Remember when you were a kid and maybe you were mean to someone because you thought you could, or simply because that was your natural reaction, so why not let it out?

Narcs never developed beyond this stage of mentality. Some kids learn empathy very fast, while others learn it more slowly, but either way most of us develop empathy at a certain point. On that note, we also develop an individual point on view, an anchor point that we can define as our “selves”. This anchor point allows us to define ourselves as “me”. If “me” was hurt, it would hurt. Other people can be “mes” too... everyone has a “me” inside of them. Everyone can be hurt, and you don’t want the “me” inside you to be hurt, so you wouldn’t want that to happen to other people, because they have “mes” inside them too.

Narcs never developed that me as an anchor, never developed that inner self that they can refer back to for a solid point of memory or guidance. I believe this distinct lack of self makes them unable to empathize with other people and impairs their memory-making processes.

How do you define a memory when it is only the narrative, with no particular point of view from which you can clearly see it from? I believe this is why narcs are so outer-oriented. They blame things on everyone else. They are obsessed with how they look to others and their status. That’s because there literally isn’t a self inside of them that would be able to provide a stable point of view. There’s no inner self telling them that they are a person, so how can they possibly comprehend that other people are people?

I’m tempted to compare them to machines, but in reality, just like how autistic people lack certain mechanisms that’s able to make them grasp reality the way neurotypical people do, narcs are the same except in a way more antisocial way.

I am not a psychologist - this is what I’ve learned and observed from my own parents and from reading a lot about narcissism and how trauma affects development. To conclude, I do NOT absolve narcs of what they’ve done. This is no excuse to just roll over and to let them keep abusing you. I believe while some narcs can gaslight you deliberately because they don’t know better or it’s more convenient for them, it’s also combined with the fact that their individual “me” is so infantile or barely developed that any frame of reference they’ve developed in their own memories can’t be relied on because there’s no self to go back to.