blowfish
If you’re alive and breathing, chances are that at some point in your life you’ve come across a narcissist. If you’re unlucky, maybe you’ve even been taken for a ride by one. Spiritual communities aren’t exempt from people with narcissistic tendencies; they can even be breeding grounds for people with these kinds of issues to flourish.
Lately I’ve been interested in the intersection between narcissism, and two aspects of spiritual bypassing - focus on the positive to the exclusion of anything negative, and overly porous boundaries led by blind compassion.
I’m going to explore who narcissists are, how they can cause damage to the world around them if left unchecked, how these mechanisms of spiritual bypassing might allow them to flourish, and finally, how we can push back against this kind of behaviour.
Let’s define narcissism first, as it’s an overused and misunderstood term. Narcissism is a term that describes a cluster of traits: lack of empathy, delusions of grandeur, superficiality, a sense of entitlement, admiration and validation seeking, hypersensitivity, disproportionate anger, antisocial behaviour, and a tendency to manipulate and use others.
These are abusive patterns of behaviour that some people display that make life for themselves and those around them painful. I’ll be referring to people that display these behaviours as ‘narcissists’, but of course it’s important to realise that people are multidimensional, and that this label is just a convenient way of referring to people that display many of these behaviours, rather than an attempt to surmise their entire character.
The word narcissist comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. With the current state of the social media culture we live in and its obsession with manicuring the perfect visage, or the systems of capital which swoop in to provide superficial panaceas to an increasingly unstable world, or the adulation of selfish traits as being essential to climb the ladder of life; we live in a world which is providing all the right conditions for narcissism to flourish.
Narcissists are actually very easy to understand – their desperate need for the world to worship them is fuelled by their ego, and their fragile, empty sense of self. Narcissists can be confusing because they tend to be emotionally cold, aloof and distant sometimes, and then smooth and confident other times; but if things don’t go their way and they feel sleighted, their mask will slip, and they can behave with unusual cruelty and vengefulness.
So why are people taken in by narcissists?
There’s a few reasons.
A big one is family. Some people may have been brought up by a primary caregiver who displayed signs of narcissism – such as with cold, emotionally distant, invalidating, or abusive parents. If this was the case for you, then you are most likely working through patterns which include an inability to trust your choices, as you were brought up being gaslit and manipulated, or you may have had problems entering and maintaining relationships as a result of having fuzzy ideas of what constitutes true empathy and love, or maybe you’re feeling like you always want the attention and admiration from an invisible, disconnected other.
Narcissistic patterns undercut the core for what is necessary for healthy relationship – values such as reciprocity, well-wishing and concern for others, respect, patience, sincerity, honesty, and trust. These things are not possible when dealing with a narcissist.
Narcissists develop a language of seduction in order to manipulate and control people, so that they can cloy the admiration and power they crave. To win the trust of people, narcissists often display charm and confidence to blind others to their manipulations and true lack of empathy.
Our relationship with narcissists are basically allowed to form and maintain through the hope that if we persist with such people, and try harder to work on our relationship with them, we may be able to heal the dysfunction and move forward; but being in close proximity with a narcissist is like witnessing a car accident on repeat, in slow motion. You slowly become conditioned to their lack of empathy, their duplicity, their barbed remarks or temper tantrums. Their words and actions slowly shape your reality until you find their voice is your internal self talk and can’t trust your own judgement.
The tragedy of becoming entangled with such people is that it’s our altruism that makes us a target, and it’s the slow replacement of our virtues with their defilements that make it difficult to escape when the tone of the dance flips from charm to abuse. There is a real terror that comes from the realisation that once you’re entangled, it can be nightmarish to let go, and so people will often endure the abuse so as to avoid the toxicity of the confrontation needed to end the relationship.
Narcissists rarely change. Most narcissists are incapable of recognising that their behaviour is negatively impacting other people and that they need to make changes to that behaviour. Instead, they hide behind a mask.
Now might be a good time to talk about spiritual bypassing.
John Welwood coined the term spiritual bypassing, which means using spiritual beliefs or practices as a way of avoiding real feelings, or processing real pain.
Spiritual bypassing is essentially a form of denial. It’s the ‘everything’s fine’ mantra, where people believe they are above their negative emotions. If you can already see the link between this and narcissism, don’t worry, we’ll explore it more soon.
