3 ms·
Narcissism can be driven by a lot of factors, so it depends on why you are narcissistic. If you feel that your life is not going right, that you aren't taking
by dkarl 7y ago
Narcissism can be driven by a lot of factors, so it depends on why you are narcissistic.
If you feel that your life is not going right, that you aren't taking care of yourself and your responsibilities properly, this can drive you to focus your attention on yourself and be less curious about others.
If you feel that other people do not care about you, that you are entirely on your own, this can drive you to focus on yourself and be less curious about others.
Of course ideally you would use a temporary state of self-focus to put yourself back on a positive track and achieve a greater level of security that then allows you to broaden your concern to embrace others. If you do that, you are not a narcissist; you just took some time to get yourself straight. You put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
If, on the other hand, you get stuck in the mode of focusing exclusively on yourself, without making progress on the factors that drive your self-focus, possibly even making the negative factors worse and making your isolation self-reinforcing, then it becomes pathological. You might need therapy to help you focus more on others and solve the underlying problems another way.
The issues driving your narcissism might be different, but no matter what they are, I recommend a double-pronged approach: actively practice caring for others in defiance of whatever dynamic is causing your narcissism, and at the same time investigate the underlying problems in psychotherapy, because the better you address those issues, the less unnatural it will feel to care for others.