It’s all too easy in today’s world to become the victim of a narcissist, because there’s actually a lot of them out there. And there isn’t as many of them out there as there are those who actually get to positions of power and authority. Because there’s a connection between the way that our world is set up, and the values that we hold at a collective level, and the narcissistic personality. I’m not going to get into all of that today.
But today, I want to talk about how to recognize a narcissist ahead of time, and about why they do some of the things they do, and how we can essentially recognize it and protect ourselves. I’m going to talk about this specifically in a spiritual community, because that is where I’ve seen a lot of them and maybe can speak from most experience. So getting to meet one of these people will sort of come with at first, they might seem very open very kind. And they’re kind of testing you and trying you to see if you have that same kind of energy. And then comes the love bombing, which is showering you with compliments, “you are the most beautiful radiant soul out there, there’s no one in the world that has gifts like you, I just wanted to know that you have a frequency and a type of energy that is so special.”
And I’ve seen the depth of the work you’ve done. And I really commend you for that. It’s these really kind of deep injections of a great sense of self worth. That comes right away from the get go maybe a couple hours or days into knowing the person. And why they do this is because the narcissist is seeking somebody who has the same dilemma that they have, but has a different approach to resolving it. This is the dilemma of lack of self worth.
A narcissist likely has a lack of self worth because they were pressured by perfectionistic parents and held to standards that they could not fulfill. There’s other reasons as well involving abuse and so on. But that’s a general I generally one potential source and there’s many others. Whatever the source, they don’t feel worthy, so they create a persona that is larger than life to compensate for that. Their perfect polar opposite is a codependent who is somebody who might have been conditioned with lots of guilt and shame for being independent from their caregivers for not fulfilling their caregivers wishes, or for not being the emotional support for their parents on some level. The codependent does not have a sense of self worth either. And they fulfill their sense of self worth by being a good person according to their own mentally accepted or spiritually accepted definitions of who and what a good person is. So they give too much of their energy to other people in order to compensate for feeling unworthy.
The narcissist draws in as much attention and affirmation from the world around them of how great they are as a way of compensating for it because they don’t believe it on an internal level, they need the external evidence. Whereas the external evidence for the codependent comes from people saying “you did such a great thing for me, thank you, you’re great.”
The narcissist likes a lot of attention and likes that affirmation. And so they will seek for somebody who is willing to be so nice and to be so giving and to be so generous. And most importantly, they’re going to look for somebody who upholds their narrative that they don’t fully believe, because they need somebody outside of them to reflect back to them this narrative. So with a narcissist, you’re going to see a lot of storytelling of the same kind of general idea. Like “we as part of this spiritual community or we as part of this business, we as part of this tribe, we as part of these people on the right side of history or the right side of whatever, are the ones who are doing the thing, making the world a better place. We have a mission from God. We’re the chosen ones, and I’m in as your leader, or the one who’s directing this thing. So don’t you agree with me?” And you need to tell the story a lot, and you need to repeat it, and they, they’re going to tell it and they’re going to ask you to then feed it back to them as if you’re like a parent or something. And, and so that’s the second major sign.
And of course, there’s gaslighting involve the gaslighting, of telling you something different from what happened. And in addition to this, the narcissist is going to make you feel dependent on them in some way, they’re going to work on the sense that without them, you are not enough.
There’s many different types of narcissists. So one form a narcissist is going to want to uphold that story that they are the best ever. And a more vulnerable narcissist is going to work to maintain the story that they are a victim to someone or something outside of them. So this narcissist may tell you the story of them against the world or them this against this other certain group of people and use you as their ally. And so when it comes to spiritual narcissist, there has to be some sort of ideology that makes this justifiable. And when we look at New Age communities, this comes back to the law of attraction taught in a very distorted way most of the time.
Dante StarShine 