Transcription
So, what's the difference between normal narcissism, pathological narcissism, being a narcissist, or having Narcissistic Personality Disorder? So, I'm going to address a question that somebody posted on one of my YouTube videos that I actually thought was a great question. And I know very often, when people begin to wonder if they're in a relationship with somebody with pathological narcissism, they also begin to think, "Oh no, am I narcissistic?" So, I want to give you a few tools to figure this out. And I also want to say, there is so much confusion with this diagnosis and with this term. And as usual, when I address a new topic, I do a little research. I see what else are you guys looking at, what else are you learning, or what else is being taught to you. And given what I'm seeing out there, I can totally understand the confusion.
So, if you're new to my channel, you may be wondering, what qualifications do you have to address this? So, I am an LCSW. I am licensed to diagnose people, and I was a psychotherapist for over 20 years. And I would say, actually, that one of my skills was really understanding some of these diagnoses. And while I have worked with a handful of people with personality disorders, in particular, when I worked at agencies where people would be mandated for treatment, the vast majority of my clients were people who had somebody in their life with a personality disorder. So, even though personality disorders are probably less than 15% of the population, in my experience, more than 50% of the people in therapy are in therapy because they either grew up with somebody with a personality disorder or they are in now in relationship with somebody with a personality disorder. People with personality disorders make it extremely difficult to have and hold healthy boundaries. They can cause a lot of havoc at home and in the workplace. And in general, people with personality disorders, now this isn't true of all of them, but it is, I think, true of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, they don't land in therapy because they don't tend to think that they have the problem. And if they have a problem, they don't tend to think it is them. So, this will become more clear as I give you some of the definitions and descriptions of what's a normal narcissistic type behavior versus what's pathological and moving into the field of diagnosis.
All right, so as an aside, if you're new to my channel and you're not subscribed, please subscribe. It's a big help. And if you do like this video, find it useful, please do give it a like. All right, let's get into the topic. So, if you've seen a lot of my videos, you know that sometimes I like to go back to basics and look at the definition of a word. So, the definition of narcissistic, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is "having too much interest in and admiration for yourself." And the Merriam-Webster definition is "extremely self-centered with an exaggerated sense of self-importance marked by or characteristic of excessive admiration of or infatuation with oneself." Now, I mentioned that definition because there's a term going around called "healthy narcissism." And I will produce a video in the future about why I dislike that term. But given that that's the definition of the word narcissistic, I think it's much more useful to think of the term "self-involvement." How self-involved are we, right? And I created a few slides for you for this video because some of this can be hard to understand. So, here is a spectrum of self-involvement. And you can see it all goes all the way from one side, which I term healthy self-involvement, through a middle area, which I put down "insecure and lack of self-esteem," and then moving into Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the spectrum of narcissism.
So, I'm going to explain what I mean by this. So, healthy self-involvement. We all have to be self-involved to some extent, right? We're, as adults, the people who take care of our own needs. We have to have careers and jobs and move forward in the world and build families. And hopefully, we are doing it with a sense of empathy, love for others. So, we can be both self-involved but have a healthy balance with it. Now, this is a very dicey area, and I will talk more about this when I get into the video that talks about, you know, "healthy narcissism." But having a very strong sense of self-confidence, knowing a realistic appraisal of your strengths and your weaknesses, a realistic appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses is healthy. How self-involved one is at different stages of one's life can vary, right? So, children can be very, very self-involved, and it is developmentally appropriate. Children can also have a healthy degree of narcissism, right? Like they can look in the mirror and talk about how beautiful they are. They can be very preoccupied with themselves, and it is developmentally appropriate, right? So, that element of self-involvement, self-confidence, going for one's goals, right? That can be healthy and balanced with respect for others, relationships, empathy, connection, intimacy, all that good stuff. And actually, when we have really healthy self-confidence, in some ways, we're actually less self-involved than people who are extremely insecure.
