But there’s more than this; it goes to this bigger question of why don’t narcissistic people like – why are they so put off by sick people? Why are they so illness-averse? Not saying anyone loves it, but they really struggle with it, and there’s a few reasons for it. It’s almost delusional, but narcissistic people really can’t get their heads around aging or death or infirmity. It flies in the face of the grandiosity that their bodies will never age, that they may be the exceptions to the rules of morbidity and mortality. So, your illness is, in a way, a reminder of that. I remember one particularly narcissistic person who was caught in a bind; he was trying to facilitate a business deal that he had. So, he kept visiting these elderly people in their nursing home to build good faith because the deal kind of involved them. But he couldn’t contain his contempt of being in the nursing home, of being that close to, as he put it, the smell of death and dying. Sadly, it ended up working out for him; the old people died, and as a result, he was able to buy the property he wanted the way he wanted. I don’t know what happened to him; he had enough money that he probably wouldn’t have ever had to go to a nursing home kind of thing. But the sheer contempt he had for that place, I sometimes wonder if narcissistic people’s penchant for much younger partners, for example, they love being with people younger than them, is linked into this obsession with health and defiance of death and illness.
Sickness and illness bring out the narcissistic person’s vulnerability. I mean, I think any of us might feel a little vulnerable when we hear of someone’s cancer diagnosis or a heart attack or some other health issue that comes up, either slow or fast – a reminder of how vulnerable any of our bodies are, how fragile life is. Well, when vulnerability comes up for a narcissistic person, when those feelings come up, they often feel a mix of shame, resentment, and anger. So, your illness is an inconvenient reminder that someday they may get sick, infirm, or dependent. And that reminder and the subsequent feelings are matched with lots of negative and reactive emotion. It’s as though if I never see a sick person, then that means I’ll never get sick.
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