Normal Narcissism vs Narcissistic Personality Disorder

so what's the difference between normal narcissism pathological narcissism being a narcissist or having narcissistic personality disorder so i'm going to address a question that somebody posted on one of my youtube videos that i actually thought was a great question and i know very often when people begin to wonder if they're in relationship with somebody with pathological narcissism they also begin to think oh no am i narcissistic so i want to give you a few tools to figure this out and i also want to say there is so much confusion with this diagnosis and with this term and as usual when i address a new topic i do a little research i see what else are you guys looking at what else are you learning or what else is being taught to you and given what i'm seeing out there i can totally understand the confusion so if you're new to my channel you may be wondering what qualifications do you have to address this so i am an lcsw i am licensed to diagnose people and i was a psychotherapist for over 20 years and i would say actually that one of my skills was really understanding some of these diagnoses and while i have worked with a handful of people with personality disorders in particular when i worked at agencies where people would be mandated for treatment the vast majority of my clients were people who had somebody in their life with a personality disorder so even though personality disorders are probably less than 15 of the population in my experience more than 50 percent of the people in therapy are in therapy because they either grew up with somebody with a personality disorder or they are in now in relationship with somebody with personality disorder people with personality disorders make it extremely difficult to have and hold healthy boundaries they can cause a lot of havoc at home and in the workplace and in general people with personality disorders now this isn't true of all of them but it is i think true of narcissistic personality disorder they don't land in therapy because they don't tend to think that they have the problem and if they have a problem they don't tend to think it is them so this will become more clear as i give you some of the definitions and descriptions of what's a normal narcissistic type behavior versus what's pathological and moving into the field of diagnosis all right so as an aside if you're new to my channel and you're not subscribed please subscribe it's big help and if you do like this video find it useful please do give it a like all right let's get into the topic so if you've seen a lot of my videos you know that sometimes i like to go back to basics and look at the definition of a word so the definition of narcissistic according to the cambridge dictionary is having too much interest in an admiration for yourself and the merriam-webster definition is extremely self-centered with an exaggerated sense of self-importance marked by or characteristic of excessive admiration of or infatuation with oneself now i mentioned that definition because there's a term going around called healthy narcissism and i will produce a video in the future about why i dislike that term but given that that's the definition of the word narcissistic i think it's much more useful to think of the term self-involvement how self-involved are we right and i created a few slides for you for this video because some of this can be hard to understand so here is a spectrum of self-involvement and you can see it all goes all the way from one side which i term healthy self-involvement through a middle area which i put down insecure and lack of self-esteem and then moving into narcissistic personality disorder and the spectrum of narcissism so i'm going to explain what i mean by this so healthy self-involvement we all have to be self-involved to some extent right we're as adults the people who take care of our own needs we have to have careers and jobs and move forward in the world and build families and hopefully we are doing it with a sense of empathy love for others so we can be both self-involved but have a healthy balance with it now this is a very dicey area and i will talk more about this when i get into the video that talks about you know healthy narcissism but having a very strong sense of self-confidence knowing a realistic appraisal of your strengths and your weaknesses a realistic appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses is healthy how self-involved one is at different stages of one's life can vary right so children can be very very self-involved and it is developmentally appropriate children can also have a healthy degree of narcissism right like they can look in the mirror and talk about how beautiful they are they can be very preoccupied with themselves and it is developmentally appropriate right so that element of self-involvement self-confidence going for one's goals right that can be healthy and balanced with respect for others relationships empathy connection intimacy all that good stuff and actually when we have really healthy self-confidence in some ways we're actually less self-involved than people who are extremely insecure so in the middle area of this graph right i put people who have insecurity and a lack of self-esteem right sort of low self-esteem probably should say low not lack of correction on my own slide but people who don't feel great about themselves can actually have a high degree of self-involvement right and this is a very painful thing i talk about this sometimes as the me loop and so people with high degrees of anxiety or even depression the thoughts can go around and around very centered on me and it could be like i'm a louse i shouldn't have done that why did i do that ruminating about what i said how other people responded to me right there's a lot of insecure focus on who am i why am i this way how are other people responding to me so in some ways that can actually be a higher level of self-involvement than for somebody who is sort of calmly confident goes about their stuff knows they're sort of good at these things not so good at that doesn't worry too much about what other people think right it's a place of more freedom actually so but this middle area where people have the you know lower self-esteem and can seem a little bit needy in terms of seeking approval right so either to themselves like you may feel this way and not exhibit it right or you might have somebody in your life who really seems to exhibit this who really needs a lot of praise and encouragement but that doesn't qualify them for narcissism so i guess what i'm saying is that there can be a narcissistic element right but then as narcissism gets more and more extreme where the narcissism is really like it's all about me all of it it's only about me and that's all i can think of and i don't take other people into account that's where you move into narcissistic personality disorder on the right hand side but there is a major cut between the middle area of this arrow and narcissistic personality disorder so what