There are many ways in which spiritual bypassing can play out on an individual and collective level. Once you learn the language of bypassing, you’ll never look at your spiritual community the same way again, as unfortunately it’s very prevalent. The two ways that I want to explore briefly are toxic positivity generated from negativity phobia, and weak boundaries led by blind compassion.
Hyper-positivity is an attitude where we don’t want to interact with anything that is bad - rather than opening up to the full spectrum of human experience, we tune out uncomfortable emotions. This most often occurs as a response to a culture of denial, where people are censored from voicing their true feelings.
In Buddhism for example, it’s tempting to label all negativity as upakkilesa, impurities or defilements that need to be instantly let go. We can approach defilements like this, however the Buddha also encourages us to try and understand the nature of our suffering; the Pāli word is pariññeyya as it occurs in the Dhammacakkappavattanasutta (SN 56.11) for example, which means one should fully understand suffering from all angles.
If we always banish uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to see their patterns as signalling a deeper need for examination and change. Pausing to examine how the past is haunting the present, for example in the way a response to past trauma is being triggered in a present situation, isn’t about identifying with these emotions so that we create additional self-reification. It’s about learning to see them with clarity, and understand the mechanisms of our reactions, so we can let go of their causes.
The result of not allowing ourselves or others to voice pain, is a climate of repression. This creates a pantomime of fake happiness, where people mask their depression, or loneliness, or whatever, and may end up feeling fraudulent when the reality of their human life doesn’t match unrealistic spiritual ideals, whether those ideals are coming from themselves, or an implied expectation by their community. It suggests that suffering is due to a deficiency in our spiritual maturation, and invalidates us by suggesting there is something wrong with us, and not the culture of whitewashing which denies such problems.
Shutting down people’s legitimate reactions to unfair, hurtful, and abusive situations – as if people are not entitled to feel these reactions – simply compounds the pain, especially if people enduring these situations have been through abusive patterns of behaviour which involved gaslighting their reality.
Creating an atmosphere where people feel ‘unspiritual’ if they feel negative emotions, can externalise into people feeling like they are failing spiritually if they take objection to bad behaviour in other people.
A systemic climate of fearing our judgement of other people’s bad behaviour tricks us into believing that we have to sacrifice our own personal needs in service of a higher spiritual ideal of unconditional forgiveness and compassion. Don’t get me wrong, forgiveness is wonderful, but I think we all too often see forgiveness as either black or white, whereas more often forgiveness is a process that happens gradually. It’s like a dimmer switch on a light, rather than simply flicking the light on or off.
Boundaries are important. We need to be aware of what our teachers and spiritual companions expect from us. We also need to define our own personal boundaries, so that others do not encroach into spaces where we are not comfortable, or where we need space.
In spiritual communities we are encouraged to relax our boundaries with one another, so as to cultivate good-will and harmony. If we don’t do this, we will be forever shut off from those around us, hiding our true emotional life by censoring ourselves, which disconnects us not only from the people around us, but ultimately ourselves, as we lose our ability to take agency in our life by defining who we are and voicing what we truly need in relation to the world around us.
If we relax our boundaries too much however, we invite people to take advantage of us. This is often fuelled by wanting to please the crowd, and can be exacerbated if it is being modelled unskilfully by people in positions of leadership in spiritual communities. It allows bad actors to enter our lives and our communities and hurt us, and leaves us feeling exploited and manipulated, and if we are in an environment that devalues calling out bad behaviour, also powerless to voice our contention. Setting boundaries towards problematic behaviour that goes against one’s values is seen as not practicing forgiveness and acceptance.
A spiritual community that sacrifices negativity at the altar of perennial positivity, or that celebrates overly porous boundaries in the game of unending forgiveness, creates fertile ground for the narcissist to thrive.
Narcissistic people generally don’t like negativity. Despite causing untold damage to the people around them, they don’t interpret their behaviour as negative - they think it’s an appropriate response. The spiritual bypassing of the positivity gospel benefits the narcissist, as it enables them to behave badly, and if someone has a negative reaction to that, the bad behaviour of the narcissist is cast into the unseen shadows, and it’s simply the victim’s spiritual failing for not being able to move through being violated.
