My friend always asks how I’m doing when we see each other. She means it. It’s not just a formality like “hello.” But I almost always get only a sentence or two in before she interrupts with a story about her own life, which she keeps talking about until a natural break in the conversation comes and we go our own ways.

I’ve been around her when she meets others, and those conversations run like that, too. At some point, one or two exchanges in, she starts talking about herself. The other people often say something interesting. I would like to hear them out, but I don’t, because my friend can’t listen long to others.

My Friend the Narcissist

She is a narcissist. Not in the technical sense a psychologist would use the word, but in the usual sense of someone so self-absorbed that she can’t defer to other people. Can’t, for example, listen to others for very long and see them as partners in a conversation with their own need to be heard and something they’d like to say. People like my friend tell others, without meaning to, “You don’t matter.”

I think Christmastide is the answer to this kind of narcissism, or at least its rebuttal. It’s an answer almost all of us need to hear. A degree of narcissism comes with the fallen human condition, because it often begins in the universal human experience of pain — of ourselves being told, in a way we absorb, “You don’t matter.” We try to resist that feeling that speaking and acting as if we matter supremely.

We’re all narcissistic to some degree, probably a much greater degree than we know. We don’t defer to others as much as we should, in the selfless way a saint would. We don’t really love our neighbors as ourselves, because we resist giving them the place we insist upon for ourselves. Human narcissism combines an act of omission (not deferring to others, in this case by not listening to them) with an act of commission (putting ourselves first, like talking about ourselves nonstop). It’s one of the active forms human selfishness takes.

The narcissists are human like everyone else, just in this one aspect even more human than the rest of us. Or at least more obviously so. Some of us know how to cover our self-absorption better. When I force myself to think about this, I find it a very painful reflection. Over the decades, I have effectively told a lot of people that I didn’t think they mattered.

I should say that most of the people I’m thinking of don’t live entirely for themselves, though a few, from all appearances, do. I care for a very sick person and my friend often asks about her and listens as I speak. Many people like her respond to someone else’s pain, so for at least a while they listen to someone else. Love sometimes overcomes their self-absorption, if the other person’s need is great enough.

A Defense as Well as an Answer

Christmastide answers this kind of life. It is also the feast of the defense against predatory narcissism. Predatory narcissists hurt people even worse than normal narcissists, and worse, they often hurt people who are hurting. They say to their victim, “You don’t matter,” with emphasis.

Many years ago, when I had a job in another religious tradition that included a lot of people with self-declared “gifts,” I met many who claimed “the gift of listening,” sometimes packaged with “the gift of encouragement” or “the gift of discernment” or some other claim to have a special divine ability to help others. A distressingly large percentage of them didn’t listen.

They talked. About themselves. Without a stop and for a long time. If they talked about the people to whom they were speaking, they did so to compare their listener with themselves, to their advantage.

I knew to avoid them, but vulnerable people I knew didn’t. Many of them really needed someone to listen to them with sympathy, who would let them tell their story and work it out in the rambling way such conversations must go, when the person in need does almost all the talking. 

Some of the people — I think many, actually — who said they wanted to listen were narcissists. Being narcissists, they were predators, and being predators could tell when someone was prey. They could be quite insistent and love-bomb their victim into an intimate conversation.

Feeling the relief of finding someone who will listen, their poor victims found that person talking about himself. Sometimes, and this was particularly wicked, talking about himself as the superior person (spiritually, morally, developmentally) from whom his listener, a person in pain, should learn. But what the listener got was someone saying, “You don’t matter enough for me to listen to you.”

The Narcissists’ Problem

I have an idea, from listening to the stories the narcissists tell, why they always turn the spotlight on themselves. I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not saying that they suffer from what psychologists call narcissistic personality disorder.

But I have listened to people like this a lot over many years, and can discern something of the reasons they do what they do. The stories they tell, if you listen long enough, almost always describe painful experiences, usually from childhood, of being ignored, mistreated, put down, physically or verbally abused, emotionally or even physically abandoned. They learned that they don’t matter. They accept, as all of us would, as children, the world’s judgment.

When I was younger, I thought these people were raging egotists, people with complete confidence in themselves and their centrality to the world. One day I was trapped listening to one of them, bored out of my mind, resenting his imposition on my time, but trying to be kind, when he started talking about his childhood, first angrily, then sadly.

And gosh, he told a sad story. I could see why he spoke the way he did, a way I’d thought mere egotism. He wasn’t speaking to me, really, but speaking to himself. He was trying to blow up an always-leaking balloon. He could not let it go flat. What felt to me like verbal aggression came from deep pain he had to overcome.

People like that, convinced they don’t matter, insist they do matter. They do that by pushing themselves onto others. What appears to us as narcissism is one desperate way some people try to convince themselves that they matter.

The Answer to Narcissism

Christmas is one of God’s answers. Benedict XVI explained why in his Principles of Catholic Theology, published in 1982 when he was the new prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He used the distinction of “I” and “Thou” popularized by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. “The inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to accept a thou,” Benedict wrote, and that “is the source of the anxiety and despair that incessantly affect mankind.”

We cannot affirm our I by ourselves. We need someone else to tell us. “Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else.” 

Man, Benedict explained, “is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist. ... If an individual is to accept himself, someone must say to him: ‘It is good that you exist’ — must say it, not with words, but with that act of the entire being that we call love.”

The Christmas season, I think, is a feast of God saying, “It is good that you exist.” That baby in the manger, God become one of us, is God's great, visible statement that it is good we exist, that the world is a better place because we exist, that our being here adds to the good in the world.

In the Incarnation, the creator says to each one of us that we matter, we count, whatever the world has told us. God loved us so much, he joined us.