A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Posts Tagged ‘narcissism’
Yesterday I wrote about how some men want to minimize and not talk about their affairs (whether emotional or physical). As a real-life example, I give you John Edwards.
Last night Edwards, the ex-senator and former presidential candidate, finally admitted to having had an affair, after denying it for months. This pretty much shatters his carefully-cultivated image of the loyal husband standing by his wife while she battles incurable cancer.
I noticed several interesting things in the television interview that Edwards gave and in the written statement that he released. All of them seem like attempts to minimize the damage.
- The timing was no accident. Fewer people pay attention to news on Friday evenings since it’s the beginning of the weekend. Also, a lot of people were tuned into the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Georgia was another distraction.
- The words affair and cheating were never used. He spoke of having had “a liason” and making “a serious error in judgment.” (You think?)
- He said that his had been “99 percent honest” while denying the affair for the past year or so. That’s just laughable.
- But he did say somthing that I find very credible: “in the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.” Ah, narcissism, one of my favorite topics. Remember that narcissists believe that they are special and that the rules don’t apply to them. Yeah, that fits here.
Some marriages of couples in their 40s or 50s are in trouble, and the couple is in marriage therapy, because the husband is having a “mid-life crisis.” But what does that term mean, exactly? It’s usually thought of as the man realizing that he is in the second half of his life, that he is not going to live forever after all, and that he’s not going to be rich and famous like he always dreamt he would be. Supposedly the guy wakes up one day and asks himself, “Is that all there is?” And then he goes out and has an affair with his 25 year-old secretary in an attempt to make himself feel young again.
But does the midlife crisis really exist? Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist who writes a column in The New York Times, wonders if it might just be a handy excuse for the impulsive behaviors of a middle-aged narcissist. Friedman writes,
…you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”
As a marriage therapist who sees men in self-declared midlife crises, I’m a bit skeptical about the ”crisis” being an actual emotional condition. I fear that it tends be used as an excuse for behavior that should be inexcusable.
Are you married to a narcissist? Not sure? Some (but not all) of the characteristics of a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are:
- Lacks empathy for you and for others. This may surface as an inability to pay attention to you when you are talking.
- Requires excessive admiration from you.
- Exaggerates his or her achievements.
- Takes advantage of you and others.
- Has a sense of entitlement.
That’s not a complete list, nor it is it enough to make a definitive diagnosis, but it should be food for thought. By the way, there are more male narcissists than female ones, so I will use the pronouns “he” and “his” for the rest of this article.
Narcissism is something I am looking for from the very first marriage therapy session. One clue is that the narcissist will typically try to get me to take his side and try to convince me that all (or almost all) of the problems in the marriage are actually attributable to his wife’s shortcomings. He will, of course, fail on both counts: I won’t take his side, nor will I believe that everything is his wife’s fault.
Trying to convince the marriage counselor that everything is the fault of the other person was deemed the fundamental attribution error by John Gottman. I like that terminology. And I have yet to see a case where everything wrong with the relationship was the fault of just one of the spouses.
So, once I realize that one of the spouses is a narcissist, what to do? I have to tell him, right? Well, that news isn’t always well-received by someone who thinks he is special and superior to others, so I have to do some of that professional marriage therapist “stuff” and handle it with kid gloves.
I work hard to increase empathy between the two partners during couples counseling, and clearly that is going to take more time with the narcissist. But I’m up for the challenge.
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