What Can You Do About a Self-Centered Friend or Family Member?
A psychotherapist explains something you might not have guessed about self-centered people
Some years ago I became friendly with a woman I will call Rachel*. We met while we were both trying to get pregnant and supported one another through years of fertility treatment, hormone highs and lows, and monthly grief over yet another failed attempt. Eventually we both got pregnant, and we were there for one another during pregnancy and the early days of parenthood. But as our children made their way through early life, something shifted. Where before, Rachel and I had seemed perfectly attuned to one another, now she seemed more self-involved, less accessible, less interested in me. As a psychotherapist who has worked with many new moms, I assumed at first that she was simply doing what she was supposed to do — her focus was on her baby and not our relationship. Moms need to bond with their infants, and the adults in their lives have to be patient and wait their turn. I was probably doing the same thing, in fact.
But sadly, Rachel’s focus wasn’t actually on her baby. I realized that Rachel’s main focus was herself. She was like the old New Yorker cartoon of two people at a cocktail party. One of them says, “So, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?” Her baby was important to her, but mainly as a reflection of herself — how she was doing as a mom was more important than how her baby was doing as a baby.
Rachel and I had bonded and served a purpose for one another as we went through the painful years of infertility. Sharing what the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut has called a twinship bond, we helped one another manage a very specific set of emotions and experiences that no one else in our lives grasped quite so well. But Rachel continued to need me to be in the same place as she was, emotionally, with my child, with my work, and with my husband. When our children had different needs, when our husbands wanted more time and attention, when I was starting to think about going back to work and struggling with feelings about leaving my child with a caretaker, we no longer had that bond. Rachel simply wasn’t interested in anything that I felt that was not the same as what she felt. Sadly, as I got to know her in a different time in our lives, I saw that this self-centeredness applied to everyone in her life — her husband and her child included.
Let me be clear. Rachel was not a bad person. She was delightfully funny, brilliant, and creative. She read books about child development and did everything she could to make sure that her child was happy and healthy. She loved her child and her husband, and she was a terrific friend in many ways. But sometimes she was so self-centered that she was difficult to be friends with.
As a psychotherapist, I have seen many people like Rachel. The odd thing is that even while they are so focused on themselves, they don’t actually often love — or even like — themselves. They often need to be admired because they can’t feel admiration from inside. And part of the problem is that while we call them self-centered, they often actually don’t have a way of finding their own center.
Although these days it’s common practice to suggest that all psychological problems in adulthood stem from poor or problematic parenting, after more than 3 decades of practice as a psychotherapist, I’m not convinced that there’s really such a unilateral explanation. Sure, parents can fail to give a child all of the tools they need to grow into healthy, connected adults; but as the psychoanalyst John Gedo wrote in his book The Biology of Clinical Encounters, biology and luck also play a role in how we develop and who we become. The author Christopher Lasch expressed concern in his book The Culture of Narcissism that political and sociological emphasis on selfish behavior was creating self-centeredness in people all over the world. As narcissism and selfishness has become more and more acceptable on any number of public platforms these days, it would seem that Lasch’s fears are coming true.
The attachment theorists Anthony Batemen and Peter Fonagy offer another insight into self-centeredness. Rachel, like many people with this problems, had difficulties with what Batemen and Fonagy call mentalizing, which they define as “the process by which we make sense of each other and ourselves.” Mentalizing, they tell us, involves a “profoundly social” process in which we are attentive not only to our own experiences but also to the mental states of the people we interact with. Mentalizing is necessary for empathy, for being attuned to and understanding others, and it is also necessary for activities like mindfulness and self-awareness — for finding our center.
We start doing the work of mentalizing quite young. Young children are self-centered, but even before they have words they respond to the moods and actions of others. This mix of selfishness and attunement is a normal, healthy part of the interactive process that leads to both self-awareness and empathy. As the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out many years ago, early in the process a child assumes that everyone feels and thinks like them. As they develop, they begin to recognize that another person might have different thoughts and feelings.
Even empathic adults often begin trying to understand what someone else is feeling by imagining themselves in the same situation. But part of maturing is learning that although they might not feel the same thing that we are imagining. Part of the interactive process of mentalization involves asking for verbal clarification of nonverbal cues to really grasp what someone else is feeling or thinking.
Parents often start this process by taking both sides of the conversation. A parent of a crying infant might start by saying, “Oh you’re hungry.” But if the infant doesn’t eat, the parent might say, “OK, you’re not hungry. What do you need? Do you need to have your diaper changed?” The infant, of course, can’t answer. But the verbalization is part of the initial process of helping a child mentalize.
Mentalizing is an extremely interactive process. Each step of the way develops both our understanding of what someone else feels and also what we feel. It’s not always clear where along the way a self-centered person slipped off the developmental track, but it is a safe bet that they are focused on themselves because they are having trouble finding themselves. They haven’t fully developed the capacity for this important psychological activity.
Understanding this problem doesn’t mean that they get a pass. A selfish person isn’t always a good partner, parent, friend, or colleague. But if you are friends with or love someone who is self-centered, you might already be someone they lean on to develop their capacity to mentalize. It’s worth it to try seeing if they can move farther along on the developmental track by trying to put into words, whenever you can, what you are thinking and feeling — even if they don’t seem interested. At the same time, try to find words to tell them what you think they’re feeling and thinking, and have them tell you if you’ve got it right or not.
Here’s the thing. It’s actually not important if you get it right. What’s important is that you’re inviting them to actually reflect on their experience. It might seem contradictory to ask someone who is self-centered to focus on themselves. But in fact, you will be helping them find language to talk and think about themselves and to develop a real center. And who knows. Maybe they’ll start to be curious about you — because that’s what mentalizing is all about.
*names and identifying information changed to protect privacy
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