Stop mistaking narcissists for “avoidant”.
They’re anxiously attached. Anxious. Not avoidant.
If I were to visually picture a narcissist’s inner child, it would definitely be an overly clingy, desperate for attention “velcro” child always tugging at mammy’s skirt and acting out to get noticed. Don’t you agree? Deep down, that’s what narcissists are. Now, let me ask you a question: does that sound even REMOTELY avoidant to you?
Exactly. It makes no sense. And I’ll say more:
Real talk now: don’t we all even wish narcissists were avoidant? Think about it. No hoovering, no smear campaigns, no triangulation, just discard. That would improve things a bit, don’t you think?
I mean, ideally, narcissistic personalities shouldn’t exist. Nobody deserves that kind of abuse. But in a less-than-ideal world, I definitely would go for a parallel universe where narcissists are avoidant, instead of anxious. And I have a feeling I’m not alone in that.
But why is it people keep mistaking narcissists for avoidant? Well… I have a theory, and it starts with this misunderstanding:
People think “avoidant” equals “antisocial” or “callous”; Not caring about anyone’s feelings; only out for themselves.
And this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Look, I’m not here to defend the avoidant. Both anxious and avoidant are considered insecure attachment styles. Both need to heal and become more secure. I’m simply here to say that it makes no logical sense whatsoever to equate ONE of the insecure attachment styles with basically all the evil in the world, and the other insecure style as “merely a poor victim of the world, oh woe is me, what have I done to deserve such suffering”?
Aren’t both insecure? Don’t both need to learn lessons and become more secure? Then why this double standard?
Come on now. That’s VERY biased. Obviously, it’s coming from very anxiously attached people who don’t understand, and don’t wanna understand, avoidant people. Ironic, isn’t it? Don’t they love criticising the avoidant for “not caring” about anyone? Well, what exactly ARE they doing when they automatically judge avoidants as evil? Is that caring? Is that loving? Is it?!
You see, in order to demand anything (such as love), the BARE MINIMUM you need to do first is to offer it. Like the common saying goes, don’t be expecting others to treat you any differently from how you treat them. Basic courtesy and respect. It ain’t rocket science. Life is a two-way-road whether you love it or hate it.
Now… this is not to say every anxiously attached person is narcissistic. That does not proceed. In fact, all narcissists are anxious, but not all anxious are narcissistic. I hope that’s clear.
This should be obvious, but since we’re on the Internet, a place where people’s reading-comprehension skill tends to be below average, it needs to be said. It’s likely that each attachment style will show up more frequently within populations that have a particular disorder or dysfunction, but that doesn’t automatically mean the attachment style IS the dysfunction. For avoidant, off the top of my head, I can think of schizoid. Definitely not narcissistic personality though.
The same way that avoidant attachment isn’t automatically a sign that someone is callous or evil, neither is anxious attachment. These are, as the name says, attachment styles. They’re not measures of moral character. If they measured moral character, they would be called something different, and (most importantly!) the theory behind them would focus on morality, rather than how we relate interpersonally.
This is all to say: if you’re still insisting on mistaking attachment styles for labels to judge people’s moral alignment from, please keep in mind that it is an irrational choice you made out of your own free will, and you can just as well stop making that choice. It’s a matter of deciding to act on truth, instead of acting on personal delusions. And this decision isn’t something others can make for you. Let’s take some overdue responsibility.
When I say all narcissists tend towards an anxious attachment style, it is likely a consequence, not a cause, of their narcissism. After all, you can’t exactly become avoidant if you have an overinflated sense of entitlement — that’s the very opposite of being an avoidant, a style which is by definition marked by one’s preference for taking radical responsibility all the time. The avoidant style is not healthy and often leads to burnout, among other problems (it’s considered an insecure style for a reason), but it doesn’t make sense that a narcissist would go for it.
Some people are simply projecting.
Maybe the truth isn’t as complicated as you thought. It could just be that some avoidant people project their own attachment style onto narcissists in order to justify to themselves why they are avoiding introspection. After all, narcissist = bad (in these people’s opinion), so they can choose to evade guilt for not looking into these issues by classifying them as “bad”. As in, attachment healing is foolish, nothing good will come out of it (or so they think…), ergo let’s bury it very deep, out of conscious awareness.
But if you know anything at all about our shadows, it’s likely that you’re familiar with Jung’s famous assertion that the more we ignore them, the more they grow. How do we know they “grow”, if we’re still ignoring them? Well, we end up projecting. It’s a human way of confronting what we don’t feel ready to confront: “hey, subconscious, let’s pretend this problem is on another person. Now I can look at it! Are you happy now?”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, wishful projection can also happen: anxiously attached people projecting the opposite of their style (avoidant) onto narcissists in a bid to evade accountability for “the dark side” of the anxious style. As in: “narcissists aren’t good role models for me. So I’ll distance myself from them by pretending they don’t have the same attachment style as me. I’ll project the opposite onto them because that’s what I wish was true”.
I know it’s disconcerting to notice that some very callous people out there might have something in common with you. Unfortunately, though, that’s part of life. We can wish as much as we want that the people we consider villains don’t have anything at all in common with us… But that’s never true. It can’t be true. For starters, we’re all human — that’s something in common. And, love it or hate it, the “heroes” of your narrative can have a lot more than that in common with the “villains”. Oversimplifying matters in order to think of yourself as all-good (while specific people get to be all-bad) is usually unwise.
I hope this article was clarifying. Let me know your thoughts.
