What the Hell Is a Narcissist?

Big dogs, quick talk, flip facts, tick talk, level up your mind, every single line. What the hell is a narcissist? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about narcissism. Guys, I've set across from hundreds of people in conflict. Couples, business partners, co-parents, and in the last five years, especially, there's one word I hear more than almost any other, and that's narcissist. My ex is a narcissist, my business partners are narcissists, my moms are narcissists, my father-in-laws are narcissists, and what I've learned is that the word narcissist is doing a huge amount of psychological lifting for the person using it, and almost none, almost 0.0% of the clinical work that they think the label is doing.

So today, we're going to cut that word open. If you stay to the end of this podcast, you will know what a narcissist actually is, according to the DSM-5, you know where it comes from in the Greek, and you'll know what the troubling reality is about using this word in conflict and how it can undermine a solution and even ossify or calcify your brain into unhelpful patterns that you might not even know right now that you're engaging in. That's what happened if you stayed to the end. We're going to cut the word open. We're going to look at what it actually means, what the research actually says, what it does to conflict when you use it, and what you should say instead. This is an anatomy of conflict.

The podcast, let's go deep breath. Let me paint you a picture that I've lived many times, I'm sure you've lived two people sitting across the table for me. They've been in conflict probably for months, let's say. They've been in therapy. They've been to attorney's offices. They've been in their own heads rehearsing arguments. And within the first 20 minutes, one of them, sometimes both, but usually one, turns to me and says, some version of this, you got to understand right that I'm dealing with the narcissist here. And sometimes they say it apologetically, they're quietly apologetically giving a diagnosis.

And sometimes, of course, they say it with a bite to it, like they're finally being believed about something that everyone else has failed to see. And sometimes they say it just like with straight exhaustion, right? But I hear it the same way. I hear it as I translate their words as to like, I'm in pain. I need a name for this. I need someone to name what is happening to me. And this is the word I found on Instagram. And that's the real part. I take the pain to be the real part and that's the part I'm not dismissing.

But because of the prevalence, I started to do research and wonder like what is a narcissist? And that's what this podcast is about. So the word narcissist, as most people are using it in 2026, and this is being recorded in April, is not a diagnosis. It's not a description. It is just straight up a judgment. It's a verdict. It's a damnation. It's a, I'll just stop there. And in conflict, and this podcast is the anatomy of conflict, verdicts, and I mean this in all senses of the word verdicts, coming from people, coming from judges, coming from juries, coming from courts, are almost always the enemy of resolution.

So let's start the conversation by what the word means, where it came from, what the clinical evidence says, and then what it's doing to us when we use it the way we've been using it. Guys, my name is Ryan McLaughlin. I'm a mediator and work with folks who are divorcing to folks who are in a very high level business leadership positions within companies who are having conflicts. And from divorce mediation to boardrooms, I help folks with the hardest conversations of their life, and I love it.

So I wanted to start with the Greek, but I think we all know that the word narcissist comes from narcissist, who was a hunter, who was damned, basically punished, I think, punished by the gods smitten for some reason, we can get into why, to fall in love with his own reflection, right, we get, we code it as like vanity, self-absorption, this is sort of the original sin of the selfie. And I don't really want to get into, there's more to the story, but I don't want to start with that, right? Just be like, yes, that's probably what we all know. Where I want to start is the DSM-5. I want to know what the heck the DSM, what the hell is the DSM-5 actually saying narcissists is?

I want to go to the dictionary definition of this thing, because people are using it, people are using it on Instagram, people are using it on TikTok, people are using it everywhere it seems, everyone else we don't like is a narcissist. And to me, as someone dealing in conflict, as someone who's obsessed with words, right? I'm obsessed with words, I love writing, I love words, after law school, I went to graduate school and created writing, got a master of finance and creative writing, I love words, I want to know what the word means, are we using the word right?

So let's get clinical, because this is where most popular conversations about narcissism go off the rails, okay, so the DSM-5, the diagnostic and statistical manual, DSM, diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Defines narcissistic personality disorder as, there's a whole bunch of stuff here, we're going to break it down one by one, a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, okay, so there's a couple of things, this is going to like swivel our brains a little bit, and I think like it should, right?

