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What is a narcissist?

Updated: 11/12/2022
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Wiki User

10y ago

Best Answer

While the term "narcissist" is often used generally to refer to a person who's overly self-centered, it can also refer to someone with narcissistic personality disorder, which is primarily characterized by:

  • A pattern of arrogance and grandiosity
  • An excessive need for admiration and praise
  • A lack of empathy or consideration for others

Other symptoms include a preoccupation with unlimited success and belief that they are special, unique, and important, and a feeling that they can only be understood by others who share these perceived traits. They are extremely sensitive to criticism.

A narcissist may exaggerate or outright lie about their accomplishments and talents and believe they are unequivocally superior to everyone else. They exist in a fantasy world built to hide their feelings of shame and insecurity. They feel entitled to special treatment and expect others to cater to their every whim, and those who don’t are met with rage, bullying, and contempt.

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Parker Kiehn

Lvl 10
3y ago
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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago
This helped me diagnose my crazy as cousin🤣
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Kelly Canney

Lvl 1
2y ago
This just described my mother!
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Tiffany Mahone

Lvl 1
10mo ago
I have a YouTube community and videos that address this topic. Narcissism is a very serious subject. Check out this video
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Karin Sturgill

Lvl 2
2y ago

A controlling , manipulative, and selfish person- who takes advantage of others to reach their own goals. Also is obsessed with self. Has no empathy for others , and disregards the feelings of others.

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Wiki User

10y ago

somebody who has the following symptoms

  • Reacting to criticism with anger, shame, or humiliation
  • Taking advantage of others to reach own goals
  • Exaggeratingown importance, achievements, and talents
  • Imagining unrealistic fantasies of success, beauty, power, intelligence, or romance
  • Requiring constant attention and positive reinforcement from others
  • Becoming jealouseasily
  • Lacking empathy and disregarding the feelings of others
  • Being obsessed with self
  • Pursuing mainly selfishgoals
  • Trouble keeping healthy relationships
  • Becoming easily hurt and rejected
  • Setting goals that are unrealistic
  • Wanting "the best" of everything
  • Appearing unemotional
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Chris Burgess

Lvl 5
2y ago

Narcissism is on a sliding scale of severity and everyone had it. It's too what degree that they have it and how pronounced the traits are the cost maladaptive behaviors. Narcissism is a defensive reaction that somebody develops oftentimes as the result of abuse but not always sometimes it's the result of neglect and overindulgence. These defensive traits are meant to protect the ego as narcissists have a fractured sense of self. Some of them were shamed or made to feel bad about some aspect of themselves when they were very young and that caused them to suppress that piece of them selves in order to present to the world what it was that they thought the world wanted to see. This is where the notion of the false self comes in. Narcissist put forward a false representation of who they are in order to try to fit in better with the world because they don't believe in their core that the world will accept them for who they are and that their lovable.

As a result narcissists end up developing some maladaptive defensive traits which are meant to stave off any guilt or shame because absorbing any guilt or shame can send them into a massive depression which can be crushing to their shattered sense of self and can be so bad as to cause them to commit suicide. So they cannot handle those feelings and they avoid them with the like the plague. So if anybody tries to hold a narcissist accountable they have these defensive traits like projecting and deflecting and gaslighting that are very harmful to other people especially if they are unaware of the concepts. So narcissists and avoiding that shame will blame everybody else for everything and they will not be accountable and they will never admit to anything. They can't because it feels to them like their life is at stake when they're in that situation and they are facing that shame.

Narcissism in a healthy sense is the ability to shrub off other people's criticisms and know that yourself value and stuff worth is intact without having some type of an ego death because of other people's opinions of you. So it's critical that everybody has some level of narcissism or just trying to function in society with the way criticisms are tossed about so easily a person would succumb to the weight of all of the insults and all of the bad things that happen and then their failures - so healthy narcissism is important but only in lower concentrations. If you have the traits that are too high you start getting the maladaptive and abusive relationship style.

For example, there are nine characteristics in the DSM-5 that are noted for narcissists. Grandiosity envy exploitativeness, feeling special, haughty or arrogant, entitled, feeling that they can only associate with special people or institutions, a sense of being better than everybody else etc etc. So there's a few of them and you can see by looking at those traits that if you combine a few of them and access you start to see where the risk is. If you have somebody that's entitled then they believe they are allowed to do whatever they want in any circumstance, and if they are arrogant then they're already looking down on somebody and if they're exploitative then you combine all those together in high concentrations and you can start to see where the abuse comes from.

So just because somebody has narcissism doesn't necessarily mean that they are abusive. That is one thing that is misunderstood by many. You can have narcissism and not be abusive if that's what they value is just with given their set of traits whichever combination it is it makes them much more prone to that abuse just because of the defensive nature of not being able to take blame and shame and the constant projection and offloading of their guilt on to somebody else It's a natural mix that very much puts them in a natural state of abuse toward their partner. Self-aware and narcissist however can exercise himself control and with extensive treatment from a professional they can learn to better control those maladaptive behaviors and actually lead somewhat of a regular life and have real relationships. It takes a lot of work for them to get there but if they do they have to constantly be working at it because they're still their initial gut reaction is to act toward a narcissistic response.

People's personalities are pretty much in stone by the time they are young adults so these characteristics are in them and ground in their like stone. So they have to be managed they can't be washed away in unlearned. But they can be managed.

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GianellaLovesTakis

Lvl 2
3y ago

A person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves.

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Emily Perrotta Russo

Lvl 2
2y ago

My late husband. 😱😱

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago

Someone who is a narcissist is narcissistic.

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago

A person who sees no wrong in their abusive ways.

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Carol Willingham

Lvl 1
2y ago
Yes!

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago

By Marls Goya

Someone like the 'Covfefe Kid'; he is pure narcissism all the way, wrote the manual on it.

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Anonymous

Lvl 1
3y ago

barak hussein obama

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