Narcissism Is Not Who You Are
I learned a very interesting and useful perspective on narcissism recently from Dr. Elinor Greenberg in her book, “Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations: The Pursuit of Love, Admiration, and Safety”: narcissism is not who a person is, and is not something people are born with, but is instead a set of tools (Dr. Greenberg calls them “adaptations”). Tools like blame-shifting, grandiosity, admiration-seeking, manipulation and entitlement.
This raises an important question, if narcissism is actually a set of tools, then what is the problem that the tools have been developed to cope with?
A common story I hear when working with people who use the tools of narcissism is how they grew up in an environment where their parents or caregivers were preoccupied with their own needs and unable to express approval, or who chronically expressed disapproval, toward their child.
Let me say here that when we are unpacking childhood experiences we are not doing so with the goal of judging a person’s parents or aiming to conclude that they were bad. Parents who have difficulty parenting were usually themselves subjected to adverse experiences in their own childhoods that caused them to struggle with parenting as adults. There are most often good reasons for why all of us behave the way we do (note though that reasons are not excuses, we are still responsible for owning and changing our behavior). Instead, through examining a person’s experiences with their own parents or caregivers, we are looking for “cause and effect” to help a person understand themselves and what they went through that necessitated the development of the coping behaviors with which they are now struggling.
Since children have no prior experience by which to determine their inherent value to others, they initially rely on their parents’ or caregivers’ communication and behavior toward them to develop a sense of value. If they experience being unvalued or devalued by their parents then they begin to develop the false belief that this likely stems from their own inherent lack of value (it’s hard for children to guess that this may come from some internal struggle their parents are going through since children don’t have this kind of insight and there is usually nobody around to tell them that this is what is going on, so they tend to blame themselves for distress in the relationship). This is a desperate situation for a child since the experience of being without value feels deeply shameful and it is hard to believe that they will survive in the world if they are without value to others.
This desperate situation necessitates the development of some way to cope. And this is where children may begin to discover and develop narcissistic tools that help them to do so. Fundamentally, narcissistic tools protect a person from the shame of fearing they are without value by shifting the shame onto other people. In other words, the tools help a person to experience themselves as being of great value through treating other people as being not sophisticated or smart enough to see it. This allows a child to dismiss negative feedback or treatment from other people as invalid. They may seek out other people who constantly affirm and reassure them that they are valued and are not the problem. The intensity to which they use these tools is generally indicative of the level to which they have experienced being unvalued and fear being a person without value. Unfortunately, the tools don’t actually create a fundamental sense of value within the person, so the person has to continue to resort to them to continue to protect themselves from criticism and reassure themselves of their value over their lifetime.
The problem is that, as people who use narcissistic tools grow up and are no longer in the environment or with the people who caused them this injury, they continue to use the tools and the tools tend to be self-reinforcing. When you make a mistake and someone calls you out for it, this can feel terrifying for someone who fears they may lack value since that moment can feel like evidence that they may actually not be a person of worth and that this will be exposed to other people. They may therefore deal with this by shifting the blame onto someone else. However, this causes two problems – one is that it prevents the person who us using narcissistic tools from maturing by learning from their mistakes, and it also pushes other people away, which increases their isolation and fear that they are not valued.
This does not mean that people who are using narcissistic tools should not be accountable for or excused for their behavior. But it does mean that there is hope since if we can understand the underlying problem then we can understand what fundamentally needs to be healed, and tools that can be learned can also be unlearned.
A safe environment like a therapeutic relationship can be a place where a person who is using these tools can begin to be honest about their fears and experiences without fear of judgment and rejection, and then develop a true sense of self value and begin to use new tools to form the deep and fulfilling relationships with themselves and others that we all ultimately want.
Afternote: We do not consider “narcissistic abuse” by men toward their female partners in intimate relationships to be a problem of narcissism or a mental health issue in most cases. More on this in a future blog post.
