Hi, I'm Dr.Tracy Marks a psychiatrist and I make mental health education videos. Today I'm talking about narcissism. I've gotten multitudes of
requests to talk about narcissism, and I've put it off for a long time because it's a very complex topic and I wanna do it justice. Narcissism has several facets to it. Here are some of the terms
you've probably already heard. Narcissism, pathological
narcissism, malignant narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, narcissistic vulnerability,
narcissistic injury, and narcissistic abuse. In this video, I'm only going to talk
about healthy narcissism. Narcissism is not a diagnosis, it's a psychological
concept that helps explain or define human behavior. Another term for this is
a psychological construct. Narcissism is defined as love of the self. The name comes from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. Narcissus was a handsome
hunter who fell in love with himself, and eventually
with his reflection in a pool of water. When he leaned down to
kiss his reflection, he couldn't see his face. So he continued to stare at the reflection until he died of thirst. In its most basic form, narcissism
as we use the term today is neither good, nor bad. It's on a spectrum of
healthy to pathological. Healthy narcissism is the
ability to take pleasure in yourself and your accomplishments. You develop a healthy level
of narcissism in childhood, when you have parents who
will allow you the freedom to form your own opinions and
express your most vulnerable emotions in a supportive
environment without criticism and shame. So in essence, you're
supposed to love yourself. Think of it as a fortress, that's built with an impenetrable core. Your outside is made of
material that can be damaged, but only on a superficial level. So for example, if you have
a strong core of self love and joy, you can sit in a
job that you hate and take the arrows that are thrown at you. The arrows may damage you
superficially like making you unhappy at work, but you can
withstand it because you still have your core that allows
you to feel satisfaction with life from the inside. So when you leave your
job at the end of the day, you have the capacity to
move on to something else that makes you happy and
restores your damaged outer covering. And this doesn't have
to be something huge, like running a non-profit
in your spare time. This could be as basic as
going home and binge watching a show on Netflix to unwind. It's doing something
that makes you feel good and rejuvenate you. Pathological narcissism
moves down the continuum in the direction of over
inflating yourself worth and doing things that are exclusively for your self gratification
and often to the detriment of others. For some people, this can
look like the need to take from people to feel a gain. You tear people down to feel built up. Someone else's win is
experienced as a loss for you. Have you seen this before? Here's an example, you can have a friend who
seems to be pretty content, where she is in life, and really isn't complaining about much. And you tell her that
you're buying a new house with a gorgeous backyard and a waterfall, but she's not very happy for you. Maybe she says, why do
you need a waterfall? That's just gonna be a lot of upkeep. Or she says a waterfall must be nice. You don't understand it
because she just bought a house last year and seemed
happy in her new home. Why can't she share your enthusiasm? Because she has this gut
feeling that regardless of what she already has, when
someone else gets something, it feels like she's lost something. Behind the pathological
narcissism is a perpetual need to fill your cup because it
always seems to be empty. Everything is weighed
against, what about me? The person with a healthy
level of narcissism can hear your news and
think, wow, a waterfall, when do I get to see it? In this case, because your cup feels full, you don't see your friends'
accomplishments as threatening. Here's another example that illustrates some of these points. A few months ago, I published
a post on my community tab about how I received my
YouTube Silver Play Button. The Silver Play Button is
an award given by YouTube, when you reach a 100,000 subscribers. when I got to a 100K, I was looking forward to
getting the play button, but it didn't come. So I figured I'd been overlooked. I was disappointed because
I'd seen other creators get theirs, but Oh well, I moved on. A year later, I got it in
the mail and was excited to finally get it and posted about it. I got a lot of wonderful
comments congratulating me and it made me feel really good. Then I got this comment
from a person that I'll call Loving Joe. I've taken down the comment, so you can't track who he really is, but this is what he said. Loving Joe said, "Narcissist,
do any of your virtual patients ever get comparable recognition for their achievements, ever? One of their achievements
is putting you over the 100K threshold, but you get the award. Eknath Easwaran once
observed that most people's communication can be summarized
as meaning, I love me. This is what your image says to me, one of your virtual patients
who is unsubscribing." I thought this was a really sad commentary about Joe state of mind. He calls me a narcissist, which has practically
become profanity on YouTube. I'm guessing he was hoping
to shame me with that. But here's the real sad part, instead of being happy for me, he focused on how he nor
anyone else watching my videos gets an award. It's like the house example, Loving Joe probably is not
sitting around watching YouTube videos every day, seething with anger because
he's not getting an award for watching. It's not until I say, look
what I have that he says, how dare you be happy when I
haven't gotten what I deserve. Now, let's look at this from
a different perspective. Let's say I were in a
relationship with Loving Joe. And I say to him, look what I have. And he accuses me of being self absorbed. If I had my own insecurities, such that I didn't have the strong inner fortress of confidence and self love. And I believe he's a
smart guy and really knows what he's talking about, I may feel shamed and think
that I'm a bad person. I don't wanna be self absorbed or selfish, so then I downplay my accomplishments. And depending on how broken I
really am in this department, I can go even further and not
let myself achieve very much because I don't wanna
grapple with self-pride and other emotions that
self-absorbed people have. If my parents made me feel this way, I may believe that I
don't deserve good things. Then I could have a decent
relationship with Loving Joe, because he would never
have to worry about me outshining his accomplishments, because I either wouldn't work for them, sabotage them, or not speak about them. So this is where healthy
narcissism becomes essential. You may have had early
experiences that chipped away at your fortress. You may be wounded in
this area of self love. If you don't love yourself enough, you become vulnerable to being in, or creating unhealthy relationships. There's not one thing that
causes pathological narcissism, but it can stem from
someone who was so starved for validation and affirmation
that they work to get their needs met at all costs. But their needs are never satisfied. My supervisor in residency
training gave me a saying that I thought was descriptive of this. When you're a child, if you
get two cookies with love, two cookies will always be enough. If you get two cookies without love, no amount of cookies will ever be enough. So what do you do if you didn't
get your cookies with love? It's a lot of work to change ingrained beliefs from your past. And it usually takes a
professional to help you with this. But a general way to look at
this is rather than spending your life constantly
chasing after more cookies, you have to find another
source of validation that you can control. Some may find it by embracing their faith, for others it may be a long
road of building confidence through progressively
significant accomplishments. Some people can find
healing through meeting the needs of others. Whatever works for you, the idea is that you lose
the pattern of trying to feed an insatiable appetite for validation and accept the new
positive image of yourself that you help create. In a future video, I'll break down the other
terms that I mentioned earlier. Pathological narcissism,
malignant narcissism, and narcissistic personality disorder. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
