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The Myths

“Live outside your comfort zone; there are great discoveries there.”

Caroline Aron

Narcissism is a belief that the world revolves around us, and that what happens in the world happens because of us. This belief is as common, and as pervasive, as it is erroneous.

Most of us live with a garden-variety form of narcissism that’s so embedded we don’t even know we have it. As a result, we suffer deeply and unnecessarily.

I call this everyday narcissism, or EN.

Nearly all of us are everyday narcissists—you, me, our friends, our children, our parents, our other relatives, our coworkers, our partners, and our neighbors. This narcissism comes from a combination of childhood wounds and enduring myths we were taught at a very young age. The more emotionally wounded we are, and the more we buy into these myths, the more narcissistic we tend to become.

These powerful myths get ingrained into our thinking, and we believe them because people we love and trust—our parents—initially teach them to us, while other adults in our lives regularly reinforce them. Let’s begin by looking at the first four of these myths. (We’ll examine the fifth myth in the following chapter.)

Myth 1: We Are Responsible for—and Have the Power to Control—How Other People Feel and Behave

When we live our lives according to this first myth, we are in a constant state of hypervigilance, fearing that we won’t belong or fit in if we don’t make others happy through what we do and say. We spend much of our time trying to figure out what other people want, what they need, and what will make them happy.

Meanwhile, we consistently ignore ourselves—what we want, what we need, and what will make us happy. We neglect ourselves, believing that if others are happy with us, they will love us—and, as a result, we will become happy, too. We may also take credit for other people’s happiness, as if it occurred because we performed so well.

When we believe this, we constantly watch how others react to us. If they are unhappy, we assume it is because we did something wrong. We tell ourselves that if only we had said or done or been something different, they would be happy. We assume we’ve failed and we feel ashamed or burdened or unlovable. Thus we live in fear of rejection and disapproval.

Honesty takes a back seat to pleasing each other when more or less everyone lives according to this myth. Worse, over time, each of us loses our sense of who we are. We no longer know ourselves; we only know what others want.

We imagine that making others happy will bring us happiness. Yet if we live a life of pleasing others and avoiding conflict, of consistently doing things for others at our own expense, we are not happy at all—because without honesty there can be no intimacy, no connection, and no genuine love.

Myth 2: Other People Are Responsible for—and Have the Power to Control—the Way We Feel and Behave

ANGELINE AND GARY

Like most of us, Angeline has been raised to believe Myths 1 and 2. As a result, when her nine-year-old son Gary does something that bothers her, she says to him, “You’ve made me angry at you.”

Instead of focusing on Gary’s actions—for example, he didn’t put away his toys, as he promised he’d do—she makes the problem the way she feels about his actions. Instead of Gary learning that he is responsible for taking care of his possessions, he learns that he is responsible for fixing his mother’s feelings.

In an extreme version of Myth 2, a parent blames their child for the parent’s feelings—and for how the parent responds to those feelings. “Now look what you’ve done. You make me so upset that I dropped my tea mug and broke it.” Or, “If you had cleaned up your room like you promised, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry and yelled at you.”

When people in a relationship believe Myth 2, their disagreements typically turn into ever-escalating arguments, and no satisfactory resolution is ever found. Each person holds the other responsible for their own happiness or satisfaction and blames the other for not providing it. Each then resents the other for not doing their part.

Myth 3: The Needs and Wants of Other People Are More Important than Our Own

This third myth implies that our own needs and wants don’t really matter, and it is especially pervasive for children. Thus Myth 3 naturally erodes our self-esteem and self-confidence.

Myths 1 and 3 are typically taught together, so they reinforce one another. As we learn that we’re responsible for how others feel, we also learn that other people matter far more than we do—or that we don’t matter at all.

Myth 4: Following the Rules Is Also More Important than Addressing Our Needs and Feelings

When rules are properly designed and applied, they can help remove chaos from our lives. This is why we have stoplights and stop signs. However, when rules are made more important than the human beings they are meant to serve, people become wounded—especially if they are young.

One of the hallmarks of EN is that it often puts rules before people by elevating obedience and compliance and discounting genuine human needs. Teaching children to not interrupt adult conversations is important. However, they also need to be able to interrupt if there is an emergency.

