Narcissists Have a Hard Time with Disappointment. A Psychotherapist Explains Why
No one likes to be disappointed. But narcissists, particularly those suffering from malignant narcissism, have a harder time than most.
Disappointment is what you feel when something you were looking forward to doesn’t work out. It is, writes Margaret Wehrenberg, author of The 10 Best Ever Depression Management Techniques “loss and grief and sadness all at once. You may be disappointed to lose something you have, but it may well be loss over something you never had.”
For most of us, disappointment is painful, but ultimately manageable. In a post on her Psychology Today blog Wehrenberg says that because the loss is often something intangible (like a dream of a new home or a baby that sleeps through the night, or a desire for fame or beauty) it is harder to let it go. She adds that disappointment can blur into depression over time.
One of the ways to keep disappointment from becoming depression is to review and re-evaluate what you were striving for. In other words, Michael Ashworth writes in an article for Psych Network, re-evaluate your expectations. Unrealistic, unfair, and unreasonable expectations can create ongoing disappointment. If you can shift your expectations and redirect your attention, your disappointment will diminish.
But for severe (what is sometimes called malignant) narcissists, such a re-evaluation and redirection is often difficult, if not impossible. I was lucky enough to hear the psychoanalyst and author Nancy McWilliams, who has written a great deal about narcissism, lecture about this subject recently. She said that one of the problems for such individuals is that they cannot shift their expectations of themselves or of the world. According to their beliefs, they are supposed to be special, and the world is supposed to treat them with all of the respect and admiration that they believe they deserve. Further, because they expect perfection, they are unable to admit — to themselves or to anyone else — that they might have needs.
Because they cannot acknowledge any need, which looks to them like imperfection, in themselves, individuals who are what McWilliams has referred to as “narcissistically defended” often direct their criticism at others. The other person is criticized for being defective, inadequate, or just plain bad because they are not able to see what is, according to the narcissist, “as plain as the nose on your face.”
In the lecture I attended, McWilliams offered the example of a man who was described in an article by psychoanalyst Ben Bursten in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1973 as someone who could not tolerate the feelings of imperfection that went along with any kind of need demanded that his girlfriend to intuit what he needed without his asking. When she failed to do so, he became furious, because he believed that she should know without his having to tell her.
To acknowledge that they are disappointed with themselves, their lives or with anyone who is important to them would shatter the image of themselves and their lives as perfect and extraordinary. They use denial, anger, blame, and guilt-tripping to avoid feeling disappointed, which is an ordinary human emotion. Their behavior often makes the people who care for them feel inadequate and disappointed in themselves, which makes it difficult to be close to a narcissist and maintain your self-esteem. I’ve written about that on my Psychology Today blog and plan to talk more about it in another post.
But here’s the bottom line: Narcissists are often more comfortable with anger than they are with disappointment or the feelings of need or vulnerability that can lead to disappointment. On top of that, anger is more in line with what many narcissists have come to expect of the world. Their expectation, briefly put, is that everything will go their way. Because they need to see themselves as the "best," they cannot re-evaluate their expectations. How can you improve on perfection? With such a view of themselves and their world, a narcissist simply cannot make space for the emotion of disappointment.
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References:
Bursten, B. (1973). Some Narcissistic Personality Types. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 54:287–300.
McWilliams, N. Lependorf, S. (1990). Narcissistic Pathology of Everyday Life: — The Denial of Remorse and Gratitude. Contemp. Psychoanal., 26:430–451.
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