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Are Narcissists More Likely to Experience Impostor Syndrome?
- jf- 8y agoNon-narcissist here, apparently. I do find the premise somewhat troubling. If you’re supremely confident and never doubt yourself, even in situations where you should, you could be described as a narcissist. And if you’re lacking in self-confidence, and constantly think you’ll be found out, you’re also a narcissist. And there’s probably narcissists who experience a moderate level of self-doubt in between. It’s more likely narcissism and self doubt are just independent variables.
- nwellnhof 8y agoI think the key to understanding narcissism is that narcissists only try very hard to appear confident but on the inside they're anything but. The grandiosity they display is just a kind of coping mechanism.
- ergothus 8y agoBut there's a difference between narcissism and just covering for a lack of self-confidence. I'm not psychologically trained, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've met exactly one person that I think was a narcissist. He was a jerk, but mostly because he was utterly baffled by any concept that didn't involve him in the center. It was an attribute completely separate from his confidence. I feel like it is really hard to explain if you haven't met someone like that - I was routinely gobsmacked by his reactions - every human interaction I'd had to date had not prepared me for it. Meanwhile, I have tons of anxiety and often cover it up with false confidence, and our reactions to similar events were dramatically different.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Amygaz 8y agoNot at all. That is why it’s called a personality disorder. They are truly and sincerely like that. The part that made me realized I was dealing with mentally diseased people is that they truly believe the crap they throw at you. Their lies become an undeniable truth as soon as they spell it out loud.
- e40 8y agoI wonder if narcissism is the brain's reaction to self doubt. I've definitely seen numerous cases of people who have a lot of self doubt over-compensating with adding confidence they shouldn't have.
- muterad_murilax 8y agoIsn't that the difference between (true) narcissists and people who suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD)?
- nobody271 8y agoThis is why I find the idea of promoting "mental health awareness" to be disturbing. It's far too tempting to say you know why someone acts some way, or that the way they are acting is a disorder, based on one or two observations. I do the same thing though. I really wish I understood myself half as well as I think I understand other people.
- sbilstein 8y agoArmchair diagnosis is dangerous IMO. It can be a form of gaslighting. Sure everyone can benefit from therapy, meditation and improving systems for managing sadness, frustration, impatience but telling yourself or someone else you have ADD, compulsive disorder, anxiety is a great way to pop the self esteem bubble and confidence you need to get through life. In the workplace it's especial dangerous; you can force someone to question why they don't like a job or feel isolated or bullied by convincing them their perception is really the problem. It doesn't take much effort to convince someone who is upset by circumstance that they have a problem. "You're too sensitive" "you're depressed" "that person has an anxiety problem" when really the environment at the job might really be the problem or some basic coaching might be the solution. I worked somewhere in which people openly admitted the company culture drove them to therapy yet were so "grateful" for an "open and inclusive" environment. The cognitive dissonance there was very disturbing. This occurs in families as well. I grew up in an abusive household and, well damn, your parents will do their best to convince you that you are the crazy one and need help.
- selestify 8y agoHow do you, as an individual, tell if it's you or if it's the environment?
- sbilstein 8y agoI wish I had a good answer. A mix of trusted friends and a thoughtful therapist. If you are in an abusive situation, a therapist should be able to identify it since there are objective frameworks to think about that. It's also easy to reject an "objective" diagnosis of a situation because you are likely to view it from your internalized perspective.
- ada1981 8y agoIt makes sense if you understand that mental health “diagnosis” has a primary function as a tool for control and status (either boosting the status of the prescriber or reducing the status of the patient). Primate dominance games.
- Sharlin 8y agoMental health diagnoses are as valid and useful as physical health diagnoses.
- ada1981 8y agoI disagree with this. If someone has a broken arm it’s observable and it’s pretty clear what the next step is. With mental health diagnosis it’s not clear what the underlying issue is and at best you’ll be given something to supress symptoms. We are doing a bit better on this with things like Psychedelics and Open Dialogue, but mental health is more of a context than a condition.
- Sir_Substance 8y agoOnly when they are made by psychiatric professionals who are suitable detached from the scenario they are judging. I can think of a few people I know who took one year of highschool psychology or once read a pop-sci book about it who like to tell people what the root cause of their behavior is. It's usually done as a dominance move.
