The Sting: Is narcissism driven by pleasure or pain?

Warning: this post contains references to trauma, abuse and neglect and pictures of wasps

Earlier this year, I was sat in a specialist clinic having an ultrasound examination of my foot. I felt awkward in the silence and slightly sorry for a man who (I imagined naively) looks at feet all day with no interesting background information on each injury. So, I thought I would tell him what had happened to cause nerve damage in my foot. Maybe he’d be amused at my expense. “I was running from a wasp” I said. “Bare foot - at an outside swimming pool.” He politely acknowledged my effort to be sociable, referred me for an ‘ultrasound-guided steroid injection’, and my limp has now disappeared.

When I was six years old, I stepped in a wasps’ nest. It was early autumn, and I was playing in the garden of my family home with a friend. I remember that the nest was hidden by fallen leaves. In the house, our two mums were talking, until they heard our screams as we tried to make our way back towards the house. I remember them coming out and trying to help us get our clothes off. Noone was calm. I can just about remember telling my mum to stop because I feared that the wasp under my t-shirt would sting if she tried to take it off. Or perhaps I remember her remembering. It’s not clear which is her memory, and which is mine. But there is a more emotional part of me – my fear system - that remembers. And that, when it gets activated, is definitely me.

Now I am an adult and a clinical psychologist, writing about narcissism as something rooted in difficult childhood experiences, and I have been thinking about my relationship with wasps.

Narcissism as avoidance

I would not say my stepping in a wasps’ nest was traumatising. It does not stop me doing things and it does not make me do things I seriously regret (ok now there is this one time). But since this childhood experience, I have carried an enduring reaction. When I feel close to that kind of situation, it still affects my heart rate, my thoughts, and sometimes my actions. I tend to stay physically distant from wasps. My avoidance of wasps was not inherited. I might have inherited some valency for this kind of reaction that another person would not. But the distinctive black and yellow object of my avoidance is based on an overwhelming emotional event.

Surely, I am talking about a simple phobia? The phobia of wasps has a name: spheksophobia (I had to look it up). And phobia just means fear, in Greek. But if a psychologist were to try to measure the severity of my phobia, they would not actually measure my fear. They would be more interested in the lengths I go to avoid this fear. The things I do to find distance from it. Do I stay away from picnics in the Summer? When running from a wasp, have I ever injured myself? Do I avoid hot countries? They would look at my avoidance strategies, what they cost me and how they limit my life.

How do we understand it when avoidance becomes a problem? As human beings, some aspects of our personalities have genetic influence. But the thing that marks us out as a species is our ability to adapt. We are born extremely vulnerable. With our large heads and small legs, we cannot walk for a whole year. Two vital things protect us during this time of highest vulnerability. Firstly, we attach to adults whose job is to protect us. We have emotional systems which govern this attachment. Emotions signal to the caregivers what we need and our state of vulnerability. But emotions do something else that is just as important to help us adapt to our environment. They mark danger. When we experience great fear, or great shame or embarrassment, or even great sadness, we learn to avoid this kind of situation.

And so, I can say that when I was a vulnerable child, I experienced something in my environment (a wasps’ nest) that caused overwhelming fear, and this adaptation system went into mild overdrive, so that I still avoid wasps today, and can actually cause myself injury with my avoidant behaviour. But what does this have to do with narcissism? Let’s start again, with a different kind of overwhelming event. A child’s environment may include wasps. But it also includes people. Let’s think about a child who is younger than six. Let’s say the child’s strong feelings are unseen by the adults assigned to help manage them, and so these emotions are experienced as overwhelming or unmanageable. Let’s say that the child is subject to repeated humiliation and judgment. This child will be ok with wasps. But what strategies will they use to avoid humiliation, shame and emotional vulnerability?

If you were to go back to the summer of 2023 and a certain swimming pool, you might see the figure of a man running and diving into the water. You might notice nothing else. The adult problem, for me, is that my flight, on that day, was too urgent. In reality, I could have tolerated the pain of a wasp’s sting. It wasn’t exactly the sting that I was running from. It was the specific situation-tied fear.

If I had grown up instead to be afraid of vulnerable feelings in relationships; especially from shame, what would I then avoid? What would this look like? I might first avoid emotional intimacy with adults. I might get my needs met, for validation, recognition and sexual fulfilment, with emotional intimacy removed. What would this look like? How do I find maximum distance from shame? There are definitely options: I can be a hero, I can be admired as an actor or singer, I can be a bit grandiose. I can seek political power. I can be the one always in control in the relationship. I can assume a monopoly over what is true and false. Whilst in these roles, I can pursue distance from shame and vulnerability. This won’t always work. And when it fails, back up strategies will be needed that meet the same criteria: drugs, alcohol, sex without emotional intimacy. If not careful, I might get described, along the way, as narcissistic. Being in one of these roles doesn’t necessarily make me narcissistic. But these roles can promise distance from shame and vulnerability – a refuge for those who are fine with wasps – but not so fine with vulnerability in relation to other human beings.

Actor Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, Rambo) recalls that his mother was unpredictable and his father “ferocious”:

“People say, ‘you were deprived, you weren’t nurtured’. Well, that’s true. But maybe the nurturing comes from the respect and love of strangers. To feel embraced and loved by an audience. Its insatiable. I wish I could get over it. But you can’t… I would spend untold hours in theatres…[Thinking that] ‘acting is the life I wanted to lead…That’s who I wanna be. I wanna be the guy… who saves people’”¹.

