Watch this video. When asked about the benefits of being a narcissist, he says – true to nature – that his lack of empathy enables him to see things more clearly than people who have emotions.
That’s the problem. People like him are usually so convinced about who they are relative to who others are – superior – that they can’t see others for who they are. They are convinced that other people make all their decisions on the basis of emotions and personal vulnerabilities and also that nobody sees through them.
They can be like gnats in their misconceptions. They don’t realize that a lot of people just shrug about their convictions and actions, maybe not at first but certainly eventually.
As they are so convinced of things being a certain way, they can also easily convince other people of how flawed you are. (They can engage in smear campaigns to undermine you.) That’s because they often truly believe what they are saying about you. They are also convinced that when they do stuff like that, the way you respond confirms their “diagnosis” of you.
They don’t get that it can be just really exhausting to have to deal with this kind of nonsense. They don’t get how it can undermine you in practical ways (and then you not getting anywhere because people believe you are flawed because that is what he has told them is just another confirmation to them and it all just becomes too exhausting).
You ironically end up in an oddly similar situation as the narcissist (a tension between insecurity and a belief in your capabilities, I mean), but because you aren’t a narcissist, you’ll likely just give up. That is, you may find ways of doing things that don’t depend on other people and on what they get told about you. Because the harder you try to convince people that they’ve been fed hogwash about you, the less inclined they are to believe you anyway. It hampers you in practical ways.
When I was in secondary school, a local well-known lawyer taught some of our classes, the ones about how society works (“maatschappijleer”). He gave an example of how hard it can be to defend yourself. How does a man deal with the question: “Do you still hit your wife?” There is nothing he can do or say that won’t make him look guilty of hitting his wife.
I don’t hate people with NPD. To the contrary, I can find them entertaining and likeable, certainly from a distance, but I also often find them exhausting. Some have plenty of good things that make up for it, and that can make them valuable to you, just like this guy to his wife, in this video below. That’s personal, clearly.
What’s also very good to hear from this guy in the video is that people with NPD often have like a switch in their brain that they flip after which they lose all interest in you. You can feel the need or duty to try to patch things up, because they can be so vulnerable and insecure, but there’s no point because you simply no longer exist. (If they feel they need something from you, they’ll contact you again.)
I’ve found that if I can see people with NPD as mischievous children, if I can see the small child inside them, at least their potential for making me feel hurt declines dramatically. It’s like he says… they’re just trying to make themselves happy and that you can get hurt in the process is just a side effect. They often are not aware of it at all because it is not material in their eyes. You don’t really feature other than perhaps as a tool within this context.
It’s complicated because it’s all about interaction to a large degree. (There must also be a potential for a solution in that.) When you get hurt, you’ll shout at the person with NPD and you get a shitload of abuse back. In my case, I may notice something and post about it which then can be taken as criticism and result in revenge or whatever and when I write something positive about anyone else, it is also often mistaken as as a secret message.
You basically have to tell them who to be, tell them who they are and tell them a lot of positive things about themselves so that they can be that positive person. (Oh! It’s a form of neurofeedback!) But how do you do that without 1) making things worse, 2) eroding your own boundaries and 3) undermining yourself, erasing yourself in the process? I don’t have the answers. AI might be able to come up with a very good neurofeedback solutions for people with NPD.
