Self-Understanding

The Wound That Isn't There

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  9 min read

The train home is the six-forty, and by December the window has gone black enough to work as a mirror, so Naledi is reading four stapled pages in her own reflection’s lap.

She asked for them — a plain-language summary of the actual research, printed by a woman she barely knew at a conference in the spring. It sat in her bag for six weeks because she was busy, and because she was not busy.

For nine years Naledi has carried a sentence about her father, found in a paperback bought in an airport: that underneath the grandiosity there is a frightened child who was never held properly, and that everything the adult does is that child, still trying. It is the reason she can sit through the birthday lunch while he holds court about a deal from 1996 without saying the thing that is in her mouth.

She reads the paragraph about grandiose narcissism twice, puts the pages face down on her knee, and looks at the black window until her stop.

What the research version actually says

Attachment is what a small child does about the fact that they need somebody bigger, and what they learn to expect from asking. John Bowlby’s contribution was that this need is not spoiling; it is a working system, as real as hunger. Mary Ainsworth made it measurable — a room, some toys, a stranger, two brief separations — and found that the informative moment is not the separation, since almost every small child minds being left. It is the reunion.

The differences she saw sorted into patterns, and a pattern like that describes tendencies rather than a kind of person. You have a way of walking into cold water: some go in at a run, some get in over eleven minutes, one shin at a time, complaining. That describes what somebody does at the water’s edge, not who they are at a funeral. Worth knowing, too: Ainsworth watched small children, while nearly all the adult research measures a grown person answering statements about themselves on a form.

The kindest story on the shelf

Now the account Naledi carries, told properly. A child arrives needing to be held and is not held — or is held only when performing, or adored on Tuesday and invisible on Thursday. The child builds a self that works in that house: if being small is dangerous, be large; if admiration is the only reliable warmth in the building, become somebody who can generate admiration on demand. Then the child grows and the structure stays, because structures do.

That account has a great deal going for it, and the compassion in it is not fake. It refuses the idea that some people are simply born wrong, an idea with a terrible history. It matches what clinicians really do see, and for many people it was the first frame that made the whole thing bearable — before it there was a father who was inexplicable, and inexplicable is unbearable. It also does one quiet thing nobody puts on the cover. It is a story about a wound, and wounds heal, so it arrives carrying an unstated forecast: underneath is something that could be reached, and the right kind of patience might reach it. Nobody writes that sentence down. Everybody hears it.

Thirty-three studies, and the sentence nobody wanted

Mohay, Cheng, de la Piedad Garcia and Willis published a systematic and meta-analytic review of attachment and narcissism, pooling thirty-three studies covering 10,675 people. It does what popular writing almost never does, which is keep the two presentations apart.

Grandiose narcissism is the loud recipe — immodest, entitled, dominant, bold. Vulnerable narcissism carries the same entitlement wrapped in distrust, anxiety, shame and hypersensitivity. Weiss, Campbell, Lynam and Miller describe both as built from a shared ingredient, antagonism, with grandiosity adding boldness and vulnerability adding shame.

Kept apart, the finding runs like this. For vulnerable narcissism the story holds — significant positive relationships with all three insecure attachment styles, strongest with the preoccupied pattern. For grandiose narcissism there was no significant relationship with any insecure attachment style. None of the three. The only reliable relationship that came back was a negligible positive one with secure attachment.

Now the caveats, in full, because a finding like this will be used badly by somebody and I would rather it not be by me. Every study in that pool is cross-sectional — everybody measured once, like a photograph of a river taken from a bridge at noon. You can see how much water is where; no enlargement tells you which way it came from. Every study is self-report. And the authors raise the obvious objection themselves: people scoring high on grandiose narcissism may over-report their own security, because saying you are fine with people is the sort of thing such a person would say.

So the honest position has three parts, held at once. The account is supported for the vulnerable presentation. It is not supported for the grandiose one. And grandiose self-reported security may be a coat rather than a body — but we cannot rule that out is a very different sentence from research shows it, and popular writing has been printing the second.

