Has everyone suddenly become a narcissist?

Has everyone suddenly become a narcissist? Over the last few years, this question has kept on coming up for me as the empath-narcissist conversation has grown online. 

It is no doubt true that sensitives often get entangled with bullies. 

Many times, we don’t even approach these people. Rather, these people come to us. 

Even as a little kid, one of my first memories from primary school is of being bullied by a girl in my class. I had done nothing to incite her. I don’t remember even engaging with her. I was a shy, quiet little kid who was simply alone all the time.  

Looking back, I can see how this aloneness – being someone who was both introverted and shy  – made me a perfect target. 

Even then, while I was going through this, I could imagine that she was acting something out. Even then, I sensed that there was something in her personality that projected things outwards.  

For a while, she made my little life hell.  

And I seemed to have pulled this experience towards myself by simply being who I was. 

I know many sensitives have experiences like these – with bullies we encounter in everyday life, whether growing up, in school or in college, or in our workplace, and sometimes, sadly, in our families.  

And if these bullies have some power over us – like in the case of a boss – they can make life truly HARD. 

I know many sensitives have had experiences like these. 

So, what I am going to say is not about minimizing the experiences that so many of us have had with power-hungry people. 

All those are true and valid experiences. 

What I want to talk about is a personal awareness that has been coming up for me as I have wondered why there are SO MANY narcissistic people out there.  

How can that be true? 

Over the last decade, I have had several interactions where I revealed something personal and trauma-laden and then was met with a huge discount. It felt crazy-making and utterly dismissive. 

It felt like the people I had confided in were totally lacking in empathy. 

These interactions felt like kicks in the stomach, as if I had been thrashed black and blue. 

They felt retraumatizing and just plain cruel. 

And yet, these people weren’t full-blown narcissists.

Instinctively, I knew there was something very wrong. I knew they were narcissistic, “lacking in empathy,” but even though they hurt me so terribly, I intellectually couldn’t put them in the narcissist category. (Not that I am a psychologist, but this is my real sense of them.)     

How could someone respond so insensitively to something that was full of so much pain and suffering for me? 

For a long while, this has felt really personal, like huge slashes to my energetic heart, or like poison bubbling up in my blood. 

But along with the utter pain, I have also started to see, bit by bit, how I am not the only one who has been on the receiving end of these kinds of dismissals. 

I have started to see how much generally women’s feelings and experiences are dismissed, how often their deepest traumas are minimized. 

And as I have thought about my own experiences and the experiences of some other people I know, something very clear has been dawning on me: 

Patriarchy is a narcissistic system.  

That’s why there are so many people out there who are lacking in what feels like basic empathy. 

When one person is one up & the other person is one down in a closed system, the way the one-up person operates & keeps power is by cutting off full awareness of the person who has fewer rights than them. 

If they were to admit the full humanity & feelings of the “one-down person”, then the power they exert would automatically feel exploitative, even to them.  

In patriarchy, this Not-Seeing often happens to women. Because we are the second-class citizens in this system. 

But it also happens to men. Because not all men have the same amount of power in patriarchal systems. 

It is only certain men, often older men, who have full access to power, the seat at the proverbial “head of the table.”

And sometimes, this power is also wielded by women. 

When we talk about “how women can be other women’s worst enemies,” it’s because of the patriarchal “power over others” dynamic that is so normalized in our world and that some women also exercise.

These things are also culturally determined. I have written before about how Indian women are often trained to “be quiet.”

Understanding that some of the empath-narcissist dynamic is not simply personal, but also part of bigger cultural & systemic problems – something that happens to a lot of people – makes me feel just a tiny bit less heart-torn.

It gives me at least a little bit of distance from people who I had taken personally before. 

If you are a highly sensitive woman or sensitive man – and your deep trauma has been minimized because you are the “Other” in some way, I want to reach out & say that I understand a little. 

I know just how terrible and disorienting it feels for your real pain to be cast aside.  

Trauma that we’ve carried for long, and that others not only NOT see but actively discount, becomes a festering wound. 

It cries a thousand cries. 

Our soul does not take kindly to being stepped on.   

If you are feeling like this, I hope you distance yourself from unconscious people. I hope you see that they are, in a sense, blind to your pain. 

They have eyes. But they cannot see. 

There are people out there who will. There are people out there with whom it won’t be so hard. 

These are people who haven’t had YOUR exact experiences, but have had hard experiences of their own. And because all human pain is understandable, while they may not understand exactly what you feel, they will still understand you, and affirm you, and count you.

And count your pain.  

These are the safe people. These are the people to keep looking for. 

And I hope that you, like me, will everyday move closer and closer to finding them. 

With love, 

Ritu  

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.”

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