A Narcissist Demands others to Express Inauthentic Emotion toward their Inauthentic Being

The Narcissistic Personality Disorder is one of the most misunderstood disorders in psychology. I am willing to swear many licensed practitioners would struggle to explain the difference between a healthy super talented person and a narcissist who lies and fibs in order to create an image of an admirable person. The difficulty lies in a surprising place: many people who are within normal limits in terms of talent, skill, and success suffer a narcissistic blow when they meet someone with real talent, popularity, and other admirable traits, such as a celebrity would possess.

As a person suffers a narcissistic blow – a negative blow to their favorable idea of self – they tend to have excuses to explain the blow away to themselves and others; to make it not true. Explaining the threatening person to have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder is one way of doing it: “They’re not real. They’re faking it. I don’t need to be worried.”

Another difficulty is, that people with a normal level of talent can’t really tell a talented and skilled person from someone without talent – or cannot truly value that talent; they merely figure “it’s not such a big deal”. However, to a  talented person, it’s like saying: “I know you have a million dollars in your safe, but here, you only need a few hundred dollars a week to survive… Just burn the money you don’t need, it’s really there taking up space.”

Narcissism stems from the false belief that everyone is same on the inside and that the only differences between people are purely external. Therefore, your value is measured by your effort, results, and accuracy of filling a certain role in life, role being a VERY good word for it; the performance of being, for instance, a mother or a bookkeeper. A part of the measurement of your worth is choosing the right role to fill. In the narcissistic mind, you get reduced points for wanting to be good at the wrong thing, regardless of your natural aptitude or interest toward something.

What is the difference between a brag and a narcissist?

It is natural for a person to want to describe to other people how they experience life. If that person’s experience of life is very artistic, intellectual, or philosophical, the ordinary people can often think they are “putting it on” or, even, that they are deliberately trying to be a “superior” or to “dominate”. That is, controversially, a narcissistic reaction to someone who is authentically superior to them in some way. One narcissistic reaction to others is to INSIST everyone is either equal or inferior to themselves. They cannot accept the idea of anyone being superior to them – only the other way around. This becomes a difficult thing to contemplate when you actually ARE the superior in the room most of the time quite authentically.

Question #1: True or false?

The first question to ponder when considering if someone is potentially narcissistic is absolutely NOT that whether they are able to love others around them. A person who isn’t in love with the people surrounding them is not automatically a narcissist, just a person in the wrong group of people. So. Instead, the first question is this:

Is this person telling the truth or is she or he lying? True or false? That’s all you have to answer. Is their idea of self realistic or is it unrealistic? Are they painting a picture to you that isn’t truthful, or is the image of themselves, to the best of your knowledge, true, consistent with reality?

The question is NOT that is this person making someone feel uncomfortable or are they a nice person or a bad person. This isn’t about other people’s feelings about the person, whether others feel dwarfed next to them due to authentic skill level difference, or not. This is not about whether this person loves the other people surrounding them or observing them or not.

This is about whether their idea of who they are and how they are perceived by others is consistent with the reality. Not how their superiority makes others feel like a failure in comparison, EVEN IF they were rubbing it right in other’s face for some reason. That might be self-defense, or them simply being an asshole, but it isn’t enough to give them a diagnosis of having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A person can be a total dick without having an NPD.

Question #2: Are they insisting people show affection and loyalty to them, regardless of how they truly feel?

The second way of differentiating a narcissist from a normal person is their attempt to keep up appearances by using other people to do so. One of the defining traits of an NPD is the attempt to force other people to express love toward them, without the love being necessarily authentic. An NPD cannot tell the difference between real love and the outward action and expression of love, and this OFTEN applies to everyday people, mothers who demand for display of affection from their family regardless or not whether this love is real.

All “go give gramma a hug” -commands, “I am your WIFE!” retorts, are potentially narcissistic. A demand of display of affection that isn’t necessarily real. The demand to display love, affection, loyalty, admiration, or attraction toward them, when the other person doesn’t really feel it. This is VERY, VERY common in normal, everyday women. And, it is also normal they accuse the person refusing to display affection when they don’t feel it of an NPD or other disorder like commitment phobia or for “having intimacy issues”.

Question #3: Do they allow people to leave them?

Many people with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder react strongly to people attempting or planning to leave them. To break the contract of a narcissistic supply, so to speak. They regard the people in their lives their property, and no matter how they came to acquire that “property” they are not easily going to give up. They are likely to label people who refuse to keep displaying affection toward them as ‘narcissists’, selfish for not serving as their automatic emotion supply. A healthy individual understands that not everyone loves everyone, and you cannot simply command a feeling and expect it to appear.

They demand loyalty and presence in their lives KNOWING FULL WELL the other people don’t want to be there. To them, it is important to keep the appearances up, to have the family, couple, friends, or group APPEAR whole, to make the marriage seem healthy, anything to keep the front from revealing internal problems. They see others as an extension to their own self and outsider the enemy looking to find out they are “cracking under pressure” and demand all units they are a part of to portray a perceived positive, “whole” exterior.

