No one is immune to troubles.  People will disappoint.  Circumstances can take unexpected, wicked turns.  Differences can’t seem to be reconciled.  People you once deemed safe can prove anything but safe.  Arguments reach a point of stalemate.  Rejection comes from unexpected sources.  Opinions lead to senseless non-acceptance.

It’s in troubling times when a person’s coping skills take center stage.  Though it is normal to ache and struggle in the midst of troubles, healthy people eventually find a way through.  New boundaries may be required.  Adjusted insights about people and circumstances are integrated.  Efforts to lean into psychological competence can emerge.  

Adjustments may not be immediate, yet they can become enduring.

Narcissists, however, reveal profound immaturity in troubling times since their core ingredients are contrarian to insight, harmonizing, or maturation.  Instead of learning helpful lessons from strains, they become bad.  Or more to the point, their bad traits can become worse.

If you are in conflict with a narcissist, you will likely encounter traits like:  insensitivity, being callous, an inability to remain decent, creating increased turmoil, becoming vengeful, showing a lack of moral fortitude, or inflicting pain.  The possibilities are quite broad.

Let’s underscore, it’s not a sign of poor character when you feel anger, fear, bewilderment, or disillusionment.  Those reactions to problems are normal.  But when badness enters into the equation with no sign of retreat, that’s when you learn how strongly a person is bent toward narcissism.

So, with that in mind, let’s identify ten of the most common ways narcissists cross the line into badness once they encounter personal troubles:

  1. They focus exclusively on what is wrong.  Beyond naming and discussing problems honestly, they have a built-in pessimism.  Assuming nothing can be learned by tensions, they easily pronounce gloom and doom, automatically resorting to blame and shame.
  2. They are fair-weathered friends only.  Rather than seeking ways to find mutually satisfying resolutions, they bail.  In troubling moments, narcissists illustrate how they do not know how to be a friend.
  3. They become dishonestly evasive.  When their cooperation is most needed, narcissists become emotionally slippery.  They will not honor commitments, nor will they make themselves available for constructive, adult conversations.
  4. They become unnecessarily argumentative.  Once narcissist feel threatened, anger takes over and it becomes ugly.  It is typified by insults, harshness, and contempt.
  5. They prove to be morally bankrupt.  Ideally in troubled moments, goodness would rise to the surface.  But with narcissists, the opposite is most common.  Being self-absorbed by nature, they seek only one’s own interests.  Decency is not required.
  6. They become willing to use and exploit.  Lacking empathy, narcissists respond to tensions with one question in mind: “How can I get you or anyone else to do my bidding?  Who will bail me out of my woes?”
  7. They refuse to receive direction.  Common sense indicates that troubled moments can become teachable moments.  But that is not the case with narcissists.  Their defenses preclude them from asking: “How can I learn?  What can you teach me?”
  8. Honesty becomes expendable.  Unwilling to be responsible for personal flaws, narcissists respond to problems with lying, deception and evasiveness.  The less you know, the safer they feel.
  9. They have a lack of remorse.  Quite often, relationship struggles require each party to acknowledge wrong.  But narcissists have such a need to stay superior that they turn off any suggestion of culpability.  They refuse to admit how error prone they are.
  10. They become reliably unreliable.  It is in troubling times when a steady hand is needed.  But the narcissists’ need to be in control supersedes their willingness to say: “Count me in, I’ll be there for you.”

A primary indicator of being bad is the need to find people who will enable efforts to find superiority and self-gratification at others’ expense.   That’s it.

Instead of turning their troublesome moments into growth experiences, they grouse with sentiments like:

“I’ve been screwed over.”

“No matter what it takes, I’ll get what I want.”

“Coordinating with you is stupid.”

“I don’t really care if you are harmed in the process of working things out.”

Like anyone else, narcissists feel psychic pain in the aftermath of disappointments.  But they cannot stop themselves from immediately blaming.  They are too strongly defended to do otherwise.  Somehow, they rationalize that their problems are solved by pouring vitriol into you.

There is a simple truth we each heard somewhere in childhood: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”  When narcissists feel they have been wronged, they decide: “I win if I can turn you into a pitiful loser.”  Such a mindset is so fraught with illogic that it is impossible to speak against it.  So, your best response is to see difficulties as the growth opportunities they are, then move away from one who is bad to the bone.

Learn how to set boundaries.

To watch the video on this topic, click here.