All About Me: Loving a narcissist

COVER

TITLE PAGE

INTRODUCTION

1 IT’S ALL ABOUT ME

What is a narcissist?

2 IN THE LOOKING GLASS

Is there a narcissist in your life?

3 ENTER MR DARCY

Why it’s easy to fall in love with narcissists

4 WHEN MR RIGHT GOES WRONG

What it’s like to suffer at the hands of a narcissist

5 A WORLD WITHOUT LOVE

What creates a narcissist?

6 GENERATION ME

Narcissism as a product of our culture

7 I’M A CELEBRITY NARCISSIST

Why narcissism helps people get places

8 NARCISSISM AS AN ILLNESS

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

9 THE HOLLOW MEN

What it’s like to be a narcissist

10 CONFRONTING NARCISSISM

Getting help

11 IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU

Confronting your future

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Why do women fall in love with bad guys? It’s a question that worried me and countless other males in their tender years when we never seemed to get the girl. It was always the mean, arrogant ones who seemed to succeed.

Why was it, I asked myself as I struggled to make an impression in my twenties, that the same self-centred showoffs who got the girls were now also getting the top jobs and glamorous lifestyles? They seemed to be rising to the top like cream (or fat, depending on your perspective). Whatever happened to the benefits of trying to be a nice guy?

Not that I was bitter. But then, as the years rolled on, I saw my arguably warped perspective changing, and what emerged was not pretty. I saw the relationships involving moody self-glorifiers proving far from idyllic and beginning to break up. I saw those grandiose schemes and high-flying lifestyles begin to crumble. And there seemed to be an awful lot of collateral damage and emotional debris left in these people’s wake.

This, in a sense, is what this book is about. It’s about a type of human personality – glamorous, self-centred, difficult, and intensely vulnerable – that we call narcissistic. Narcissists are people who are full of big ideas of themselves and for themselves, but they need others to reflect their glory, and find real empathy almost impossible. They are people who mean trouble when it comes to relationships.

There are a lot of them around, and you’re bound to have come across them. In fact, if you’ve picked up this book, you’re probably wondering whether your partner is a narcissist or not. It’s a good question, and the answer is probably yes – although, as we’ll see, there’s a world of a difference between someone who shows narcissistic traits, which is far from uncommon, and someone who is a full-blown narcissistic personality.

This book is about the hold narcissists have on us – how they are easy to fall in love with, how they have a major influence on our culture, how they can damage the lives of those around them, and how they can be incredibly hard to disentangle yourself from.

But it’s also a book about all of us. Narcissism is a concept, not a diagnosis. In other words, it describes common characteristics in human beings. We all need a bit of narcissism – a bit of self-centredness, a bit of overwhelming self-regard – to be able do anything, to feel good about ourselves, to impose ourselves a little. It’s just that in some people, those tendencies can be consistently dominant, even overwhelming, and that means trouble.

Ever spent much time with a toddler? Then you’ll have experienced narcissism. For all their allure, babies and toddlers are unable to see the world from anyone else’s perspective apart from their own. Don’t get what you want? Then throw your rattle out of the pram. It’s quite natural and programmed into them – into all human beings. But as we get older, through the influence of our parents and others, most of us lose that self-regarding, impulsive streak to a greater or lesser extent – we learn that there are consequences to our actions, and that we have to take into account the needs and wants of others if we are to be happy.

Throughout history, some of us have never learned those lessons, and continue to act like toddlers. It’s part of human life, achievement and tragedy, and it influences every one of us. It’s narcissism, and it makes us the flawed and fascinating things we are.

Once you begin to understand narcissism – and to use it as a lens through which to see much of human behaviour – then lots of things that are mystifying and frustrating about people, relationships and our culture begin to fall into place. Relationships in particular.

