What makes a narcissist a narcissist?

Too many people are harmed by narcissists, whether it be your partner, parent, friend, co-parent, or co-worker, their behaviour can have a massive impact on your mental health, physical health, and relationships. Understating what narcissism looks like can aid your ability to notice what is happening, understand that it is not you and be able to establish firm boundaries and ultimately know when to walk away to keep yourself safe.

Narcissists can wreak havoc in relationships, families, and workplaces. By exposing the traits of a narcissist, we can empower and protect ourselves from these individuals. Knowing that it is not you and it’s not your fault, and even if you are unable, to cut ties with these individuals altogether you can get to a place of acceptance and acknowledge that a person’s behaviour is not ok. Individuals who have been affected by narcissists often feel alone, and full of shame, questioning themselves about why they didn’t spot it sooner, or what they did to bring about their behaviour. Unable to see that there was nothing they could have done and that they were not able to fix the other person.

Narcissism is a term that is thrown around a lot, I see many individuals in my practice who have ‘diagnosed’ a person in their lives with this disorder. But what is it narcissism? It is a type of personality, personality is a number of characteristics that form a person's distinctive nature which we can use to some degree to predict their patterns of behaviour, and how they may think or feel in certain situations.

Someone who has a narcissistic personality tends to have low empathy, along with high levels of entitlement, be grandiose in nature, arrogant, and have a strong envy of others. They often put themselves on a pedestal and believe that others envy them, they can be very selfish and controlling, believing their needs are more important than others. Status is essential, they can be extremely vain and superficial, and they have a real need for external validation. But just like other types of personality, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all, narcissism and narcissistic traits can vary from mild to extreme.

You may have read some of the traits and think that you too can display some of them from time to time, you may find when you are in a stressful situation or when you are having a particularly bad day, being open to the needs of others or being emphatic to someone else when you have a lot going on can be tough. It is also normal to feel good when receiving external validation, for example, to be told you have done a good job or that you are kind.

But the difference with narcissism is that the narcissistic behaviour is consistent, they have an absolute lack of empathy for anyone in any situation at any time. They are unwilling to take any responsibility for anything and will always try to focus blame on someone else. They will rarely try to make amends for any wrongdoing unless it suits their needs. External validation is their only motivating factor, there is no internal goal-driven system, they set their goals on not what matters personally to them but what they think the world, society, and others expect of them so they can soak up the praise and wonderment of others.

However, the curious thing with narcissists is none of this is real, these are defences that they use to hide a deep-seated insecurity about themselves. When they get criticised their very fragile ego, insecurities, and shame are triggered and they can become explosive where they lash out at other people, deflect blame and harshly criticise others in an attempt to preserve their self-image. Unfortunately, in our society and culture, this grandiose nature is rewarded, narcissists are often very successful in business and climb the ladder very quickly, but this is obvious when you understand their lack of empathy as they don’t care who they step onto to move themselves up that ladder.

There has been a lot of research into why or how someone has a narcissistic personality and while it’s true that adverse childhood experiences impact someone’s behaviour and, through this, they can develop narcissistic traits, but it is not a sole maker. They can equally develop into many other conditions like complex trauma, eating disorders or addiction for example.

Other areas of research have focused on the false empowerment of children, where they have been passed on a sense of entitlement by their caregivers as this too has a detrimental effect on an individual's behaviour. It could be that the child has been told that they are more special than others. When they don’t pass an exam, it is the teacher's fault for not understating how brilliant they are, if they don’t score that goal, it is the coach's fault for not noticing how bad the other kids were playing. Or when emotionally unavailable parents show their children love by buying toys, gifts, or the newest gadgets and do not model or explicitly show the child how to emotionally regulate themselves they too can go on to display narcissistic traits and behaviour, but again they may not.

After all this, the most important takeaway point is no matter where it comes from you being their partner, co-worker, child or friend you can not ‘fix’ them and sometimes waking away completely is the best thing you can do for your own mental and physical health.