For someone to be on the spectrum of the narcissist personality disorder, people would need at least five of the nine characteristics—one of those being A lack In Empathy, unable to identify or recognise the thoughts, feelings, needs of others.
The others are:-
- A belief they are special.
- Exploitative.
- Grandiose.
- Envy.
- Entitled.
- Preoccupation with their ideal.
- Requires excessive attention.
- Arrogance.
Signs someone lacks empathy.
- Oblivious to others feelings.
- Gets annoyed when people expect them to understand how the narcissist hurt them.
- Always right.
- Refusal to admit fault.
- Refusal to listen to other perspectives.
- Acts insensitive to others pain, saying,” You’re overreacting, don’t be so sensitive, it was only a joke.”
- Blames all others for problems.
- Difficulty maintaining healthy relationships.
- It’s all about them.
- Doesn’t recognise the pain they cause others.
- Argumentative.
- Not sympathetic shows little compassion.
Empathy is having the ability to understand how another is feeling in any given situation from the other person’s perspective. Having the ability to empathise is having the ability to care. Empathy is having the ability to share in the feeling that another might be experiencing. With empathy, people try not to hurt people in the first place.
Empathy is the ability to share in an emotional feeling or physical feeling, Love, pain, fear, hurt, sadness, anger.
A narcissist often lacks the empathy to care.
A narcissist might hurt you in some way, either humiliating or shaming you, which is often intentional to gaslight you into believing you’re less than you are so they can further their control over you, then to distract you from the pain they caused, if you recognise and ask them about it, they’ll claim ”its only a joke.” or ”don’t be so sensitive.” as they don’t want to admit fault, they want to blame your emotions and not their actions.
This is when we can give someone a chance and then remind ourselves were entering the danger zone. If they were joking and have empathy, they’d recognise their actions hurt us and wouldn’t repeat their behaviour. We all make mistakes. Most of us recognise these mistakes and empathise, feel bad for hurting another that pain they caused would stop them doing it again. If someone does it again, that’s who they are, and if we forgive them again and give them a second chance, they learn it’s acceptable to treat us that way, and when they do it a third time, to them, it’s our fault for forgiving them, not theirs for hurting us.
When you’re trying to talk through something that’s happened to you, and they either change the subject, tell you ”it wasn’t that bad.” or start talking about something far worse that happened to them, and not to strike up that two-way conversation for mutual understanding, to gain sympathy for themselves.
When someone will sit and watch you cry over the pain they have caused with a glint in their eye, no apology, and claim you brought it on yourself. When they just don’t recognise the pain they cause those around them.
When you try to explain to those who hurt you or someone around you, and they don’t seem to listen, worse still, they use that explanation against you or those around you to cause more pain.
When they refuse to admit any wrongdoing? Instead, they come at you with ”That’s just like you.” or ”Why do you have to make everything so difficult.”
When they rage out of nowhere or accuse you of being untrustworthy because you found out about and the untrustworthy thing they did.
The best way to handle those with a lack of empathy is no contact.
The best way to handle those around you that are on the lower end of the scale. If you can not go no contact, grey rock, don’t give them anything they can hurt you with, don’t tell about you, don’t ask about them, be monotonously boring as you possibly can, don’t make eye contact when face to face, just look over the top of their ear, keep things on a need to know basis, if they are provoking your emotions to create anger, retreat, rethink and only respond if you need to do so, remember you can not change who they are or how they treat people, you can change how you respond and how you let them make you feel, it takes time, it takes patience, it’s a learning curve, it might feel uncomfortable, you might slip up when you do slip up. That dark cloud hits. It’s just a reminder to go again. Try a new approach, so you feel happy. It’s not mean treating those who like to hurt you this way. It’s for your mental health. You can, and you will recover from this.
Narcissists lack empathy.
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Elizabeth Shaw is not a Doctor or a therapist. She is a mother of five, a blogger, a survivor of narcissistic abuse, and a life coach, She always recommends you get the support you feel comfortable and happy with. Finding the right support for you. Elizabeth has partnered with BetterHelp (Sponsored.) where you will be matched with a licensed councillor, who specialises in recovery from this kind of abuse.
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