So, first, can you help us understand sort of the context of narcissism and then also the context of borderline personality disorder? Yeah. And we’ve talked so much and had a great day planning all this yesterday and we’re we’re saying categories to think in. Interesting. There’s some information here.
I do know I will recount that when we did um way back in therapy and theology an episode somewhat touching on the talk topic of narcissism who we warned clearly on that podcast. Um please don’t jump in and say oh my word I’m married to a narcissist and I remember distinctively calling uh down here to talk to someone. I said I was watching on YouTube said when will this be released? I think it was 9:00 that morning.
I went in soon about as we said that started going through some information diagnostic criteria the comment section I was watching went I mean I couldn’t catch it well he’s a narcissist I’m married to a narcissist and so as much as we may warn we have no control over that but we’re trying to be helpful to understand very low percentage of people diagnostically in America meet the criteria of narcissistic personality disorder and one of the things around that is when there is a true personality disorder order.
Most of the research and understanding is most of those are going to be very difficult. Some say impossible to change. So I want to just do this talk about some informative things but not rush to that. People love doing it. I was just going to say I think I remember when we were first having this conversation years ago and then even recently there’s some I remember listen sitting and listening to you as you were kind of going through the the characteristics and I started sweating cuz I’m like am I a narcissist? like this this is and I I think I asked
you that Jim and you said something that was like really helpful um and you said well actually everybody has some level of narcissistic tendencies inside of them. And so I think that that is just also a helpful kind of baseline of instead of using labels to try to label people a certain way of just recognizing oh there and the theological principle behind that is there’s this thing that happened in Genesis 3 called the fall and when the fall happened Martin Luther John Calvin have this Latin phrase called homoonous and say okay wait you
know you’re going to say that uh they have a Latin phrase that’s called homo incur incurvetus in say uh which simply means humanity curved in upon itself. What a picture. And so, you know, prior to the fall, we were human beings that um had appropriate balance of appropriate selflove, but appropriate appropriate God love.
Like, we’re supposed to be fountains that poured out love and affection upon God. And then we received appropriate love and affection. But at the fall, uh our hearts are curved inward. And because our hearts are curved in in inward, we all have this tendency for self-preservation. We all have a tendency uh towards self-love.
And so I just think that when you had said that that was just such a helpful way for me to even recognize, oh um there’s just tendencies that I might have that can be redeemed and can be restored and dealt with in the economy of uh the work of the Holy Spirit. And then there are also situations that are beyond just the everyday normal.
