These labels get used a lot on GN. Of course, people like to label other people. They especially like to label people they disagree with or dislike. But I do wish they would choose their labels with care.
I think it’s a repeated bad habit here in GN for people to label those they don’t (or didn’t) like as ‘narcissistic’. A poster’s family member may indeed be (or have been) an unpleasant, unkind, bullying, cruel, self-centred person. That describes their attitudes and behaviour. But since we can’t climb inside someone else’s head, we can’t possibly detect whether such attitudes and behaviour are the result of narcissism or some other disorder of personality or reasoning.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a relatively rare diagnosis, and yet narcissism is reported to crop up quite frequently among families of posters to this forum. It seems unlikely that GNetters are disproportionately unfortunate in the psychology of their relatives, or are better able to diagnose the condition than the professionals.
Furthermore, it may be that much unpleasantness is actually the result of a two-way breakdown of a relationship because of a clash between two personalities. We rarely get both sides of a story on GN, and so we often rely on a poster’s angry or bitter diagnosis of somebody who has hurt them, often over many years, as the basis for a discussion. I often wonder how the other person would describe the GN poster if we could ask them.
As soon as I see someone using that term about another person, it tells me at least as much about the person using it as it does about the subject of their complaint.
I shall now don asbestos underwear and await a flamefest.