- sbilstein 8y agoI think OP meant non-professionals. A mental health diagnosis from a laymen is no different than saying "you're crazy!"
- ada1981 8y agoThis is true as well. But historically diagnosis was used as a way to strip liberty away from people. Women who refused to sleep with husbands were routinely committed. Capitalism is intense and is resulting in mental health issues for many people. The system doesn’t self critique rather it labels the people as “ill” and sells them a pill, at a profit of course. The practitioners often benefit and reinforce the dynamics that create the symptoms in our culture. Open Dialogue is an approach which does a great job at healing folks in the context of community.
- motohagiography 8y agoIt's notable that over the last couple decades, we've moved to where we refer to diabetics as people with diabetes, schizophrenics as people exhibiting symptoms of a variety of mental disorders, disabled as people with disabilities, the obese as people coping with obesity - but narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths are still othered, and yet still within the domain of detatched clinical assessment. These are moral assessments of character, and ones that aren't wrong to make. But it's disingenuous to say that we have a medical definition of what is essentially an evil tendency that we can treat (and presumably, eradicate) as a disease. The more literary theme among the obvious narcissists and psycho's I've met was they lacked self acceptance, and were pathologically actuated by the approval of others, particularly imagined others. They filtered their experiences to only ones that reflected a deep seated idea of a perfect and adorable self, and they had adapted to ferociously attack anything that threatened this perfect and vulnerable self image. That's not a disease, it's poor parenting exacerbated by a culture that enables it. People can learn and change, and they do it every day. The popular pseudo scientific discourse around narcissists and sociopaths is politically dangerous and in many cases, I suspect motivated by a purifying urge that is a much deeper evil.
- macawfish 8y agothis is the realest shit ever thank you so much for your perspective on this
- barberousse 8y agoThis. I mean the term Marx would've used here is reification, we are so terrified to confront our actual practices with one another that we'd rather make out the sum of those practices to appear to be an individual pathology, separate and irresolvable from the domain of how I actually raise my children, their emotional cultivation, or treat others, or even how I relate to myself (which tends to loop back to childhood...). For those who haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend the film Nightcrawler, which is essentially about the enablement of what we call narcissism/sociopathy in our media-driven society.
- sdiq 8y ago>That's not a disease, it's poor parenting exacerbated by a culture that enables it. Any resources to better parenting than this?
- kraig911 8y agoWell great now I'm also a Narcissist today too :|
- swozey 8y agoAre you sure? Would you even be a good enough narcissist to qualify as one? ;)
- 1001101 8y agoMay be affirming the consequent here.
- dsego 8y agoDo you have any of the listed behaviors and traits? http://outofthefog.website/personality-disorders-1/2015/12/6/narcissistic-personality-disorder-npd http://outofthefog.website/personality-disorders-1/2015/12/6...
- knaik94 8y agoThis seems to share the same sentiment I have been hearing from a lot of places recently, the only person you should be comparing yourself to is the past version of yourself.
- kmarc 8y agoWow, this is the most concise and deepest thought I read lately. Thanks! (Also this needs more upvote)
- ravenstine 8y agoMaybe they're more likely to report imposter syndrome? How exactly can we distinguish between a self-aware narcissist who knows they have imposter-like tendencies and someone who gets satisfaction over having a pathology that others will be sympathetic towards? Nothing I've read here suggests an answer to this, I think.
- jacobmoe 8y agoTIL I'm a narcissist. Not how I expected this morning to go. I think these kind of categories that come from psychology are useful and also dangerous. Our innate tendency towards heuristics makes it difficult to talk about this stuff, especially with words like "narcissist" that have strongly negative connotations. The brain is a complicated mess. Maybe the most complicated mess in the universe. We try to impose some order on it without understanding it. It's true that "everyone in this room loves me" and "everyone in this room hates me" could be manifestations of a similar neurological configuration, and we could put the label "narcissist" on it. But the label is somewhat arbitrary and the behavioral results are often very different.
- wellpast 8y agoAgreed. This striving towards binary classification is so flawed from any broader perspective. I, too, just learned that I'm a narcissist. I had to squint quite a bit at the diagnostic list there, and sort of wedge my own psychological dispositions creatively into the qualifications list there but then yeah -- snap (and crap!) -- I'm a narcissist. Oh, but if I use just a little more nuanced application of thought, then suddenly I'm not a narcissist. Or at least in a safer position on the linear spectrum that is assumed in this kind of "scientific" categorization. Which is really quite absurd as you have pointed out.