So, in the middle area of this graph, right, I put people who have insecurity and a lack of self-esteem, right? Sort of low self-esteem, probably should say low, not lack of, correction on my own slide. But people who don't feel great about themselves can actually have a high degree of self-involvement, right? And this is a very painful thing. I talk about this sometimes as the "me loop." And so, people with high degrees of anxiety or even depression, the thoughts can go around and around, very centered on me. And it could be like, "I'm a louse. I shouldn't have done that. Why did I do that?" Ruminating about what I said, how other people responded to me, right? There's a lot of insecure focus on, "Who am I? Why am I this way? How are other people responding to me?" So, in some ways, that can actually be a higher level of self-involvement than for somebody who is sort of calmly confident, goes about their stuff, knows they're sort of good at these things, not so good at that, doesn't worry too much about what other people think, right? It's a place of more freedom, actually. So, but this middle area where people have the, you know, lower self-esteem and can seem a little bit needy in terms of seeking approval, right? So, either to themselves, like you may feel this way and not exhibit it, right? Or you might have somebody in your life who really seems to exhibit this, who really needs a lot of praise and encouragement. But that doesn't qualify them for narcissism. So, I guess what I'm saying is that there can be a narcissistic element, right? But then as narcissism gets more and more extreme, where the narcissism is really like, "It's all about me. All of it. It's only about me, and that's all I can think of, and I don't take other people into account," that's where you move into Narcissistic Personality Disorder on the right-hand side. But there is a major cut between the middle area of this arrow and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. So, what I'm showing on this slide are two slashes in this arrow. This arrow really isn't one smooth continuum. You really don't move from the two-thirds on this side of the arrow into Narcissistic Personality Disorder. There are some major slices. So, people to the left of these slices don't end up on the right-hand side. I hope that makes sense for you. And I think my next slide is going to illuminate that a little bit more.
So, what really differentiates kind of narcissism that we all might experience or feel from Narcissistic Personality Disorder are these things. Now, this isn't everything, but these are some of the major things to be aware of. And these would be some of the major signals for you in terms of knowing whether you are dealing with somebody who has really a pervasive personality disorder versus they're just having a bad day or at a bad point in their life where they're feeling, you know, a little bit more selfish and self-focused. Okay.
So, on the left of my slide, in the non-personality disordered area, people have empathy. There is an ability to empathize, to recognize and care about the emotions of others. Versus the pathological narcissism, where empathy is impaired. Now, narcissists sometimes can recognize the feelings of others, but they will tend to use that ability to recognize the feelings of others to exploit it. They don't really feel the empathy. They don't truly care about the other person's feelings unless it behooves them to do so. Okay. In the non-personality column here, there's mutuality in relationship. Which doesn't mean it's exactly equal. You might have a partner who needs way more reinforcement than you do, or you might be the one who needs a little bit more, you know, "Please give me affirmations." Right? It's okay. Like, there isn't always exact balance, but there is some mutuality and there's a recognition that others have legitimate needs. With Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and I'm going to use the term "pathological narcissism" in a similar way, which I know might be controversial, but let's bear with me for the moment, with pathological narcissism, relationships primarily serve the narcissist's self-esteem. The narcissist needs other people's admiration to be okay, like needs it deeply. And the narcissist will manipulate people to get that self-esteem. And if others in their relationship have needs, maybe not initially, but over time, if the needs of their loved ones conflict with their own desires and their own desire to see themselves in an elevated way, they will put down the needs of their loved ones. And then, on the non-pathological side of this, you know, equation here, people have an ability to take responsibility for their mistakes. Now, that doesn't mean that they always do, okay? None of us always do. We tend to blame sometimes. We blame other people, sometimes we blame ourselves, sometimes we blame both, sometimes we blame the universe, right? But we have the ability to take responsibility and acknowledge when we do something wrong. And even if, you know, we might have people in our lives who, yeah, they sort of acknowledge it, they're not very good at saying it, they may never say they're sorry, but they make some effort to change their behavior if they have hurt you, right? There's an ability to take some responsibility for their own behavior. On the pathological side, nope. People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder do not take responsibility for their actions or for how they hurt others. And a couple of these get qualified. The person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder will take responsibility for something they've done wrong if it clearly benefits them. If they can do that in a way that is going to get them the self-esteem and the praise and the elevated, right, self-image, if they're gonna get it from making a major apology, then they'll do it. So, pretty much all of these things on the Narcissistic Personality Disorder side, the narcissist can adjust based on how they want to present. For example, if a narcissist is trying to elevate themselves at work or in the community, their behavior might be impeccable. But at home, with their loved ones, who they're no longer trying to impress, their behavior is despicable. So, there is a real split. And the other term that should have been on this sheet is manipulation.