A sea of second chances motivated by unhealthy, blind compassion is an accelerant to the narcissist, as the altruism of always giving people the benefit of the doubt will be readily abused by someone who doesn’t feel remorse and is quite content to keep crossing lines if they are allowed to, in order to get what they want regardless of how it may affect other people.
This is how narcissists are allowed to take root and take over – they thrive on not being held accountable for their actions and being allowed to cross boundaries. Forgiveness is interpreted by the narcissist not as a sign to humble oneself and do better, but as an amusing weakness and get-out-of-jail-free pass on behalf of the institution which encourages it, and the victim who is forced to comply.
This leaves the person who is experiencing the narcissistic abuse feeling as if there is something wrong with them, and places the abuser, the narcissist, in the position of being the better man or woman, as after all, they aren’t the one ‘being negative’ and spoiling the positivity party by pointing out crap behaviour, or ‘causing trouble’ by not exercising compassion to keep the peace.
In this way, spiritual bypassing becomes an enabler’s game. Instead of the spiritual aspirant being allowed to feel the full spectrum of who they are in a safe environment where they are protected by healthy boundaries, the community that condones bypassing actually invalidates and disempowers the aspirant, in addition to the manipulative, antisocial and apathetic behaviour they are being forced to endure by the narcissist. It’s a double whammy.
This is a terrible thing to inflict on anyone, and it should be called out for what it is – which is a systemic failure to address toxic behaviour and protect members of spiritual communities from horrible people. It’s a dynamic I’ve seen a lot, and one I simply can’t get down with.
So then, how do we deal with narcissists?
The answer is - manage your expectations, and set boundaries.
You can’t change a narcissist, nor will hoping they will change be of any use – one must accept that that person is the way there are, and learn to navigate them, or slowly move away from them. How we do that will of course depend on the nature of the relationship; whether they are someone pivotal in our life like a parent, or someone that we have more mobility with, like a boss or a friend.
It’s easy to get stuck in old narratives. People who come from a family with a narcissistic parent may feel like they missed out on having someone who had their back, and those who married a narcissist may find themselves abused, or simply alone despite being married.
Survivors of narcissism do have happy endings, albeit different to what they expected. We can change the ‘you are not enough’ narrative into a better story, and we can learn to heal our inner child by becoming our own ally. Every life story can be a misfortune, or a miracle, it just depends on how we work with it. Real experiences like grief, sadness, anxiety, and trauma, aren’t solved in a finger snap with a spiritual bypass; they take time, courage and persistence to work through. Sometimes being given pain is an opportunity to grow, and we can do that, if we allow ourselves to take the steps to grow.
The more important point is that instead of investing so much of our energy and mental space into the dysfunctional and unhealthy relationships in our life, we can flip the script and invest in the people that are good and kind to us – the true kalyāṇamitta – giving our best to those relationships, and leaving the scraps for those who are not nourishing us.
If we sideline the people in our life that don’t meet our standards for good and reasonable behaviour, then we take our power back and the onus switches from continual forgiveness, to healthy boundaries that respect our needs and values.
I think the reason I take such issue with narcissistic people is that they’re kind of emblematic of what I see as the crux of the problem in our world. When we allow a society driven by a relentless, unquenchable thirst for its own importance to continue the pursuit of its desires at all costs, we expose the rot in our collective psyche.
The rewarding of narcissistic traits in our society results in being the subjects of insecure tyrants; politics marred by fear and deception, or workplaces that normalise dodgy ethics and revenge. All of this is allowed to fester and breed without consequence. In fact, it’s celebrated.
When our society is driven by such metrics, then qualities like empathy and non-harm, which are central to all that is good and true in this world, are sidelined. How about we switch off the attention-seeking, polarising discourse, and learn to measure ourselves with better values such as authenticity, compassion, and kindness? This will not only lay a good foundation for our own lives, but enable us to form the future that can brace for the changes ahead for all of us.
We can push back against the tendency of narcissism we see in our own lives, and in the world. We can find communities that value kindness and compassion. We can choose who we let into our lives. With the world burning all around us, anyone who is moving through the world with empathy, an open heart, sound integrity, and a lightness to see the humour in this mess, in the face of people that would have us burn with them - is a hero.
- Peace