- bcOpus 8y agoBy no means is this a universal truism, but in general if you think you have a Cluster B personality disorder, you probably don’t. If you think you’re the smartest, best person in the world and other people are inferior and should know it... then you might.
- wellpast 8y agoWhat if I think I'm approximately the 100th smartest person in the world? But only when it comes to, say, J2EE? Like I'm the 100th smartest person at J2EE in the world, and everyone else besides the approximately 100 above me are J2EE-inferior. Am I a Narcissist? A J2EE-Narcissist?
- wellpast 8y agoI've always wanted to be a Narcissist, for years have strived to become one, but I never quite feel like I am one. I always feel like a wannabe-Narcissist, like an impost....
- biglenny 8y agoplace the ellipsis immediately after "an". better comedic effect
- astrodust 8y agoBe advised that impersonating or misrepresenting yourself as an Officer of Comedy Law is a felony and you may be subject to fine and/or imprisonment.
- Udik 8y agoThat's it, you're under arrest for breaching the law that forbids ending comedy sketches with the intervention of a policeman. Oh, wait a minute... this is a feck up!
- dsego 8y agoIf you are interested in this topic and want to discover more about yourself and maladaptive behaviors and coping mechanisms, a great resource for personality disorders is the “Out of the Fog” website[1]. I also find Sam Vaknin has written a lot of interesting stuff on covert narcissism and the concept of narcissistic supply. (he also has a youtube channel) [2] I feel that covert NPD shares a lot of traits with BPD. [1] https://outofthefog.website https://outofthefog.website [2] http://samvak.tripod.com http://samvak.tripod.com
- ModernMech 8y ago> I feel that covert NPD shares a lot of traits with BPD. True in a sense some of the symptoms of mania can be the same, but NPD is much different from BPD in that BPD is a mental illness that can be managed with medication and behavioral/situational adjustments. BPD sufferers can be completely normal people under the right conditions.
- Amygaz 8y agoI don’t know about medication, but CBT should work on N
- ouid 8y agoAll the "cluster B" disorders have similar diagnostic criteria.
- rhacker 8y agoThis is my point of view: Everyone is a narcissist maximally. It's not a spectrum, just a maximum state that is always on, always self preserving, but personality differs quite a bit. Personality causes others to perceive others as being more or less narcissistic. In other words we started using the word narcissistic to start describing personality types.
- thr0awaz 8y agono... there really are people out there that really think they're better than you, on an existential level, and that the only reason you're better at any one thing than them is because they haven't gotten around to doing it better than you yet. The short test for narcissism is: "Are you a narcissist?" Actual, pathological, narcissists answer 'yes' so often that it's almost useful as a diagnostic tool. Most people have some idea of their shortcomings.
- barberousse 8y ago>Actual, pathological, narcissists answer 'yes' so often that it's almost useful as a diagnostic too Citation?
- thr0awaz 8y agohttps://psychcentral.com/news/2014/08/06/it-takes-just-one-question-to-identify-narcissism/73260.html https://psychcentral.com/news/2014/08/06/it-takes-just-one-q... (snip) In a series of 11 experiments involving more than 2,200 people of all ages, the researchers found they could reliably identify narcissistic people by asking them this exact question (including the note): To what extent do you agree with this statement: “I am a narcissist.” (Note: The word “narcissist” means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.) Participants rated themselves on a scale of one (not very true of me) to seven (very true of me). (snip) Results showed that people’s answer to this question lined up very closely with several other validated measures of narcissism, including the widely used Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI).
- Regardsyjc 8y ago
- timr 8y agoStatistically, half of all people with Impostor Syndrome aren't suffering from a syndrome at all. They're actually not very competent.
- gizmo385 8y ago> Statistically You got anything to back up that claim? That sounds like a pretty big conclusion that you're jumping to without evidence.
- timr 8y ago"You got anything to back up that claim? That sounds like a pretty big conclusion that you're jumping to without evidence." It's not a "claim". It's literally the null hypothesis: two traits are assumed to be uncorrelated unless proven otherwise. If you want to claim that a sense of "impostor syndrome" is actually indicative of increased skill, it's your job to prove it.
