Narcissistic Tendencies

Experiencing yourself as especially talented and important, feeling notably irritable when others don’t appreciate your specialness, and ignoring people who don’t impress you could indicate narcissistic tendencies to your personality style. As a psychodynamic psychotherapist and board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. Kleinman can help you address complicated perspectives and help you develop a more grounded sense of yourself.

What are narcissistic tendencies?

Your mind is organized around how you see yourself, how you see others, and how you understand the world around you. In certain circumstances, a person may learn to determine their value through superficial qualities such as superior wealth, beauty, power, or achievement  - or through association with others who are felt to have these qualities. This might suggest that there are narcissistic tendencies to one's personality.

With these tendencies, you may feel like you can only feel good when you can feel superior in some way, and the need for superiority can become so intense that you may struggle to compromise for anyone else. Perhaps you are someone who knows what they want and feels entitled to get it, even if that means taking advantage of others. Some may even justify this as optimizing circumstances. Perhaps you privately look down on others and refuse to be vulnerable to anyone, and relationships feel essentially performative and transactional. Perhaps if you find yourself feeling humiliated, you might fly into a destructive rage or become vindictively cruel. Perhaps you are someone for whom a self-righteous attitude, sly manipulation of others, and/or inflexible behavior make it hard to keep employment.

When these attitudes and behaviors like these lead to difficulty in a person’s life, then narcissistic tendencies may be part of the problem.

What are ways to recognize narcissistic tendencies?

Common experiences might include some combination of:

• Frequently seeking others’ attention and engagement
• Frequent efforts to impress others
• Desiring admiration for positive or negative things
• Feeling superior to other people
• Feeling more deserving than other people
• Outwardly presenting extreme self-confidence
• Avoiding situations that may end in failure
• Bragging about achievements or struggles
• Being inordinately upset by criticism
• Having notable difficulty with self-reflection
• Being frequently critical of others
• Having problems getting along with other people
• Having difficulty imagining other people’s feelings or perspectives
• Taking advantage of people or circumstances if the ends justify the means
• Leaving relationships before they get too serious
• Feeling overly confident or intensely insecure in social situations
• Being prone to irritability, impatience and anger outbursts
• Having deep, unspoken feelings of emptiness and loneliness

While some people with a narcissistic tendencies may appear excessively confident, others may seem overly dependent on those around them. Most often, people with these tendencies may have a strong feeling of how impressively unique they are and may act in ways that could be considered entitled and demanding by others around them.

How do people develop narcissistic tendencies?

These tendencies may emerge under the following circumsances:

• Having parents or family members with narcissistic personalities
• Experiencing inconsistent attention from parents during one's upbringing
• Having an inordinately competitive upbringing
• Receiving excessive praise or advantages for cleverness, beauty, or achievement
• Feeling humiliated or criticized for kindness, weakness, or failure
• Having peer groups that reinforce narcissistic tendencies

Having these risk factors alone does not guarantee a person will have narcissistic tendencies. However, these factors along with a person’s unique biology, their way of making sense of the world, and their general life circumstances may all contribute to the development of narcissistic tendencies.

How does Dr. Kleinman assess narcissistic tendencies?

Dr. Kleinman starts by having an extensive discussion of your primary concerns, current symptoms, and general life circumstances. She conducts a full psychiatric evaluation which includes asking about any past symptoms, experiences in psychotherapy, and any past use of psychiatric medication. She also asks about your life history, family history, and lifestyle habits. She will then customize a personalized treatment that’s best suited to your needs.

How does Dr. Kleinman treat narcissistic tendencies?

Dr. Kleinman offers psychodynamic psychotherapy that works by exploring the underlying forces that may have led to the maladaptive patterns in the first place. This approach includes exploring your sense of self and personal identity, reflecting on your experience of how the world works, and examining your patterns of interacting with and relating to other people. Close attention is paid to patterns of relating to others, including how patients relate to the therapist in the moment. If symptoms of anxiety or depression develop over the course of treatment, Dr. Kleinman can offer medication to help manage these symptoms.

Dr. Kleinman’s treatment approach could be particularly helpful for people who have tried other kinds of counseling or therapy in the past but had only limited improvement.

Dr. Kleinman will tailor your treatment to your personal needs and follow your progress closely to ensure meaningful progress.