Sunday, September 8, 2013

Narcissism, Part Three

The as-yet-not-done teenage brain is rather narcissistic in its approach to life and living. The process of maturing the teenage brain is designed to move it away from narcissistic behavior to more balanced behaviors. This is not a genetic process but a learned process and the teenager either learns it or not. If they fail to mature and move to more balanced behaviors, they tend to become narcissistic adults. While narcissists are able to feel most emotions as strongly as do others, they lack the essential ability to perceive or understand the feelings of others. As Martha Stout PhD has put it, narcissism is a failure not of conscience but of empathy. Emotionally speaking, narcissists don’t seem to see past their own nose, sometimes flying into narcissistic rages and then lacking the skills to get back on the good side of people they love. That’s exactly what had happened in the interactions between this mother and her adult daughter. The daughter had flown into several narcissistic rages when things has not turned out exactly as she expected or wanted, which had fractured the mother-daughter relationship, yet again. What to do? Last part tomorrow.

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