Narcissistic Collapse
choosingtherapy.com
choosingtherapy.com
Some examples. The minute someone "crosses" me (or I feel they have, even if they haven't) I completely remove myself from the relationship. That doesn't work too well for jobs, romance, or friendship. I can become extremely aggressive when someone who I feel should be paying attention to me, doesn't (typically, a bored bank teller). I have strong road rage. I never make myself vulnerable, never say what I really think or how I really feel.
In general I consider that I deserve everything, and should be on top of the world. Since I'm a nobody, the space between what is and what should be is incredibly hard to bear. I hate everyone but the person I hate the most is me.
It's easy to identify what needs to change, but very difficult to act upon a specific behavior in the heat of the action.
The EMDR technique specifically has helped me here where as years of talk therapy helped me self awareness but didn’t help change the my initial reaction to triggering events.
For example, I find that not believing I deserve anything actually led to people treating me badly in the past. And developing a healthy dose of "I deserve this" mentality has improved my day-to-day interactions and even relationships.
Another thing I learnt much later in life was that wanting success is the first step of... success, and there is nothing wrong with grand dreams.
Maybe I need a narcissist friend and exchange notes.
I know you're making a joke, but be careful: you are exactly the kind of person a narcissist will latch onto and take advantage of.
> not believing I deserve anything actually led to people treating me badly in the past
People who treat others badly will seek out people with self-esteem issues, because they will come back for abuse again and again. Whereas a person with high self-esteem will not put up with abuse.
Good luck with your self-esteem boost!
Not just that, that kind of relationship presents itself (at least on the surface) as the comfort zone of both parties. The narcissistic end gets the validation and self-esteem boost. And the person with more self-doubt hears what they already believe in (even if they're trying to change it).
That's why it can be a dangerous path because a narcissist (pretty much by definition) is not there to help you make progress, they're there to reinforce their own ego.
Isnt this comment of yours exactly this? Being vulnerable, saying ehat you thing, how you feel?
But I think you're right, that even doing it anonymously is something. It's a step.
Besides, this is admission is a meta-case (which is also done anonymously through a throwaway account)".
A big problem is that most therapists have no experience with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as it's quite rare, but at the same time, conventional talk therapy actually exacerbates the disorder. So unless a person seeks out treatment for NPD specifically, they're unlikely to get better and in fact will likely get more stuck.
And it's a catch-22, because nobody will seek out an expert for a diagnosis they haven't received.
I was treated for a long time like I had anxiety and depression in therapy. But therapy just allowed me to go on and on about my problems and got a lot of tips and tricks about my mood, but they were all just papering over the core issue which is that I trap myself in situations I don’t like and then feel like I can’t leave because then I’d be all alone.
Through a fluke I ended up changing therapists to someone who got their thesis studying narcissism. She was the first person pretty much in my whole life who would cut through my b.s. and tactfully push back. Suggesting there might be more colors to situations than my distorted vision would let me see.
Now when I see someone else with unchecked narcissism it really bothers me because I know what kind of hell they must experience internally. It still hurts, but I’d like to think I’m starting to be more self aware.
Was a dreadful experience that I would never wish on anyone else and I am pretty certain I'll never trust anyone to co-found another startup with in the future.
Edit to add: advice for anyone in business with someone they suspect of NPD: tidy everything up, get legal advice, get away as quietly as possible, don't look back.
Source for the curious, many more online and on YouTube (including often helpful role play videos, strongly recommend for practical purposes): https://www.talkspace.com/blog/grey-rock-method/
It took about... 5 years? Maybe more? For me to learn to use the principles well, whatever you wanna call them.
These issues go core-level deep!
But yeah, grey-rocking & medium chill are effective strategies to create & maintain the necessary distance to endure the onslaught from covert/ full-blown/ any and all narcissists. Granted, we all got bits and pieces of that dark side in us somewhere, and all of us will have to learn to address it sometime and to whatever extent it impacts us.
The most important sentence in the whole post.
It is nice to have a common and simple language with which to talk about our emotions and mental health, and tempting (and probably sometimes useful) to try and diagnose others. Particularly given that many people are uncomfortable just talking about these topics without medical (or pseudo medical) labels. But this article seems to provide a shallow framework with which laymen can purportedly diagnose others, without citing any real scientific, medical, or really evidentiary basis of any kind. Fun to read but I am wary of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule
From the APA ethics guidelines:
However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.
This article is damaging because it provides people justification to use an overly-simplistic generalised theory to instead of doing the real work of understanding the other person.
Doing this amounts to gaslighting and degrades the ability of the two parties to have a meaningful discussion based on real events rather than bogus disconnected internet dogma.
Nobody who has lived with this type of person would agree with you.
Yes for scientific or legal purposes one may require a high burden of evidence.
But for everyday usage the narcissist terminology is a life saver for many people who may otherwise not understand the behavior of these dangerous individuals.
