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Am I the Narcissist? | Thinking Out Loud · Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly

• Kimberly: Am I the narcissist? I'm gonna be blunt. I'm not gonna give you the simplified answer. No no, I don't do that here. Well, if you're worried you're a narcissist, you're probably not one. Nope, absolutely not. instead I want to ask you some follow-up questions. Why are you asking? Is it because you genuinely want to understand your behaviors? Or is it because you need reassurance that you're not the bad person? That you're not the villain. So you can finally go to sleep at night knowing you're the good one? Because here's the uncomfortable truth. Sometimes we are the problem. That doesn't automatically make us the narcissist. Do you care more about being right? Or do you care about the people in your life? When you have power in the relationship, have you ever used the power to control someone? Consciously or subconsciously? Have you minimized your impact when someone said, hey, that hurts me? Have you told someone whose feelings you had power over that you simply didn't care? When someone challenges your behavior, do you become curious or do you immediately start building a case for why they're wrong? Because what does being right do? Does it mean we don't have anything to be accountable for? or does being right matter more to you even though it cost the other person their personhood? I saw a post say something that struck me. Abuse is shorthand for abuse of power. now do I think abusing power automatically makes someone a narcissist? No. I don't think narcissistic behavior automatically means someone has NPD I do think there's something worth investigating about our relationships with control. power, validation, and accountability. Maybe the question isn't simply, Am I the narcissist? Maybe a better question is, what do I do when I have power over someone? what happens when they tell me I've hurt them? Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. Hi, it's me, Kimberly. Before we go any further, a quick note. This podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. Here we slow down and we explore life's great areas, especially in relationships and behavior patterns we can observe and reflect on. I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to offer frameworks that can help you. understand your relationship, strengthen your thinking, and hold space for complexity. Let's get to thinking out loud. Seriously, why do you need to know if you're the narcissist or not? Has being told you're not started to become a coping mechanism? Are you asking because you genuinely care and you want to change? If someone is telling you that you're the narcissist, yet, you are completely powerless in the relationship with that person calling you one, I think that's worth investigating. Sometimes someone benefits from you constantly questioning yourself. I keep thinking about the times I was convinced by people who had power over me that I was the problem. if I had been less emotional, stop crying, I'm making them uncomfortable. My concerns, apparently, were me secretly being manipulative. My feelings didn't matter to them. Why did I keep coming back? That's what happens when you're slowly stripped of your autonomy. You believe your feelings make you the problem. maybe even the problem. When in reality the people who had the right were the littles in my life, the people I actually had power over, the people who had the least amount of power when it came to the dynamic. guess what? Eventually I changed. I removed myself when I couldn't. So I could change. sometimes it was something simple as please call me by this name, I didn't always get it right immediately. When I realized I was hurting someone, I cared to research, I cared to listen to the people I felt safe with I changed. Because I cared. even when that child had already given up I called them by the name they wanted to be called. When I harmed the littles in my life, I apologized when I could. I changed what I could for the time I was around. When the abuse I was experiencing though became overwhelming that I was becoming unhealthy and I didn't want my resentment to spill onto them, I removed myself when I realized I was becoming the problem in that dynamic, in that environment. that doesn't make me guilt-free. I had done things that participated in the systems that contributed to the cycles of abuse. I have to own that too. It means I could hear you hurt me. It means I could sense that I cared. Because when I was the one holding power, I tried to make changes. And doing something with that information. Is important. When it came to my treatment, did I experience feeling protected growing up? Did I experience similar patterns growing up? Did the people who had power care when I was crying and begging them to stop? I was given the silent treatment. I was gossip about. I was isolated. I was shut down. I was told that I needed to change. I was brushed off. I was punished with vacation photos, matching outfits, things. I had begged for years to be included on prior. I was told I was the one who needed