Another Expert on Narcissism

If narcissism is an incurable brain disorder, don’t narcissists deserve compassion?

This is actually a great question! Because of the horrible things narcissists do, we often stop seeing them as people - flawed people who truly do need help that you typically are not qualified to provide. However, your question is flawed. Let me explain.

First, narcissism is NOT an incurable brain disorder. Narcissism, at its very basic core, is a set of coping mechanisms that people employ, often as children, to cope with different types of abuse and trauma. It is NOT a brain disorder. People are NOT born narcissists. Narcissism is a learned response. As such, people who are narcissistic are just regular people who have developed awful habits! THAT is the basic truth. Can they change? Sure! They ABSOLUTELY can and do change sometimes. That change usually happens after some terribly traumatic event for the narcissist, but most NEVER experience that “magic moment” of clarity to even START down the road of thinking they need to change. The truth is that the “traumatic event” that typically sparks such a change is almost NEVER the result of losing a romantic relationship - even though that is the MAIN time when their partners WANT them to experience a change!

I would also like to clarify something that I have discussed with many people in the comments. Please understand that narcissists, in spite of all of the horrible things they may have done to you, are still people. People are typically predictable, but gloriously complex creatures. Sometimes, when you look at a person through your lens of pain, it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to see that the person who did something awful to you could be anything but awful. One thing that people have to guard against is seeing others as all of one thing, because this is rarely true. Even though you may be a survivor of narcissistic abuse, you may have made some bad choices in your life. Does that mean you are a bad person? Have you ever lied? Have you ever intentionally hurt someone when you didn’t have to? We have all done things at different points that don’t reflect the better part of who we are, but that doesn’t mean that we are incapable of being good people. I want you to understand a FUNDAMENTAL truth. People are not TRAINED on how to be good people! Think about it. You can go to school to learn how to cook, learn how to paint, learn how to work on cars, learn how to fly planes and learn how to build bridges, BUT

Where is the school that teaches you how to be compassionate? Where is the school that teaches you how to be empathetic? Where is the school that teaches you how to be kind?

Where is the school that teaches you how to listen to others? WHERE IS THE SCHOOL THAT TEACHES YOU HOW TO LOVE? THOSE things come from your parents and those you grow up with! The parents who are with you every day, show you what to do and help mold your character! In some cases, this is a fantastic thing, if you have parents who know those things and good people around you. However, if you don’t, you end up with parents teaching their children what they know and you end up with a damaged person who has to now go out into the world and survive when they were never given the love, tools and support to navigate life in a healthy way!

Have you ever seen a new mother who just seems to “know” what to do and have you ever seen a new mother who struggles to figure everything out?

• There is no training manual for kids!

• There is no manual that says “Don’t constantly belittle or berate your child because the child may develop a personality disorder because of your yelling & screaming and them internalizing your negative words & behaviors” .

• There is no manual that says “hug your child often and tell them you love them so they develop a strong sense of connection and learn productive ways to connect with others”.

• There is no manual that says “if you spend time chasing after some woman or man, while you have kids, you are taking away time from your children and your children will notice what is happening around them”.

Parents are flawed and imperfect beings who are trying to work with the tools they have. Sometimes they have great tools and sometimes they don’t have great tools. That is the honest truth! When you don’t have the best tools, you can’t produce the best work! You can only produce what you are able to produce with the tools you have!

This is why it is so critical that people understand that narcissism isn’t predetermined when you are born! Those behaviors are taught, learned and reinforced through experiences the child has as they grow over time. The more they experience, the more they learn.

There is NO truer statement than we teach people how to treat us!

Children are no different. There is a video of a little toddler who wants to play in the snow. Her mother tells her no. She IMMEDIATELY turns to her father, cries, points to the snow and he takes her over to the snow so she can play in it. The toddler isn’t to blame. She has learned that she can ignore her mother if her father is around because he will do what she wants him to do. She has learned that her mother is not to be taken seriously and she does not have to listen to her. When that child grows up, if that dynamic remains the same, you can predict what her behavior is going to be like! The path is clear! Now, many people looking at that family may think that the mother & father are just awesome because they love their daughter & they are around their daughter, but they aren’t teaching her in a way that is going to produce a healthy outcome for that child! That child is LEARNING how to manipulate and that is going to carry forward into her adult life if everything remains the same.

