@i.ehrenfest349

1 year ago

Another reason that your approach releases me from the confusion I feel when listening to or reading other NPD experts, is that while I’m predominately (I think) the victim of childhood narcissistic abuse, I feel I have narcissistic traits myself, too. In the approach on other channels, there are only victims and perpetrators, the good and the bad. Not only don’t I see “just bad people” in my abusive relatives, but I also don’t see a perfectly virtuous individual in myself. (In fact the thought is wonderfully absurd.) Now - I want to acknowledge my own narcissistic traits, but in the black and white worldview, this leads me to constantly ruminate whether, possibly, I am “the” narcissist, or also a narcissist. Especially since I’m very aware that many narcissists see themselves as victims and the world outside as mean and disappointing. That’s unproductive. With your clear and coherent explanations, I think I see reality more for what it is. I’m not a narcissist, but I do have traits, I have a lot of vulnerabilities such as you address, and that doesn’t suddenly put me in the dark camp - instead, it’s something I can learn to understand and allow, instead of just hoping I’m mistaken and that’s not really a part of me. I just don’t gain anything from the antagonistic approach. (Although it had its value in getting out of the phase of being too understanding and forgiving, to my detriment.) Now I feel I am in learning mode, instead of “condemn and vilify” mode. Finally, your insights have more internal logic than the theories, if they’re really full blown theories, that I usually find online and in books. This is a model of human behaviour and dynamics. The others are often more of a get-together of like minded individuals - with which there is nothing wrong, but does it support our growth? I once read an interview with a man who spent his whole life doing research into - well, I forget the exact description, but what it came down to is that he researched wars, holocausts and other forms of catastrophic human behaviour. He said there was one main thing he had learned from his lifetime of doing that. And it was simply this: that the root of all such catastrophe is, and now I go verbatim, people believing they are better than other people. Condemning narcissism, especially as a societal trend, is very very important. But creating an artificial division between good and bad people is not. Just look at the many comments in which people say, literally, “I don’t regard them as human.” That disturbs me. Dutch writer Abel Herzberg who survived the concentration camps said about Hitler, in an interview: “I feel sorry for him as a human being.” He did not mean that we should in any way forgive or justify what Hitler did. He did not mean that he underestimated the evil of Hitler. He probably did not mean that he wouldn’t have killed Hitler if he had had the opportunity to. But he saw the entirety of the human drama. As we see in the massive support Hitler had, evil doesn’t come from inhuman demons. It comes from us. So yes. This nuanced and internally logical approach is needed if we want to be full human beings instead of caricatures fighting the evil in others. I could not say this in the very many narcissism posts on Quora, because it would lead to strong hostility, as I’ve noticed. Not that one should be swayed by that.

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