And boy howdy will research back up the other view - that it's a real thing with real victims.
It's comfortable to deny things that challenge a world view. But not helpful.
When shitty pop-sci articles like this "helpfully" label certain behaviors as bad-sounding medical terms, it helps no one. It just cements the stigma of mental illness in society and prevents people from seeking help.
I've recently adopted a very strong principle - I will vehemently oppose any kind of narrative that puts down people with mental illness, because I believe it to be cruel and unhelpful at best, and malicious and sadistic at worst.
Incorrect. It helps people who are trying to relate to those with NPD.
I no longer associate with people who have drinking as a core hobby, it just exacerbates whatever emotional issues they may already have.
He’s extraordinarily aggressive and abusive when he’s drunk, and lashes out at everyone. The thing is, now he claims he can’t even remember that happening when he’s sober. I don’t know if this is the truth or he’s lying lol
Either way it’s tragic and sad. Probably the most self destructive cycle I’ve ever personally witnessed.
You do a great job at keeping this place worth coming to.
Us as laypeople read an article like this and immediately begin to assess who we know that fits the mold, when we aren't properly trained in human psychology. Having an ego or thick skin is essential to survival in today's world, Heck The Rock has an entire TV show dedicated to stories of his childhood... Yet somehow psychology now wants to convince us that the spectrum for chaos goes from The Rock, To Donald Trump, To your Dad... It not helpful at all to me, and it seems like it only drives polarization rather than problem resolution. I also don't believe that humans stay fixed in one phase, like narcissism or depression, which makes treatment sometimes a really harmful, and often an ineffective but torturous thing to people that receive the classification and treatment.
I respect the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but it seems to me like since the pandemic, they have attracted some highly opportunistic individuals that make generalized characterizations of personalities that truly don't help with problem resolution, but they serve to drive sales of pharmaceuticals and services.
This article advertises "Better Help", a company that totally inundated social media during covid lockdowns. That same company (Better Help) ran TV commercials around that time to, and became popular out of nowhere. I assume they made a lot of money off of mental health marketing because even my family members and friends began to tell me about the company, how telehealth services for mental health did not work well for them, and how the company quickly billed them for undelivered services.
If you look up the definition for "BiPolar" it literally looks to me like it includes absolutely everyone I know --
Symptoms - Bipolar disorder
feeling sad, hopeless or irritable most of the time. lacking energy. difficulty concentrating and remembering things. loss of interest in everyday activities. feelings of emptiness or worthlessness. feelings of guilt and despair. feeling pessimistic about everything. self-doubt.
SOURCE: https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/bipolar-disorder...
That is any of us (conveniently) throughout our lives... Including some highly functional and responsibly motivated people. We go through peaks and valleys in life, If all modern psychiatry does is seek to drive medication and counselling profit and to generalize conditions across very different people to gaslight and create paranoia for profit, it's a highly problematic and costly threat towards our future.
Right now, in many states, individuals can file mental health petitions against friends and family members that get them involuntarily detained, even when they haven't committed any crimes, have no history of drug abuse, and have not shown any violent behavior. It's based on generalized conditions that the industry issues like this, and like the one for bipolar... It can and is being weaponized against many people, and it also drives a vast amount of unexpected medical billing for affected individuals that didn't even consent to being detained for the evaluations.
My advice is to be very wary of psychology for profit, and advice from companies that drive it.
If you look up the definition for "Bi Polar" it literally looks to me like it includes absolutely everyone I know, including some highly functional and responsibly motivated people. We go through peaks and valleys in life, If all modern psychiatry does is seek to drive profit and to generalize conditions across very different people to gaslight and create paranoia for profit, its a highly problematic threat towards our future.Because of the nature of how much social media and software drives our lives now, it's embedded deeply into emotionally manipulating people more than ever, and it complicates human psychology greatly. The best treatment for some afflictions is often to disconnect from toxic Internet resources rather than taking a pill. It's evidenced by Trump being off of Twitter for example, as the entire tone of the platform and even Trump changed when he was banned... As you can see though, people who want to profit off his narcissism work hard to try to drive him back to wild public statements and towards posting on Twitter again. Profitmaking drives a lot of negative behavior and toxicity these days in people, and often the things that drive harmful behavior can't be fixed with antidepressants.
The mental health industry should be making serious moves in countering and calling out the negative aspects of psych manipulation like that more than ever.
There are good and bad therapists on the platform. I've been on and off BetterHelp as a client for a long time, probably since around 2016. Every year, I switch my therapist to see what different branches of psychology can do for me. I have had some genuinely awful therapists. But one can change them easily.
My wife had a bad first impression of BetterHelp, too, because her first therapist was seriously incompetent (offering a live-love-laugh type of therapy, as we called it). She later quite liked the platform when she found a good therapist.
