Kitobni o'qish: «Fragile connections. How wounded narcissism prevents us from living in peace with ourselves and others»

From the author
In Pursuit of Healing

One day, while casually re-watching an old lighthearted TV series, I caught myself thinking: “How simple, sincere, and unaffected their lives seem! No endless analysis, no buzzwords like 'abuser' and 'narcissist', no constant discussions about personal boundaries or independence. Just life.” Indeed, those old stories were so full of life.

It struck me then how much we have been “spoiled” by modern psychology (there really should be a little smiley face here, but the editor will not allow it). It became painfully clear that most people I meet today are preoccupied with how “unhealed” or “immature” they still are – as if, somewhere along the way, these became necessary prerequisites for living, loving, building friendships, or having relationships. And so, we all rushed into endless self-work, hoping to one day earn that coveted ticket to the paradise of the healed and normal.

I found myself wondering: When did we fall so deeply in love with the idea of self-perfection? When did self-work start to look more like a moral obligation than a living process of seeking ourselves? It feels like we have turned our inner lives into projects with strict deadlines, where every “immature” feeling is a missed milestone, and every unresolved pain is a failed assignment.

Paradoxically, in our desperate race for healing, we often lose life itself – interrupting it at every step with self-monitoring: “Am I mature enough now?” “Am I still too unhealed?” Instead of simply feeling, loving, making mistakes, we analyze ourselves, scan every emotion for “trauma”, and keep thinking: “Just a little more work on myself and then I can finally be happy…”.

But life is not a checklist waiting for all boxes to be ticked. The maturity we will reflect on together is not a prize for good behavior, not a status awarded after mastering every psychological level. It is a path, a movement shaped by how we meet reality and weave it into the fabric of who we are.

At the very start, it is important to remember:

Life does not wait for us to solve all our internal conflicts or reach “full maturity”.

It is already happening – right here, right now.

And perhaps, our task is not to “fix ourselves” but to learn to live within this imperfect human experience – to coexist with our inner paradoxes, with that strange mix of love, fear, desire, and anxiety that makes us alive, instead of endlessly postponing life under the pretext of self-improvement.

Let us think about this together. Without rushing. Without judgment. Simply observing the remarkable puzzle of our Self slowly coming together.

You are holding a special work in your hands – a book that brings together knowledge from different fields of psychology. This information will help you better understand your mental life. It will help you find words for your inner processes and states, those vague sensations you may have felt but never clearly named.

This book is an invitation to a deep dialogue with yourself. It will help you understand the structure of your relationships with the world, with others, and, most importantly, with yourself. You will see how wounds, disappointments, and internal conflicts have shaped your personality and how you can begin the journey back toward your own integrity.

As you read and reflect, your unconscious will awaken. Your dreams may grow richer, your fantasies bolder, your memories more vivid. You will start noticing inner patterns that previously lived quietly in the background. It will not always be easy, but that is how we begin to truly know ourselves.

In every chapter, you will find life stories, which do not provide theoretical explanations but help you recognize yourself in other people. You will see that your background is a part of the shared human experience, and this realization will bring you closer to others.

Practical exercises, reflection prompts, and checklists encountered throughout the book are not simple tasks to complete but a gentle way to build a deeper connection with yourself. Gradually, you will learn to recognize where harsh, critical voices dominate your inner world, and how you might soften their hold.

This book will guide you through essential stages: from acknowledging your wounds and vulnerability, to discovering the strength hidden within your authenticity. You will see how your Adult Self can become a guide for your Inner Child, helping them leave their lonely inner exile. You will begin to sense freedom from the destructive inner filters that make the outside world seem so unbearable to you today.

Together, we will work on changing your internal dialogue, so that, over time, the stern voice of self-criticism gives way to a voice that is respectful and supportive. By the end of this journey, you will feel closer to yourself —

more alive, more whole, more real. This is not a journey of “fixing yourself”. It is a journey of discovering and accepting the self that, perhaps, you have never truly known.

Introduction
The Epidemic of Narcissistic Loneliness

Hello. It's me, your narcissism

Yes, the very same you might have read about in books and articles, usually portrayed as some kind of inner enemy. But what if I, your narcissism, have always been on your side? I'm not about arrogance or selfishness. I am your protection. A subtle, complex mechanism that helped you cope with hardships and preserve yourself when the world seemed not to see you or worse, to reject you.

Once, I was simply a part of your inner childhood world. Born alongside you so that your sense of self could emerge. I helped you feel: “I exist. I matter.” But then I saw how often you lacked acceptance, safety, support. So, I stepped in stronger.

I began creating roles and masks for you so that you wouldn't have to face the pain of your real self being unseen, uninteresting, or unwanted. Those roles helped you survive, but over time, they started getting in the way of living. I see how you sometimes wake up feeling the day is already lost. How every action turns into a tiny test: Was it good enough? Fast enough? Smart enough? How even rest becomes a competition: who got more done, who was more productive? That's not you. That's me whispering that if you just try a little harder, you'll feel worthy. But that voice – it's not your true essence. It's just an echo of the old pain I tried to muffle but only made louder.

You know, I always wanted one thing: for you to feel significant. Remember how, as a child, you craved being noticed? How you lit up when someone praised your drawing, your schoolwork, your bravery or kindness? That was me, whispering: “You can do it! You're important!” My task was to make sure you never forgot that feeling.

I wanted you to see yourself through the eyes of those who loved you. I worked so hard hoping you'd find such eyes and reflect yourself in them! So that you could say, “I exist. And that's enough.” I could have been the cement holding together the fragments of your self, helping you realize you are unique, worthy, whole. But sometimes, the world didn't respond.

Often, those whose acknowledgment you longed for turned away or criticized you. Even those closest to you couldn't always give what you needed. I whispered: “Hold on. Don't show weakness. You can do it!” I tried so hard to shield you from new wounds, new rejections that, without noticing, I became more of a captor than a supporter.

And now, when I see how my protection brings you resentment, anger, and exhaustion, it hurts me too. I never meant for it to end up this way. I just tried to keep you from falling, feeling worthless or not enough. And it seems, I overdid it. Instead of inspiring you, I began to control you. Instead of freedom, I built endless checklists: good enough, right enough, fast enough.

I see how hard it is for you. How you look in the mirror and feel unsure. How you hold back bold steps, afraid of making mistakes. How you close off when you want to show true feelings, because you're afraid of judgment. This is not what I wanted for you. This is not what you deserve.

I'm here to say: it's time for me to stop being your overseer. I want to become your ally, helping you see that even with all your imperfections, you are already good enough. Let's rewrite the story of our relationship in order to cooperate for your better future.

Narcissism: A Story of Our Relationship with Ourselves

In psychoanalysis, narcissism is not just a character trait and certainly not simply a mental disorder. It is a fundamental structure that shapes our relationship with ourselves and others. At its core lies the ability to feel one's own value and significance, which is an essential part of psychological health. It is how we build our sense of self, balancing internal experiences with external expectations.

In early childhood, narcissism is natural: the child sees themselves as the center of the world, and that grandiosity helps their Self to grow. The “narcissistic piggy bank” gathers together the history of our relationship with ourselves. It holds all traces of love and rejection, joy and sorrow, unexpected discoveries in relationships with our close ones and devastating losses. Narcissism is designed by nature precisely to allow our Self to first emerge within the field of relationships with parents. Like connecting cement, it binds the scattered puzzles of our Self into a holistic view of ourselves, so we can rely on it and navigate our inner world.

From the very beginning, narcissism was on our side. Thanks to it, we felt significant, coped with early challenges, and learned how to relate to the world.

But not everything went smoothly. When there was not enough attention, acceptance, or simply the safety to be oneself, narcissism had to work differently. Sometimes, it reminds me of that song: “I made him out of what was at hand…”. It stitched our self-image together from the chaotic fantasies and the reflections we caught in the eyes of those around us. Sometimes, there were not enough reflections. Sometimes, they were colored too darkly, showing only our flaws. Sometimes, they were distorted by parental expectations we could never quite meet.

Thus, narcissism sewed us a costume not tailored to our Real Self but to the pattern we were handed. And it helped preserve the vital connections we needed so desperately – more than we needed to stay loyal to ourselves.

At the heart of this kind of narcissistic work, there is always the fragility of the construction of what we can consider our Self. As if it wants to emerge but keeps hiding in its childhood costume, still unable to find a healthy form of living in today's world.

We do not know whether we should flaunt our strengths, hide our flaws, or, on the contrary, obsessively embrace everything in ourselves so that it becomes an egoistic message to the world:

“Accept me as I am. I don't care what you think of me.”

It is not possible to always fully feel what our Self actually is, and we do not know how to replenish the missing pieces of that fullness. So, we decide: “Maybe I'll feel it through achievements and success?” “Or through enthusiastic responses – or at least through any attention at all?” “Or maybe I should stop needing it altogether, so I won't be so vulnerable and dependent?”

A New Model of Narcissism

One day, a client of mine, a very successful woman by modern standards, complained about an unfair comment she had received on social media. A comment that, in my view, was borderline abusive. I asked her how she felt about it. I was not surprised when she said she was angry with herself. Since every pop-psychology outlet she had encountered had already explained that “if you have high self-esteem, nothing can hurt you”. So, logically, she wanted to get rid of her feelings – her woundedness, which revealed her vulnerability to others.

I think I would be right if I say that most of my clients think the same.

Some believe they must forbid themselves to feel “inappropriate” tenderness toward anyone who has not yet “earned” loyalty. Others think they must purge anger from themselves to show they have total control over their mood and emotions. Some wish to become utterly free of needing care or support. “Why does this affect me so much?” “Why do I care so much?”, they ask me, convinced that it is abnormal. They believe that our work together must help them to finally rise above all this everyday fuss and human relationships filled with feelings for each other.

What is being glorified today as personal growth model is, in fact, a new form of social narcissism. Everyone thinks it is about constant striving for success and craving recognition. But it is subtler and more insidious. Detached from our Real Self, unsure of who we really are, our “narcissistic costumes” now disguise us as “healed” and “well-therapized”.

Now, vulnerability is seen as a mistake. Feelings, even the most natural and sincere ones, are treated as weaknesses, as signs of immaturity. And it is not just a personal conviction. It is practically a rule in the culture of “successful” people. We think real maturity is about being above emotions, mastering them, controlling them. About not feeling pain, offense, longing, or dependency. And certainly, about never showing anything like that to others.

It is fitting to recall Ayn Rand's words here: “In an absolute sense, an egoist is not someone who sacrifices others. He is someone who stands above the need to use others. He does without them. They are irrelevant to his purposes, motives, thoughts, desires, or the sources of his energy.”¹ But if you look closer, you will not see strength in this “absolute egoist” – you will see fear. Fear of showing feelings. Fear of needing others. Fear of being misunderstood or rejected.

It is that fear that drives us to hide behind “healing” and stoicism.

We learn not to feel – because feeling hurts.

We learn not to need – because needing makes us vulnerable.

We learn not to want anything from others – because they might reject us, and we might get hurt.

We learn to keep our distance – because closeness always carries risks.

When my client got angry at herself for feeling hurt, she was actually angry at her Self for refusing to fit into this new model. Her feelings were real, but the model demanded that they disappear. And in this conflict between the Real Self and their “narcissistic costume”, she is not alone.

Many of us live trying to be invisibly vulnerable and perfectly indifferent at the same time.

Since that is sold to us as success in personal development.

Confused People

New social models (by the way, with the help of pop-psychology) have reprogrammed our defensive narcissism. It is as if it received new instructions on how to protect who we are – and simultaneously create the illusion that we are manifested authentically.

