This is part of r/Farhad, in which Slate contributor Farhad Manjoo delves into the Reddit communities that bring him peculiar joy.
In 2016 Dayna Craig, a poet from Belfast, Northern Ireland, published a short bit of verse that might well explain every terrible person you’ve ever known, not least a certain former American president.
It’s called “A Narcissist’s Prayer”:
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did
You deserved it.
I discovered Craig’s poem on Reddit, where narcissism—what it is, how to spot it, how to deal with friends and family in the grip of it, and how to not deal with them—lies at the heart of some of the site’s most riveting tales of interpersonal drama.
In this column, r/Farhad, I—conveniently also named Farhad—explore the bottomless intrigues of the internet’s best discussion site. One of the most unexpected and useful insights I’ve gleaned during my years perusing Reddit involves narcissism, especially its seeming pervasiveness and its power to explain the otherwise inexplicable behavior of the most difficult people in public and private life.
The subreddits dedicated to the subject—forums like r/RaisedByNarcissists, r/NarcissisticAbuse, r/NarcissisticSpouses, and r/LifeAfterNarcissism, as well as some subreddits not specifically focused on narcs, like r/AmITheAsshole—have given me something of a map for understanding how narcissism shapes society. Thanks to Reddit, I’ve come to rely on this rule of thumb: If someone often has you asking yourself Why are they acting that way?, a big part of the answer might be narcissism.
What is a narcissist? Narcissistic personality disorder is a clinically defined mental health condition. Psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, outlines nine behavioral patterns involving grandiosity, empathy, and a person’s need for admiration, of which a patient must meet at least five for a formal diagnosis of NPD. Of course, when people on Reddit use the term colloquially, they’re not usually referring to people who might meet this high diagnostic bar. Another complication is that NPD often goes undiagnosed and untreated, and many mental health clinicians have little experience with it. (A paradox of treating narcissism: Narcissists tend to think they’re not the ones who need therapy. In a clinical setting, patients with NPD “are generally unable to handle criticism from peers or staff and frequently become enraged,” states one review of the condition.)
People also use the term as a generic insult, interchangeable with jerk or jackass. But the narcissists discussed on Reddit aren’t simply assholes who want to make life difficult for others. Reddit’s narcissists are also not usually defined by our most basic idea of narcissism, the thing that got Narcissus himself in trouble—overt self-involvement, a regard for oneself so obsessive that it eclipses any interest in others.
No, what’s most insidious about the narcissists in Redditors’ lives is a capacity to hide their self-interest: The greatest trick the narcissist ever pulls is convincing the world he cares about others. As a result, a lot of Redditors’ stories about dealing with narcs involve epiphanies.
“I recently came to the realization that my best friend of 4+ years is a narcissist,” begins one post on r/LifeAfterNarcissism. The woman explains that it took going to therapy—for her, not the narc —to understand the complete one-sidedness of the friendship.
“All of our time was spent working on her emotional needs and support,” she writes. “Even though I’ve had my own struggles, it’s as if they can’t measure up to what she’s going through and therefore aren’t important.”
The discovery floored her: “It’s still just hard to realize that the person I was supposed to be ‘closest’ to doesn’t really know me at all and never had empathy for me, when I’ve had so so much for her. … I feel like I’m realizing I’m in the Truman Show.”
Sometimes it even takes a person posting on Reddit to realize that a supposed friend doesn’t really care about them. Consider the woman whose lifelong best friend asked her to be the maid of honor at her wedding—but then requested that the maid of honor not appear in the wedding photos because, after years of fertility issues, she’d recently become pregnant.
“She said that my bump would be too distracting, she didn’t want her pictures to turn into a ‘maternity photoshoot’ and that she just didn’t feel comfortable with it,” the woman wrote. “However, she still wanted me to pay for the bachelorette party, help her plan the wedding, and wanted me to do almost everything MOH except be in pictures and she was debating if she still wanted me to give a speech. She then sent me a bunch of bag-like dresses to choose from as my new dress since I won’t need my MOH dress.”
The post appeared on r/AmITheAsshole; the OP—Reddit jargon for “original poster”—wanted to know if she’d be the asshole for declining to attend the supposed friend’s wedding. After receiving overwhelming support from Redditors, the OP decided to talk to the bride about how hurt she was by the request. Bridezilla’s response was manipulation: She tried to argue that staying out of the pictures would be less stressful for the OP.
“If I were to be fully honest, she almost convinced me that the whole idea of just keeping me as MOH but with no pictures was for my benefit,” the woman wrote in an update. But the scales had fallen from her eyes; realizing that her friend was merely using her, OP stepped down as maid of honor, and the bride, after saying “some deeply hurtful things that will take me a long time to recover from,” uninvited her from the wedding.
This saga suggests why Dayna Craig’s “Narcissist’s Prayer” is so often cited on Reddit—it’s the perfect shorthand for identifying the narcissist in your life. The poem captures the narcissist’s go-to tactics: There’s the routine denial and defensiveness about their actions; an inability to take responsibility or admit wrongdoing; the incessant effort to manipulate others into believing an alternate version of reality; and, at the root of it, a deep sense that other people don’t matter. Reddit’s narcissism forums abound with advice for dealing with narcs, but a lot of it boils down to two strategies: Stay away from the narc if you can; if you can’t, try your best to avoid engaging with the narc.
The first is straightforward: Go low- or no-contact with your narcissistic parent, break up with your toxic friend, stop talking to your difficult neighbor.
But sometimes getting away is impossible—if you have a narc co-worker, say. For those people, many on Reddit swear by the “gray rock” method. The idea here is to make yourself as uninteresting to the narc as a pebble on the sidewalk: Avoid conversations or try to steer them to the blandest subjects; pretend you’ve got something else to do or are engrossed in a book or TV show; generally deny them the chance to dictate your actions.
“My mom called me once to berate me, and I started reading different quotes to her from a book of famous quotes,” one commenter wrote. “Every time she tried to interrupt I would say, ‘Wait! Mom, just listen to what (famous historical figure or author) had to say! I know how much you appreciate intelligent writing!’ … I felt that it was well deserved revenge for the years of listening to my mom’s relentless complaining.”
For some, that might be the way to go. But plenty of us have self-centered people in our lives whom we do not want to cut off or gray rock—and for that, we might need to get off Reddit and talk to a therapist.
