Sometimes people make a mistake because they desperately try to avoid making a different mistake. That’s what sometimes locks them in the bad place: “but if I stop doing X… wouldn’t that make me Y?”
There is another group of people who approximately never think a negative though about themselves, and it’s narcissists. They know that it’s everyone else who sucks and is responsible for everything bad.[1]
That could be an (unspoken) obstacle against getting rid of the self-negativity: “but won’t that make me a narcissist?” or “but won’t that make my parents/friends believe that I am a narcissist?”.
Ironically, this behavior could have started in the past as an attempt to appease some narcissist in the victim’s environment. “If I keep acknowledging that I suck, maybe they will stop attacking me so much?”
But there is a third option, which is simply to abandon the negative thoughts, without redirecting them.
Some people insist that actually, deep down, the narcissists are deeply insecure, and their outward behavior is merely their desperate attempt to push that internal negativity away. Unless I get some data to support this, I am going to assume that this is just another case of the typical mind fallacy: someone who has negative thoughts about themselves failing to imagine that someone else might simply not have them. If it is possible for a healthy person to have no negative feelings about themselves, why wouldn’t it be also possible for the right kind of unhealthy person?
Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is “can’t stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like ‘I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me’ does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she’s wrong about the negative thoughts”. It’s like this person can’t occupy the mental territory “I’m OK, mostly good” it’s either “I am fantastic” or “I am terrible”.
I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.
It’s true. People who hate themselves worry they’ll become narcissists if they don’t, just like how workaholics fear becoming lazy if they relax a bit, or the overly-guilty fear becoming selfish. People must be over-estimating how much influence they can really have over their own personality. A workaholic will approximately never become a layabout. But you can change habits of thought much more easily.
In psychology it seems to be the case that some narcissists (grandiose narcissists) are internally confident, and other narcissists (vulnerable narcissists) are insecure. This seems to correlate with extroversion, with the more extroverted narcissists being the grandiose narcissists. Here is a study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01600/full
Sometimes people make a mistake because they desperately try to avoid making a different mistake. That’s what sometimes locks them in the bad place: “but if I stop doing X… wouldn’t that make me Y?”
There is another group of people who approximately never think a negative though about themselves, and it’s narcissists. They know that it’s everyone else who sucks and is responsible for everything bad.[1]
That could be an (unspoken) obstacle against getting rid of the self-negativity: “but won’t that make me a narcissist?” or “but won’t that make my parents/friends believe that I am a narcissist?”.
Ironically, this behavior could have started in the past as an attempt to appease some narcissist in the victim’s environment. “If I keep acknowledging that I suck, maybe they will stop attacking me so much?”
But there is a third option, which is simply to abandon the negative thoughts, without redirecting them.
Some people insist that actually, deep down, the narcissists are deeply insecure, and their outward behavior is merely their desperate attempt to push that internal negativity away. Unless I get some data to support this, I am going to assume that this is just another case of the typical mind fallacy: someone who has negative thoughts about themselves failing to imagine that someone else might simply not have them. If it is possible for a healthy person to have no negative feelings about themselves, why wouldn’t it be also possible for the right kind of unhealthy person?
Third hand anecdote re: your footnote: a good friend of mine has a mother who she says is a narcissist, and the behaviour she describes is “can’t stand the thought she might have flaws, evidence of a flaw is brutally suppressed, reacted to with anger, blame, denial, gaslighting and displacement, and if a thought like ‘I am not perfect, specifically this is a way that I am not the best/someone else is better than me’ does get through the defenses, it results in a mental collapse and period of weeks filled with only negative thoughts, expressed to others to try and build back up her sense of self worth by getting people to say she’s wrong about the negative thoughts”. It’s like this person can’t occupy the mental territory “I’m OK, mostly good” it’s either “I am fantastic” or “I am terrible”.
I would be unsurprised if different people exhibiting narcissistic behaviour had different reasons for doing so, and some just straight up think unreasonably highly of themselves and are resistant to evidence to the contrary, without it being a defense mechanism, while others were like the anecdote above.
It’s true. People who hate themselves worry they’ll become narcissists if they don’t, just like how workaholics fear becoming lazy if they relax a bit, or the overly-guilty fear becoming selfish. People must be over-estimating how much influence they can really have over their own personality. A workaholic will approximately never become a layabout. But you can change habits of thought much more easily.
In psychology it seems to be the case that some narcissists (grandiose narcissists) are internally confident, and other narcissists (vulnerable narcissists) are insecure. This seems to correlate with extroversion, with the more extroverted narcissists being the grandiose narcissists. Here is a study: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01600/full