- smogcutter 8y agoNext you'll come for our precious Dunning-Kruger effect! If my sense of incompetence doesn't mean that I'm actually a big brainy boy, what've I got left?
- timr 8y agoYou can always attack science. If the statistics don't work in your favor, just claim replication crisis.
- tanderson92 8y agoIt's also not true that because only two outcomes are possible that the null hypothesis is a 50/50 split between them.
- timr 8y agoThere are more than two outcomes. Competence is not binary. Also, again: null hypothesis. If you want to argue that there's a positive correlation between X & Y, you provide evidence.
- nwellnhof 8y agoFrom my experience with "grandiose" narcissists, they share most of the traits of "vulnerable" narcissists, but they try very hard not to show them. If you want to understand their behavior, you have to realize that beneath their self-confident facade, these are extremely vulnerable people as well.
- gowld 8y agoThis just smells like using the same word for two different concept, and then conflating them. Thinking that the world only exists for your own benefit, and thinking that you don't fit in the world, both have an aspect of separating yourself from the world, but it's more harm than help to lump them together. If "narcissism" means having any sense of self identity, then the word means very little as a pathology.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoA maximum ratio of economic growth to number of controlling board members occurs when all self identity is destroyed, and people allow command structures (at work) and advertising (at home) to dictate their self conception. So yes, under capitalism any knowledge of the self in the working class is pathological.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agoimpostor syndrome is the damage caused by weaponized empathy
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tayo42 8y agoI never understood the difference between narcisms and self confidence. The same way this article makes it unclear what the difference between being insecure and no self confidence and narcism. Is insecurity a disorder?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoYou can lack self-confidence and still have empathy for the welfare of others. Narcissists see other people entirely as threats or opportunities, not as separate individuals with lives and needs of their own. They literally have no concept of empathy. Their actions are motivated by a need to destroy and devalue any perceived threats to their fragile self-image, while cultivating people, projects, and situations that make them look and feel good in front of the imaginary audience that judges everything they do. There's no ability to think of others as equals. Everyone is either better or worse than a narcissist - not just in a passing way, but absolutely, infinitely, and obsessively.
- skedaddle 8y agoThe difference is that narcissism is grandiose and fragile, based on a need for admiration rather than actual confidence, and fills in for a lack of self-worth. Confidence doesn't prevent you from acknowledging mistakes or flaws. Narcissism does, because their self worth is based on achievement and imagined flawlessness. They think that without these things they would be worthless and unlovable.
- biglenny 8y agoImposter syndrome, like social anxiety, is the result of an incessant obsession with what others think of you. Both of these are conceited forms of narcissism.
- smogcutter 8y agoSome pretty engrossing material on narcissism: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com https://thelastpsychiatrist.com The blog is long defunct, but the archives are definitely worth a read.
- ouid 8y ago"Instead, worry about being authentic."
- 50 8y agoYikes. I’m thinking about how labels and identifications like these might harm us. As naive as it may sound, I think when you identify with something, you are constrained within that indentification, not aware you are really not that and therefore limited. I know we live in a society but yikes.
- barberousse 8y agoThing is, its "names", for lack of a better term, all the way down
- btkramer9 8y agoreminds me of this: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- narrator 8y agoAnyone who has had an extended experience with a full blown narcissist would not throw that term around so casually.
- adjkant 8y agoWhile there's much to debate when it comes to generally how useful, harmful, or dangerous labels are (I think they are all 3 in different ways personally), I think there's a highly uderrated takeaway in the last paragraph: > "To be clear: these results do not invalidate the fact that most of us experience feelings of impostorism or doubt our ability to make desired impressions on others at various points in our life. Instead, they suggest that no matter where any of us are on the impostor syndrome curve, one potential route to realizing your best self is through dialing down your excessive preoccupation with how you are being perceived by others. Don't worry about being an impostor; worry about being authentic."
- Amygaz 8y agoPsycopaths are an example of covert narssicists, not exclusively but it’s an example. This article gets it wrong. Vulnerable narcissists are still needy, egotistical and vain people. It’s just that they are introvert. Instead of presuming that any higher being can go back to sleep when they wake up, the introvert N will wonder if it would be possible for other people to recognize that they have everything under control and should just be trusted. I’ve be raised by a N:bro and N:mom, not the introvert types, and I sure hope this article is a joke or written by a N looking for excuses! Edit: few typos. I probably missed a few more. I am fuming!