Before the pandemic, the platform was good with refunds, too. They used to offer discounts, and I remember it was pretty easy to get a refund as well. During the pandemic, I wanted to take a break from therapy one month into my 3-month plan, but all they could offer was to pause my subscription, which worked for me.
I think it's easy to make the platform work for you, but it's probably more likely that you will have a bad time than not if you go with your randomly assigned therapist. I hope this additional context is helpful.
Delusions of grandeur are a common symptom of bipolar mania. His diagnosis explains everything. If he's experiencing a manic episode now, it's hard to draw any conclusions at all about his baseline personality (which may in fact be narcissistic).
I think most narcissists only metaphorically think they're the next coming of christ, and most of them are too self-aware to say it even if they didn't.
If someone tells you they're Christ, or Napoleon, think schizophrenia or bipolar or manic-depressive before narcissism.
But as someone who has known several people diagnosed with NPD and bipolar. Kanye screams bipolar manic episode to me. The difference seems subtle until you've seen both close up.
But his every passing whim and crisis is the axis of existence for his gibbering swarm of sucker-creatures.
He has a truly wonderful support system.
He used outsized power to take control of a public square, and has let previously disruptive individuals back into that public square. (And Twitter is a public square. Governments, celebrities, charities and more all use it to communicate with people, and news organizations report on the goings-on there.)
I disagree with assigning a Narcissistic collapse to Musk though, I don't think he fits the criteria laid out in the article. Kanye West may fit, but his other untreated mental illness makes that difficult to separate from the narcissism that drives some of his actions. trump, of course, fits NPD, but again I don't think he's collapsing right now. putin as well doesn't seem to be collapsing despite what's happening to the russian military in Ukraine.
While I wish I didn't have to hear anything else about Musk, he's an incredibly powerful person who can effect massive change in our society. Whether that's right or wrong depends on your personal views, but I personally believe that no one person should have that power unless it has been temporarily granted to them by a government in a time of great need.
whether you find it funny/ effective is up to you, though.
I know exactly 3 rich people. None famous.
NPD is probably rare, but narcissism-lite is endemic to humanity. What are the indicators that tell me I should start inducing a collapse in myself? How do I make it obvious that my ego has diverged from the world around me?
For example, a relatively normal person might lash out after being dumped, but then after one regrettable night yelling at his friends, or one regrettable text message, realize that he did some dumb things and self adjust.
In general, the difference between what usually gets diagnosed a personality disorder, and the spectrum of normal is how systemic a behavior is, and how resistant a person is to changing their behavior.
In general, whenever you read about X personality disorder, you need to mentally qualify every statement of behavior with some variant of "to the extent of consistently/frequently causing self-harm or harm to others".
Chiefly, the fact that you are concerned with acting narcissistic is a strong indicator that you likely would not be diagnosed with NPD.
Like I said, acting narcasissitcally in a moment, lashing out when your ego/self-image is damaged, feeling insecure, wanting external validation - these are -all- normal human behaviors. Completely erasing these "faults" is... I think impossible.
That said, one does not have to be a NPD to be an asshole. Every group will have different thresholds from "noticeable trend of behavior" and "a real actual problem". Self-reflection is always helpful.
And
>Someone with NPD would believe at their inner most core that therapy is incompatible with their being
You do see how these things could correlate in a manner that leads to a diagnosis rate lower than the population rate.
And if reading https://old.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/ is any signifier, yeah it's likely rampant. It gets bad there quickly and stays bad.
Even my own mother is one such narcissist. She's tried to bait us siblings against each other. Fortunately, we'll just get on a call or zoom and actually talk. As of now, all siblings have blocked her. Thankfully, we (siblings) all met up for thangsiving, which was awesome. Mommy dearest can go tell herself how great she was, by herself.
That is, it's a problem in my mind that "Narcissists" are othered as a category whereas narcissism (self-love) is a natural and essential part of the psyche the same way your heart is a part of your body. Everybody has it. You have to engage with (cathect) your own self image to remember to do self-care such as brushing your teeth, planning for retirement, etc. Many things can go wrong with your narcissism the same way that many things can go wrong with your heart (heart attack, heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmia, etc.)
There is a case that people have more trouble with narcissism today than in the recent past because of the need for self-invention that people have today: it used to be that you didn't move, you didn't have to think about who you would marry or what kind of work you would do or how you fit in with other people, it was all decided for you. Chris Lasch, on the other hand in the book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism
saw the culture in the US being corrupted by narcissism in the later half of the 19th century to today. Japanese people think that analysis applies to Japanese people in the Tokugawa period and if you believe that you might also find traces of it in Imperial Rome. (Lasch would see religion with an ecclesiastical structure separate from the state as a countervailing force.)
Myself I had two periods in my life of about six months in my life where I experienced NPD-like symptoms and behaviors. Once I found an article in Psychology Today with a title like "Are you the target of a Narcissist?" and I think I had exhibited 10 out of 12 of the behaviors on their- list. In both of those cases I was under stress, in a kind of transitional situation, and exposed to bad influences.
