July 28, 2026
These days, “narcissist” has become shorthand for “bad person”. We hear about them as manipulators, villains, abusers – people who only care about themselves and will never, ever change. The story is simple: narcissists are dangerous, empaths are good, and the safest thing to do is cut the narcissist out. I used to believe some version of this story myself, until my own nervous system began to tell a more complicated truth.
But what if narcissism, like people-pleasing, is first and foremost a survival tactic? What if one nervous system learned to stay safe by making everything about themselves, while another learned to stay safe by making everything about everyone else?
I’d even go a step further and say narcissists and empaths are two sides of the same coin. Both are deeply sensitive, and both feel a lot. One learned to survive by cutting off from those feelings; the other learned to survive by living entirely inside them.
My intention in writing this is to soften the language we use around “narcissists”, to explore how change might be possible (and why it is so frequently not), and to ground both in a nervous-system understanding – from someone who knows she might once have fit that description.
When My Life Revolved Around Me
My life was powered by achievement: career ladders, promotions, productivity. The self-help and personal development industry cheered me on, making everything about optimising, improving, and outperforming. Spirituality became the final upgrade, as I tried (unsuccessfully) to transcend my own humanity rather than inhabit it.
It is painful to admit this, but I rarely gave others a thought.
There was no space for them in my inner world; being asked to feel what someone else was feeling was like being asked to move a muscle I didn’t know I had.
Narcissism can show up in more ways than we tend to imagine. Most of us think of the classic picture: an inflated self-image, a need for admiration, and a strong sense of entitlement. But there is also the vulnerable narcissist, who is hypersensitive to criticism; the communal narcissist, who builds their worth on being especially kind, caring or spiritual; and the antagonistic narcissist, for whom life is organised around rivalry and winning. On the outside, these versions can look quite different, but inside, they share the same problem: it is very hard to make room for anyone else.
My own patterns did not always look obvious from the outside. I had enough awareness to read a room, to sense what was expected, and to offer the “right” response. It could come across as attunement and consideration, even when, internally, my attention was still organised mainly around myself.
When someone shared something painful, I could understand – on an intellectual level – what was needed from me. But the felt sense of their experience wasn’t there as I would have expected.
This isn’t about blame or shame. These patterns often form as a way of meeting needs that were not met earlier in life. They are intelligent adaptations – ways of managing pain, of staying connected, of finding a sense of worth.
When The Body Became The Way In
It was the concept of emotional wrapping that changed everything for me. By emotional wrapping, I mean the stories we tell ourselves about our feelings – the interpretations, rules, and meanings that surround an emotion and keep us from simply being in our bodies and feeling it. These wrappings are made up of the messages we were given and the narratives we built about our emotional worlds.
A core narrative I carried was that my emotions were too much to handle – and, by extension, that other people’s emotional worlds were, too. When a child doesn’t have a primary caregiver to help them make sense of their feelings, emotions can feel overwhelming rather than manageable.
As I worked with this, I began to recognise how sensitive I was to other people’s emotional intensity. Underneath the distance, the pride, and the self-focus was a nervous system that felt too much, too strongly, and had learned to harden itself just to get through. No wonder I kept wanting to move away from people; when I had so little space for my own emotions, there was no way I could genuinely make space for theirs.
I also came to see how strongly my system defended against genuine relationships, which limited how far talk therapy could reach me. Traditional talking therapies are grounded in relationship with another person, which can be a big ask for a nervous system that has organised itself around distance. I had to learn to be in relationship with my own body first, before I could begin to build real, empathic relationships with other people.
Going further into my body, I started to notice what had been shaping everything from underneath: a core belief that I was in this on my own. This belief lived so deeply in my nervous system that I organised my entire way of being around it.
What I was discovering in myself also helped me understand why some people now talk about empathy in narcissistic patterns in a more nuanced way. It isn’t always that empathy is missing; often it is there, but heavily defended or temporarily switched off when things feel too much. That way of seeing it felt kinder and closer to my lived reality.
What this showed me is that asking someone with narcissistic tendencies to jump straight into an empathic relationship with another person is like pushing them into the deep end without teaching them to swim. The starting point often needs to be much simpler: supporting them to build a relationship with their own body. That foundational work builds the capacity to feel, which then opens space to explore their own emotional material and, eventually, to meet the emotional reality of others.
Life On The Other Side of Defences
Healing and becoming are key stages within the InCorr Method, the body-centred approach I trained in. They describe the part of the process where old survival patterns – including narcissistic ones – begin to loosen, and where there is more room to grow into who we were always meant to be. Through this work, I began to experience something that surprised me – the depth of feeling that had always been there.
My nervous system had needed to adjust to the intensity of my own emotions. I came to see that I experience things deeply. Joy feels full and expansive; sadness carries a real weight. Over time, I learned to allow that, rather than contain it. It has brought a greater sense of aliveness to my life.
The next step was a different kind of challenge – allowing others’ emotions to reach me without my body interpreting them as a threat or something that needed to be managed or resolved.
Now, I notice a shift. I can be moved by others’ experiences in a way that feels open rather than overwhelming. I allow emotions, both painful and joyful, to move through me, rather than bracing against them.
It has changed how I connect – with more ease, and more depth.
In many clinical settings, people with narcissistic patterns are still seen as “too complex” or “too difficult”, with limited hope for meaningful change. That attitude has spilled into the wider culture, where narcissists are often written off altogether, reduced to a label rather than understood as human beings in deep survival mode.
What I hope this piece offers is a different way of looking. Narcissism can be understood as a survival strategy rather than a moral failing – a way a nervous system has learned to cope with emotional overwhelm and unmet needs, not unlike how people-pleasing develops as its own strategy for staying safe. For me, seeing it through the lens of the body and the nervous system has made greater compassion and nuance possible for both myself and others.
This doesn’t mean excusing harm or ignoring the impact of narcissistic behaviour. It does mean questioning the idea that “nothing can be done” and allowing space for the same kind of compassion we might offer to those who overextend themselves to keep others comfortable. From there, we can begin to imagine careful, embodied work that expands the capacity for feeling in those with narcissistic patterns – first toward their own inner world, and then, gradually, toward the feelings of others.