That Stallone can reflect and recognise this need in his younger self does not make him narcissistic today. But he seems to give a first-hand account of power and admiration as a one-time escape from unsafe emotional vulnerability.

The pleasure seeker

Thinking about narcissism as avoidance of a feared situation is countercultural in more than one way. Firstly, the mainstream portrayal of narcissism is not usually a trauma based one. Secondly, mainstream descriptions of narcissism give an impression not of avoidance but of approach. We see narcissistic people as seeking power, control, admiration, thrills, drugs… The ‘narcissist’ is viewed as feeling entitled and hungry. This popular pleasure-seeking view of narcissism may date all the way back, long before Freud, to a notorious Greek philosopher, Aristippus. Despite being a student of Socrates, Aristippus practiced his own hedonistic philosophy: shocking, undignified and callous for the sake of pleasure as its justifiable end. Aristippus is said to have been once asked whether it disturbed him that the well-known sex-worker, Hetaira, whom he knew well, did not really love him. He replied, "Both fish and wine do not love me, but I enjoy them"².

Aristippus: blueprint for the stereotype narcissist?

This idea of power or pleasure-seeking, rather than avoidance, fits with what narcissism looks like on the outside, on the surface. It looks prominent, callous, confident, and pleasure-seeking. And often it is. I am not saying that there is no approach motivation in narcissism. Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen describes how over-stimulation can be a strategy in narcissism for distraction from an emotional void³. There may be kinds of pleasure sought in narcissism which not only create distraction from other feelings, but also maintain the persona or ‘image’ (as Lowen describes it) whose function is to ward off vulnerability - for example the trophy sexual partner.

I suspect the avoidance motivation in narcissism is both hidden and powerful. In the words of Jeremy Fox on the Men’s Psychology Substack,

“One of the truths of evolutionary psychology [is that] it’s a lot costlier to misread a negative situation than it is a positive one.”

In other words, for the survival of a species, it is more urgent to be vigilant for pain (to avoid) than to be vigilant for pleasure (to seek). In this newsletter, I have looked in detail at the lives of 11 people who became famous through achieved charisma and performance and power. In nearly every childhood there was evidence of trauma that was severe, complex and relational.

Narcissism’s avoidance of self

The lack of empathy we see in narcissism also appears on first site to agree with an ‘approach’ or pleasure-seeking motivation: nothing will get in the way of the ‘narcissist’ taking what they want. But if we look closer, this apparent ‘approach’ motivation behind narcissism starts to break down. The lack of empathy for others is based on a distance from emotions in the self: avoidance of vulnerable feelings³. As Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen puts it,

“This insensitivity [to others in narcissism] derives from an insensitivity to one’s own feelings…When we deny our feelings, we deny that others feel.”³

When I have a wasp on my arm, I may try to avoid showing it, but I will be aware of anxiety. In the case of narcissism specifically, those who avoid, might not be able to feel what they are avoiding. Being able to feel emotions and identify them is actually a developmental achievement that we cannot take for granted. One strategy that the human child can learn, faced with overwhelming experiences of vulnerable feelings, is to dissociate. In its milder form, this looks like a general disconnection to their own vulnerable feelings. Not only does narcissism look non-avoidant. Narcissistic people do not necessarily feel avoidant. The phobic person might approach their local exposure therapy provider. But their narcissistic neighbour does not describe themselves as avoidant or fearful. To do so would be to step close to vulnerability itself.

I should say here that I have no intention of making excuses for adult perpetrator behaviours associated with narcissism. Asking about what primes people to behave in certain ways does not remove responsibility for the adult choices they make. Usually, what gets people with narcissistic problems to seek therapy is feedback about the impacts of their behaviour choices. Whether or not they have an awareness of their trauma should not stop them managing their behaviour and seeking help.

If we look at psychological therapy specifically for narcissism, we might expect the focus to be on moderating excessive, dehumanising or antisocial behaviour. Therapy will certainly involve looking at the impacts of behaviour. But the focus ultimately will be on tolerating vulnerable feelings – including shame – so that the distance they need to achieve from such feelings is less. In therapy, (a safe and controlled emotionally intimate relationship) the task is to stop avoiding, and gradually learn to pick up and hold these uncomfortable physical chemical experiences we call emotion.

In exposure therapy for spheksophobia, the task might be to look at a wasp, then to pick up a dead wasp, then to pick up a live wasp, maybe risk getting stung by a wasp... It will never be comfortable. But that’s not the point. The point is to stop running. And now, the wasp is no longer a wasp. Its vulnerable feelings. It’s a person you need to depend on. Perhaps you’ll have a child together. A child full of emotions. A vulnerable, adaptable human child.

Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own unless otherwise stated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any institution I have been employed by. The content here is for information and should not be interpreted as advice.

1.     Zimmy, T. (2013) Sly. Netflix.

2.     Greece In High Definition (2021). The Ancient Greek Philosopher, who had the Pleasure as his only Purpose in Life. Downloaded from: https://www.greecehighdefinition.com/blog/2021/3/4/the-ancient-greek-philosopher-who-had-the-pleasure-as-his-only-purpose-in-life

3.     Lowen, A. (1985). Narcissism: The Denial of the True Self. Touchstone.