You Don’t Need to Know If They’re a Narcissist

After narcissistic abuse, vigilance can feel like wisdom. Every shift in tone becomes evidence. Every strange question begins a private investigation. I understand the impulse. Confusion hurts, and a label seems capable of putting the world back into order.

A life organized around detection keeps the nervous system staring into the same dark territory. The person who caused the damage can continue occupying our attention long after the relationship has ended. Eventually, the subject begins shaping identity, expectations, and every new interaction.

Fairness, calm, openness, humor, compassion, and mutual respect offer a more useful way to measure connection. They give the mind somewhere healthy to move toward.

Where is the line between awareness and obsession? That line can be surprisingly difficult to see while we are still standing inside the loop.

Transcript

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Well, the truth of the matter is the more I've looked into narcissism, the more confusing I've found it. And the more you look into the diagnostic criteria for a clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, the more confusing and self-contradictory it becomes. And then you add into that the fact that it's trending. People are using the word narcissist more to mean a greater and greater variety of what they experience as negative patterns of behaviour. And in some areas it's so overused that it can effectively be argued that it's turning into just a slur. So if anybody does anything you don't like, you can call them a narcissist, and it's sort of considered generally acceptable to do that. So I personally don't think in those terms, I think I've mentioned elsewhere on the channel before that when I've discussed this with my therapist, he doesn't believe me. He doesn't believe that I don't personally use the filter of narcissistic personality disorder. Apart from the fact it's confusing, I think it can actually be quite hard to observe at first. Um you can see if somebody is bombastic and loud and bullying and confrontational, but even if somebody showed me all of the signs of classic grandiose narcissism, which is what the DSM uh criteria lean towards, I'd still be very reticent of saying, oh, that person has narcissistic personality disorder. Because how could I know? I'd have to have pretty extensive interactions with them in order to get to that point. And I don't want to have extensive interactions with loud, bombastic, boastful, bullying, high-conflict personalities. I find them vexatious to my spirit. Then you have covert, fragile, um, vulnerable narcissism. Well, we know that that's harder to detect. Even for clinicians, it's harder to detect. Even the tools that have been constructed by clinicians have greater difficulty in detecting covert and fragile narcissism. So, what chance have I got? What I look for as I'm navigating life as a human being, because it's not massively important to me to know whether the people I'm interacting with on a daily basis, the human beings around me, have narcissistic personality disorder. It's not massively important to me. Um, and I don't think I have the ability to tell, so I make it much simpler. I will occasionally think in terms of high conflict personalities. So if I see that somebody's very bonded to the thrill of conflict, um, and very bonded to the thrill of upsetting the people around them and saying outrageous things and sort of demanding that they be the center of attention at all times, that would be a person that I would steer away from. If I notice somebody is boundary breaking and uh pushy and asking inappropriate questions too soon, um, and the interaction starts to feel one-sided, and somatically inside of my body, I just think I'm not very comfortable with this person, uh, and I'm I'm not gonna stand there in the bank or in the gym or wherever I am and analyse why. I'm just gonna be like, I'm getting a signal that this person is probably not on the level, this person doesn't seem cool. I'm gonna trust my instincts on this one, and I would just avoid them. I think an optimistic outcome for people who are recovering from narcissistic abuse isn't that you have an amazing detection system, because I I really don't think that that's that's possible. I think you could drive yourself insane trying to figure out who has narcissistic personality disorder or not, and you're at risk of becoming pretty disagreeable and insufferable yourself if this becomes an obsessive thing. You know, every time I walk into a room, I'm going to try and figure out who the narcissists are. Why? If you are committed to living a good life, a sane life, a peaceful life, and as a human being, you're committed to only engaging in authentic interactions with good, honest, open people who seem to be on the level, then you're putting your energy into something positive rather than negative. In in the sense, uh, the way they use that in science. You're putting your energy into something that is, you know, I want things to be sane and calm and good humoured and kind and compassionate. That's what I'm focused on. Negative, not necessarily meaning bad, but why would I put my energy into the not? Not abusive, not exploitative, not one-sided, not tyrannical. I I don't need to do that as a human being, and I don't think that's a very expedient strategy. Focus on what you do want. Put your energy and your time and your attention into what the relationships you do want to build. Because if I'm constantly looking at what I don't want to build, I'm worried I'm going to effectively co-create that or start filtering with my uh reticular activation system experiences, scenarios, and people who are more likely to be darkly aspected and predatory. And I don't want that. So why focus on that? If I'm focused on sane, calm, authentic, um good natured, then that which is not that is automatically filtered. And I'm not exerting what I don't want is for people to end up exerting energy to push away because I don't think it's necessary. As a human being, I think you can put your energy into what you do want, and then you don't give time and attention and thought and emotion to the people, scenarios, and institutions that you don't want to be associated with, to be interacting with, to be uh if it was an institution that you don't want to be inside of, just say that's not for me. I think it's cleaner, I think it's easier, and I don't know about you, but I don't have time to sit around trying to analyse people's questions and answers. It would be like um if you're a Blade Runner movie or book fan, do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Are we all going to walk around with our own handheld Voigt camp test and ask people a series of questions and then inspect their pupil