What just dropped, and what it does not license

The presentation most readers have in mind when they say my father, or my brother, or my old boss, is the grandiose one. For that presentation, the wound story is not supported.

Two losses sit inside that, and only one is obvious. The obvious one is the compassion — an effortful kindness run for years on a mechanism the evidence does not support. That does not make the kindness wrong; it makes it unmoored, which is a strange thing to discover about your own kindness. The loss underneath is worse: if the behavior is not armor over an injury, there may be no injury to heal that would fix this, and then all the patience in the world is not patience aimed at anything.

If something just dropped, the name for it is grief. What is being taken is a story that has been holding somebody together inside a relationship, and losing it is a bereavement with nobody to tell. If you would rather not read the rest today, this will still be here in March.

Three things the finding does not license. Not contempt — a meta-analysis of questionnaires cannot tell you that a specific man had a good childhood, and whatever happened to your father happened to him. Not the reverse story either, that the grandiose presentation is therefore chosen, or evil, or something a person could stop doing on a Tuesday by deciding to. And not the conclusion that trauma is irrelevant: Gao and colleagues do find childhood maltreatment associated with narcissistic traits — small, larger for the vulnerable presentation, strongest for neglect — in studies that are cross-sectional, retrospective, and unable to separate the neglect from the genes, since one parent supplied both.

The rate you learned

Now point the apparatus at the person doing the reading, because that is where the practical value sits.

Annika is thirty-seven. She checks her phone thirty-one times in an hour when her husband is out, and she has counted, because counting is part of it. When he is warm she does not relax; she uses the warmth to get things done, because warmth is a window and windows close. In the third year she took an attachment quiz — nineteen statements, a result in a colored box — and read the paragraph underneath as a description of her character. For about a year it made everything worse, because now the checking was not a response to anything. It was who she was.

Consider what is actually being described. A learned rate: how often you check something is set by how unpredictable it has been. Picture a pot that boils over sometimes, at no fixed time, with no warning. Watch it for two years and you will check constantly — not because you are an anxious person, but because that is the correct checking interval for that pot. Annika did not bring thirty-one checks an hour into that marriage. She learned them there, and the learning was accurate.

Let me be careful about that claim, having spent this article complaining about people who are not. It is a clinical observation rather than a meta-analytic finding, and I have not found research that cleanly separates what somebody brings to a relationship from what the relationship produces in them. Test it yourself, since it costs nothing: what were you like about all this before — not before the bad year, before the whole thing? And if the honest answer is that you were like this before, that is worth knowing, and not a verdict on you either.

Compassion is not a prediction

Everything here comes down to a distinction easy to state and unpleasant to live in. An explanation can be accurate. An explanation can be useful for staying. Those are different properties, and a story can have either without the other. You tell them apart by asking what the explanation predicts. An accurate account of somebody’s history tells you where a pattern came from; it does not tell you whether the pattern will stop. Naledi’s account might be true in every particular and none of it would change what her father does at a birthday lunch in the year she is forty-three. The past explains the shape of a thing. It makes no promises about next Tuesday.

Do we love people for who they are, or for the emotional functions they perform for us? A story about somebody’s wounded childhood can be a way of loving the whole person. It can also become a function that person performs for us: the explanation is what lets us stay, so we need it to keep working, and we start doing maintenance on it.

So hold both sentences, or both go wrong. A person’s history deserves compassion. Compassion is not a prediction. Drop the first and you have contempt, which is not only ugly but inaccurate. Drop the second and you have nine years of waiting for a boy on a step. You are allowed to feel tenderness toward somebody’s seven-year-old self and make an entirely separate decision about what you will be available for.

Naledi and Annika are composites. Nothing here is drawn from any one person’s life; these patterns are common enough to belong to nobody in particular.

If reading this took something away rather than adding something, that is a real loss and not an overreaction. A therapist who works with family material is the right person to sit with it, and it is worth going.