thought exercise on Narcissism

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome young man who caught sight of his reflection in a pond, fell in love with his own image, toppled into the water and drowned. So “narcissism” is an excessiv...

Recently a group of researchers conducted a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs. The researchers reported a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music...

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat shares about a unique phenomenon that occurs in organizations: Collective Narcissism: Churches are particularly susceptible to a phenomenon...

A colleague of mine often says that ministry is a magnet for narcissistic personality—who else would want to speak on behalf of God every week? While the vast majority of people struggle with public s...

In His book When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat describes a common tool employed on social media, gaslighting: Gaslighting is a form of emotional abuse that draws its name from a 1938 Bri...

People often think of Narcissus as the symbol of excessive self-regard, but in fact, he exemplifies the opposite. As the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino observed in the 1500s, Narcissus did no...

Over the next few years I collected data to suggest that we have seen a broad shift from a culture of humility to the culture of what you might call the Big Me, from a culture that encouraged people t...

In the ancient world, a place where the veil between the earthly and spiritual was easily pierced, rumors and gossip about great leaders being born of the gods, especially amongst royals, was somewhat...

For years Kyle and I [Jamin Goggin] had no trouble looking critically upon others in their quest for power. We bemoaned the rock-star pastors who were in the spotlight, whose churches appeared to be m...

In the Christian faith, we frequently take for granted how radically Jesus evens the playing field. No matter your wealth, your position, let alone your race or gender, all of us are equal in God’s ey...

In his important book When Narcissism Comes to Church, professor and therapist Chuck DeGroat makes an important connection between shame, narcissism and addiction by looking at the myth of Narcissus. ...

Humanity is thirsty for God, but we drink from cups that can hold no water. We draw well water and find that we are thirstier after we drink our fill. It is the water of self-hatred and rejection. It ...

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started, vulnerability was not a high value. Things have changed. But with a higher value on transparency, authenticity, and vulnerability in the church,...

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson points out our blind-spots with respect to pride: We rarely think of ourselves as proud. I...

Perhaps the greatest irony in the life of continual comparison is that while it involves so much attention to the attributes and gifts of other people, it’s actually quite self-focused. From that hype...

Do you remember those birds in Finding Nemo? They get me every time. As they fight for what’s on the ground, they are flying around screaming, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” Never has Disney nailed a picture of ...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

Recently at church I asked our congregation, “How many of you battle with self-deception?” A few people in the crowd raised their hands. Then I asked, “How many of you know someone who is very self-de...

Entitlement is a hot topic today. The root word entitled means exactly what it says—to give someone a title or a right. It used to be reserved for the wealthy and the privileged, based upon economics ...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

There’s undeniably a dark side to restless ambition, however. You can see it in dramatic fashion in the documentary  Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop , which follows the comedian on tour after he left the To...

Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the ...

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

One of the great ironies of sin is that when human beings try to become more than human beings, to be as gods, they fall to become lower than human beings. To be your own God and live for your own glo...

On the “ribbon of highway” that stretches “from California to the New York Island”—the great American Main Street—the mass of people seem completely self-absorbed. One hundred and fifty years ago Alex...

But it is important to be aware that the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.” Long before we are criticizing others, the ...

Researchers at the University of Kentucky and University of Central Florida who explored the neurobiology of the selfish-selfless spectrum found that most of us are neither extremely selfish (which re...