How to stop being a narcissist? Or diagnose it in ourselves?

September 7, 2022 6:55 AM

Can you recommend the best resources, e.g. books, podcasts, courses, for diagnosing narcissism in ourselves and for managing or curing this? All of the resources I see on Google seemed aimed at dealing with other people's narcissism, whereas there seem to be fewer resources for people prepared to do the work on themselves. I'm not sure that I'm a narcissist, but I'd certainly like to investigate and try to be better.

I'd always thought I was immune, because everyone knows I'm one of the "nicest people", but a very bright friend recently mentioned that one of the nicest people she knows was actually a really terrible narcissist, who would get really upset sometimes and my friend started describing all of these traits that I see in myself. Anyway, regardless of labels, I'd like to try to do better, and in particular to investigate this.

Has anyone recovered from this? Or been able to get a clear diagnosis and clear prescriptions of things to do?

I don't want to get mad at people or treat them poorly.

If you'd like to send email so your username doesn't show up on this question you can mail me at [e-mail]. Thank you.

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (16 answers total)

At this point, "narcissism" is a pop culture term that means either "celebrity I don't like" or "person whose bullshit I don't want to deal with anymore." Which, fine! But it's not especially useful as a self-diagnosis.

From what I'm reading here--and I'm not your therapist, so I can't do any deeper--it seems like your main worries about yourself are that you have anger problems and perhaps poor emotional regulation. Searching for help on those problems could lead to some helpful techniques.
posted by kingdead at 7:07 AM on September 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you think you are a narcist - but are spending this much time on self-examination and open to the concept that you might be one, you may not actually be one.

What are your empathy levels like?
posted by rozcakj at 7:08 AM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

It might help more if you can ask the mods to add the traits you identify in yourself so we have a clear picture to offer suggestions.
posted by brilliantine at 7:19 AM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm suspicious of the whole concept of cluster B disorders, but, having had this same freakout, I'd recommend just trying to cultivate more empathy, seek out different perspectives, listen more, and also do your best to heal whatever trauma you may have. Doing some volunteer work would help with all the above.
posted by coffeeand at 7:45 AM on September 7, 2022

When your friend said she's actually a narcissist, did she mean "I have been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder by a team of trained professionals and I am currently in treatment for it" or did she mean "I have applied this label to myself based on conversations I've had, articles I've read and tiktoks I have viewed"?

Personality disorders are really scary. I actually don't know that they are over diagnosed because I have only met a few people who have been officially diagnosed with them, and they were / are in intensive treatment with multiple therapists, and it took a very long time to get those diagnoses.

I think as a society we apply these labels to people at times because we need help understanding the reason why we were harmed. We want answers for why we behave certain ways and we want answers for why people behave certain ways around us.

I think you are on the right track with your desire to not label yourself, and also affirming your values. Not doing harm or hurting people is a good goal. Unfortunately it is also not something you can entirely avoid without hurting yourself.

Advocating for yourself or putting yourself first at times is not evidence that you are a secret narcissist. In my experience the opposite is true in people who have narcissistic tendencies. They never think they are centering themselves. They actually don't know how to do that in a healthy and balanced way and so they always feel aggrieved, which leaves them feeling entitled.

The trick is to get the balance right. To trust yourself and know when to act on your own behalf vs that of others. It is a complicated calculus that can get really messed up if you grew up in a system that was very unbalanced.

Instead of doing your own research or diagnosing yourself, I would recommend talking to a therapist about your fears if you can. Perhaps there is some work you can do to better understand where these fears are coming from and how you can feel more confident in how you relate to others.
posted by pazazygeek at 9:15 AM on September 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Can you ask the friend if they were in fact talking about you? Somehow it jumps out at me reading your post that you think you are a narcissist because of what friend said, but unless they specifically talked about you, i would question the assumption.
Here is a list of symptoms from the Mayo Clinic.
But i think selfdiagnostic has limitations. If finances permits, consider seeing a therapist to discuss your concern.
posted by 15L06 at 9:19 AM on September 7, 2022

Everyone has narcissistic traits. In fact I would argue that it's healthy to be slightly narcissistic. What's not healthy is to always prioritize other's needs over your own.

