Internalized Narcissistic Culture Series Introduction: Embodied Exploration of Tendencies and Traits

This series comes from observations and reflections of how normalized some unhealthy manifestations of narcissistic traits are in our culture. These traits have proven repeatedly to be counterproductive to a healthy, functional, fulfilling life on the individual and collective level.

I found myself revisiting the literal diagnostic characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder every so often to keep them in my awareness so they didn’t become normalized again, and I finally invited myself to an embodied exploration of how these characteristics live in me, as well as my relationship to them intrapersonally and interpersonally. The diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder became the structure of my exploration to help me understand myself and the influences of these traits on me from the culture around me.

I’m finding it difficult to put into words what my experience is with the discovery of this information and realization of its impact on me, even how it had formed me, so significantly in my childhood and as an adult.

Inner Exploration

I feel pain in my upper back between my shoulders, like a wall. It is hard to swallow and my abdomen also feels like there is a wall facing the front of my body. A deep breath comes. Another wall makes itself known at the front top of my chest.

A doubt enters my mind, why do I even want to share this? Again I feel the difficulty swallowed in my throat. Pain clenches my shoulders and stretches across my forehead. It feels like something is twisting my throat. I notice my breathing rising and falling underneath the wall of my chest. My stomach feels like a large lump. I feel sadness rising up through my chest to my eyes. A deeper breath comes.

The invitation comes to continue writing more of a narrative of how this came about, but I feel a distrust within me, where is the invitation coming from? Is it as gentle as the invitations I have felt through this process the past 9 months? It doesn’t seem like it. Can it be trusted? The center of the top of my head hurts and is pulling on my right eye. The sides of my abdomen squeeze inward with pain. Pain consumes my shoulders.

A shattered window or mirror is in the shape of a web, with the center resembling an eye, and lines of broken pieces extending out in all directions — Photo by Connor McManus on Pexels.com

My breath continues to rise and fall under the weight of what feels like metallic armor around my body. My stomach squeezes and now I feel nauseous. The breath feels like the only gentle thing in my system right now. My throat again trying to swallow and finding it difficult.

I return to the narrative and feel the weight in my stomach. A deeper breath comes and really is moving at a different pace than the rest of me. It feels like it is moving at its own pace. Tears rise to my eyes and a sense of pride and encouragement for my breathing to remain unphased while the rest of me becomes a me I barely recognize. These sensations are not entirely unfamiliar but I’m not used to them being present all at one time. A deeper breath comes and it feels more forceful, like it has the power to cleanse coming into my being, and cleanse going back out. My awareness goes to all that the inhale is bringing for me, all that I could not live without for more than a few short minutes, and all that it is helping me release and get out of me that I don’t need, that if built up and not released, I also wouldn’t survive long.

I feel my whole being settle around the power of the breath, the power this very breath that I’m breathing in this very moment has. It suddenly feels like the most powerful thing present, after I felt suffocated and consumed by a metal cage of my own being.

I see the invitation to write words as part of this out breath, just one part of it. I exhale many times per day, and some of those facilitate my words being spoken. Words of love to the creatures I shower with affection every day. And this causes a pivot in how I see my exhales, as not only the release of what I need to get rid of, but also nourishment to the trees that need what I get out. Truly, where does all the love come from that I express to the beings dearest to me? We can’t give what we never received…but where did I receive it? I feel a sobering, settling, awe and honor of what has been placed in me by life itself. I heard recently someone say “I learned compassion from those who did not have compassion for me.” And this feels similar. It is only in the past 2 years that I recognized the sun rose every single day every year of my life. The warm life-giving sun. And I did not feel myself receiving it until recently, yet receive it I absolutely did. The nourishment of the food I have eaten every day of all the years of my life. The body I am in, healing me over and over, sickness after sickness, cuts and bruises and sprains, not to mention all that it prevents every single day. I have been so cared for, surrounded in warmth and aliveness, even when all I was capable of perceiving was what my need to survive taught me to focus on, the very opposite of all of these things.

A deep breath comes. My mind is having a hard time synthesizing what just unfolded from within me. But I see and feel and know that my breath is so powerful. The life that has been placed in me and all around me is so powerful, far more powerful than all the things I am healing from, that consume my awareness a lot of the time, although far less time relative to my past.

And I see and feel and know that my exhales and my output are an offering of nourishment to whatever being might need it or benefit from it.

I feel settled in me. A deep breath comes. It is refreshing. I feel curious now about how this introduction will continue, although even now I feel a tightening in my shoulders again and pulling on the back of my head and tightening across the front of my chest. Curious as to how this is obviously a nourishing process for me to get out.

Introduction Continued

I became very concerned with these characteristics in my own patterns and behaviors after learning about their impacts in relationships that described my own, my whole life, and began revisiting them over time to check if I had fallen back into these tendencies as my own norm, accepting what was hurtful to me in relationships with others, or accepting and normalizing this behavior in myself. I have also seen a lot of content with people asking “Am I the narcissist?” so I know I’m not alone in the concern for how these traits may be outside of our awareness and impacting us negatively on a wider scale.

I feel the need to note that a major part of my healing experience is giving myself fully and completely at times to the unmet needs of an inner infant and inner child of different ages and developmental stages, who by nature are of course “narcissistic.” As far as I can see at this moment, the only way out is through, again, individually and collectively, and I don’t intend to vilify the expression of unmet needs by these narcissistic tendencies and traits, nor disregard or downplay the very painful experience of these legitimate needs being unmet for entire lifetimes and perhaps entire generations.

The sun is rising over a cultivated field on two hills under a blue sky with whispy clouds — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I also don’t intend to shy away from confronting the impact these tendencies and traits have had on me and my conditioning, or the anger that arises as a natural process of facing that reality. It is truly a dig, or unfolding, layer by layer, back and forth from the understanding of the bird’s eye perspective to the visceral, often mind-boggling experiences of its impacts, moment to moment.

This embodied exploration has taken me to root causes of physical, emotional, and mental health symptoms that I otherwise had not known how to access.

There will be one embodied exploration for each of the following 9 symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder according to the Cleveland Clinic’s presentation of the DSM-5-TR criteria for diagnosis:

1. Grandiose sense of self-importance.

Overestimating their capabilities or holding themselves to unreasonably high standards.
Bragging or exaggerating their achievements.

2. Frequent fantasies about having or deserving:

Success.
Power.
Intelligence.
Beauty.
Love.
Self-fulfillment.

3. Belief in superiority.

Thinking they’re special or unique.
Believing they should associate only with those they see as worthy.

4. Need for admiration.

Fragile self-esteem.
Frequent self-doubt, self-criticism or emptiness.
Preoccupation with knowing what others think of them.
Fishing for compliments.

5. Entitlement.

Inflated sense of self-worth.
Expecting favorable treatment (to an unreasonable degree).
Anger when people don’t cater to or appease them.

6. Willingness to exploit others.

Consciously or unconsciously using others.
Forming friendships or relationships with people who boost their self-esteem or status.
Deliberately taking advantage of others for selfish reasons.

7. Lack of empathy.