The Narcissist Inside Your Head

Chapter 1

Introducing The Narcissist

The term narcissist is derived from Narcissus who was the beautiful Ancient Greek mythological hunter who fell in love with himself through looking at his reflection in a pool of water.

There are variations of the story and sometimes the story ends with him drowning in the pool, or of him turning into the Narcissus flower. Either way, all accounts are a metaphor for the vanity of Narcissus himself, and of his being unable to find anyone as wonderful as he to fall in love with—so he fell in love with himself.

Despite the Narcissus myth being around for nearly 3000 years it isn't until the last decade or so that the term 'narcissist' has come into mainstream everyday use, and indeed it's probably only in the last five years when it has become more prominent in the media. The reason for that? Well, it's partly because of the advent of social media where everything from breakfast to childbirth is now posted for us all to share, but also we can now demand accountability of a person's behaviour, and bad behaviour, whether you are famous or not, can no-longer be spin-doctored or swept under the rug because we now have thousands of witnesses. Consequently, every phone in the land has become judge, jury and executioner, and whether you agree if this is a good thing or not is up to you.

However, what phones and social media are doing quite well is helping us all to understand each other better, and if you're an older person reading this, you'll know what I'm getting at because before the advent of the world wide web, our source of information was the library, the TV or each other, and all three were unfortunately limited in their scope, time-consuming, and not easy to cross-reference. Thankfully we all have Google at our fingertips these days and learning about other people is now much more fun, as well as relative and appliable.

In fact, learning about other people seems to be a full-time job thanks to the amount of stuff on social media these days.

Before writing this chapter, I was on my phone reading an article about a woman whose ex-partner had attacked her and left her brain damaged, a particularly harrowing story but one I was interested in because first I wanted to know if she was going to be ok, but I also wanted to know if the ex-partner had been appropriately jailed for what he did to her.

Another story popped into my feed soon after about an actor who had withdrawn from the public eye after a period in which she was all over the media accusing her ex of beating her and other things besides.

I read both of these articles with interest mainly because I thought they contained narcissists, the ex-partner and the actor, but I remember thinking, not for the first time, that there seems to be an explosion of narcissistic behaviour in mainstream media lately and I wondered whether it's just that the media is focusing on these types of stories or do we have a growing population of narcissists?

This is the question I have already asked myself some time ago which got me started thinking about all the people in my life; friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances, who may or may not be narcissists. I began to piece together a picture of anecdotal evidence about the narcissists in my own life and it was as if a lightbulb had gone on in my head. All those times over the years when I struggled to comprehend the reasons for someone's contentious behaviour either towards me or just in general, started to become clearer after I theorised that they might be a narcissist. I was suddenly very aware of the problem, and the impact they'd had on my life, and while I tried to clean up some of the emotional damage they'd inflicted over the years I realised how important it was for my presence of mind to ensure I never let another narcissistic person into my life again: they are just too destructive, and what little I got back from them wasn't worth the way I was left feeling, at times, worthless or inadequate, or used, when they are around.