i'm showing on this slide are two slashes in this arrow this arrow really isn't one smooth continuum you really don't move from the two-thirds on this side of the arrow into narcissistic personality disorder there are some major slices so people to the left of these slices don't end up on the right hand side i hope that makes sense for you and i think my next slide is going to illuminate that a little bit more so what really differentiates kind of narcissism that we all might experience or feel from narcissistic personality disorder are these things now this isn't everything but these are some of the major things to be aware of and these would be some of the major signals for you in terms of knowing whether you are dealing with somebody who has really a pervasive personality disorder versus they're just having a bad day or at a bad point in their life where they're feeling you know a little bit more selfish and self-focused okay so on the left of my slide in the non-personality disordered area people have empathy there is an ability to empathize to recognize and care about the emotions of others versus the pathological narcissism where empathy is impaired now narcissists sometimes can recognize the feelings of others but they will tend to use that ability to recognize the feelings of others to exploit it they don't really feel the empathy they don't truly care about the other person's feelings unless it behooves them to do so okay in the non-personality column here there's mutuality in relationship which doesn't mean it's exactly equal you might have a partner who needs way more reinforcement than you do or you might be the one who needs a little bit more you know please give me affirmations right it's okay like there isn't always exact balance but there is some mutuality and there's a recognition that others have legitimate needs with the narcissistic personality disorder and i'm going to use the term pathological narcissism in a similar way which i know might be controversial but let's bear with me for the moment with pathological narcissism relationships primarily serve the narcissist's self-esteem the narcissist needs other people's admiration to be okay like needs it deeply and the narcissist will manipulate people to get that self-esteem and if others in their relationship have needs maybe not initially but over time if the needs of their loved ones conflict with their own desires and their own desire to see themselves in an elevated way they will put down the needs of their loved ones and then in the non-pathological side of this you know equation here people have an ability to take responsibility for their mistakes now that doesn't mean that they always do okay none of us always do we tend to blame sometimes we blame other people sometimes we blame ourselves sometimes we blame both sometimes we blame the universe right but we have the ability to take responsibility and acknowledge when we do something wrong and even if you know we might have people in our lives who yeah they sort of acknowledge it they're not very good at saying it they may never say they're sorry but they make some effort to change their behavior if they have hurt you right there's an ability to take some responsibility for their own behavior on the pathological side nope people with narcissistic personality disorder do not take responsibility for their actions or for how they hurt others and a couple of these get qualified the person with narcissistic personality disorder will take responsibility for something they've done wrong if it clearly benefits them if they can do that in a way that is going to get them the self-esteem and the apprais the praise and the elevated right self image if they're gonna get it from making a major apology then they'll do it so pretty much all of these things on the narcissistic personality disorder side the narcissist can adjust based on how they want to present so for example if a narcissist is trying to elevate themselves at work or in the community their behavior might be impeccable but at home with their loved ones who they're no longer trying to impress their behavior is despicable so there is a real split and the other term that should have been on this sheet is manipulation now one more spectrum for you not trying to confuse things here but there's also a spectrum of people who have narcissistic personality disorder in terms of how severe their symptoms are so personality disorders in general exist on a spectrum you might have people who have very extreme manifestations of the symptoms and other people where it's kind of muted and they've learned to kind of keep a lot of their natural tendencies in check so that they can conform to society so even the personality disorder symptoms exist on a spectrum so i want to go back to an earlier slide for something because i showed you this one where there's these two slashes people on the right side of those slashes do not have empathy navigate the world through manipulation which i want to come back to and generally have the other criteria i just talked about so while that is true to the left of this line for people with healthy self-confidence healthy self-involvement normal neuroses right like insecurity low self-esteem but they're navigating the world with empathy but that empathy doesn't always kick in right they have bad days they may do things that are overly self-involved they may hurt your feelings you might hurt their feelings right because for a while or because you were triggered by something or because of a lack of understanding your empathy is temporarily limited and your self-involvement is increased right so yes do we all do some narcissistic things at a time absolutely right like okay what would be some normal things right like cutting in line or you know rushing to get the best for yourself or you know that kind of thing it doesn't tend to be the behavior we're super proud of and we don't always have perfect empathy right like sometimes we think that the other person is motivated like that they want to harm us right and if we're thinking that and we're in that fight flight freeze mode right i talk about that as our reptilian brain when we're in our reptilian brain our empathy signals and ability to have empathy and feel other people's emotions and care about them is really really limited and this is why normal couples right can get into these fights where they're so nasty with each other and then afterwards they regret it and they feel bad and they try to talk it through so i'm just saying this because not all behavior that appears narcissistic means the person is a narcissist or has narcissistic personality disorder or has pathological narcissism whatever these many many words out there that you want to use and i'm thinking of a client she was dating somebody relatively new and early in the relationship he pulled out some awards some like sports awards that he had won while he was in high school and she had dated a narcissist before and she was on high alert for narcissistic behavior and she was very concerned