“Am I a narcissist?” What the question says about you

It is nearly two in the morning. The argument ended three hours ago, but one sentence is still standing in the room: “Do you know what you are? A narcissist. It’s always about you.” Your partner is asleep, and you are holding your phone in the dark, typing four words into the search bar: am I a narcissist. You open one test, then another. At the item “I like being the centre of attention” you stop. Sometimes, yes. Is that already enough?

People ask themselves this question more often than you might think, and almost never out loud. It comes after an argument, after a break-up, after an article about “narcissistic parents” in which you suddenly saw yourself rather than your mother. It also comes when someone close to you says the word straight to your face.

In this post I will not tell you whether you are or you aren’t. Nobody can tell you that through a screen, professionals included. What I can do is explain what the word narcissism actually means in psychology, why everyone needs some of it, how a trait differs from a disorder, and what is really worth looking at in your question.

Where the question comes from

In recent years the word “narcissist” has moved from professional books into everyday conversation and onto social media. There it is used almost exclusively about other people: ex-partners, bosses, mothers-in-law. What that kind of use does to the word, and to us, is the subject of “Narcissist”: a word we reach for too quickly. Here I am interested in the other direction: what happens when you read a list of “ten signs” and flinch at three or four of them.

Those lists are written so that almost anyone can recognise themselves. Have you ever interrupted someone? Have you ever expected praise and felt hurt when it didn’t come? Have you ever defended yourself in an argument instead of hearing the other person? Of course you have. Everybody does these things, especially when tired, frightened or hurt. What the list does not tell you is the part that matters most when assessing personality: how often, in how many different relationships, for how long, and with what consequences.

That is why the question “am I a narcissist” rarely comes from calm curiosity. It usually comes from fear. And fear is a poor diagnostician: it mostly sees what it is afraid of.

Is it true that a narcissist never asks?

You will quickly find reassurance online: “If you’re wondering whether you’re a narcissist, you definitely aren’t. A real narcissist never asks.” It sounds lovely, but it is too simple.

In 2014 Sara Konrath and her colleagues published a series of eleven studies with more than 2,200 participants, testing a single question: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist?” (with a note that the word means egotistical, self-focused and vain). It turned out that people who score high on longer narcissism questionnaires say so about themselves quite openly. Erika Carlson and her colleagues found something similar: people with pronounced narcissistic traits know that others see them as arrogant, and they agree with the description. So the insight is there. What is missing is something else: it doesn’t worry them much, because they don’t experience the trait as a problem.

The difference worth noticing, then, lies in how you ask. One thing is the calm observation “yes, I like being in charge, so what”. Something quite different is the question at two in the morning, with a knot in your stomach and the thought: “What if I’m harming the people I love?” The second version contains concern for the other person and a willingness for the answer to be uncomfortable. It is not proof that you have no narcissistic traits. It is a sign that you have something that can be worked with: the capacity to doubt yourself.

Healthy narcissism: the part you need

In everyday language, narcissism is an insult. In psychology it is first of all a description of something ordinary: the need to feel worthwhile, to be seen by others, and to be proud of something in yourself. In the 1960s and 1970s the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut argued that narcissism is not something a person should outgrow and leave behind, but something with its own line of development. A child needs an adult who lights up at the sight of them, whose eyes say “I see you and I like you”. Over the years this grows into mature forms: ambition, creativity, humour at your own expense, the ability to enjoy success and survive failure.

Healthy narcissism is what makes you apply for a position even though you may be turned down. It lets you say “I did that well” without immediately adding “but it’s nothing special”. It lets you take criticism without your world collapsing. People who have too little of it often recognise themselves in posts about how hard it is to accept a compliment, or in the description I gave in When everything looks fine outside but feels empty inside: fragile self-esteem.

So the difficulty does not begin with wanting to be seen. It begins where the sense of your own worth becomes so fragile that it has to be defended all the time, and where other people become mainly a means of that defence.

Two faces: grandiose and vulnerable

When we say “narcissist”, most of us picture a loud, self-satisfied person who talks only about themselves. That is just one face. The psychologist Aaron Pincus and his colleagues, reviewing the research, described pathological narcissism as having two expressions that other authors have also distinguished for decades: grandiose and vulnerable.