Take this plea for help in an online agony column:

Hi. This may seem silly but it hurts me. The thing is, my friends invite me and my boyfriend out every time they are going out, and when I ask my boyfriend if he wants to go out he always makes up an excuse. Like on Saturday, my friends had arranged to go for a night out and asked me and my boyfriend to go, and when I asked him he said maybe. Then two hours later he said he wasn’t feeling well. But then his sister phoned and asked if we wanted to go and play pool and he said yeah. We got into an argument because I thought he was being selfish, because my friends had asked first. When I asked if he had a problem with my friends, he said no, he just didn’t want to go. We ended up staying in that night but he hardly spoke to me. I asked him the following morning why he had hardly spoken to me the night before. He said that it was because he wanted to go play pool. Is he being selfish, or am I just being silly?

As the writer says, this sounds like old-fashioned selfishness. But it can also be explained by her boyfriend showing narcissism – a particular form of selfishness that targets people with either lavish attention or hostility, that makes loved ones isolated, and that blames others for personal shortcomings. As you’ll see further on in the book, this can have far more disastrous effects on relationships than arguments about not seeing friends.

I was talking to the journalist, novelist and relationships writer Bel Mooney about this. The idea of narcissism, she said, helped explain many of the letters she got from readers writing in to her regular advice column in The Times. In recent years, she said, she’s noted an increase in people writing to her who are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, ‘self-centred’.

‘It’s all I, I, I, I, I,’ she said. ‘They go on about themselves in a very self-indulgent way, talking about how they need to find themselves and so on. And I think, “Why are you asking me what to do, because what you really want me to do is to confirm what you are feeling, and if I challenge it you aren’t going to like it.” And I think, how are those people going to be in a relationship? And I’d say dire.

‘You get letters from these sorts of people wishing that others could be satellites around their sun. I’ve been amazed at the number of stories like that I’ve had since I started the column – people who are so lacking in empathy that you feel something is very missing. The problem is serious because at its more extreme end it can go into personality disorder.’

She told me of one letter from a man whose 40-year-old wife had become increasingly obsessive about her appearance and weight, constantly going to the gym. He discovered she was having a relationship with another man at the gym because of the texts she had been sending him, and when he confronted her with this she became violent and abusive with him in front of the children. She became increasingly critical of him, and then asked for a separation. ‘I don’t know whether that’s narcissism or not, but it is common and extremely cruel,’ Bel told me.

Well, yes, it is narcissism, and it does manifest itself in very cruel ways in relationships. But as we’ll see in the rest of this book, the concept of narcissism also throws light on all sorts of other aspects of our lives: it makes sense of our ideas of romantic heroes, of obsessively driven high-achievers, of compulsive liars and doomed and deluded dreamers. It makes sense of our glamour-led, celebrity-obsessed culture. It makes sense of our society’s obsession with high-achievement and winning at all costs. It even makes sense of our Truman Show-style love affair with reality television, and all those X Factor contenders who believe against all the evidence that they really will be the next Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake.

Think of those high-profile politicians whose relationship with the truth has been, shall we say, tenuous. Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Archer … all have been caught lying in a big way. Their behaviour can be explained in the context of the narcissistic traits that made them big achievers in the first place. With their vision and drive for success came a tendency to the fantastical that is classic narcissism, and makes lying less of a sin and more of an inner compulsion.

Narcissistic personalities are, and always have been, intrinsic to human attraction, achievement and tragedy. But today, in the navel-gazing, celebrity-exposing noughties, they are more apparent than ever before. If there ever were one, this is the Age of the Narcissist.

In the therapy-obsessed United States, narcissism is a household word. It is used to explain sundry acts of cruelty, selfishness and grandiosity among the population. The internet message-boards of Dr Phil, America’s top agony uncle, are full of people suddenly realising that their problems are the result of having narcissistic parents.

