Sorry, But Your Ex Is Probably Not a Narcissist

The Hazards of Self-Help

In 1969, George Miller, the president of the American Psychological Association urged psychologists to “give psychology away”. There were too many problems and too few psychologists for them to hoard their knowledge. Instead, psychology should be popularized and spread to the public, so they could use it themselves. It was in this spirit that thousands of self-help articles, books, podcasts, videos, blog posts, and social media memes have been conceived. How is it working out? We’ve had more than fifty years of self-help psychotherapy. Are we getting any better?

In some ways, we are. There is a little less stigma about some mental illnesses and far less stigma about getting help for them. People readily claim to have minor variations of ADD, OCD, and PTSD. They’re getting better at talking about some feelings. Ninty-one percent of the users of Hinge, the dating website, prefer to date someone in therapy. Now, when people first come to my office, they already know the cognitive behavioral tips I used to have to teach them. They have apps on their phones that train them on how to relax. Psychological concepts such as addiction, assertiveness, attachment, co-dependency, dysfunction, narcissism, projection, self-esteem, traumatic bonding, triggering, and toxic masculinity have become everyday language. Give the typical man on the street the quote from Freud, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, and he’ll know why it’s funny.

On the other hand, the articles, books, podcasts, videos, blog posts, and social media memes that get liked and spread the most are not those that show you how to cultivate your virtues, take personal responsibility, listen to others, and maintain healthy relationships. They’re the ones that tell you your ex is a narcissist and he’s been gaslighting you. They’ll urge you to go your own way and end relationships rather than how to preserve them.

We shrinks should be ashamed of ourselves, but we’ve taught people to have no shame. I’m an offender, too. I’ve generated a load of articles, written a lot of books, appeared on podcasts, produced educational videos, and even created a meme or two. I’ll be speaking about reconciliation by video at the Family Recovery Summit, July 24-28, 2023. This will be a free conference. Anyone who’s had a loved one who’s been addicted should tune in.

What could possibly be better than that? Is anything better than free?

Nothing is free. There are always hidden costs. Sometimes they’re acceptable. Sometimes they’re not.

There are advantages to getting your therapy by self-help. You don’t have to make an appointment, put pants on, or show up on time. No one has to know except for your librarian, bookseller, Google, or the over-worked people at the Amazon warehouse. If you read or watch online, you can clear your history or use private mode. Depending on who you’re reading or listening to, you could end up learning as much or more about your condition as the best-educated therapist you can find.

But if you don’t have an opportunity to talk about what you think you’re learning, you might be getting it wrong. You’re not accountable for following up on their advice and they’re minimally accountable for the advice they’re giving. Also, most self-help sources only espouse a single point of view. If your case is complicated or if you simply picked the wrong source, it might take you off track.

The biggest flaw of self-help, in all its forms, has to do with something called the hermeneutic horizon. It’s hard to learn what you don’t know and it’s almost impossible to be told what you don’t want to know. It’s all beyond your hermeneutic horizon.

When I’m doing psychotherapy with a client, I always try to hit the edge of their hermeneutic horizon, that sweet spot between what they already know and what they cannot accept or understand. If I introduce something too far beyond, at best it goes nowhere; at worst, it alienates them and becomes a barrier between us. On the other hand, if I know the client’s history, I know their point of view and frame of reference. I can present a perspective they can accept, while still challenging them a little. As I give them new information, I can observe how they’re receiving it and alter what I’m saying on the fly. But a poster of a meme, an author of an article or book, or a speaker in a video or podcast doesn’t know and can’t see the audience. She can only rely on who she imagines her target audience to be.

What happens when millions of people with their hermeneutic horizons go on social media and consume articles, books, podcasts, videos, blog posts, and social media memes? They start liking, re-tweeting, and sharing the ones that are already within their hermeneutic horizon, the least challenging ones. This is how we get millions of posts about how your ex is a narcissist and gaslighting you. It’s probably gratifying to hear that you’re not the problem; but sorry, he’s probably not a narcissist and, when you think he’s gaslighting you, he’s only sharing his point of view.

If your ex is not a narcissist, then what is he? He’s another suffering, divided human being like you. He certainly has narcissistic tendencies, just as you do, and me. It’s not a matter of whether a person is a narcissist or not, it’s how narcissistic are they. Psychotherapy was never meant to facilitate putting people like your ex in a box called narcissism and dismissing everything they have to say. We do better when we erase stigma and recognize our own pathologies. Here’s some irony for you. Narcissism is all about having a constricted hermeneutic horizon. To the extent you’re narcissistic, all you know is your own point of view and nobody can tell you anything.

Given enough sessions, a therapist can gently help you see things about yourself you don’t want to know, but need to know if you want to grow. So, it’s clearly better to go into therapy than to rely on self-help. But here’s the thing, therapy for as many sessions as needed may be impossible. Just as George Miller said in 1969, there ain’t enough shrinks in the world to fix everything that’s screwed up. He didn’t say it that way, but he would have if he could have tailored his message for a particular audience. We need self help because there’s not enough professional help. Therefore, if you use self-help, use it wisely.

If you use self-help, you’ll find some speakers or authors will tell you things you like to hear. They might provide you with a better argument for your position. That kind of information has some value; it reinforces old lessons. But listen closely to the messages you don’t understand or could even object to. That’s how you grow. That’s how you get free from whatever mire you’re stuck in.

Addendum

When I published this piece in the Invisible Illness publication on Medium, I got a lot of comments that I didn’t get here on my own website. Many of them were very negative. I want to thank all those who have commented on the piece, especially those who made examples of themselves. The main point of the article was that, whenever we try to talk about serious matters using any form of mass communication, we have no control over the frame of mind people will be in when they receive it. They are apt to approve of things that don’t challenge their point of view, within what I call their hermeneutic horizon. They’ll respond with bafflement or hostility to anything they don’t understand. But, when we’re able to sit down and discuss our points of view in person, with an attitude of mutual respect, then we’re better able to work things out and expand our hermeneutic horizons. Unfortunately, we’re not always able to do that. Therefore, if you are encountering something in text that seems strange to you, it’s best to keep an open mind so you can learn something new. If you need to see examples of what happens when you don’t, just scroll through the comments to this article and take note of those who had such a strong reaction to the title that they didn’t appear to absorb anything else I had to say.

It’s a fair question to ask whether I kept an open mind when I was reading reactionary comments. I tried to do so. Some did point out something I missed. I wish I had written part of the essay differently. If I could add to it now, this is what I’d say:

When I say that your ex is probably not a narcissist, I don’t mean to imply that your feelings for him are invalid. If he treated you poorly and hurt you, then he treated you poorly and hurt you. If he lied, broke promises, betrayed you, or failed to take you into account, those are facts. I can understand if you decide to leave him. Not calling him a narcissist doesn’t change any of that. It certainly doesn’t excuse it. Calling him names usually doesn’t make anything better. It generally makes everything worse.

The exception may be if he meets the strict criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (which, by the way, is far more narrow than both the public’s notion of narcissism and the way it’s discussed in the psychoanalytic literature). Then there may be some benefits to grouping him with others who meet those criteria and studying what they have in common. However, no one in a close relationship with such a person should be making this diagnosis alone and no one else should be making it if they haven’t interviewed him. If he meets the criteria, then he has a mental health condition and should be treated with the same compassion we’ve learned to treat people with other conditions. If he hurts people, he should be accountable for what he did, and not stigmatized for a condition he has.