Self-presentation has become more refined and subtler: morning coffee snapshots, sunset jogs, snippets of daily life. We crave being seen but must not show that we crave it. In this model, emotions stay behind the scenes; desires are tightly controlled. As if we play roles pretending that it is our real life and that we are truly present in it. But everything feels… fabricated.

In this new reality, the rules are different:

We must be here – but behind the glass, untouched and unmoved.

We must show ourselves – but only just enough. Brightly and sometimes even obtrusively – but pretending that it is natural.

We must evoke emotions – but not directly feel them toward those who evoke them in us.

We must create distance, always leaving space, so that no one can come too close.

And in that silence, your narcissism does not scream, “I'm the best!” It whispers: “I don't know if I'm really here. I don't know what I'm supposed to be like. I'm completely lost about how to manifest myself, because the way I am feels not enough. And pretending to be someone else is exhausting.”

It is the voice not of strength but of confusion. It is not controlling but searching for control. It is not dominating but trying to find itself in a world where the right answer to “Who am I really?” is always somewhere else, outside, and in the future.

And the heaviest part: we feel we must quickly get rid of this confused, vulnerable self. The moment we discover ourselves to be confused, vulnerable, or unsure, we split into pieces and sweep the unsuitable parts under the rug. Instead of a whole Self, our narcissism keeps piecing together a shifting mosaic, whose shape and colors change depending on the lighting. Today we might see the bright, captivating colors of our Self. Tomorrow, after one indifferent glance from someone – we shatter, like tiny glass fragments in a child's kaleidoscope.

Black-and-White Coloring Books

The world we live in increasingly resembles a childhood coloring book. But a simplified one. Black-and-white. There is no room for nuance, complexity, or anything that cannot be described in a single word. All the immense media power of countless mentors, curators, coaches, and psychologists has handed us uniform pictures where nothing can be changed.

You are either “healed,” having conquered yourself, your emotions, and preferably your need for others – or you are a loser-neurotic, stewing in your contradictions, while everyone else has “already figured it out”. You are either manifested – in the feed, in stories, in the other people's mind, or a procrastinator who cannot pull themselves together to “make it out into the world”.

This is a reality where answers are simple and criteria merciless. You are either strong or weak. Either you know how to set boundaries, or you have let the whole world walk all over you. Either you are free or still dependent on the opinions of others. Either you are utterly confident and know exactly how to react in every situation, or you simply have not worked hard enough on your self-esteem yet.

And most importantly: you must always know exactly which side you are on. Because in this crisp picture of the world, there is no space for searching, for not knowing something yet. Uncertainty is not appropriate. It looks like a mistake. We ourselves become mistakes…

But what exists beyond this coloring book? Color that cannot be named. Feelings that cannot be squeezed into a quick checklist. Complexity. Something bigger than a simple answer, something deeper than mere approval or rejection. Complexity demands time. It demands reflection. It demands psychic effort, where our soul could slowly sharpen its own colored pencil. And most inconvenient of all, complexity demands admitting: you do not always know what is right, normal, or enough.

It is complexity that makes us real, and it is precisely what we fear most. Because complexity cannot be quickly sold, cannot be packaged into a flashy product, cannot be captured in a single post. Complexity is always contradictory, always a bit awkward. No one is entirely right in it, but no one is entirely wrong either. In complexity, you are neither a perfect hero nor a broken neurotic.

You are just a person: who sometimes manages and sometimes does not.

The world that tries to turn us into coloring books is comfortable because it is predictable. But in that comfort, we lose the most important thing: the ability to be complex. To be both strong and vulnerable at the same time. Both successful and still confused. Bright and sometimes invisible. It is terrifying – but it is out of this very complexity that real color is born. Color that is not distorted by filters.

The Epidemic of “Adulthood”

I once saw a picture that was both hilarious and sad. It read: “Ah, these new relationships, where you aren't allowed to ask for affection, support, or warmth because you are both ADULTS. Might as well replace 'I love you' with 'I don't need you' – just to make sure you're truly independent.”

To my mind, it perfectly captures a modern trend. We no longer tolerate abuse, we no longer agree to discomfort, we no longer bend to demands of other people. We have a language now to name what hurts us: toxicity, gaslighting, codependency. We know exactly how things should be, and anything outside those bounds is immediately tossed into the trash. “You're abusive? Goodbye.” “You aren't self-aware enough? Goodbye.” “You're dependent, unstable, too complicated? Go fix yourself first, then come back.” And we diligently work on maturity, where vulnerability, weakness, and sensitivity are labeled as childish flaws.

And you know what? This is a pure narcissistic dream: to need no one, depend on no one, and purge yourself of vulnerability as something that decent people have long since gotten rid of. Thus, our narcissism has learned to become socially acceptable. It no longer looks grandiose or demanding. It has learned to say all the right words about self-worth, boundaries, and toxicity. But its essence remains unchanged: we are still afraid of being vulnerable, of being complex, of not being accepted as we are. Instead of learning how to be in relationships, we learn how to avoid them.

It is narcissism that says: “If something is uncomfortable – get rid of it.”

“If someone causes complications, they're not right for you.” “If something goes wrong, it is not your responsibility.” This kind of narcissism sounds like self-care, but in reality, it is a way to cling to the illusion of invulnerability. A protection behind which we hide from real life and real relationships.

Because it is true that real life is uncomfortable.

People are complex.

Relationships demand effort, compromise, the ability to hear and accept not only the other but also your own imperfection alongside them.

It is not about tolerating abuse or ignoring your needs. It is about being ready to accept that intimacy is always a risk zone.

Yes, sometimes relationships truly destroy us, and it is vital to leave them in order to save ourselves. But the problem is, we start seeing danger where there is none. We stop giving people a chance. We stop learning how to be with others in their complexity, just as they are learning to be with us in ours.

Narcissistic Loneliness is about remaining trapped in the idealized version of life, where no one can hurt us, but no one truly sees us either.

We cannot negotiate. We stop trying to understand. We cannot bear disappointments.

We diagnose, but we no longer connect.

We fear admitting that we are also complicated, dependent, vulnerable.

We are looking for ease in areas where ease cannot exist.

We choose to stay in this “lonely invulnerability”, clutching the illusion of control.

We hide in these narcissistic shelters, believing it to be self-work. And every day, I see the consequences: the deep, hopeless feeling of being cut off from the world and from ourselves. And it feels as if there is no way out…

Wait, Was That Even Possible?

Once I was talking to an acquaintance who, like many, had a habit of attacking himself whenever he felt unsure. He said, “I just want to rest. I'm so tired. I'd love to not work for a year to sort everything out.”

“That's an interesting fantasy,” I said, slipping a little into psychologist mode, “that a break from work could calm your inner battles. In fact, it would probably be the opposite. As soon as you have free time, the anxiety will surge even harder for you not to leave yourself alone. Your exhaustion isn't from external pressure. It's the grip of self-aggression pressing down on you. If you give yourself a break, that pressure might even increase.”

“But then how can I feel calm?” he asked.

“You know,” I said, “I think you're confusing calmness with something else. What you call calmness isn't about the absence of external stress. It is about making peace with yourself. Look, right now I'm writing a book (yes, this very one) and it's not going well. I can't figure out how to weave together all the things I want to say. There are so many ideas that I feel overwhelmed. I get angry, anxious, tense, trying to improve it. But it didn't occur to me once that I'm stupid or worthless because it's not working. Not once. It's just not coming together yet, that is all. But I'm trying. And of course, I get tired, but it is a different kind of tiredness. In this tiredness, my Self is alive and feels normal.”

“Wait, is that even possible?” he said.

“It is,” I said. “It might feel like fantasy for now. But that's what people truly come for when they seek help. Under the pressure of their previous worldview, people turn to psychologists to fix themselves: to turn a Bad Self into the Ideal One. But deep inside they aren't looking for that. They come seeking peace inside. A place where they can look at themselves with a different lens. Where instead of the Bad Self, the Real Self emerges – the one that doesn't swing between 'worthless' and 'magnificent'. Where the inner gaze shifts from judgment to acceptance, from cruelty to love.”

It is not about indulgence or abandoning growth. It is about inner support – strong enough to bear who we really are – that helps us move forward without breaking under the weight of expectations.

For example, one of my clients, after a disappointing date, said, “Maybe it's not about me. Maybe that woman just has her own issues.”

Another client shared how her state had changed:

“Last time, we talked about my childhood, about how I coped with loneliness when my mom left. I saw the roots of my tension. And I suddenly realized I've carried this feeling for years. For the first time ever, I didn't want to get rid of that part of me. In two weeks, I didn't attack myself even once when I noticed I was tense. I just thought: 'Yeah, that is me'. That's all.”

And another client, summing up our work, said:

“This year, I stopped treating myself badly. Maybe I still don't know how to treat myself kindly. Next year, I want to learn that. But I already have more strength to find that attitude in real life.”

And it really does feel like “surfacing”, like emerging from the endless lake Narcissus sat beside, staring at his reflection. Now you can look around. See others. Feel the real world around you – a world that matters too.

When a person accepts that the 14th-century chapel had been destroyed long before they were born, and not everything is about their badness or perfection, there is hope. Hope for a shift from narcissistic ways of treating oneself to something more human and mature. It turns out peace with oneself is truly possible.

Why Read This Book?

We are all tired. Tired of endlessly trying to relax, to let go of control, to stop attacking ourselves. Tired of battling the inner critic who always finds a way to whisper: “You aren't enough.” Tired of the aggressive internal dialogues that never end. But the real problem is that our whole search for peace starts from two fundamentally false premises.

First – that our Real Self is terrible. That deep inside us lurks a monster best kept locked away. Well, maybe not a monster but that infamous core defect, the idea that “something is wrong with me”. This belief acts like a slow poison, infecting everything that comes from within us. How can anything good belong to someone so defective?

Second – that our true Self must be perfect. That if we just attend one more training, learn one more ultimate truth, we will finally find and reveal it. And if that has not happened yet, it must be due to some freak accident but most likely because of trauma or unloving parents.

These are not simply our beliefs. They are the very rules of the game of today. The pendulum has swung: from general psychological ignorance to widespread, simplified pop-psychology. But the essence remains the same: we are all still running around with our neuroses. Only now we have legal grounds to keep trying to “fix ourselves”. Because if you are not sufficiently “healed”, “confident”, or “successful”, then obviously something is wrong with you. It cannot be that you are normal and simply do not know exactly what to do yet or how to react properly, can it?

But that is what matters: both ideas are false. Our Real Self is not terrible. They are complex. They carry contradictions, mistakes, fears, desires – all the things that make us alive.

Our true Self does not have to be beautiful.

They can be tired, confused, imperfect, lost.

And that is their value.

Come with me – and I will show you why the ideas of personal growth and strengthening self-esteem do not work the way they promise. Why we get stuck in endless self-improvement, and what it is really protecting us from. Why we cannot admit that our real need is connection with others. And why we cannot step out into the world while endlessly wandering in our own narcissistic Wonderland.

This book is not about finding the way to finally become better. It is about stopping. Stopping the escape from yourself and beginning to understand yourself. Together, we will explore how our fears, masks, and inner critics became part of us. We will understand how narcissism, trying to protect us, sometimes becomes the very abuser that traps us in eternal self-battle.

We will go through your stories – the ones that shaped your Bad Self. We will work out how they taught you to fear your feelings and reject your imperfections. We will look at your Inner Parent, who sometimes becomes too harsh or even cruel. And step by step, we will find our way back – to the real you. Not perfect. Not “healed”. But sincere. And alive.

This is a book about coming home.

To yourself.

To those around you.

To the idea that being you, just the way you are, is a wonderful thing.

