The Internal Radio Station of Narcissism

i was working the other day with Kim. He was working inside, I was shovelling snow off of some product. It was monotonous work, but I didn’t mind. i just started singing to myself, and thought about something positive. Can’t remember what. 

Since I was working with Kim, I started thinking about him. He would not be happy to work alone like this, I thought. He would not enjoy his own internal radio station.

I thought of times, when I was younger, before I had some therapy, that probably saved me from going down the road to narcissism myself. I thought about how I needed to always have distractions. I needed to have the radio, or a podcast blaring all the time. “Some people don’t like silence because they don’t want to be alone with God.” That is what my youth pastor had said. Well, God was fine. But I didn’t want to be alone with myself. Leave me alone with myself, and pretty soon all of the negative thoughts would start coming. I would remember and obsess about something embarrassing I said three hours — or three years — ago. Or think and obsess about someone that I thought may perhaps be angry at me. Or think and obsess about trying super hard not to mess up. Then visualizing myself messing up. Then thinking of how it would be so terrible if I messed up, and I would have to explain that to my boss, and it would feel just like that time that I messed up and my dad yelled at me and…oh shoot. I just messed up…

After therapy, these voices subsided. As the years went on, they got less and less. I realized now, shovelling snow, I really like the internal radio station. Mostly, it is just silence. But sometimes there are tunes. I am writing a few songs, and play snippets over and over. Or I sing hymns or whatever.

I thought of how my dad was/is. Always under pressure. Always “dealing with so much.” It was like that. Like, he was always coming back from some war, or always fighting a terrible war in his mind. Like, how if we bugged him or did something wrong, it took all of his energy not to yell at us (or sometimes he was less successful in controlling his anger). And we should have understood that we shouldn’t have bugged him in the first place. “Can’t we see how much pressure he is under?!” So he made his emotions our responsibility, and trained us to be hyper-sensitive to his emotional states. This conditioning still remains, and is very powerful. I have talked about this in previous posts.

But mostly, i want to talk here about the “internal radio station.” I think that is something that Kim, Joe, and my dad all have in common. They all had really bad growing up years. They were not affirmed, or loved in the ways that matter most to a child. And now, as adults, they fight very difficult, very personal, very real battles every day. The internal radio station is set to a very toxic station. Mostly, there is a lot of self-hatred going on. Which causes them to lash out, retreat, hide their emotions, intelllecutlaly lock, or act out in narcissism, as discussed elsewhere. 

I’m not sure where I am going with this post, or where to end it. Is it sad? Is it infuriating? Mostly, it just feels like a kind of insight. 

Get counselling. Get help. That is the real answer.

And as you do, this internal noise can start to subside. As the noise subsides, your behaviours can become more normal, and more healthy. 

That is what I would wish for the narcissists in my life. Unfortunately, the true narcissists see no problems in themselves, nor any need to change, despite the terrible voices going on constantly in their head…