The common behavioural trait displayed by a narcissist - are YOU guilty of it?
A US-based Reddit user who goes by the handle @Party_Programmer_453 has revealed the moment he realised he is a narcissist and wants to change.
The 26-year-old confessed that his 'wake-up call' came after having an argument with his mother about a drink he spilled on her carpet.
He wrote in a post titled, 'HELP, I'm a narcissist': 'So, I've been crashing at my mother's place recently after some stuff went sideways in my life.
'Last night, I was walking through the living room with a drink in my hand, not really paying attention, and I tripped.
'The glass slipped, spilled all over the carpet. The first words out of my mouth were: 'Why would you even put that there?''
The Redditor explained that he was referring to a side table his mother keeps near her sofa, and he had automatically blamed her for something that was 'clearly my fault'.
'And as soon as I heard myself say that, it was like a switch flipped in my head. It hit me how messed up that reaction was,' he reflected.
'Not because I spilled something, but because of how automatic it was to blame someone else.'
He then started thinking about situations in which his girlfriend, 28, had pointed out he would 'twist' things in order to 'flip blame' onto anyone other than himself - including on her, which would 'make her feel like she's always doing something wrong'.
Admitting she was 'right', he continued: 'I always brushed it off as her being dramatic or sensitive.
'But standing in my mother's living room with iced tea soaking into her carpet, I realised she was right. And it wasn't a one-time thing.'
The Redditor, who has been with his girlfriend for three years, divulged that the couple had 'constant little fights', but he would 'always have a reason why it isn't my fault'.
Recalling several instances during which he was a self-described 'garbage of a human being', the user wrote: 'Three months ago, she got home from a long shift and the kitchen was a mess.
'She asked why I didn't clean up, and I snapped, 'You didn't ask me to'. Like I needed a chore list instead of just being considerate.
'I said, 'You think I don't have stuff going on too? The difference is that you always complain and I keep things to myself' instead of just listening.
'Another time, she got emotional about something she was going through, and I made it about me. I flipped it, every f***ing time,' he realised.
'I always accuse her of 'overreacting' any time she brought up how I made her feel. Then I'd get mad at her for 'starting fights which I now see was just her trying to communicate.'
He admitted that his girlfriend had told him 'more than once' that he had a habit of '[manipulating] the situation so it always looks like [she's] the problem'.
The Reddit user added that, previously, he 'honestly thought she was just being unfair', but upon reflection has realised that he was 'deflecting, blaming, stonewalling, all the classic signs of narcissistic behaviour'.
'It wasn't about being a villain, it was just... my default,' he said.
Circling back to the drink he spilled on his mother's carpet, the user described it was his 'wake-up call'.
'I spilled something. I blamed someone else. And in my head, it made perfect sense until it didn't.'
He also realised that his behaviour didn't just affect his girlfriend and his mother, but that he had also 'done this exact thing over and over' with co-workers and friends.
'I weaponise logic to avoid blame, I gaslit people without even realising it, and I always make myself the misunderstood one.'
Upon his epiphany, the author of the post said he was turning to Reddit for ideas and suggestions on where he can start changing his behaviour, and how to seek help to do it.
'Now I don't know exactly what to do with this. I've been reading a bit about narcissistic tendencies and it's honestly terrifying how much of it fits,' he confessed.
'I don't think I'm a monster, but I can't ignore this anymore. I don't want to keep hurting people close to me, or keep lying to myself especially after my mother gave me that look of disgust.'
He added: 'I want to change. I just don't know where to begin. Please help.'
Dozens of other Reddit users offered advice to the post author, suggesting he begins therapy to discover the root of his behaviour and begin making steps towards real change.
Many acknowledged that his self-realisation was the first step towards becoming a better person and encouraged him on his journey.
'Finally seeing all this is very hopeful for the future. Do not allow yourself to avoid/ignore it moving forward,' one person said.