This is a complex diagnosis, and I think just the number of factors should give us pause as to how we use it, because so it's a pattern of grandiosity, that's pervasive, need for admiration, lack of empathy, that all begin by early adulthood and show up, present themselves across a variety of context, there's, and I was like, well, how do clinicians, like that's a super vague, right? Is there a score? Is there a multiple choice test? Is there like a heightened weight assessment, are there scenarios, is there a workshop like, how do we measure this?

And so there's nine criteria, and you need to meet five, okay, so you got to get five out of nine or higher, five, six, seven, eight or nine, and you're a narcissist. So let's see if there's any more helpful guidelines. Number one, a grandiose sense of self-importance, exaggerating your achievements and expecting to be recognized as superior, okay, and in my mind, I'm like, do I have that? A grandiose sense of self-importance? How do you measure that versus just self-confidence versus just self-worthiness versus like a healthy expectation of being recognized and validated? I don't know. I don't know. Number two, a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

I'm not going to comment on all these, but you can just hear in my mind that I'm skeptical from the outset. I'm like, how is this not like just manifesting? People are all about manifesting and having, like, put it out there into the universe. Number three, a belief that one is special and unique and that they can only understood be, they can only be understood by or like, appreciated by other people who are similar as special. Number four, they have an excessive need for admiration, number five, they have a sense of entitlement, number six, so they need excessive admiration, they have a sense of entitlement, number six, they exploit others to achieve their own ends.

I mean, number seven, okay, sorry, I'm going to try to be more neutral here, number seven and guys are just nine, so hang on, they have a lack of empathy. They are unwilling to recognize other people's feelings or other people's needs, and I'm going to come back to this word unwilling in a minute who is doing a lot of work, they're unwilling to recognize. There's no willingness. Number eight, they're often envious of others and they often believe that other people are envious of them, so there's this thing about envy and instability. And number nine, they're just generally speaking arrogant, they're generally speaking kind of haughty and prideful.

So the diagnostic threshold is five of nine. So now we're talking, like at least we have something now, when we're talking about these narcissists in our lives, like we can cue, do they meet five of the nine of these, can you make that argument? And I want to, there's a sentence in the DSM five that virtually never gets quoted in popular discussions, and I want to show you guys, you ready? Many, and I quote, many highly successful individuals display personality traits that might be considered narcissistic, only when these traits are inflexible, maladaptive and persisting, and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress, do they constitute narcissistic personality disorder, end quote.

So let's read it again, they have to be inflexible, only when these traits are inflexible when they're maladaptive and they're persisting and causing significant functional impairment. This is a very high bar. It's not merely that my ex doesn't listen, it's not merely that my business partner takes credit for other people's work. Those things might be super frustrating, annoying, damaging, they might need to even be patterns, but it's not clear that they meet this diagnosis. The diagnosis requires that these traits are rigid and ossified, that they show up on church on Sunday, to happy hour on Monday, to the golf course, to the kids, to your spouse, to employees, and so that they can't be turned off.

It's not something that can be turned on and off. And this is what's interesting about alcoholism too. Here the diagnosis requires that they cause real impairment, like show me the damage in work relationships or daily functioning. So it's not situational, it's not a response to grief, it's not a response to a traumatic life event like death, it's not about fear or conflict, it's like all the time, always on.

And that's a really important distinction, because conflict is tough and it may bring out force to us, conflict, especially high stakes conflict, like divorce can be business, business conflict can be like anything where you're in court or facing the threat of court or have lawyers involved, it feels high stakes to me. And these sort of stressful moments trigger, like they themselves trigger temper in narcissistic behavior in people who often don't have the disorder, so it's situational.

So when people feel threatened, they defend, when they feel humiliated, they attack, when they feel powerless, they attack, they sort of control, and that doesn't make them narcissists, that makes them scared human beings. And so we're, I want to like, I want to note and note again the distinction.

So how common, now that we know what NPD, narcissistic personality disorder is, how common is it, right? Is it, is on Instagram, it's like everyone's, everyone's a narcissist. The number I've heard in the research I've seen over and over again is 6%, 6% is the population prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder. And it's slightly higher in men, slightly lower in women, 7.7% in men, 4.8% in women.

