Stop Diagnosing Your Ex! Focusing on Yourself and Growing After a Breakup
There has been a beautiful movement in pop culture in the last few years. Surpassing my previous hope that therapy would no longer be stigmatized, people are talking about their therapy and mental health everywhere. Instagram be damned, TikTok has provided a wonderful platform with sassy snippets where people are getting real about their innermost thoughts and vulnerabilities.
As often happens, however, the pendulum seems to have swung a bit too far in the other direction. It’s great that people are more open about mental health but there’s a ton of diagnostic language being thrown around in a way that is at best, not correct. At worst, it’s pretty harmful.
One of the biggest places I have seen this is not with people’s own mental health but with their exes. I’ve seen more versions of “Top Ten Signs that Your Ex is a Narcissist” than I can count. Now listen. It can be really, really helpful coming out of a toxic relationship to have some framework to help make sense of what went wrong. However, there is something counterproductive about moving too quickly and swiftly to focusing on and diagnosing the other person.
People are not Black and White
Focusing narrowly on the armchair “narcissist” diagnosis for a moment, everyone has narcissism. Narcissism, just like many other feeling states and internal structures, is on a spectrum. There is a healthy range of narcissism for us all to have where we feel like we have value to offer themselves and the world. When someone suffers a “narcissistic injury” and does not get enough of the right type of love growing up, they can run a deficit in healthy narcissism and self worth. Some people express this by being unsure of themselves and having very low self esteem. For others, they cope by going in the total opposite direction. These people can be very self focused, easily wounded, and more of what we think of when we hear the word “narcissist”.
People who are definitionally narcissists and fit the criteria for the DSM 5’s diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder do exist. These people are very hard to be in stable, healthy relationships with because of an unattended attachment wound from earlier life. However, they are not as prevalent in number as social media is representing. People exist on a spectrum and more often than not land in the gray area.
Keep the Focus on You
When people hurt us, there is something very gratifying about having others validate that hurt and even go as far as point out what an ex did to wrong you. There is a place for that, the sort of girlfriend, “what an asshole” type of reassurance and love. However, it is important that the therapy community maintain a high level, perspective, neutral stance about what went down in a relationship.
The most valuable thing that a break up offers us is an opportunity to take stock of ourselves. After a relationship ends, it is important to ask ourselves what worked, what didn’t, and how we participated in the latter in order to attend to the parts of us that have some growing to do. Even if the person you were with was definitionally a narcissist, what attracted you to them? It’s important to reflect on why you engaged in something harmful and what vulnerabilities you might have to being manipulated or abused in order to ensure that you are not recreating something so unhealthy in the future.
It is really, really important to name what is reality and that can include commenting on others. However, in order to break toxic cycles, it's imperative that you remain your primary focus.
