Trait Nine – Lack of Empathy
One of the main identifying factors of narcissistic personality disorder is a person’s “impaired ability to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM–5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). A person identified as a narcissist is “excessively attuned to reactions of others, but only if perceived as relevant to self” with an “over- or underestimate of their own effect on others” (APA, 2013).
In other words, a narcissist lacks empathy. A narcissist lacks the ability to put themselves in anyone else’s shoes as a way to identify with anyone else’s emotional pain. It does not matter how much a person cries in the presence of a narcissist, a narcissist will be unable to relate or even emote the emotional composure to identify with another person’s feelings.
I have been around a number of narcissists who gave off a composure of hollowness [on the inside] all while pretending to show signs of cognitive empathy. Despite the cognitive ability to project what seemed to be empathy, the narcissists themselves were empty and void of feeling anything for me at all. They just had the knowledge that I was sad, broken, or emotionally upset, but they could sit in my presence and lack the ability to relate to or connect with me at all.
The lack of empathy has always been the affirmation for me in discerning whether some of the people I have dealt were narcissists. Every single narcissist I have ever known lacks the ability to emotionally empathize. They have always given off the “do not care” vibe even while showing me a caring face.
Narcissists can watch and listen to me cry in agony all while staring blankly at me with a hint of uncomfortableness because they do not know how to connect with me in the moment of my despair. Some narcissists have even winced with a narcissistic smirk at my emotional pain because they took immense pleasure in seeing my suffering.
In the face of affective empathy, narcissists show no affect. They do not emote at all. Yet, in an effort to get their targets to believe they have empathy, narcissists will pretend to emote or do whatever it takes to make themselves appear as caring individuals in the presence of others. Their public face in the presence of their target’s emotional pain will always give off the vibe that they truly care when nothing could be further from the truth.
My first experience with the lack of empathy from a narcissist was a terrifying experience I had with my narcissist mother. I was three and had a dramatic fear of the dark. My mother did not care and despite my piercing cries, she refused to comfort me but instead backed me into a corner and physically and verbally lashed out at me. The darkness in her eyes pierced and crushed my soul and sent me into an abyss of depressive suffering.
Throughout my young childhood, I attempted many times to create a closeness with my mother but without any success. The closest I ever got to her were the moments she allowed me to comb and brush her hair. Those were my most favorite and most sacred times with my mother, and I cherished them.
Yet, these moments were short-lived phases of the love bombing stage with her. Any time that she sensed that I found and felt her hollowness or inability to truly connect with me while I was physically close to her during those times, she would immediately shut those times down with a quickness.
The hollowness I discerned with my mother was like some deep dark hole to a bottomless pit that I never wanted to fall into at any time. My first experience with this gave me a great sense of fear. I remember not being able to sleep because of it. The feeling that I could fall into this abyss caused me great heartache.
It was as if any emotion that my mother carried inside of her was cut off. There was absolutely nothing inside of her. It was as if she were not truly present within her body, and if she was present, she was someplace that I could not reach her. That experience with her has always been my measure of comparison to the hollowness in others.
If I physically hug a person or am close enough to feel their energy, and I absolutely feel the semblance of what I felt with my mother, then I take a step back. I never give off any hint about what I notice, but I will find that I actually dissociate because I can literally feel the memory of that abyss. I know that feeling well because it was unforgettable.
When I sense this abysmal feeling with any person, I know beyond any doubt that I am in the presence of a narcissist and even worse … something spiritually dark and extremely evil.
Am I A Narcissist?
As often as I ask myself this question, I come away at times with great wonder because of some of the behaviors that I have mirrored from narcissists – particularly my family of origin. Yet, time and again, I am faced with a relieving and resounding “no”.
I know that I am not a narcissist because I have way too much emotional empathy. My emotional empathy was a major problem for me as a very young child. I often wonder if my emotional empathy was the reason my mother seemed to recoil from me and why my father often stood at a distance from me – sometimes in fear.
There was a lot about me that my parents found very puzzling. Of course, I was their first born child. So they did not really have a lot of experience with children in the first place. So there was a lot to learn with me. My ability to connect with the world around me began quite early – around the age of nine months being the first sign that I was “strange”. My ability to feel emotions deeply was experienced not just by my parents but by others around them too.
I have been told some wild stories by a few relatives about my ability to “feel things” even when I was unable to talk or walk. Some relatives refused to even spend any length of time at my family home because they thought I was a strange and kooky child. I was even given a nickname that signified my ability to empathize with others, and the name stuck for quite some time.
Although I do not believe empathy is some special ability, I seem to have been born with a lot of it. From my readings on the topic of empathy, I learned that it is often a response to trauma. In relation to trauma, I know that I was born into it, but that is an entirely different blog post for another time.
Nevertheless, I am highly empathic to the point that I can sense the subtlest shifts of energy with a person or in an environment. I can even detect when something is off with a written or typed message. I have the ability to go deep beneath the surface when it comes to people and situations – often narrowing in to the core of an issue.
I understand pain and often what drives pain. Most often, I feel the pain of others so deeply in a way that no amount of distance or separation can stop me from feeling it. When people tell me about situations they have experienced, I will feel the sensations of their words in my body. For instance, if a person describes how they stepped on a nail, I will feel the sensation of that nail in my own foot. So it often literally pains me to hear of people’s suffering no matter how miniscule their suffering may seem.
Because of this understanding and ability to relate to and connect with pain, I have been an easy target for other people to release their “stuff” onto me. Even strangers will talk to me about their personal problems while I am out and about minding my own business. Despite my love of people and willingness to know them for who they are, I easily find that I carry the burdens of others too.
Thus, it has been easy for me to become bogged down in other people’s stuff even to the point that I agonize over their issues and become more focused on their problems than they do (more on this in another blog post). It has also been easy for me to love people through their pain and stick by them even to my own detriment. I suppose that is why narcissists find me so “attractive” in that respect.
Additionally, it has been especially easy for me to long to see the good in people [including narcissists] and want to help them. I have even had great hope and belief in narcissists’ ability to change even when the truth about their lack of willingness to change stares me in the face. Even now I do not want to give up on hope, but I know the reality and accept it for what it is.
Nope! I am certainly not a narcissist, but I will still ask myself this from time to time as if to be sure. Whether some of the narcissistic traits I have mirrored were inherited or just a part of growing up in my narcissistic home environment still remains an unanswered question. Yet, I certainly do have narcissistic traits that I work to alleviate from my life as much as possible.
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Reference
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596
My Voice Unchained 