At the core of structural personality disordering is a rigid coping strategy which was very functional for restrictive developmental environments, but which later in life causes all kinds of trouble for the person in contexts which don’t require that rigid form of coping. We all know narcissism from our own healthy narcissistic development as children, but we also know its more toxic forms from cultural/collective narcissism, and from any of the unhealed narcissistic wounds that remain alive in us as individuals, in our own relationship to ourselves and in our relationship to others and the world. Healing narcissistic wounds is available for many of us, and our individual healing contributes to profound systems change, as intergenerational, cultural and collective narcissistic wounds are crying out to be tended to and repaired. Psychologist Jennifer Harvey Sallin explores all this and gives resources for further discovery and recovery in the article below.
A gifted-specific version of this article is available on the InterGifted blog
Narcissism as a coping strategy
At the core of structural personality disordering is a rigid coping strategy which was very functional for restrictive developmental environments, but which later in life causes all kinds of trouble for the person in contexts which don’t require that rigid form of coping. Taking narcissism as an example, a person with a high level of narcissism relies on consistently trying to prove they are superior to and more special than others to avoid feeling existentially annihilated (emotionally or even sometimes physically).
Feeling superior can be an ego-saving and life-saving strategy in times when we need to mobilize our energy to get out of or endure situations or relationships that grossly compromise our authenticity or integrity. But when stuck in the “on” position, this “better than” strategy becomes a “personality trait”, or more literally the structural ordering of our life’s energy. Of course, the longer we need the strategy (i.e. throughout our childhood), the more entrenched, dominant and fixed it becomes. Then, even when our current context doesn’t demand the strategy and there is no longer a true relational threat, the person stuck in a pattern of narcissism will still organize their life’s energy around proving themselves “superior to” and “more special than” the person or people they are relating to. For people who grew up with narcissism in their family of origin, this can be quite the dilemma, as they often have to keep the strategy active to continue to relate within their family system, and yet the active presence of the strategy causes all sorts of collateral damage to their other relationships and obstacles to building a thriving future of their own.
And the people around them feel it: whether it shows up through overt/grandiose, covert/vulnerable, communal, antagonistic or malignant narcissistic behaviors (here’s a short explainer of these types of narcissism), they will be aware, sooner or later, that they have only one possible position relative to the more narcissistic person: “inferior” and “less special”. They will feel, if they have to or want to stay around the narcissistic person in their lives, that their own life energy has to organize or order itself around the fixed position of the narcissistic person. We could more precisely put it this way: that their life’s energy has to disorganize itself or disorder itself in order to fit the rigid relational mold offered by the more narcissistic person.
Why is it a disorder?
Hence, we get a better sense of what it really means to call something a personality disorder. The more narcissistic person has had to create a disordered (rigid) life energy in the short-term (if we can consider childhood short-term), relative to the kind of flexible life energy ordering required to thrive intra- and interpersonally over the long-term (throughout adulthood). It’s an organization of life force that limits the person to a relatively narrow focus or aspect of existence, at the expense of all the rest. Though I won’t elaborate on other disorders in the rest of this article, briefly I’ll mention that outside of narcissism, we see disorder of life energy in a rigid focus toward, in broad strokes, creating chaos (borderline or emotionally unstable personality disorder), being perfect (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder), avoiding engagement (avoidant personality disorder), living in fantasy (schizotypal personality disorder), hypervigilance to threat (paranoid personality disorder), taking up all the available social space and attention (histrionic personality disorder), taking up no social space and attention (schizoid personality disorder), attacking and offensive protecting (antisocial personality disorder), and excessive dependence on others (dependent personality disorder).
Of course it should be said here that since the disordering arose as a response (survival strategy) to threat, the pattern will be experienced and seen most strongly when the person is once again under stress and feeling threatened (i.e. in the case of narcissism, becoming controlling and forceful when perceived superiority is under threat). What also contributes to it being a disorder is that when we have unresolved trauma, we see the world, even benign aspects of it, through a lens of threat. So the disordered brain actually predicts a threatening world, and often sees one where it is not, or even actively creates one where there wasn’t. And this points to personality disordering being on a spectrum, and being a matter of degree and complexity (more on this below).
Coming back to narcissism, when feeling threatened, narcissism keeps other people and the rest of the world in the realm not of equals, but in the realm of “tools” for maintaining the narrow, restricted and rigid focus on “being superior” or “more special”. There is limited, and sometimes no, possibility for others to just be “the same as” or maybe sometimes even better than (in a given context) the more narcissistic person. Or if they are perceived as such, this can cause a huge reaction and all of the classic forms of “narcissistic abuse” that have been described in great detail in the psychological and popular literature in recent decades: gaslighting, stonewalling, emotional blackmail, coercion, criticism and humiliation, narcissistic rage, intimidation, exploitation, smear campaigns and so on.