Now, one more spectrum for you. Not trying to confuse things here, but there's also a spectrum of people who have Narcissistic Personality Disorder in terms of how severe their symptoms are. So, personality disorders in general exist on a spectrum. You might have people who have very extreme manifestations of the symptoms, and other people where it's kind of muted, and they've learned to kind of keep a lot of their natural tendencies in check so that they can conform to society. So, even the personality disorder symptoms exist on a spectrum.
So, I want to go back to an earlier slide for something because I showed you this one where there's these two slashes. People on the right side of those slashes do not have empathy, navigate the world through manipulation, which I want to come back to, and generally have the other criteria I just talked about. So, while that is true, to the left of this line, for people with healthy self-confidence, healthy self-involvement, normal neuroses, right? Like insecurity, low self-esteem, but they're navigating the world with empathy. But that empathy doesn't always kick in, right? They have bad days. They may do things that are overly self-involved. They may hurt your feelings. You might hurt their feelings, right? Because for a while, or because you were triggered by something, or because of a lack of understanding, your empathy is temporarily limited, and your self-involvement is increased, right? So, yes, do we all do some narcissistic things at a time? Absolutely, right? Like, okay, what would be some normal things? Right? Like cutting in line, or, you know, rushing to get the best for yourself, or, you know, that kind of thing. It doesn't tend to be the behavior we're super proud of. And we don't always have perfect empathy, right? Like, sometimes we think that the other person is motivated like that, that they want to harm us, right? And if we're thinking that, and we're in that fight, flight, freeze mode, right? I talk about that as our reptilian brain. When we're in our reptilian brain, our empathy signals and ability to have empathy and feel other people's emotions and care about them is really, really limited. And this is why normal couples, right, can get into these fights where they're so nasty with each other, and then afterwards, they regret it, and they feel bad, and they try to talk it through.
So, I'm just saying this because not all behavior that appears narcissistic means the person is a narcissist or has Narcissistic Personality Disorder or has pathological narcissism, whatever these many, many words out there that you want to use. And I'm thinking of a client. She was dating somebody relatively new. And early in the relationship, he pulled out some awards, some like sports awards that he had won while he was in high school. And she had dated a narcissist before, and she was on high alert for narcissistic behavior. And she was very concerned that that was narcissistic. And okay, there's a little bit of a narcissistic element in it, but that in and of itself is not narcissistic, right? That's somebody wanting to share his background with her, wants her to know more about him. And yeah, okay, did he want her to know that he used to be good at this stuff? Sure. So, we do have to be careful. And I think the real key here is, does the person navigate the world through manipulation or through empathy?
So, if about 15% of the population have personality disorders, and most people with personality disorders navigate the world through manipulation, the rest of us, we navigate the world through empathy. We, you know, we sort of judge, we feel what other people are feeling. And again, it doesn't mean we're always acting perfectly empathetic and not acting at all narcissistically, okay? But the way we figure out how to move forward in life is with a sense of empathy. Whereas, overall, people with personality disorders, and in particular somebody with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, is going to be navigating the world through manipulation. So, this ends up being very, very confusing for the rest of us because our minds just don't work that way. So, we really don't understand. So, if I'm not, we're in an argument with a narcissist, and the narcissist says, "Look, I never said that." "Yeah, you did. You did." But they are so convinced and so convincing that they never said that, you question your own reality. And you could find thousands and thousands of examples like that. Once you've been in a relationship with somebody with a personality disorder for a while, you end up feeling like, "What? We're on different planets. And I'm maybe I'm going nuts." Right?
