The idea of narcissists as bad people, and their targets as good, has permeated popular culture over the last decade. The ‘narcissism movement’ is founded upon the vilification of narcissists, the development of strategies for dealing with these ‘terrible people’, and of course, the best way to recover and heal moving forward.
I have written multiple books on the topic, one such book having the sensationalist title ‘How To Kill A Narcissist’. As I quickly explain, it is crucial to separate the behaviour from the person. This helps us avoid dehumanising a narcissist while still protecting ourselves from what they are capable of.
The end game of recovery, in my opinion, is to hold two truths together:
Narcissistic abuse is a plague on the planet which we must fight at all costs.
Narcissists are deeply-wounded human beings who we need to set boundaries around.
Upon reaching this stage of recovery, you ‘kill a narcissist’ by seeing the disease and protecting yourself from the abuse.
Nonetheless, I have found hate to be useful in the early stages of recovery. I constantly tout the productive use of anger for setting boundaries, and spurring the target of narcissistic abuse into action. Eventually, however, I recommend letting that anger go. Otherwise, a person can get stuck in a victim mentality trap which can last a lifetime, where the target of narcissistic abuse makes their abuse their primary identity.
Years on, I now believe that we as a collective are due to embrace the next shift in our understanding of toxic relationships and emotional abuse. It comes in the form of a far more insidious trap: Focussing too much on the narcissistic elements of personality disorders.
Narcissism Is Worse Than You Think
My journey out of narcissistic abuse has taught me infinite lessons.
At the beginning, I had a clingy, anxious style of relating, and was terrified of taking risks. As I released shame and trauma, those behaviours faded away. I grew more confident and aware, and I began to notice shifts in my psyche which eventually set off alarm bells. My recovery journey had revealed dark elements of myself I never knew existed.
I noticed that as much as I desperately craved connection, I also had a distrust of people. I noticed a deep need to be not only accepted, but desirable. This had a profound impact on my sex life, and not always for the better. I found that I dissociated a lot, and that I had gaps in my memory. That my emotions were far more chaotic than I had otherwise believed. I was, in fact, quite impulsive. Most terrifying of all, I began to notice a mysterious figure in my shadow who craved power and control.
Self-knowledge is liberating, but this often comes with the uncovering of horrible truths. Truths I sometimes wished I never found, as it challenged my perception of myself as a fundamentally ‘good person’. The reality was far more complex.
This all came to a head when I stared at the cluster map of personality disorders:
The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) separates personality disorders into three groups, of which narcissistic personality disorder is one of many. If you dig deeper into this model, you notice that each one aims to fulfil particular needs, as well as protect a person from particular forms of harm.
In my book ‘How To Bury A Narcissist’, I describe the cluster map in detail, and also how each relates to the others. For the sake of brevity, here is a brief summary of each, outlining the core need related to the personality disorder, how that need was betrayed (core wound), and how the personality disorder aims to compensate for the resulting wound:
Paranoid
Core Need: Safety.
Core Wound: Being terrorised by one or more people.
Personality Disorder Symptoms: Constant hyper-vigilance and mistrust of others.
Schizoid
Core Need: Safety and connection.
Core Wound: Violent break of sense of safety due to extreme abuse or societal upheaval.
Personality Disorder Symptoms: Flat emotional affect to avoid vulnerability. Numbness. Indifference to people.
Borderline
Core Need: Resilience, safety and love.
Core Wound: Major disruption or upheaval of family life in childhood (e.g. parents divorce or lack of healthy parenting)
Personality Disorder Symptoms: Emotional dysregulation and a fear of abandonment paired with a fear of engulfment. A desperate need for a saviour figure. Chronic fantasising to escape reality.
Histrionic
Core Need: Visibility, Desirability.
Core Wound: Feeling unseen and unwanted.
Personality Disorder Symptoms: Needing to be the centre of attention at all times.
Psychopath
Core Need: Feeling in control of your life.
Core Wound: Feeling out of control for extended periods (e.g. through extensive abuse, repression, humiliation etc.)
Personality Disorder Symptoms: Needing to dominate others and achieve absolute power to avoid loss of control in the future.
Perfectionist
Core Need: Growth and competence.
Core Wound: Feeling incompetent and stuck.
Personality Disorder Symptoms: The need to do everything perfectly, and the unwillingness to risk failure.
Dependent/Avoidant
Core Need: Connection and love.
Core Wound: Intermittent connection, emotional neglect and abandonment.
Personality Disorder Symptoms: Clinginess (dependent) or indifference (avoidant). Fear of abandonment. Anxiety in relationships and chronic niceness to avoid abandonment (dependent), or aloofness and hyper-independence (avoidant).
The above list is incredibly simplified, and misses many of the details and nuances of each personality disorder. Yet hopefully it paints a basic picture of the psyche’s landscape beyond narcissism.
The Many Faces Of Trauma
Narcissism, at its core, aims to protect the narcissist’s self-esteem by helping them feel and appear more special and significant than they otherwise might feel or be. However, as we can see from the above cluster map, core wounds can manifest in many forms beyond self-esteem and significance.
What often confuses people is their inability to understand a narcissist’s behaviour. If we look at abuse purely through the lens of narcissism, then we are effectively trying to understand the elephant by studying its tail. Therefore, to enhance our understanding, we need to widen our view and look at the whole.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: Narcissists are not always narcissists.
Depending on which core wound is triggered, and which need they have in the moment, the ‘narcissist’ will switch to other personality structures. Loved ones of narcissists often wonder if the person they are dealing with is the same person from hour to hour. The cluster map can help us understand why this is the case.
We begin by accepting that narcissists switch, and when they do, their underlying needs and motivations also switch. A narcissist in their default state only wants one thing: narcissistic supply. Yet when a narcissist feels out of control or humiliated, they may switch to their psychopath, and become oriented by a desire for control, retribution and domination. Some narcissists can be vindictive and calculating, which arises when they switch to their psychopath, and then goes away when the situatioon is resolved. This leaves the target disoriented and confused.
A narcissist is often driven by their paranoid, which shows up in their lack of trust in others and the rigidity in their beliefs. This paranoia is often invisible when the narcissist’s sense of grandiosity and control is at its peak.
When a narcissist loses their grip over people, or has their false self viciously challenged, their borderline self may activate, heralding in emotional dysregulation and a fear of abandonment that otherwise would not be there. This can help us understand why narcissists may seem calm and calculating one minute, then desperate and an emotional wreck the next.
When a narcissist accentuates their appearance or hogs up all the space, they may be seeking narcissistic supply, but their histrionic wound of feeling unwanted and undesirable might also be playing a part.
Narcissists can be avoidant or dependent, depending on how connected and in control they feel over others. They sometimes flip-flop between avoidance and clinginess. The narcissist is cold and distant especially if they feel suffocated and engulfed. Yet when the other person gets hurt and pulls away, the narcissist grows anxious again.
Narcissists are often perfectionists. They integrate this into their narcissistic false self to help them gain narcissistic supply, or might even weaponise perfectionism to point out their target’s ‘flaws’, which helps the narcissist feel more grandiose. This can then blend into the psychopath, who weaponises perfectionism for control.
When uniquely combined, the possibilities of the cluster map are endless.
Narcissism 2.0
To put a label on narcissism has been an incredibly empowering phenomenon. However, it has also proven to be a limiting force, sometimes producing more confusion than enlightenment. By embracing the entire elephant, we gain the tools to evolve our understanding and accelerate our self-actualisation by reducing confusion and ignorance.
But how to widen our lens? We can begin by seeing anyone we suspect of narcissism as a human with a singular core trauma that is unique to that person. A core trauma can be made up of multiple core wounds, which were created in that person based on their unique childhood experiences.
A person’s core trauma can manifest through the various personality disorders, often switching depending on the trigger and the situation. A person whose default personality state is narcissism can be deemed to have narcissistic personality disorder, but they are not limited to behaving through it at all times.
Finally, we must also understand that narcissism is often visible on the surface of a traumatised individual, even when their core is not narcissism, but rather psychopathy or borderline. That is, they have a particular core, with a narcissistic overlay. Their default drive is not based on narcissistic supply. Instead, this traumatised person uses narcissism to fulfil other needs, such as gaining attention (the histrionic), avoiding abandonment (the borderline), or achieving domination and control (the psychopath aka malignant narcissist).
A narcissist is a mirage, just like the concept of narcissism. It appears as one thing, then another, switching constantly with no apparent rhyme or reason. Keep that in mind when dealing with ‘a narcissist’.