Everyday Narcissism. Nancy Van Dyken
guidance? Force unreasonable control over natural processes? And does your body resist you, or manifest the resulting tension by attacking itself? Are you sometimes surprised by sudden and impulsive explosions of anger?
Beneath this struggle is your own weeping self.
Through this thoughtful book, you will discover your own automatic behaviors that consume your time and energy. You will track their origins and then free yourself from them. You will uncover attitudes and thoughts that were programmed into you when you were just a tot, and your brain was still being formed, and replace them with messages that are more loving, honest, and effective.
With Everyday Narcissism, you can find your way back.
You will unearth the myths that have sidetracked your life, and reinstate boundaries that help you heal rather than suffer. You will channel yourself toward the life that belongs to you—a life that you create as you discover your own truest focus and deepest resources.
You will emancipate honest feelings that have been trapped in vaults deep inside you. By lifting out of darkness those closeted parts of yourself, you will discover a fuller self, release your own wisdom, and free energy that can fuel travel in your own best direction.
Do you know where that direction goes? Maybe not. And you need not fear your deepest self.
Even if you suspect that a fiery layer of anger lies dormant, you need not fear your deepest self. That anger is like a battery. It is stored energy. As with any energy source, learning how to handle it will empower you.
Everyday Narcissism will raise your awareness of your own layers. It will also give you tools to gently bring those layers into the light, according to your own best timing.
You have the potential to emerge from your cocoon of inauthenticity, to find a peaceful internal grace as you tune into your own profound self-authority that can orchestrate your unique best life.
Anne Katherine
Bestselling author of Boundaries and Where to Draw the Line
“Live outside your comfort zone; there are great discoveries there.”
Caroline Aron
Narcissism is a belief that the world revolves around us, and that what happens in the world happens because of us. This belief is as common, and as pervasive, as it is erroneous.
Most of us live with a garden-variety form of narcissism that’s so embedded we don’t even know we have it. As a result, we suffer deeply and unnecessarily.
I call this everyday narcissism, or EN.
Nearly all of us are everyday narcissists—you, me, our friends, our children, our parents, our other relatives, our coworkers, our partners, and our neighbors. This narcissism comes from a combination of childhood wounds and enduring myths we were taught at a very young age. The more emotionally wounded we are, and the more we buy into these myths, the more narcissistic we tend to become.
These powerful myths get ingrained into our thinking, and we believe them because people we love and trust—our parents—initially teach them to us, while other adults in our lives regularly reinforce them. Let’s begin by looking at the first four of these myths. (We’ll examine the fifth myth in the following chapter.)
Myth 1: We Are Responsible for—and Have the Power to Control—How Other People Feel and Behave
When we live our lives according to this first myth, we are in a constant state of hypervigilance, fearing that we won’t belong or fit in if we don’t make others happy through what we do and say. We spend much of our time trying to figure out what other people want, what they need, and what will make them happy.
Meanwhile, we consistently ignore ourselves—what we want, what we need, and what will make us happy. We neglect ourselves, believing that if others are happy with us, they will love us—and, as a result, we will become happy, too. We may also take credit for other people’s happiness, as if it occurred because we performed so well.
When we believe this, we constantly watch how others react to us. If they are unhappy, we assume it is because we did something wrong. We tell ourselves that if only we had said or done or been something different, they would be happy. We assume we’ve failed and we feel ashamed or burdened or unlovable. Thus we live in fear of rejection and disapproval.
Honesty takes a back seat to pleasing each other when more or less everyone lives according to this myth. Worse, over time, each of us loses our sense of who we are. We no longer know ourselves; we only know what others want.
We imagine that making others happy will bring us happiness. Yet if we live a life of pleasing others and avoiding conflict, of consistently doing things for others at our own expense, we are not happy at all—because without honesty there can be no intimacy, no connection, and no genuine love.
Myth 2: Other People Are Responsible for—and Have the Power to Control—the Way We Feel and Behave
ANGELINE AND GARY
Like most of us, Angeline has been raised to believe Myths 1 and 2. As a result, when her nine-year-old son Gary does something that bothers her, she says to him, “You’ve made me angry at you.”
Instead of focusing on Gary’s actions—for example, he didn’t put away his toys, as he promised he’d do—she makes the problem the way she feels about his actions. Instead of Gary learning that he is responsible for taking care of his possessions, he learns that he is responsible for fixing his mother’s feelings.
In an extreme version of Myth 2, a parent blames their child for the parent’s feelings—and for how the parent responds to those feelings. “Now look what you’ve done. You make me so upset that I dropped my tea mug and broke it.” Or, “If you had cleaned up your room like you promised, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry and yelled at you.”
When people in a relationship believe Myth 2, their disagreements typically turn into ever-escalating arguments, and no satisfactory resolution is ever found. Each person holds the other responsible for their own happiness or satisfaction and blames the other for not providing it. Each then resents the other for not doing their part.
Myth 3: The Needs and Wants of Other People Are More Important than Our Own
This third myth implies that our own needs and wants don’t really matter, and it is especially pervasive for children. Thus Myth 3 naturally erodes our self-esteem and self-confidence.
Myths 1 and 3 are typically taught together, so they reinforce one another. As we learn that we’re responsible for how others feel, we also learn that other people matter far more than we do—or that we don’t matter at all.
Myth 4: Following the Rules Is Also More Important than Addressing Our Needs and Feelings
When rules are properly designed and applied, they can help remove chaos from our lives. This is why we have stoplights and stop signs. However, when rules are made more important than the human beings they are meant to serve, people become wounded—especially if they are young.
One of the hallmarks of EN is that it often puts rules before people by elevating obedience and compliance and discounting genuine human needs. Teaching children to not interrupt adult conversations is important. However, they also need to be able to interrupt if there is an emergency.
Adding Up the Myths
These four myths don’t just pervade