Adding Up the Myths

These four myths don’t just pervade our culture; they are cultural norms. We teach them to our kids to help them grow up and become functional adults. Some people would even say the myths of EN help children learn to be kind and thoughtful.

However, the myths of EN do nothing of the sort. They make all of us—those who learn it and those who teach it—smaller, younger, less functional, and more wounded.

To teach kindness to others, we must first be kind ourselves. EN, and the myths that support and perpetuate it, are not kind.

Yet these myths are everywhere. As we age, our mentors, teachers, and role models—and, eventually, our peers—all live by these four myths and teach them to us.

Year after year, we repeat these myths to ourselves and learn to act them out, over and over. With each thought and each action, we internally reinforce their hold on us. Eventually we come to believe them and live by them. Then we also teach them to others.

By the time we are adolescents, most of us have internalized all four myths—and we have put them together into the following narrative, which we constantly, yet subtly, communicate to each other:

• When you feel angry, sad, or hurt, or when you act in ways I don’t like, I am responsible for your feelings and behavior. This means it’s my responsibility to fix you or the situation, so that you feel better and act appropriately.

• And when you feel good or act in ways I like, it’s because I did the right thing.

• Furthermore, when I feel bad, it’s your fault—and your responsibility to fix me or the situation so I feel better.

This narrative is the basis for the everyday narcissism that almost everyone shares.

Why is this a form of narcissism? Because, as a result of the lifelong training I’ve just described, almost all of us live by the following unconscious (and false) principles:

• I am responsible for how other people feel and behave. Therefore, I experience myself as all-powerful.

• I am responsible for how others act toward me. Therefore, I once again experience myself as all-powerful.

• Other people are responsible for how I feel and behave—and are supposed to make me feel safe, happy, and okay. Therefore, I am the center of the universe.

The myths and principles of EN take root in our psyches because they are taught to us, over and over, by people we trust.

The first two principles of EN involve an unrealistic obligation to others (and their unrealistic expectations of us). The third involves our own unrealistic expectations of others.

The myths and principles of EN take root in our psyches because they are taught to us, over and over, by people we trust. Yet the myths and principles wound us deeply.

Worse, in our mostly misguided efforts to soothe our wounds, we often wound others in much the same ways that we were wounded. We then pass on our everyday narcissism to others, as if it were a virus.

Outgrowing Narcissism

In order to survive, babies or young children need the world to revolve around them. Parents must attend to them closely, meeting their needs and keeping them safe.

As we grow older, however, we naturally want to become ever more independent. By age two, we start letting our parents know that we can do things ourselves, such as put on our coats and take off our shoes. With each passing year, our parents back off a little further, and we are quick to remind them that this is what we want and expect of them.

By nature, as we grow older and gain more skills and confidence, we would outgrow our childhood narcissism. Over time, systematically, we would seek more and more independence. We would stop demanding or expecting the world to revolve around us. We would learn to do more and more things ourselves: tie our shoes, ride a bike, comb our hair, brush our teeth, and so on. We gain our physical independence slowly and methodically.

However, our process of emotional independence is thwarted. Even as we gain more physical independence, we simultaneously internalize the EN myths and the principles that accompany them, and we develop emotional dependence rather than independence. We believe, in all the perverse ways I previously described, that the world does revolve around us.

As we mature, most of us learn to meet our own physical needs. Emotionally, however, most of us struggle with everyday narcissism, which stifles our emotional development and our independence. We carry this EN into adulthood and into most or all of our relationships.

Nearly all of us suffer from EN without knowing it. It has a tremendous impact on our lives, creating anxiety, anger, depression, an unnatural emotional dependence on others, and less fulfilling relationships.

The Role of Trauma

Trauma is always felt deeply—and remembered—by our body. To the body, trauma is invariably experienced as an assault, whether physical, emotional, verbal, psychological, sexual, or spiritual.

When most of us think of trauma, we think of extremely painful events such as incest, abuse, rape, war, assault, serious injury, severe betrayal, extreme neglect, or great and unexpected loss. However, trauma can also result from small, painful incidents that get repeated many times. This is often the case with the everyday narcissism most of us are exposed to as children.

