The Dark Tetrad: Nondual Therapy and Narcissism

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In psychology, Narcissistic traits include selfishness, entitlement, a lack of empathy, inability to take responsibility, and a compulsive need for admiration. Psychoanalytic literature has connected this self-centeredness to a failure to distinguish the self from external objects, either in very young babies or as a feature of mental disorder. At the core of the narcissistic dynamic there is an awful feeling of being negated. The client feels unseen, unheard, and unmet. It is a horrible feeling of disappearance directly associated with the negation energy in trauma. These feelings of lack are inherent to the very mechanics with which trauma is created as an area of experience which is split off from the whole. The allowance of the energetic vibrations in this dimension of negation is fundamental in relieving the marriage of the energy with a mental belief in limitation. When the energies can be felt, they are relativized. This is especially true when we meet the narcissistic arteries with the dimension of trauma.

A trauma vortex spins partly around the authentic need for attention: it says “see me, feel me, touch me.” Paradoxically, it can be at the same time propelled by self-abnegation, saying “don’t see this, don’t feel this, don’t touch this.” What can arise out of this doubleness is a forceful will to control anything with a scent of the traumatic residue. This controlling force will be designed to claim the positive attention and disclaim the negative attention. Light is allowed to touch the feelings that bring admiration and acclaim – such as victimhood, courage, innocence; and to radically disown the feelings deemed unacceptable, such as impotence, vengeance, failure, or repulsion. Because of these agendas, the client projects the unwanted stuff onto others, and the unwanted energy is what propels the projection. For example, with a blast of aggression, contempt, arrogance, and repulsion, they can protest their vulnerability. Or with tears in their eyes, they tell you how they wish their parents dead.

 From a Nondual perspective, we could say that narcissistic aspects of the psyche arise where there is a contraction of freedom in time and space, meaning there is a loss of proportions, and of the ability to put or see boundaries. The person centers themselves within an original painful experience and this pain becomes the narcissistic wound. The wound is to the normative personality. But because the pain feels impossible, and the conflict with it is so active, naturalness and the sense of self is lost. The only thing that feels real and definitive is the strong charge of outrage around the pain. Because there is a strong belief that they are the personality, the trauma can feel like they are physically hemorrhaging in plain sight, and no-one cares.

The resulting insecurity or even paranoia means there is a grasping toward structures of identity or ego, as if these “positive” attributes will somehow bring structure, safety and belonging. These are then dictated on the environment with persistence and inflexibility. “I am always caring. Therefore, you should take care of me (in this or that way). If you don’t then you are wrong.”  The full force of mind is recruited to take control, lock-down the unwanted zones, and to meta-manage the healing process.

This clinging toward ego-form of the loss quality also generates an aggression to anyone that is perceived as undermining that lynchpin of identity. From the subjective point of view, the identity is already undermined and contrived, so what plays out is a borderless projection. For example, if we are determined that we are only good, and we can never be bad, we could have an aggressive response to anything or anyone that awakens a sense of badness within us. Then when we do feel bad, aggressive, or even murderous it is only because of the other. We preserve the identity of being good, while feeling entitled to all the badness in the universe. If our home must be seen as always perfectly clean, we can have an invective response to even a whiff of domestic shame. If our physical suffering guarantees our right to exist, then we might rage against whoever seems to invalidate that suffering.

It is common in trauma that our client will declare a war about their weakness, overpowering any healing movement, because from the state of trauma, the outrage of suffering matters more than healing. This could be why Hippocrates said: “Before you heal someone, ask him if he's willing to give up the things that make him sick.”

Negating the Negation and More Negation

Every trauma vortex has a narcissistic element within it. Energetically, it’s a back flip of suffering in which there is a tremendous feeling of not being seen, heard, or understood. This spins with a rage around a center-point of existential lack. The energy is spinning because it is turning in on itself – there is no overt release. It is an emotional cytokine storm, fueled by such a breathless vapor of outrage, that even the communication of the pain, or any bridging movement such as attending a group setting) can feel like an impossible humiliation. The outrage of suffering is ineffable. Words cannot do it justice.

