Enough about You: My Explanation of Narcissism

Because Understanding can be a Good Strategy for Getting Through the Holidays.

A magazine called Real Simple once asked me to write “a life lesson.” I thought and thought about what kind of lesson I wanted to share, and then wrote the following piece for them about twenty years ago.

At that point, I was very obsessed with learning about narcissism because my lack of understanding seemed to be ruining my life. I should add here that at the time, we hadn’t yet elected a president who was offering us all a surgically precise example, daily, of every out of control narcissistic behavioral trait and threat so there weren’t articles about narcissism everywhere.

I grew up with narcissistic parents, so in some ways I believed that narcissistic behavior was the sport of kings: the ideal adult way to be. Since I saw it as the norm, I was also attracted to narcissistic people in all the other areas of my life. And then confused by my inability to get along with them. It seemed to be entirely my fault.

My education about personality disorders began when the therapist I started seeing gave me several books to read. It felt like she turned a light on in a dark room. I read them over and over, discussing them with her and everyone else ad nauseum. I started identifying so much narcissism around me that for a while I felt like I was living in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.

As personality disorders go, narcissism can be difficult to wrap your brain around because so much of the way it operates is upside down and backwards from the way a lot of us were raised to believe is the right way to think and behave. So for my “life lesson” piece, I decided to see if I could explain it more simply to others.

A lot of people told me they found my explanation helpful. So below the cartoon I have posted the piece I wrote about narcissism. It starts with a ruined Christmas because the intensity of family interactions on holidays makes understanding how this not uncommon personality warp works a very smart idea. GOOD LUCK!

EVERY year at Christmas my mother would buy me an expensive piece of clothing that I would never wear. Or, if luck was smiling on me, it might be several pieces of clothing meant to be worn together. I describe the clothing as expensive because when my mother gave me these gifts, she would make a point of telling me the exact dollar amount of how much everything cost. She would then go on, at length, about how much effort she had expended finding and buying my gift. But also, unfortunately, every year, she would miss the mark of predicting my taste by such a wide margin that I thought she might know an alternate universe version of me who dressed in blouses with Peter Pan collars festooned with applique ducks holding umbrellas and matching skirts with gathered waists.

I began to dread getting these gifts because from December 26 on they hung in my closet unworn. Every time I saw them, I felt shame for having selfishly squandered my mother’s time and money.

Then one year, with this gloomy annual holiday ritual looming before me, I had a great idea. At age 35 I had finally conceived of a brilliant solution! I suggested that she and I go out shopping for my gift together! And I was truly thrilled when she agreed because I knew just what I wanted: A fitted black blazer that I could wear with everything. Not only would it be stylish and versatile, it would herald the end to my guilt about unworn presents and wasted money! She would get me something I liked! I would be genuinely happy to wear it whenever she saw me! WIN/WIN!!

So, on the appointed day, my mother and I walked around crowded department stores for hours on end as she waved hangers full of skirts with gathered waists and blouses with Peter Pan collars at me in a flag-like manner, reminiscent of Napoleon on the bridge of Arcola. Not wanting to be the one to fire the first round, I made sure to say, in reaction to each of her offerings, ‘Mmm, yes! That’s really lovely! ‘ Or, ‘Wow! Thank you, Mom. What a great choice!!’ But I also held firm, taking care to often repeat, ‘But the thing is… I could really use a new black blazer,”. Then I would hold up an example of one that I had tried on and liked. My mother would look over at my selection, scanning the blazer up and down as she made her signature grim face, revealing herself to be a woman suffering a silent unspeakable agony. Wielding an expression lifted from a George Romero movie, she would curl her upper lip and let loose with her patented “Yucccch,”as she insisted that I at least try on a few more of the clothes that she had picked out. So, respectfully, I played along, thinking to myself as I looked in the dressing room mirror dressed in the outfit she had chosen, that if my goal was to look 15 years older and 30 pounds heavier, these were definitely the outfits I would buy.

At the end of the day, when closing time was requiring us to wrap this party up, I said to her, ‘Mom, as much as I love all those things you showed me, I really need this black blazer. I can wear it to work, for casual stuff, over pajamas, to a pool party. Its a bulls-eye on every front!,” She rolled her eyes, and exhaled an exasperated gust of air so powerful it caused all the clothing on all the racks in the Women’s Sportswear Department to sway. Then she angrily grabbed the hanger bearing the blazer I had selected out of my hands and marched over to the cash register counter where she muttered bitterly as she threw the jacket down, as though it were beneath her to even be seen with it. As she handed over her Visa, she closed her eyes and sneered, ‘This is the last time I am doing anything like this. I get no pleasure from buying you something I don’t happen to like.”