Another added: 'I just came here to say that you even acknowledging this about yourself is huge.
'Good for you. More people need to take accountability for their actions and behaviour.'
Several people said the first thing the post author should do is apologise to his girlfriend for all the times he made her feel like she had done something wrong even though she had not.
'Go to your girlfriend and tell her you're sorry. That she's been right all along. That you never realised despite all the times she's talked to you about these things, how you've been treating her,' one Redditor said.
Another chimed in: 'Assuming you want to keep your girlfriend, I'd start with an apology.
'You can tell her about the iced tea, and how it's made you realise some things you don't like about yourself.
'If she's stuck around this long there's a good chance she will continue to stick by you if she sees you actually trying to better yourself.
'And while it is not her job to fix you, she may be willing to help or at least be a cheerleader.'
Some recommended that the post author seek an official diagnosis for narcissism in order to clarify what therapeutic work he will need to do in order to be successful in his quest for change.
'I have a good friend who is a diagnosed narcissist. He's done a lot of work in therapy to keep his impulses from affecting others,' one person wrote.
'There's been a lot of good advice in here, but once you get a handle on your responses and reactions, I think it's important to remember that there's no finish line to being a better person. It's always active and ongoing.'
Another added: 'Therapy, therapy, therapy. You don't sound like a full blown narcissist but you are definitely walking the path.
'The biggest thing you are gonna have to face is the why. Narcissist Personality disorder is a maladaptive response to your upbringing.
'Your brain wired itself this way for a reason and unlearning and undoing that is what your goal should be. You will learn tricks and hacks to undo the behaviour in the moment, but you have to unpack what got you to that point as well.'
Another suggested that the original user find a therapist who is experienced in narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as they would have the best expertise to help him.
'It took a long time to grow this way, fortunately it will take less time to unlearn it, but still, often several years,' they continued.
'Totally worth it! You'll notice yourself wanting to pick apart and blame the therapist, too.
'The sessions will be good practice. It's so great that you want to change and grow! You are choosing well for yourself.'
According to the British Psychological Society, people with narcissistic tendencies often put their own interests ahead of others and constantly show off, as well as taking credit where it's not deserved.
They also tend to agree with self-aggrandising and controlling statements, and feel less concern for others in distress.
In the UK, it is estimated around one in 20 people have NPD. However, the number of undiagnosed cases could be much higher.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
The kindness of strangers: I was five years old when a woman I'll never know gave me an extravagant doll
When I was very young, my family and I emigrated from Albania to Melbourne. As a child of refugees settling in Australia after the second world war, I experienced the searing poverty that myriads of displaced people dealt with as they tried to rebuild lives in far away, unfamiliar places. As a result, my brothers and sisters and I very rarely enjoyed the magic and thrill that come when a child gets a new toy. One day – I must have been no more than five – I was wandering through the local town hall with my mother. Some sort of fair was in full swing and I happened upon a table where, for a mere penny, I could try my luck to win a doll. I didn't have a penny, but I did have a fervent wish to have a doll – particularly the beautiful one with the gloriously extravagant light blue dress! I lingered at the table watching people try their luck and hoping no one would win the doll I felt was mine. At some point, a woman – I'll never know who she was – decided to play and won the chance to choose a doll from the dozen or so settled along the wall. As she prepared to claim her prize, she turned to me and, with a smile that I can still remember today, asked me to choose. I hesitated until she said: 'Which one would you like to take home with you?' Feeling emboldened, I pointed tentatively to the doll with the magnificent pale blue dress. A moment later, the doll floated down from the wall and into my waiting hands. It was mine. I was overwhelmed with wonder. This incredibly kind woman had noticed the longing in the eyes of a little girl and made her dream come true. Her act of kindness was a moment of pure magic. I cherished that beloved doll until I was 17, when we left Australia to move to Canada and luggage restrictions forced me to bequeath her to another. That woman sowed the seeds of my own belief that small acts of kindness can change lives. We are regularly confronted with choices about how to treat other people and how to interpret their words and actions. I try to be forgiving and empathetic because I believe very sincerely in the goodness of people, in large part because of that day at the fair. Sixty five years later, I can say that I am a better person because of that woman. From making your day to changing your life, we want to hear about chance encounters that have stuck with you. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. Your contact details are helpful so we can contact you for more information. They will only be seen by the Guardian. If you're having trouble using the form click here. Read terms of service here and privacy policy here
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘What about me?' The confusing jealousy of being spared the abuse my father committed against my sister
A winter's day. My father in the dark room of my memory developing photographs. The door is shut. My sister stands with him. He aims to teach her the essentials of photography. How to turn a black and white negative rolled from the interior of his camera, unspooled in the dark, then bathed in trays of chemicals, to bring the past back to life in black and white. My sister's special treatment as the only one of nine siblings to learn this skill does not go unnoticed, by me at least. I am 10 years old and long to learn, even as I want only to be an insect in the corner watching unseen. My father taught me fear. Small children rely on their parents for sustenance and survival and when a parent is abusive, where the only love a child comes to know is corrupted, it comes with a sense that other siblings, who also seek his love, are rivals. Writing about child sexual abuse is hard. Writing about the unfathomable, yet surprisingly common jealousy experienced as the sibling of an abused child is even harder. This is what I aim to do here. The pecking order of people in my family fascinated me from when I sat perched on a bench at the kitchen table. We dangled our legs and looked at our plates still empty until our mother piled on a mountain of potatoes mashed with carrot and onion. Hutspot, a Dutch delight designed to fill empty bellies with basic nutrition and as easy to assemble as cheese on toast. Look around this table. Note the parents at either end. Mother closest to the kitchen sink, father at the head. A constellation that speaks to the order of things. Migrants to Australia from Europe after the war. Imagine this family and consider which of these children suffers most. Is it the girl who sits beside me? At nine years old she travelled alone in an ambulance to the Fairfield infectious diseases hospital and stayed there for three months in the women's dormitory with rheumatic fever, a strep throat gone wrong. Excluded with a communicable disease. Or could it be her taller brother on the other side of the table? Months earlier as a sixteen-year-old he copped the same fate. Only his rheumatic fever morphed into osteomyelitis after the infection travelled from his heart to his feet. He nearly lost a leg, but doctors dragged his life and limb back from the brink. Still functional, despite the crater in its centre. Was it the boy on the other side of me? The one christened the family genius, who scooped prizes in his final years at school, in Latin, French, English, mathematics, physics and chemistry. He was left-handed in the days when left-handedness was a curse to be ironed out. Or the other boy on the bench, the 'runt of the litter' because, unlike his four brothers, he failed to grow tall. He struggled to read in a family that valued literacy. He sat at the end of the table after dinner alone reading out loud. Each time he stumbled his father rapped a fork over his knuckles. None of these. From the oldest to the youngest, the one singled out for the prize of victim, goes to my eldest sister. She in the dark room. A red globe overhead, the only light as my father touched her body in secret. It took 50 years before she could tell me. How could I be jealous of an elder sister for having something I never wanted and yet at the same time longed for? My father's abusive 'love' and my mother's apparent gratitude towards her for enduring it. When Haruki Murakami's character Kafka, in his novel, Kafka on the Shore, experiences a stab of jealousy, Murakami reminds us, jealousy is like 'a brush fire. It torches your heart'. Heat that rises from your core. If there is any emotion that dogs me beyond shame and occasional deep longing, it is jealousy. And to understand this complex emotion I join with another who has researched this area for a deep dive. We met online. Social worker Anais Cadieux Van Vliet had read my book, The Art of Disappearing and was interested to discuss the impact of childhood sexual abuse