Basta! Stop it! I’ve had enough. I actually heard a colleague say something like this in an interview about his new book. The subject of the book? You ask– Yep.You guessed it-NARCISSISM. After listening for what seemed like hours to his use of some variation of the word in almost every sentence, I clicked off the interview. The term has become a cliché, a catchword for the millennium that now means nothing. At the same time, there’s no question that ours is an age of great self-absorption. For example, Marty Kaplan calls electronic devices “weapons of mass distraction”. When people walk toward me down the street on a collision course, too focused on their cell phones to pay attention to the surroundings, I wait until they are inches away and shout:”Beep”. It usually gets their attention. Just the other day, I was walking along my office block while a woman ahead of me was slipping a can of soda from a paper bag ( I think it was a ‘Dr. Pepper’–but that’s beside the point). As she was walking, she let the bag fall to the ground. This incensed me. I picked up the bag, approached her and sarcastically said: “Excuse me, I think you dropped this”. She looked at the bag, then at me and said;” That’s okay. It’s empty”. But here’s the topper.
A wife dragged her husband into my office for couple’s counseling after she caught him sexting another woman as they lie in bed. I confronted him: “What were you thinking?” I asked. He replied:” I wasn’t doin’ nutthin'”. I said: “Yes I know, you were doing something”. He didn’t get it. Apparently this was the last in a series of affronts to her self-esteem and she finally had enough. I asked her what was she getting of the situation just the way it was. She shrugged her shoulders and said” I guess I love him”. I asked her why she was willing to accept unacceptable behavior? She couldn’t answer me. I suspect that years of these type of debilitating behavior had eroded her self confidence to the point that she had become so dependent on him that she actually believed that she didn’t deserve any better. They left my office never to return; I thought if she were emotionally healthier, she would have left him.