You know, May is mental health awareness month, and I didn't really call it out because even though I was aware of it, and I knew it was, I wasn't really concerned about it because it's kind of like always mental health awareness month for me. But there is something that I do want to talk to you about, which is really about our nervous systems and how they are primed from such a young age and how the things that you trip over today, the things that trigger you, the things that hurt you, the things that scare you, the things that depress you or cause you anxiety or anger are often rooted so much earlier, before you even know that your nervous system encoded them and came up with these amazing strategies for survival.
When we think about going back in time to the pieces that make us up as we are today, of course, there is our spiritual core, and that is, I believe, the part that is God breathed. And then when we get saved, he saves us from our humanness, but that our soul, our spirit are His. They are saved, and they're covered in the blood of Jesus and redeemed. That's what I believe is our true self. However, we also have this human experience that is also reality. It is where we are right now. It is the experience that we are having, and that human experience is also sacred. God made our bodies. God made our minds. God made our personalities. He made our makeup and the way that the body makes us up, so to speak, is through our thoughts and our connections throughout our body, in our nervous system.
We have a lot of different chemicals that fire, give messages, and tell things what to do. We can think about our arm moving or that we need to move our arm, and it can do it. We can naturally focus on things if our eyesight is working well to be able to see far away or up close, or we can alter that through glasses because we're trying to help ourselves. There are often ways to correct for things that we're having difficulty with. When it's something like an arm, a broken leg, or eyesight that we can do something about that's concrete, it's easy to see.
But what we can't see are the things from such a young age that impacted our nervous system. For example, were your cries attended to by a loving caregiver consistently from the time of birth until you were a toddler? Did somebody meet your needs when you didn't have the words to ask for it? Did they come to your cries? Did they console you when you were hurting? Did they bring peace and regulation, or did they ignore you? Because that's still in your nervous system. Your nervous system will know whether you have been cared for predictably and dependably, even though you probably don't remember back to being a baby. You may not trust other people, and it can go all the way back to the attachment you had with your caregivers in infancy.
Let's say that went well and you now know that my basic needs are met, and then we step it up to the toddler years, and you're starting to learn whether you can really branch out safely, whether you're safe to go on your own, and yet still have help if you need it. Healthy secure toddlers will be able to go explore but keep the parental unit or the caregiver in sight or in mind. They can go away and they can come back and they know that there's this ebb and flow that is healthy, that their back, they still, you know, someone still has their back. Then if that's not there, if they're insecure, that attachment can follow them the rest of their lives, too. It can be something where in romantic relationships later, you feel desperate, like, please don't leave me or I'm going to be abandoned and I'm not safe without you. Or if you've had a trauma where you really were not seen, not cared for, not heard, left alone, frightened, then you learned other lessons that got encoded into your nervous system.
Your nervous system is brilliant. It is here for you to survive. Then you look at the things that happened during the elementary years. How were you perceived by classmates? How were you perceived by the teacher? How were you taken care of at home? How did you feel about different things? The labels you started to get...sometimes those are the years where people start to get messages about themselves, like they're no good or they're always trouble, or they always want something and they're a bother, or they don't read well enough, or they're no good at math or whatever. There may be some truth to some talent type things. There are people who are more language-based learners and people who are more math-based learners, but people seldom have taken the time to really say, but that isn't a deficit in you. This is just your strength area, and we can also enjoy this other area and continue to also cultivate our strengths, and you are great.
However you've been created, whatever your design is, is okay, you are loved, you're acceptable. Every kid is a genius in their own way, but if no one ever comes alongside and says, you don't have to be good at this because you're good at that, everybody is good at something. Then comparisons are in there and that is something that once it starts, unless you nip that root out of there, it can continue to bother you for the rest of your life. You have to some point intentionally say, I am not going to fall to comparisons. I'm not going to be defined by other people. I am defined only by God, and I am enough because He is enough, and He doesn't make mistakes. When you can stand in that and have peace in that, that's a very solid ground to be on.
Our nervous system remembers rejection or ridicule or not feeling good enough, and it wants to compensate for it. Then you bring on the middle school years and oh my goodness, there's so many changes going on hormonally and socially and you're trying to figure out how to make that next leap into the next development period. In some ways you're still wanting to hold on to being a kid or you can't wait to get rid of the kid stuff and really be taken seriously, so there's struggle there.