I followed her out of the store and into the parking lot, filled with shame as I carried the garment bag containing my present. I watched nervously as she pursed her lips and silently shook her head ‘no’, making sure I understood that she could not comprehend and certainly did not deserve the indignity I was causing her to endure. The very fact of this purchase made it difficult for her to even look at me. As I got into to the car, I was conscience-stricken. What was wrong with me? Why oh why had I intentionally gone and ruined another Christmas for my mother? Why had I not allowed her to just buy me more clothes I would never wear? Here I had thought I was not only saving her time and money badly spent, but ensuring her future happiness by being able to show up for family functions wearing a present I loved that she had bought for me. This seemed like a good idea to me when I thought of it! I hadn’t expected this reaction at all. I was shocked.

This was just one of many bafflingly similar incidents that cluttered my life for many years. But by then I had begun to notice that my parents and boyfriends seemed to have similar kinds of complaints about me. I was combative and contrarian, according to one boyfriend who would become furious if I stayed up to watch a late movie by myself instead of going to bed at the same time he did. Other paramours would accuse me of always trying to have things my own way.

This certainly didn’t sound like what was going on from my perspective. But because these complaints were coming from people I cared about in two separate arenas of my life, I figured I had better make a sincere effort to stop hurting the people I loved by digging in deep and repairing my problematic shortcomings. If having my own taste in clothing or picking my own bed time was endangering my relationships, I wanted to figure out how to stop. So, I started seeing a therapist, hoping to discover what steps I needed to take to change myself for the better. What I learned was not what I expected.

I learned that I was the child of two law-abiding, middle-class narcissists, a man and a woman bound together by their twin passions of criticizing their offspring and picking fights in restaurants. And because of this behavioral legacy, I was also attracted to narcissists as lovers and friends. Now, at last I had insight in to what was behind three decades of embarrassing restaurant incidents in which my parents behaved like aristocracy and treated the stammering wait staff with contempt. I can only marvel now at how well our family survived the number of dinners that were probably drenched in the spit of revenge seeking restaurant employees.

I also finally had a reasonable explanation for why my brother and I always seemed to be wearing and doing and saying the wrong thing, every single time at every family gathering, even after we had attempted to arm ourselves with perky outfits, tidy new haircuts, and carefully selected topics of conversation.

What is a narcissist? Any time you find yourself living inside that classic New Yorker cartoon in which two people are dining together and one says to the other, ‘Well, enough about me. Let’s hear what you have to say about me,” your narcissism alert radar should be beeping. But it is not, at its core, self-love , as many people think. It is insecurity and self hatred covered up by self-obsession. A friend of mine explained the credo of the narcissist as follows: I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around.’

Narcissists are people who cover up painful feelings of shame and worthlessness inflicted during their own screwy childhoods, by doing whatever it takes to maintain a false sense that they are so special that they have no shortcomings. They are above being bound by ordinary rules. This requires them to surround themselves with people who will constantly help them feel pumped up by agreeing with them and praising them about everything. In narcissism talk this is called ‘feeding their grandiosity’. One popular narcissism expert on the internet refers to what the narcissist receives during this act as “fuel.”

Why do they act like this? As I understand it, narcissists need to live in a world that is one person big because they never fully outgrow a phase of infantile behavioral development in which Baby thinks he and Mommy are the same person. The problem begins for them during the next phase, where at about the age of three, Baby begins to make forays of independent behavior out into the world. (This phase is sometimes called ‘rapprochement”, which is French for “resumption of harmonious relations.”) So perhaps Baby takes a brief walk away, on his own, and when he returns, Mommy is acting upset rather than handling the reunion with the right amount of praise and support for this early attempt at independence. Kaboom. Baby, not understanding what they did wrong, ends up concluding that it is too dangerous for he and Mommy to ever be separate. If it goes wrong, there are consequences. It was better and more controllable, he or she concludes, when Baby and Mommy were still one person.

Complicated, right? And come on: how many well-intended Mommies are capable of making a delicate judgment call like this correctly millions of times? Let alone the emotionally immature ones, the ones who had children while they were still children themselves, or the mommies on drugs and alcohol? Our adult brains don’t even finish developing until our late twenties, for crying out loud. But Nature says ‘Too bad, Mommy. You just screwed up everything without even seeing it. Enjoy watching your child narcissist spend their life seeking safety by trying to dominate everyone everywhere always.”

And good luck to the rest of us as we encounter these people everywhere. This is usually not a correctable problem because don’t forget, the narcissist is perfect. There is nothing wrong with them, ever. The problem is always you.

So here is what I learned: When a brilliant, charming, elegant and grand narcissist, maybe even one who you genuinely admire, honors you by allowing you entry into his or her very elite cadre, you have now been annexed by an imperialist country. Your borders have been erased. You have agreed to enter a world where there is no you! The subtext of all future interactions will be: What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine. (And for added fun, most narcissists think that now that they have honored you by annexing you, the least you can do in return is always be able to predict what they want from you by reading their mind.)