to fix it and apologize. at the same time, I was told I wasn't in the wrong, but keeping the peace. And apologizing because you know how they get Kimberly. I was encouraged to silence my autonomy, to not listen to myself, to become numb to survive. What I did was not the same thing. I changed. I stopped. I apologized. My reactions reflect that. They doubled down and found different ways to point the finger back at me. That's different. Now, am I guilty with my oldest child? Yes and no. I wasn't well. And I was fighting my health and my mental health. Fighting to get better. I was making changes. The abuse I was experiencing during my pregnancy and postpartum period didn't stop. I was isolated, avoided, called creepy, bipolar, a liar. Told, we have it worse, Kimberly. You're not the first person to get pregnant. I clearly needed support and help because I wasn't doing well. And it was treated like a bother. It was treated like here's Kimberly, attention seeking. I felt I had two choices. I behave the way people expect me to, Or continued to be isolated. Or I was called crazy in one fashion or another. Sometimes I screamed at my child. I was overwhelmed by the colic. I was overstimulated. I had lost hope. I was at my lowest. My health was failing. My mind was falling apart. And that was very clear. I was dealing with abuse often enough that the recovery periods were really just chances to take a breath when I was holding my breath for so long. I was crushed with exhaustion by the time I could breathe. And I needed relief from it, And my phone became an escape. An addiction almost. Because I was struggling. that was harmful for my little girl. My child needed me. Even though it was only ten percent of the time that I became intense, it was still something I'm not proud of and it still affected her. I can admit that. I can put a name on that. My child suffered. I had to and continue to repair that low and dark time of my life with my child because repairing a nervous system takes time. It's not the good times we prove to them that we're safe. Where they can feel safe with us, a safe place to land. We prove it when the bad times come. because in their minds, what happens when the bad time returns? Do we apologize and try again or do we escalate and double down? How long does the repair last? How long does this time last? Is it getting better or is it back to square one? I had to realize that. Because I've experienced that too. And so I took it seriously. And maybe the cuts weren't in the thousands for my daughter. However, there were moments when she needed her mom and I couldn't be there for her. Sometimes I simply would say, I need a moment. Mama has big feelings. now she has the words. to express herself when she's upset Mama, I've have big feelings and now her daddy and I know, stop, take it seriously, she needs help. she's in the middle of a meltdown. She needs our support and kindness. Something I needed growing up too. I didn't have the motherhood journey I dreamed of with her from the beginning. and it wasn't too late. And I don't think it's too late for most people. I realized maybe quickly that I didn't have to be the monster or bully in my child's life. I got help. I changed I took accountability. It's easy to say, yeah, Kimberly, she was a baby. She was a toddler. I was two and called difficult. I was four, called too much. I was eight, called a liar. Sixteen, called unstable. Eighteen, called emotional. Twenty five, called sensitive, twenty-eight, called a bad person, twenty-nine, labeled bipolar, not my diagnosis. Thirty-three, a spoiled brat. It never mattered how old I was. For many people struggling with childism, maybe it never will be. If they refuse to see the harm their behavior causes, that their words matter. There is another part of this that matters too. I didn't have the power over the people who were abusing me because again, abuse is someone abusing power. I was the youngest in most situations. being that much younger meant they had developmentally, socially and informational advantages over me that I simply didn't have yet. They knew things I didn't know. They understood things I didn't understand yet. All I had was was my monstrous strength, my wit, my memory, and my ability to call out hypocrisy to people with power over me without fear. honestly, it was because I didn't have social understanding of power. I just was very literal. I grew up inside a system where things that hurt me were normalized. the same people had endured that system too. Some of them probably endured things that were worse than what I experienced. They warned me yet I still fed into the system. I minimized things, I repeated things, I unintentionally became a spy within the system and I didn't even realize it. I really didn't realize what I was doing until I watched the testament, the spin-off of the handmaid's tale, and I recognized something about the way information can be used inside of oppressive systems. Sometimes that harmed other people what I did. I didn't know and I have to own that. I didn't know I was a spy in some cases. owning that harm doesn't mean pretending I had the same power as everyone else