Then we all know what the high school years can be like and the peer pressure and the coming into our own and trying to find our voice. Before we know it, oftentimes what people do is they end up making decisions about their life, whether they'll marry or not, what education they'll have, what they're going to do for a living, and where they're going to live. Sometimes those choices don't turn out so well, or they do for a time and then they don't or they're great. You know, it is possible to have a lot of great things.
Overall, all of this goes into a nervous system that remembers. Your nervous system remembers any traffic accidents you had when you first learned to drive. It remembers any time where you had hoped for somebody older and wiser to give you a stamp of approval, and instead you were met with criticism or rejection or somebody who didn't get it. It remembers every time you felt safe or felt threatened. It is trying to predict the future based on all of this input that happened through all of these different relationship stages, developmental stages, and needs that were there and whether they were met or not.
So, it's really common for people to all of a sudden wake up and realize something's wrong here. What affected me so much? Some people's coping skills and ways of dealing with it, decide I'm going to deny it, move on, and not look back as if those that are affected shouldn't let it bother them like they're just wasting time and are wimps or something like that. Maybe they tell themselves, you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going. Sometimes people get stuck there and wallow and they're like, woe is me and I never had anything good, and I'll never get past this. Sometimes it's a bit of both, right?
The healthiest way when you acknowledge something isn't giving you peace and joy is to figure out what's happening here and do I need help with it, need more education, or need to take personal responsibility to change something or get more skills? What do I need to do to be responsible for me, so that I don't cause damage to other people's nervous systems, nor do I prolong my suffering here with what my nervous system has learned to try to manage and deal with. It can look different than how it looks at first glance, right? It can look like maybe trusting somebody you wouldn't normally trust, or realizing there's a problem when you didn't think there was or realizing that you're not the problem and maybe it was your environment that was the problem, or maybe the people you were around were the ones who were toxic. We have to kind of figure out where the lies got in there about you and where the lies and the not helpful coping skills came from.
They probably served well at some point.
Your coping skills probably served you well at some point, but when they start to not work in certain situations or they themselves start to hurt, that's often when people need to call for counseling because they don't know what to do anymore. The way they manage things isn't working anymore, and they don't have anything else to rely on oftentimes because they thought they had it. Sometimes people think I am going to find my value in dating, and then they find that they're put down in dating, and that didn't work. So now what? Or I'll find my value in just rising up the corporate ladder, and then they get laid off, or they don't actually like their job, and they're like, well, that didn't work for me. These times where we have to reevaluate are not failure. It's a learning experience. All of life is a learning and growing experience, a refining a journey, and we both get hurt and we heal.
Just like with that arm, that is so easy to fix with a cast, we can see that as a concrete example. But when we move forward, we can do that in other things, in other ways in life, we don't have to constantly be stuck. We can take these certain actions that teach us different outcomes, that tell us the truth, that help us to regulate our nervous systems, that help us to see ourselves more clearly and say no to the things that are hurting us and breaking us down. Instead, we can get something like a cast through support from other people, through our faith, through telling ourselves the truth, through going through trauma therapy, through learning new tools and reading more books, listening to more podcasts, and applying it. Life does not have to cause undue distress forever. It just doesn't. But you have to do something different to get something different.
When people have such horrific things repeatedly, over time, they might have what's called chronic PTSD. So, PTSD would be the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. That's like replays in your head, feeling like you're back in time, feeling like something present is still connected to something that happened in the past, but you don't know that the past is over. It feels like it's this continuing thing that follows you. If that's happened repeatedly during your development or your growing up years, where you continually had trauma, it can really wreak post-traumatic stress, and then they call that CPTSD because that chronic nature, that ongoing nature, is harmful. We get used to those things, and we don't even realize to challenge them.