So, I've gone on here and I haven't told you the question that prompted this entire video. So, let me read that to you. The subscriber who commented was asking me what I thought of somebody else who publishes on YouTube about this topic a lot. And he said that he feels that she elaborates and expands the bounds and definition of narcissism so broadly that according to her, if you are hypersensitive to people's rudeness or tone or disrespect, you are a narcissist. And he asked me what I thought about that. So, maybe, given whatever he told you, you can tell. But no, sometimes people are hypersensitive to other people's criticisms because they're in that middle category of low self-esteem or insecurity. And it could be that they always feel insecure, or they could be just going through an insecure period of their life, or it's on a topic that they feel particularly insecure about. We don't all take criticism well, right? Like, really taking criticism well is a gift. It really is. And I think it's something we can strive for. So, those of us on the, you know, left side of that arrow can strive to not take things so personally, to take criticism in a more balanced way. I think that is healthy. And the more self-respect we have, and the more self-esteem we have, the more we're able to do that. Because if we have good self-confidence, we might be able to say, like, "Yeah, okay, I'm really not that good in that area. I could use some improvement there." Whereas if I'm really sensitive and sort of insecure about that, and I really don't want to admit it, it's going to be very hard for me. And then also, sometimes we were criticized a lot unfairly as children, and we have a snap reaction to it. Or maybe we're in a job situation or in a relationship where we're being criticized all the time, maybe by a narcissist, but we do feel that the criticism is unfair. So, there's a lot of reasons that we can take criticism personally. There's a lot of reasons we can worry about people being rude to us. Not that I think we should, right? Because I do think it's on them, not on us. But a lot of the people that I work with are very sensitive to other people not responding to their texts quickly enough, or if somebody's rude to them in the workplace, or isn't even like nice to them, does not mean they're a narcissist. But it does mean that the thinking is very me-focused. And it is that painful me loop. It is that painful, "Why isn't she responding to me? What did I do? Why, why didn't she respond to my text?" It's not really thinking about, "Hmm, I wonder what's going on for her that she didn't respond." Or not even worrying about it. Like, takes sometimes it takes me a couple of days to respond to a text, right? So, there isn't a balanced view of the world. It is an element of a, what I call that me-focus, but it's not narcissism. And in fact, if you do fall into that area on that arrow of the insecurity, lack of self-esteem, you actually might be more prone to end up in a relationship with a narcissist because the narcissist's criticisms are going to be something that initially you take on.
So, that's a very complicated topic. I will do more videos on it. And I work with people on boundaries around this stuff extensively. And I currently have a boundary course, a course on boundaries, which will really go into how do you have internal boundaries that protect you from getting into a relationship with somebody with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But also, if you're already in a relationship and it's not one you can get out of, how can you insulate yourself from their tactics? How can you set and enforce boundaries? Because the narcissist is not going to want you to do it. And if you're in a relationship with one, you know what I mean. So, this takes some work. And it is really based in your own self-respect, self-esteem, self-confidence, and a deep understanding that boundaries are for you. They're for you to protect yourself physically, emotionally, all sorts of ways. They're there for you to protect your sense of self. And sometimes they don't even really involve the other person. They're for you, by you. They don't always change the other person's behavior directly. But if they change your behavior, the behavior in the relationship will change. The mutual behavior, or whatever the behavior between the two will change, if your behavior changes. And that's all you have control over. So, we spend a lot of time on this in this program. If you have an interest, check it out. I'll put the link below. Post the link here. I think it will be super useful, not just with regard to the relationship you're in now, but going forward, like how to spot what is going to be a healthy relationship versus one that's not going to be healthy. It's a great tool to have.
So, this is a big topic. I'm very grateful to the subscriber who posted that question because it sort of got me thinking about doing a few more videos on this. I will be coming out with a couple more soon. So, please subscribe, stay tuned, and I'll see you soon.