Someone hurt you. Or so it feels. Why? They didn’t mean to. What they said/did had nothing to do with you. Yet it hurts all the same.
Welcome to narcissistic injury. To paraphrase Epicurus, we—the narcissistically inclined—live in an unwalled city. Everything is a threat to the fragile self. Illusions, accomplishments, these are not defenses. Not when you’ve got the special, sensitive antennae trained to receive (and create) the signals that challenge your precarious balancing act.
They hang out with somebody else, it means they don’t want to hang out with you. They don’t ask how you were feeling, it’s because you don’t matter. They do something you don’t like, it’s because they know you don’t like it and did it anyway. And these are the straightforward, almost-logical kinds of slights. From there it descends into hopelessly opaque list of unrelated and seemingly banal events with one commonality: a twisted, selfish interpretation that it somehow said something about me (and how woefully awry things went from that faulty premise)
It is a miserable way to live, whatever the degree of your affliction. Deep down this is all a fear about existence. And to have trivial events make you feel as though you do not exist, is a constant and unavoidable source of aggravation (torture). That’s the consequence of trying to determine your identity through external things—making it possible for it to be challenged by the things that other people say or do, no matter how unrelated to you they actually are. So go the risks of allowing your identity to be anything but secure and intrinsic (to say nothing of delusions of grandiosity).
The solution, well, I don’t know if there is one. But it seems to get better with therapy—rigorous, introspective and committed therapy. It is possible to rewire the brain, but it takes a lot of work. For me, practicing a different take on empathy has been helpful (or at least, humbling). To realize that other people have as much to wrongly interpret from your actions as you do from theirs. And that there is a feedback loop between these worldviews. So too, with contemptuous expressions. The less you puff, the less there is to pop.
Aware of all this, you must do your best to just stop, and take things as they are. Remind yourself: this doesn’t say anything about me—because external things cannot—and, even if it literally did, I don’t have to let it bother me. I don’t need to hear it, let alone agree with it. It has nothing to do with my identity, my existence or anything foolish like that. Because narcissistic injury is by definition a self-injury. Figure out why you feel the need to inflict it.
