Why People Who Call Everyone Else Narcissists Are Often Narcissists Themselves

If you’ve been frustrated by a problematic relationship with an employee, a family member, or a romantic partner lately and gone to the internet for advice, you’ve undoubtedly been told the same thing. This toxic other party is probably a narcissist. 

Social media and the self-help press are full of tips on identifying, classifying, and dealing with narcissists. 

As someone who writes for the internet, I don’t have to guess why. This kind of content performs incredibly well. Everyone has had to deal with jerks and wants their pain validated. Plus, narcissism is having a cultural moment, with everyone from presidential candidates to entire generations being tagged as narcissists. 

But is all this awareness-raising about an apparent epidemic of narcissism actually helping people build better relationships and live happier lives? 

Not according to a chorus of experts who all warn narcissism mania has gone too far. Overuse of the word “narcissist” dilutes the true meaning of the term, distracting from other hard but more meaningful conversations and, in some cases, even turning people into narcissists themselves. 

Calling people narcissists is making you more narcissistic. 

For a catchy summation of this concern, I point you to this short clip from the podcast of author Mark Manson. In it, psychologist and relationship coach Sadia Khan describes her issues with what she calls “the narcissistic movement.” 

Is she right that “nine times out of 10 when someone comes to me and says ‘so-and-so is a narcissist,’ they are a narcissist themselves”?

This is a particularly dramatic and click-friendly way to put it, but psychotherapist Jennifer Gerlach has suggested something similar, if more subtle. Calling other people narcissistic is so appealing because it takes responsibility for conflicts off your shoulders.

“It can be very validating,” Gerlach writes in Psychology Today, but it also “makes it difficult for us to relate with the person, and to gather what they may be feeling/thinking outside what we have learned to associate with narcissism.”

Calling others narcissistic boosts your ego and assigns you the role of pure victim. That feels comfortable, but it also often makes you less empathetic and clear-eyed about the relationship. That’s not the same thing as being a narcissist, but it’s definitely nudging you toward too much self-involvement. 

Kristin Dombek, author of a book about the narcissism epidemic called The Selfishness of Others, describes labeling yourself the victim of a narcissist as “a story that can change the way you see everything if you start believing in it, giving you the uncanny but slightly exciting sensation that you’re living in a movie. It’s familiar, this movie, as if you’ve seen it before and it’s a creepy one, but you have the most important role in the script. You’re the hero.” 

Describing yourself this way may be a perverse thrill — who doesn’t want to be the hero of the story? — but this is still “a story that divides us, by defining empathy as something we have and others lack,” Dombek insists. 

Real abusers versus garden-variety jerks 

Of course there are actual, diagnosable narcissists out there truly emotionally abusing others. No one is excusing this behavior or arguing you should try to stay and work it out if that’s genuinely what is going on. Label away and run for the hills. 

But as Khan points out, the people throwing around the “narcissist” label are often the least likely to be in genuinely awful situations. When you’re really abused, you tend to blame yourself and think you’re the one that needs fixing.  

Much of the time the narcissist label is applied to garden-variety selfishness, obtuseness, or simple incompatibility. A bad relationship can be just a bad relationship. As Dombek insisted on Next Big Idea Club, “it doesn’t [do] any justice to people who are in abusive relationships for this word, or this label, to be just applied so generally.”

Slinging around the term “narcissist” dilutes its meaning. It can also be a way to dodge the hard work of either finding a way to co-exist with someone you find difficult or working up the nerve to sever the relationship, according to Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist who joins Dombek for the Next Big Idea Club discussion. 

“The healthiest thing for your well-being is to get off the label train and take responsibility for your life [and] actions. All of us have a lot more power to control our lives than we realize we do,” he argues. “So you either make the decision to take responsibility of your life and say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be this person’s friend anymore.’ And you have an assertive conversation with this person and you get out. Or you make the decision [to] accept that person’s character, both the good and the bad.”

What does all of this add up to? Good reason to be suspicious of people who throw around the term “narcissist” casually. 

Yes, there are plenty of genuine malignant narcissists out there, but calling every incidence of selfish or egotistical behavior narcissism diminishes the power of the label and often serves as a way to dodge responsibility for your own role in the situation.