What hurts a narcissist but doesn't hurt normal people?

 What hurts a narcissist but doesn't hurt normal people?

One big thing that hurts a narcissist or someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that does not typically hurt someone without it is that when “other people” are happy or enjoying themselves in some way, a narcissist is likely to be more unhappy as a result. When I refer to “other people,” I am referring to friends, family, etc, not colleagues or professional acquaintances, as work can be an inherently competitive environment for many people, not just for people with NPD.

That being said, emotionally healthy people want their friends and family and other people in their personal life to be happy, do well, have a good time, have loving relationships, feel good about their appearance, etc. However, for a narcissist, they typically experience happiness and success of any kind as a zero-sum game- meaning it feels to them that everything is a secret competition, and if you are happy and things are going well for you, they feel that they are losing. This frequently drives them to try to sabotage other people’s happiness or success, sometimes in big, obvious ways, but also in smaller, more passive-aggressive ways, to try to regulate their self-esteem. In other words, when they notice other people around them doing well or feeling happy, they may feel narcissistically injured by this and try to ruin it or make the other person feel less than in some way.

The higher functioning the person with NPD is, the more they will try to hide what they are doing, as they know it would reflect badly on them to appear to be sabotaging other people’s happiness around them. The lower functioning they are, the less deterred they are by what others think, and the less self-aware they are their impulse to sabotage other people’s happiness and less aware they are of their actions and words that act out their primitive impulses. Interestingly, someone with NPD is likely to enact this pattern, no matter how “smart” they are, even when there are other consequences for them in doing so, as the feelings of jealously, inadequacy and competitiveness override their better judgement, which frequently leads to interpersonal consequences as a result of their disordered reactions.

However, due to their disorder and lack of self-awareness, they typically do not see the connections between the interpersonal consequences they face and their acting-out behavior. As a result, their narcissistic defense is to blame others, feel further victimized, and use the experience as more justification for acting out however they choose to.

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