A few days ago, I heard Brene Brown on Tim Ferriss Podcast. She expressed her views on narcissism, stating, “We think that narcissism is about self-love. Rather it is about grandiosity driven by high performance and self-hatred. It is the shame-based fear of being ordinary. In fact, narcissism is the most shame-based of all the personality disorders.”
These lines shook me to my core. Not because I was surprised to hear them but mainly due to the fact that I had been listening to people’s opinions about narcissistic behaviour especially for the past two and a half years. But there was something inside of me that was stopping me from agreeing to those opinions. I didn’t quite believe in those. I had this intuition that there was something more to it than the general perception. I could not find better words for it then. But these words are pretty close to that intuition.
Their feeling of being “ordinary” is inseminated from constant self-comparison to the people who are high-achievers. “Self-hatred” starts originating from doing a few objectionable acts of selfishness in the early years which start piling up with years until there seem to be no returning back in their own mind. They start justifying all those acts because it serves their objectives. But they stay aware of this truth the whole time which further manifests “self-hatred” in their subconscious mind. It makes the whole thing a vicious circle hard to escape from, of course in their own mind.
Hard-working, workaholic, power-driven individuals with high IQ end up using their intelligence in every other way that they could find suitable to give themselves that feeling of grandiosity.