A little clarification
The idea of looking for or finding narcissistic behaviour EVERY WHERE, has snook in. That's certainly not my intention in starting this thread. Please stop that tangent.
Narcissism is a spectrum, both of degree of the behaviour, and in the forms it takes. Plenty of people can be narcissistic, without it forming their entire personality and "who they are". In other words, they can behave narcissistically without qualifying for a diagnosis of personality disorder.
Shimmerz, I hugely appreciate and value your input here, unfortunately you've seen narcs more clearly and more closely than I have.
You (Shimmerz) are right, the worst narcs that ive spotted have used their narcissistic behaviour to further their careers, they triangulate, assassinating the characters and performance records of any who fall foul of them, to their higher management.
They blame shift and scapegoat, dumping the blame for their mistakes onto people below them, who either get fired on the spot, or certainly don't get to defend themselves in the meetings where the lies are told.
They bully, and dress it up as "getting the job done", "that's how you run an x" or "just having fun (so long as the victims are never uppity enough to give any crap back).
They gaslight and outright lie to cover their tracks.
They goad, and when the victim eventually reacts, that reaction is used to damn the victim, while the narc plays all righteous and hurt. The victim was too sensitive, mentally disturbed, clearly psychotic...
Even if narcissism is the entirety of a person's personality, if it is what they are;
When those shitty behaviours work, why would such a person ever end up diagnosed?
They don't and they generally won't.
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That's where the infectious part comes in,
If you are raised amongst such behaviour, or you work amongst it for years on end...
Perhaps ( as I used to do) you begin to see it as the way to be, the way to get on, how to get the job done, how to treat a partner, how to treat offspring and colleagues. It never did me any harm...
I'm not looking to victim blame, I'm looking for how ( as someone who's beginning to recognise these behaviours in my family of origin when I'm well into middle age) to spot these behaviours
How to avoid enabling them
And to understand how they have been passed on through many generations on all sides of my Family Of Origin
Perhaps Bram Stoker's Dracula novels are a bit strong, but there is a good analogy in there.
There are people who seek out narcs in order to serve and enable them
There are beautiful prey, who will let the narcs into their lives, an allow themselves to be fed upon by the narc.
Then there's the narc itself, often preened and well turned out, outwardly successful and perhaps superficially admirable, generous even.
But inside, it can only continue to exist by feeding on others, it has to have other people react to it, in admiration, in love, in fear,
It has to repeatedly inflict that grandiose self onto other people, and to punish any who do not react in the way that the narc needs them to in order to feed, and to temporarily fill some of that inner emptiness.
And it will continue to feed on or to belittle and punish as long as the victims will allow it to, and will provide it sustenance.
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What of the victims?
Even accepting the dangers and potential fallacies of reasoning by analogy, the Dracula analogy still seems good
Once the inner resources of the victims have been sucked out by the vampire, the victims themselves become empty, un dead and un living parasites
Is that how so many generations of my FOO became narcissistic?
Is that how I came to get jobs working with out and out bullying narcissistic managers? And to accept their behaviour as necessary, or just having a laugh, or the way that these things are done?
Is that why the males I used to be attracted to were narcissistic towards me?
And how much of it have I imbibed?
Have I just lived thus far without developing or understanding boundaries?
Or have I become infected with those memes, behaviours, attitudes?
Predictive text has just helped me here, am I infected with the malware? The virus?