You can get a sense here of why someone feels less like a unique person of value in their own right and more like “narcissistic supply” when interacting long-term, and even sometimes short-term, with someone who is stuck in the “on” position of narcissistic disordering. But you can also get a sense, and this is important, of how challenging it must be for a person stuck in the “on” position of narcissism to navigate life. Everyone is a unique person, no one is actually “superior” to anyone else or, as extreme narcissism would have it, “superior to everyone else”. We’re all valuable in our own unique way, and our vulnerabilities and weaknesses are as valuable to our life’s experience as our strengths and our areas of resilience. This basic fact is experienced by a person ordered toward an existential need to feel superior to others, as an existential threat. Maybe if we simplify the narcissistic dilemma in this light, it could sound something like this: “It’s me or them, but not both. So it’s gotta be me.”
Think about the loneliness of that fixed position, and the loneliness of the child who is needing to make that awful choice to sacrifice so much of themselves (i.e. their capacity to feel safe with vulnerability and to embrace weakness compassionately) to stay out of what is or was for them a real danger zone (i.e. equality or vulnerability with other people). We can say a lot about narcissism and people who struggle with it (i.e. they hurt people, they cause relational damage, etc), but one thing we cannot say is that they had it easy. A child doesn’t spontaneously opt for loneliness as a first choice; they are coerced by their early ecosystem into making a survival choice that results in loneliness. We can hardly assign blame to their ecosystem, however, as those adults who make up their ecosystem were once children navigating their own probably impossible survival dilemmas, and on and on up the cycle of intergenerational and collective trauma transmission. Each generation disordered its own energy to fit into a family system of disordered energies.
A matter of degrees and directions
Many people, especially those of us who have been in the position of receiving narcissistic abuse (and to a degree, we are in a society with high narcissism, so the narcissistic abuse is built into our daily lives via the systems we interact with) might say, “Yes, but I had difficulty as a child, and I didn’t turn it into narcissism and abuse of others”. Sure, but this is where all of this is a matter of degrees and also directions. I, for one, can point to many coping mechanisms I adopted to survive early developmental trauma, which relied on a sort of internalized narcissism, where I was outwardly very servile, while inwardly using many of the same tactics you’d see on the list of narcissistic abuse to get parts of myself to conform to the rigid version of me the (developmentally healthy) narcissistic part of me thought I needed to be to survive: lack of empathy, criticism, rage, exploitation. Essentially, one part of me believed she was better than other parts of me, and felt she had the right to boss the other parts around without empathy. She was a “protector”, in the language of Internal Family Systems, who helped me survive; she was a form of developmental intra-personal narcissism.
Fortunately, I had enough personality flexibility to recognize these patterns and continue to seek help in my adulthood to repair my sense of relational safety within myself. But I consider myself, in spite of my early suffering and the relative resulting internal disordering that continued into my adult life in various forms, privileged. I was able to study psychology and spend most of my days learning about the inner world and the inner workings of people from all walks of life. I have a mind which can take in a lot of information and resources and actively use them for personal transformation. And, in the context of the depths of disordering I’ve seen throughout my decades of working with clients, I know how much deeper the disordering can go and how much more complex and rigid it can be.
The point here is that most of us know what it’s like, at minimum, for one part of our “inner family” to sometimes be “the boss” of the other parts, and for the boss part to lack empathy, be ruthless in criticism, and to use the other parts of our self in service of a false self constructed to help us through relationally dangerous contexts. Or we know what it’s like to resort to externalized narcissistic strategies to “rise above” people who would otherwise pull us into toxicity or chaos. Maybe it’s only happened to you once or twice in your life to survive a limited-scope threatening relational situation, and if so, you’re lucky! If you can imagine being compelled to live like that all the time, without recourse to other relational strategies, you can get a small sense of the daily dilemma of living with a more serious level of structural personality disordering. Can you imagine not knowing how or not feeling safe enough to choose other strategies, not having the internal and external resources to do so, or even being considered as “incurable” by those who are tasked to help you (a common problem in the old psychiatric and psychological schools)? Again, we can say many things about the harms that personality disordering can bring to relationships, and that is very real, but at the same time, it is true that living with a personality disorder is not an easy cross to bear.
