We all have narcissistic traits. For some, these traits help to maintain balance in difficult times, for others these traits make them endlessly ashamed of themselves.

The questions is how healthy narcissism differs from pathological narcissism and how to accept your imperfection.

Once upon a time, all the good people on the planet came together to find out who is the worst in the world. It turned out that narcissists are to blame for all the troubles of the world in general and human relations in particular.

After that, people were delighted and began to call failed husbands, bad lovers, harmful mothers-in-law and other parents, whom they could not take revenge in another way, as narcissists.

Often we diagnose the symptoms of narcissism in the wrong people, people who are not suited to us anymore – we say these people claim to be unique, have inability to empathize with us, that they are egoistic —and we label them and calm down. It seems intelligent to say: “I’m good, it’s just that you are a narcissist.” Let only inside our psyche, but justice has been restored for a short time.

Yes. Narcissism has become popular and demonized. Many books have been published recently, everyone has learned to recognize “10 signs of a narcissist” and found out “how to neutralize it”, and groups are proliferating on the Internet where victims of perverse, of course, narcissists unite and complain to each other about a hard life. At the same time, they often describe ordinary human relationships in which people do not know how to mediate and negotiate, see and hear each other. But in groups of “narcissistic-haters” the angry victims feel being “constantly devalued”, “ignored my needs”, “exploited and used”. I see personally see no need to defame narcissists, but, on the contrary, to rehabilitate narcissism in general and narcissists in particular.

To begin with, healthy narcissism consists of a good feeling and understanding of oneself, one’s capabilities and limitations, is one of the most beautiful and desirable human states. But now many of us are so out of tune that we sincerely think that if we are not successful, or think that something is wrong with us. We stop comparing ourselves with ourselves in the past, stop being proud of our movement and development. We lose touch with who we really are. We stop noticing our likes or dislikes.

Instead, we look around for ideal guides, try to stretch ourselves onto artificial images, to start doing what we think successful people should do, and endlessly compare ourselves to everyone who is at least a little better in some way. “Cloaked in an artfully constructed illusion of limitless possibilities, we all, at least until the onset of a mid-life crisis, adhere to the belief that our existence is an endlessly ascending spiral of achievements depending only on our will,” Irvin D. Yalom once noted.

Yalom very subtly noticed the metaphor: life as an endlessly ascending spiral of development. But this spiral has become no longer just the trajectory of a single life, but a widespread narcissistic trend.

Even the process of development of a child is chained in a cage. People start to believe that development begins in the womb by listening to Schubert and Mozart. At six months, the child is taught a second language. In a year – the ability to distinguish the same Schubert from Bach. And at the age of two, the child is obliged to stage skits in the same two languages and show them to all the friends so that parents are not ashamed of their child’s aimless years.

Each subsequent life step and choice should be more and more successful than the previous ones in terms of results. And the ability to manage oneself, control oneself and be independent of reality should be increased in ascending order. The narcissistic ideal is the ability to ideally live your life, using every opportunity to become better, more successful and more efficient.

We become too vulnerable in the part of us that is responsible for good self-esteem.

And almost all of us acquire “idee fixe” becoming better than the previous version of ourselves; becoming so grandiose that no comparison with others can hurt us anymore.

However, very often the narcissist lives not at all with a sense of his grandiosity, but, on the contrary, with pain from his own insignificance. But what exactly hurts the narcissist? Feeling of self-worth and self-respect. Our narcissistic core is a processor with a powerful program that is responsible for our perception of ourselves and an adequate understanding of our capabilities and limitations.

Narcissists live in a constant fear of their own inferiority and insignificance compared to the ideal image of themselves they cannot achieve. Depending on the severity of the wounded narcissist, his or her defenses will work differently. At the pole of pathological narcissism (that is, when we are no longer talking about individual features of the psyche, but about a full-fledged narcissistic personality disorder), the defenses against the feeling of one’s own insignificance are so powerful that everyone from afar will see how grandiose a person is in front of them.

The narcissist becomes obsessed with his own grandiosity. He is convinced of his uniqueness and even chosenness in comparison with ordinary people. But no reality can confirm all this, and when faced with his inability to influence the world, a person experiences a mixture of shame and rage.

On this fuel, the narcissist again and again attacks the environment in an attempt to prove his omnipotence. All this is accompanied by the exploitation of others, ignoring their feelings and experiences on the way to achieving their grandiosity. Strictly speaking, it is these people that are usually called “narcissists” in the clinical sense of the word. But the good news is that there are very few of them on the planet.