though. That's where it gets complicated. Does that make people who hurt me horrible people? No, a lot of them are wonderful people in many ways, especially with the people outside of the inner circle. Inside the circle there was mocking. Being told I don't care about you or your feelings, Kimberly. There was telling me my feelings didn't matter, there was calling me names left and right. There were times when they made my dolls talk to me. When my brain was struggling to tell the difference between what was real and what wasn't because I was four. There was times I was almost drowned, not because someone wanted to kill me, allegedly, but because putting my head under water was funny until it stopped being funny. And I know someone could hear that and say, but did you die? That's exactly the problem. Harm doesn't have to end in death for it to matter. You don't have to have bruises for something to have been harmful. You don't have to diagnose someone with narcissistic personality disorder to acknowledge that a Pattern of using power to humiliate, control, silence, or dismiss another person is abusive. That's the distinction I'm trying to make. Abuse isn't shorthand for volatile behaviors or manipulation. It's about what happens when power is repeatedly used against someone who has less of it. Maybe the question isn't who is the narcissist? Who, who, who, who? Maybe who has power here and what are they doing with it? You can hurt someone without being a narcissist. You can make mistakes. You can lose your temper. You can repeat something you were taught. You can cause harm and still be capable of accountability. When someone has power over the other person and repeatedly uses that power to control, humiliate, silence, punish, or dismiss, and then refuse to take responsibility for that impact, that's a relationship dynamic worth taking very seriously. Asking, is this narcissistic abuse or is this something else? I've hurt people. I've participated in unhealthy systems. I harmed. I had less power in some of those relationships. I am responsible for what I do with the power I have now. When I look back in my own life, I have to face the harm I caused. Even the harm I caused to people who had abused me. That isn't the person I wanted to be. Honestly, I was really good at being mean, the matching energy kind of mean before I even knew what that was, before it became a thing. If someone was cruel to me, I could be cruel right back. You take my finger, I take the tip of your finger. I think part of that came from my autism and learning social behaviors through what was being modeled to me. Now, I didn't want to take the full finger. No, I wanted to scare people enough to show them what power they were doing over me before again I had any realization what I was doing. I was really good at modeling to the people above me in power how their power was affecting me. some people would change and some people just double down in entitlement. How dare you make me feel the way that my parents made me feel, Kimberly? I was doing what I had been shown, honestly. And that doesn't mean it was okay. It just meant I understand now what I was doing. understanding where our behavior came from doesn't erase the impact of that behavior. I learned that about myself because I was never very good at hurting children. I like the kids too much. They're fun. I was the youngest growing up, kids are cool. finally, after all these years, someone wants to play with me and I'm the cool kid. that's just the energy I had about it. Something about it made me stop. I would get triggered. I'd started learning about childism even before that though. In the past when I was repeating things that have been done to me, I couldn't live with myself when I saw what it did to a child. I stopped. I tried to do better. And it was hard I was packing in a lot of resentment. if I didn't bring it out, it kept hitting me instead. even before that in the past, when I was repeating things that had been done to me, I couldn't live with myself if even the idea of passing it forward to a child I kept thinking there had to be another way. in the meantime, I very much internalized the pain. That's part of why I got into behavior therapy. that's why I worked with children. Children brought out the best in me. the more I slowly detached myself from abusive people, the more patient I became. I noticed something about myself. Every time I had to spend time around people who made me feel small, I became someone I didn't want to be. I would be dysregulated and impatient afterwards that sometimes I would call in sick to work because I didn't want to bring that version of myself into the lives of the little people I worked with. those kids shouldn't have to deal with that. I didn't want my resentment to spill onto them. Sometimes the environment around the child made it impossible for me to continue working with them in a way I believed the child needed. Now what I mean by that is I remember situations where a parent literally told their child, Don't listen to Kimberly. This wasn't because I wasn't making progress. When that happened, parents let me go, which is fine, because sometimes you're