on what they call non-abused and non-abuser siblings. Cadieux Van Vliet uses the term with reservations, as it fails to include the fact such siblings are also indirectly abused. As part of their research, Cadieux Van Vliet has interviewed clinicians to ascertain how they consider the experience for non-abused, non-abuser siblings within such families. Although clinicians might understand the vexed position we so-called non-abused siblings find ourselves in, others are more circumspect. Maybe more concrete in their understanding. As if the abuse matters only to the people within the abused/abusive couple, primarily the victim/survivor. The rest becomes collateral. One of the hardest things to understand, the extent to which a person who survives abuse by avoiding it, one who sits beside or witnesses the abuse like me, or who like Cadieux Van Vliet learns about it later, carries a question: 'What about me?' A tingling of jealously we find hard to understand because we know we're also the lucky ones to have been spared. My father never showed me love. He had eyes only for my big sister – she was the one who got 'special treatment'. Although she and I did not talk about it until I was in my fifties, I knew what had happened between my father and my sister even as a 10-year-old when we shared a bedroom. I had no words for it then. How can we call abuse 'special treatment'? In the mind of a child this is how it seems. Your father chooses you, or at least he chooses your body on which to focus his attention. As Maurice Whelan, a psychoanalyst describes it, for the abused child a deep confusion ensues. The father visits in the night, in secrecy and does things with their body that trouble, and disturb them, even as this touch might arouse them in ways they cannot understand. Then the father swears them to secrecy and in the morning and in days to come, says nothing. The non-abused sibling may not be aware of this. May not see it happening, as I did, but all non-abused siblings live in a hot house of repressed sexuality. It erupts in secrecy and silence in the shadows. A sexuality that is confused with power and shame. My younger sisters have different stories. They too came close to being sexually abused by our father. Non-abused siblings, whether they consciously know or not, are overtaken by an atmosphere of secrecy and violent underpinnings that speak to something dangerous going on. It does not feel safe in such a household. The unspoken rule is to stay silent. When I was 14, my sister told me the so-called facts of life as relayed to her by our father. He had given her this information to help her grow, he said, because our mother came from a repressed Catholic household and did not know what a man needed. He therefore taught my sister about his desire, confused as hers. And she in turn, wanting to shield me from the pain of his lessons, told me repeatedly: 'If he touches you, scream.' When you're a child, the life you lead is the only one you know. You catch glimpses of other people's lives from a distance. Our family was unique in our foreignness and in the abuses my father meted out. It shamed me when I looked at the fathers of other children at my school who seemed more loving. My father's choice was my fault. If I behaved in a different way, if I was more like my elder sister, if I offered him more by way of interest, or body shape or beauty then he might not only notice me but also he might be kind and not fly into rages at the simplest slight. My mother's overcooked steak. Dishes piled high in the sink. Any child who did not behave as they were told. When I was 12 and shared a room with my elder sister I went to bed ahead of her. Alone under the blankets I imagined myself as Maid Marion from Robin Hood and his merry men. I hid in the forest terrified the Sheriff of Nottingham might carry me to his castle and ravage me. Somewhere in my unconscious mind, I knew what was happening to my sister. I was almost asleep to the soft thud of my father's bare feet on the carpet between our beds. My sister asleep or so I imagined. I did not want him to take me in his arms and possess me. I did not want whatever it was my father did to my sister on those nights, night after night when he came into our room while the rest of the house slept. And yet, I wanted to turn him into Robin Hood. I wanted my father to want me. Looking back, it was as if any woman who commanded my father's attention was one who evoked sexual feelings in him. The rest of us were dispatched. People to cook and clean. My mother bore babies for him, but those already born were of no consequence. Except my sister. My mother believed our father had stopped visiting her in the night. She caught him once in our bedroom, my father hunched over my sister while I was in the next bed pretending to be asleep. 