In contrast, a person with healthy narcissism might describe himself as follows: “Inside myself, I consistently feel that I am good. Everything is fine with me, even if I can’t cope situationally, I don’t achieve goals, or I can’t build relationships. It hurts me when interesting people don’t choose me, but I no longer collapse, thinking that it’s me as a nonentity.I feel capable of being equal in relationships. I agree to my own place in relationships with people, and for this I do not need to be either grandiose or special. Fantasies about the “ideal version of me” no longer spur. I’m more and more interested in getting to know the real me, rather than trying to fit in with the phantom.”

Probably one third of people live the middle of this “narcissistic scale”: our psyche is not completely destroyed, but at the same time not so healthy because the narcissistic fantasies still somewhat cause us anxiety and discomfort. Yes, perhaps we do not always rave about grandiosity and even rarely fall into a rage that the world and the people around us do not give us the recognition we deserve. We do not fantasize about our greatness and that we should be great everywhere and always. Everything is exactly the opposite:

Some of us shrink from prying eyes, fearing that the embarrassing truth about our inferiority will suddenly be revealed to people.

Most of us perfectionists:
We want to do everything to the highest standard, but we cannot take a step, fearing that failure will bring down our self-esteem, which we work so hard to piece together every time.

We want to be with people, but we stand on the sidelines, feeling ourselves unworthy with every cell of the body.

We look at people arrogantly, in fact, protecting ourselves from the disgust that we are afraid to read in other people’s eyes.

We attack ourselves for any shortcomings that we can find in our actions and even thoughts.

We treat ourselves without pity and mercy, because we are afraid to relax and become a “rag”.

We try to be “normal” and pretend we don’t need anyone.

We are focused on maintaining our self-esteem by all means, but we are not good at it. It is easily destroyed by the slightest setback or feeling that we do not fit in something.

Some people can recognize themselves in this description. I call this condition narcissistic fragility or narcissistic vulnerability. There is still a very good word in the scientific literature – “deficiency”. And we who feel ourselves in such a narcissistic neurosis often feel exactly that: a pervasive and constant lack of oneself. We always lack fullness, confidence, success, achievement, attention, praise, recognition and other things. And I must say that it must feel exhausting to live in this state.

After all, there is no way we can appropriate a stable idea of ourselves. As if there is simply no place inside where this “good me” lives. We are exhausted by the desire not to feel our scarcity, but nothing works out for us. We run after achievements, but they seep somewhere past, as if there are solid holes where self-esteem should be.

This is the essence of narcissistic neurosis. The feeling of one’s own inferiority causes great anxiety and shame, and we endlessly try to cover up, shut it up, fill, saturate, etc. Anything is suitable for this: work, education, relationships, food, chemicals and any other “compensation” or “distractions”.

To calm the anxiety of one’s own insufficiency, a person tries to saturate himself with something that is not really what he needs. He is sure that as soon as he believes in his successes and assigns victories, he will automatically begin to appreciate and respect himself. But we are doomed to experience disappointment in this idea. It does not work! No matter how much we invest in success, no matter how much we receive recognition, it does not feed self-esteem so that we become good for ourselves.

Narcissistic Praises and External Approvals Are Like Fast Tasty Carbohydrates.

Short-term pleasure, and often following heavy withdrawals and even dependence, as from sweet chocolate. No matter how hard you try to accustom yourself – you won’t be able to get enough.

Friendship with your own inner world and the ability to be yourself in relationships with others will allow you to experience real satiety. Then the scale of achievements and success will become just one of the factors of life, far from determining and not intended to support the whole structure.

Our goal of finding other scales of life (interest, comfort, pleasure, happiness, self-expression, etc.) is an attempt to create our own balanced nutritional menu, refusing to eat only carbohydrates and recognizing their insidiousness.

Success, fame, achievements, victories in themselves mean little for you if there is no one with whom you can share your experiences and the feelings of success. If the waves of one soul do not knock on the shore of another, and then do not mix in one current.

Here we feel a little for what is to be on the saving shore, where we can take a break from the exhaustion caused by our narcissism. From fantasies that we can be accepted by people if only we are perfect, we descend to ordinary people. And we find ourselves just one of them – where dignity and value are not in sterile perfection and infallibility, but in all the diversity that each person possesses.

This is where a completely feasible, realistic goal arises (as opposed to achieving the ideal): to study ourselves well enough so that our features nourish the very narcissistic emptiness that we unsuccessfully try to fill with things that are not suitable for this.

And when we have “mastered” and studied ourselves well enough, there is no longer any need to either run after external evaluation and praise, or attack anyone – including narcissists. We begin to perceive the world in many radiant shades, where the features of each of us have a place.