When you are with a narcissist, their needs must become your needs. You must also always know what their needs ARE! It’s not enough for a narcissist to be the center of their own world, they must also be the center of your world as well. And after they’ve secured your center, they would really like the rest of what you are to disappear. If you are not mirroring the narcissist or praising them, you are proving that you are still a separate person. This is not permitted because separate is a threat. So from now on, it is your job is to serve as an admiring audience, a vent for their anger, a Fan Club President or an Incompetent Maid. (And I say Incompetent Maid, because there is no way that you can take on the maid job and not find out that you are doing it wrong.)

Once I understood this, I could finally solve The Mysterious Case of My Mother and The Christmas Present. My mother became peevish and aggressive about my desire to select my own present, because by not paying homage to her excellent taste in clothes, I was telling her that I thought she was inadequate, incompetent, shit. Buying a present for me, in her mind, was not about getting me something I might like. It was about pumping up her own self-esteem by giving me a reason to agree that she had superior taste. In her rigid and fragile world view, when I demonstrated that I had my own ideas about clothes, I had humiliated her. And a narcissist, when humiliated, strikes out with rage.

Unfortunately you are about to learn that narcissists only have two functioning personality gears: Grandiosity. And Humiliation (which triggers Rage.) They are either absolutely right, every single time, and therefore a picture of perfection. OR by demonstrating that you see things differently than they do, you have told them that they are a piece of shit. They are very easily humiliated. It happens continuously. And 100% of the time, it triggers rage.

At first, having this new knowledge was a mixed blessing. People I once regarded simply as family and friends were transformed before my eyes into strangely predictable robots whose limitations were more important than their capabilities. It was certainly not good news to learn I had to give up on any of these people ever behaving with any real degree of empathy for or interest in me, unless it served their grandiosity. But EVERY book on this subject explains (in CAPS, italics, and underlined with bold exclamation marks!!!), that the only method for getting along with narcissists is to change your expectations. You have to stop trying to please un-pleasable people. YOU must learn a brand new trick: how to maintain emotional distance.

That was the sad part of it all. Because the death of expectations also means the death of hope. Gone forever was the dream that by treating my mother kindly, or explaining myself honestly, I was going to transform her in to a more enlightened version of herself with whom I could get along. Instead I had to face the depressing fact that to interact un-guardedly with her (or any narcissist) was to set myself up for situations that would morph in to unexpected fights full of petty personal attacks.

So from that point on, when she provoked me, I didn’t bite. I “disengaged.” I created emotional distance. It’s a challenge at first, but it becomes second nature. The process required me to keep reading books about narcissism over and over, end to end. The good news is that there a lot of good ones for sale. Just type narcissism into any search engine.

After I figured out how to disengage, my mother could sense that a certain familiar degree of push and pull in the dance between us that passed for closeness had been modified. She knew things were different. She could feel that I was more aloof and it confused her. Sadly since I now also understood that it would do no good to explain any of this or get into any kind of an argument, I stopped helping that happen. Understanding that there was nothing I was going to be able to do that would make things any better was a real life saver.

But at least now I understood that when I found myself in another confusing conflict I didn’t even understand, about something I didn’t even care about, the only way to end the fight was going to be to disengage. Or leave. By the end of her life, I found myself tip-toeing around my mother, doing whatever I could not to get blindsided by unsolvable, miserable unwinnable confrontations.

The good news is that by learning about narcissism, I also learned to protect myself from wasting a lot of energy. Now when I find myself unexpectedly under attack, and wondering “How did I get in to the middle of an argument about hair removal when I’m not even angry, and I don’t even care about hair removal.,” the new smarter me knows that the answer is not to look within and figure out what I did wrong. The answer is that I am probably hanging out with a narcissist. And once that piece is in place, I also know I have only two sane options: Either agree with everything they say, or pick up and go elsewhere. To stay and fight is to confront an irrational, wounded animal. And if that’s what I want, animal rescue is more productive and does more good.

Once I assimilated that stuff, life got a little easier. I still think back proudly to a flirtation at a party with a guy who set off all my alarm bells. There he was, sad-eyed, brooding, artistic, articulate, hilarious, attractive and utterly self-absorbed. I knew instinctively that I should draw him out of his shell by asking many flattering questions, then listening to his answers with rapt attention and appreciation bordering on awe. I knew that if I greeted his every anecdote with extreme empathy and selfless offers of support, including suggestions on how he could solve all his problems, then he would be mine. But despite the fact that every microbe in my body was encouraging me to do these things,(old habits die hard), I watched myself with amazement as the voice coming out of my face said instead, “Well, you seem like a smart guy. I’m sure you’ll figure it all out.” And then instead of allowing myself to get sucked in to his turmoil, I went off to talk to someone else.

I’m happy to report that these days I no longer find myself locked in crazy fights about hair removal or socks or pudding or anything else. I know I am allowed to be a separate person. And I know I don’t have to feel guilty for failing to read a narcissistic person’s mind. In short, I’m no longer being emotionally batted around like a cat toy. And ironically, it’s also the greatest present I ever received from my mother.