not a good fit, and that's okay. Not everyone is a good fit for every situation. However, what I'm talking about is parents who saw progress was happening, and that was the problem. I was making progress on the goals the parents had asked me to work on. I had gotten the child to listen to me through respecting the child's autonomy and at the same time I had consistent expectations that made room for being human when flexibility was needed. here's the thing: a child behaving differently for another adult doesn't automatically mean the child is manipulative to the parent. Sometimes it means I'm not the parent. And yes, the history of being a parent is a thing. Sometimes your kids will misbehave more with you, That's not manipulation. Sometimes I have a short window. I work with them and that consistency was enough. Sometimes the expectations I had were clear, and sometimes me just being Regulated was enough. Sometimes the child is responding to a different relationship. sometimes the uncomfortable part that I had learned is some parents don't want to investigate why their child behaves differently with someone else. Some people don't want to actually sit and process the amount of power that they have over children, Children depend on them. Parents have enormous power, parents often control the money, the home, transportation, food, medical care, access to other people, access to information, consequences. Sometimes whether a child gets connection, affection, attention, and or even the ability to leave an uncomfortable situation, and that's a lot of power that gets just ignored. Power exists in those relationships. A boss has authority over an employee who loses more if they don't have a job. A therapist has professional authority over the client who loses access to care. A caregiver can have an enormous control over the person they're caring for. literally all their basic needs A landlord has the power over the tenant. Homing, shelter, Someone with financial resources can have power over someone who depends on them. Someone with social influence can determine who gets believed. someone with information can decide who gets access to that information. Sometimes the most important power someone has is simply the power to leave. Or the power to make someone else leave. When we talk about narcissism, abuse, and control, I think we have to ask who has the power here? What happens when that power is challenged? That's where we can get a better understanding of the situation. When someone challenges you, do you listen to them or do you become defensive? And that can be shutting down. I can't talk about this right now. When are we ever able to talk about it? Do you minimize it? That didn't happen. my gosh, your imagination. Do you punish them? I am not going to talk to you until you stop bringing up the past. Stop holding a grudge. Do you retaliate? You're not gonna get what you want. I'm gonna make sure everybody knows. Do you manipulate the situation? Well You know when I was a child, I had all this trauma. My mother father never loved me. do you dismiss their feelings? It wasn't that big of a deal. Do you use your position to make them comply? I am your elder. You will respect me. Or do you become curious? Wait, you experience me that way? Tell me more. Curiosity doesn't mean you automatically agree. You can disagree with someone's interpretation of an event. You can believe they misunderstood your intentions. You can even believe they are wrong about some of what happened. You can still ask, what was my impact? That is a completely different position. Children are incredibly easy to overpower. You can physically overpower them, financially control them, control where they go, what information they receive, whether they get access to another adult. you control their entire environment. You can make them believe that your emotional state is their responsibility. A child saying, I don't like this, and adult response is because I said so. That same child grows up, they get a job, they may have a partner, they may have children, and suddenly someone tells them that hurt me, and their response is I don't care. Where did they learn that? Maybe they learned it from someone. Maybe they developed it as a survival strategy. Maybe they are repeating a pattern in a cycle that continues. Maybe they are simply choosing to be cruel. You don't always know, and the behavior still matters. That's why I don't think power is inherently bad. Parents need authority, teachers need authority, caregivers need authority, and bosses need authority. There are situations where one person genuinely has more responsibilities and that equates to more power what do you do with your power? Do you use your power to make people smaller? Or do you use it to make people feel safer? Do you need people to obey you because you're afraid of losing control? Or can you explain the boundary and tolerate their disappointment? Do you punish people for having feelings? Or can you hear their feelings without surrendering your own autonomy? Do you need to be right? Or can you be responsible? I think there's a difference between authority and domination. A parent can say, you