Why have the Americans latched onto this term in such a big way? It probably all started with a hugely popular book written by sociologist Christopher Lasch in 1979 called The Culture of Narcissism. It was an indictment of the increasingly self-centred short-termism of American society, as sense of family and society declined. It drove the word ‘narcissism’ firmly into popular American usage. Not long after came the classification of a new personality disorder by the American Psychiatric Association – it was called Narcissistic Personality Disorder. After that came a personal mission by self-confessed narcissist and author Sam Vaknin to raise the profile of the condition, through a book and continued high profile on the internet.

Since then, the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder has spawned a string of books, been the subject of hundreds of chat shows, and given rise to dozens of support groups and online chat forums where victims of narcissists share their stories of suffering at the hands of manipulative men and women.

The focus over the Atlantic is very much on narcissism as a dangerous disorder – a psychiatric problem. ‘Narcissists lack empathy, are exploitative, envious, haughty and feel entitled, even if such a feeling is commensurate only with their grandiose fantasies,’ writes Sam Vaknin. ‘They dissemble, conspire, destroy and self-destruct. In the long run, there is no enduring benefit to dancing with narcissists – only ephemeral and, often, fallacious “achievements”.’1

Not nice people then. Over here, the popular view is a bit different. When most of us hear the word ‘narcissist’, we don’t tend to think of people with a personality disorder. We still tend to think of a narcissistic man as a preening Brad Pitt type, who hones his abs and pecs, occasionally plucks his eyebrows and assesses his own reflection when he looks into your eyes. It’s people like David Beckham who get called narcissists in Britain, because they care about their looks and have a standing and image that they do their damnedest to maintain.2 Because the British are naturally suspicious of anyone who cares too much about what others think of them, the term here is still mainly reserved as a vague form of mild abuse. We are far less aware of the specific meaning of the word in psychoanalytic or psychiatric terms.

But things are beginning to change. In July 2005 the film star Jude Law, dubbed the world’s sexiest man by People magazine, admitted an affair with a family nanny. Reports followed, supposedly from a ‘source close to Ms Miller’ that actress Sienna Miller, his partner, had as a result given Law an ultimatum: he must make her fall in love with him all over again, he must control his temper, he must not stop her from seeing her friends.

The reports gave way to media speculation that Jude Law did, in fact, show all the traits of a narcissist. ‘It’s the musts that give it away,’ wrote Yvonne Roberts in the Independent, ‘as does the graphic picture presented in the press of a controlling, possessive, cheating individual who doesn’t appear to know what he wants until it’s in danger of slipping away.’3 These, she explained, were some of the traits associated with a condition called narcissistic personality disorder, widely diagnosed in the United States. ‘In the Sixties, the common slogan was “All men are bastards”. Now for those in the know, fairly or unfairly, it’s “All men are narcissistic bastards”.’

Who knows if Jude Law really is a narcissist? But I like the new slogan, because narcissism does (as we’ll see later in the book) indeed help explain why men are bastards.

What is interesting is the way the story exemplifies the new importance of narcissism in our culture, and the way we view relationships. The characters Jude Law plays in his films sometimes exemplify the traits of narcissism – look at Alfie in the film of the same name, for example: remote, self-regarding, womanising and incapable of empathy. These are the kind of anti-heroes that have gained increasing currency as leading men in film and television culture. There’s something about them that draws and keeps our attention. Those same qualities seem to have rubbed off on the actor in real life, drawing a feverish interest from the media and among the public. We watch the every move of the glamorous and famous because we aspire to look like them and be like them. So the appeal of narcissism draws out our own narcissistic tendencies.

Yet beneath it all, if you look at Jude Law and his family, there’s a real story of pain. We don’t know what happened in his household, and it would be unfair to label Law a narcissist on hearsay. But we do know that people with strong narcissistic traits tend not to be happy people, and find family life hard. Having a relationship with a narcissist is a rollercoaster where the lows can drag all sense of self-worth out of the partner.