that that was narcissistic and okay there's a little bit of a narcissistic element in it but that in and of itself is not narcissistic right that's somebody wanting to share his background with her wants her to know more about him and yeah okay did he want her to know that he used to be good at this stuff sure so we do have to be careful and i think the real key here is does the person navigate the world through manipulation or through empathy so if about 15 of the population have personality disorders and most people with personality disorders navigate the world through manipulation the rest of us we navigate the world through empathy we you know we sort of judge we feel what other people are feeling and again it doesn't mean we're always acting perfectly empathetic and not acting at all narcissistically okay but the way we figure out how to move forward in life is with a sense of empathy whereas overall people with personality disorders and in particular somebody with narcissistic personality disorder is going to be navigating the world through manipulation so this ends up being very very confusing for the rest of us because our minds just don't work that way so we really don't understand so if i'm not we're in an argument with a narcissist and the narcissist says look i never said that yeah you did you did but they are so convinced and so convincing that they never said that you question your own reality and you could find thousands and thousands of examples like that once you've been in a relationship with somebody with a personality disorder for a while you end up feeling like what we're on different planets and i'm maybe i'm going nuts right so i've gone on here and i haven't told you the question that prompted this entire video so let me read that to you the subscriber who commented was asking me what i thought of somebody else who publishes on youtube about this topic a lot and he said that he feels that she elaborates and expands the bounds and definition of narcissism so broadly that according to her if you are hypersensitive to people's rudeness or tone or disrespect you are a narcissist and he asked me what i thought about that so maybe given whatever he told you you can tell but no sometimes people are hypersensitive to other people's criticisms because they're in that middle category of low self-esteem or insecurity and it could be that they always feel insecure or they could be just going through an insecure period of their life or it's on a topic that they feel particularly insecure about we don't all take criticism well right like really taking criticism well is a gift it really is and i think it's something we can strive for so those of us on the you know left side of that arrow can strive to not take things so personally to take criticism in a more balanced way i think that is healthy and the more self-respect we have and the more self-esteem we have the more we're able to do that because if we have good self-confidence we might be able to say like yeah okay i'm really not that good in that area i could use some improvement there whereas if i'm really sensitive and sort of insecure about that and i really don't want to admit it it's going to be very hard for me and then also sometimes we were criticized a lot unfairly as children and we have a snap reaction to it or maybe we're in a job situation or in a relationship where we're being criticized all the time maybe by a narcissist but we do feel that the criticism is unfair so there's a lot of reasons that we can take criticism personally there's a lot of reasons we can worry about people being rude to us not that i think we should right because i do think it's on them not on us but a lot of the people that i work with are very sensitive to other people not responding to their texts quickly enough or if somebody's rude to them in the workplace or isn't even like nice to them does not mean they're a narcissist but it does mean that the thinking is very me focused and it is that painful me loop it is that painful why isn't she responding to me what did i do why why didn't she respond to my text it's not really thinking about hmm i wonder what's going on for her that she didn't respond or not even worrying about it like takes sometimes it takes me a couple days to respond to a text right so there isn't a balanced view of the world it is an element of a what i call that me focus but it's not narcissism and in fact if you do fall into that area on that arrow of the insecurity lack of self-esteem you actually might be more prone to end up in a relationship with a narcissist because the narcissist's criticisms are going to be something that initially you take on so that's a very complicated topic i will do more videos on it and i work with people on boundaries around this stuff extensively and i currently have a boundary course a course on boundaries which will really go into how do you have internal boundaries that protect you from getting into a relationship with somebody with narcissistic personality disorder but also if you're already in a relationship and it's not one you can get out of how can you insulate yourself from their tactics how can you set and enforce boundaries because the narcissists not gonna want you to do it and if you're in a relationship with one you know what i mean so this takes some work and it is really based in your own self-respect self-esteem self-confidence and a deep understanding that boundaries are for you they're for you to protect yourself physically emotionally all sorts of ways they're there for you to protect your sense of self and sometimes they don't even really involve the other person they're for you by you they don't always change the other person's behavior directly but if they change your behavior the behavior in the relationship will change the mutual behavior or whatever the behavior between the two will change if your behavior changes and that's all you have control over so we spend a lot of time on this in this program if you have an interest check it out i'll put the link below post the link here i think it will be super useful not just with regard to the relationship you're in now but going forward like how to spot what is going to be a healthy relationship versus one that's not going to be healthy it's a great tool to have so this is a big topic i'm very grateful to the subscriber who posted that question because it sort of got me thinking about doing a few more videos on this i will be coming out with a couple more soon so please subscribe stay tuned and i'll see you soon

Channel: Barbara Heffernan

Views: 154,272

Keywords: barbara heffernan, narcissistic personality disorder, what is narcissistic personality disorder, what is pathological narcissism, what is normal narcissism, what is healthy narcissism, normal narcissism vs narcissistic personality disorder, how to tell if someone is a narcissist, am i a narcissist, how to tell if someone is a narcissistic partner, am i a narcissistic person

Id: 1cG5MrGwN-s

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022