How I Experience My Narcissism: Aware, Not Healed

I want to tell you how much I am afraid of pain. To me, it is a pebble in Indra's Net - lift it and the whole net revives. My pains do not come isolated - they live in families of anguish, in tribes of hurt, whole races of agony. I cannot experience them insulated from their kin. They rush to drown me through the demolished floodgates of my childhood. These floodgates, my inner dams - this is my narcissism, there to contain the ominous onslaught of stale emotions, repressed rage, a child's injuries. Pathological narcissism is useful - this is why it is so resilient and resistant to change. When it is “invented“ by the tormented individual - it enhances his functionality and makes life bearable for him. Because it is so successful, it attains religious dimensions - it become rigid, doctrinaire, automatic and ritualistic. In other words, it becomes a PATTERN of behaviour. I am a narcissist and I can feel this rigidity as though it were an outer shell. It constrains me. It limits