People who genuinely like themselves aren't usually emotional extremists. Challenges and setbacks don't obliterate their sense of self and they can deal with them in a mature way. They're capable of empathy for others and don't need to perpetually one-up themselves with condescension, bullying, criticism, and psychological and emotional attacks.
Not so much narcissists, who are notorious for all of the above.
Self-esteem does change over time, but not always in predictable ways. Young people aren't necessarily more narcissistic than older people, or vice versa. The common factors seem to be embedded shame and a kind of terrified sense of impotence that can only be alleviated by constant and excessive praise, attention, and reassurance.
Terminology shifting in the last 10-20 years is another sign of that othering. The thing about othering is that they always other somebody else until they come to other you.
Or the development of the understanding that it is a spectrum?
> they always other somebody else until they come to other you
Who are "they"?
If you had to blame somebody for the othering it starts with Kernberg, Lasch makes his contribution, probably the worst of them all is Sam Vaknin who claims to be a narcissist and obviously gets narcissistic supply by doing massive SEO spam on the subject to warn the world about the dangers of narcissism. (He'd probably agree he's the worst and that's the disease talking) There is a particular horror in that people are waking up to NPD being the "master personality disorder" in our culture in that people who are NPD or NPD-adjacent frequently rise to the top in business and political organizations.
My first take is to reject "spectrum" in terms of autism spectrum because in the case of autism most people are not autistic at all. I think there are people with other disorders, particularly "schizoid spectrum" or "schizotypal spectrum" that want to imagine they are on the autism spectrum because there is so much awareness of autism.
I would say that "narcissism" is a part of normal psychological organization and that (1) has something to do with why some people with NPD can dangerously hook people, and (2) complicates people who have other disorders. I knew a woman who I think had schizoaffective disorder (never got a real diagnosis or treatment) that that caused her to be disabled and on top of that had intense feelings of worthlessness because she was disabled (narcissism spectrum). It was the latter that I think led to her suicide.
Clearly narcissism is part of human nature, but are you saying that people make too much of NPD and that we should ignore the impacts of it, both on the individual and people they interact with?
(2) If you've ever talked to someone in the limerent phase of love you will recognize that such a person will not bide any discourse that the love is a lost cause or that the love object is no damn good. "Naming and shaming" is a highly ineffective way to change people's behavior.
(3) The psychology of narcissism is full of insight into everyday psychology, ordinary behavior, and questions like "why do social interventions often have the opposite effect as intended?" If "narcissism" just becomes a label we slap on some other, we can't have conversations which might actually proof people from damage by narcissists.
(4) To take an example, some people would say the last president of the US was narcissistic and that he was a threat to democracy. On the other hand, one might say that democracy itself is problematic if somebody like that can run the gauntlet to get elected. Maybe that's "blaming the victim", but the real problem is the vulnerability of the population to a person with certain characteristics and simply calling out this person's characteristics has a polarizing effect where the people who weren't going to vote for him will glom on to this label and the people who were going to vote for this people will reject it. Daniel Boorstein in his 1963 book The Image thought that it was just a matter of time before celebrities would outcompete ordinary politicians and he might have been surprised it took as long as it did.
The problem is bad enough that one might conclude that democracy is not such a great idea after all, but one thing for sure is that someone is going to try to replicate his success again.
It might even be damaging for you. Maybe you're depressed, or have self-esteem issues, alcoholism, addiction, co-dependency, developmental issues, or any of a number of other things going on.
Re: Narcissism-lite -- it's been pretty well established that a small amount of narcissism can be a good thing, while too much is a bad thing. How to know the difference? Results. Does your life work for you? Do you have some friends that you can talk with about this? Or maybe a therapist?
Thanks!
Maybe try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonglen
Interestingly, though, the way you talked about inducing collapse reminds me of a Vajrayana Buddhism guru type thing where the guru sometimes punches you in the self-centered weak spot in the context of practices that help you realize self-clinging as the ultimate source of the pain.
That happened to me after I came to a pagan high priestess. I tried to explain my problems.. but she knew already (learned narcissism and other terrible behaviors as a defense - terrible parents). She was able to do a ritual which was a forced ego-death. The ritual was maybe 5 minutes. None of the hollywood trappings. It allowed me to see me for who I am, others for who they were. Basically it reversed much of my extreme ego, and did similar to what Tonglen does... but in a span of a half hour. I broke down at least 5 times with the gravity of what I had done to others in my life.
My case was extreme. And since I explicitly asked, she did so. I asked her afterward the downsides (since I knew I was spiraling downward), and most people just crumble under that. And I'm still eminently grateful she did so.
another thing is to relate to others in very simple context: a charity, doing simple stuff for others, it helps reconnecting with people without an egotistic ladder in mind
ps: I don't know i'm NPD or a competitor, but I often need perfectionist context and comparisons. I have trouble not being able to rank myself on a ladder.