So, I want you to take a look at where in your life you're struggling today and see what patterns might have come from way back. What experiences does this remind you of? When did you feel like this previously? Because that is the wound or the hurt that may need to be healed. It's pretty easy if there is a one-time big trauma like a car wreck, and you can put the casts on the arm and the leg to heal those, but if you have a trauma and, in your mind, you can't stop hearing the horn blaring, tires screeching, someone screaming, or anything like that, it is still causing you triggers and pain. That kind of situation is a one-time trauma, but it still has invisible expressions. It needs a cast; it needs support. Even though you can't see it and it's not tangible like an arm or a leg, if untreated, it can cause more mental health issues. It can make anxiety worse; it can make depression worse. It can just bring on a whole host of things in the body and the mind and even mess with your spiritual life.
So, I just want to encourage you that mental health awareness month is not the way I want to focus on it for you because we're not talking mental illness, although it is illness when something is not well in our system, in our nervous system, in our mind, in our relationships, it can cause us to feel sick or to be sick or to act sick. So mental wellness, mental health is to recognize when we're showing symptoms of hurt, pain, or trauma to our nervous systems because of the history of what we've lived through and survived, we get help now to heal the stuff from the past, heal us in the present, and help us to go forward in the future a lot healthier than we are today.
If something is troublesome today, don't beat yourself up for it. There's no point to that. Take a look with compassion and grace to see what you've lived through and how that may have been something you strategized with to try to keep yourself safe and surviving. I'll bet there are more threads there that you'll notice if you look at it through that lens. If that's the case, then you'll know what's still needed, what needs to be healed, or what type of help might be beneficial.
Have you ever noticed that there are people who think it's all about them, that everything has to revolve around them and their needs and their moods? If so, you may be experiencing someone who has a personality disorder. Today we're going to be talking about narcissistic personality disorder. In our last episode, we talked about gaslighting. Gaslighting is mental manipulation that some people like to do to make others doubt themselves, to make others feel crazy, and to kind of get the upper hand.
One of the personality disorders that gaslighting is very aligned to is called narcissistic personality disorder. What is a personality disorder, you might ask? Well, you're about to find out over the next several weeks, because I'm going to be doing episodes on personality disorders. They are basically what are called cluster B personality disorders that I'm going to cover. These are the ones that are dramatic and emotional having basically this pervasive pattern dysfunction in relationships and areas of functioning that is long lasting and causes difficulty in interpersonal experiences.
If you're on the receiving end of somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder, you may wonder what in the world is going on because if you're not aware of what it is, it can feel like they're trying to tell you that the way they see things is the way it is, and, you know that's not the way it is, but that is how they see things, and then they're insistent on getting their way. It can be part of that crazy making, and we do no more crazy, ladies! So, I want you to know when somebody may have personality disorder traits.
Now, before we jump into those 9 traits, I want to share this week's newsletter's final thoughts for...
4 "Should" Lies that Mess with Christian Women's Minds:
Have you ever felt like your sense of what is right, true, actual, or factual has been twisted by someone else? Maybe you've had someone tell you you don't feel the way you do, or maybe someone denies that something you know happened actually happened. When someone else undermines your sense of truth, it is dangerous ground, but here are six lies that seem "Christian" but aren't.
Anytime that the words, "should," "always," and "never" appear in a sentence, my ears perk up, and my mind starts analyzing because these are often statements that are not fully true. It may be that some part of the sentence is true, but often, things may sound true and absolute that are really more general and without reflection may actually be harmful.
The lies that good Christian girls/women:
1. Should always submit to those in authority. Biblical authority and submission are definitely concepts that have their rightful place and applications, but this blanket belief is dangerous because not all "authorities" are in line with God's authority, and God's is the highest authority. Remember how Nebuchadnezzar wanted all to bow to him? He was an authority figure, but Daniel would not sin and bow, as Daniel was under the Lord's authority, and not to bow to idols. See Daniel 3, Psalm 118:8-9.
2. Should always put others above themselves. We are human, and we do have "selves" to steward. We do not have endless time, energy, and resources to take on all of the needs of the world just because others bring them to our doorstep. Jesus regularly took time to get away and pray, and He is the Savior. God is the One to always put above ourselves and live for, but He is also a good God who gave us bodies that need rest and food and time to pray and seek Him. Luke 5:16.
3. Should never feel angry. Feelings are part of being human. Who made humans? Yes, God. It is not wrong to feel our feelings; there is righteous anger. However, in our anger, we are told to not sin. This is different. This is responsibility for our thoughts and actions that accompany our feelings. What we do with the information is the important thing, and feelings are simply information from our internal and external environments. We can choose wisely how God would have us to act. See Ephesians 4:26.