can't do that without saying your feelings don't matter. A therapist can hold a boundary without humiliating a client. Boss can correct an employee without disregarding them. A caregiver can provide structure without treating the person they're caring for like they are incapable of having a voice. A parent can say, I'm the adult. I'm responsible for keeping you safe without turning it into, therefore you owe me. That's the line I'm interested in, not Who's the narcissist? Who who? Rather, who has power? How are they using it? Perhaps most importantly, what happens when someone with less power says, You hurt me? That's where accountability becomes visible and exposes us. It's important to name our emotions. It's important to name our behaviors. It's important to name harm. Abuse sounds scary. It is scary for the people experiencing it. It is scary when someone abuses their power over someone. And I think we have to be careful about how we use the word harm and abuse are not automatically the same thing. anyone is capable of causing harm. A toddler can hit their parent. A child can call their parent names. a person having a medical episode can unintentionally hurt someone. Someone experiencing dementia can become aggressive Or say things they never normally would have said. Pregnancy itself can seriously affect a mother's body and health. The harm is real. We don't automatically assign the same moral responsibility to the person causing the harm. Why do we sometimes call a child abusive because their behavior harmed their parent? Yes, the behaviour needs to be addressed. Absolutely. Before we decide the child is the problem though, we need to ask, where did they learn that from? If they learned it from us, that's a whole conversation and a whole lot of self-reflection that needs to be done. If they've learned it from somewhere else, we need to ask, is this exposure healthy? What are they being exposed to? What are they being taught? What are they trying to communicate? It isn't the child's fault that they were modeled by the environment around them. It's not always the parents' fault either. Sometimes there are influences outside of either person's control. Some things may still need to change. Saying something needs to change doesn't mean the child is the problem. You are not a bad parent because you lost your temper. You are not a failure because your health is struggling. You are not a horrible person because you didn't know what you didn't know. once you know, you have the information. Information gives you the opportunity to do something differently. That's why I want us to stop blaming the people we have power over, especially our children, even adult children. They didn't choose the environments they were raised in. They didn't choose the drama. And no, that's not an acceptable inheritance to give our children. Geez Luis. They didn't choose what we modeled to them. They didn't choose the systems we brought them into, And when it comes to our own upbringing, neither did we. We didn't have a choice. You are not a failure for not knowing better. You are not evil because you did what everyone else around you was doing. maybe you were trying to be a trend follower instead of a trendsetter. You are allowed to be flawed. you are allowed to be an imperfect human being. being imperfect doesn't mean we don't have responsibilities. it means we have somewhere to begin. Name your feelings, name your behaviors, name the harm, and then ask, what can I change? A husband doesn't need to blame his wife for his anger because he feels disrespected. A mother doesn't need to blame her child for being difficult because parenting them is exhausting. A teacher doesn't need to label a struggling student lazy because the student's behavior is making the classroom harder to manage. A manager does not need to blame an employee for failing when the employee was never properly trained. A doctor doesn't need to blame a patient for not following instructions if those instructions were never clearly explained. A government doesn't need to blame individual voters for every failure in the system that policy makers have the power to change. A parent doesn't need to blame their child for struggling inside the family system. The parent has the authority to change. That's part about power I keep coming back to, baby. If you have more power, you often have more responsibility. Not because the environment not because you're a worse person. Rather, you have more ability to change the environment. And at the same time, you're not a horrible person for not knowing better. you're not automatically a narcissist because you caused harm. You're human. Humans cause harm. Humans can learn. Humans can change. Humans can repair. at the end of the day, I don't hate the people who hurt me. I see the dysfunction now. I can see where I didn't help. I can see where I caused harm and I can see where I participated in things I didn't understand at the time. I can also see where I was being harmed. when you're being abused and continually being told that's not abuse you can start to go crazy trying to figure out what is real. Does anything matter anymore? Nothing really