With care for you, Julia Pirumova

Part One
How the Psyche Is Built and What Narcissism Has to Do With It

Chapter One
“Narcissistic Syndrome”

After the book Fragile People, many recognized themselves in narcissistic deficiency and even called themselves narcissists. Of course, I understood that this was not accurate, but it was impossible to attribute such a variety of narcissistic symptoms and manifestations to one definite phenomenon. After all, for example, we all sometimes feel a sense of inadequacy or shame about some part of ourselves. And many live with the feeling of a hole or emptiness inside. And then I thought, why not unite all this under the name “narcissistic syndrome”? You will not find this term anywhere. That is why I put it in quotation marks and now I will explain why I find it important to talk about it.

In psychology, a syndrome is not always a pathology. It is a collection of symptoms and manifestations united by a common cause. In our case, it is exactly so. Narcissistic dynamics can belong to any type of character and any organization of personality. They are what form, sustain, and protect self-esteem, dignity, a sense of self-respect, and our human identity – that is, our Self. They can manifest through different strategies and behavioral patterns. For some of us, narcissistic dynamics are the leading way the psyche functions. And then we can call ourselves a narcissistic person. But even in this case, there are several variations of how exactly the narcissistic syndrome will manifest in us and to what extent it will define our lives. Thus, looking at our history, as a result of childhood trauma, we can become either a narcissist to the extent of a personality disorder or a depressive person with narcissistic defenses. Or a schizoid character with a powerful narcissistic armor.

“Narcissistic syndrome” is a concept that unites these manifestations, showing how they can take the form of masks, defensive bastions, or internal emptiness, regardless of where we are on the scale of mental health. It is not only about the “narcissists” who we easily recognize by their demonstrative brightness but also about those who quietly retreat into the shadows, walling themselves off from the pain of insufficiency. And about the neurotics for whom a compulsive striving to be better is a hidden cry for help. And also about those who seem perfectly adapted but are afraid that behind the facade of success, their own fragility will be revealed.

This idea is like a magnifying glass that allows us to see the barely visible lines on the map of the psyche. It shows that no matter how strongly or weakly narcissistic traits manifest themselves in us: they are there, and they are working. Grandiosity can be obvious or hidden, vulnerability can hide behind a stone face or spill out in tears.

But inside each of us, there is a place where narcissistic trauma whispers that we are not good enough, and where our defenses against it are born.

That is why “narcissistic syndrome” is not a diagnosis but a way to see how our nature fits into the general map of personality development. We all carry elements of the syndrome. We are all trying to compensate for the lack of maturity in our psychic structures where they are still too weak to withstand this big complex world. This is our common human essence, and it has far more nuances than simply dividing people into “healthy” and “unhealthy”.

Symptoms That Lie on the Surface

“Narcissistic syndrome” often speaks in the language of paradoxes. When clients talk about their lives, we observe everyday dramas, internal monologues that become visible through words, actions, and even silence. And the most surprising thing is that they exist in all of us – to varying degrees, in different forms, but inevitably.

The first trait that catches the eye is the striving to seem. It is not always grandiosity or flamboyance, although sometimes those are obvious too. A person may try to seem stronger than they are, smarter, more successful, more attractive. To seem better. But what hides behind it? The feeling that simply “being” is not enough. That something must be added to oneself or, more often, something must be eliminated from oneself to gain approval, to be seen, to earn acceptance.

Next – the constant drama with self-esteem. “Narcissistic syndrome” is often manifested in the inability to remain in a state of balance. A person seems to swing between the sense of greatness (of course, imaginary) and the feeling of total failure (also imaginary). One day, or even at one moment, they are convinced they are capable of everything; the next, they feel worthless. These are not the consistent highs and lows of bipolarity, but rather a subtle, habitual instability: the dependence of the inner Self on the gaze, assessments, and opinions of others.

Another noticeable symptom – the eternal search for confirmation, the thirst for recognition, for being needed, important, significant. This search shows itself in how a person talks about their achievements, looks at others awaiting their reaction, tries to be useful or needed, sometimes even at the expense of themselves. There is nothing overtly narcissistic here in the way we usually think about narcissists, but it reflects the same internal mechanism: if I am not confirmed, it is as if I cease to exist.

Equally evident is the fear of revealing and expressing oneself. People with “narcissistic syndrome” often fear being exposed, fear that someone will notice their weaknesses, their imperfections. Therefore, they maintain distance, do not fully reveal their feelings, and build relationships in a way that keeps them safe.

The fear of intimacy can be read in small things:

in answers with slight defensiveness, in avoiding painful questions, or in the desire to change the subject if the conversation gets too close to something too personal.

These symptoms are a vibrating fragile armor, hiding the internal struggle with one's worthlessness, with the sense of insufficiency. They become so obvious that they seem “normal” against the backdrop of life filled with achievements, duties, and demands. But these symptoms are clear alarm signals hinting that something inside is wrong. We are not imagining things, and we are not exaggerating. Our Self desperately seeks attention and signals about problems through symptoms. It simply has no other language for us yet…

Loneliness

Behind the obvious symptoms that complicate life, there is always something deeper, which can also be attributed to “narcissistic syndrome”. For example, loneliness.

And when I use this word, I do not mean simply the absence of people around. It is not situational emptiness. I am speaking of the collapse of connections – both external and internal. Imagine an inner world where there is no life: scorched or, on the contrary, frozen land. There are no people, none expected, and between the person and the surrounding world lie deep moats and rise high walls. Sometimes, you feel like an invisible being, a bodily shell unable to establish contact with others. And although outwardly we might rush from one relationship to another, bustle about, try to adapt or fit in, inside we cannot overcome the distance to reach what we call a connection with others.

Loneliness is not freedom and not solitude, which can be temporary or desirable. Loneliness is a constant and habitual state.

A sense that no close relationships  are possible in principle.

Maybe because we are not suitable for them, or because we do not even hope that someone would respond to us so perfectly that we could let them get close and start to trust them.

Feelings of guilt, shame, melancholy, and hopelessness – that is what lies at the root of loneliness. It is global alienation, not related to the physical absence of people but to the internal impossibility of genuine connection. We do not even believe that we are capable of being in these relationships. We do not believe it is even possible to be who we are in intimacy with others. Since attempts to change ourselves create too much tension, and, thus, isolation and refusal to establish connections become the logical choice.

And now this process of “withdrawing ourselves” from connections becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We turn into observers, unable to get involved in direct interaction. We avoid intimacy, believing that it is the only way we can protect ourselves from pain, fear, and tension.

One day during a session, a client and I observed how he was making himself lonely right in our conversation.

He said, “Firstly, I don't look at you. Secondly, I don't show my feelings. And thirdly, I always try to answer your questions correctly so that nothing else is noticed.”

It was a clear demonstration. You can close all channels of communication: visual, emotional, verbal. You can cut off all energetic exchange with the world: give nothing and take nothing. We seem to be present, but we remain somewhere far away, on our own cold and deserted inner North Pole. We talk, listen, show emotions, but we do not let anything inside. We do not allow ourselves to be touched or involved. It is an eternal illusion of connection and escape into oneself for self-correction…

Abandonment and Abnormality

The experience of abandonment, on the one hand, resembles loneliness, but it contains something more: feelings directed not just inward but toward those who left us. It is like constant flashbacks where someone once left or simply abandoned us to our fate. It is a psychic imprint left by relationships that defines our essence.

“Abandonment” has synonyms: “being lost”, “being forsaken”, “orphanhood”. But for abandonment to become a habitual state, it is not necessary to have been a literal orphan from childhood. It is enough that no one showed us we were important to others, that no one gave us a sense of belonging. We were not given attention and care but rather shown indifference or apathy.

Abandonment is when we are left alone with ourselves and have no one to rely on at the very moments when someone is needed around.

These moments did not just generate pain, fear, or dissatisfaction in us – they planted the feeling of having been left behind.

Deep inside, there is a belief that we were abandoned because something is wrong with us. Because abandonment is not just an action, it is an attitude, and no one would abandon someone who is valuable and loved. After being left, we feel a rupture not only with the external world but also with ourselves. We begin to feel that some parts of us deserved this rejection.

Of course, the sense of abnormality resulting from abandonment can be very loud and destructive. It can sound like: “I am a mistake, I am an error.” Or it can manifest itself as a faint thought that something is wrong with you when things do not work out, when you do not meet expectations. Or it can appear as clear convictions about yourself: I don't fit, I'm not enough. But most often, it is deep melancholy that is hard to recognize consciously. A feeling that everyone around knows how to do things, and you don't.

I am incapable of loving.

I am incapable of feeling.

I am incapable of creating, of making something new.

I am incapable of being in deep relationships with others.

I am incapable of being…

Self-Alienation

For a long time, I could not find the right word to describe something I felt myself and that my clients tried to convey to me. It always seemed that some aspects remained unexpressed. And then I found it: self-alienation! That is the word!

We feel cut off from our Self, as if we exist behind thick glass that prevents us from connecting either with the energy of life or with other people. We are separated from ourselves, we do not understand who lives inside us and whether they even exist. We do not feel our desires, we do not understand what we truly want. It is as if we live someone else's life, fulfilling duties, following obligations. Sometimes, when waking up in the morning, we do not even know why we got out of bed. We read books, talk to people, but we do not feel that it has anything to do with us. Sometimes, it seems that we act not out of our own inner impulse, but because “it is necessary,” because others expect it.

For example: we sit at work, enjoying our achievements, but inside, there is emptiness. We feel anxiety that we cannot express in words. It seems that no accomplishments can bring a sense of reality, because we do not feel connected to ourselves. We strive for success, but inside, there is no one who could rejoice in these victories.

Self-alienation can manifest itself even in the simplest actions. For example, we simply sit at dinner and suddenly realize that we do not feel the taste of the food or the pleasure of communication. We are surrounded by people who love us, but inside, we still feel as if we are not there. Or, on the contrary, we sincerely laugh with friends, but then, when we are left alone, we feel emptiness, as if the good mood was just a mask we wear to avoid being noticed, to hide from others the absence of connection with ourselves.

And in such moments, the realization comes that we were never truly in contact with ourselves, that our inner world remained inaccessible.

But scarier still is the feeling that this “real self” might not exist at all.

And then we see no point in changing or doing anything, because it seems that, anyway, it will lead nowhere. We do not feel hope that life can change. We feel complete meaninglessness and even despair. Yes, we flail, try to drown out the anxiety, chase achievements and reflections – but it is useless.

That is how self-alienation works.

It manifests itself in the fact that we do not believe ourselves.

We do not feel what we want and what we do not want.

We do not feel our body and what is happening to it.

We whip ourselves with a mental “lash” for misfortunes and failures that prevented us from becoming the ideal version of ourselves.

We close our eyes to what has been done and experienced.

We betray our soul, which was silenced because its impulses led us into trouble too many times.

We refuse our potential, citing the pain of past disappointments when something did not work out.

We retreat from life into our psychic shelters, prepared back in childhood when we were too young to have any control.

We hide in loneliness, fleeing from connections that might bring new disappointments.

We become so cautious that we almost block the flow of our own life, turning it into a dried-up trickle.

Case from Practice

One day, a client came to a session and said he had nothing to talk about today. And that if he could, he would just go and lie down to sleep because he was very tired. A person, coming to another person, does not consider it possible to talk about what is really happening to him and how he truly feels. Fatigue and the tension that caused it seemed not serious or weighty enough for conversation. Who he was at that moment seemed not important enough to be brought into the present contact.

When we began to discuss this, it turned out that, like many of us, he was guided by a purely functional attitude toward himself: if I cannot feel relieved, why share it with you? As a result, the entire layer of human attitude to oneself gets removed from all contacts. What remains is effective and useful interaction. At first glance, the logic is flawless and fits the modern trend: “I'll come to you, you'll fix me, and as for how I am in all this and how I experience it – let's leave that out of brackets.”

