Find out How Narcissistic Behavior Applies to the Obsolete Art of Conversation
Most folks are narcissistic.
I’m not using that word in the clinical diagnosistic way, nor in the normal sense of vain or conceited. What I mean is that most people are almost entirely focused upon themselves, their particular interests and their own emotional needs for attention. A certain amount of preoccupation with oneself is ordinary and healthy; it becomes a complication when you’re not truly interested in other persons or ideas and simply want to talk about yourself.
Here’s a fairly familiar experience for me: I’m at a party or get-together, talking to a man or woman I’ve just met, or an acquaintance I haven’t run into in a long while. I’m asking questions, inquiring about the person’s background or catching up since we last met. Fifteen, twenty minutes go by … we’re still focused on the other person. I get the feeling that I could be anyone; I’m just a receptacle, a mirror or an audience. I contribute needed attention to the other individual; he or she has no interest in getting to know the otherindividual who’s listening.
As a therapist (by temperament as well as profession), I’m an accomplished listener and skillful at drawing people out. As a student of human nature, I’m genuinely curious and, for the most part, fascinated by the diversity of human beings I meet. Sometimes I feel estranged, though. I used to be surprised and disappointed that the individual I’d just met didn’t want to get to know me. Now I hope for a lot less. Lack of genuine interest in others — that’s what I mean when I say I find most folks to be narcissistic.
Even with dear friends, conversation tends to mean waiting your turn to introduce your own anecdote, waiting for the opening or the conversational trigger that will make the transition over to you seem more or less natural. With some truly narcissistic people, the passage seems forced — they’ll use any pretext to change the subject. It can even seem funny if you look at it from the right point of view, although painful when you recognize the reasons for that kind of behavior.
For these persons, their families were so impaired and the typical parental attention so deficient that there’s an unquenchable need to have other human beings listen and make them feel meaningful. In this way, narcissistic needs accompany many other psychological difficulties.
In my practice, I typically expect my clients to be taken up with their own needs. Of course they are! After all, they’re paying me to listen and my individual emotional needs have no place in our relationship. In my own individual psychotherapy I found it thoroughly satisfying to be able to relate details about myself as much as I wanted without feeling that I had to ask questions back. My clients are normally needy and narcissistic and so was I.
What I long for, and find scarce, is the type of conversation where we’re not talking about me or you but about an idea or current event, maybe an outstanding book one of us has read. I enjoy the back-and-forth of dialogue, one person adding to or disputing what someone else has just said. I hunger to feel I’ve learned something, or that in the conversational back-and-forth, we’ve both come to a new understanding.
I’m a run-of-the-mill narcissistic, too — now and then, I want to tell my stories — but for the most part, I know all my personal stories and they don’t interest me. I would rather hear your stories, too — but after we’ve caught up, let’s enage on something larger than either one of us.
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