Narcissism and Surrender
Overcoming a need for control
What is relational narcissism?
Narcissism, a term which originated from Greek mythology about a man Narcissus who fell in love with his own reflection, is classically defined as the pursuit of gratification from one’s own vanity and admiration of one’s idealised self-perception.
There’s more to narcissism than vanity and endless need for recognition. Narcissistic behaviours involve dominance and domination expressed along a spectrum of authority, superiority, self-absorption and exploitativeness, from the most subtle to the most violent.
From a trauma-informed perspective, narcissistic behaviours are survival adaptations to earlier life adversity, relational trauma and emotional wounding. It's how people behave with others in order to assuage feelings of powerlessness, inferiority, shame and fear of the unknown. It’s our attempts to evade death and complete loss of control that keeps us in a state of suffering and ignorance of the human condition.
Narcissism is ultimately about control - controlling one's experience by controlling other people's emotional states, experiences, narratives & behaviours in order to maintain one's constructed view of reality.
Control is about maintaining order, predictability and comfort. Needing to be in control perpetuates suffering that's sourced in shame of one's perceived powerlessness, imperfection, weakness and inferiority.
The antidote to narcissism in each of us is surrendering the need for control in order to manage feelings of powerlessness and ultimately, fear of the unknown.
What is surrender?
It’s yielding to a greater force - a force of nature, a higher power, a greater purpose or to the present moment once you’ve realised you can’t force solutions or situations to go your way. It’s not about surrendering to another person (unless you’re in a consensual arrangement about domination). This requires trust and faith that even if you let go of needing to be in control, everything will be ok.
I’m not saying this is easy. Or smooth. Or remotely comfortable.
It’s what happens when you’ve tried everything to make things work according to your own vision or dream. You might have tried everything to make a relationship work or complete a project or survive in a hostile work culture. You eventually arrive at a moment where you recognise that you are limited in your capacity to create the change or circumstances that align with your plans and you have to give up those plans. You let them go because you accept that this is the end of the line and you’re ready to accept help in whatever form it takes. And then something happens - you find strength to take one more step and you’ve become open to whatever comes next. You’ve safely entered into the unknown and are now open to the infinite possibilities in this new space.
There are less dramatic ways of opening into the unknown. Being open to diverse perspectives, curiosity and desire to learn something new from others who are quite different to you help you get more familiar with sitting in discomfort. Being in the discomfort without doing anything to shift the sensation is strength training to 'doing' surrender.
Surrender rebuilds trust with yourself, others and the world around you and heals the effect of countless life betrayals that began early in life.
Thank you for reading and for your thoughts on this topic,
Nathalie Martinek, PhD
The Narcissism Hacker
Hack narcissism and support my work
I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.
While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.
I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.
Here’s how you can help.
Order my book: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence
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I grew up around a lot of this type of behavior and did it myself because I didn't know any different. Discovering astrology in my early twenties helped me get off a path that was not going anywhere good. For example, I was controlling and overbearing toward my younger sister in a way that went beyond normal older sibling protectiveness. Of course, I looked up her astrological chart once I knew how to do so, back in roughly 2009. I saw that the ongoing cycle of Pluto was about to interact with her chart in a difficult way over the coming years — and I realized I could not go out in the sky and grab Pluto and pull it away from her. That very literal realization helped me learn to back off from her. I suppose you could call that process surrender. It was easier for me to release my own illusion of control once I was able to replace it with the superior force of the cycles of the planets, though. I think it would be really hard for someone to drop the idea that they were in control if they didn't have another compelling idea to replace it with.
The climax in this article for me is the surrender and in that we find strength or a gate opens to other ways.
To paint a scenario; should one now be faced with a work environment that is aware of this progression to persistently keep to a narrative knowing that results are either surrender or they are ready to put up a fight till one of us tires out. Dr. Nathalie thank you for this article, but might this not tend to a catch 22? Either Surender or be ready to fight. My experience seems to align with the surrender to greater powers path; I simply took solace in "truth is non-verbal" and focused on other concerns of mine. My curiousity is might there have been something else that could have happened? I definitely did not like fact that within that community of practise if anyone had a contrary view that person got bullied and my 'crime' was that I asked why we should take a certain lime of action. The reaction was violent emotional outbursts.