What if you practice being wrong? Present your firmest-held opinions to those most prepared to challenge them.
I suspect non-narcissists don’t lose their minds over it because they practice it all the time, present more accurate and reasonable personas and don’t base their personality on a fiction.
Once someone builds their identity around a job, title, group, app... they either continue to build and nurture that identity by focusing exclusively on their strengths... or play "not to lose" and get defensive at anything that threatens their image.
But I think that might be over-medicalizing things.
Reading the article, I recognized a collapse in myself after a lost a deeply-valued job in a horribly-unfair way. I was fired after a new sysadmin pulled drives from a still-active storage array, after I told them to pull drives from the shut down array. The reason given was that I didn't write a change request, when there was no change control system in place.
I met some of the conditions in the article, but none of the abusive-towards-others ones - I didn't accuse my then-wife of being responsible, I didn't gaslight or lash out verbally. I withdrew into myself and became deeply depressed and anxious.
Back on topic after too much personal sharing, I think everyone has aspects of NPD, just as everyone is on a scale of other personality traits. The more we understand these scales and spectrums, the better we'll be able to deal with negative events, I feel.
So basically meta questioning yourself and your personality probably means you do not have NPD.
Also specifically for narcissism, there is a yt channel and website by Sam Vaknin, I think he possibly coined the term "narcissistic supply".
All the expertise on the really deep psychological stuff is like that to an extent, and I think the best way to understand any of it better is to compare a few different perspectives from academics, practicing therapists, and people who worked on healing themselves. I recommend learning about Object Relations Theory and Attachment theory from an academic perspective, Pete Walker’s CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, and Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy from a personal/clinical perspective.
Someone who is actually confident doesn't need a constant stream of validation from other people to feel good about themselves.
If you have or had to deal with people with NPD, this doctor is a very, very good source of lots of information / videos on the topic and how to deal with it and finally: move on.
I don't think there is any topic left, that wasn't discussed there and in a very human tone.
The space around NPD on Youtube is very saturated, but this one channel really stands out.
I never expected to see this topic on HN and now really had to share this to all interested parties.
-- Dr. C is one of the few that have, imo, the discipline to orient his content around how 'narcissistIC' patterns operate whereas nearly all others fall into the trap of describing 'the narcissIST'. This is a fundamental and, for me, life-saving difference: Narcissistic patterns are hugely insidious, because they go undetected (by design) and can even become virtues. In contrast, obvious narcissIST is obvious.
-- Dr. C uses repetition to reinforce the core identifiers of the narcissistic pattern: In nearly every video he will do a sort of 'verbal footnoting' to re-re-re-state what narcissism really is...
-- ... the manipulation tactics around control. Very few Youtubers keep the focus on the narser's fundamental interest in 'control'.
-- Dr. C has by far and away the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any nars channel. Every video is in list format, but as he goes thru the items in a given video, he frames them within the larger concepts of nars patterning as a whole. In my experience, this low-level/high-level framework is absolutely crucial and generative: When you see how behaviors emerge from a system, 'new' narcissistic tactics are understood as novel approaches to the narser's standard intentions.
I've just paged through his entire video catalogue, and every single title is bitter.
I think this is because people who become particularly interested in narcissism, speaking from my own experience included, were victims of them. Especially children of them. It's something very hard to just move on from.
Not a single one of his videos are titled things like "Where does a narcissist come from?", "how does a child of narcissists repair the damage", "how can a narcissist be cured" (or treated).
It's all just bitter stuff, and none of that, except perhaps for any "cut and run" advice, helps people move on. It's all just anger fuel.
I recently was let go by a narcissistic boss.
Early on I was fairly heavily 'love bombed' and told how great I was. I was told how the team was being built up around me, how my leadership and inspiration was driving the team forward. This boss did a few things, staying up late nights, to help me out on a few things. I thought "Wow this person really has my back!". So I let my guard down.
Over time, like the frog in boiling water, I gradually experienced a lot of gaslighting about my performance. One day I would be told X behavior is good and expected. The next day I was told that same behavior was problematic.
This boss increasingly became very top-down and domineering, and had a fairly fragile sense of their self worth. I helped to setup the team this boss took over as a Director. I was well liked and respected as a leader on the team (I was a Staff+ IC). I think this boss felt challenged by the esteem I had with my peers. They would work to undercut my own leadership, exclude me from decision making, and increasingly chide me for having idea. Providing technical leadership, and other activities that were core to my role, were seen as negatives. All of these were activities I used to receive praise for.
I started to feel like a scapegoat for anything going on in the team, being told I was "disruptive" and a "distraction" for doing my job. My expectations became whittled down to things like editing X document, or having Y conversation. Very micro-managed low level things.
