Sometimes people take offence, their ego forces break out in bitter complaint, and they roar at you: who do you think you are?
Take a breath. You have just encountered a person displaying narcissistic injury.
Now let us straighten something out. There is insane inflation in the shallow and mistaken use of psychological terms — the two most common I encounter are post-traumatic and narcissist. Today we will talk about something connected to the second.
Narcissistic injury refers to a particular and lethal kind of insult. Some act performed towards you burns your self-image so badly, mainly because you feel the other party is unworthy, inferior, and above all has no legitimacy to perform such acts towards you, by virtue of a sense of superiority you hold.
You see it most in the romantic field.
It is no secret that the balance of power between partners is rarely even. One party usually feels, quietly and without saying so, that they are the one conferring — that they are somewhat above the arrangement, and that the relationship continues by their grace.
And then that party is left.
And what emerges is not ordinary grief. Ordinary grief says: I loved her and she is gone. Narcissistic injury says something entirely different: how dare she. Who is she to do this. This is not the correct order of things.
You can hear the difference plainly. Grief is about the loss of a person. Narcissistic injury is about the loss of a position.
Which is why it produces such disproportionate rage, and why it so rarely settles. Grief runs its course and ends. An injury to standing has no natural conclusion, because it was never about the other person at all — and no amount of time apart addresses it.
If you recognise this in yourself after a separation, the useful question is uncomfortable and short. Do you miss them, or do you miss being the one who was chosen?