But when they re-analyze this research, I can't remember how many years it was, I want to say a decade later, they found that the 6% number dropped to 0.96% prevalence. So like 6% is kind of a lot, less than 1% is a lot less. It's a 6-fold change from the same data set based on, I can't remember exactly, but it's like, how strictly do you score each criteria? I don't know, it's not helpful, but suffice it to say some are between 1% and 6%, is the prevalence. And that's a very low number. We don't know the prevalence, I guess is a short way of saying it, but it's not, it's 6% is possibly high, and it's possibly high by a factor of 6.

Our best suggestion says it's 1%, but really we can say it's between 1% and 6%, okay, so that's prevalence. And that's like the best snapshot as we can give you in the half hour about what the numbers we know are without getting too far down the rabbit hole. Now I gotta tell you, and if you're in it this far, you've come a long way, we're gonna dip into some research here, because I think research is important, that's how we know shit, right? That's how we don't get bludgeoned and buffooned by believing everything we hear on Instagram.

So I wanna tell you about a tool called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, the MPI. And this is where a lot of the cultural narrative fell apart. This thing, this inventory was developed in 1979, 1988. Was it book ending? Book ending my birth year of 1986. It's a 40 item questionnaire, and it measures narcissism or tries to. And it wasn't designed to diagnose narcissism, it was designed to measure just narcissistic traits in the general population, okay, so there's a little distinction there worth noting. And that's this inventory, so it's helpful to note that around the time I was born in 86, there was an inventory, a questionnaire designed to measure just run of the mill, normal range narcissism.

And this is in the general population, not to diagnose NPD, but just to find out things like people bragging, which is called exhibitionism, leadership, whatever, authority, self-sufficiency, okay, then in 2009, there's a book published called The Narcissism, The Narcissism Epidemic, viewing that MPI scores in the US drastically rose from 1982 to 2006. And basically like a panic happened after this book. It was all about like millennials or self-entitled, there's a selfie generation, social media, where all naval gazing, where all self-absorbed.

And well, in the aftermath of this book, researchers like did their thing and they did the whole research thing and they looked at the same data and they found no change, they found no change in MPI scores, which is again, the narcissism personality in inventory. And they said, you know, basically like younger people, they looked at the data set where like what we're actually seeing here is that we didn't control for age and younger people always score higher than older people on these sort of narcissistic traits. Younger people are still farming their identity, that's not narcissism, that's adolescents.

Okay, so that brings us to 2009. And last year, 2025, there was the most comprehensive study on this question about are we increasing the rate of narcissism? Are younger are as we go through time, get closer and closer to the present, are there more and more narcissists? Is there an epidemic of narcissism? And their finding was no, that properly controlled, since the 1980s, the MPI is declining, not rising amongst the general population that surveyed. It is the narcissism epidemic that we kind of assume in our minds is occurring because of social media does not appear to have happened. The data is not there to support that claim at all.

So what we have is not, so thanks for bearing with me with that. And guys, hopefully like trust me, if I'm going to give you data, there's going to be a payout at the end, because I can't sit through data unless there is, I won't give you guys data unless it's like a payout. The payout here is that we can call bullshit to the claim that social media is making us own narcissists. What we have is not, according to the data, a generation of narcissists.

What we have is, you could say, a social media epidemic, an addiction to social media epidemic, a visibility epidemic, you could say more people performing in public, more masking, more platforms, more, those are all real things and cultural things, but it is not the same thing as a pathological character structure. And that's the point I'm trying to make here in this episode of the Anatomy of Conflict Podcast, which is probably brought to you by flannel people mediation. Guys, flannel people mediation, if you need any conflict, resolution or management from grandma and grandpa dying and need help managing their wills and trusts, conversation to, hey, we are about to go to trial.

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So what I'm saying is, I'm going to give you the sauce, I'm going to give you the juice, so thanks for hanging there with me through the data. I think it was worth it. The data basically showed declining MPI values across time, not increasing. And take on point, words matter, okay? Words matter.