People don’t grasp or understand the very deep connection between how people are raised and how they behave as adults, but the path is SO incredibly clear!

Parents often have NO IDEA that what they are doing is building destructive habits in their children, but they ARE! Don’t come around when you tell your kid you are going to? The child learns that they are going to be let down by those they care about, they learn that they can’t trust others and they begin to feel like they don’t matter and they start down the road to insecurity. How do you think that insecure child behaves later on in life

I mention all of this because when I say that narcissists deserve compassion and are people too, it is important for you to understand that I say that because they actually ARE! It is not a statement to diminish the abuse that any one may have suffered at the hands of a narcissist. Instead, it is a recognition of the fact that this person who hurt you is typically more than just pure evil! Narcissists may have different sets of problems from you, but they ARE people who need support and help.

The KEY is that you may not be the person who is qualified or able to give them the help they need AND just because a person needs help does not mean you allow them to mistreat you or that you stay with them!

• People don’t change because YOU want them to or NEED them to!

Let me repeat that.

• PEOPLE DO NOT CHANGE BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM TO OR NEED THEM TO!

People change, when and if they are ready, because they reach an internal place that tells them they need to change or compels them to change. NO ONE TRULY CHANGES a second before they are ready! People who smoke don’t try to quit until they reach the point where they are ready. People who are overweight don’t try to lose weight until they reach the point where they are ready. People who cheat don’t stop until they reach the point where they are ready and people who are narcissists don’t try to change until they reach the point where THEY are ready. Will it happen? Maybe AND maybe not! Plenty of overweight people have died still being overweight! Plenty of people have died before they got a chance to quit smoking. You have people who are told if they do this thing or that thing one more time they will suffer some bad consequence and they STILL do whatever it is! The bottom line is NO ONE DOES ANYTHING UNTIL AND UNLESS THEY ARE READY and no one can ever be forced to change to love you the way you want to be loved, just because you want them to, if you don’t love yourself enough to show others how you want to be treated! When you look around and you see negativity in your life, you are wherever you are because of your choices. That is a bad and a great thing. It is bad because if you are in a bad place, you may have been making some poor choices. It is good because YOU are in charge of changing your life whenever YOU are ready to change it!

So, the question is do narcissists deserve compassion? In as much as ANYONE who has suffered abuse during their formative years does, I would say YES! Does that mean you should stay with them in a romantic relationship or stay with them and allow them to abuse you? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Think of it like this. There are serial killers who were HORRIBLY abused as children! THAT is when they developed their sadistic habits! Should you feel sorry for them? SURE! No child should be abused or mistreated. However, it does NOT change the fact that they became a monster because of their abuse and they killed people! A pedophile who has raped countless children may have been raped when they were a child. Do they deserve compassion? SURE! Does that excuse their behavior? ABSOLUTELY NOT! The compassion you extend mentally does not circumvent the need for the person to pay for his or her crimes! Narcissists fall under that same umbrella.

A narcissist does deserve compassion as a human being, but they don’t deserve leniency for their actions because of it! One has NOTHING to do with the other.

To be clear, I am not saying all narcissists are pedophiles or all narcissists are serial killers. In this case, I am using those two groups to clearly illustrate that although an abusive childhood is horrible, and it does lay the foundation for future behavior, it cannot ever excuse the bad choices people make later on in life that bring harm to others. People who commit those acts deserve compassion for their childhoods, but not compassion for their actions or their mental or physical abuse of others! The point is that no one gets a pass for their behaviors because they may have been abused.

Narcissists, due to their coping mechanisms, have LEARNED NOT TO EMPATHIZE! Notice what I said! I said LEARNED not to empathize!

They have LEARNED to only look out for themselves.

How do you get good at anything? Practice! If you have been practicing a particular action over and over again since you were a child, you are GOING to be excellent at whatever skill you were practicing - good or bad. In this case, the narcissist’s lack of empathy was a learned and practiced thing that has now become a fundamental block of who they are. The narcissist, for all intents and purposes, is typically not going to change this because that is what has gotten him or her through their lives.