4. Should always obey the "rules, be nice, be seen and not heard." Whose rules are these? Are they God's, or are they contrary to God's ways? Speaking the truth in love and having a gentle answer that turns away wrath are concepts that can allow even the most difficult things to be shared and help us to sharpen each other as iron sharpens iron. However, if someone is not willing to be sharpened when truth is appropriately shared with them, then it may be a time to "shake the dust from your sandals." See Ephesians 4:15, and Matthew 10:14.
Looking at the overall big picture of God's truth and love can help us to break free from the toxic lies that try to put others and evil things in the place of God in our lives. You are always free to disagree with others.
Anytime that the words, "should," "always," and "never" appear in a sentence, my ears perk up, and my mind starts analyzing because these are often statements that are not fully true. It may be that some part of the sentence is true, but often, things may sound true and absolute that are really more general and without reflection may actually be harmful.
The lies that good Christian girls/women:
1. Should always submit to those in authority. Biblical authority and submission are definitely concepts that have their rightful place and applications, but this blanket belief is dangerous because not all "authorities" are in line with God's authority, and God's is the highest authority. Remember how Nebuchadnezzar wanted all to bow to him? He was an authority figure, but Daniel would not sin and bow, as Daniel was under the Lord's authority, and not to bow to idols. See Daniel 3, Psalm 118:8-9.
2. Should always put others above themselves. We are human, and we do have "selves" to steward. We do not have endless time, energy, and resources to take on all of the needs of the world just because others bring them to our doorstep. Jesus regularly took time to get away and pray, and He is the Savior. God is the One to always put above ourselves and live for, but He is also a good God who gave us bodies that need rest and food and time to pray and seek Him. Luke 5:16.
3. Should never feel angry. Feelings are part of being human. Who made humans? Yes, God. It is not wrong to feel our feelings; there is righteous anger. However, in our anger, we are told to not sin. This is different. This is responsibility for our thoughts and actions that accompany our feelings. What we do with the information is the important thing, and feelings are simply information from our internal and external environments. We can choose wisely how God would have us to act. See Ephesians 4:26.
4. Should always obey the "rules, be nice, be seen and not heard." Whose rules are these? Are they God's, or are they contrary to God's ways? Speaking the truth in love and having a gentle answer that turns away wrath are concepts that can allow even the most difficult things to be shared and help us to sharpen each other as iron sharpens iron. However, if someone is not willing to be sharpened when truth is appropriately shared with them, then it may be a time to "shake the dust from your sandals." See Ephesians 4:15, and Matthew 10:14.
Looking at the overall big picture of God's truth and love can help us to break free from the toxic lies that try to put others and evil things in the place of God in our lives. You are always free to disagree with others.
Let's get back to those 9 traits of a Narcissist...
Now, I'm not diagnosing people. I'm not saying that you should diagnose people. Diagnosis is for the clinical therapy room, but for the purposes of this, I want you to have a general overview over the next several weeks of these cluster B personality disorders, because it will make sense of a lot of things where maybe it didn't make sense to you before. Maybe you kept holding out hope things could be different only to have a repeat and you're being the one hurt by somebody who has these personality disorder traits.
So, there are four types of dramatic emotional personality disorders in this cluster B: narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. We're going to start with narcissistic personality disorder. To have that diagnosis, there have to be five out of nine traits, and I'm going to share those with you.
But, What's a Diagnosis?
First, let me talk to you about diagnosis. So, technically, the medical model of the psychotherapy field is based on the medical model, which means we need to rule out things. We need to figure out what's actually going on and tease out what the diagnosis is. Now, you may have heard me say this before: I'm not personally a fan of diagnosing because people are so much more than their labels. That's how I feel. I feel like people are so much more than their labels. It's genetics. It's what's happened to them. It's their experience. It's what they got in their attachment and what they didn't get. So as far as noticing what we are treating, it's helpful to have a diagnostic criterion that we are able to put a label so that we know what we're treating, we know what we're looking at, and we know maybe if there are more than one of these diagnoses that apply to somebody. It's more for helping to decipher what is going on. The reason I don't like labels is there's a stigma to them making people feel like they fit into a box, when very often at the root of a lot of it is genetics or environment, and often it's trauma. We live in a world where we all get wounded at times, and that can be traumatic, so that's why I don't like labels. I think that oftentimes people get a lot of labels when really, underneath all of it is a lot of trauma, and it just kind of manifests in certain ways.
