In my experience when people discuss bad experiences with narcissists they are discussing people who are extremely manipulative, self centered, cruel and superficially charming. It really isn’t about people singing their own praises per se (although a lot of narcissists will never accept anything they do to anyone is wrong, but they will raise hell if anyone does anything to them).
Its unrelated to selfies.
I agree. Narcissism is one of the terrible triads though. I don’t care about your selfies, I’m not going to look at them. But if you want to hurt someone else you are less of a human.
A narcissist is not just an asshole. It is a personality disorder, and you can look up the criteria. The lack of empathy and disdain for others is accompanied by a constant need for admiration, and an irrational form of self-importance. They exaggerate their accomplishments. They tend to constantly lie. If you’ve actually dealt with a narcissist, you know they are beyond what would normally be labeled an asshole, which is just someone who does something mean, or has a habit of being mean. Asshole is just an intensifier for “jerk,” and surely you know jerks who don’t have any of the problems I listed above.
I’ll be more specific than I was before. Narcissism is brought up because a lot of narcissists are quite abusive to those under them. Since they are only ever nice for show, to get approval, anyone under them is fair game to treat horribly. It can lead to abused children and abused workers.
My sister had a narcissistic boss. How did she know? Because this was at a psychology clinic, and she was trained in how to evaluate psychological testing criteria. And, yes, said boss was herself a psychologist. Fortunately, one patient was trying enough that she snapped and admitted to a lot of the bad things she had been doing, thinking she was so special she could get away with all of it. My sister treated her a lot like how people around Trump treated him, while working to try to get rid of her.
No, she didn’t stare at herself in a mirror. That may be where the term came from, but that’s not what it means. That’s symbolic: it’s just the high view of oneself, while paradoxically needing validation. It’s like a part of you knows you aren’t actually special, but you keep telling yourself you are, and need other people to back it up. Because your worst fear is that you aren’t as special as you think you are. To a narcissist, that fear is worse than the fear of death in some cases.