So the basic upshot of this point is we are almost certainly misusing the word narcissist and over applying it. So notwithstanding that data, the frequency of use of the word narcissism, narcissist, excuse me, exploded anyway, regardless. So we have studies that show declining values. We have a diagnosis that is like, remember we went through those, the complicated scoring system for the diagnosis? Like that's contested, a lot of people contest that. This epidemic language that's disputed and factually bunk, all that begs the question will then why in God's good name did the word narcissist become one of the most Googled psychological terms of the last decade?

Can you imagine the word narcissist is one of the most Googled terms and it checks out right in the frequency of that. So a couple of things, I'm going to go through these quickly. It's a historian named Christopher Losh in 1979, published this book, right? The culture of narcissism and he was in a clinician, he was sort of, he was at the Tocqueville. You guys ever read the Tocqueville? The Tocqueville was a French guy I think who came to America and just like, checked out America in the late 1700s, he's like that. He's watching America culture become image obsessed, self-emotional, like kind of like therapeutically self-absorbed and he predicted that we would, he predicted in 1979.

This is 50 years ago almost that with the internet, when the internet came and saturated us, we would kind of, what's the word, demise ourselves into sort of narcissism, naval gazing and the book won the National Book Award. And then after that, that was 1979, then social media came, then TikTok, then this whole ecosystem of content about how to identify narcissists, how to identify narcissists abuse, how to spot the red flags, how to go to no contact. This whole threat of content came like this rise of Instagram psychology, this rise of TikTok psychology, this rise of social media self-help, this rise of all of this content.

And so what I think is actually happening is that the word narcissist is doing really good work, really helpful work for real people. It's what it's doing is it's giving a word, a name, a face, a vocabulary to people who really did have our experiencing real shit, real harm in the relationships where often they feel shitty, they feel like they've been treated like shit, they feel like they've been dominated, they feel like they've been minimized, they feel like they've been shut up or shut down, they feel like they've been undermined, they feel like they've been neglected, they feel like, and having the ability to name a thing, again, as a writer, as a linguist, as a person studying the written word, this can be huge, and I do not want to take that away, I think that's a benefit of having labels and names for things.

The clinical concept that we are borrowing could even say that we're hijacking, that our culture is hijacking, right, we're taking a clinical concept with a specific clinical definition, and we're using it broadly by culture, we're misusing it, we're stretching in a part to fit a range of behaviors that if we're honest, describe like most people in conflict at some point, and so the word has gone from a specific precise descriptor to a verdict that, and most people don't notice the shift, that's the damage, that's the problem, that's the harm, most people don't notice that distinction, the distinction between a precise clinical label on one hand, and a god damn it, that person is guilty as as AF, a judgment, but they're a bad person on the other hand, right, in the moment of conflict, and this is the part that I want everyone to think, think, think, think, think, share, like, subscribe, share with a friend, tag a friend right here, right, if you're a mediator, if you're a therapist, if you're a facilitator, if you're a teacher, if you're a parent, if you're a person, who has ever really been into the spew, which is everyone to really hear, this part right here, so things for staying to the end, I will always give juice and sauce and squeeze at the end, so there's a concept in social psychology called the fundamental attribution error, coined by Lee Ross in 1977, the fundamental attribution error, it's our tendency, and I'm super tendency of this, to over attribute other people's behavior to their personality, to their person, to who they are at their core, to who they are, right, and to under attribute it, to under attribute it to the situation they're in, so they're a shitty person, they're a selfish person, they're a, a, a, a, a, a this loyal person, they're a mean person, rather than, they're in a really tough time right now, they're having a really rough go of it, they're really in some mud right now, right, it matters, so if your spouse snaps at you at dinner, they're selfish, they're in consideration, if you snap at dinner, according to the fundamental attribution error, I'm exhausted, I'm stressed, I'm, we explain it by context, so it's giving to another person, the error to them as a person, rather than to the situation, so it's same behavior, just a different explanation, that is the fundamental attribution error, the ways in which we miss attribute to others differently than we do to ourselves, and so Narcissist is a fundamental from my view, a fundamental attribution error, it's an, that we, that we've hijacked a clinical label, we've now labeled a person as a bad thing instead of a situation, and here's what I mean, when you call someone a narcissist, you're not, you've now moved from describing their behavior, which you might like, dislike, which might evoke feelings in you that come from the feeling real, you're now describing, you're now diagnosing a soul, you're now describing them as a person, you're saying this, you're saying, okay, the reason this person did this thing or didn't do the thing is not the situation, it's not the fear, it's not the grief, it's not the history, it's who they are at their core unchangeably, and like, right, wrong, otherwise, we could debate facts all day, but what that does, the effect of doing that in conflict, is that all the doors that could be opened to understanding, repair, resolution, positivity, anything, what it does in conflict has a practical matter, is it slams those doors shut, right?

