Are We All a Little Narcissistic?
Or is someone just making this crap up?
When a friend invited me to join a group for survivors of narcissistic abuse, I turned her down. The truth was I felt so much shame that I didn’t feel good enough to talk about what happened to me.
Contributing to my shame was a false belief that I had somehow been complicit in the abuse because I hadn’t stopped it. Like many survivors, I blamed myself. I asked myself questions like — why me? Why didn’t I see that coming? Why couldn’t I stop it? My default was to blame myself before the narcissist. Sometimes I even wondered if I was just a bad person who deserved what happened.
When I finally got up the nerve to enter the group, I was surprised to hear other people’s stories. It was validating to find out that other people had gone through similar experiences. Many of their stories echoed my own. For the first time in my life, I felt safe enough to spill my secrets.
The group was healing and cathartic until I heard someone making excuses for a narcissist by saying “Well, we’re all a little narcissistic.”
Two things bothered me about this statement — the first was that it sounded like an excuse for the evil that had been done to me and countless others. The second was my own fear that what happened to me was my fault —…
