ANDLove is an intense feeling that is normally directed towards another person. Feeling love for someone involves a series of intense emotions: desire, jealousy, affinity, and it can even be experienced as something painful and contradictory. In any case, there is a variant of this inner passion, self-love.
In a simple way we could define it as self-respect. It is often stated that we will be loved by others as long as we are the ones who love ourselves first. For this reason, self-esteem is the essential element of this version of love.
But what happens when that love for ourselves exceeds the threshold of normal? That is, when it begins to affect our functioning in different areas of life, such as social or work.
Within the field of mental health this is known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder and is defined according to the DSM-V (2013) as follows:
Pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning in early adulthood and occurring in a variety of contexts, and manifested by five (or more) of the following facts:
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- Has feelings of grandeur and arrogance (e.g., exaggerates his achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without corresponding successes).
- He is absorbed in fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty or unlimited ideal love.
- You believe that you are “special” and unique, and that only other special or high-status people (or institutions) can understand you or relate to you.
- He has an excessive need for admiration.
- Shows a feeling of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic fulfillment of your expectations).
- Exploits interpersonal relationships (that is, takes advantage of others for his own purposes).
- Lacks empathy: not willing to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
- He often envies others or believes that they are envious of him.
- Shows arrogant, superior behavior or attitudes.
There are various investigations that seek to decipher the causes of this personality disorder, for example:
A published in the magazine Neuroscience, led by Chinese researcher Yu Mao and his team, found that pathological narcissism was associated with a reduction in the thickness and volume of the prefrontal cortex, which plays an important role in executive control of the brain and is related to emotional dysregulation that these individuals present. In addition, mentions that pathological narcissism is related to a decrease in gray matter in a region of the brain responsible for compassion, according to a group of scientists from La Charité University Hospital and the Free University of Berlin.
According to the study, published in the journal Journal of Psychiatric ResearchNarcissism is a personality disorder in which patients have strong inferiority complexes but outwardly behave in an arrogant and self-indulgent manner.
The study, led by psychiatrist and researcher Stephan Röpke from La Charité, shows a structural correlation between affective deficit and a brain abnormality.
“Our data show that the degree of empathy is correlated with the volume of gray matter in that region in which patients with narcissism show a deficit,” Röpke said.
Types of narcissists
Dr. Bruce Stevens, in his article (2000), proposes an interesting classification of narcissistic personality into nine different types (or a nine-headed Lernaean Hydra), in order to better illustrate the different ways in which this disorder can be expressed and the associated problems. However, all heads share the same underlying problem: the desperate search for the source of self-love in places where they will never find it, a problem that is beginning to be vaguely outlined from outside academic or scientific psychology under the name of codependency. .
Dependent
He feels a great need to be loved and is never satisfied. He never gets enough love. Has fear of abandonment and rejection. His main problem is that he is not capable of loving and caring for himself and focuses on giving love to others in order to get their approval and affection. He is suffocating for his partner.
The special lover
“Our love is unique, special, wonderful and perfect.” He thinks that no one can love her partner like he or she, that with her love he will heal all the wounds he may have. He idealizes love and the loved person, whom he does not see as he really is. The result is usually disappointment. They are very vulnerable to any offense and carry wounds from previous relationships. They do not tolerate any imperfection in their partner.
The powerful
He is in love with power and expresses it by humiliating or terrorizing his employees. Arrogant, he despises his subordinates and “inferiors” of him. The only thing that matters is his career and his success. His partner is usually an attractive person whom he displays as a trophy.
The body”
It is a very common type of narcissism today. Your image is of enormous importance and your self-esteem is linked to that image. She needs everyone to like her and for everyone to recognize her beauty in order to feel like a valuable person. Obsession with having the perfect body. He tends to deny his problems and focus on his physique, as if achieving physical perfection would solve all his problems.
The Furious
He has frequent outbursts of rage due to his hypersensitivity to any real or imagined offense. You tend to see bad intentions in the actions of others. Beneath that anger are often hidden feelings such as sadness, shame or despair. It is also characterized by an inability to control intense emotions, including anger.
The scammer
He is a charming person whose motives are completely selfish. He aims to use and exploit others through his personal charm. She enjoys deceiving her unsuspecting lover with infidelity, fraud, etc. and she enjoys planning it. Her self-esteem increases by seeing herself capable of doing those kinds of things. Moral standards are not applied to himself. That is for others and they consider themselves above.
The fantasist
His inner world is very rich and populated with fantasies of beauty, admiration, love, success and wonderful worlds, while he considers reality a nuisance from which he would like to escape. Some teenagers spend hours isolated playing the same computer game, with whose protagonist, a hero capable of anything, they feel identified. Loneliness prevents the outside world from penetrating their lives by showing them reality, and their need to feel great, unique and special (something that, to some extent, is normal in adolescence) can cause them to identify with the video game hero and confuse fantasy with reality.
The martyr
Your identity is built around being a victim or survivor of something terrible. He focuses on himself and his own pain, which he never gets over and has no time for anyone else. Within that pain he feels great, “no one suffers like me,” “I have had to endure terrible things.” He is that martyr whom everyone should admire for having suffered so much and still being alive. They tend to exaggerate the pain of it, which sometimes has religious dimensions: the divine destiny of suffering exalted and admired. In reality, it is a way to avoid the real pain and real problems that are in his life and in himself. “My pain is so great that it prevents me from thinking about other people or doing other things.”
The Savior
“Only I can help you”, “only I can change your life”. He probably has a job related to helping others, to which he dedicates all his time because “they need it.” However, he always ends up asking for something in return, like sex or money. It is common in certain religious leaders of sects.
Stevens makes a good illustration to categorize some types of narcissistic behaviors. But beware, Feeling identified with some of these criteria does not mean that we suffer from this personality disorder, because it is very likely that we have different personality traits, a percentage of obsessives, perhaps somewhat narcissistic or even somewhat histrionic, whatever they may be, we should not enter a state of worry, as long as it does not affect us in any of our areas of functioning such as work, social, family, etc.