Just spitballing, but have you been called self-centred or selfish by a family member or a close friend? Is this person controlling and rather self-centred themselves? This is a common tactic of emotional manipulation. They make you worry you're selfish so you sacrifice more of your time and energy catering to the accuser and neglect your own boundaries and needs.

People tend to be self-centred when they are under a lot of stress. It's not pleasant but it's utterly normal. If you're struggling and worried you're being kind of a jerk to others, it's time to talk to someone about it. You may want to talk to a therapist anyway, as they can help you dig into this fear of yours and help you resolve it.
posted by Stoof at 9:38 AM on September 7, 2022

I'd certainly like to investigate and try to be better.

Then congratulations, you aren't a narcissist. To the narcissist, the problem is never their own, but always with someone else. Maybe, everybody else.
posted by Rash at 9:38 AM on September 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I would strongly encourage you to seek out a therapist (if at all possible) to discuss this concern. I say this because Narcissistic Personality Disorder is real, but people who live with it rarely develop the insight on their own that they have it--that's part of the disorder.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Take a look at the criteria and take particular notice of things like "True symptoms of NPD are pervasive, apparent in varied social situations, and are rigidly consistent over time." and "in order to qualify as symptomatic of NPD, the person's manifested personality traits must substantially differ from social norms.[2]" This isn't about sometimes being self-centered or even consistently ignoring one particular need of a group of people. NPD is about ALWAYS centering yourself, ALWAYS exploiting others rather than treating others as equals, NEVER recognizing that other people have real, legitimate needs/feelings. That's why it's labeled as a personality disorder; it's an extreme condition.

If you'd like, feel free to MeMail me. I am a therapist, I am not YOUR therapist, this is not a therapeutic relationship. That said, if you have concerns about certain behaviors you do, I might be able to steer you at books to read about those behaviors.
posted by epj at 9:57 AM on September 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

Understanding that the idea of narcissism has certainly been virally co-opted ...

I have a family member who, in contrast to some self-centered people I also know, clearly ticks allll the boxes of narcissism, in ways that have seriously damaged and limited her life. Pervasive, rigid, extreme, does not recognize her actions/beliefs about self as outside of social norms.

I wanted to elaborate on what you wrote about because everyone knows I'm one of the "nicest people",. When people meet my family member, they often come away raving about how she's the nicest, most interesting, greatest shiniest person. Because: she puts on a show for new people -- and it's very clearly performative, over-the-top sparkling friendly behavior. I suspect it's because she can get praise/attention from new people, that is no longer available to her from non-naive subjects.

Sure, there are some people who are that nice every day, that's their personality. But it's not hers. She is equally intensely dismissive, standoffish, angry, uninterested at other times (and good luck to you if you're the object of that).

So what I wanted to point out to you, was that for her the "nice" is very much a performance aimed at eliciting as much praise/fascination as she can get. In contrast, most of us do try to be nice in meeting new people, but also try to be a faithful representation of our real selves, in anticipation of a relationship based on that true self. I hope this can help you distinguish which version of "nice" you are to different people, and what that reflects about your true self.
posted by Dashy at 10:46 AM on September 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I truly recommend doing a RHETI personality test ($12) which explains your personality and its values and needs, and describes the healthiest and unhealthiest expression of your personality. If you find your behavior is leaning towards the unhealthy expression then you know how to fix it.

Being nice is sometimes a manipulative action - I’m nice so you do what I want or I get kickbacks and ego strokes.

Narcissism is getting angry when you don’t get the ego strokes, when the image of yourself reflected back from others is not how you take yourself to be. Like, performance reviews, friends feedback, the way “the help” treat you, natural consequences of your actions and the like. So notice when you get angry and try to sit with feelings of shame and tease them apart a little.

The ego is a self-system protection program and naturally defends its sanctity but is unhealthy when its patterning cannot account for regular inconsistencies that occur and insists on seeing itself as always perfect in order to never experience the emotion of shame / defectiveness.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:44 AM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd like to redirect the conversation back to the question: Can you recommend the best resources, e.g. books, podcasts, courses, for diagnosing narcissism in ourselves and for managing or curing this?

Strangers on the internet saying "nah yr fine" isn't what they're looking for, and I don't think is particularly helpful here.

I'll also say from my own investigation of self that I see narcissism as a spectrum, and that there are absolutely narcissistic qualities that someone who is not "a narcissist" can have and that this person might want to work on.