The trauma vortex can be intensely self-referring, grandiose, entitled, antagonistic toward others, and is characterized by imbalance and misconception around boundaries. Boundaries become punitive toward others, rather than protective. They get weaponized as ways to protest, punish, and exclude, even if the exclusion is of the self. They are a covert way to broadcast the inner felt sense of torture, intolerance, punishment, and exclusion. Boundaries are weaponized in defiance of the environment, rather than serving as structures of manifestation, communication, and protection over which the person feels full control. They form damns of pent-up energy rather than bridges of rapport.

The tragedy is that when the narcissistic strain takes over the trauma vortex, the experience of being undefended in the night, excluded, punished, and tortured becomes part of the spiraling mix of horror. The environment tends to shrink from such dissonance, further confounding the belief that True Nature is a ruse, a manipulation, and is of little utility.

Again, we are talking here about the mechanics of trauma. We all move through the same mechanics of the psyche. When we visit even a light contraction of a Nondual Quality, we could meet the narcissistic potential, with full sentient radiance. Our self-awareness and ability to take responsibility for what we experience when we do meet our narcissistic traits are what brings us the insight and resilience to support others, in all degrees of contraction and trauma.

Shadowlands, Projections & Compulsive Self-Reference

Narcissistic phenomena show up in the shadowlands where we project the core traumatic residue on others and try to resolve it there through forceful transference. It is at the nexus where victim becomes perpetrator by acting out on the world, all with a self-righteous arrogance. The whole world is a stage, and often you can sense the dissociated energy of case-building and accusation as if the conversation were happening in a courtroom in which the client-protagonist is lawyer, judge, jury, and audience, and some unwitting “other” (maybe you) will be condemned. There can be many, many stories that never really resolve, but rather transfer from one projected field to another.

 While it incessantly projects unwanted energies outwardly, the narcissistic dynamic in trauma also has a compulsion to self-refer through more superficial layers. When we use the discernment of the felt sense, we can notice that this differs energetically from the readiness to unconditionally own an experience in its purity. The self-referring movement has a kind of protest and defiance to it. It lacks heart connection.

Service to the Authentic Self

Where Narcissistic propulsion is dominant in sustaining the momentum of a trauma vortex, the suffering continues to divide, separate, and perpetuate, without reaching the core of the original vibration of pain. In this, the Nondual Quality of Service (often contracted through guilt as the horrible sense of debt and duty) is paramount in breaking the cycle.

When we can truly be there for another – being of service to their suffering, there is the possibility of breaking the loop of self-referral in which the pain is punctured by isolation, exclusion, and rejection. Narcissism is traditionally seen as self-serving. But the self which is being served is a self that is identified with an agenda around suffering. When we are in a narcissistic loop, we spiral in service to our own brand of suffering. This is all about the highly charged and unconscious maintenance of the illusion of the separate self: “Yes but (Me), Yes, but (Me), Yes but (Me, myself, mine, and I).

Unconditional service is a quality that helps lift us out of the circulating core of dualistic conflict of “self” verses “other”. When we perceive suffering in another and are of service to the qualities in the other, then the horror of humiliation deflates into the boundless quality of humility (realizing that the personality is not who or what we are – it doesn’t define us). The suffering is no longer private, nor is it exclusive. It is no longer locked into our sense of value or our right to exist. It relativizes, losing its grandiosity, and its tyranny over the state of being.

The transactional prize of exclusive suffering as a horror within the separate self is replaced by something of infinite value and abundance – the manifestation and realization of our True Nature. The Nondual Qualities of sovereignty and esteem can then be awakened, centered in the client’s own essential core through the compass of compassion and the sense of purpose and value found through the quality of service.

Service is intrinsic to the primal drives of manifestation, wellbeing, and wholeness. It opens a passage of energetic flow from the core to the outer world, and from the core of others back to the core of the authentic self. Its energy allows the mind to be of service to the heart and the heart to be of service to the whole. In this, it brings immediate reward as it dissolves the suffering substance of rupture, separation, and alienation. It facilitates belonging and wholeness. When we move with it, we ride the powerful and natural currents of the psyche. When we re-join the river of life, the vortices of trauma begin to release into the flow. The originating pain – the area of unbearable feeling – begins to be bearable within the panorama of all experience. It matters, as part of the experience of the whole.

