But I believe the reverse is also true. Someone who doesn’t have a healthy amount of emotional empathy would find it very difficult to understand what it’s like to have that healthy level of emotional empathy. They don’t really understand the feelings behind it, and how that empathy can drive you to make decisions and keep you from becoming a ruthless narcissist. But if you think that everyone has the desire to get ahead no matter what and has the ability to be a ruthless narcissist, then you’re really going to have trouble trusting anyone.
And with this, I’ll add: I know a lot of you watching this right now have some trust issues because you’ve encountered a narcissist, and that is completely understandable. But having trust issues doesn’t mean that you don’t have the ability to trust. If you’ve ever considered yourself a trusting person and then scaled back on that because you’ve been hurt, then you definitely have the ability to be trusting. And your lack of trust becomes a choice.
With a narcissist, it’s not so much a choice. It’s really their worldview: they believe that anyone can—and probably will—act the way they do if given the chance. In reverse, we can see how we end up trusting narcissistic people and then getting hurt, because it’s difficult for us to believe they would be as ruthless. It’s difficult to believe that anyone who ever cared about you could be so ruthless.
When it comes to empathy, it’s hard to wrap your head around what you don’t have and what it’s like to be in their shoes—which is interesting, because that’s essentially what empathy is. So you might say that having empathy for someone who doesn’t have empathy is the biggest empathetic challenge there is. And I’m not saying you need to—just an interesting observation.
Another thing that a narcissist will never have is authenticity. And this one can be a little surprising, because when you think about what authenticity is and what authenticity looks like, sometimes it looks like a narcissist is just totally being their authentic self, because they don’t care what other people think. But that’s actually not authenticity.
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