Criticizing - Dan Cassenti, Novelist

Concept: Generally, there are two means of giving feedback to another person—advice or criticism. Those who favor empathy and understanding of others wish for other well-intentioned people to succeed in their goals and offer advice to help them. A narcissist is averse to the success of others as another’s success threatens the narcissist’s self-esteem (due to seeing that success as a personal loss). To avoid this outcome, they often couch their feedback as advice but give criticism and thus attempt to lower the other’s self-esteem. This serves the dual purpose of making the receiver doubt their ability to achieve success to sow doubt and increase the chance of failure, but also to prop up the narcissist’s fragile ego when the receiver believes the criticism and thus validates the narcissist’s superiority.

Testing someone who you suspect of narcissism: Figure out some goal that would benefit you but not the suspected narcissist to ensure a pure test. Ask the suspected narcissist for advice on how to achieve that goal and reason about whether the response falls into the category of criticism or advice. If you hear words like, “You don’t seem ready for that” or “I don’t think you have what it takes,” those are some good indications of their narcissistic disposition.

Examples:

“Yeah, I don’t think you should ask Sonia to marry you unless you want to be disappointed. Honestly, I get the sense she knows she can do better but feels bad for you because, well, you know.”
“He only succeeded because of luck! Everyone knows Rashad is a moron.”
“She’s always going to fail because she’s a backstabber and a traitor.”

Advice: Criticism is about a person on a personal level. Anyone may criticize others, but when someone does this as the default position, it exposes people as more self-serving than other serving. You should ask yourself when in or starting a relationship with a narcissist, “How long before they do battle against my self-esteem too?”

Narcissism Encyclopedia

Red Flags