The grandiose expression is the one we know from films: a sense of being special, an expectation of special treatment, a need for admiration, little interest in how the other person is doing. I write about the healthy and the defensive versions of that kind of presence in Overconfidence: when trusting yourself is a defence.

The vulnerable expression is quieter and harder to recognise, in yourself too. From the outside the person seems reserved, shy, even modest. Inside they carry the conviction that they ought to be something special, together with a constant fear that they are not. They respond to criticism by withdrawing, holding a grudge, or spending days quietly offended. They envy, and are ashamed of envying. They brood over how others have overlooked them. In this expression shame, not self-satisfaction, is in the foreground.

An important point in Pincus’s work is that these are not two types of people but two states between which the same person can move. When things go well, grandiosity is in front; when failure or rejection arrives, vulnerability shows. Both faces share a core: a sense of worth that does not stand on its own and has to be propped up continually by achievement, admiration or comparison with others.

A trait is not a disorder

Narcissistic traits are distributed across people much as height is: some have less, some more, most are somewhere in between. A trait gets stronger when you are under pressure and eases when you feel safe. It is usually more pronounced at twenty than at fifty.

Narcissistic personality disorder is something else. The diagnostic manual DSM-5 describes it as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts; at least five of the nine listed criteria must be met. But counting criteria is not enough. For any personality disorder the pattern must also be enduring and inflexible, and must cause the person or those around them significant distress or impairment in relationships, at work and in daily life.

Specialists also point out that the criteria in the manual mainly describe the grandiose face, so the vulnerable expression is easily missed in assessment. That is one more reason why online questionnaires are unreliable: they measure what is easiest to ask.

A personality disorder can be diagnosed by a psychiatrist or a clinical psychologist, after interviews and sometimes psychological testing. As a marriage and family therapist in training I do not make diagnoses; who may do what is explained in Who may diagnose, who may prescribe, and who leads the process. An online test result is not a diagnosis, and neither is a sentence said in the middle of an argument.

So what does the question say about you?

If we set diagnosis aside, a more useful question remains: what happened in you that made you type this into a search engine? There are several possibilities, and they do not exclude one another.

Perhaps you noticed something real. In the argument you heard yourself and didn’t like it. You noticed that for the third time you hadn’t let your partner finish a sentence, or that you met their success with a remark that made it smaller. That is a valuable moment. What you are feeling now is probably guilt, and guilt is an emotion that leads towards repair.

Perhaps you were flooded by shame. Shame does not say “I did something bad” but “I am bad”. The word “narcissist” suits it perfectly: it is not a description of an action but a verdict on a whole person. I described the difference between the two emotions in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters. Someone who grew up with sentences like “don’t make yourself important” or “who do you think you are” may experience every need of their own as selfishness, and suspect that something is seriously wrong with them at the first ordinary wish for attention.

Perhaps someone keeps telling you. If a partner or parent regularly says that you are a narcissist, selfish, that you only think of yourself, especially when you set a boundary or express a need, it is worth looking at the relationship as well, not only at yourself. Sometimes the label is honest feedback. Sometimes it is a way of ending the conversation about what you just said. Psychology also knows projection: a person attributes to someone else what they cannot bear in themselves.

Perhaps you grew up beside someone like that. Adult children of parents with pronounced narcissistic patterns are often afraid of exactly this: that they have become the same. I write about it in Growing up with a narcissistic parent: the child as a mirror.

A short example of how a label and a description differ (composed, not a real person):

“Yesterday you said I was a narcissist. I spent the whole night reading tests.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. According to one I am, according to another I’m not. I’d rather you told me what I did.”
“When I told you about my promotion, you started talking about your project after two sentences.”
“That’s true. I didn’t notice. Tell me again, I’m listening now.”

More happened in those five lines than in five tests: a word you can do nothing with turned into an action that can be repaired.

Better questions than “am I a narcissist”

The question “am I a narcissist” has only two possible answers, and neither tells you what to do tomorrow. More useful are questions that can be answered by observing.