'If you ever come here again,' she said, 'I'll kill you'. Her threat did not stop him, but my mother could not bear to believe otherwise. When you're desperate, you'll do anything to survive. I was in awe of my sister's courage when she stood in front of my father's chair and sometimes asked for money. I could not ask for anything of my father beyond the good night gesture my mother forced on to us younger children. My father stretching up from his chair to make the sign of the cross on our foreheads as some type of fatherly protection. I despised this ritual. The rasp of my father's fingers on my soft forehead, the croak of his words, 'goedenacht', the air puffing back into his seat when he flopped down, and we, my younger sister and I retreated to our respective rooms, ready for the dangers of the night. Bless me father for I have sinned against my younger sister for wanting what was hers. I borrowed her dress when she did not give me permission. Then I ruined it. My sister's dress was too small. I slipped into it well enough, but the buttons could not hold against the pressure of my first attempts to skate around the ice rink at St Moritz in St Kilda with school friends one summer holiday. I came home in the dress; its underarms ripped from their sockets. My sister was enraged. I had destroyed her favourite dress. Blue denim with buttons up the front. Jealousy ruins things. Ruins people. But my therapist reassured me it was a feeling, and not evil, however painful. It's bad enough to endure this feeling, she told me, but ten times worse if you're given the message it's wrong to feel it in the first place. If we squash the feeling because we believe it's wrong then the feeling will bury itself inside, until the sinews of our hearts are like shards of stone that can harden into volcanic rock. Explosions are dangerous. They can destroy everything in their path. Better to feel the tug and pull and pain of jealousy than to let it enter the vaults of the hidden and forgotten. My father in the dark room of my memory holds my sister close and I shudder, relieved to be spared while sad to have missed out. Only in writing can I reconcile these two opposing emotions. When you know something is wrong it surrounds you every day. In families where child sexual abuse occurs, not only are you silenced in the childhood of your home, you're silenced throughout your lifetime, because it hurts other people to hear. But on the page, we can see it, the marks of memory. The open secret. The weird jealousy of an unloved child. The colour green.
Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Daily Mail
People creeped out after man posts photo of massive spider hiding in plain sight... can you spot in 20s or less?
A man who almost put his hand on top of a massive spider has posted a picture on Reddit challenging users to see if they would be as lucky in avoiding it. User kingakatosh shared the picture in the subreddit /FindTheSniper, a Where's Waldo-inspired community where people post photos and ask others to find a particular thing. While many struggled at first, it was not long before more eagle-eyed users spotted the large critter, leaving many feeling thoroughly creeped out. Self-described arachnophobes were quickest in spotting the frighteningly large, brown-colored spider in the mess of leaves and twigs. 'My spidey senses (arachnophobia) were tingling and I found that f***er immediately,' one person wrote. 'Oh hell, I immediately zoomed in on it and gagged,' another person wrote. 'Finding it gave me a crawling sensation in my brain, which I disliked very much. Thank you,' a third commented. Take a look at the photo and see if you can spot it in 20 seconds or less. In the comments, the poster revealed that they live in the midwestern US and narrowly avoided touching the critter. 'Reached my hand down to pick up and rock and noticed this dude mere millimeters from my hand ACKKK,' the user wrote. Others commented on what type of spider the poster had seen, with most settling on it likely being a dark fishing spider, scientifically known as Dolomedes tenebrosus. Dark fishing spiders are found in the United States and Canada. Despite their name, they typically dwell in trees and wooded areas. Females can reach a body length of about an inch long with a leg span of over three inches, while males are usually about half the size. They generally don't pose a threat to humans as they considered shy spiders. They will usually run away at the slightest bit of movement from a person. In the rare circumstance that one bites a person, the bite is no more severe than a bee or wasp sting, according to the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State. However, those who are already vulnerable to spider venom could experience more serious symptoms. Mature dark fishing spiders are typically found roaming around starting in May through September. Studies have shown that male spiders die when they mate, which leads to their female counterparts cannibalizing them. Females deposit their egg sacs in June and carry them around until they're ready to hatch.
