Wait... Am I a Narcissist?

Have you ever gone through a season where you felt so consumed by your own problems that you started wondering, “Wait... am I a narcissist?”

In this episode of The Energy Xchange, we’re unpacking the difference between narcissism, self-focus, and what happens when a deeply caring person loses the capacity to care in the way they normally do.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why deeply introspective people often fear they’re selfish or narcissistic
• The difference between self-focus and self-importance
• Why emotional exhaustion can make you feel disconnected from your usual caring nature
• How survival mode limits your capacity for others
• Why the better question may be, “Do I have the emotional capacity to care right now?”
• How to get curious about what is knocking you out of safety instead of shaming yourself for struggling

This episode is not a diagnosis or a deep clinical breakdown of narcissism. It’s a compassionate conversation for the person who has ever spiraled into the question, “Is this who I really am?” during a season when they simply didn’t have much left to give.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spent years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today we're tackling a question that comes up for a lot of deeply caring people during seasons when they don't feel as caring toward other people. A few years ago, I had a lot of stuff going on. I wasn't feeling like myself, and I genuinely wondered if I was in fact a narcissist. Not because I thought I was better than everyone else, not because I lacked empathy, but because I found myself completely consumed by my own problems. I really wasn't thinking about or showing up for anyone else in my world. I didn't have a lot to give, and that scared me. If you're someone who identifies as thoughtful, tuned into other people, empathetic, there is a specific kind of feeling that sets in when you suddenly don't feel that way. We start asking questions: am I being self-centered? Am I manipulative? Am I making everything about me? And if you've really identified as a deeply caring, sensitive person and you're feeling all of these things, you might get the big whammy. Wait, am I actually a narcissist? Now, first of all, if you are genuinely asking that question of yourself and trying to understand your impact on other people, that's a pretty good sign that you're not dealing with narcissism in the way that you fear that you might be. But you're also not crazy for thinking that. Because when you are emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed, hurt, maybe really preoccupied with your own pain, your behavior can start to look different from who you know yourself to be. You might have less patience. Maybe you start pulling away from people, you stop checking in, you might not have the emotional bandwidth to hold anyone else's problems. And for an introspective person, that can feel unsettling. But I don't think most people who might ask themselves, you know, am I a narcissist are actually wrestling with narcissism. I think they're wrestling with what happens to a caring person when life strips away their capacity to care in the way that they normally do. The title of this episode might be a little clickbaity. I really don't want to dive too far into narcissism, but let's talk about what narcissism truly is. It's gotten to be a big buzzword, and I think that we're using it a lot more loosely than it's intended. It actually is a clinical diagnosis, but it's more than simply thinking about yourself. One part of it involves a persistent pattern of self-importance. That's obviously not the whole picture, but it's an important distinction for this conversation. It can also involve entitlement, difficulty taking accountability, and maybe difficulty recognizing or caring about the emotional reality of other people, especially when that conflicts with your own. Instead of I'm struggling right now, it's more like my struggle matters more than yours. It's not just I need support. It's other people should organize themselves around my needs. And I think that's where we need to make an important distinction between self-focus and self-importance. Self-focus is about where your attention is. Self-importance is about believing that your needs, your perspective, or experience should carry more weight than everyone else's. So self-focus says, I'm struggling right now. Maybe my resources are limited, I'm in survival mode, or I don't have much to give. Self-importance would say, my needs matter more than yours. My problems are more important than yours. Other people should accommodate me, or you know, the rules should bend around my experience. And those aren't the same thing. When we don't feel safe, our world gets smaller. Our nervous system starts spending all of its energy trying to keep us alive, emotionally, mentally, physically, financially, whatever version of survival mode we are in. And when all of your energy is going towards survival, you naturally have less capacity for everyone else. When you're drowning, you're not asking whether everyone else can swim, right? You're looking for air. And that doesn't mean you don't care about other people. It just means your system is overwhelmed and it's going inward first. And I think caring people can judge themselves especially harshly here because they're used to being the helper. They're used to being the one who notices, the one who checks in, the one who makes space, the person who can sense when something is off. So when we lose the capacity to do that, we don't just think, oh, you know, I'm tired, I'm struggling right now. We think, oh my God, is this who I really am? This came up for me pretty heavily when I started learning more about my own sensitive nature, when I really was at this stage where I was embracing that as my superpower. I was resonating with so many of the traits of being highly sensitive and emotionally attuned to other people, you know, the emotional awareness, the deep processing, the ability to feel what's happening in a room. So when I found myself in a really tough period of time and was seeing this behavior in myself that felt uncaring or ungenerous, I immediately thought, I'm not an empath. I think I might actually be a narcissist. And I didn't just wonder for a few minutes, like, I bought the books. I went down the rabbit hole. I was genuinely trying to answer that question. But what I can see now is that one of the reasons this question comes up for us is because we're measuring ourselves against who we know we are when we're doing well. You know that you're normally generous, you know that you're normally thoughtful and that you're emotionally available. So when life strips away your capacity, you don't just feel exhausted, you start questioning your identity. Some of those moments where I felt most selfish looking back now were the moments when I didn't feel safe enough to access the parts of me that naturally care for other people. When a relationship was failing, when my finances were a disaster, certainly in my 20s, when my weight was off the charts and I wasn't feeling any self-worth at all. I was in a different space. I did not have the capacity to show up for other people. I had to protect and nurture myself first. I couldn't see that then, but I see that now. So if you ever find yourself in this space, I think a better question than, you know, am I a narcissist or am I a selfish person is do I have the emotional capacity to care for other people right now? And if the answer is no, that doesn't automatically mean something is wrong with your character. It probably means something is happening in your life that's requiring every ounce of your attention. So the goal here isn't to shame ourselves into becoming less self-focused. What we want is to become safe enough in our body, in our relationships, our finances, our life that our attention naturally expands beyond ourselves again. Most deeply caring people do not need to learn how to care more. That's probably the default, right? I think a lot of us need to recover enough to regain the capacity to care the way that we naturally do. So if you're feeling a little bit selfish lately, do yourself and the people you love a huge favor and get to the root of what is knocking you out of your safety right now. All right, I'm gonna leave it with that. If this resonated for you, I would love it if you take the time to leave a review that helps other like minded people find the space. Thanks for listening, guys, and I will chat with you next week.