Sadly, it took a long time for me to see this pattern. I thought I was the problem, and so I internalized a lot of the behaviors. It created a tremendous amount of stress and sleepless nights.
At my wits end, I tried to get some coaching and outside perspectives. I realized after a long career I hadn't had a negative relationship with a boss. I started to be more assertive after I decided after a year plus I wasn't the problem. As I started to speak up for myself more and more, the boss let me go, to the surprise of many of my fellow teammates.
I feel like I went through a classic idealization -> devaluation -> discard cycle of narcissism[1].
Long story short, please educate yourself about narcissism. Most empathic, 'normal' people assume they're the problem, they will internalize it, and so this kind of subtle abuse can creep up on you.
1 - https://pathwaysfamilycoaching.com/4-phases-of-a-narcissisti...
On the other side of the coin, if you met a new person and they immediately started talking about how they were completely in love with you and showering you with attention and affection that didn’t have any real backing in a developed relationship, it might make you uncomfortable. Unless you are feeling very insecure, in which case this behavior might seem like a gift from the gods.
Over-all it’s the lack of boundaries or long-term plan to follow through that differentiates honeymoon phase from love bombing. The narcissistic person just wants the attention, even if only for a couple of weeks. It can leave the other person feeling used.
It's going to be a weird world, but maybe we will be better adjusted ?
Or does that sound like the ending of Serenity the movie?
It is one way that private schools can justify their expense and that rich people can pass their status to their kids since in a private school it might be safe to be different, but if you are different in the public schools you will get wounded for life and not fulfill your potential.
So it happens behind close doors to people who don't fight back for whatever reason, and are mostly hidden.
What if celebrities were on the TV saying how much having a phone provide therapy chnaged their lives? We can easily imagine a fringe of people doing this - quantified living etc? What happens when those people start to have real world advantages? Are healthier wealthier?
What happens when a company of well adjusted people whose conversations are mapped is able to react faster? Extract meaningful knowledge graphs from who knows what? What about a country - will their army be more efficient ? will having a knowledge economy be all about meta data management ?
What happens at the tipping point ? When does it become suspicious that you are not medically recording your life? When does refusing to allow these recordings make a defence against accusations harder?
None of this is great, or fair, or even better.
But these are feasible future options - and something is going to chnage - this is all possible with tech - and we shall have to deal with it?
I am not advocating for this, I am pointing out the technology not only exists, but exists in every home. It's hard to imagine something along these lines not happening
Edit: I just want to be clear I am not trying to belittle or reject emotional abuse that goes on day in and out across all societies - nor suggesting that tech is some silver bullet for complex problems.
This is the problem deepfakes are meant to solve
If you continue to complain after that, it will be because you have an ego disorder -- those damned narcissists, always throwing tantrums -- and you'll be paired with a confessor and medicated to within an inch of your sanity. This will be called "care".
This is not of course a pass for people to be offensive and obtuse, as it is usually interpreted (see for example Elon at Twitter). But still it's a difficult path to walk
It's a mechanism to rant online about your life without the risk of someone calling you on your bullshit. I'm not saying that all of the stories on there are bullshit, I'm just saying that it's (ironically) primarily a label that comes out to describe someone when you are looking to find a narrative that protects your own ego -- because you've experienced trauma and you are looking for a mechanism to not put an ounce of blame on yourself.
Are there narcissists in society? Sure. Is a large percentage of the population narcissistic? No.
When someone "collapses" in the way that the article indicates and/or slights you, does that probably make them a narcissist? Absolutely not.
Calling someone a narcissist lets you freely claim that the other side is incapable of sincere emotion and lets you get away with believing whatever the hell you want. It's popular because sometimes you need to do that to move on. But it's not a healthy way to look at the world.
/rant
Are you suggesting that the 800k subscribers indicate an over- diagnosis of narcissism? Because I don’t think that follows.
I don’t know what my parents are, but they’re not narcissists. However I have a good friend whose mother is definitely a covert narcissist. When you’re trying to help friends and family you end up reading about disorders that don’t affect you directly. There is even a whole genre of help books for people who live with someone who has a problem. Addiction, depression, autism, narcissism… you name it, there’s a book for people in the blast radius.
You also see it with countless of people claiming to have ADHD, bipolar disorder or other actual diagnosable diseases which are not common in the general population.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1...
The comment you reply to describes people who label others as narcissists for frivolous reasons (they disagree with people, want to dehumanize or blame, want to protect their own ego).
We haven't established that they're the same people or correspond with one another. I think both groups simultaneously exist. I know I've witnessed the second group in real life, though I wouldn't dare claim it's everybody who says they've been abused by a narcissist.
To be very clear, neither would I.
There's zero indication that the GP as approaching this from the perspective of an aggrieved narcissistic parent. There are certainly some people who were actually "raised by narcissists," but the point is that it seems like a lot of people weren't use that concept as cover for validation and to air unrealistic complaints on social media.
