Narcissism

*This post came from the Steve Pavlina forum before it closed down. I am not the original author.


Narcissism is a big problem when we’re trying to communicate with the other sex. Nobody ever thinks they’re narcissistic, but narcissism isn’t an acute disease, it’s a pandemic. We’ve all got it, the question is to what extent. Narcissism is a product of our times, plenty of people make good livings off of it. The Last Psychiatrist goes into detail far better than I, I defer to him for a better blog concerning it.

If you want to get better at relating to others, you have to really get narcissism, and how it affects you, personally. You can’t just witness it in others. That’s only half of the journey. You need to realize that all of your expectations and demands stem from narcissism, and that they need to be thrown out and replaced with better ones.

When a father expects his daughter to dress conservatively, that’s narcissism. He believes he is the gatekeeper to his daughter’s sexuality, that she’s too young/dumb to handle the responsibility. He’s over-estimating his contribution to her maturity due to a misplaced sense of duty. Making illogical demands does not serve this purpose, having honest conversations does. But the narcissist is afraid of honesty, he is worried that honesty will strip control from him. Control over others is the cardinal task of narcissism.

So much of what we say and think is predicated on narcissism, it’s nearly impossible to catch yourself being narcissistic while you’re in the act. The solution is to proactively invite honesty into your life. Learning to make simple statements that express the whole of a situation, including your selfish desires.

If you’re single, male and horny, honesty is approaching a woman, telling her she does funny things to the insides of his pants, and asking her for her number/a kiss. Cut the BS and be straight up. The key is to avoid all expectations that there is a “process” to dating/relationships/sex. It’s all about the present, and it remains about the present even years after you’re married and the kids are in school. Honest communications work always, and serve to cut narcissism off at the root.

Honesty means realizing that there’s another person behind that mask you’re looking at. Too often we see each other not as people, but as supplemental roles in the movie constantly running through our heads. 

To avoid looking at people as unfeeling roles, always labor to never say a person “should” be doing something a certain way, no matter how strongly you feel about it. In fact, the more strongly you feel, the more likely you’re succumbing to narcissism. Knowing somebody means understanding their motivations, and until you have deep communications with somebody through numerous radically honest conversations, you won’t be able to, and the mind, when it cannot understand something, typically makes something up to bridge the gap.

 The mind hates uncertainty, it will constantly try to fill in gaps. You’ve seen this every time you’ve ever witnessed or participated in a political argument. Nobody “knows” that conservative or liberal policies are best, but that doesn’t stop people from being “totally certain” about their position. The convincing arguments they make about these positions are the mechanisms by which the brain fools itself. 

This is even more true of relationships. You don’t ever really know the person you’re relating with, but that won’t stop you from believing you know them better than they know themselves. Based on what? A pattern of behavior? That tells the narcissist nothing. And unless you’re being radically honest, you’re being a narcissist.