What Is the Connection Between Narcissism and Depression?

Narcissistic personality disorder is a complex personality disorder often misunderstood. Its basic feature is exaggeration of self-worth. Paradoxically, under this arrogance, narcissists often experience a fragile low self-esteem for a long time, but because the arrogance of narcissists is always ubiquitous, we are more inclined to disregard them. Humanistic view.

In practice, they feel a little unhappy, and they feel self-worthless. They fantasize that they are successful, that they have power, cleverness, and beauty, and that they encounter strong jealousy when they meet someone more successful than them. Their self-esteem is fragile, they care too much about others' evaluations, and require constant attention and praise; they feel inner anger and shame about the criticism, but their appearance is covered up with a cold and indifferent reaction. They cannot understand the subtle feelings of others, and lack the empathy of comparing hearts to hearts, so interpersonal relationships are often problematic. Such people often have a sense of privilege, expecting that they will receive special treatment, and their friendship is mostly based on interests.

People with narcissistic personality disorder often have general interpersonal relationships; their depression, interpersonal difficulties, or unrealistic goals can affect work. But on the other hand, their pursuit of utilitarianism may also lead them to higher work achievements.

There is currently no uniform standard for the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. The characteristics are generally considered as follows:

1. The response to the criticism was anger, shame, or shame (though not necessarily manifested immediately).

2. Likes instigating others and asking others to serve themselves.

3 Too much arrogance and exaggerate one's talents, hoping to receive special attention.

4 He firmly believes that his concerns are unique in the world and cannot be understood by some special characters.

5. Illegal illusions about infinite success, power, honor, beauty or ideal love.

6. Think that you deserve privileges that no one else has.

7. Longing for lasting attention and praise.

8. Lack of compassion.

9. Have a strong jealousy.

10 Difficult intimate relationships (marital relationships, parent-child relationships, etc.).

As long as five of these are present, a narcissistic personality can be diagnosed.

Regarding the causes of narcissistic personality disorder, the classic psychoanalytic theory explains this: the patient cannot bet his own instinctual psychological power on an external object, and the power stays inside, forming narcissism. Modern object-relationship theory holds that the narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by "self as an object", or, in layman's terms, "you don't distinguish between me and him," he said. The reason for this is that patients have experienced interpersonal trauma in their early experiences, such as long-term separation from their parents, discord between parents, or their parents' attitudes toward them are too rude or doting. Having such experiences makes patients feel that it is safe and right for them to love themselves.

In Kohut's view, it can be traced back to childhood as an infant. According to the study of the object relationship theorist Mahler et al., This obstacle is about one and a half to three years old. Kohut believes that every individual has a tendency to be arrogant and exaggerated during his infancy. For example, an infant will cry if it is not satisfied. In the infant s psychological world, he or she is almighty God. . When this God is satisfied by the parent (self-object), he is happy. If you are not satisfied, you are furious because your frustration cannot be achieved.

This unsatisfactory situation often happens by accident in infant rearing, but if the baby-raising person treats the baby for such a long period of time, it means that the baby cannot obtain exaggerated self-narcissistic satisfaction for a long time. If the pairing with internal expectations is not successful, the baby will be disappointed with the external, and the brain will abandon the normal nourishing and nourishing loop circuit according to the actual situation, and replace the need for compensating for this narcissism with the self-fantasy loop circuit. Such fantasies often prevent the self from understanding the reality of normal narcissism, and beyond the acceptable range of ordinary people to form their own and excessive narcissism, so there will be similar exaggerated personality of the above narcissistic personality disorder which performed.

At the same time, if the caregiver often has emotional problems, he will also reflect the anger of his narcissism failure at the same time, and internalize it into the baby's psychological information processing system in the interaction with the baby, and become the baby's future. Unconsciously judging certain basic feelings in interpersonal relationships. So in a famous video experiment by British subject-relational scientist Winnicott, because a happy baby has been with a depressed mother for more than an hour, the baby's face has become as depressed as the mother. This is the famous view mentioned by Kohut: the internalization of transformation. In the long run, it will have a direct impact on the interpersonal emotional ability of infants and adults. This is the basis of internal expectations that affect the future development of babies.

Narcissistic personality is mostly formed in early adulthood, and it can be diagnosed as a narcissistic personality if it meets the following five clinically.

1. Feel everything about yourself. They always think that what they have is the best after making a few achievements.

2. They are obsessed with endless success, power, talent, beautiful fantasy of love.

3 They believe that they are unique. They think that they have noble bloodlines. They think that their unique "abilities" can only be understood by a few high-ranking people.

4 Addicted to praise, can't hear the opposite.

5. Feeling privileged. They unreasonably expect others to take special care of themselves. They disregard the interests of others, they only care about "as long as I am happy", and they are interpersonal adventurers. They think that "anyone has to turn around me", and a little "cold" in the crowd will be hostile to others.