dilations? That seems ineffective and tedious and and uh puts you at risk of becoming, as I said, a bit insufferable. If you're a self-appointed inquisitor, interrogator, detective, you know, it's it's kind of it's gonna put people on the back foot a little bit. So I genuinely, genuinely don't think in those terms. People see the material I make and they're like, this guy must be obsessed with the subject. And I'm really not. Um, it's interesting at points, it's challenging. My major interest and my uh emotional impetus, the trajectory that I'm on, is helping people to recover, is helping people to um explore their own unconscious scripts, is helping people to explore their own unconscious fantasies, and to sort of regain agency and sovereignty with people to help them to move away from that dark landscape. And it is a dark landscape. You know, there is there's the dark landscape of people who may have a pathological attachment to an internal structure that is highly narcissistic or a borderline organization, or internal organizational structure, an architecture, or psychopath or psychopathic, or histrionic, or just we could just say predatory, or we could say exploitative. That's a dark territory, but the clinical domain that responds to that dark territory is pretty dark as well because it well, largely speaking, it it runs from a historical medical model. So there is the virus, we are the suppliers of the antivirus, and it's it's pretty dark, it's pretty limited, it's pretty um bonded. So you're kind of bonded to the study of evil, like you know, and you end up with broader philosophical questions that can't really be answered. Like, why do people do bad things knowingly? Why do people knowingly do harm to others just to increase their own comfort or their own esteem or for a momentary pleasure? Maybe we'll never know. Maybe we can't know in this lifetime. Maybe, you know, in the reality structure we're in, it's like the the speed of light or something. You can't you can't crack that because it removes the notion of causality, it removes the notion of karma, cause and effect, and maybe, you know, maybe maybe if we go woo for a second, in some transcendent space beyond life, maybe we'll know, or maybe we won't. I I don't know if consciousness continues after life. I have uh stuff to do, I have bills to pay and responsibilities to fulfill. I can't, I can't sit around all day thinking about these things, and I don't, if I said it, said if I could say it in short form as if I say anything in short form, I don't find the concept of narcissism a particularly useful metric or filter for analyzing human behavior because it doesn't tell me why people are doing what they're doing. And even at the clinical level, if we keep it purely clinical or tried to, the clinical diagnoses don't try to do that either. So all that that does is give me a measuring stick for what nasty, silly, exploitative, petty, childish, mean-spirited things people are doing. And I don't want to sit there and count that. I don't I don't want to take an account of that. I don't want to be an accountant of dark, nasty, soulless, mean-spirited behavior because it doesn't it doesn't make me feel good. And if I'm not feeling good, I'm not thinking good, I'm not speaking good, I'm not acting good, and I only have one life. We only have so much time here. And I don't think it's a good use of time, I don't think it's a good use of attention. And this isn't me saying, you know, don't watch material on narcissistic abuse or study narcissistic abuse if you have been inside of a coercively controlling, emotionally manipulative relationship and you're looking for understanding. Take your understanding, but don't let your identity fuse with the subject, don't let your identity fuse with the notion of narcissism, don't let your identity fuse with the abuser or abusers plural or the abusive institution or whatever it is. Your identity should be free from that, unbonded from that. And so that's why I put like if I tried to use that filter, I'd disappear up my own bum. It's it's too confusing, it's too circular, it leads you into loops. Um and I like I personally find it very freeing to say it's not my responsibility. I don't need to know, and I don't, it's not my responsibility to figure out. I'm not responsible for for resolving the issues that exist in a clinical setting because I'm not a clinician, and I'm not responsible for finding out or deciding who or is not beyond, you know, into in such a pathological state that they're beyond salvation. It's not for me to say. What I can look at and explore is patterns of behavior and potential motivations, and I'll think about it if I have time. And a lot of the time, I don't have time, so I don't do that. I just go, I know what I'm focused on, I know what I'm moving towards. It's not helpful, it's never been a helpful metric or a filter for me. There are other more helpful metrics and filters that I can use, and I'm just gonna stick to using them. I want my relationships to be equitable and fair and free from manipulation and free from exploitation. And if I start to get the sense that there are things we can't talk about, but that are there present in the relationship and that are affecting me through the relationship, it's not a relationship, whether that's a friendship, a romance, or in any context, it's not a relationship I'm willingly going to pursue. And I accept there are situations in the real world, in practical terms, where people have to continue to interact with pathological predatory types. But then, even then, narcissism isn't a great, isn't the great filter. It's how am I going to do this without being contaminated by whatever by whatever pathology or evil intent this person is carrying? That's a more useful question. Anyway, that's my thought for today. Um, I hope it was useful. And if it wasn't useful, I hope it was interesting. And if it wasn't useful and interesting, well, I'm not very good at my job. Ladies and gents, thank you very much for your time and for your attention. If you have been affected by a narcissistically abusive relationship, we have a free course for you available on RichardGrenan.com. It is a four-part course, it is completely free, and it's my intention and my hope that even as you are watching the course and engaging with it, you should start to feel better. It doesn't mean it's going to heal you, it doesn't mean it's going to resolve the the issue in totality, but there's a certain state of mind we can loop into after narcissistic abuse that feels very confusing, very anxiety inducing, and it crushes optimism. It makes you feel very, very pessimistic and pushes you to the edge of despair. And this short free course should help you rapidly with that particular feeling. Okay, thank you very much, and I'll speak to you soon.