I'm sorry I don't have any resources to provide, however!
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:59 AM on September 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Narcissists do know what they're doing. They know they're behaving in somewhat (or extremely) shitty ways, they just minimize it and justify it and act entitled to do it because they think they deserve to get away with it because they're the biggest, most important victim and their pain matters more than anyone else's. If you're not acting in a shitty way, you're very very likely not a narcissist. If you're not violating other people's boundaries regularly because "they owe me" don't worry about it.
posted by stockpuppet at 12:46 PM on September 7, 2022

Then congratulations, you aren't a narcissist. To the narcissist, the problem is never their own, but always with someone else. Maybe, everybody else.

this is the logical endpoint of trying to make narcissism into an all-purpose insult. you can call people narcissists with abandon because if anyone admits to being hurt or concerned by it, you can say that means it must not apply to them. unless you want it to apply to them, in which case you can also always say that a hit dog will holler. what a wonderfully useful concept.

to have narcissistic traits in the semi-scientific sense is to be an average human being. everyone has them and they have their uses. however, to be "a narcissist," in the colloquial sense of being interested in yourself more than you are ever interested in anyone else, is often tiresome. people in this condition can alter themselves, if they want to, without any need for diagnosis. wanting to do it is not the same thing as having done it. neither is wanting to do it proof that you don't need to do it.

as for narcissistic personality disorder, for them as believe in it, it is not true that people who have it never feel like they need help or to be fixed. if that were the case, most psych professionals would have no confidence in their own ability to recognize and understand such a disorder because the people who have it would never voluntarily present themselves for treatment in any great numbers. but they do have considerable confidence, even - especially - the ones who don't think they can treat it. this, to me, suggests something.

anyway, self-obsession is tedious. if you have more narcissistic tendencies than you would like to have, well-intentioned solitary self-examination is not necessarily going to minimize them. certain types of anxiety and narcissism are easily mistaken for each other because they aren't that different. traditional therapy encourages thinking and talking about the self in a way that is helpful to people who have never done it before, but less helpful to people who worry that they do it too much.
posted by queenofbithynia at 12:53 PM on September 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I would like to recommend the kind of annoyingly named Why Is It Always About You? because it examines narcissism, being in relationships with actual people with NPD, but also how being raised in a narcissistic environment will give a person ways of doing things that are narcissistic and how to address those things.

It does approach it from the self-protective end. But as someone who was raised by someone who suffers -- and I do mean suffers although so do those around them -- from NPD, it helped me shift some of my mindset and habits around. I needed to.

Some other reading I recommend is really just about the tools to become a person who behaves as ethically as possible while still giving one's self the space to be human. Some of these books are a bit weird or dated but they have been touchstones for me:

When Things Fall Apart
The Road Less Travelled (M. Scott Peck)
Loving Each Other (Leo Buscaglia)
Traveling Mercies (religious but not like, stupid religious)
The Drama of the Gifted Child/For Your Own Good
Emotional Intelligence
Exhalation (Ted Chiang)
Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series for the kind of amusing side of ummmm whatever on hyperactive mode (and growing out of it. And falling back into it. And so on.)

For podcasts I have two weird recommendations. One is the Happiness Lab. Narcissistic traits tend to come out over control issues or fear and really thinking about actual happiness helps with that. The second is about cult leaders and is The Influence Continuum. For me listening about extreme individuals and what they try to do helps me determine different approaches to things.

Good luck, it's a worthy project. I agree with other people that if you've been around someone who has true-blue NPD, it's pretty certain that someone asking the question is not on the diagnostic end of narcissism. But that doesn't mean there isn't a value in exploring the question of what we do for ourselves and what we do for others and how...tense... that gets.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:13 PM on September 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

About eight years ago, a study was going around that suggested that asking people "are you a narcissist" tracked relatively closely with the results of more rigorous tests. I can see one replication and nothing so far suggesting it's bunk. So, if the description of narcissism does not appear to apply to you, and in particular, you don't look at said description and think that based on the description there isn't anything wrong with being a narcissist, you probably don't have at least a kind of narcissism. Thinking of asking the question "am I a flawed human being" would also suggest that narcissism may not be your problem.
posted by Merus at 8:43 PM on September 7, 2022