To get back to narcissistic personality disorder, the reason this is something that is very important to understand is because we all fall on a continuum of a level of narcissism. If you think about a less to more kind of line and you say, okay, I have fewer of these traits, or they have more of these traits, it's something that having a sense of self has a bit of a narcissistic trait to it, right? You have a sense of self, but that's not in a negative way. That's not a harmful thing. It's good to have a sense of self. Having a sense of self, though, that exploits other people is not healthy. There's a continuum of how much is healthy and how much is toxic.
9 Traits of a Narcissist
Let's go through these nine traits so that you can get a grasp of the things that you might want to keep in mind if you consider that someone may be higher on these narcissistic traits and possibly even have narcissistic personality disorder. You need to have five of these to qualify for the narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis.
- A grandiose sense of self-importance that they expect to be seen as superior even without the achievements to back it up.
- Fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, or beauty.
- Belief in being, "special and unique," only able to be understood by other special people.
- Requiring excessive admiration.
- Sense of entitlement, expecting favorable treatments or automatic compliance.
- Taking advantage of others to get what they want.
- Lacking empathy and unwilling to recognize the feelings and needs of other people.
- Envy of others, believing that others are envious of them.
- Arrogance, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
If somebody exhibits five out of those nine, they may qualify for narcissistic personality disorder. That's troubling is if you are on the receiving end in a relationship with somebody who fantasizes themselves as being better than, or who is good at demanding excessive admiration or being critical of others because they're so high and mighty, or they lack empathy, they can do real damage. They can do real damage because if people are trusting them as somebody without a personality disorder, you might think you can talk with them. You might think that you can reason with them. You might think there could be this give and take and some apologies and understanding and further growth, but that's often not going to happen. In fact, it's likely not going to happen. These people often cannot apologize. These people often know how to kind of play well, but internally, it's all about them. They don't really get it. They don't really have that ability to empathize with the feelings and needs of other people. It's all about them. People are merely pawns. If they can't give them their narcissistic supply, they have no use for them. If you try to talk with them like you would with a person without this personality disorder and work things through, you're more likely to get rage, put downs, or blame where they twist the tables.
This goes back to that gaslighting concept we talked about in the last episode.
All cluster B personality disorders have trouble managing emotions. They have attention seeking behavior, hypersensitivity, impulsivity, unpredictability, lack of inhibition, and the rules don't apply to them. So, no wonder it is so frustrating for those of us without personality disorders, because when the rules don't apply to other people and it's all about them, there is no way for this sense of fairness to take place in relationships. So, it's really hard to figure out how to be safe in interactions with people with these traits. If that is something you have experienced where you just don't quite know what it is, but you just feel unseen in relationships and you feel like it always goes back to the topic of conversation, being this other person, that this other person has so many needs and ideas about the way they see the world and criticizes how other people do things and expects them to have some sort of higher, admirable traits that others should see, you may be dealing with somebody high on the narcissistic spectrum. They may even qualify for five out of those nine traits that indicate they could have narcissistic personality disorder.
What Do You Do if You Have a Relationship with a Narcissist?
So, what do you do about this? Let's say this is someone you care about. Let's say this is a spouse or a parent or a good friend, right? What do you do about this? Well, unfortunately, there's very little that seems to be effective because the problem is that these people do not see they can do any wrong. It's actually rooted in deep insecurity within them, but they've put on this mask, this armor, or this barrier that no one's going to penetrate into that permeable soft part inside. They have to put on this hard external shell as if things don't bother them, but they do, and they don't know how to manage their own emotions. So, it's this difficult situation. If you try to point it out to them, they have difficulty being able to admit it because that would be letting down their armor, letting down their guard. While that could actually help them, if they could tolerate it, tolerating that is almost worse than having these issues in relationships because at least with the entitlement and grandiose sense of self in some way they're still admired and they're still getting a narcissistic supply.
