Dealing with narcissism may be unavoidable, but are there ways to lessen the damage it does? Perhaps part of the antidote lies in figuring out how to have a meaningful, connected and worthwhile existence, even in a world that breeds disconnection and despair. Easier said than done, but here are a few possibilities. 1. Discern meaning in life: One of the trickiest tasks we face is dealing with the yawning maw of nihilism, which threatens to swallow us up if we don’t have some over-arching system of truth to hook ourselves onto. In their 2011 book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly suggest that we may be able to avoid nihilism (and its narcissistic defense) by focusing on and opening ourselves up to what’s happening around us in the everyday world and connecting to the physical universe. (Thats not always so easy to do when technology and consumption culture lure us into chronic disengagement.) They point out that it may be helpful to try literally to touch the world—to handle things, move among them, develop our flexibility and engagement with processes like learning to play a musical instrument, or planting a garden. Do things that require attention, skill and nuanced responses may interrupt the routine distancing that has become our habit. They argue that our task in life is not to create meaning, but to discover or discern it in what is already around us —cultivating a kind of correspondence with the world instead of trying for brute mastery over it. It’s a kind of heightening of involvement, and discovering meaning through engagement and connection. 2. Practice reverence and gratitude: The ability to recognize the positive things in our situation and respond to people and experiences with reverence and gratitude is anathema to narcissism. If you can cultivate appreciation for the things that you have, and clichéd as it sounds, in the moments of beauty and wonder that life reveals even in the most seemingly mundane and trying circumstances, then the allure of someone who relies on grand promises never to be fulfilled may not be as powerful. Gratitude is the opposite of grandiosity. Of course, even a narcissist can be grateful, but perhaps the salient difference is what the narcissist is grateful for — being promoted ahead of her peers, having the fanciest car on the block, having got one over on a colleague. A narcissist is probably less likely to be grateful for a kindness done to her, for the success of a friend or a neighbor, or simply for the fact that the trains happened to run on time today. Gratitude for things and experiences that benefit not just the individual, but increase the happiness of others, is a richer, more nourishing kind of feeling, and might serve as a corrective to constantly frustrated desire. 3. Be receptive to community feeling: Dreyfus and Taylor urge us to move away from privileging the individual mind and toward a more shared and communal understanding of the world. Whatever we can do to open ourselves to community feeling takes us in the opposite direction of narcissism. Seeing ourselves as intimately connected and practicing empathy helps us learn to drop our defenses and step out of the eat-or-be-eaten mentality. Cultivating citizenship helps us to become oriented to reciprocal obligation and a sense of gratification that, again, comes not from the triumph of the individual, but the success of many. Making a contribution to the community can bring balance to the urge to constantly strive for personal success and act as an antidote to unappeasable envy. 4. Seek relationships based on respect: Being in close proximity to narcissists, who may lurk in your immediate family, your workplace, or the house next door, can be draining and demoralizing. These relationships are by nature volatile, unpredictable and destabilizing. One way to balance out the negative impact they bring is to make a conscious effort to cultivate relationships with people you respect and who respect you in turn. Instead of seeking to use you as an object, such people will have the desire to engage with you as an equal, and deal with you in terms of honesty and reliability. They may not heap you with flowery compliments, but neither will they exaggerate your faults when you cross them or boost themselves at your expense. Even having one close relationship based on mutual respect can make the narcissist’s machinations appear false and superficial, which helps to lessen their power. Narcissists are ultimately contemptuous of others. Respect, the opposite of contempt, is a powerful remedy. 5. Honor the past and the future: Part of the narcissist’s fantasy is that nothing of importance came before or will come after him. The narcissist has a limited perception of time: In the here and now, he is all that matters. He lives in deep fear of old age, death and annihilation. If he does think about the past or future, it is in mostly personal terms, my past glory, my future grandeur. There’s something deep in the American tradition that tends to support this way of thinking, born in a society defined by breaking ties with older cultures. It has its positive side, having set the stage for experimentation and new ways of thinking. But it has a dark side, too, which Christopher Lasch expressed succinctly: A denial of the past, superficially progressive and optimistic, proves on closer analysis to embody the despair of a society that cannot face the future. Establishing a strong connection to the past gives us a sense of our place and participation in a long tradition of human thought and striving. Connecting to the future reminds us of causality: how what we do will impact those who will follow us. Both these habits of mind provide a sense of perspective that counter-balance the me-now mentality of the narcissist. There will probably never be a cure for narcissism; it’s part of the human condition and will express itself more or less depending on the cultural contours and economic realities of a society. But scientific research has suggested that qualities like empathy can actually be improved with practice. This indicates it’s not a futile effort to try to build bridges between people, or work to increase our receptivity to others, or practice our engagement with the physical world. Nor is it futile to confront the forces that heighten the inequality and economic insecurity which set the stage for a narcissistic culture. Narcissism may be the way things are in America in this moment, but it’s not necessarily the way things have to be, either on a personal or societal level.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:51:18 +0000
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