EN can be seen as a form of neglect, in which a child’s emotional (and sometimes physical) needs are ignored in favor of those of adults. Through EN, day after day and year after year, most of us experienced a slow, repetitive grinding down of our self-worth, self-confidence, and self-trust.

CASSIE AND HER GRANDMOTHER

Four-year-old girl Cassie is told by her mother to give Grandma a kiss goodbye. Cassie doesn’t want to because Grandma just hurt her feelings. Nevertheless, her mother insists—with annoyance in her voice—and tells her, “If you don’t kiss Grandma, she’ll be hurt.’”

This is a classic and common example of how we teach our kids Myths 1 and 3. Although Cassie is only four, she is taught that she is responsible for how Grandma feels—and how Grandma feels is important, while how Cassie feels is not.

Cassie’s mom is trying to teach her something important: to be sensitive to others’ feelings. However, what Cassie is actually beginning to learn is to be sensitive to others’ feelings and to ignore her own.

Because of the incident, Cassie hurts. She doesn’t have a terrible wound, of course; it’s more like a paper cut. However, when this same lesson is repeated over and over, in many different contexts, it becomes a damaging wound.

I call this hazy trauma. It’s not the result of a single big event. It’s the cumulative effect of many emotional paper cuts. It’s also a form of neglect because Cassie’s own feelings get repeatedly ignored, discounted, or pushed aside.

As psychologist Patrick Carnes has noted, neglect can be harder to recover from than incest or physical abuse—precisely because there is no single big, causal incident. Instead, the trauma is hazy and hard to clearly identify because it is made up of many smaller, recurring events. And, in the case of EN, these events are seen as normal (or even instructive and beneficial) by most adults, whereas incest and physical abuse are not—and, indeed, are against the law.

Our normal response to trauma has several aspects. First, our body experiences fear in the limbic part of our brain. When this occurs, the amygdala (within the limbic system) kicks in, creating a fight, flight, or freeze response. At the same time, our left prefrontal cortex—the thinking, organizing, sequencing, and impulse controlling part of our brain—shuts off. Our survival instincts and emotions are now in charge. Rational thinking is literally not available to us because the rational part of our brain has been temporarily unplugged (or, as some therapists say, overruled or hijacked).

This is why, when we see that our kitchen curtains are on fire, we automatically start moving toward safety. We don’t sit still and thoughtfully analyze the cause of the fire or what possessions to save.

Trauma may also impact other parts of our brain. As a result, we may have little or no conscious memory of the cause of the trauma, especially if it occurred in preverbal childhood, when we didn’t have words to remember or explain our experience.

Usually, though, our body remembers the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, or other sensory information associated with any trauma. When we later experience a similar sight or sound or taste, our body may automatically get triggered and shift into a trauma response. Suddenly, we will feel or act as if the original trauma is happening right now, in the present moment.

. . . intense and abrupt emotional reactions are usually trauma responses from an old wound that just got triggered.

Our body never forgets. It continues to react to those triggers, whenever and wherever they appear, until the trauma is healed. A classic case is the war veteran who, while playing with his kids in his own backyard, hears a car backfire. Because the sound reminds his body of a gunshot, fear kicks in, and his amygdala takes over. Without thinking, he dives for cover. As we will see, the trauma of everyday narcissism has similar effects on most of us when we re-experience—or are reminded of—painful sights, sounds, smells, and feelings from our childhood.

Have you ever had a sudden, strong emotional reaction to a seemingly small incident, comment, or gesture? You yourself may have been surprised by the intensity of your reaction. These intense and abrupt emotional reactions are usually trauma responses from an old wound that just got triggered—the result of the EN we were taught as children.

The Takeaway

This book will help you understand how everyday narcissism manifests in your own life, and it will teach you to recognize it and heal it.

As a result, you will grow into a life of greater happiness; more fulfilling relationships; less reactivity; greater responsiveness to the people and things that matter to you; and more meaning. You’ll also learn to recognize everyday narcissism in others and respond to their EN in healthy ways. Best of all, you will begin to understand your life in a whole new way. You will learn to recognize more choices and greater freedom in your life. You will begin to relax and enjoy your life more. You will rediscover your true self and live a life of greater joy.