6. Lack of empathy. This seems to be common to almost all narcissistic personality disorders. They sometimes seem to understand people, but they cannot achieve a truly equal interaction. They may be talking about equality most, but the actual performance is "require Marxism for others and liberalism for themselves".

7. Often jealous of others and believing that they are jealous of themselves.

8. Express an arrogant behavior or attitude.

Narcissistic personality is similar to hysteria personality in many aspects, such as emotional drama, and sometimes sexual provocation. The difference between the two is that the hysteria personality is outgoing and enthusiastic, while the narcissistic personality is introverted and indifferent.

Disengagement

The main characteristic of narcissistic personality is self-centeredness, and the most self-centered stage in life is the infancy. It can be seen that the behavior of patients with narcissistic personality disorder actually degenerates to infancy. Judith Wilster said in his book "The Necessary Loss": "A man who is obsessed with the cradle is unwilling to lose his childhood and cannot adapt to the adult world. Therefore, to treat narcissistic personality, it is necessary to understand those infantile behaviors. Make a list of what you consider to be annoying personality traits and other people's criticisms of you, and see how much of an infancy there is. E.g:

Longing for lasting attention and praise, and adopting extreme behavior once they are not noticed.

I like to instruct others to regard myself as the emperor.

Drooling at the good things of others, jealous of others' success.

By recalling your childhood, you can see that the above personality traits have their prototypes in childhood. E.g:

Always eager for parental attention and praise. Whenever a parent ignores this, they play rogue, trick or do something whimsical to attract parents' attention.

In childhood, the clothes came to reach out, the meal came to open their mouths, and the parents were servants.

I always want to have everything. Other children have it, but they also want it.

After you understand that your behavior is a reproduction of childhood naive behavior, you must always remind yourself:

I must work hard to get results to attract the attention and praise of others.

I am no longer a child, I have to do many things by myself.

Everyone has their own good things. I want to win what I deserve, but I am not jealous of what others deserve.

You can also ask someone close to you as your supervisor. Once you have self-centered behavior, give warnings and reminders to urge you to make corrections in a timely manner. Through these efforts, self-centeredness will gradually be eliminated.

Learn to love others

For narcissistic people, it is not enough to just abandon self-centeredness. You must also learn to love others. Only in this way can you truly realize that it is a wise choice to abandon self-centeredness, because you must first pay for love Love. Fromm's book "The Art of Love" elaborates such viewpoints: the love of young children follows the principle of "I love because I am loved"; the mature love follows the principle of "I am loved because I love"; Immature love thinks "I love you because I need you"; mature love thinks "I need you because I love you". Wilster believes that through love. We can go beyond life. Narcissistic love is like the love of young children, immature love, so we must work hard to correct it.

The simplest act of love in life is caring for others, especially when others need your help. When someone sends you a greeting in time, the patient will sincerely thank you; when others have financial difficulties, you can do everything you can to help, and you will naturally get the respect of others. As long as you have more love for others in your life, your narcissism will naturally ease.

In the latest research, narcissistic personality disorder uses self and object psychoanalysis to study and treat.

They are people who live completely in themselves, they cannot really understand the people around them, and everything in their eyes is closely related to themselves. Everything outside has something to do with myself.

1. The subconscious mind regards the external object as an individual subordinate to itself and as part of his identity. This kind of interpersonal relationship is manifested as severe self-confidence or lack of self-limitation.

2. Omnipotence, they over-idealize many things and consider themselves omnipotent.

3 The infinite need for praise is to prove that you are omnipotent through the praise of others.

4 Lack of empathy. This is the loss of a phenomenon of "same and good with others". Even if they understand some people, this understanding and experience of others is regarded by others or as part of themselves. In short, they can never do without "thinking about problems or experiencing problems". Their praise for others is to satisfy their narcissism by using the object as themselves.

Patients with narcissistic personality disorder become suddenly cold and hot. People around do not quite understand where their heat comes from and how their cold comes from. These are manifestations that they have no boundaries with external things (objects). The outstanding characteristic of narcissistic personality disorder is that everything externally points to itself.

They are indifferent to everything except themselves. So they are hostile to the outside world, but they always want to get recognition from the outside world. So their actions are very destructive.

An objective fact is that all normal love relationships have a narcissistic factor. There are some degree issues here. The difference between a normal person's love relationship and a narcissistic love relationship is that although normal people also project their ideals onto each other when they are in love, they can realize that the other person is an independent individual and have different desires and desires. need. Normal people know the difference between themselves and others while projecting.

The narcissist's heart seems to be saying: I don't love myself who loves me.