Why Do Some People Seem so Self Absorbed and Not Care About Others?

Image by Laura M from Pixabay 

“When people treat you like they don’t care, believe them.” Samuel Rodenhizer

One of my big discoveries in the last year was this premise that some of us internalise feelings, thoughts and emotions, whereas others externalise them. What I’ve found, put simply, is people who internalise things feel pain; people who externalise have troubles (usually because the people around them are in pain).

I’m an internaliser, and I’m hyper-attuned to other people’s feelings. I used to live in hope that people would see just how hurt or upset I was, the same way I could tell that they were upset at me, and – in the same way I would seek to create harmony – they would seek to create harmony with me. But it’s often not the case, especially since I seem to attract people who externalise their feelings.

The best explanation I have found for this dynamic/ coping style/ way of being in the world, takes this back to how well caregivers tune into a child’s needs from the cradle through the school years. When I ask myself:

• Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me?
• Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not?
• Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way?
• How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

This gives me an indication of how attuned my parents were to my needs. Big clue here is that parenting until the late twentieth century predominantly treated kids as an empty vessel who needed moulded to fit society. A child’s feelings did not feature so much as the drive to be good, to fit in and most definitely – as I quickly learned - not to upset the apple cart (being my parents and their anxieties).

So, as Teal swan says, “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

Understanding this helped me to understand my partner (and others) more, because he is an externaliser. There was many a time he would project something onto me and cause me pain, or I would be feeling pain from an interaction from some other quarter, and he just couldn’t empathise.

Something relationship expert Terry Real (founder of Relational Life Therapy) talks about in his series Fierce Intimacy, and Wendy Behary in her book Disarming the Narcissist, is that people who externalise their pain (Terry refers to their behaviour as grandiosity), projecting it onto others, need motivation to change.

They agree that people who externalise don’t feel bad, in fact Teal Swan goes so far as to say “the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble”.

Terry Real says the kind of conversation he has when working with someone who has this coping style might go along the lines of “What kind of father did you have? What kind of father do you want to be? It must really kill you to realise that – in this family – you’ve become your father. What kind of relationship do you want your kids to have with you?”

He has a saying “Pass it back or pass it on. If we don’t wrestle this together, the people who are going to be most damaged are your children.”

For both my partner and I this has become our biggest motivator for change, we don’t want to pass on our dysfunctional ways of being in the world to our kids. We want our kids to have healthy self esteem, healthy boundaries, compassion and empathy for their fellow beings and the creatures and planet around us.

Figuring out what my limitations are, as a result of the way I subconsciously reacted to the people and my environment growing up (psychologists call this maladaptive schemas), and weeding them out, has been part of a healing journey.

As an adult I found myself longing for acceptance, validation and recognition of who I am, what I need, what I feel and what I achieve. I was longing for support and connection, and a feeling of safety to be vulnerable. I began to understand that the way I was being in the world was basically subconsciously attracting repeat experiences into my life as opportunities to have a more successful outcome.

Once I became conscious of a lot of these patterns of beliefs and behaviours, and why I had developed them, it became a lot easier to see where I was shooting myself in the metaphorical foot.

But as Terry Real says, “it takes more than putting our past in the past, it takes skills to have healthy relationships with people, and skills can be learned”. He explains “There’s a skill in learning to love yourself, there is skill in learning good boundaries, there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and how to respond with generosity instead of defensiveness”.

I was asked by someone why they found themselves having to discard friendships, because she seemed to be attracting friends who could only talk about themselves and never asked about her. She couldn’t figure out how some people could focus so totally on themselves.

I shared with her that I’ve found it takes getting good at expressing and holding my boundaries to get what I need from relationships and, for that, I’d definitely recommend both Evette Rose’s Healing Your Boundaries and Terry Cole’s Boundary Boss.

But I also really like Terry Real’s approach where, in Relational Life Therapy, he teaches relational empowerment, the golden rule being “What can I give you to help you to give me what I want?”

While that is indeed empowering, he also admits that one of the core skills required in any relationship, and he calls this the proto-skill, is shifting out of that triggered part of you (the wounded child that is the knee-jerk reaction, automatic, unthought, compulsive response) back into the adult part, with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex that can think and make deliberate decisions.

Regardless of the new skills I’ve learned, I was somewhat heartened to hear him admit that one of the things he personally still finds hard is containing that desire to react when his wife comes at him with a triggered self-righteous energy. He says:

“Containing that impulse, settling into my adult, holding myself with warm regard, holding her in warm regard (even though she’s out of her mind), and doing whatever I can to make things better, that moment right there, that’s a tough moment.”

The point is, though, it can be done. And while some people seem not to care about others, I find it useful to remember it’s just a coping style, and I am often able to have compassion for why this is the case (if not in the moment, enough to keep me in the game in some longer term relationships).

I also have figured out my boundaries, what I am and am not willing to put up with, what the deal breakers are and what I’m willing to do about it. I am getting better and better at speaking my truth and holding those boundaries. What I know for sure, though, is I cannot change anyone else; the only thing I can change is how I think, feel and react.

Ironically the more those of us who do care about others can connect in with ourselves and honour our own needs, wants and desires, and can hold those who seem self absorbed accountable in a loving way, the more aware of our own needs and those of others we will all become.

In addendum, I observe we all have the capacity to internalise and externalise, just the same as we all have the capacity to be narcissistic or people pleasers at times. It’s perhaps more helpful to think of these things in more general terms rather than as definitive labels. For example, as a newborn and young child, I internalised a lot of pain, shame and guilt, but as an adult I often subconsciously projected this outwardly when triggered (meaning I experienced emotions that were overly intense in comparison to the present situation as it had re-triggered the pain I internalised as a child and I then put that pain on/blamed something/someone else). Different circumstances and different people elicit different responses depending on what they echo from our earliest experiences of feeling safe and seen. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, What I Love About Being With Narcissistic People, How to Find the Courage to Let Us Hear Your Heart’s Voice, Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.