Daring Greatly

Narcissism

When Brené Brown applies the powerful “lens” of vulnerability to narcissistic behavior, she finds that people often act out a “shame-based fear of being ordinary.” That fear is at the heart of the problem of narcissism, even as it offers a way of escaping it. She says it’s often hard to believe that anyone recognizes your uniqueness, and such isolation leads to the current plague of self-loathing derived from “the number of likes you get on Facebook or Instagram.” Though Brown poses this plague as mostly affecting millennials, older adults also fall prey to feeling invisible.