PreciousChild
MyPTSD Pro
This is another post about my explorations into whether my coping patterns are narcissistic. I loathe to think that I'm narcissistic, and I don't think I truly meet the definition of NPD. Also, I think my father's malignant narcissism is the main reason why I suffered and still do. But genuinely reflecting on whether my coping style could be narcissistic has been really helpful. OMG. In another podcast on narcissism, this time a different doctor, was saying that for a narcissist, all external objects (people and platforms) have exactly the same reliability. Different people can provide different quality in terms of narcissistic supply (a "hot" girl's attention is going to be higher in quality than someone who is percieved as not being hot), but to a narcissist, everyone has equal weight in terms of their reliability for assessing reality. He said that this is the case because the narcissist has a very weak sense of self, or perhaps more accurately, no self at all, so he or she is not confident in their memories and assessments of reality - they probably were inserting their own grandiose delusions over the situation, and so they are always confused about what is real and what is an illusion. So they automatically assume that when it comes to reality, other people are right. If someone criticizes the narcissist or challenges them, the narcissist automatically adopts the assessment as true, and that adoption reverberates to revise their view of themselves in all their previous memories. To compound the mortification that this causes the narcissist to experience, the narcissist cannot self-reflect and question their interpretation of the criticism. The narcissist is driven to believe that they are always right, so if they adopt the other's criticism as absolutely right, they cannot revise that because that would imply that they can be wrong. So to feed their narcissism, they have to persist in their belief that other people were right about their inferiority (strangely). I don't really identify with the way narcissists cope with that inability to revise, but I do relate to everything this doctor was saying. Whether it's my boyfriend, or a colleague, or even a stranger, if I perceive negative feedback, I crumble. I don't ask, "well, is that true?" I have no defense. The solution would be to have a stronger sense of self that could balance and assess other people's opinions and assessments. But like the narcissist, I don't think I have that.