What is The Narcissist’s Prayer?

Whether you know it as The Narcissist’s Prayer, Creed, or Playbook, in 2016 I wrote and published online A Narcissist’s Prayer, a short poem about patterns of behaviour I felt were playing out around me. I’ve been writing poetry for myself for a long time and sharing it was a good way for me to ask if anyone else was seeing the same cycles in their relationships.

What is a narcissist?

“The narcissist,” or the speaker of the poem, is simply a person so pre-occupied with and anxious about the image they have of themselves and the way other people perceive them, that they engage in harmful or maladaptive behaviours to preserve it. Across this website and in my writing, I am speaking of narcissism, the trait, and not Narcissistic Personality Disorder: I’m a poet, I’m not qualified. I’ve spent a long time as a captive audience for people who are more afraid of being thought poorly of, than behaving hurtfully, and it’s my experiences with them that I’ve drawn on here. I’ve found that someone struggling with narcissism doesn’t suffer from an abundance of self-love, but self-loathing. Someone proud of their own behaviour doesn’t deny it. A narcissist will avoid letting people see any reflection of themselves except the funhouse-flattering kind not because they believe it to be accurate, but because it’s the only one that isn’t painful for them to look at. Pure unfiltered reality is too frightening, because to the narcissist, it’s hideous. They’re hideous. Sometimes they’re right about that.

What makes this narcissism?

An uncomplicatedly malicious person would just skip to the end and enjoy it. A narcissist doesn’t necessarily want to hurt anyone, but if that’s as low as they need to limbo to avoid accountability, they’re flexible enough to go there. They’re not delusional or confused about the truth, either: just editing out the parts they can’t handle. We all have a version of ourselves in our minds that we aspire to be, and be seen as. A version that’s more patient, more polite, better dressed, more charming, in a flattering light with one of those big fans that blow your hair around in slow-motion. A little bit of narcissism is fine and healthy - we’re all going to choose the nicest photos of ourselves for social media, put our best foot forward in an interview or on a date, and gloss over the part about getting a stomach bug when someone asks us how our summer went. We make choices about how we want people to think of us, and that isn’t necessarily problematic. We can’t all be perfectly humble and vulnerable and ego-less all the time, we all find things embarrassing, have insecurities, and know, most of the time, when a shirt looks ridiculous on us. For me, the threshold for narcissistic behaviour becoming an issue is when anxiety about that image starts to negatively impact your life, your behaviour, damage relationships, or keep you from personal growth. How far away from a mirror do you have to be before you stop finding things you hate? How much time do you spend looking, and how close? How do you feel afterwards? The narcissist will go down this flowchart as far as they are forced to, but that doesn’t mean they enjoy it. If you or reality (or both) keep insisting they face a version of themselves that’s too threatening for them to accept, it can truly feel like self-defence to lash out.

It sounds like you feel sorry for people like this.

It must be isolating to live that way, but I can appreciate that someone is suffering without giving them a pass to hurt people without consequence. It’s difficult to form relationships with other people, and impossible to form deep lasting friendships, when one party is unable to be vulnerable, can never be held accountable, and may turn on you if you try to force the issue. Being able to explain a behaviour is not the same as excusing it: it’s never okay to abuse other people, but I can still see that those with these issues suffer from them significantly.

You should put this on stickers.

If you’d like a copy on your wall, for your journal, to tape on your fridge, to keep on your phone, you go ahead and print one out with my blessing. There are nice images on the internet if you don’t like the ones here! If you’d like to license A Narcissist’s Prayer, other writing, or commission original work, drop me a line and tell me about your project. Please don’t buy or sell copies, or use it in your own paid, paywalled, or monetised work without asking.

Wow, this sounds just like someone I don’t like or agree with!

Okay, well, maybe. Maybe not. Not everyone saying those words is being dishonest or abusive. People can be wrong, insecure, disagree with you, an asshole, whatever, without being a narcissist. I don’t think the classification of an abusive behaviour is as important as avoiding the material reality of abuse. If someone is hurting you and then telling you they didn’t, that’s not okay, and that’s all it needs to be before you do something about it. You can theorise about which flavour of not okay that is after you’re removed from that harm. When someone you care about is having repeated difficulty taking responsibility for their actions, or won’t accept that their actions are harmful…and keep on doing harmful things, I don’t think we need to litigate the precise boundaries of narcissism to decide if that’s bad or not.

Is there anything else I can read about this? Do you have any recommendations?

Your favourite book store will have a section on interpersonal relationships, personality disorders, conflict in relationships, abusive personalities, but if you came to me as a personal friend, I would probably dig out one of these:
Why Does He Do That? Lundy Bancroft
Burnout, Emily Nagoski
The Gift Of Fear, Gavin De Becker
Personal Renewal, John Gardner
On Repentance and Repair Danya Ruttenberg
The Velveteen Rabbit. The Velveteen Rabbit
Crazymad, For Me, CMAT
Daisies Belfast