I love helping dumb people! So I posted that link, which explores this very issue.
But it's not a singular story, it's many thousands of independent stories. That link only provides the other side of some of them.
A famous one in our sphere is the YouTuber "TechLead", who referred to his wife as a narcissist while unwittingly revealing his own clear cut narcissism by describing many of his behaviours in that relationship (like having her have a GPS tracker on her phone, demanding she did certain things for him because he said she should, like investing his money when she had no interest in investment, and making out he did nothing but right in the relationship). Turns out his braggadocios personality in his videos wasn't much of an act -- he was merely exaggerating his natural thinking, which is why his "character" came so easy for him.
In my own case, my mother was especially fond of hissing that everyone else was "selfish", while being herself a profoundly selfish and self-centered human being in every interaction she had with anyone (she was severely damaged due to a nasty childhood).
This is because narcissists project, transferring all responsibility onto others, in order to keep the pain of feeling shame away from their fragile senses of self. This includes projecting the mental illness itself, which is where their tendency to gaslight comes from.
But I think a narcissist using the very specific word "narcissist" to describe others is quite rare, because it's a bit too close to home. It has a very specific definition and presentation, and a narcissist is scared of anything that could affect their sense of self -- and an undiagnosed mental disorder is a particularly severe example of that, so it's dangerous for them.
I'd say for the most part that subreddit is a force for good. Even if there's people in there who themselves refuse to accept responsibility, its reach gives those who are still in the dark a chance to discover the truth as to where they've come from.
To anyone who has had prolonged contact with this style of personality, then you’re also well aware that the first thing they’ll do is say someone else is the problem. Think about Trump’s repeated bald-faced accusations that his opponents are doing what he is accused of.
If you can’t see things from someone else’s perspective, then it seems to you like other people can’t see things from your perspective. If you are completely absorbed with worrying about yourself, then people who aren’t constantly worrying about you seem self-centered (i.e., centered on “not you”!)
A good way to tell the difference is to see how much detail a person goes into when describing a conflict with another. If they describe the conflict from both sides and in detail, then things are probably ok. If they describe conflict in very vague terms and vilify their opponent, then run for the hills.
I'm a child of two NPD sufferers. My mother had severe vulnerable narcissism, and my father had aggressive grandiose narcissism. They both had NPD proper, as it was clear that their narcissism was driven and accompanied by deep rooted psychological distress of some kind. My mother was such an emotional wreck that she could barely function, and my father dealt with his own demons by filling every waking hour with work to distract himself.
They both came from vicious childhoods.
The problem is that you presume, like everyone does, that your parents, or perhaps partners and coworkers, are just normal people. They look normal, they behave for the most part like normal people. But under the surface, they're really not.
And if you had them as parents, you don't come away unscathed, not by a long shot. I only realised this stuff in my thirties, after decades wondering why I wasn't like everyone else, and why my life was going such a bad way, full of suffering and desperation. So much pain could have been avoided if I'd known and understood. Now I know about NPD and the effect it has on children of its sufferers, so much about me makes sense now, and I've been able to start healing myself.
It is not right that this stuff is just being left under the radar, in the backdrop of our society. It needs to be brought out into the open, and challenged, and addressed.
It's a hard one though. The problem is that NPD overlaps so heavily with evil, it's hard for people to empathise with them at all, which results in hatred and vigilance towards them, them which they respond to by doubling down.
We need to do much more to get the word out about it and where it comes from. We need to get these people to think back to their younger selves and introspect about what happened to them, and find ways to repair it. A narcissist can only care about themselves -- but that includes their young self (the "younger self technique"). It might be the only way.
I was one of those cases. After years of repeatedly being told I was going to be sent to live at my mother’s house (not an appealing prospect at the time, I assure you), my father finally threw me out. Then he immediately started phoning anybody who would listen, crying to them that I “left him” just like my mother did.
Maybe the collapse is defined a bit too generically. It looks like it could just be someone going through a rough patch.
For example, if you tell your friend that you are not interested or available for some suggested activity, they may lash out with verbal abuse rather than say “oh ok”. Or they may manipulate you into doing the thing by suggesting that your friendship would be over if you say no, they are considering suicide, etc.
A single event like this may not indicate a disorder but making a pattern of this kind of thing is definitely not normal and is pathological.
Are you sure about that? Like... as in... full blown raging and making a scene? It's normal to experience negative emotions in such a situation, but it's not necessarily normal to fly off the handle.
Ego-death can be brought on by yourself, with extreme introspection and seeing yourself from inside your body. The end is realizing your body is not you. This sometimes can be done by situations, but usually done in some branches of psychology, or by an occult practice.
