Narcissism and Self-Recognition on the Spiritual Path

I feel compelled to write a few words about narcissism and self-recognition on the spiritual path. I hope it is useful to people.

I don’t mean the narcissism that people speak about when they talk about a certain dynamic in romantic relationships; nor the type of narcissism that merely describes a person who always needs to be the center of attention. I’m also not necessarily speaking about the kind of narcissism where parents see their children as extensions of themselves and are unable to relate to their children’s authentic needs and self-expression. Those types of narcissism are just aspects of the genuine affliction.

I mean something more fundamental, something spiritual. I want to point toward what the essence of narcissism is and how working through narcissism is fundamental to becoming free, showing up fully, and relating to others creatively. 

What follows is how I see things. I wonder how you see them. 

The word “narcissism” has become so pejorative, I almost don’t want to use it. We don’t need more words for objectifying and criticizing each other. I read a wonderful book on the subject of narcissism in which the author opened disarmingly with the sentence, “Some of my best friends are narcissists.” I’d like to approach the issue with that attitude. 

We’re all somehow narcissistic and we can still be friends. If we see each other clearly in this, we’ll help each other out. We can be better friends to each other.

To begin with, I’m not going to give a scholarly interpretation of the Greek myth of Narcissus, but merely refer to it in passing, as a point of departure. 

Narcissus was a beautiful young man who rejected all his admirers. Without getting into the story – he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. So the term refers to self-absorption and an inability to love. Eventually, Narcissus dies at the edge of the pool.

For the purposes of this discourse, we can say that narcissism means getting trapped in your own reflection.

The metaphor is not perfect, but it’s useful. 

What does it mean to be trapped in your own reflection – to be trapped in a mirror? 

What it means is that your vision is fixated on your own reflection. You don’t see what is in front of you, you just see your own reflection. In the psychological sense, this means that you are unaware that you are seeing only your reflection. In fact, you mistake your reflection for the world. More precisely, your reflection distorts the world and prevents you from relating to people and things as they are in themselves.

You look out into the world, and instead of seeing the mystery of creation as it is, you see your own reflection. You don’t see other unique people, you just see your own reflection. For example, someone smiles at you and you wonder how they are manipulating you – in your past, you were hurt, and now you only see the reflection of that hurt. You don’t see the smile that is just a smile.

You stay trapped in the mirror because you don’t realize you’re trapped in the mirror. You don’t know what is your reflection and what is not your reflection. 

This also means that you’re unable to see yourself, to feel yourself. Because if you could see yourself, you would know what is you and what is not you. You could distinguish between what is your reflection and what is not. But you do not know that: you see a reflection of yourself, but you don’t know that you’re just looking at yourself. You think you’re seeing someone else! You don’t know where you end and others begin. 

So, being able to see yourself would allow you to get out of the mirror – it would allow you to see others, know them, and love them as they are, not obscured by your reflection. 

So, at bottom, narcissism has to do with a lack of self-recognition, not recognizing who and what you are. 

That’s why self-inquiry and inner work are ways to free yourself from the mirror trap. 

Once you see yourself, you miraculously see and make contact with other people, beyond the illusion of your own reflection. 

Seeing yourself more clearly is not a form of self-absorption, it is a form of liberation. 

That’s why spirituality is described as a path to the self. 

I want to give an unusual example of narcissism that departs from what most people think of when they hear the term. It helps illustrate what I mean. 

I’m not giving this example to be clever, nor to criticize anyone. Also, I don’t want to sound harsh. 

An unusual example of narcissism would be the person who tends to shy away from taking up space in a room, someone who is nervous about giving a speech in front of other people. There’s perhaps fear of not being accepted. There’s fear of being judged, of not doing a good job. (I suffer from this, sometimes with real terror of putting myself out there, and I’m still working on it, by the way). 

Suppose you’re anxious about giving a presentation and showing up in front of people. 

What could be happening beyond the reflection of your own fear and anxiousness? 

Now, it’s quite possible that the people in the audience are not judging you at all. Perhaps they’re not even paying attention, but not because you’re boring. Perhaps someone in the audience had a difficult experience before your event, and this person is just coping until it’s time to go home. Perhaps another person is there to receive something they need from you, and they’re showing up with gratitude, so that judging you is the farthest thing from their minds. 

There are thousands of possibilities about what is happening with other people in an audience.

However, you’re looking out into the audience and all you see is your own reflection: your fear. There is no possibility of seeing these other people in front of you as they are. The entire room has become a mirror for your own self-judgment, your fear – and you’re not aware of that. You think it has to do with the other people in the room. It doesn’t. It has to do with your reflection.

So that’s a form of narcissism that we don’t usually talk about. 

Usually, we might consider this type of anxious person to be a typical victim of the bona fide narcissist, the dominant one who takes up space in the room, who is charming and manipulative, and so on.

Let’s consider that particular caricature of the narcissist, someone who needs to be large and stay in control and be the center of attention. 

What I’ve learned is that people who need to stay in control in relationships – either through domination and aggression or through manipulation and seduction – grew up in homes or environments where their trust was betrayed. 

The world is challenging enough, so when you’re betrayed, abused, manipulated, and harmed in your own family, you don’t even have that place of refuge. This is painful to write about, but it’s the truth, it happens. 

People who behave in a controlling manner are acting consistently with the mirror they're trapped in. They’re acting in a way that is consistent with having learned that the world is full of untrustworthy people. They look into the world and see the reflection of their own past experience, not the world as it is today, filled with people who are genuinely helpful and trustworthy. 

This is one of the most catastrophic and tragic ways of being trapped in the mirror, for people and families. The power of past fears is sometimes so strong that the only way out of the mirror is when it gets smashed. Seeing yourself as you are in this case – self-recognition outside the mirror – is terribly vulnerable: it goes back to the situation when a child was abused and betrayed in a chaotic and untrustworthy world. What happens when you see past the mirror in this case is that you stop seeing an untrustworthy person, which is just a reflection of your fear. Now you see the person who is no longer distorted by your reflection; and at the same time you see yourself.

If you look at it that way, you may begin to have compassion for so-called narcissists. You may begin to have compassion for yourself. You may begin to see yourself more clearly, too. 

You open up to seeing beyond your own perspective, not merely seeing people in relation to yourself. The narcissist is no longer a bad person, whose badness is defined only in relation to what you need and want. You open up to the possibility of seeing someone else as being a mystery unto themselves, with a unique history and perspective, with a unique way of being trapped in the mirror. 

That’s spiritual strength. That’s liberation from the mirror. 

We could say that the essence of being trapped in the mirror is not recognizing your inherent perfection. This is so because the experience of perfection is contained in seeing what is.

This perfection does not rule out the desire to grow. The desire to grow is an expression of this perfection. It really is – you want to grow. 

What leads us out of the narcissistic mirror in the first place? That question points to a larger mystery.

We need to look inward in order to see and experience ourselves more clearly. We need to be able to differentiate between ourselves and other people. We need to do this if we want to live as fully as possible and to be most alive. For aliveness is contact, and contact happens when we see beyond the mirror.

We can get genuinely interested in other people for their own sake. We learn about ourselves this way. It turns out that genuine interest in others is a form of self-inquiry. We strive to see beyond the mirror, to make true contact with others for their sakes and ours.

It is a great mystery that we should be writing about mirrors and self-recognition. But so it is.