You could read "Conversation with God" by Neale Donald Walsch. This book had a profound disrupting effect, bringing up the best of me. Especially since this is not about religion or moral values. Cool fact: served as an inspirational base for The Matrix movie (first one mainly), and many other contemporary works. No source on that, I just know it.
Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
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Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
That had been my excuse for ignoring my own problems for years so I’d add: If you think you’re insane but also thinking it could be self-mis-diagnosis, no, you are not sane. There is no such inherent contradiction in an ability for a logical system to detect its own anomaly were you one. If it had been a false positive, the fact that a false positive is occurring itself is an anomaly, and an issue.
How do you distinguish these thoughts from the intrusive ones?
You go look for external help with figuring that out. Which brings us back to...
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question, really trying hard not to word it in a standoffish way: what do you get out of a therapist that can't be obtained from thought or general conversation outside of therapy? I don't think a "brilliant rational mind" is a prerequisite for coming to the conclusion that you're spending money to lock someone in conversation with you - someone that would not associate with you otherwise. To me, the relations…
"Conversational Prostitution"? Are you saying if you were more attractive/deserving/whatever, people with therapeutic skills would go around sharing their insight with you for free?
I believe that's called a "friend". They might not necessarily be as good at it but they are doing it out of genuine concern for you
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#374Stoic philosophy, while not about narcissism per se, can help put things in perspective because it forces humility and detachment. So book- wise: meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#375sign up for brazillian jiu jutsu, that would teach you some humility. jokes aside, getting a therapy would be the best option, if it is available for you. "the problems" we observe may had roots and/or just an outcome of the root problem that we have no idea of.
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree with this. Getting married has definitely forced me out of my shell. In general, getting involved in groups, e.g. religion, that is about more than self gratification gives me a broader perspective on life.
People with Narcissistic parents suffer. Their children are just tools to prop them and their ego up. See r/raisedbynarcissists Pushing a narc to have a family is a terrible idea.
Depends if the narc wants to change or not. If not, then most anything they do will be unhelpful.
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#377Religion could help you here, especially Christianity, since a fundamental insight is, as GK Chesterton puts it: "What's wrong with the world? I am." Without realizing there is something fundamentally wrong with me, i.e. the narcissism aka pride, it is impossible to break free. This is the insight that allowed Dante to leave Hell in the Divine Comedy.
Oh yes. Believe in this thing that you don't believe in so that you can become a better person. Except that believing for that reason is simply telling yourself a lie. And professing faith based on a lie will make you a worse person. And yet this type of argument is often used by those who seek to spread the Gospel. See likewise Pascal's Wager. That said, there is no evidence that I am aware of for Christianity actua…
Also I personally know people whose lives have been completely changed after believing in Jesus. For example my uncle who used to be part of Hell's Angels. One day he decided to believe in Jesus, and now he runs a drug rehab, is a deacon at his church, and runs missionary trips to preach the Gospel to drug lords in Columbia. Or take my own parents, normal college kids from middle upper class non believing households. My dad chose to follow Jesus while in the Navy, and then he and my mom devoted the rest of their lives to missionary work. Or my wife's mother who grew up living with people doing drugs and living promiscuously, and generally not going anywhere. She and her siblings chose to follow Jesus, left their situation, founded a church, all attended college and some gained advanced degrees and PhDs, and my mother-in-law ran a lab at John Hopkins. My perception is Christianity can certainly change lives for the better, in dramatic ways.
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#378Seeing a therapist might be infinitely better than reading a book, and not just for narcissism. We're all broken in our own wonderful and unique ways. I've been seeing a therapist for 5 years now, and the positive impact this has had in my life and on my general self-awareness can't be overstated. As engineers and tech people we have one tool that has proven incredible useful in our careers: our brilliant rational mi…
What are examples of problems you couldn't solve with your mind?
World peace.
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#379Narcissism can be driven by a lot of factors, so it depends on why you are narcissistic.
If you feel that your life is not going right, that you aren't taking care of yourself and your responsibilities properly, this can drive you to focus your attention on yourself and be less curious about others.
If you feel that other people do not care about you, that you are entirely on your own, this can drive you to focus on yourself and be less curious about others.
Of course ideally you would use a temporary state of self-focus to put yourself back on a positive track and achieve a greater level of security that then allows you to broaden your concern to embrace others. If you do that, you are not a narcissist; you just took some time to get yourself straight. You put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
If, on the other hand, you get stuck in the mode of focusing exclusively on yourself, without making progress on the factors that drive your self-focus, possibly even making the negative factors worse and making your isolation self-reinforcing, then it becomes pathological. You might need therapy to help you focus more on others and solve the underlying problems another way.
The issues driving your narcissism might be different, but no matter what they are, I recommend a double-pronged approach: actively practice caring for others in defiance of whatever dynamic is causing your narcissism, and at the same time investigate the underlying problems in psychotherapy, because the better you address those issues, the less unnatural it will feel to care for others.
Re: Ask HN: How did you fix your narcissism?
#380I just created an account to post a comment. I was raised by a narcissist, and over the years I've, like you, come to realize how narcissistic I am too. Narcissism has a terrible negative taboo associated with it, and rightfully so, because it can drain the living shit out of the people close to the narcissist. But you have to be careful not to be even harder on yourself about it. Because that's how a narcissist woul…
I just bought this book per your recommendation. Thanks so much!