Only somehow it turns out that the problems the client came with do not go away. Because in life he does exactly the same: he extracts himself, his feelings, experiences, pains, and anxieties from relationships, sincerely considering them unimportant and undeserving of attention. He tries to present himself at that moment as someone else: collected and efficiently coping with his fatigue, for instance, somewhere else.

“If we cannot solve my work problems right now, why discuss them? If, for example, I punctured my foot, I need to run to get it stitched, not discuss my feelings.”

“I totally agree. But that doesn't mean you won't have feelings at that moment. And I, for example, can handle them differently while being around. I can comfort and soothe you, acknowledging your pain as real. Or I can pretend that for me nothing is happening except the task of stitching your foot. And then, when everything is over, I can ask you how you experienced it. And you will tell me how scared you were, how you panicked, how it hurt. You will recall that in childhood you had already punctured your foot. And what happened then. And I will sympathize with you or tell you about my own case. And then the human part will surface in each of us, as well as toward each other. But we can stay efficient, rational, cold. We won't leave these roles: I am a psychologist, who doesn't get distracted by feelings and solves people's problems; you are a proper client of a psychologist.”

“That doesn't sound very good.”

“I seriously want to see how exactly you feel inside these problems. How you experience them. What's happening to you. Because that is you, not just your problems at work.”

“I hear what you are saying, but it just doesn't fit into my picture of the world.”

“Yes, I understand. If until now, no one has looked into your feelings and states, they simply could not appear as a reality inside you and much less be seen as a valuable reason to share them with someone.”

In this example, there is a lot about loneliness and abandonment. Inside us, there is an “embedded” picture of the world where people around us are indifferent to our feelings, and we are not needed by them with what we are. We have spent many years learning to suppress manifestations of ourselves. And we have become very efficient at it.

Unrealness

You will not find the word “unrealness” in proper academic texts either. But what can you do if no other word captures this very essence? “Falseness” does not exactly convey the feeling of unrealness and disconnection from what is happening inside and outside. Probably, “unreality” is the closest synonym. Or even “lifelessness”.

Still, “unrealness” is the word that best describes what is so familiar to us: the feeling that our life is happening without us, even though it is we who strain, exhaust ourselves, and try to keep up.

One of my clients once put it this way: “I can move, speak, even smile, but everything happens somehow by itself. I watch my actions but don't feel that it is me. Life goes on, but I seem to be absent from it.” For me, her words became an example of how unrealness paints everything in shades of a color that does not really exist. Feelings that seem to be there but feel alien; thoughts that sound but do not resonate; actions that happen but are not felt.

The psychoanalyst Neville Symington described this phenomenon very precisely. He wrote that people experiencing unrealness sometimes compensate for it with frantic activity, drowning out the inner emptiness with constant hustle. As if movement and external events could revive what feels dead inside. But there are others – those who freeze, withdraw, sink into apathy, in order not to feel the unreality of their existence.

Both of these strategies, hustle and freezing, are just ways to cope with the absence of oneself in one's own life. Some seek proof they are still alive through constant activity, others – through complete stoppage and withdrawal from reality. The first envy the peace of the second, and the second dream of the life of the first. But both sense this unrealness, this constant question: “Am I living? Or just functioning?”

This feeling is familiar to many. It arises when our days are filled with tasks but not emotions. When, after a string of events, only fatigue remains, not joy or satisfaction. When inner tension and boredom mix into a strange cocktail, and you want either to run away or to hide.

Unrealness is pseudo-existence. Life in which we do not participate. Because there is no place for us in it as we are. And we will never become the selves we could manifest ourselves through…

Emptiness

The feeling of inner emptiness is so familiar and natural to many that it is almost the first thing people complain about. It causes most of the anxiety. And indeed, if inside me there is no “me” but only emptiness, you will turn to any means just to plug this feeling. You will throw in achievements, work, children, anything, just to calm down. But it is like stuffing yourself with vitamin C when you actually have an iron deficiency. Attempts to fill the wrong thing with the wrong means.

People talk about their emptiness differently. Some mention it in the way the abovementioned metaphor illustrates it, describing vague feelings of missing something important inside. Others feel real physical symptoms, they describe a hole in the chest or solar plexus area that aches and throbs. Some experience a constant feeling, resembling hunger, but not experienced physiologically – rather psychologically, pushing them to seek various ways to get rid of this painful discomfort.

And again, I want to say: it is not just our imagination that there is a hole inside us. Emptiness in our psyche is not just a poetic metaphor or a vague sensation. It is something much more real than one might think. It exists as part of our inner structure and can be described almost physically: a space devoid of our own content. An uninhabited room with nothing but walls.

It appears where something was supposed to be once. Where our real Self, their desires, feelings, interests, should have unfolded. But instead, their absence took root. The space inside us is not just “empty” in the usual sense. It was not filled because at some point in our development, the process of filling it was interrupted. And since then, it is as if the construction has never been finished: the walls are there, the floor and ceiling too, but the room is hollow, lifeless, and cold.

Emptiness cannot tolerate itself. Because it knows that this is not the normal state of our inner space. It forces us to search for at least something outside to fill it: new people, achievements, purchases, bright emotions. But no matter how hard we try, nothing brings lasting relief, since you cannot fill inner emptiness from the outside.

Emptiness is not the same as apathy or depression, though it can be connected to them. It is deeper. It is a structural, almost fundamental sensation of the absence of life where the energy of life should be. Where the feeling of our true, Real Self should be.

Emptiness again cries out about unrecognizedness. About the fact that we have no connection with who we truly are, and this loss must be acknowledged. And then we turn toward ourselves, toward the processes we must undertake for ourselves. Instead of trying to fix and repair what was never broken…

Case from Practice

Once, with a client, we were examining why she had absolutely no free time. She worked, studied, managed the house, raised children – she was always busy. Of course, she got tired, but allowing herself to rest was impossible for her.

I explained that no matter how unbearable the symptoms may seem, they are still easier to endure than to face what we are not ready to face.

At some point, I said, “It seems that even now you are rushing. As if you need to find the right answer.”

“Otherwise, why are we here?” she replied.

“What if you allowed yourself to slow down a little and not hurry?”

She thought for a moment and then said quietly, “Then I would feel too anxious.”

“I understand. But what would happen if you didn't try to fill our contact with quick words or actions? If you simply stayed in this state?”

“I don't know…” She fell silent, then added, “Maybe I would see the emptiness.”

This emptiness frightened her. She confessed, “I've worked so hard on myself, only to find this? How horrible!”

“I want to remind you that right now you continue to exist. You are here – confused and thoughtful. That is still you. What would happen if you allowed yourself to be like this and let me see you like this?”

“You would think I'm boring and stupid. And then you'd say it is not interesting to work with me and we would end therapy.”

We started to explore this fear. I asked, “It must be hard to always try to look like a 'proper' client?”

“Honestly, I don't even notice it anymore. It's become habitual for me.”

Then I clarified, “So, you fear that I won't be able to handle seeing you thoughtful, without ready answers?”

“Yes.”

“And if you could honestly tell me what you need, what would it be?”

“Probably, that I need more time. I'm not one of those who instantly grasp everything.”

Gradually, she began to remember, “When I was different, not like everyone else, I was mocked at. It hurt so much. I learned that it is better not to show anything of my own. 'Stay silent, and they'll think you're smart.' But now it feels like I not only don't speak but don't even feel anything of my own.”

“I understand. If every expression of individuality results in pain, risking being yourself becomes too dangerous,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is sad: I was afraid of my feelings for so long that I stopped noticing them.”

“It is very sad. But I want to point out that of course you are always filled with something. But since you broke the connection with yourself for the sake of external contacts, it feels like emptiness.”

These words seemed to touch her. For the first time in our sessions, she dared to linger in this feeling, not running away, not filling it with something external.

Afterword to Chapter One

Remember the terrifying creatures in the Harry Potter books – the Dementors? Their presence made people feel as if all the light had disappeared from the world. It was not just a gloomy feeling but an unbearable, all-consuming cold that seeped into the very soul. As if it sucked not only joy but also hope itself, leaving only painful memories and fear.

People felt utterly powerless, defenseless, as if all the good moments of their lives had turned out to be a lie. The most terrible episodes, the most frightening losses, and forgotten grievances would surface in their minds. Dementors seemed to draw a person's past out of them, forcing them to relive the pain over and over again.

Physically, it resembled falling into icy water: the body would become heavy, breathing labored, and a sticky horror would spread all around. Moreover, with each passing moment, it seemed more and more that the cold would never end, that there was no way out, and that the darkness would last forever. Dementors robbed people not only of happiness but of the very sense that happiness was even possible. It felt like the awareness of absolute abandonment when it seems that no one will come to help and that salvation is just an illusion. And the scariest part – this feeling did not quickly fade. Even when the Dementors left, their imprint remained in human souls for a long time. People could sense emptiness, as if a part of them had been irrevocably lost.

Many of us, to a greater or lesser extent, carry both the mentioned symptoms and these deeper experiences. This does not make us narcissists. Such states can be caused by traumatic events where the psyche, trying to protect itself, walls itself off from both the inner and outer worlds.

But for those who have survived narcissistic trauma, these sensations are especially familiar: inside – darkness, silence, and emptiness, as if the connection with the living, life-seeking center has been severed. Moreover, the emergence of the warm, vulnerable part that could reach out to the world and to people becomes forbidden and aggressively suppressed. All this creates a feeling of disconnection from others, leaving a sense of isolation and unrealness of what is happening.

Let us set out on a journey of exploration and understanding of what exactly was lost in the process of the formation and development of our Self. And how narcissism, out of a normal defensive mechanism, turned into an instrument for halting our vitality and spontaneity. The goal of our journey is to feel again the connection with ourselves, with others, with the world. Because behind the outer armor, there is still light that is waiting to be noticed.

Chapter Two
Conditions for the Emergence of the Self

Getting to Know the Self

When we are born, we do not yet have a Self as a stable psychic structure capable of performing different functions. It will be formed later. But imagine that inside each of us, there is initially a “seed” or some kind of a prototype of our Self – a tiny but incredibly powerful core. It is like a bright little flame hidden deep inside, and whatever happens, it must remain untouched. This core is our essence, our true nature, what makes us unique. Let us call it the Self. It becomes the foundation of our personality and defines who we are and where our authenticity lies.

Born together with our body, the Self goes through a long journey to one day fully unfold its potential. At the beginning of life, it exists as chaotic energy that needs contact with parents. And not just any contact, but warmth, care, love. Like a little star born somewhere in a cold cosmic valley, it reaches out to the great suns to be nourished by their light. Receiving this parental “nourishment”, the Self acquires its own psyche, and we begin to form as personalities.

At first, we are completely dependent on our parents, and there is no question yet of individuality. We learn to feel ourselves as part of something steadier and more stable, identifying with our parents as examples of what we could become.

And only based on belonging and similarity with someone, our individuality begins to form.

A little star must first orbit a great Sun to learn how to shine on its own someday.

The Journey of the Little Self

Having been born, the Little Self travels its own path, moving from one developmental stage to another, becoming stronger at each step. When it grows up, it will no longer be just potential. Each day, month, and year, it gathers more resources and capabilities through the investments made by its environment. In this way, it builds our psyche around itself. And it gains the ability to appear in reality, to manifest as our unique, incomparable Self.

At the very start of its journey, the Self goes through several essential stages.

The Time of Sleep (up to one month of age). In the first weeks of life, the baby hardly wakes up. His world can be cozy, quiet, and blurry, as if he is still floating in warm waters, just as before birth. When he feels hunger or discomfort, he calls for help. But, living in the hallucination of his own grandeur, he feels that nourishment comes by itself. He believes he possesses such mighty power that it compels other people to obey him and provide nourishment, comfort, and calm. As if the infant lives in his own world so far, where there are no others. His main task is to get used to the world, to the sounds and smells of this new space. His Self does not yet exist, just as his mother “does not yet exist”.

