The Memory Issues of Narcissists

I once I tutored a student who beared all the familiar red flags of NPD: a major tell was that she revised her life in real time.

One day, she told me she’d received a 1200 on the SAT.

She was weeping, pulling out her hair, bemoaning the loss of her dreams of Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. “Now I’ll have to go to a college for stupid people,” she spat bitterly. 

“I think you have a warped idea of what college means and you put too much emphasis on clout. Why are these institutions so important to you?” I asked. 

“I want people to be jealous of me!” she cried, “I’m SPECIAL!”

Narcissists project their own pain: because they suffer from pathological envy of others due to extreme insecurity and low emotional intelligence, they’re often deeply concerned with making others envious. 

They don’t understand that emotionally mature people don’t experience envy: they experience admiration, because they have empathy. 

Jealousy is always a failure of empathy, because it’s a delusion that says that your happiness would come if only you had what someone else had, but happiness is much more complex than that, and all people have struggles and pain, even if they sometimes have good things in life. An empathetic person understands that no one gets to escape pain in this life. 

After nurturing her through her the narcissistic injury and promising to help her study for her next SAT, I was surprised when she showed up for the next session chipper. 

“Did I tell you?” she squealed, “My SAT?”

“Yes,” I nodded apologetically.

“My mom is so happy — she’s taking me out for dinner tonight!”

“Oh?”

“Yep — a 1400!”

“Oh!” I said, truly surprised. She’d apparently forgotten telling me in the previous days, and, according to her, she was finished taking the test.

Having been raised by narcissists, the sudden revision of reality was something I was used to, and I knew better than to question it. 

Months later, however, she was preparing to take the SAT again. 

When I reminded her about the 1400, she seemed genuinely confused. She’d forgotten telling me about it. 

She brushed it off: “1200, 1400 — it’s not perfect, so I’m taking it again.”

Next time, she told me she got a 1600 — a perfect score. She was euphoric as she dreamed of all the top schools in the world begging her to attend. 

It was as though the past kept moving toward the version of herself she wanted to inhabit.