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Terms and Usage of site
Narcissistic Personality Symptoms
- grandiosity / exaggeration
- fantastic thinking / romantic
- believes special / unique
- requires admiration
- entitled / demanding
- exploitive / manipulative
- lacks empathy
- envious / jealous
- arrogant / haughty
Quick links:
Why Narcissists use us as their waste basket.
When I understood that Narcissists project their emotions and ideas onto others, I wanted to find out more. Because I was guilty of letting them do it to me and of doing it myself. I needed to break the pattern.
The metaphor I use for splitting and projection is when someone spits at someone they don't like - or just spits out a bast taste in their mouth. Try spitting into a glass and then drinking the liquid that was just in your mouth; difficult isn't it? Once something is outside of our bodies, it takes on new meaning.
Notice how people gossip about others, their houses, kids etc. Sometimes with jealousy/envy and sometimes with admiration? How we see others says much about ourselves. He who says it, is it- means that we often blurt out nasty things about people, not knowing why. This is called splitting; taking something we don't like about ourselves and then projecting it onto someone else. Next time you hear a friend calling someone a 'drama queen' or a 'jerk', think about what is really happening. The speaker may be admitting something about themselves. On the other hand, "silence is golden" and "if you have nothing good to say - say nothing", are maxims that narcissists use to silence their critics.
The more you read about people with NPD, the more you will come to understand how corrosive is their splitting and projection of their jealousy and hate onto others who then introject the NPD garbage into themselves. It is very destructive unless you know what is going on or have good defenses (or are another NPD).
The following is from changingminds.org
Projection takes aspects of one's internal world and projects them onto external subjects. This can be a defense mechanism where it is used to expel and externalize uncomfortable inner thoughts and feelings. Projective identification involves projection into another object and then identifying with the object (often a person). This keeps bad parts of the self at a safe distance without losing them.
Introjection occurs where a subject takes into itself the behaviors, attributes or other external objects, especially of other people. A common pattern is where a child introjects aspects of parents into its own persona. According to Freud, the ego and the superego are constructed by introjecting external behavior into the subject's own persona.
When a person expels a bad object, it may well be into another person. Projective identification involves projection into another object and then identifying with the object (often a person). This keeps bad parts of the self at a safe distance without losing them.
Introjective identification Where a person finds another person attractive in some way, then they will often take a part of that other person and introject that part into their own ego. In this way, they become more like the admired person. Also, having a part of that person in them, they feel closer to them and usually like to be physically and emotionally closer to them, perhaps for fear of distance leading to the introjected part (particularly if it is not fully internalized) being lost.
The next step is to understand how we take in the mental problems of other people. How they can warp our thinking by acting as introjects.
Splitting and Projecting in Post WWII Germany "Mary Katherine Armstrong
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