Transcription
What causes narcissists to become narcissists? Were they born that way or exposed to trauma that caused them to become that way? What a great question.
So, where does a narcissist come from? Basically, the way that a narcissist forms, you can call it trauma, but I would say it's a very specific thing. A narcissist forms from conditional love.
See, when we unconditionally love someone, we teach that person that there is something within you that is good, that is independent of how you act, how you look, how you behave. When you are not unconditionally loved and when you are conditionally loved really really really hard or not so much the love but when the conditions are huge. When your whole life is about conditional responses then what happens is someone becomes very attuned to things outside of them. They become focused on the outside focused on the outside. Focused on the outside and that leads to narcissism.
But the other thing is if you grow up with a narcissistic parent they're narcissistic right? So the way they feel about themselves depends on how you behave. And then in turn, I don't know if this kind of makes sense. I'm going to try to draw this. They'll do something that then makes you do something, behave in a certain way, which then then makes them feel proud. And if they feel proud, that means that they are a good parent. So this behavior that you do determines whether they feel proud or they feel good. And if they feel good, then they love you.
So what happens then? You learn that love depends on this behavior. If you do this behavior, then you get love. If you don't do that behavior, you get punishment. You're growing up in a conditional love situation, which is really common when your parent is a narcissist. And so that will make you narcissistic.