The beginning and end of spiritual development is personal responsibility. The situation you find yourself in today has come about as a direct result of the choices you made, and the decisions you took, yesterday, and your situation tomorrow can be different, but only when you make different choices. Basically, nothing changes until you do.

Narcissists, however, say no to this, for they are in the business of blaming others. In their world it is always someone else’s fault, never their own. Their behaviour is always impeccable (they think) whereas the actions of others are outrageous and beyond the pale.

Now, the word is definitely over-used and, for a long time I did not believe that such people really existed. They were just assholes right, and the world is full of those. But, I see now that narcissists are a level up from plain old assholes. They are toxic and their capacity for destruction has almost no bounds.

Narcissism is a spectrum, and some people may be more narcissistic than others, but along that spectrum narcissists will engage in a variety of behaviours. These include (but are not limited to):

Never answering questions directly.

Cycling and looping conversations so that they go nowhere.

Throwing tantrums, and never saying sorry.

Love bombing you (even if your relationship is not intimate).

Refusing to take criticism, but readily criticising you.

Being unable to cope with others having the limelight.

Walking ahead of you (strange but true).

Popping up in your life unexpectedly, just when you need them the least.

Making you feel like you are walking on eggshells around them.

Sob storying about their past. Talking about how badly others treated them.

Being willing to self-destruct (in order to take you down with them).

Never allowing you to question their story.

Believing themselves to be thoroughly good people.

Living chaotic and disordered lives, and avoiding accountability because they have enablers who clean up after them.

Narcissists behave like this because they possess no empathy. They are not stupid, far from it. Many narcissists are in fact highly intelligent and some have even learned how to cognitively, mentally, understand their own behaviour. But because they lack empathy – because they are deficient in Feelings – they are unwilling to change. They do not see the effect they have on others and nor do they care. And – this is very important – narcissists can be female. In fact there is growing evidence that most narcissists are female. This means that parents can be narcissists, as can brothers, sisters, friends, lovers, exs, bosses and colleagues.

It is hard for empathic and sensitive people (and that almost certainly means you) to understands how such people could even exist in the first place, still less behave this way. Sadly, this makes you prime fodder for the narcissist, who will feed off your empathy ten times before breakfast, leaving you lost, confused and damaged as a result.

We might wonder when will such people learn? When will they get a taste of their own medicine? The short answer is that their narcissism is their karma. It is their punishment for misdeeds in a past life. Narcissists, you see, are deeply, profoundly and existentially unhappy. Their social media might be full of them smiling, living their best life, but deep down inside they are dying, deprived of the very thing they want the most, connection.

Narcissism often appears where there are Master Numbers 11, 22 and 33, and sometimes where there are Karmic Debts in the Link Number. But narcissists can also possess regular single digit numbers, it’s just that they are operating to the negative of all of them. But even this isn’t the whole story, for narcissists have a broken soul, which makes them incapable of being happy or contented. Narcissism is not a mental illness that can be therapied out, it is a soul sickness, a corrective to their egregious actions in a previous life, actions that were so bad that their soul became stained and warped and had to be split to prevent anything like that happening again. We are talking mass murderer-psychopathic-despot territory, that’s what these people were and the splitting of their soul occured so that those crimes cannot happen again.

But of course, its even more fundamental than that. What is the connection that they lack in this life? What was the connection they lacked last time, which led them to perform such terrible deeds? That connection, of course, is to God. Narcissists are the way they are because they have abandoned God and substituted themselves in God’s place. This is why their social media is full of pictures of themselves, for that is who they worship. Obviously, not all those who post social media pictures of themselves are narcissists. But all narcissists are in love with themselves, above all others, and social media encourages them.

Naturally, in a culture that has been New Aged to death, plenty of narcissists will lay claim to some form of spirituality, and if we were feeling generous we might give them that and say well at least they are trying. But in truth their spirituality merely operates in service to their narcissism, just another way where they can lead their best life, be the best version of themselves, love themselves unconditionally, and all that jazz.

Now, you may read this and wonder, well am I a narcissist? So here’s a simple test. Please consider the following statement:

All praise is due to God.

Nothing good, that I have ever done, has come from me. It has come from God.

Everything bad that has ever happened to me, was created by me.

Ha! Strong stuff eh? Yes, but it smokes out the narcissists.

If your reaction to these words is ‘yes, they are true’ then you are confirmed narc-free.

If your reaction is ‘well I don’t know about that’, then you are just an ordinary human being with doubts, but still narc-free.

However, if your reaction to this is violent, if it enrages you or if you find the words insulting and offensive, then I’m sorry, you have tested positive for potential narcissism. All hope is not lost though for maybe we just caught you on a bad day, but if your bad reaction sits alongside an unwillingness (not inability) to journey to past lives then we have a red flag and a confirmation that you need to step back from the mirror, back from your own concerns, and start to live a life that is selflessly directed toward others.

Of course, the reality here is that you almost certainly wouldn’t be reading this is if you were a narcissist, because you would have long ago identified me a threat to your delicate self-image. What is more likely is that you are reading this as victim of narcissistic abuse. Now you know me, I don’t like the word victim at all, but empaths and sensitives get chewed up and spat out by narcissists every day of the week, and then they wonder what they have done wrong! But they haven’t done anything wrong! Narcissists cannot be accommodated or negotiated with, nor can they be fixed. They are broken, profoundly and deeply at the level of their soul, and many years, or even lifetimes will be needed before they see, understand, accept and finally change their behaviour. Empaths and sensitives, feelings based watery people need to recognise narcissists for what they are, and walk away now! If you are a sensitive, intuitive, empathic, compassionate person, hanging around for a narcissist, waiting for them to do the right thing, well this may actually be making you ill. The symptoms might be physical, but they are more likely going to show as some form of PTSD. Solution: Walk. Away. Now.

Please feel free to share your own experiences and realisations about this topic below.