If I'm dealing with a narcissist, quote unquote, you guys can't see my haircuts, if I'm dealing with a narcissist, because I've labeled them as such, I don't have to examine my own stuff, I don't have to open my own closet, look at the skeletons, I don't have to be curious and reflective about my own behavior, I don't have to, I don't have to stay curious about anything, I don't have to stay curious about them, or what they might be experiencing, I don't have to consider, did I contribute to this, did my, the label is the beginning and end, they're a narcissist, case closed, damn, you know, guilty as charged, the label explains everything, and it doesn't, doesn't need anything from me.

Therefore, it also makes resolution really, really, really unlikely, functionally maybe impossible, because you, it's like a non-starter, right? You can't negotiate with someone who, who, who, you won't negotiate with someone who you think is, like fundamentally a disordered person, right? It's like, it's like the same thing as saying, like, I'm not going to negotiate with someone who's drunk, like, there's no person there, there's no there there, you yourself as the person using the label, foisting the label, you're not going to do it, and the other person is not going to do it either, right? Because they're already damn from the get go, so it makes any kind of even attempt at resolution impossible.

Unless it's fleshed out, like, you can maybe survive the person who you label a narcissist, you can manage them, but you can't work with them, because you're label, you know, basically for close up possibility. So I want to, I want to be a little bit careful here, because there are real relationships that are genuinely harmful, that generally have pervasive, hugely problematic patterns that are hard to change and persistent across time, and I'm not in, in any way here saying that every conflict is repairable or worth repairing, right? I want to make that super clear.

When every conflict is repairable, even with non-narsicists, not every conflict is worth repairing, even with non-narsicists, not every conflict with non-narsicists are worth thinking about repairing, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that we're reaching for the label too quickly, before we've done the harder work of A, describing specific behaviors, B, describing specific experiences, C, describing specific feelings, and that move, that shortcut move, I get it, it's a shortcut, it's fast, it's easy, and it requires of us very little cognitive load, very little brain load in a time where we're ourselves are probably stressed, and therefore incentivize to reduce our brain expenditures, but it almost always makes the conflict worse for the reasons we described, and not better, and so, I want to end with, I want to end with one more wrinkle, I often hear that one thing about non-narsicists that they all have in common, which is that they have no empathy.

What's interesting though is, the research says the opposite, basically, it's not something different, and this might be one of those top episode important things that you write down, so let me walk you through this study. 2014, personality and social psychology bulletin, hepper, heart, and sedicis. They took participants who scored high on narcissism measures, and showed them a documentary about domestic violence, okay, so you have high scoring people on narcissism, show them a documentary about domestic violence.

The control group was no instruction, and the high in the control group with no instruction, the high narcissism people reported less empathy, as you would expect, than the low narcissism people make sense, okay, then they gave a different group, one instruction before watching the domestic violence video, they said, take the perspective of the woman in this documentary and the empathy gap disappeared entirely, so the high narcissism participants reported empathy levels, comparable to the low narcissism participants, just from being primed, from being queued, from being asked to take a perspective change.

Now this is not a minor finding, folks. This is not a minor finding because the DSM-5, remember earlier, I said that what the DSM-5 says, that people with MPD are, quote, unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, so this is the difference between can't and won't in this case, it's not that they're unable to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others, it's that they're unwilling, so the shift, the language of the manual is doing real clinical work here because it tells us that the empathy capacity is there in narcissists, it's impaired in some structural ways because they are unwilling to take the perspective, but they're still able, right, when we're talking about empathy.