The Time of Symbiosis (1–5 months of age). After a month, the baby begins to notice that there is another figure in his world. And she completely obeys his magical power: always ready to embrace, feed, and comfort. This is the mother. Together they create a symbiosis, like two travelers walking hand in hand. The mother becomes for the infant an extension of himself. It is during this period that a magical moment occurs – a smile. The baby smiles at his mother, and she, seeing it, feels like the happiest person in the world. Their bond becomes stronger. This is the time when the little one's impulses are perceived by the adult and returned with a smile, joy, and mutual pleasure. There is no separate Self yet; there is only a shared psyche, where all regulation occurs through the adult.

The Time of “Hatching” (5–8 months of age). Around six months of age, the baby “hatches” from his psychic cocoon. He stays awake longer, actively explores the world, and gradually distances himself from his mother. But each separation still causes anxiety. He may cry even if his mother leaves for just a minute. Yet he learns, and gradually the awareness strengthens within: if the mother leaves, it does not mean she will not return. And during this absence, he finds the strength to be himself. The encounter with separateness is a very delicate moment. On the one hand, it is important for the mother to withstand and encourage the baby's attempts to separate and become more independent. On the other hand, it is important that the mother's disappearances are not too abrupt or prolonged and that the anxiety from her absence is somehow soothed.

The Time for the Boundary between “I” and “You” (8–16 months of age). As the baby grows, he starts to notice that he has hands and feet he can control. He also realizes that his mother is not entirely him but a separate person. This discovery, of course, brings joy, but anxiety also increases. Sometimes, it rightly seems to the child that his mother can disappear, and his powerful control over her is lost. At the same time, his interest in the world around him grows. The child learns to crawl, tastes toys, and even finds his first “treasures”, like a favorite toy or the edge of a blanket, which help him cope with separation when his mother is not around. Pressing his beloved white teddy bear to himself, for example, my one-year-old son would calm down and fall asleep. This was his first transitional object, as psychologists say. Such object plays a key role in the transitional period between experiencing fusion with mother and the understanding that she might temporarily get out of sight.

If one finds a suitable transitional object, one can safely exit the state of shared psyche without experiencing the terror of psychic collapse.

After all, the mother used to be a part of the child himself. Therefore, when she disappears traumatically and prematurely from the psyche, the infant feels as if he has lost part of himself, thus, losing the ability to function as well as he did before with the help of an adult.

Romance with the World (16–24 months of age). Once the child has learned to walk, the most exciting part of his early journey begins. He feels like the king of the world, an explorer of uncharted lands. Every step is a victory. Every dropped and found object – a new mystery. The child runs, laughs, and rejoices in his independence. The mother is nearby, but now not as a part of him but as a faithful friend and protector.

Some researchers, and quite justly, in my opinion, say that it is during this period that an active and self-affirming Self is formed. Encountering the joyful reactions of adults to the emergence of new abilities, which radically change the previous direction of development, the child's individuality can receive a ticket into life. Or, conversely, it may be faced with the adults' indifference and the unimportance of his first achievements. Then the normal and healthy childhood exhibitionism will be interrupted, and the child will begin to turn all the impulses to share what he can do inward.

Realizing One's Separateness (2–5 years old). Each day, the child better and better understands that: his mother is not him. She can leave, she has other things to do. This discovery first stirs a storm of emotions: anger, sadness, resentment. But gradually, the child learns to endure such moments. He begins to understand: even when his mother is far away, she still remains in his heart. And that he can cope on his own, be independent, and find joy in it.

Thus, step by step, the little one grows, getting to know the world, people, and himself. His journey is full of complexities, and each step strengthens his psyche. At any stage, certain disturbances and breakdowns are possible, which, though they may not destroy the psyche, activate those very defenses that later block natural and free development. We will talk about this later. For now, let us look at what allows the Little Self to initially embody what we came into this world with.

How Parents Become the Supports of Our Self

Even though we come into the world with a body that already knows how to breathe, cry, and demand, our psyche is just a barely functioning mechanism, merely ready for development but still made up of entirely scattered fragments. We do not know how to manage ourselves, regulate our emotions, calm ourselves, or understand ourselves. All we know at this stage is how to cling and to need.

In such fragility, our parents become something greater than just adults who feed, cradle, or change diapers. They become the Supports of the Self – those who help us not only survive but also begin to form our Self. They are the bridge leading us out of chaos into a world where we can understand who we are, what we want, and how to cope with what we feel. At the same time, parents are our guides not only into the real external world. It is through their reactions and reflections that our inner world becomes ours. It gathers itself from chaos and transforms into our own reality.

To illustrate that, I will share a story: once, my almost twelve-year-old son needed a minor, yet nonetheless, real surgery. General anesthesia, rehabilitation, pain. He kept himself together, was brave, and handled everything wonderfully that day. But the next day, it “caught up with him”. There was an emotional outburst. The inner “hysteria” as manifestation of the restrained tension that could not be shown became external. He directed all his feelings at me, needing someone understanding and accepting to share them with. They ceased to be just his fear and pain; they were met, reflected as normal and natural emotions, processed by my psyche, and returned to him as comfort and reassurance.

We initially “borrow” the parental psyche so that it performs various functions for us while our own cannot. Parents at first perform important functions on our behalf: they help regulate emotions, make decisions, and feel safe.

You could say that our psyche structures itself around the Self through our parents, placing them inside.

Gradually, these functions are supposed to become our own.

Ideally, the parents' role weakens, leaving behind stable structures within us to lean on: the ability to care for ourselves, cope with difficulties, and find inner balance.

This process can be imagined as the “embedding” of parental images (their behaviors, values, reactions) into our psyche. They become figures around which it forms. If the parents fulfilled their role well enough, the necessary structures become strong and help us live. If not, “holes” might remain, which we try to patch up through relationships or defense mechanisms.

But here is something that is important to understand right now. All these ideal models of psychic development that I have written about and will continue to write about further exist only to provide a reference for “relative norms”. And we, ordinary people, always carry a whole “bunch” of our own deviations and disruptions that are an integral part of our story and personal uniqueness. In our psyche, there will always be “holes”, and thus, a need for defenses and compensations. It is normal, it is not some personalized punishment for our unworthiness.

Thus, our task is not to sprinkle ashes on our heads over the impossibility of erasing the consequences of our upbringing forever but only to make sure they do not severely affect the quality of our lives. As they say, psychology does not guarantee you happiness, since its purpose is to free you from excess suffering.

Becoming completely healed and independent from your past is impossible.

But it is quite realistic to learn to perceive it adequately and to use your own potential to achieve adult goals, like love, creativity, money, and sex.

Love as the Foundation of Wholeness

At the very beginning of life, love seems and feels absolute: you are me, I am you, and the whole world exists only for us. Merging with the parent is not just pleasant (although it is pleasant too); it is vitally necessary. Without it, we simply could not cope with the chaos of early experiences.

But let us not idealize it. Infant love is not about emotional experiences; it is need-love, dependency-love, demanding-love. In essence, a love that screams: “You must be here, or I simply don't exist!” And that is normal. At the beginning of our journey, we are all like that: little, demanding, incredibly vulnerable, and at the same time absolutely egocentric.

It would be wonderful if all people consisted only of love. Just imagine: our parents – pure love, tenderness, and acceptance. And we ourselves, would be made only of pure love the moment we were born. But, unfortunately, that would be an evolutionary dead end. Fusion, attraction, appeal, connection, bond – all this is indeed powered by the force of love. But along with it, its sister – aggression – is born. And without it, there would be no chance for our separation, withdrawal from fusion, autonomy, individuality, and finally, adulthood.

Thus, to become a human being, we need a lot of love and reliance on connection, and to become a personality, we need a lot of aggression.

Do you remember Akhmatova's lines?

 
“If only you knew from what rubbish,
Poetry grows, knowing no shame…”
 

Similarly, our Self grows not only out of beautiful feelings and emotions. It is formed from traces of love and aggression born in all important relationships in our lives. And today it continues to develop at that same intersection, believe me. Only sometimes, instead of exchanging with the world, we direct aggression solely at ourselves. That is the root of all the disorders that ruin our lives. But we will return to this a little later.

Our need-love, dependency-love, and so forth have many “faces”. We want to be fed, cleaned, freed from pain and tension. We want attention, reflection, consolation, belonging, warmth, closeness, acceptance of our feelings and their processing. We need control and supports, examples and ideals.

All these are the needs of our infant psyche, which may be satisfied – or may not. When we get what we want and need, we feel an exchange of love: our requests are accepted by the adult, who finds a way to fulfill them and returns that to us. When acceptance does not happen, there is only one conclusion: our love is not needed. This inevitably leads to: “I am not needed”, “I am not valuable”, “I am not important”.

In such cases, aggression follows love to erase all its previous contributions. In the infant world, any anger crosses out the value of what was previously received. And love is devalued by every new deprivation we must endure. It easily evaporates under the first rays of disappointment, the first shadows of frustration.

Love overcomes aggression not by force but by endurance. It accepts anger, pain, and disappointment without retreating. This is precisely what we are taught in the first years of life. When our anger encounters the parent's softness and acceptance, when our frustration does not break the connection but becomes part of the dialogue, we begin to understand: love can endure. It does not dissolve from anger, does not disappear if we are imperfect. On the contrary: it becomes larger, deeper, more stable.

Maybe it sounds silly, but I will now give an example… of my dog. When she (sorry for the details) is in heat, it becomes very noticeable that she wants love and closeness. At least, that is what I tell my son when he asks me why she whines. I am sure that what emotions do in the human psyche, instincts do in a dog.

And every time during such periods, when we leave the house, she immediately drags one of my slippers onto her bed. As if saying, “You left, but I need a piece of you to miss you less. You stay with me even if you aren't around. I comfort myself and maintain the connection.”

My son says, “Mom, I feel so sorry for her.” And I answer, “Oh, don't worry, son, she found a way to feel less lonely and to better endure our absence.”

But the most interesting thing happens when we come home. I take slippers away from her and put them back on my feet. Guess what the dog does? She starts biting my feet in those slippers, as if playing but obviously “scolding” me for leaving her.

This incredibly accurately reflects the inner dynamic of a child who, even finding comfort in something, still feels anger at the mother for leaving them for something else. At such moments, they lose a lot: safety, the certainty that they are still loved, the sense that they are valuable enough to be chosen over something else. Can they remain emotionless? The emotions are there – but sometimes, there is no one to share them with, or showing them to the parent feels too dangerous. I, for instance, stroke the dog, showing her that I am not angry and that I understand her desire to “punish” me. But few of us, when we were children, were comforted this way, few had our fears and feelings shared during such moments. And even fewer parents could endure our anger about it.

In a healthy version, it is precisely through parental acceptance that our infantile aggression begins to transform. It ceases to be the enemy that attacks love. And only then, over time, do we develop a whole image of the parent: one who loves but sets boundaries, leaves but always returns and continues to love. One who can be angry at us but can also be gentle and respectful.

For example, my son often sulks at me and says I am mean or bad. Once, as an experiment, I asked him, “Tell me, isn't it normal that I'm the bad one and you are not?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. So, you're okay, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But to be honest, we should also admit that I'm not always bad and often do nice things for you, right?”

“Yeah.”

That is how we live. A child does not naturally have the option, “I'm fine; it is just my mom who's losing it”. Everything that happens in the relationship is attributed to itself by their narcissism: “I did something wrong”, or “I'm not good enough”. Not “Mom cannot love, see, or notice me”, but “I'm not worthy of her attention and interest”.

