Hi, I'm Dr.Tracy Marks a psychiatrist and I make mental health education. Today I'm talking about narcissism. I've gotten multitudes of requests to talk about narcissism, and I've put it off for a long time because it's a very complex topic and I wanna do it justice. Narcissism has several facets to it. Here are some of the terms you've probably already heard.
Narcissism, pathological narcissism, malignant narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, narcissistic vulnerability,narcissistic injury, and narcissistic abuse. In this article, I'm only going to talk about healthy narcissism. Narcissism is not a diagnosis, it's a psychological concept that helps explain or define human behavior.
Another term for this is a psychological construct. Narcissism is defined as love of the self. The name comes from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. Narcissus was a handsome hunter who fell in love with himself, and eventually with his reflection in a pool of water. When he leaned down to kiss his reflection, he couldn't see his face. So he continued to stare at the reflection until he died of thirst.
In its most basic form, narcissismas we use the term today is neither good, nor bad. It's on a spectrum of healthy to pathological. Healthy narcissism is the ability to take pleasure in yourself and your accomplishments. You develop a healthy level of narcissism in childhood, when you have parents who will allow you the freedom to form your own opinions and express your most vulnerable emotions in a supportive environment without criticism and shame.
So in essence, you're supposed to love yourself. Think of it as a fortress, that's built with an impenetrable core. Your outside is made of material that can be damaged, but only on a superficial level. So for example, if you have a strong core of self love and joy, you can sit in a job that you hate and take the arrows that are thrown at you. The arrows may damage you superficially like making you unhappy at work, but you can with stand it because you still have your core that allows you to feel satisfaction with life from the inside.
So when you leave your job at the end of the day, you have the capacity to move on to something else that makes you happy and restores your damaged outer covering. And this doesn't have to be something huge, like running a non-profit in your spare time. This could be as basic as going home and binge watching a show on Netflix to unwind. It's doing something that makes you feel good and rejuvenate you.
Pathological narcissism moves down the continu in the direction of overinflating yourself worth and doing things that are exclusively for your self gratification and often to the detriment of others. For some people, this can look like the need to take from people to feel a gain. You tear people down to feel built up. Someone else's win is experienced as a loss for you. Have you seen this before? Here's an example, you can have a friend who seems to be pretty content, where she is in life, and really isn't complaining about much. And you tell her that you're buying a new house with a gorgeous backyard and a waterfall, but she's not very happy for you. Maybe she says, why do you need a waterfall? That's just gonna be a lot of upkeep. Or she says a waterfall must be nice. You don't understand it because she just bought a house last year and seemed happy in her new home.
Why can't she share your enthusiasm? Because she has this gut feeling that regardless of what she already has, when someone else gets something, it feels like she's lost something. Behind the pathological narcissism is a perpetual need to fill your cup because it always seems to be empty. Everything is weighed against, what about me? The person with a healthy level of narcissism can hear your news and think, wow, a waterfall, when do I get to see it? In this case, because your cup feels full, you don't see your friends 'accomplishments as threatening. Here's another example that illustrates some of these points.
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