Narcissistic collapse is when the facade of control by a narcissist is collapsed down around them forcefully, and they then have to deal with the fact they are not the center of the universe. This loss of control causes them to spiral inward, and then lash outwardly very violently. They , in almost all cases, lack the capability of addressing the causes of narcissism or the damage they cause others.
I still see them somewhat the same, but can see that perhaps a collapse is an event before/during an ego death. Somewhat similar to narcissistic mortification where a great revelation can have a complete change of heart. While it's practical in storytelling (Christmas Carol, The Grinch, etc), you are right. It's very rare in reality for one to address the causes. Instead they may stay stuck in their ways or double down until their ultimate demise (Moby Dick, Great Gatsby, etc)
This is definitely not the case for friends or myself who've experienced ego death, with or without psychedelics.
At a time when one has expectations of your entire family placed on you, hundreds of thousands of dollars of financial pressure, an entire new peer group to be 'cool' for, along with unyielding studies and new requirements, it's a time where many must destroy their old self image.
> In the workplace, narcissistic collapse can also resemble a tantrum. A boss with NPD, for instance, may impulsively fire people, bully others, or make nasty threats about how they intend to give people consequences.
Now, capitalism... now that causes a whole host of problems. If a corporation were a real human, it would be diagnosed as a sociopath. Noam Chomsky did a great work with "The Corporation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk
In this case though I wasn’t saying the people calling this leadership are narcissists, but I do think it’s a sign they are confused that the behaviours they are calling leadership are also symptoms of a narcissistic meltdown.
And in my case, all my siblings have deemed that our mother is indeed a narcissist. We're all no-contact with her. We're not docs, so med diagnosis is off the table... But you can definitely be a narcissist without being diagnosed with NPD.
Why? Because they still have a decent amount of support and don’t want to alienate their fans?
By 1936 it was clear that Hitler was a crazy narcissist. If people don’t speak out due to fear it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because everyone thinks the number of people supporting the narcissist is so much bigger than it actually is.
The best antidote against a narcissist is having the largest possible amount of people spending time with them 1:1 or in the same building anyway.
Because by itself it's just an ad hominem, just an attack against someone's character, with no other substance. It's not better than to point a finger and yell "Ur dumb!".
By pointing out a bad behavior and denounce it.
“Call out a Narcissist day” should be a thing
I worry more about current world leaders, like Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping. What's Putin going to do when it's clear he's loosing in Ukraine, and popular support within Russia? What's going to happen in North Korea or China when their leaders lose support?
Is Trump's tantrum about losing the 2020 election an example of Narcissistic Collapse?
> Is Trump's tantrum about losing the 2020 election an example of Narcissistic Collapse?
Given what I know about NPD, Trump’s initial run for the presidency might be an example of lashing out in response to a perceived slight.
Trump was vocal in the “Birther” scene during Obama’s presidency. In response to that, Obama publicly ridiculed Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011: https://news.yahoo.com/news/blogs/ticket/obama-ridicules-tru...
I’ve heard several people, on both sides of the political aisle, mention this specifically as the direct motivation for Trump to run in 2016.
As the race continued, Clinton’s overt condescension of Trump seemed to galvanize him to continue and double down - he returned her mocking with straight-forward insults. Because Clinton was wildly unpopular with a bit over half the country, this went over very well indeed and likely resulted in his election.
All in all, I’m fairly confident that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the direct causes of the Trump presidency - they unwittingly played directly to the part of Donald Trump’s personality that most strongly motivate him.
Also Tyler, the Creator raps about it in the song 911 / Mr Lonely:
> They say the loudest in the room is weak
> That's what they assume, but I disagree
> I say the loudest in the room
> Is prolly the loneliest one in the room (That's me)
> Attention seeker, public speaker ...
Yes.
That said being married to an alcoholic narcissist sucks.
Very few psychology article deal with this and only consider narcs as evil clear headed monsters. Not always.
It's the same pseudo-scientific garbage that explains how bullies are vulnerable and that's why they bully.
No, you idiots, bullies, narcissists, and other pricks do what they do because it gives them advantage in life. Period. They choose their wealth, health and life over the wealth, health and life of other people.
Everyone I've met who was toxic in my adult life seemed to me to have their toxicity coming from something more complex than that. Narcissists seems to be people who are desperately trying to assert something about themselves and constitutionally incapable of self-awareness. Bullies seem to be threatened by how someone else acts according to different values than them, and their weak emotional reaction to it is to try to change it, or punish the person who doesn't see the world they do, because their existence threatens the bully's tenuous validity.
It's convenient to say that people are just doing it for advantage but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny if you talk to these people. It also doesn't match their actual behavior at all, since they rarely gain any actual advantage (in wealth, health, or life, for instance). If anything it's usually totally obvious to people around them and alienates them from "healthy" people.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/04/the_abusive_boyfrien...
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/02/the_other_ego_epidem...
>They choose their wealth, health and life over the wealth, health and life of other people.
Isn't that what most people do everyday?