At such moments, I help my child not only to maintain a normal image of himself (“I am okay”) but also to see me as a whole: not only bad but also good. If we do not do this for our children, the world divides into black and white. We risk constantly being either on the white side – ideal, completely good – or on the black side, when we make a mistake or fail to meet expectations.

And yes, love in this story is not just tenderness. It is endurance, the parent's willingness to return, even when they themselves would prefer to hide for a while (or a long time). It is the strength to stay around and thus build the foundation for a whole and resilient Self. Because love is not about everything being perfect – it is about the ability to stay in the relationship despite its complexity. And even if childhood love sometimes sounds like a cry for help, it is out of this very cry that our capacity to love and accept, both ourselves and others, is born.

Only in the union of these forces, love and aggression, does an integral psyche appear.

It contains not only belonging and resemblance to others but also the separateness of our Self, which asserts itself through standing up for itself in relationships. If aggression remains forbidden, then our Self will constantly stumble over the impossibility of resisting others, saying “no”, and defending itself.

Cases from Practice

These are very common stories we often discuss with clients. For example, they talk about difficulties in relationships, assuming that they are afraid of intimacy, unable to trust, unable to come close, keeping their distance. It seems to them that this stems from a lack of love and an inability to freely express their attraction to people.

Of course, that is possible too. But do you know what we discover after some time? What actually suspends their need for closeness is not so much the fear of expressing love but the impossibility of later expressing aggression toward the one they have made “good” for themselves.

We remain caught in this childlike splitting, according to which you cannot be angry at someone you love, and you cannot love someone you are angry at. Behind the inability to resolve conflicts, there is also the fear of losing your Self in the storm of feelings. “The scary part is not that I come closer, but that then I won't be able to resist you.” Our little anger, arising in moments of dissatisfaction and frustration, became such a threat to connection precisely because it always was supposed to lead to a rupture. You cannot stay with someone you are angry at. If he or she is bad, you must break the connection. And if it is inevitably going to happen, then why even begin?

This is the logic by which we live, protecting our Self from the internal conflict we do not know how to resolve. Because if you cannot both be angry and love at the same time, then it is safer to avoid closeness altogether. And for now, it is the only solution we can find to protect ourselves from the tension of unbearable feelings.

Tasks and Functions of the Supports of the Self

Each subsequent stage requires different qualities from our parents, so that they remain loving, reliable, and empathetic for us, that is, attuned to our real needs – so that they can serve as the Supports of the Self.

● Sleep time. The function of the Supports of the Self is to sustain the infant's hallucination that they are still inside, by providing yourself “at their disposal”, timely and sufficiently. Thus, the feeling of discomfort or tension will not overwhelm the little psyche.

● Symbiosis time. The task of the Supports of the Self is to submit to the will of the baby, maintaining their fantasy of omnipotence and continuing to be stable for their whims and needs. To be the face that joyfully responds to their smile. A rupture of symbiosis due to strong frustrations or growing tension without the mother's ability to soothe the child may negatively affect development.

● Hatching time. The task of the Supports of the Self is to remain stable during moments of presence and absence. It means seeing the child's anxiety, containing it, not collapsing under one's own anxiety about separateness. It means to comfort and encourage the child to grow and become themselves. This stage implies constant reflection and containment of emotions.

● Time for the boundary between “I” and “You”. The task of the Supports of the Self is to continue staying around without disappearing abruptly, so that the child does not lose the feeling of omnipotent control. At this stage, it is necessary to encourage exploration of the surrounding world. To find transitional objects that prepare the psyche for separation. This way the child will be able to endure situations where the mother disappears from view.

● Romance with the world. The task of the Supports of the Self is to be a guide into the big world where the child has abilities and capabilities. To reflect and support them. To rejoice and actively be present when the child shares their first victories. Healthy support of the child's exhibitionist manifestations: “Look at me! I can do it!”

● Awareness of one's own separateness. The task of the Supports of the Self is to endure the growing and constantly changing emotions of the child connected with their own successes and failures. To contain and return their fears, anger, sometimes even hatred over the mother not being there as much as they needed – all in “processed” form through parental reactions and consolation.

The tasks and functions of the Supports of the Self in each period are diverse. Sometimes they must support the child's fantasy of grandiosity, and at other times, they must confront him or her with the fact that their mother is not their possession. Sometimes, it is necessary to sustain fusion, and then to create quite the opposite conditions for experiencing separateness by both sides. During some time, there is only the child's feelings and desires, and then, gradually, the inner world of the other appears.

All this is necessary for the child to gradually become more independent and autonomous by accumulating psychic resources – not through abrupt cutting of ties, which leaves him or her feeling abandoned, lonely, and unwanted.

Case from Life

One morning, as my son and I were getting ready for school, I hurried him along in irritation and hurt him with something I said. Later, in the car, he was angry and pushed my hand away when I tried to pat his head. I had already apologized, but he sat turned away. We rode to school like that: he sulking, and I silent, not touching him. I respected his unwillingness to engage and his right not to return to contact with me right away.

Another time, after sports practice, he was irritated and upset because something had not worked out. I tried to ask him about it to support him. But it turned out that he needed me to be silent and leave him alone. And that is what I did.

These examples are not about me being a supermom. The first one illustrates an important aspect of growth, where a person forms the right to manage contact independently. He chooses when to come closer if he is hurt or angry, and he comes because he wants to, not because he has to. The second one shows that parents must sometimes step back in good time and not give what they think is needed, even if they believe it is for the child's good. Otherwise, they calm only themselves, turning the child into an extension of their own needs.

I want to show that we often think of parental tasks only as providing presence and support. But there is another category of functions that serve the development of the child's Self. Not giving when it is excessive. Not supporting when there is no request. Not chasing with kindness when there is no desire to receive it.

Mirrors, Heroes, and the Circle of Belonging

Of course, when we are little, our parents do almost everything for us and INSTEAD of us. Independently, we can only breathe, swallow, cling, and uncontrollably soil our diapers. But the Little Self also needs parents to perform a special kind of psychic work for us. They are to meet three of our major narcissistic needs. And how these needs are satisfied, determines whether we will emerge alive and real to ourselves or whether our Self will remain cut off and alienated from us.

Thus, for the Self to develop and, having been born, move toward its true embodiment, and for us to feel more and more ourselves, we need to use our parents in three roles: a mirror, a hero/magician, and a unity to which we can belong.

When we began to crawl, take our first steps, and say our first words, and as our abilities to control our body and reveal our potential increased, each of us wanted to see delight and joy in others. Such a response to our first scribbles or a memorized poem strengthened our faith in ourselves. We had no doubts about our accomplishments if we managed to see positive reactions from our loved ones. This is not just a desire for attention for its own sake but the first and most important need of the Self. A child needs a “mirror” – a person who reflects their achievements and emotions, saying, “Yes, I see you. You are wonderful!”

Similarly, each of us sought an example to follow in our parents. Think, for instance, about some recent course you took. You needed someone who was smarter, more experienced, more professional than you. It is true that we can grow and develop only by becoming similar to someone. And so, a child always seeks a powerful figure who inspires a sense of security, strength, and confidence. A father can be a hero, fair and steady, and a mother a magician, kind and wise. For the child, they are beacons whose light says, “I am strong, I can cope with life in this world, and so will you,” “I am wise and just. And you are too.” The hero helps the child to feel that they are not alone, that there is someone reliable nearby to emulate.

There is another important task that parents perform – they give the child a sense of belonging. This is the feeling that you are not alone, that your emotions and experiences are shared by someone close. If the mirror says to the child, “You are wonderful,” and the hero inspires, “You can handle it,” then belonging says, “We will go through all difficulties together.” This is the very unity, the sense of connection, the invisible thread that binds.

Belonging gives a sense of similarity and unity. The parent says to the child through their presence: “I understand you. What you feel is normal. We will get through this together”. Thus, the child gets a foundation for later building deep connections, trusting, and being part of something greater – a family, a team, a world. When a child grows up with such a sense of belonging, they know that their Self is not isolated. They understand that the world is not a foreign, cold space but a territory where there is a place for them, where they are needed and accepted as they are. Without a sense of belonging, a child may grow up feeling disconnected, as if their inner world matters to no one, as if they are always alone. It is precisely belonging that teaches the child to be connected with others without losing themselves.

These needs – to be seen, accepted, and to receive confirmation of one's significance – are not mere whims or signs of weakness, not caprices or indicators of selfishness. They are natural and the only possible desire to be yourself in a world where initially you do not even have yourself and where later you are forced to adapt and erase your individuality for the sake of important connections.

Our narcissism is to illuminate the path for the Self, reminding it why it came and who we can become if its potential is realized.

So that our Self does not lose its path, along which it learns and masters itself better and better, narcissistic needs stay with us for life. They do not disappear with age but are transformed. The adult Self still wants to be seen but no longer seeks endless validation. It seeks connection with idealized figures to continue growing and developing. It strives for belonging to groups of people with whom we have similarity and mutual understanding.

Case from Practice

One day, with one of my clients, we were discussing what had been happening in our work over the past years.

“In the beginning, I couldn't even see you. Honestly, I couldn't even see myself. I kept getting lost trying to understand what was happening to me. And if I ever did understand, I didn't trust myself. It was like being lost in the dark without any landmarks. A very heavy feeling.”

“I understand. And how was it for you to work with me while in that state?”

“I just wanted to please you all the time. This desire simply took me over, and I didn't even notice what was happening around me.”

“That is natural. It happens when one's own Self hasn't yet been firmly established inside. Do you remember what you wanted from me then?”

“Just for you not to abandon me, to stay close.”

“Why was that important?”

“I needed external evaluation. I had none of my own.”

“Yes, that is common. At the very beginning of our development, we need supports and mirrors. We are not yet thinking about who is in front of us or what kind of relationship we have. We are simply clinging to someone so that something inside can begin to emerge, so that our Self can start taking shape.”

The client quickly added,

“But back then, I didn't trust you at all.”

I smiled.

“That is normal. How can you trust anyone when you have only the experience of distrust? It works like a filter through which we perceive all new significant people. But I stayed around anyway. And even if you didn't trust me, you still took my stability and reliability, and tucked them inside yourself.”

The Emergence of the Inner World

Perhaps, you already understand that our narcissistic needs – to be seen, noticed, and valued, are not about grandiosity or a desire for importance for its own sake. They run much deeper than the wish to prove our exceptionalism or superiority, and are much closer to the essence of our Self. It is precisely through the satisfaction of these needs that we become real to ourselves.

The better the functions of the Supports of the Self work, the greater our potential connection with ourselves: with our desires, feelings, needs, and so on.

Imagine a tiny newborn baby boy who has just entered the world. His eyes are still adjusting to the light, his body learning to breathe and feel. He lifts his little hand, accidentally bringing it into his field of vision. Tiny fingers move, but the baby looks at them and sees something utterly foreign and unfamiliar. “What is this? Where did it come from? Why is it moving?” asks his psyche, which is still unformed, though he is not yet aware of these questions.

The baby might look at his hand like at something external, unrelated to him. For him, it is not yet “mine”. It is simply a part of the world that happened to appear before his eyes. Sometimes, it moves, sometimes, it is still, but the baby does not yet know that he is the one moving it. His natural, instinctive Self makes itself known through the first impulses: to move, to grasp, to reach. But there is not yet a connection between these impulses and the world.

The same thing happens with feelings. Hunger is not an internal sensation; it is a storm that overtakes him like a real natural disaster. Crying is not his own sound; it is just a scream that suddenly appears nearby. Joy, fear, and pain are like fleeting flashes of light, which the baby experiences without understanding that they originate from within himself. His psyche is like a kaleidoscope: colors and shapes shift chaotically, but there is no one to hold them together into a coherent picture.