• What do I do when someone criticises me? Do I defend myself, hit back, go silent for three days, or can I, after a while, hear what was true?
• Can I apologise without a “but”? More on what a real apology is in How to apologise and how to forgive — yourself included.
• Am I interested in how someone else is, even when it has nothing to do with me? Not just whether I can show interest, but whether I feel it.
• Can I be glad about the success of someone close to me? And what happens in me when I don’t succeed.
• What would three people who have known me for a long time say about me? Not in an argument, but in a calm moment.

These questions do not measure whether you are a “good” or a “bad” person. They show where you are flexible and where you get stuck. And where you get stuck there is usually something old that once made sense.

In relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, a defence is not seen as a flaw of character but as a solution a child found in the relationships they had. A child who was noticed only when they shone learns to shine. A child who was shamed for having needs learns to hide them, and to look down on them in others too. This does not excuse an adult’s behaviour. It does tell you where to begin.

Exercise: five questions after an argument

Do this today, or after the next disagreement, once you have calmed down. You need a sheet of paper and ten minutes. The aim is neither to condemn nor to excuse yourself, but to replace the word “narcissist” with a description.

1. Write down what happened as if a camera had recorded it. No adjectives, no explanations: who said and did what. “She told me about her promotion. I said ‘great’ and started talking about my project.”
2. Write down what you felt just before. Envy, fear of being overlooked, tiredness? Something vulnerable often sits underneath a “selfish” reaction.
3. Write down what it was probably like for the other person. One sentence, in their words, not yours. If you don’t know, that is information: ask them.
4. Separate the action from yourself. Instead of “I am selfish”, write “in that moment I wasn’t listening”. The first sentence paralyses you; with the second you can do something. Self-compassion helps here. It is not letting yourself off, but the condition for looking without defending.
5. Choose one small repair and make it within twenty-four hours. A question, an apology without “but”, or simply: “I didn’t hear you yesterday. Tell me again.”

If you repeat the exercise a few times, a pattern appears: in which circumstances you close in on yourself, and what you are protecting when you do. That is far more useful than a test score.

Where this explanation does not hold

The comforting message “we all have a bit of narcissism” has limits, and it is only fair to name them.

Worry alone is not a certificate. The fact that the question torments you does not mean your behaviour hurts no one. A person can be sincerely concerned and still be doing serious harm in their relationships. If several people, independently of one another and in calm moments, tell you something similar, take it seriously, even if you do not recognise yourself in the word “narcissist”.

If you control, humiliate or intimidate someone, the question is no longer “am I a narcissist” but “how do I stop this”. A diagnosis neither explains violence nor excuses it. More in When you recognise yourself as the one who is violent.

If you fear the word “narcissist” because someone uses it as a punishment when you give your opinion, see your friends or say no, and you are afraid around that person, then the problem is probably not your personality. In Slovenia you can talk to the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55; in danger, call 112 or the police on 113.

If brooding over what kind of person you are will not let go, if you cannot sleep, if thoughts appear that others would be better off without you, do not stay alone with it. In Slovenia you can call the mental health crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), or turn to your GP.

And if you really want to know whether this is a disorder, the route to an answer is an assessment by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, not one more test and not this post.

How therapy helps with this

You do not need to come to therapy with an answer. A question is enough. In a safe relationship you can slowly look at what is too hard to look at alone: what happens in you when you are criticised, where you know the feeling that you must be special or you don’t exist, how you learned to hide your needs or to demand them. Not in order to get a label, but to have more choice in your relationships than you have now.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. When the question turns around what you brought from your family, a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, can be a good start: on paper it becomes visible how praise, shame and attention were handled in your family across generations.

What to remember

• Narcissism is a range. Everyone needs some: without it there is no ambition, pride or resilience to criticism.
• Specialists distinguish a grandiose and a vulnerable expression; both protect a fragile sense of worth, and the same person can move between them.
• A trait is not a disorder. A disorder is a rigid, lasting pattern with clear harm, and it is assessed by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist, not by an online test.
• The claim “if you ask, you’re not a narcissist” is too simple. What counts is whether you care how others are and whether you are willing to change something.
• Instead of “am I a narcissist”, ask: what did I do, what was it like for the other person, and what can I repair?