Everyday Narcissism. Nancy Van Dyken
become functional adults. Some people would even say the myths of EN help children learn to be kind and thoughtful.
However, the myths of EN do nothing of the sort. They make all of us—those who learn it and those who teach it—smaller, younger, less functional, and more wounded.
To teach kindness to others, we must first be kind ourselves. EN, and the myths that support and perpetuate it, are not kind.
Yet these myths are everywhere. As we age, our mentors, teachers, and role models—and, eventually, our peers—all live by these four myths and teach them to us.
Year after year, we repeat these myths to ourselves and learn to act them out, over and over. With each thought and each action, we internally reinforce their hold on us. Eventually we come to believe them and live by them. Then we also teach them to others.
By the time we are adolescents, most of us have internalized all four myths—and we have put them together into the following narrative, which we constantly, yet subtly, communicate to each other:
• When you feel angry, sad, or hurt, or when you act in ways I don’t like, I am responsible for your feelings and behavior. This means it’s my responsibility to fix you or the situation, so that you feel better and act appropriately.
• And when you feel good or act in ways I like, it’s because I did the right thing.
• Furthermore, when I feel bad, it’s your fault—and your responsibility to fix me or the situation so I feel better.
This narrative is the basis for the everyday narcissism that almost everyone shares.
Why is this a form of narcissism? Because, as a result of the lifelong training I’ve just described, almost all of us live by the following unconscious (and false) principles:
• I am responsible for how other people feel and behave. Therefore, I experience myself as all-powerful.
• I am responsible for how others act toward me. Therefore, I once again experience myself as all-powerful.
• Other people are responsible for how I feel and behave—and are supposed to make me feel safe, happy, and okay. Therefore, I am the center of the universe.
The myths and principles of EN take root in our psyches because they are taught to us, over and over, by people we trust.
The first two principles of EN involve an unrealistic obligation to others (and their unrealistic expectations of us). The third involves our own unrealistic expectations of others.
The myths and principles of EN take root in our psyches because they are taught to us, over and over, by people we trust. Yet the myths and principles wound us deeply.
Worse, in our mostly misguided efforts to soothe our wounds, we often wound others in much the same ways that we were wounded. We then pass on our everyday narcissism to others, as if it were a virus.
Outgrowing Narcissism
In order to survive, babies or young children need the world to revolve around them. Parents must attend to them closely, meeting their needs and keeping them safe.
As we grow older, however, we naturally want to become ever more independent. By age two, we start letting our parents know that we can do things ourselves, such as put on our coats and take off our shoes. With each passing year, our parents back off a little further, and we are quick to remind them that this is what we want and expect of them.
By nature, as we grow older and gain more skills and confidence, we would outgrow our childhood narcissism. Over time, systematically, we would seek more and more independence. We would stop demanding or expecting the world to revolve around us. We would learn to do more and more things ourselves: tie our shoes, ride a bike, comb our hair, brush our teeth, and so on. We gain our physical independence slowly and methodically.
However, our process of emotional independence is thwarted. Even as we gain more physical independence, we simultaneously internalize the EN myths and the principles that accompany them, and we develop emotional dependence rather than independence. We believe, in all the perverse ways I previously described, that the world does revolve around us.
As we mature, most of us learn to meet our own physical needs. Emotionally, however, most of us struggle with everyday narcissism, which stifles our emotional development and our independence. We carry this EN into adulthood and into most or all of our relationships.
Nearly all of us suffer from EN without knowing it. It has a tremendous impact on our lives, creating anxiety, anger, depression, an unnatural emotional dependence on others, and less fulfilling relationships.
The Role of Trauma
Trauma is always felt deeply—and remembered—by our body. To the body, trauma is invariably experienced as an assault, whether physical, emotional, verbal, psychological, sexual, or spiritual.
When most of us think of trauma, we think of extremely painful events such as incest, abuse, rape, war, assault, serious injury, severe betrayal, extreme neglect, or great and unexpected loss. However, trauma can also result from small, painful incidents that get repeated many times. This is often the case with the everyday narcissism most of us are exposed to as children.
EN can be seen as a form of neglect, in which a child’s emotional (and sometimes physical) needs are ignored in favor of those of adults. Through EN, day after day and year after year, most of us experienced a slow, repetitive grinding down of our self-worth, self-confidence, and self-trust.
CASSIE AND HER GRANDMOTHER
Four-year-old girl Cassie is told by her mother to give Grandma a kiss goodbye. Cassie doesn’t want to because Grandma just hurt her feelings. Nevertheless, her mother insists—with annoyance in her voice—and tells her, “If you don’t kiss Grandma, she’ll be hurt.’”
This is a classic and common example of how we teach our kids Myths 1 and 3. Although Cassie is only four, she is taught that she is responsible for how Grandma feels—and how Grandma feels is important, while how Cassie feels is not.
Cassie’s mom is trying to teach her something important: to be sensitive to others’ feelings. However, what Cassie is actually beginning to learn is to be sensitive to others’ feelings and to ignore her own.
Because of the incident, Cassie hurts. She doesn’t have a terrible wound, of course; it’s more like a paper cut. However, when this same lesson is repeated over and over, in many different contexts, it becomes a damaging wound.
I call this hazy trauma. It’s not the result of a single big event. It’s the cumulative effect of many emotional paper cuts. It’s also a form of neglect because Cassie’s own feelings get repeatedly ignored, discounted, or pushed aside.
As psychologist Patrick Carnes has noted, neglect can be harder to recover from than incest or physical abuse—precisely because there is no single big, causal incident. Instead, the trauma is hazy and hard to clearly identify because it is made up of many smaller, recurring events. And, in the case of EN, these events are seen as normal (or even instructive and beneficial) by most adults, whereas incest and physical abuse are not—and, indeed, are against the law.
Our normal response to trauma has several aspects. First, our body experiences fear in the limbic part of our brain. When this occurs, the amygdala (within the limbic system) kicks in, creating a fight, flight, or freeze response. At the same time, our left prefrontal cortex—the thinking, organizing, sequencing, and impulse controlling part of our brain—shuts off. Our survival instincts and emotions are now in charge. Rational thinking is literally not available to us because the rational part of our brain has been temporarily unplugged (or, as some therapists say, overruled or hijacked).
This is why, when we see