Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?

If there were ten attributes that particularly define a narcissist (wide disagreement on that, so I'm just using an example number), I think most people would have four or five of them by default of humans by nature being normally self-interested.

The narcissist will have a few more critically elevated attributes that are missing or quite weak in your average person: lacking in empathy and caring thoughts of others (narcissists feel like users when you're around them, they use people as tools for how they can feed their narcissism); very aggressive inability to recognize their own wrongs (they'll do everything to avoid this); methodically blaming everyone/everything else for things that go wrong (goes with the last one as a requirement); extreme and sharp turns against others in cases of being blamed or having mistakes & flaws pointed out (even casually; this can't be tolerated, it opens up a personality collapse risk); often a very elevated obsession with image, how they're perceived (often including beauty, but not required); you'll usually see elevated levels of lying and manipulation, often related to maintaining the other items such as image and or getting what the person wants/needs to maintain the ecosystem of narcissism (it's a whole system that has all sorts of requirements, each of which cause other consequences); they will believe they're very, very special, with typically little in the way of supporting life results to back that up (it's an inherent impossibility, as the inflation of image is always far beyond the results, no matter what the results are; and they will have excuses to cover the lack of obvious supporting results, calling themselves lazy for example, for why they've accomplished nothing, while simultaneously proclaiming they could conquer the world if they wanted to).

Maintaining narcissism is its own form of hell for most narcissists. It's a never-ending treadmill of lies, deception, abuse, losing friends, self-torture, unhappiness. They will often not understand why they're so miserable, they offload that on others via blame as well.

True narcissism almost feels like dealing with a sociopath when you're near it. Like you're dealing with a robot or alien.

Thank you!

At its core, narcissism is a defence mechanism [1] against a state of mind of which you are afraid.

To get over your narcissism, you can grow your emotional strength until you are ready to face your biggest, unknown-to-you fear, until you are ready to be in the state of mind that you avoid. Right now, your mind does everything to hide that state of mind from your awareness.

There are plenty of ways to grow your emotional strength. Meditation, being compassionate, express yourself e.g. with singing or dancing, ...

Trust yourself. Deep down you know what you have to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism

I'm actually attending therapy, on a regular schedule, and struggled to find a good therapist.

Shop around? You're inviting someone to perform online brain surgery on you. Fortunately, you can undo the operation if you don't like it (sort of). If you don't like what the therapist is doing, keep looking for a different therapist that works for you.

I've heard a story where a therapist got upset with their client because the client said, during a therapy session, they were going to find someone else.

Simple point of order: I don't need to tell my therapist if they're fired. I just walk away.

A therapist can confront you as a human being in way that no book, friend, or family member ever can. There are often truths about being human that one has difficulty accepting on the basis of logic. A trained human being can find a way to make those truths acceptable.