matters. Anyone can see nothing really matters. eventually you have to choose. You can pass it down, you can leave, you can let it go. You can try again. I used to think narcissistic people were the ones who started over. I was taught somewhere, growing up, that if the collective had a problem with you, you were the problem. And history shows us that the collective can be wrong. Galileo was punished for challenging the dominant understanding of How the universe worked. Ida Wells was attacked for exposing radical violence and challenging the systems that protected it. Rachel Carson was attacked challenging the widespread use of pesticides and the industries that profited from them. Literally, there was a guy he was ridiculed for insisting that doctors wash their hands before treating patients. The point is that not everyone who gets called crazy is secretly a genius. it's that the consensus is not the same thing as truth. Sometimes the group is wrong. Sometimes the person standing outside the group is wrong. sometimes both sides have things they need to examine. That's the part I don't want to lose. I don't want to replace everyone else says I'm the problem, so I must be the problem, right? To Everyone says I'm the problem, so I must be right. I can investigate myself. I can acknowledge where I cause harm. I can acknowledge where I participate in unhealthy systems. I can acknowledge where I need to change. I can still recognize when someone else's power has been used against me. Those things can exist at the same time. Both can be true, as we say here. maybe that's the part of healing. Not proving that you're the good person. Not proving that someone else is the bad person. Becoming honest enough to say this hurts me. I hurt you. I participated in this. I didn't understand it then. I understand it now and I'm going to do something different. Sometimes starting over is the best thing you can do for yourself. if you do start over, remember to heal. Remember to look at yourself. Remember to see your flaws. Remember that leaving a harmful system doesn't automatically make you incapable of becoming harmful yourself. You still have power. Use it differently. Use it to build something safer, to break cycles, to become the person you always had the capacity to be. Maybe that's the version of you the world needs. you, the version you have the capacity to be when no one was telling you who to be. Back to the question. Am I the narcissist? Maybe. I don't think that's the most important question. I can hurt people without being the narcissist. I can participate in unhealthy systems. I can repeat things that were modeled to me. I can cause harm and still be capable of accountability and change. I can be harmed by someone without becoming incapable of examining my own behavior. Maybe the better questions are, who has the power here? What am I doing with the power I have? And when someone tells me you hurt me, what do I do with that information? Do I listen? Do I become defensive? Do I minimize? Do I punish? Do I retaliate? Or do I become curious? I don't think accountability means deciding you're a horrible person. I think accountability means being willing to look at yourself honestly enough to say, I did that. That hurts you. I didn't understand it then. I understand it now. I'm going to do something differently. maybe that's the part we lose when we become obsessed with figuring out who the narcissist is in the jungle We're busy looking for the villain that we forgot to ask what the relationship is telling us. Maybe you're being harmed. maybe you're causing harm. Maybe it's both. Maybe you've been given power you didn't realize you had. Maybe you've been using survival strategies that worked once but are hurting people now. Maybe the answer isn't a label. Maybe the answer is change. You don't have to prove you're the good person to acknowledge that someone is hurting you. You don't have to be the villain because you hurt someone. You can be a flawed human being. You can take responsibility. You can repair you can get out of there. Run! It's Godzilla. You can start over. You can choose what you do with the power you have now. instead of asking, Am I the narcissist? Ask yourself, what do I do when someone tells me I've hurt them? What do I do with the power I have over the people I claim to care about? Or people I'm neutral with. perhaps most importantly, am I willing to change when I discover I am part of the problem? you don't have to have all the answers immediately. You don't have to decide who is the villain. You don't need to sharpen those pitchforks and get those torches lit. You can start by being honest and listening to yourself, being curious about yourself, and you can start anytime. if you discover something you don't like. plot twist, you can change it. whether you leave a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with the question yourself, I hope this conversation stays with you. thanks for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. Remember, you don't have to be the villain to be accountable you don't have to be innocent to need understanding for connection. I'll see you in the next episode.