So, it's really frustrating because there can be really good people, perhaps you're one of them, who really wish you could have an authentic, empathetic, reciprocal relationship with somebody you care about who has a narcissistic personality, and instead they can't see it and if you try to point it out, you become the target of blame. They project onto you, their shame. They project onto you, their wrongs. They make things twisted so that it seems like you're the problem when you're not. It can be really heartbreaking.
You may want to get them into therapy, or they may want to go into therapy, and if so, it's also unlikely that it's going to change anything. Because to have therapy be effective, they would have to stay in it, and they would have to actually let down that armor and that guard so that they could heal. But because they're so insecure on that deep, soft level inside them and they can't tolerate that because that doesn't protect their insecurities, it's not likely that they will stay in therapy. It's actually very, very sad. It's thought that there may be a genetic component to this, that they couldn't live up to a parent's excessive admiration, or they kind of had some dismissal in their early life. There can be different things that lead to this, but it's very sad because the only person that is really being harmed, when it comes down to it, is the person with this diagnosis. They put this front on, so that they won't be hurt, and it's kind of a self-fulfilling hurt thing. They just kind of do that.
Only the Narcissist Hurts Once You Know the Signs
Then the reason I say the only person that's hurt isn't true in the sense that many other people are hurt. When you are in relationship with somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder, but if you can understand the traits and realize, oh, that's them, that's the way it is, we can still hope and pray for miracles. Yet thinking about how pervasive this is and historically, have they've ever been able to give you something more connected, more authentic, more reciprocal? If not, and you notice this, it doesn't have to hurt you anymore. When you know, then you need to grieve what you wish you had in that relationship and what they may have even told you you had in that relationship, like, oh, this is the best relationship. A good relationship is when two people feel that way and are healthy. When it's only working for one person, that's not a healthy, good relationship. Relationships have to work for both people in them. When I say it only hurts them is because when the people who are their supply wise up and learn techniques such as gray rocking, which is where you just don't engage with the drama anymore. You become about as interesting as a gray rock. There's nothing that supplies them anymore. Your own life has so much more peace in it because you're not tossed by the waves of their need for excessive admiration or control. You just don't play anymore. You take your ball and go home. That's why it's so sad, because they're left with no one to play with, and understandably so. But then you can grieve, lick your wounds, heal, be wiser for it, and go seek out the healthy relationships that are out there for you. But it is sad because they are kind of left just to their own devices in a world of their own making. Unfortunately, it's very lonely in there. Very, very lonely. Because when you can't connect with somebody on a real, authentic basis, you are missing out on doing life together with people who can lift you up. Again, that iron sharpens iron where someone can lift you up and you can lift them up, so that's why it's very tragic.
But if this is somebody in your life you care about, you can let them know. But be warned, it may not go well because that would require them being able to accept some form of critique that usually ends up in rage. So, taking care of yourself, getting people around you who understand, explaining where you're coming from and what you've experienced with safe people, can help bring healing to you. The Bible has different passages about how it's important to have traits of good character. A lot of the narcissistic personality disorder traits are against that. It's not okay, but it is tragic.
If you need help to process what's been going on in your relationships, I urge you to seek out therapy from somebody who is well versed in personality disorders, abusive relationships, gaslighting, and trauma. Those are the types of therapists who can really help you because there's been a lot of emotional abuse and mental abuse going on behind the scenes you may never have realized.
So next time we're going to go into another one of the personality disorders, borderline personality disorder, and we'll talk more about that. If you think you may have narcissistic personality disorder or be high on the narcissist spectrum, I just want to encourage you that you can go to a therapist and tell them that you have trouble tolerating emotions that make you feel less than, and they can work with you on being able to tolerate that without it causing you undue distress. You may have to sit there with some distress, but they can work with you bit by bit. You have to be willing to admit you need help and that it's getting in the way your relationships and your functioning in life. So, I'll talk to you next time about borderline personality disorder.
I want to remind you that our Membership Community is opening up again in June. In the Membership Community, you get weekly access to coaching with me, and you get support in community whether you're online, live, or whether you watch the replay and email or text. In the community, you get support, and you get clarity for stopping the mental circles in your head so that you can take strides in your life from a place of confidence and peace and power as God designed you to.