Healing a narcissistic system: healing trauma, understanding intelligence
Recognizing that narcissism is a healthy survival strategy when it’s needed, and that we all have relied on it internally or externally at least once in our lives (even if you’re lucky enough to have a life that hasn’t required this coping strategy as an adult, you for sure used it when you were an infant as a healthy part of egoic development), takes us out of the classic polarization against it. We realize it’s needed when it’s needed, and that when it’s not needed, we can pursue other options and, with compassion, tend to any wounds which may have caused us to overuse it.
This is not just on an individual level. I mentioned above that our society, at least in the West, is highly narcissistic. We are in a system created to cover over rather than heal narcissistic wounding, which therefore perpetuates and selects for additional toxic narcissism. Both on the internal and external level, I think the key to our own healthy personal development and societal systems change is to figure out how to create systems where narcissism is not needed much outside of the healthy bounds of early childhood development, and when it is needed, that it does not need to resort to becoming a toxic version of itself.
What would a system look like if toxic narcissism wasn’t needed? On the global scale, Capitalism would certainly take a back seat in such a system, if not be replaced altogether (i.e. Degrowth). On a family and personal (intrapsychic) scale, intergenerational and collective traumas, as well as individual traumas, would be understood and addressed, with a commitment to not perpetuating intergenerational narcissism and violence (for this I highly recommend the work of psychologist Thomas Hübl and physician Gabor Maté). On an educational scale, we would educate society and our children about what true, holistic intelligence is, and how while narcissism and other personality disordering are intelligent from a developmental survival perspective, there are also intelligent paths to healing the long-term fragmentation and rigidity that these survival mechanisms engendered.
The heart of my work lies at the crossroads of these three domains: systems change, trauma healing, and education about intelligence. In essence, what I’ve learned or reaffirmed for myself in doing this work is that we need to make sense of our relationships – to the world, across generations, to our minds, and to intelligence and meaning. I know we can’t do that in any sort of “it’s all fixed now” kind of way. Being a psychologist has taught me that there are no pretty packages with pretty bows that don’t get reopened and reconfigured in life, neither on the level of the individual nor on the level of the collective. But still, each of us can start wherever we are, in our intrapersonal healing (healing between the parts of ourselves, for which I can recommend Internal Family Systems Therapy and Compassionate Inquiry), in healing within our families (intergenerational trauma) and within our communities (collective trauma), and in informing ourselves, our children and our society about how we can each understand our own unique intelligences as well as the panoply of intelligences around us (this is the main purpose of my work via InterGifted and Rediscovering Yourself).
If narcissistic rigidity is present in our own intra- or interpersonal relationships, in the way we lead others, in the way we parent, or in the way we relate to our inner worlds, we can explore healing the wounds that created this disorganization of our life’s energy. Of course, this leads us back to intergenerational, collective, educational and systemic healing. None of us are struggling with narcissism (generated within or received from without) on our own. We’re in a whole systemic web that predisposes us to and selects for toxic narcissism and other forms of personality disordering. So each of our healing, regardless of scale, contributes to the healing of the whole.
If one takes a transpersonal, contemplative and quantum-oriented view of these matters, which I’ve tended to do, where every one of our actions will take us and how they will influence the greater system to which we belong is yet open to discover. I find that exciting and hopeful.
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Resources, inspirations and links for further exploration
I’ve been developing this work with the influence of a lot of inspiring and powerful minds, among them: Kael Cockcroft, Aurélien Sallin, Gabor Maté, Richard Schwartz, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Zak Stein, Sam Vaknin, Jason Hickel, Erin Remblance, Jan Provoost, Kelly Pryde, Terry Real, Paul Levy and Karen O’Brien. I feel I have just scratched the surface here, and plan to continue to write on these matters in the future.
Throughout this article, you’ll find hyperlinks to the various references and works of a number of the above-mentioned people. Here I want to make special mention of the following:
- For individualized healing support for intellectually gifted and creative adults who struggle with personality disordering, I recommend working with Kael Cockcroft of Storm’s Edge Therapy.
- Listen to Kael’s and my recent podcast episode on my Conversations on Gifted Trauma podcast: Giftedness, Personality Disordering & Paths to Wholeness.
- I can highly recommend the books Healing Collective Trauma by Thomas Hübl and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté.
- For those of you who have suffered narcissistic abuse or want skills to mindfully and compassionately respond to toxicity in relationships, I recommend the book The Highly Sensitive Person’s Guide to Dealing with Toxic People, by Shahida Arabi
- An excellent general resource for understanding and healing personality disordering and recovery from narcissistic abuse is Out of The Fog
cover photo thanks to the talented Joshua Rawson-Harris via unsplash
What an excellent article Jennifer!!!