Again, very, very, very common in everyday mothers, much more so than fathers these days, as this behavior coming from a father is no longer perceived positive, and as such doesn’t work as a narcissistic supply. For women, this is still considered “brave” and being a strong mother, so narcissistic women still do this.

Celebrities

Famous people are often accused of having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder simply for being famous. It would be beneficial for celebrities to know this disorder in and out and through, in order to not only recognize it when someone is reacting to them from a narcissistic place but also to protect others from being falsely labeled as an NPD.

In a word, celebrity symbolizes everything that is important for a type of a narcissist to be. EVERYTHING. This does not AT ALL mean that celebrities are narcissistic, or that all narcissists consider celebrity their goal, but that certainly doesn’t stop poor psychologists and psychologists from spreading the myth that this is what drives the celebrity culture. When a person doesn’t TRULY value the arts, philosophy, or beauty, they don’t see what else could possibly drive a person to celebrity but the perceived elevated status toward everyone else. It is very common for a what I’d call a shallow person, to completely miss the depth that goes into the entertainment industry, and the genuine joy it brings to both the artists and the fans.

Narcissism isn’t about wanting to be famous

Being an NPD is simply being fake in the pursuit of achieving a greater level of control over other people, and preferably over influential people. This makes celebrities magnets for Narcissists** who want to use and control them. MAGNETS. Narcissism is about acquiring an elevated social status by any means required. This is not about wanting to be famous, that’s fine, it’s about wanting to be famous so that you can control other people, and manipulate other people to do your bidding for you. It’s about USING other people and creating an image that allows more control, more power in commanding others to display positive feelings toward them.

Narcissism is about not being real. Pretense, without the concern of whether the exterior matches the interior. Being healthy is about being authentic. Real. Actual. Consistent with reality. We ALL fake to some extent, we all pretend we don’t have to go to the toilet just now, we all have a tendency of pretending we like a person in our company a little more perhaps than what we do, we pretend to be touched by compliments that mean nothing to us, but the difference is this: Is it politeness, a genuine attempt of being kind, or is it to make people admire you so you could control them better?

The motivation and logic

Finally, the motivation of creating a fake exterior is fear of not being enough. Fear of not being loved for who this person actually is, and not really knowing why being loved for the boring internal that you are would be even valuable. The need to create another, alternative expression to oneself in order to gain approval and love. This is not about LOOKING for real love, we all want to find true love, it is about what you expect to make you feel loved. The Narcissist will feel they need to build an external front that will gain them love, they feel they deserve love for the performance, their SKILL of being a human.

A healthy individual doesn’t feel loved when people love their front, they want to be loved for the person they are on the inside. A Narcissist will barely understand what that means if they understand it at all. They don’t understand what’s there to love about a person’s insides, as they believe EVERYONE is the same on the inside, and all the differences between people are external. They feel all lifestyle choices are strategies, and that logic dictates lifestyle choices when in reality, it is emotion.

It is not so much a disorder as it is a misunderstanding

I do not think the people with an actual, real Narcissistic Personality Disorder are actually sick, it’s just that they don’t know what it is like to be loved for who they are, nobody has loved them yet to show them what it’s like. They would easily now cry out “can’t you show me then?!” because they need love so bad, and they still think love is A SKILL or an action, something you simply decide to do or not do. This is part of the problem, they feel love must be some kind of a storage space where you simply dish out nuggets of love to people you deem deserving, like an emotional salary for all the work they put into life, when a healthy person knows love is an involuntary reaction to a person you find wonderful. It is a emotional response, not something people deserve, per say.

Narcissists** feel that being nice to someone in order to gain love is… Cheating the system. They feel love must be gained by performance; how well you perform your role, but showing love to others doesn’t come into the play, because by some logic, love must be given to them first, without the realization that if everyone expects the other person to be the one with a duty to show love, nobody will ever get to be loved.

You can’t choose who you love, says a healthy person with a small smile on their face, as they understand love does not always seem fair. It goes where it wants to go, and it often goes to the same few individuals in masses. This is because these people inspire love and admiration, they don’t DEMAND it. Love cannot be asked for, it can only be inspired.

The cure for narcissism

It is said you cannot cure narcissism, but I beg to disagree.

You cure a narcissist by showing love to them, but that love must be authentic for their true character traits. They will reject it at first because they feel it’s underserved when it comes from something other than the front, their performance. How well they performed their role in life. They don’t understand why anyone would love them for simply being them, and that’s why they’ll reject the love offered at first, and that’s what throws them further into their own narcissistic despair. They don’t know what makes them so special, therefore, they cannot accept love until you truly convince them that they are, in fact, special.

That kind of applies to all of us. We all need to be seen first, for who we truly are, before we are able to accept love given to us. That is one strong motivation of wanting to be famous, wanting to be seen for who we truly are, to splash the insides of us out there for the public to see: “Can you see me? Can anyone see me? Is there anyone out there who actually gives a crap…?” That is the healthy person’s motivation of wanting to be famous. A narcissist would do the same, but NEVER even think about revealing the insides of themselves, as they don’t think there’s anything to love about it.

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