What Narcissism Isn't

Clearing Up the Confusion

Many people are confused about narcissism. The word itself has become a kind of catch-all term for a wide range of interpersonal dynamics, some of which are painful or confusing, but not necessarily pathological.

So this piece is about what narcissism isn’t.

Let’s start with a basic distinction: narcissism is not a synonym for selfishness. It’s not the same thing as being inconsiderate, or aloof, or emotionally unavailable. It’s also not entitlement, although entitlement is often involved. It isn’t stubbornness or a lack of interest in another person’s feelings. While all of these attitudes and behaviors may be present in someone with narcissistic traits, they’re also frequently present in people who are anxious, avoidant, grieving, depressed, burned out, or just having a bad day.

Narcissism isn’t a conscious choice.

It is not a persona someone puts on like a mask to deceive others. It’s not a strategy to manipulate or control other people. It’s not the opposite of kindness.

Narcissism may involve low-empathy states, but it is not defined by an absence of empathy.

Narcissism also isn’t abuse. Abuse is abuse. There is no need to attach the word “narcissistic” to it.

We don’t routinely stigmatize other conditions in this way. There aren’t countless forums built around the idea of “bipolar abuse” or “anxious attachment abuse.” It’s a unique feature of how narcissism has been culturally moralized. I made a video a while back discussing the term “narcissistic abuse,” where I offered a clinically grounded alternative: the use of others as selfobjects. This is something that all children do when they are developing their baseline self-esteem. Adults with pathological narcissism and NPD continue to use people as selfobjects because they lack the mature capacity to regulate self-esteem effectively.

But this definition is a far cry from the lurid, visceral depictions of nightmare narcissistic abuse you’ll find on most other forums. Most of those are conflating multiple concepts that may or may not have anything to do with actual narcissism or NPD.

Perhaps most importantly, pathological narcissism is not another word for “evil.” It’s not cruelty disguised as charm. It’s not a moral category at all. It’s a form of mental illness.

Here’s what narcissism actually is: it’s a vulnerability in self-esteem that causes a person to hold reactive views of themselves and others, and to sometimes engage in interpersonal behaviors that are used to stabilize self-image and self-esteem. At more disordered levels, NPD can involve a fragile or even fragmented self-experience that must be continually propped up through idealization, performance, control, grandiosity, or devaluation.

People with pathological narcissism aren’t choosing to be the way they are. Their behavior emerges from how they learned (or perhaps didn’t learn) to manage unbearable feelings. It is an internal disorder that shows up in myriad ways that can’t be reliably recognized as “narcissistic.” To accurately diagnose narcissism, you need to know the person’s psychology, not just their behavior.

Let’s look at a few common examples of behaviors that get confused for narcissism:

Avoiding emotional intimacy

This can be hurtful, but it isn’t narcissism. People avoid intimacy for many reasons: maybe they don’t feel safe, maybe they struggle with loss of self in the context of emotionally close relationships, maybe they’re depressed or dissociating. Perhaps most difficult to tolerate—sometimes people avoid intimacy because they don’t want to be close to you. That can certainly challenge anyone’s self-esteem. But not wanting to be close to someone isn’t a form of mental illness.

Setting a boundary

I am regularly called a narcissist because I remove abusive comments on my YouTube channel. People rage at this rule. Consider the irony, for a moment, of calling someone a narcissist because they won’t allow you to abuse someone else in a space they moderate. People call me entitled, arrogant, controlling, and flat out accuse me of lying when YouTube auto-moderates their comments and deletes them before I even have a chance to review them.

But I’m not just discussing my personal boundaries around abusive comments. There are many people out there who regularly confuse boundaries for entitlement, who carry the unexamined belief that they should be permitted to do and say anything they feel, and that anyone who says “no” is trying to manipulate or control them. Without boundaries we couldn’t have relationships at all. If you believe someone else’s limit is narcissistic simply because it frustrates your desires, you may be struggling with entitlements of your own. Does that make you a narcissist? No. Entitlement isn’t narcissism. But it can certainly result in behavior that is abusive or harmful to other people.

Disagreement is not gaslighting

Gaslighting is a very specific phenomenon where one person methodically and intentionally undermines another person’s grip on reality. If you and your partner remember an argument differently, that’s not gaslighting—it’s just being human. Accusing someone of gaslighting because they remember something differently than you is another form of implicit entitlement. It assumes that your recollection of events is entirely correct and that anyone who disagrees with you or has a different perspective must be trying to undermine your reality. Such a stance is fundamentally egocentric. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve seldom run into actual gaslighting. I’ve run into dishonesty. I’ve run into manipulation. I’ve certainly run into narratives that defensively minimize a person’s accountability. But situations where someone has a studied, conscious, methodical intent to drive someone else insane are incredibly rare. It is much more often a combination of chronic misunderstandings, poor communication, and mutual defensiveness. And occasionally, the accusatory partner is actually engaged in paranoid ideation, fueled by watching thousands of hours of narc abuse content.

Being oblivious or uninsightful

There are many people in the world who lack insight into their behaviors. Only a small fraction of them have NPD.

Being selfish, preoccupied, or insensitive

These are behaviors, and behaviors are not narcissism. Behaviors can be motivated by narcissism, but in that case we still aren’t talking about behaviors—we are talking about the underlying motivations. People are selfish and insensitive for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps they are worried or preoccupied with something else, perhaps they don’t appreciate the extent to which you feel hurt, perhaps they can’t tolerate the guilt they would feel if they admitted fault for something they did, or perhaps they just don’t like you. In the absence of a central self-esteem deficit accompanied by maladaptive compensatory strategies that at least occasionally include legitimate grandiosity, selfishness or insensitivity is not narcissism or NPD.

We are living in a cultural moment where narcissism has become a shorthand for anything that feels invalidating or emotionally threatening. But there is a cost. It fuels moral panic. It stigmatizes people who are already struggling with shame. It silos us into rigid categories of victim and abuser. And I can tell you from experience, I have treated many individuals and couples, and the person who identifies as the victim is sometimes absolutely engaged in abusive behaviors of their own, about which they have little insight and for which they take no accountability. The world isn’t black and white, and treating it as such leaves us stuck in cycles of accusation, othering, and stagnant anger that only leads to more pain.

People who struggle with legitimate narcissism are often ashamed, confused, and afraid to ask for help precisely because they know how vilified the word has become. When we treat narcissism as an accusation rather than a condition, we don’t create accountability. We promote silence.

So my invitation is this: the next time you’re tempted to call someone a narcissist, pause. Ask yourself: What am I actually feeling? Am I hurt? Am I disappointed? Do I feel unseen or rejected? And then ask: Will calling this person a narcissist help me with any of those feelings? Or can I tolerate the ambiguity inherent in human relationships?

Narcissism is not a moral failing. The people who struggle with it are not monsters. They are just people. Whether or not you can see it, they are often hurting, often defended, and often terrified. I say this as someone who spends a significant portion of every weekday discussing the most private feelings of people with this condition. The moment we forget someone else’s humanity, we lose something essential…not only about them, but about ourselves.

I’d like to close with a quote by the 13th century poet Rumi, that speaks to what is so often lost in these conversations:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.