A brief description of “narcissistic” personality

The basic characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder are an exaggerated sense of self-worth and a lack of empathy for others. Such people unfoundedly exaggerate their achievements and talents, believing that they should be regard as “special talents” and that their ideas are unique and can only be understand by special people.

In reality, when they are slightly unsatisfied, they feel their own worthlessness. They imagine that they are very successful, that they have power, intelligence and beauty, and they will feel intense jealousy when they meet someone who is more successful than them. Their self-esteem is very fragile, they care too much about other people’s evaluations, and demand continuous attention and praise from others; they feel inner anger and humiliation to criticism, but they cover it up with cold and indifferent reactions on the outside. They cannot understand the subtle feelings of others and lack the empathy to empathize with others, so interpersonal relationships often have problems. Such people often have a sense of privilege, expect to receive special treatment, and their friendships are mostly based on interests.

People with narcissistic personality

People with narcissistic personality disorder often have pervasive interpersonal problems; their depression, interpersonal difficulties, or unrealistic goals may affect their work. But on the other hand, their pursuit of utilitarianism may also enable them to achieve higher work achievements.

The patient has an exaggerated belief that he or she is special and superior. What they show is not strong self-confidence, but excessive enthusiasm for themselves. The patient’s obvious belief is a compensatory psychology of his own superiority: “I am a precious and special person”, or “I am better than other people”. If others do not recognize the patient’s special status, the patient feels that he has been subject to intolerable abuse and becomes angry, defensive, and depressed. If you fail to become a winner or are not treat as a special person, you will feel inferior, insignificant, and weak, and will seek self-protection and self-defense remedies.

People with narcissistic personality disorder experience

People with narcissistic personality disorder experience “hot and cold” moods. Guys around me don’t quite understand where their heat comes from and where their coldness comes from. These are all manifestations that they have no boundaries with external things (objects). The outstanding feature of people with narcissistic personality disorder is that everything external is direct towards themselves.

They are indifferent to everything except themselves. So they are hostile to the outside world, but their self-recognition always wants to be recognize from the outside world. So their actions are very destructive.

An objective fact is: there are narcissistic factors in all normal love relationships. There are some issues of degree here. The difference between the love relationship between normal people and the love relationship between narcissists is that although normal people project their own ideals onto the other person when they love, they can realize that the other person is an independent individual with desires and desires different from their own. need. Normal people know the difference between themselves and others while projecting.

The narcissist’s heart seems to be saying: If I don’t love myself, who will love me?

Cause

Patients with narcissistic personality disorder usually receive too much attention and unprincipled admiration in childhood, while taking little responsibility and receiving little criticism and frustration.

Psychologists believe that the emergence of narcissistic personality stems from the long-term inability of the self-object (parents or main caregivers) to penetrate into the child’s narcissistic needs, which causes the individual’s narcissistic development to suffer traumatic setbacks, which in turn leads to the narcissistic libido fixation. On top of the original self-object—the idealized parental image and the grandiose self—the normal deformable internalization process is blocked, and the development of narcissism is stagnated in childhood or even earlier infancy.

Specifically, if a child suffers severe narcissistic trauma, it will be difficult for the grandiose self to be integrated into the personality, and the child will continue to pursue the original expressiveness and grandiose fantasies in its original form. Likewise, if a child experiences traumatic disappointment when interacting with adults he admires, then the idealized parental image cannot be transformed into the superego, but will continue to pursue the original, transitional, and perfect form in an unchanged form. self-object, just to maintain the original narcissistic balance.

That is to say, individuals with narcissistic personality try to compensate for the lack of narcissism from the objects they experienced in adulthood. They regard both the objects and themselves as perfect, omnipotent and seek unlimited praise.

Since the emergence of narcissistic personality is caused by the lack of narcissistic needs in childhood, the essence of narcissistic personality treatment is to create a situation for the patient so that the patient can get the opportunity to restart the healthy development of narcissism and let the narcissistic development stopped in childhood The developmental process continues, thereby compensating for defects in the psychological structure.

Features

Narcissistic personality disorder. It is generally believed that its main characteristics are as follows:

1. Addicted to praise and unable to listen to negative words. Reacts to criticism with anger, shame, or feeling humiliated (although not necessarily expressed immediately).

2. Like to instruct others and ask others to serve themselves. To express a arrogant behavior or attitude.

3. Excessively arrogant, exaggerating about one’s own talents, hoping to receive special attention from others. A feeling of omnipotence about oneself. After they have made some achievements, they always think that their own is the best.

4. Believe that the issues he is concerned about are unique to the world and cannot be understood by some special people. They believe that they are unique, they believe that they have noble blood, and they believe that their unique “abilities” can only be understood by a small number of high-status people.

5. Have excessive fantasies about unlimited success, power, honor, beauty or ideal love. They are addicted to the fantasy of endless success, power, talent, and beautiful love.