And then his mother comes into this chaos. Her smile, her soft hands, her voice saying, “You are my little one. Look, it is your hand; see how you are moving it.” She helps him see that the waving hand is his own. She says, “You're crying because you're hungry. I will feed you now.” She gives the chaotic bursts of discomfort in his inner world their first meanings.

When the mother says, “I know you're angry right now, and that is okay,” she is doing something very important: not only noticing the child's anger but showing that anger is a temporary state that can be understood and endured. As if she says, “Your anger does not make you bad. It is just a feeling, and we can handle it together.” The child sees that his emotions do not frighten his mother, and thus, feels safe: “My natural feelings can be named, understood, and they will not destroy me.”

The mother helps the child take the first step in realizing: his anger is his own feeling, not chaos crashing down from outside. It is as if she takes this feeling, processes it through her adult psyche, and returns it to the child in the form of a clear message: “These are your emotions, and that is okay.” Gradually, such moments teach the child that his inner world can be understood and that emotions are connected with certain situations and have a beginning and an end.

The mother becomes the voice that says, “This is yours. This is you”. Through her, the child begins to see that his feelings are not chaos but his own inner world. His hands, body, and voice are not something foreign but a part of himself. Gradually, the child's psyche starts forming its first connections with reality. These connections are still fragile, like fine threads, but they are already beginning to weave his inner world into something whole. And there is something touchingly magical in this process.

But the formation of connections with reality is not just about awareness. It is also about the emergence of a Self. The child wants to be significant to someone so that they can mean something to themselves. They want to be seen by others in order to see themselves. Without a sense of significance, their inner world will remain inaccessible to them and will feel empty. We would lose ourselves within ourselves…

Deep Connections – A Space for the Self

But parents, acting as reflectors or ideal figures for emulation, cannot clear the path for the creation of our healthy psychic structures by this alone. We need deep emotional connections with the environment.

It is not about the desire to be accepted unconditionally, no matter who we are. It is about having someone nearby who can endure our uncertainty and stay with us while we are still searching for ourselves, confronting different parts of who we are: fear, anger, joy, tenderness. A child does not need the world to always say “yes” to them. What matters is the feeling that even when they are faced with a “no”, it does not make their existence impossible.

We learned to be ourselves through the way our parents helped us endure our states. When we cried, it was not necessary for them to soothe us immediately. What mattered was that they stayed with us, bore our crying, sadness, and tiredness without trying to fix them.

This does not mean it is necessary to allow “everything” to the child; rather, it means giving them the opportunity to encounter their real self without feeling rejected.

Here I will make a first remark about rejection. Today, in the era of mass fascination with psychology, the word “rejection” is almost demonized, much like “narcissism”. It has come to the point where any unfavorable reaction to our actions is perceived as rejection of our very being. As if the task of growing up is not to learn to cope with people's feelings and behavior directed at us but to ensure that we never provoke any emotions or reactions in them. Since otherwise, their real and unaffected reaction is already a rejection of our very essence. For instance, one of my clients told me that her husband completely refuses to accept her right to freedom and distance. When I asked to clarify it, it turned out that he… gets upset when she says she wants to go on vacation alone.

“Perhaps, it would be very strange if he rejoiced or sighed with relief in response to such words? Even if for you that would be total and unconditional acceptance of your freedom to decide what to do with your vacation.”

So, the point is this: initially, a child does not perceive as rejection the ordinary attempts of a mother to correct their behavior or her emotional responses to what they have done. If there is no humiliation, mockery, or abandonment, then the emotional exchange is perfectly natural and normal. “I see that you're angry, but it upsets me that you want to hit me.” “I understand that you want a candy, but I cannot give it to you because you're allergic. Come, I'll comfort you, let's find something else.”

True emotional connection is not a promise that everything we do will be accepted. It is the confidence that our mistakes will not destroy the relationship.

We can act wrongly, be in a bad mood, get angry – and it does not mean we will stop being loved. Not for a particular incident, but in general. It also does not mean we will never be stopped or told, “You cannot do that.” A parent who can set boundaries without rejecting the child shows them the main thing: your actions do not define you, they can be corrected, and your existence is never in question, nor is our relationship.

Such connections are complex, because they involve two people: the child, who is just searching for themselves, and the parent, who also does not always know how to act. A parent can just as easily be angry, tired, or make mistakes. Deep connection arises not out of their flawlessness but out of their willingness to stay in the relationship even when things are hard. To be with the child in their confusion, instead of demanding immediate clarity. To stay even if one wants to run from the child's tantrum or one's own helplessness.

Children do not seek boundless acceptance. They seek someone who will be with them while they figure themselves out. Someone who will not be afraid of their weaknesses and at the same time will not let these weaknesses completely overtake them. Someone who can say: “You made a mistake, but it is not the end of the world. You're upset, but we'll get through it.” Deep connections do not lead to permissiveness but create space for mistakes, explorations, and failures – without paying a terrible price.

When we are little, we do not know who we are, but it is precisely through relationships that we begin to feel: “I can explore something inside myself. And this something will not destroy my connection with others”. It is precisely where the foundation for the Self is formed – not as a static image that must always be accepted, but as a living process in which we grow and change, trying ourselves out in the presence of someone who can endure it.

Case from Practice

Once in a session, I observed how a client was doing the very thing we almost all love to do. It always looks as if, having realized something, we must immediately rush to do something with ourselves. What exactly – unclear. Whether it is needed at all – unknown. But it was impossible for this client to endure even a small pause, sitting in thought or even confusion. Shame pushed her into the familiar circle of fuss, not allowing her to experience the feeling of inadequacy next to me.

“Which version of yourself can you not tolerate at this moment? From which self do you need to quickly escape?” I asked.

“The one who doesn't understand, the stupid, the slow one.”

“And what would happen in our contact if you said you needed time to think? At that moment, you would be exactly equal to yourself: you don't understand and you need time. That would be you – exactly as you are at that moment.”

“Firstly, that is very strange. How can you just say you don't understand yet? And secondly, I'm sure that the way I am is not enough. That I didn't try hard enough and am giving a bad result.”

“So, you're sure that for me the way you are is not enough? And what do you think I want instead?”

“Well, you want me to develop, work on myself. After all, therapy is needed for positive changes.”

“So, it turns out that I'm supposedly interested in you being someone else, constantly remaking yourself for me?”

“It sounds strange now, but yes, I'm sure that is how it is. After all, therapy is a place where I should heal and become normal.”

“And is that what you want? To come here and learn to be even better at not being yourself so that I would consider you normal?”

“Uh…” the client got confused. “No. I think I want something else…”

“What would a more resonant need sound like?”

“Probably, I want to learn to be myself more.”

“And if you fantasize, what would be a truly good result of our therapy?”

“So that I wouldn't remake myself but could be here more as I am. But it is terribly scary!”

“Oh yes! It is a real challenge: to build the puzzle of our relationship not around the version of yourself you are tired of being, but around the one you already are.”

“I'm curious. I really want to try to be here as I am. And I want you to help me, without remaking me…”

The Helper of the Self – Grandiose Narcissism

Thus, we reach the part where we will start exploring normal childhood narcissism in the process of the child's growth. On the one hand, the Self has great strength, because it, like a small sprout breaking through asphalt, withstands enormous tension so that we can become ourselves. That is, it is simply forced to cling to the environment, feed on its responses, and “pass through” parental programs. But on the other hand, at the beginning of the journey, the Self is vulnerable, because it does not yet have a solid structure. Its fragility is not weakness but a natural state, reminding that potential requires development and any growth requires care, time, and favorable conditions.

The fragility of the Self is explained by its dependence on the outside world. In the first years of life, it develops through responses: warmth, love, smiles, care. Every confirmation that we are seen and accepted adds strength to this fragile structure. But the slightest coldness, a harsh word, a lack of attention can leave invisible cracks. This does not mean that the Self is easily destroyed, but if the blows are significant, they leave a mark.

At the start, we have no ready-made supports giving stability. No experience inside to say: “It is unpleasant, but you can handle it.” Everything we experience seems final, boundless. Every separation from the mother is perceived as a loss forever. Every glance full of disappointment feels like a threat to existence itself. The Self is only learning to endure such experiences, but at the early stages they are too heavy.

And at this point, narcissism becomes a faithful helper of the Self. It has three main tasks. The first one – creative. Here narcissism works to assemble our image of ourselves. Gradually, in its “narcissistic piggy bank”, it collects reflections, responses, evaluations, opinions, and beliefs about our Self. Over time, from the mirror functions of the environment, we get our personality at our disposal. We begin to understand ourselves better, to navigate our inner world more clearly.

Throughout life, narcissism leads the Self to the best realization of its potential. Of course, I am talking now about the healthy variant.

The second task of narcissism – protective. And it deserves separate discussion.

Protective Narcissism

In the imperfect world we grow up in, we are constantly influenced by many negative factors. Irregular support, insufficient responses, reactions of the environment that we do not like – all this is normal and inevitable.

And in a world full of mysteries and potential threats, grandiose narcissism gives us our first refuge. It is a way to preserve our Self when the psyche is still too fragile to withstand reality as it is.

Imagine a newborn having an invisible cocoon, where they feel omnipotent. The cocoon gives them the illusion that everything in the world happens according to their wishes.

The mother in it is not perceived as a separate person. She is part of an all-powerful world that is always close at hand, always protecting, always giving. For the baby, this is the only way to feel safe. The world is too big, too bright, too noisy. Any sudden sound, a cold stream of air, or a delay in an adult's response can be perceived as a threat to existence itself. Grandiose narcissism helps not to notice these threats, creating the illusion of complete control: “Mom is here because I wanted it. The world is safe because I control it.”

If this illusion did not exist, the baby would face the truth that they are not yet able to survive: that they are vulnerable, dependent, and the world is not always predictable. This full encounter with reality will happen later – when their psyche is ready to bear the weight of reality. But for now, the cocoon of grandiose narcissism protects them from the catastrophe.

And of course, the described ways of functioning of infantile narcissism are healthy and natural for the child's psyche. They inspire the child with more power, omnipotence, and deny reality, where anything can happen. Such egocentrism and even egoism are normal for the first stages of development; both are intended for the accumulation of psychic investments from the environment into our Self.

Narcissism simply cannot allow our psyche to remain fragile and vulnerable in front of a world we do not control.

That is its role at these stages.

Problems begin later, when, in cases of systematic or sharp frustrations and traumas, narcissism places us in the saving cocoon of its defenses, continuing to do everything described above. Then we grow up but continue to believe that omnipotence is normal. Or that we can be so valuable as to be liked by everyone and always. Or that if we invest more in our personal growth, problems will not affect us, because we can anticipate and regulate everything.

Narcissism in this case does not mature into an adult form, remaining in its infantile state. We seem to regress to the protective function that it continues to perform for us, believing that otherwise, we simply would not be able to endure adult reality. And in some ways, it is certainly right…

Afterword to Chapter Two

Each of us begins our journey in life as a true little narcissist. And this is not an insult but, perhaps, the healthiest start one could imagine. At the beginning of the path, we know nothing about boundaries, about reality, or about the fact that someone or something can exist separately from us. Our world revolves solely around our grandiose Self.

This is a natural way to survive in a world that is still too big for us. Little narcissism creates the illusion of omnipotence, which protects the fragile Self. At this stage, the parent is a function, serving as a support, a container, a regulator, and everything else. Their love is the natural psychological “nourishment” for our Self.

In conditions of such total dependence, it is simply impossible to allow ourselves to prematurely encounter the terrible truth that the parent is not our property, that they can leave, turn away, be unavailable. Little narcissism soothes: “Everything is under control; the world obeys you.” Yes, it is a denial of reality, but it is not a weakness – it is a tremendous strength. Precisely thanks to it, our psyche has time to grow stronger before facing reality.