So what's missing then is the motivation, their default setting of a narcissist is self-focust, it's not that they're unable, it's not that they're like the hardware, it's not that they're like the software, it's just that their empathy has to be recruited, it doesn't switch on automatically, so check this out, let's layer on top of this, okay, so there's brain imaging work that supports this. 2013 study found that people diagnosed with MPD have less gray matter in the left anterior insula, which is brain part, corresponding to empathy, less gray matter there.

So it's a real structural difference in the brain, in the brain scans of people, so you might be thinking like, okay, well, if there's a structural difference in the brain, doesn't that mean that they can't, because it's a feature of their hardware, that there is actual hardware differences in MPD people versus non-MPD people, but even there, the finding isn't that gray matter is absent, it's not that they have no gray matter in the left anterior insula, it's that it is, that the gray matter is less than people that were not diagnosed with MPD, it's a reduction, it's a harder road to the same destination.

So in this research on emotional intelligence, people with high grandiose narcissism show intact empathy, right, they can see and hear and feel, it just takes longer. And so when you're in conflict with someone who you're calling a narcissist, the picture is not that the person is incapable of understanding your experience, even if the person is a narcissist.

The picture is more like this person, cognitive anatomy, has self-protective architecture that makes, I guess, how can we read this in their favor, sitting with you and sitting with your experience and accessing your experience, very cognitively costly to them, right, they can have an empathetic experience to have the gray matter, they have the left anterior insula, they have the ability to feel what another person feels.

So it's just, and read what other people are feeling, and read other people very accurately. They might not be able to perceive that as intensely as someone with more gray matter, but they can, and it's just, what is it just? It's a function of their hardware in folks with NPD that it's more difficult. It's more difficult.

So for all of us, these distinctions matter, right, the science of it matters. They can still sit with your experience, it's just more costly to them. They can still identify. For you as the other person, it's still super hard, it's still sucks, it's still painful, it doesn't mean that you should stay in the relationship with them or in relationship with them, but it changes the posture because we're complicating the picture. It moves you from, they're just an asshole, there's nothing there to, there is something there, it's just difficult to reach. And these distinctions, these distinctions in my line of work, in mediation, and I think in all of our line of work, in navigating life, matter tremendously.

So let's wrap up this bad boy, what, what, what the heck should we say instead of narcissist? If narcissist isn't doing the work that we need to do, what is? And I'm going to borrow from a lawyer in therapist named Billy Eddie, who has already built the answer to this, around this question. He created the concept of high conflict personality, HCP for short. And he has explicit, unlike the DSM-5 folks, that this ain't a diagnosis, okay, it's just a pattern description.

And so he posits that high conflict pattern people, high conflict personality people have four observable features, and one, so it's simplifying it, they have a preoccupation with blaming a specific target, two, they have all or nothing thinking, three, they have intensely or very poorly regulated emotions, and four, they have extreme behavior that most people wouldn't engage in. That's it, no diagnosis required, no DSM, no claim about who someone is at their core, it's just high conflict people, high conflict personality.

You described the behavior, you located it, and in some ways, that's that, okay, I was going to talk a little bit more about nonviolent communication and how that ties in, but I think we should wrap this bad boy up. So I think the lessons learned, the lessons learned and the core point is instead of saying you're a narcissist who doesn't care about anyone but yourself, which is, it's a diagnosis because it's a label, it's also a verdict, it's also a conversation, and so what should we say? Maybe something like, hey, when you agreed to pick up the kids and you didn't show up or call, I felt, notice that I feel statement, super duper alone, and I felt unsupported.

When it comes to the kids, I need, need, need, and they need reliability, and I'm asking for a plan that, plan going forward, an action plan that we can both commit to. So version one, slams that door shut, version two leads door open. One, the second one, is about a specific behavior at a specific time with a specific person. The first one is about who they are fundamentally that they can't change.

And yes, like this level of precision is hard, it requires you to stay in first person with eye statements, it requires you to locate yourself in the experience, which requires vulnerability, requires you to name what you actually need, which requires pause and self-reflection and self-awareness, and it's slower, and therefore it's dramatic for all of the reasons. It's dramatically more likely to produce resolution. Boom, that's a pod, that's a rap. I think so, guys, my name is Ryan McLaughlin, this is Anatomy of Conflict, I will see you next episode.