I used to work in a brain imaging lab. One of the interesting studies I came across was one involving clinically diagnosed narcissists (NPD) where they were shown things that should elicit an empathetic response naturally in the brain! Their brains did NOT activate in the anticipated areas versus the normal controls. This was expected because the narcissist is not empathetic by nature. However, AFTER the narcissist received “training” on being empathetic - training on how to be empathetic, they were scanned again with different images that were designed to elicit an empathetic response. Guess what happened? Their brains showed activation in the areas associated with empathetic feelings! This “proved” with this small study that it was POSSIBLE to “train” narcissistic people to empathize and see things from the point of view of other people. The thing is this was a research study and narcissists, in the real world, aren’t out here looking for ways to CARE! In fact, they often do NOT think anything is wrong with the way they see things because they have experienced some success thinking the way they do, so changing who they are or how they think isn’t even on their radar!

So sure - the narcissist is wounded AND deserves compassion. You should care because another human being has created circumstances for themselves that have resulted in harm to others. However, that is the extent of it! Your COMPASSION won’t change ANYTHING for the narcissist and you are likely not equipped to provide them with the psychological structure THEY need to facilitate an internal change to the fundamental way they process their environment, even though you might love them and care for them dearly! You SHOULD NOT try to be the one to “help” them because THEY have to

1. think they need help,

2. truly want help and

3. be willing to change based on the help they receive!

ALL THINGS THE NARCISSIST TYPICALLY IS NOT WILLING TO DO WHEN YOU WANT THEM TO!

Please understand. You cannot hope narcissism away, pray narcissism away, offer compassion to help it go away or just stay with a narcissist and hope their coping mechanisms change! They won’t. What WILL happen is that the narcissist will wreck YOUR existence piece by piece! While you are trying to offer compassion, the narcissist will take that supply and continue living his or her life as he or she sees fit! YOU will waste your time and the narcissist will be casting their tentacles out for a cast of new supply sources!

By the time you realize they are done with you, they will be well on to the next person in the lineup!

AND they won’t feel all the compassion for you that YOU feel for them when they do unceremoniously leave you behind!

Allow me to illustrate my point with some simple words and bold lettering.

• YOUR THINKING =>

  • NARCISSIST + MY COMPASSION = POSITIVE OUTCOME

• TYPICAL NARCISSIST THINKING =>

  • SAVE YOUR COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF! BY THE TIME I’M DONE WITH YOU, YOU’RE REALLY GOING TO NEED IT!

There are people who will fight so hard to try to “HELP” the narcissist without ever understanding that they can’t force a narcissist to change. It is so sad to me.

I will tell you one story about people like this and leave it as my parting words in this answer.

This is a true story! A couple had a drug addicted daughter. She had been molested as a child. She turned to drugs to cope. They thought they did EVERYTHING they could for their daughter. When the molestation took place and the parents found out, they “talked to the guy” and told him to stay away from the daughter. He did, however, they did not call the police. Their thinking was that they didn’t want to embarrass the daughter. They also did not get the daughter counseling. They were very permissive parents and as the daughter got older, she was allowed to do pretty much what she wanted to do. They loved their daughter, but they clearly made mistakes. She was actually very angry with them, even as an adult, for how they handled the abuse situation and her belief that they didn’t do enough to protect her. She ended up getting strung out on drugs. They bailed her out of problem after problem. She got pregnant two times and they let her live with them. Then, she left the kids with them one day and went off with some random guys. She would come back when she was out of money and they would give it to her. They coddled her, likely out of a sense of guilt and “compassion”. Well, guess what? The daughter, who over the years had received all of that love, support and compassion, killed her parents! It didn’t matter to her that her kids were with them. It didn’t matter that her kids would not have a stable home anymore. It didn’t matter that her parents loved her and gave her everything she asked for (which is abusive by the way). What mattered is that she was angry because her mother wouldn’t give her a piece of land she felt she was entitled to so she could sell it for money to buy drugs! She got angry and literally plotted & carried out the murder of her parents! Does she deserve compassion SURE! Should she still pay for her crimes? ABSOLUTELY! Compassion DOES NOT EQUAL acceptance of a person’s horrible actions!

Have your compassion! Have ALL THE COMPASSION YOU WANT! Just make sure you do it from a distance! Your life, emotional well being and emotional safety ABSOLUTELY depend on it! Learn to have compassion for YOURSELF because the only person you can save is yourself!

Written by Kay Morton