Empathy

I hate the term ‘Narcissist’ because it carries such a pejorative.

Historically it has been used to describe anyone that is excessively selfish, according to someone else.

More latterly, we have Narcissistic Personality Disorder,which comes with a means to ‘measure’ one’s degree of Narcissism.

We do this because Narcissism is usually considered a problem in relationships with others.

Rather than labelling people, I would find it more useful to label people’s behaviour in certain interactive situations, especially behaviours that cause issues for one party or more.

After all, there ain’t no personality disorders for the lone ranger in the wild.

Even if a person does have a problem with their good self, it usually requires current or temporally displaced interactions with others to egg it on.

All I can gather from the web is that people that are treated unwell in their childhood (for their inherited and situational psychology) can react by learning certain behaviours that allow them to bypass the reliving of the early problem.

These start as habits and then become addictions.

Because these habits can be onerous on others, the practitioner also learns to be furtive about their efforts, mostly subconsciously.

Because, just like about everyone else, they don’t like being lonely.

Other people have a threshold of how much of this style of behaviour they can tolerate, where after they will run, hide, avoid, get angry, and just generally make the problem worse.

Fortunately the distribution of empathetic behaviour in people, the tolerance for being on the receiving end of the so-called Narcissistic behaviours, is quite wide because we all have these traits.

Both of them.