’t use the magic hypnosis word of narcissism, I say, I’m a psychologist, I have a client, and every day of their life they’re just in fantasy mode. They live in a permanent state of fantasy. They’re pretending to be something that they’re not. They’re pretending to be somebody that they’re not.
They interact, but not just with themselves, this client has to recruit other humans and force them to role-play with him, his fantasy version of himself. I mean, he just lives in delusion.
He wants nothing to do with reality and he wants to do everything to keep that fantasy going. If my client wasn’t abusive and didn’t hurt people but he just really needed everybody to believe that he was Napoleon Bonaparte, you would say that person is, even if you don’t have a background in psychology, you know what psychosis is, you know what delusion is, you know what someone living in a fantasy world is. You would say, poor dude, psychotic.
The poor dude is psychotic. We don’t talk about this enough. So when you are considering breaking up with the narcissist, or you have a narcissistic parent or a narcissistic boss, or you are co-parenting with a narcissist. Everybody should remember and should be talking about the fact, psychotic levels of delusion. You’re not talking to a person who is there. Whatever you say to them goes in, and gets filtered through their psychosis.
It’s all of reality that is pulled in and interwoven with their fantasy version of who they are. It’s infuriating. If you insist on being sincere with them, and telling them the truth, and working towards reconciliation, you will drive yourself insane. Here’s a piece of advice for you, abandon sincere communication when communicating with the terminally insincere.
The third thing
What I’ve learned in the last 10 years, that nobody seems to be talking about in terms of narcissism, is a little bit more controversial. It’s a little bit more challenging for the people watching. And it’s what narcissism isn’t. It’s what narcissism isn’t and nobody seems to be talking about this. Narcissism is not, you met a man or a woman who is vain. That’s not narcissism. Vanity is not, that does not that. You could say vanity is a kind of narcissism, small
But that does not a narcissist make. That is not a narcissistic personality disorder. So narcissism is not vanity. Narcissism is not a good-looking man or woman who doesn’t reciprocate your affection. You can’t call everybody who frustrates you in romance a narcissist. Even though, technically speaking, when you look at Ovid’s myth, yes, narcissist, the beautiful young Greek hunter was a very vain man and yes, he did rub off people’s attention.
You can’t, in frustration, when you know a good-looking vain person that you are really into who’s not really into you, say because they’re good-looking and because they’re vain that means they’re a narcissist.
I guess if you wanted to be a pedant, you could say they’re just like Ovid’s version of a narcissist but you’re not going to say that to your girls at a cocktail party, are you? So, someone who’s vain someone who’s good-looking, someone who’s frustrating you, someone who doesn’t feel about you the way that you feel about them, somebody who’s using you sexually or financially.
Which is pretty awful, you know, if somebody uses you for sex, or they uses you for money, or they use you for the opportunity or fame, or gain, or whatever else, that isn’t nice, that’s not a nice person. But we do have the option to call people other things other than a narcissist. Not everybody is a narcissist. Oh, this guy he didn’t call me back, he’s such a narcissist. He could just be a dick. What’s wrong with that? Say, he’s not very polite.
When I met him and I was hanging around with him, he was good-looking and he was really charismatic but pretty rude. And I noticed the way he spoke to the people who were like waiting at a table and he was pretty mean to them, he wasn’t kind to them. I noticed the way that he spoke to me when blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, like a person could just be a bit of a dick. The girl, the woman that you’re dealing with who acts this way, could just not be a very nice person. The word narcissist is dramatically overused.
It does not mean somebody who’s acting like a dick. It does not mean somebody who’s vain, good-looking, who frustrates you in romance or frustrates you sexually, and it doesn’t mean somebody who’s used and exploited you sexually, financially, or in terms of an opportunity. It might mean that but there are nine traits that are available to anybody who wants them on the internet. Go to the Wikipedia page for the entry on narcissism and you’ll find the nine traits.
For a person to have narcissistic personality disorder they must consistently fulfill six of the nine traits, across time and across contexts. Please don’t misuse the word narcissist. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that you found that useful. Thank you very much for your time and for your attention. If you enjoyed that article, please like, subscribe, and share this article with your friends.
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