The Long Haul

In working with certain types of traumas, especially where the relationship to suffering has become narcissistic, we may hold the direction of service, but it might not be straight forward.

At times it might seem that the energy of service is there only to bring patience and openness to the therapist to stay present in a process that awakens a lot of personal aversion. Selfishness, aggression, and entitlement for example, are repulsive energies, like puss in a wound. Yet we are there to be of service to a healing process, not to the aesthetics. If we don’t let ourselves feel the natural aversion, however, we can spiral into pretense and contractions of guilt through which we lose our boundaries and blind-side what is the deeper energies beneath the words.

The client, when in a narcissistic dynamic, will not necessarily be amenable to the qualities of true nature, such as service, care, or compassion. When our client is caught within a vortex of trauma, the first response will be something like: “But I am always of service to others, and nobody is ever there for ME.”  This response could come with contempt and aggression. The full weight of blame can be transmitted to the therapist who is supposed to be making them feel “better” by caring for their personal suffering above anything else. You might feel a sense of betrayal or carelessness, or worse, a loss of professional status as the accusation will be that you are “re-traumatizing” clients. The full weight of the perpetrators’ shame awakens within you.

This is the narcissistic loop showing up to control the process and maintain the superior status based on exclusive suffering within an exclusive separate self. It’s a dynamic of abuse playing itself out. It reflects the basic trauma of conditioning around True Nature. It mirrors the rupture in the individual between their personality and their essence. It hangs on belief structures that state that Nondual Qualities such as care, compassion, and service are transactional or relative.

From the narcissistic point of view, love is just an emotion, like anger or fear. It’s from the area of positive or pleasurable feelings, rather than the area of negative or painful ones. It’s caught in duality, and could easily be replaced by “adoration”. It’s transactional, but in the end, suffering is the true currency, because suffering brings real attention. Do you notice the language of abuse? If the narcissist can’t get attention towards their own suffering, they will make others suffer more.

The narcissistic dynamic arises out of the belief in the separate self. It carries the immature dualistic notion that it’s possible to get only positive experiences and not negative. It demands control over this love, and always feels cheated because the suffering is here anyway, creating an endless demand for narcissistic supply. Yet when there is suffering, there can be the entitlement to receive love. So there is a vested interest in suffering, as a way to force love. It fails, partly because suffering itself is made of love. And when you let suffering and love be one, the natural effect is to be of service to the whole.

Do you notice how important self-work is for the Nondual Therapist? The pull toward the trauma vortex of the client is very strong where the narcissistic pathology takes over and claims the dimension of suffering. Through contractions of guilt and shame, we can find ourselves working for the tyranny of the clients’ suffering at the expense of equanimity and with a loss of boundaries.

Skillful Means

With patience, self-attention and an attitude of unconditional care, there are ways through. But the therapist must protect their own deeper intuitive sense of what feels right and wrong in any moment. They must guard their sense of integrity and truth and ground themselves in the sense of reality and naturalness. It is immensely to initiate and preserve boundaries in simple structures such as space, time, and renumeration.

When the possibility of service or compassion from an empowered place inside themselves meets resistance in a client, we can ask them to notice the aggression in the purity of its energy, encouraging some self-awareness and curiosity as to its pathway. Never underestimate the curative effect of self-awareness, interest, and long-term curiosity.

When the client is amenable, we can find creative ways to move with the Nondual Qualities despite the narrowness of the heart. The quality of service, for example, is an energetic vibration, connected with humility, opening, and offering from the depth of the self. Let’s say the client is caught in the horror of being a family scapegoat. We can ask them to imagine themselves in a previous life, suffering the same resonance and perhaps even worse. Here, it could be possible to awaken the sense of service or compassion – from the core of themselves in the here and now, to the core of themselves then. At the very least, the reign of absolute isolation and exclusivity will be diminished. In this, any imaginative differentiation to this “other” is helpful. For example, if the client is a female, you can have them recall or imagine a past life when they were suffering scapegoating as a male. How can they be of service? What can they do to support this “other”? The need is to create a flow of quality, between self and other. Even if the “other” is a safe projection, or another form of themselves.

In the words of Bob Dylan:

You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody