The friendly face of Narcissism

The insidious abuse of love

This article is about the developmental stage where our perception of success and failure becomes tangled up with receiving the love and the attention that we need. And according to many psychologists, it is at this stage that the first seeds of an inner narcissistic wound are sown.

Johnny has just learned to walk and is swimming in a sea of omnipotence. He is the King of his very own castle, the shining sun in his solar system. He is adored and cheered on by his admiring caregivers, applauded for every smile, fart, and warbled word. Although he can’t think it yet, he feels that he truly commands his world. He has arrived.

Be still for a moment and dig down into your own psychological memory bank. You may still find small glittering strands of this brief time of omnipotent glory in your psyche. Or has it been obliterated by what happened next. The moment you fell flat on your face, relinquished your throne, a humiliated failure, crawling back into the safe arms of comfort, or, judgement.

The rapprochement phase

Between the age of fourteen to eighteen months old we are confronted with the fact that our grandiose view of ourselves is wrong and that we are only very, very small people in a very, very big world. And in the months to come we will be swung backwards and forwards between the idealised grandiose version of ourselves and the deflated and vulnerable side.

It is the task of our caregivers to avoid entangling love and self-worth with the dynamic of success and failure. What Johnny needs to hear is; “I applaud you when you succeed, I comfort you when you fall, but neither one nor the other has anything to do with your value in this world or my love for you.”

But caregivers can only teach what they themselves know. And so even the most loving parents may project their own mismanaged self-worth-gap onto their children. In therapy it is this insidious abused version of love that is so hard to unpack.

The psychologist Stephen Johnson PhD describes this gap, or split, as being on a spectrum. In his model, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) sits at the most pathological end of the scale, Narcissistic Neurosis in the middle, and the Narcissistic Character Style, the friendly face of Narcissism, at the healthier end. And we are all on that spectrum somewhere, because we all experienced that fall from grace, the injury to our sense of self-worth, the pride that came before the fall.

Psychologist Nina Brown reminds us there is healthy narcissism, where there is self-acceptance, empathy, humour, creativity, and the ability to form equal and meaningful relationships. Where the great in ourselves lives happily alongside the deflated and vulnerable. However, the deeper the split between these two poles, the more pathological the expression of your narcissistic wound in the world, be it grandiose or depleted.

Self-diagnosis

What happened to you when you fell from grace. Was there compassion and comfort. Or was there shame and judgement?

Do you unconsciously link your value in the world to what you do, your status, or the measure in which you control your surroundings? Do you always rank people as ‘better than me’, and ‘worse than me’ in any given situation?

Or are you living from the opposite polarity. From a depleted state, with at its heart an inner vacuum, devoid of healthy self-love, with no ability to set boundaries because your sense of self serves another, in return for their love?

Furthermore, these two polarities are like magnets that attract one another into high functioning but often destructive relationships, where one person always grows at the cost of the other. And of course, few people seek therapy complaining of suffering from the top dog version of these two polarities. Although a narcissistic burnout can sometimes offer hope or insight.

And the people who suffer from the depleted polarity would never even think of themselves as narcissistically wounded, nor, that, given the chance, they may sometimes even play the role of the top dog. But unless you see and take ownership of both polarities acting out in yourself, and the gap between, you can’t bridge it, and heal the split.

Equality is the healing factor

So again, take a quiet moment to reflect on the message that you received after your own early fall from grace. Did your failure embarrass someone, did you conclude that to be loved you needed to succeed. Or was your failure totally accepted because you really can’t do much better. Perhaps by a parent who was relieved you’re not going to abandon them yet. Or because there is someone else in the constellation who was designed to shine more than you?

Do you consider yourself equal to others. Equally shining and equally fallible?

What we as infants needed to know, and what the fall-from-grace-phase might have taught us, is that we are special, just as special as the next person, and the next. That we are fallible, and just as much of a fuck up as the next person and the next. As Nina Brown says, the capacity to laugh at ourselves, with love, that is the sign of truly healthy narcissism.

Equality is the medicine that heals us from the Narcissistic mindset. And equality is not something that anyone gives you. It flows from the bridging of the internal split between grandiosity and self-loathing into the joy of being perfectly imperfect. Or best enough.

And when we have healed our own split, we must help heal the world by celebrating others when they do well, commiserating with them when they fail, and repeating time and time and time again, that neither their success or their failure has anything whatsoever to do with their value as a human being!!!

I love hearing from you about your own experiences with this topic. So feel free to leave a comment …

Or contact me directly to share how narcissism has affected you.