So what I hope to show in this book is that narcissism is a far deeper and far more useful idea than the British have previously given it credit for. And it’s a far broader, less medicalised idea than the Americans have given it credit for. As a health and relationships writer, I come to the subject with a very broad perspective. You’ll find other books on narcissism (if you search hard enough) that look at it from a psychoanalytical point of view, or from a relationships counselling point of view, or a cultural point of view. What I want to do with this book is take a wider approach, combining the above with the medical, the evolutionary, the psychiatric, the sociological and the historical. This is not a specialist or an academic book on narcissism – it is a book to help us try to understand our relationships with people and the world. Because if this is indeed the Age of Narcissism, we need to understand how the concept is shaping our world and relationships in all its different ways.

There are dangers in addressing a subject like this. As a journalist, I’m very aware of how easy it is to label people for the sake of convenience. There’s an increasing tendency among popular psychoanalysis and psychology to force human nature into boxes neatly labelled ‘personality type’. There’s another, and linked, tendency for doctors, psychiatrists and drug manufacturers to try to turn personality traits into illnesses. Once we were just a ‘type’, now we have a diagnosis. There are lots of examples. Many thousands of children are now being diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), which was unheard of 30 years ago. Some people are controversially saying that the condition doesn’t really exist. It’s simply what a few decades ago would have been classified as ‘wilfully naughty children’, they say. The children haven’t changed, but our attitude to them has.

There is a similar controversy raging over autistic spectrum disorders – some are claiming that many of these conditions, such as Asperger’s Syndrome, are not disorders at all – merely different manifestations of ‘maleness’.

These are difficult areas. But whatever you believe about ADHD and autism, it’s certainly true that a large number of drug companies are now trialling drugs designed specifically to combat all sorts of behavioural traits that until recently most of us would simply have regarded as all being on the continuum of ‘normal’: stress, shyness, anxiety, phobias, gambling, impulsive behaviours – even addiction to the internet.

I don’t want to do the same kind of thing for narcissism or suggest that something which up to now has been regarded as a human trait of selfishness should become a formal tag to put onto people willy-nilly. But seeing patterns in relationships and the way we conduct our lives helps us to overcome problems, and talking about narcissism can help us understand some of the people in our lives and some of the pitfalls in our own behaviour that can make us more vulnerable to them. It helps us to identify when we are the victims of narcissism, and ways we can assist each other to break out of destructive, self-centred cycles. It also helps identify the small number of people who need expert psychiatric help because they have a genuine personality disorder.

So forgive me if I use the tags ‘narcissist’ or ‘narcissistic personality’ in the following chapters. I’m not suggesting that the people being referred to are only narcissists, or that they don’t have many other characteristics too. Humans are an intricate bundle of motivations and behaviours. But I hope to make it clear that in some people, narcissistic traits are sufficiently character-defining for us to have justification in calling them narcissists.

You’ll see in the next chapter that the word has a long history of describing human characteristics, from Greek myth, via Freud, into modern psychiatric textbooks and popular usage. That makes it different and arguably richer than other, simpler human personality traits such as, say, ‘anger’ or ‘selfishness’. What’s more, there’s an increasing consensus that the causes of narcissism lie in the way we are brought up. It raises fascinating questions about parenting, and the interaction between our genetic make-up and our environment in conditioning our personality.

The book also deals with how narcissism has affected relationships, how different individuals have coped, and some of the coping strategies you can try to implement if narcissism is having a negative effect on your life. You’ll read in the chapters ‘I’m a celebrity narcissist’ and ‘Generation me’ about the dangers we all face as we are unwittingly drawn into a cult of narcissism, where the selfish and self-obsessed values that create narcissists are also being promoted as desirable and glamorous in our popular culture.

I started out writing a book because I was intrigued about the men who seemed to succeed at everything, and I ended up writing a book not just about them, but about all of us. About the vulnerability that can make us behave in strange and difficult ways, and which leaves us susceptible to the charms of those who will make life most troublesome for us. Like the tale of Narcissus itself, it’s a very human story. Anyone who has ever felt used by the one they love, anyone who feels that others have needed them merely to prop up their ego, and anyone who has ever been humiliated in a relationship should read on …

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