More Features

6. Believe that you should enjoy privileges that others do not have. The feeling of being privileged. They expect others to treat them with special care for no reason. Some do not care about the interests of others, only care about “as long as I am happy”, and are risk takers in interpersonal relationships. They believe that “everyone has to revolve around me” and will become hostile to others if they are slightly “indifferent” in the crowd.

7. Desire for lasting attention and praise.

8. Lack of empathy. Lack of empathy. This seems to be common to almost all people with narcissistic personality disorder. They seem to understand people sometimes, but they cannot achieve a truly equal interaction. They may talk most about equality, but their actual performance is “Marxist requirements for others and liberalism for themselves.”

9. Have a strong sense of jealousy. Often jealous of others and believing others are jealous of themselves.

Narcissistic personality is mostly formed in early adulthood. As long as five of these items appear, you can be diagnosed as narcissistic personality.

They are people who live completely in “themselves”. They cannot truly understand the people around them. Everything in their eyes is closely connected with “themselves.” Everything external has something to do with yourself.

a. Subconsciously regard the external object as an individual subordinate to oneself and as part of one’s own identity. This kind of interpersonal relationship is manifested by severe confusion of self-boundaries or no self-boundaries.

b. Omnipotent. They over-idealize many things and think they are omnipotent.

c. The infinite need for praise is to prove that you are omnipotent through the praise of others.

d. Lack of empathy. This is the loss of the phenomenon of “sharing the joys and sorrows” with others. Even if they understand some people, this understanding and experience of others is what others regard as themselves or part of themselves. In short, they can never “think about problems or experience problems” without themselves. Their praise of others is actually to satisfy their own narcissism by treating the object as themselves.

Diagnostic criteria

There is currently no completely consistent standard for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality. It is generally believe that its main characteristics are as follows:

1. Reacting to criticism with anger, shame, or feeling humiliated (although this may not be immediately apparent).

2. Like to instruct others and ask others to serve themselves.

3. Excessively arrogant, exaggerating about one’s own talents, hoping to receive special attention from others.

4. Believe that the issues he is concern about are unique to the world and cannot be understand by some special people.

5. Have excessive fantasies about unlimited success, power, honor, beauty or ideal love.

6. Believe that you should enjoy privileges that others do not have.

7. Desire for lasting attention and praise.

8. Lack of empathy.

9. Have a strong sense of jealousy.

As long as five of these items appear, you can be diagnose as narcissistic personality.

Treatment

For the treatment of narcissistic personality disorder, the following methods can generally be use:

1. Get rid of self-centeredness. 

The main characteristic of narcissistic personality is self-centeredness, and the most self-centered stage in life is infancy. It can be see that the behavior of patients with narcissistic personality disorder actually regresses to the stage of infancy. Judith Wilster said in his book “Necessary Loss”: “A person who is obsess with the cradle does not want to lose his childhood and cannot adapt to the adult world.” Therefore, to treat narcissistic personality, it is necessary to understand those infantilizing behaviors.

You can list down the personality traits that you think are annoying and the criticisms others have made about you, and see how much of them are infancy. For example:

①Eager for lasting attention and praise, and will adopt extreme behaviors once they are not notice.

② Like to instruct others and regard themselves as the emperor.

③ Covet other people’s good things and be extremely jealous of other people’s success.

By recalling your own childhood, you can find that the above personality traits have their prototypes in childhood. For example:

①Always eager for parents’ attention and praise. Whenever parents ignore this, they will act rogue, make trouble or do other whimsical actions to attract their parents’ attention.

②When I was a child, I had to stretch out my hands for clothes and open my mouth for food. My parents were servants.

③Always want to possess everything. What other children have, I also want to have.

After understanding that your behavior is a replica of childish behavior in childhood, you must always warn yourself:

①I must work hard to achieve results to attract the attention and praise of others.

②I am no longer a child, and I have to do many things by myself.

③Everyone has their own good things. I want to fight for what I deserve, but I don’t envy what others deserve.

You can also ask someone close to you to be your supervisor. Once you show self-centered behavior, he will give you warnings and reminders to urge you to correct it in time. Through these efforts, self-centeredness will slowly be eliminate.

2. Learn to love others. 

For narcissistic people, it is not enough to abandon the self-centered concept. They must also learn to love others. Only in this way can they truly realize that giving up the self-centered concept is a wise choice, because in order to obtain love, you must first give. like. Fromm elaborated on this view in his book “The Art of Loving”: the love of young children follows the principle of “I love because I am loved”; mature love follows the principle of “I am loved because I love”; Immature love thinks “I love you because I need you”; mature love thinks “I need you because I love you”. Wilster believes that through love. We can transcend life. Narcissistic love is like the love of a child, immature love, so we must work hard to correct it.

The simplest act of love in life is caring for others, especially when others need your help. When someone is sick and you send them a timely greeting, the patient will be sincerely grateful to you; when someone else is in financial difficulty, if you do what you can to help, you will naturally gain the respect of others. As long as you have more love for others in your life, your narcissism will naturally lessen.