Grandiose infantile narcissism is only the beginning. The illusions it creates serve as a temporary support until our Self gains its own strength. Our internal world begins to be built, to grow more complex, accumulating its own supports, which will remain with us throughout life.

In the third chapter, we will dive into the fascinating process and look at the creation of psychic structures. It will be a journey from the chaos of first impressions to the construction of internal organization, which will allow us to deal with reality without losing connection to ourselves. We will see how the participants of internal performances are formed: the Instinctual Self, the Inner Parent, and the Adult, who will continue to develop throughout life. We will learn how from the first impulses, reflections, and interactions with the world something amazing is born – our personality.

It is precisely what we need love, care, tenderness, and attention for. They are, of course, wonderful and pleasant in themselves. But the task of the Self is to become something greater than just the potential of a newborn soul. Therefore, it takes the Supports of the Self in one hand, the grandiose narcissism in its protective armor in the other, and, “bathing” in the ocean of relationships with parents, it swims out to its own shore. Where one day it stands firmly on its own feet…

Chapter Three
The Birth of the Psyche and the First Transition

Two Kingdoms for the Emergence of a Little Self

Ayn Rand once wrote: “To say 'I love you,' one must first know how to say the 'I'.”² From the point of view of the psyche, this is astonishingly accurate.

In order for our attractions to be directed outward, toward someone as a truly separate person, we must first come into existence for ourselves.

But not automatically – only through becoming valuable and important to those close to us. It is precisely for this that our narcissism works so hard, for us to be able to say “I”.

If we could imagine our psyche as a magical world, then for the task of creating a Self, we would need two “kingdoms”, two realms. Only together do they create the conditions for us to not just exist but to feel alive, valuable, and, most importantly, able to be in relationships with the world.

1. The Narcissistic Kingdom – a place where the energy of life bubbles, where our attractions reside. The force that seeks out the parent not only to survive but also to find itself. A place where we first begin to feel, experience, and realize our Self.

Here everything is built on reflections. Parents and close ones become mirrors in which we see ourselves. When a little boy proudly builds a tower of blocks and looks at his mother with bated breath, he is awaiting her reaction. If his mother smiles, hugs him, and says, “What a good boy! That is amazing!” he sees his reflection in her eyes. His world fills with light, and the Self is strengthened. The child feels: “I exist. I am important. What I do matters.” This mirror gives him confidence in his own value.

But what if the mother turns away or coldly remarks, “Scattered your toys again?” The child sees no reflection and begins to doubt: “Maybe I'm not good enough? Maybe what I do doesn't matter?” These early scars on the Self can stay for a lifetime, breeding inner doubts and a sense of emptiness.

However, if the psyche remains only in the narcissistic kingdom, we become trapped in relationships with ourselves. In this domain, people are perceived merely as functions: they must support us, validate our importance.

For our Self to develop, narcissism must connect us with other people.

To achieve this, the psyche builds a bridge leading to the Object Kingdom – a space where external connections become more than just sources of reflection or other functions serving our Self. This bridge is built through interactions with parents who not only reflect us but also show that being in a relationship is safe.

2. The Object Kingdom – the realm of relationships where the energy meets the parent and later, other people. A place where we learn to build bonds and feel closeness. If the first kingdom helps us to see ourselves, the second teaches us that we are not alone in the world; there are others beside us. Here, it is not praise and admiration that are crucial, but reciprocation, understanding, and acceptance. Imagine a little girl who falls and scrapes her knee. She runs to her father, hoping for comfort. If he sits down beside her, takes her hand, and says, “That hurts, doesn't it? But I'm here. It will pass…”, the girl feels that her pain and fear matter. She understands that her feelings have a right to exist and that someone is there to share them. The kingdom of connections grows, strengthening her confidence that she is not alone.

But if the father says, “Don't whine, it is nothing,” the girl is left alone with her pain, feeling unneeded and rejected. The realm of relationships turns into a land populated by grim shadows, from whom it is useless to seek help, connection, or hope, with whom one cannot share one's feelings. Thus, she learns to keep her attractions to herself, not to give them to those who cannot respond.

Notice: our narcissism seeks reflections, admiration, and recognition.

But not for the sake of greatness and magnificence themselves.

It is to allow a Self to be born, to grow stronger, and to begin to differentiate from others, finding its full uniqueness. If creating psychic structures required that no one paid attention to us, then normal narcissism would “erase” us for the world. If building an inner world required that the mother only stayed silent in response to our emerging feelings and experiences, then somehow, it would have responded to that too.

Yes, we crave attention, interest, and praise. But what if we do not get them, and within us the magical birth of a Self never occurs?

Dialogue Between the Worlds

The narcissistic and object worlds work inseparably, playing a key role in forming a Self and maintaining inner balance. They complement each other, performing different but interconnected tasks.

Narcissistic energy keeps us afloat, helping us not to fall apart when life does not go the way we wish.

The object domain teaches us to endure the reality where things are not perfect. Through it, we begin to understand that disappointments are not the end of the world but simply a part of life.

Narcissism reminds us that we are valuable, teaching us to believe that we are worthy of love and attention. The object world nudges us toward empathic understanding of others, reminding us that there are people nearby who also feel, desire, and sometimes make mistakes, just like us.

In the narcissistic kingdom, we receive protection in painful moments. When we are wounded by rejection or disappointment, it gently wraps us in fantasies or devalues what has become too painful. While in the object kingdom, the world is shown to us as it is, connecting us to reality, helping us to not get lost in our fantasies and see people and things as they truly are, not through the prism of our expectations.

In the narcissistic world, we hear the call of dreams, find inspiration – those images that inspire us to strive for something greater. Sometimes, though, narcissism becomes too carried away with the ideal and forgets reality. Then the object world gathers everything into a whole picture. Thus, what we experience inside connects with what happens outside, creating a complete story about ourselves.

As a result of the dialogue between these two kingdoms, our psyche emerges, capable of independently handling different tasks and functions.

Drawing resources from the object world, narcissism invests them into strengthening the sense of Self. Gradually, we move from dependence on others to relying on ourselves. And later, while remaining ourselves, we turn toward others, exchanging attractions and energy with them.

And only this way.

No psyche and its maturity ever emerge solely from the might of one's own grandiosity without exchange with the environment.

This is a normal process of growing up for magnificent, incredible, unique – or most ordinary, psyches.

Formation of Psychic Structures

If we continue the metaphor where the Self is a little star that came into being so that we could become ourselves, then at first it does not know how to shine and learns this from the Supports of the Self. It needs its own psychic structures, which should become a kind of a “cosmic shell”, helping it to interact with the world. These structures in the psyche provide us with the ability to perceive and process information, regulate ourselves, react to external events, and build relationships with others. Without them, our little star might get lost in the boundlessness of inner chaos or simply fail to fully manifest its ability to shine, remaining invisible. Translated into psychological language, we would stay in the world of pathologies and psychosis.

As we grow and develop, psychic structures are created through relationships with parents, teachers, friends – those who help us realize our value and capabilities. Our environment, like stars in the sky, guides the way and strengthens our inner confidence.

At the beginning, while we are still in the narcissistic realm, our psychic structures are not fully formed, but each is already starting to perform its unique task. This is a world where there are no clear boundaries between a Self and “others”, and each part of the psyche works under conditions of total dependence on the responses from the outside world. Here, the structures act not as fully developed tools but more like scattered, still forming drafts of what will eventually become our psyche. Let us take a closer look at each of them.

The Instinctual Self

This is a volcano of energy erupting with desires and needs. It knows no doubt or limitation: everything must happen here and now. If a child wants to be fed, hugged, or heard, their desire sounds like a demand. But despite its strength, the Instinctual Self is fragile. It does not tolerate refusals, because refusal is perceived as a threat to existence itself. It does not yet know how to wait or adapt. Its task is simple: to demand and to obtain.

The Inner Parent

At the very beginning of life, we do not yet have an autonomous element of our psychic structure called the Inner Parent. It is still forming from the projections of the signals we receive from our parents. If adults are kind, patient, and consistent, the Inner Parent acquires a soothing and supportive voice. But if the parent is cold, harsh, or unpredictable, we internalize messages like “You are not good enough” or “Your feelings don't matter”. These early sketches of the Inner Parent can become either a resource or a source of inner tension for us.

The Inner Adult

In the narcissistic realm, the Inner Adult is still “offline”, that is, they do not yet perform their functions. This part of the psyche requires awareness of boundaries and the ability to withstand reality, but in the narcissistic realm, such skills have not yet developed. As long as the child lives in a world where the boundaries between their desires and reality are blurred, the Inner Adult watches over this chaos, waiting for their time, as a potential that is only gaining strength. With the support of our close ones and over time, they are to take a leading place in our inner reality.

At the stage of the narcissistic realm, the psychic structures do not operate as a mature system. The elements within it are not yet a coordinated team but rather a set of players, each trying to cope with the world in their own way under conditions of dependence on response, warmth, and acceptance.

The Real and Ideal Self during this period

Alongside the Self within us, there are potentially two other parts, two aspects of our personality: the Real Self and the Ideal Self. In the first three years of life, they form in close connection with each other to ensure the integrity of our psyche in the future.

The Ideal Self in early childhood is not the grandiose construction we see in adults, but rather the feeling of what we can be in order to be loved. These are the first glimpses of striving for approval, shaped according to what parents value and encourage. For example, if the mother smiles when we sit quietly, the Ideal Self may incorporate the image of a calm, obedient child. If the father rejoices when we laugh loudly, the model of the Ideal Self will adjust. At this stage, our Ideal Self is not yet a rigid form, but fragments of what we would like to be to deserve warmth and attention.

The Ideal Self is also a defense. The Ideal Self helps us cope with anxiety when the Real Self encounters coldness or judgment. When the Real Self feels, “They don't love me like this”, the Ideal Self offers an alternative: “But they will love me like that”. However, if anxiety becomes too frequent, the child begins to drift further away from themselves, trying to adapt to expectations.

The Real Self in the first three years of life is absolute, immediate experience of oneself. The child knows no filters or doubts. When they are thirsty, they want a drink right now. When they are afraid, they scream with fear, and that is their only truth at the moment. The Real Self lives in sensations, emotions, and bodily needs. The Real Self does not yet compare or criticize; their task is simply to be. The child exists in a living, open state that seeks reflection and confirmation in the eyes of a close adult.

Only the Real Self gives us the sense of authenticity of ourselves and our life. It is through encounters with the parent as a mirror that we are given everything that we will later experience and consider to be ourselves. By naming what happens to us, the mother labels states, feelings, thoughts. By reacting to us, she simultaneously tells us what Real Self exists within us. Our entire inner world, including self-attitude and self-evaluation, emerges precisely from such reflections.

Or does not emerge – which gives rise to those very experiences of emptiness and unreality that most people later complain about. We will talk about this in more detail in the following chapters. For now, I will only say that it is exactly the way many of my clients end up disconnected from their inner world and their Real Self. They poorly navigate it and do not understand how they can manifest or express themselves at all.

I have explained all this only to illustrate how many people are not even aware that their Self is always actively present. We are not used to noticing it or considering it something meaningful, to sharing it with someone. Once the loss of one's Self becomes obvious and discovered in therapy, a person at least begins to suspect the scale of the loss. Usually, it happens after the client has allegedly “solved” all their problems and no longer needs a functional reason to justify their need for contact. And that is when the most interesting part begins. We can observe how exactly the person builds contact. Or does not build it, but endlessly interrupts and regulates themselves – which happens much more often.

And this is the real reason why a person comes to therapy.

Situational problems and difficulties are just the upper, visible layer.

Of course, a person comes for themselves – for the restoration of connection with their true Self and for learning the ways in which they have been preventing this Self from coming out.