What’s a narcissistic behavior, really?

@Carissimi they are not reasonable at all and you can’t have an adult conversation about anything that they don’t agree with you on. If it is something to do with personal business and they disagree they will have circular arguments that go nowhere. For example, after separating from my husband the insurance agent and my lawyer both used the same phrase to describe the conversation they had with him “We went round and round”. I don’t know if having a genetic predisposition plays a role in their personality but they are conditioned by a doting relative, could be a mother, aunt or grandmother but it’s generally a woman who does it and usually at the expense of siblings who are not treated the same way. They are spoiled at a young age and expect the world to do the same, they become angry brooding adults when they find out that the world doesn’t revolved around them.

I think some are born that way, and others are conditioned/brainwashed into being one. Right now, the west has a case of mass narcissism that has been created by bad players on our children. It started years ago when everyone got a trophy, and self esteem and feelings were more of a priority in the school system than education. Self esteem and feelings are important, but they went too far with it. Created a whole generation of self righteous, little Hitlers. @cherokeepatti

@Carissimi I have heard older people say as far back as 30 years ago that Dr. Spock parenting has had a lot to do with it. I think it was happening way before that. I didn’t realize what the hell my father’s problem was but my half-sister who is 8 years older than me remembers coming to stay with him and our mother after they married and she told me that my grandmother doted on my father even when he was in his 30’s and she thought it was because he was her first son. My great-aunt (my grandmother’s sister) doted on her son and he ended up having two families at once, he married a woman and had 3 children. He was a police officer and told everyone he was going to go into business for himself as a private detective. He moved his family into his mother’s basement and did stake-outs at night. When his son from his marriage turned 18 he told his wife he wanted a divorce, he had another woman he was spending his evenings with and they had 5 children. He didn’t want to divorce his wife till the boy turned 18 because he thought he would damage him emotionally if he did (to hell with his two younger daughters though). His mother was still doting on him after he divorced his wife and wouldn’t say anything at all negative about the crap he pulled for over a decade. And she had a son who was a psychiatrist in another state and was the head of the mental health association in that state and she wouldn’t brag on him one bit. Isn’t that something?

@Carissimi also I read a book about 20 years ago where the author had the theory that the reason there are so many more sociopaths now and that they are increasing in number has to do with women getting involved with men before knowing them and getting pregnant…about the time the woman finds out she is pregnant he picks up and moves on to the next woman and repeats the cycle many times and ends up spreading his sociopath genes and increasing the numbers of them in society. Every generation it increases more and more.

I think we have more sociopaths now because of a laissez faire kind of parenting. Pretty much kids are growing up with no proper directions or moral compass. We know how manipulative and mean kids can be. If there’s no one to call them out or correct them, the behavior is carried on into adulthood. @cherokeepatti