How Narcissism Arrived In My Life

I was bimbling along, through the online world, creating a home business for myself. Things were going well. I had already had success online in the startup industry, and success offline in network marketing, but now I was combining the two worlds. So, I went into student mode, and sought out those who'd walked the path before me.

I had various trainers and mentors. I was open to learning. Many nights I stayed up until 3 or 4am in England, watching webinars from America, and taking notes.

Over time, I started to get some cognitive dissonance. Some of the trainers, as they got to know me more or I became more vulnerable with them, were acting in a strange way. This was happening to other people too. One, in particular, would praise me in private before broadcasting in public what an idiot I was for the thing they had praised me for. 

Generally, they didn't name me, but they made it obvious who I was. 

I noticed my heart hammering when this happened. I got scared, which was weird as I've never been intimidated by authority for its own sake. However, I started questioning myself. What was I doing wrong? How was I the best person in the world one second and the laughing stock the next?

Then I noticed that others were going through the same thing. 

After I got away from this person, I began to research narcissism. Sure enough, they had classic traits associated with it. 

As I began to build my business out of their circle, they started to try to affect how others saw me. They actually began to try to dismantle my business!

I hadn't fallen out with them. I hadn't done anything except detach from them. 

All of a sudden, people started to approach me, asking why this person had told them not to work with me. Apparently, the person in question was telling multiple people a day never to work with me, but giving no clear reason. 

I was horrified. Everyone was whispering about me behind my back, but nobody had any specifics to say. 

Long story short, this really made me paranoid for a while, and I got down on myself, until I discovered that this person was doing this to TONS of other people. It was nothing to do with me at all. It was to do with them. 

Now, I don't know whether this person has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder diagnosis, or if they'd get one, but I do know that a lot of the things they did were in the neighbourhood. At the very least, they were using tools one might pick up in the suburbs of the dark triad. 

I decided to avoid people with these traits, but they kept showing up everywhere. I soon realised that it wasn't possible to avoid them. I couldn't run about trying to slay all the dragons in the online marketing space. Instead, I needed to learn how to live alongside the dragons.

The Universe works in mysterious ways, and I found myself blessed with an assortment of narcissistic clients. Among other things (including working on relationships in my personal life with those further up the narcissism scale) working with them, and helping them to understand empathy better made me aware that there are some truly exceptional people who just happen to have a bit of an issue with vanity or empathy or short temperedness. Received wisdom at the time was to cut them out of our lives. But, that's like throwing away roses because they have thorns. 

I noticed that while everyone else was seeing thorn bushes, I was seeing truly exceptional roses with a bit of a thorn problem. 

As I say in the video above, I noticed that all superheroes face the same internal issue. If we ditch our superheroes and superheroines just because they're flawed, we miss out on some of the most inspiring stories. 

Then, after seeing other empaths end up in relationships of all kinds with narcissists over and over again, I had a thought. Maybe we are actually magnetically pulled towards each other for a reason. Aside from obviously abusive relationships that fit the 'predator and victim' model, which should be avoided at all costs... what if there is something in narcissists that we actually need, and vice versa? What if, instead of looking so deeply into the narcissists in our lives, we need to look more deeply into ourselves?

At the same time, I noticed the weirdness of spiritually enlightened people telling us to love all things unconditionally, but to 'kill the ego'. I go into this in more depth in the video above.

Then, one day, the idea for The Egon just landed in my head at midnight. It was an idea I'd fished for daily for years, so the moment it arrived I knew I needed to seize the moment. I typed faster than I ever have before, and wrote over 13,000 words in the next 24 hours. At midnight the following day, the first draft of my new theory was complete.