Question: This is question is about narcissistic personality disorder. Psychology distinguishing narcissist from psychopaths, calls a narcissist a person who among others, has a grandiose sense of self importance, dreams of unlimited power, success, beauty etc., believes he or she is special and unique and requires excessive admiration, unreasonably expects special favorable treatment, exploits and takes advantage of others to achieve personal ends, lacks empathy for the feelings and needs of others. What could the masters say about this mental disorder from a spiritual perspective? Are there avatars who developed a full or extreme spectrum of this disorder?
Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given at a conference in Holland in 2019.
Well to begin with the last question, yes, there are indeed avatars who have developed narcissistic personality disorder. There are also many of the people who have narcissistic personality disorder who are fallen beings. And there are some who are the original inhabitants of the earth who have not fallen. But there are relatively few among the original inhabitants who have gone to the extremes of narcissistic personality disorder. It is mainly avatars and fallen beings who fall into this.
You could say that the fallen beings already had this disorder before they came here. Many of them have gone even deeper into what you call being psychopaths, where they are much more aggressive in controlling other people or harming other people. You could say that an avatar does not go into becoming a psychopath. It just would not be possible unless the avatar fell at the end of a particular sphere, but that is relatively unlikely to happen. It certainly has not happened so far.
When you take the teachings we have given on the birth trauma—when you are exposed to the birth trauma, what happens is that you are forced into shifting from a more global awareness that you have on a natural planet to a more self – centered awareness. On a natural planet you are much more aware that you are part of the whole, and it is this awareness that causes an avatar to look at the earth and decide to descend here in order to help raise the earth. So the avatar comes in with a global awareness that, of course, is the antithesis or the opposite or the cure for narcissistic personality disorder.
But then when you experience this birth trauma, if it is very, very deep and very, very painful, then the avatar shifts into being focused on self. It can gradually, usually over several lifetimes, become more and more focused on self, more and more focused on never again experiencing the kind of pain it experienced in the birth trauma, and this then can cause the avatar to become more and more focused on itself.
We have earlier talked about the fact that in spiritual movements there are two types of people. There are those who start looking beyond themselves and start working for the whole or realize the value of having a frame of reference that is beyond their current state of consciousness. Then there is the group that cannot make, or have at least not yet made, that transition. Therefore, they approach the spiritual path from a self-centered, self-focused perspective.
In a sense you could say that most people, when they first find the spiritual path, they are very self-centered, because why are they open to the spiritual path? Well, it is because they are experiencing great pain from being on earth. They have a sense that this is not natural or this is not right, they have their birth trauma they are struggling with, and they have been willing to acknowledge this to the point where they realize they want to do something about it. They want to get out of it. So many people have a focus on self, and then as they apply spiritual teachings and tools and grow on the path, then they gradually overcome that. When the pain becomes less and less, it does not pull them into it.
As you realize, anything that involves self-aware beings with free will has many levels of complexity. We have so far given you a certain teaching about avatars, and we have focused on the kind of people that we know we can help. As I said, you acknowledge that you have pain, you have a problem here, you want to solve it, and you want to grow. Therefore you are willing to look at yourself and what it takes, what changes you have to make in order to attain a more peaceful state of mind, instead of trying to change other people or the world.
So these are the kind of people that are open to our teachings. But there is a certain type of avatars who, after the initial birth trauma, they are so effective at denying the birth trauma and denying the pain, that they come to a point where they do not consciously acknowledge their pain anymore. Some of them go into a state of almost wanting to prove the fallen beings wrong by making themselves have some kind of special ability or knowledge. There are some avatars who have gone into a state of competition with the fallen beings in terms of developing certain psychic powers, what you often call black magic, and they feel that they want to prove that they are better at this than the fallen beings. As I said, they don’t go into the psychopathic disorder where they are aggressively willing to kill people, but they can go into this very, very clear focus on raising up themselves.
So you have these people who find a spiritual teaching, even an ascended master teaching, and they approach it not from the point that they want to overcome their pain and their limitations, not from the point that they want to learn, they want to grow, they want to change themselves, but only from the point that, how can they raise themselves up, gain some special ability, make themselves look better in the eyes of other people. They want to impress, they want to prove the fallen beings wrong, they want to prove themselves superior, and they approach the spiritual path for this purpose.
You are not seeing it as much in this dispensation, although you did see it much more in the early years of this dispensation. But you saw it more in previous dispensations—that you had these kind of people who used the teachings as a tool that basically reinforced their narcissistic personality disorder, even to the point where sometimes they would feel that the ascended masters were approving of their narcissistic tendencies and their narcissistic quest to elevate themselves. They felt the teachings had justified their sense of superiority.
What can we do for these people? Really nothing. There is nothing our teachings can do for them. Because if you are not willing to look at yourself, then our teachings will not work for you.
We respect free will. We realize that many, many people on earth are in the school of hard knocks, where they must pursue a certain experience and encounter the physical reaction to it from the universe, from the cosmic mirror, until they have had enough of it and come to the point where they open their minds to learn something new. We cannot do anything for them.
This is something you can use when you encounter such people, where you realize that: “If the ascended masters cannot do anything for these people, why should I think I could do something for them?” There are spiritual people, well-meaning spiritual people, who have had family members or spouses or have been in relationships with people who have narcissistic personality disorder, and they have felt compassion and wanted to save these people. It has often led to great disappointment and pain for these people because people with narcissistic personality disorder simply do not change, or they change very, very slowly.
So the best thing you can do if you know people like this is to not allow yourself to be frustrated, and the only way to avoid being frustrated is to not think you have to change these people. You also need to recognize that neither do you need to change yourself to accommodate these people.
You need to recognize here that you need to accept who these people are and there’s probably nothing you can do to change them. But then you also need to accept that just because you are in a relationship with these people, it does not mean that you have to change yourself to accommodate them. You have a right to be who you are and to follow the path as you see it, and if that means that you will grow beyond them, then you have a right to leave them behind because it does not help them that you hold yourself back, and it obviously does not help you that you hold yourself back. Neither does it help humanity as a whole, the cause of raising consciousness, that you hold yourself back because you know somebody with narcissistic personality disorder. You just let them be.
This does not mean that you cannot tell them certain things, but you are not telling them things in order to change them, with the intent that you want to change them. You are just expressing yourself: who you are, how you see life, what your understanding is. You just express yourself, and then you are totally non – attached to how they react to it because you do not have the purpose of changing them. You just have the purpose to be yourself and express yourself with whomever you meet.
You also can, of course, come to a point where you realize you no longer want to be in a close relationship with people like that. Then you have a right to move on, no matter what your relationship is to such people. You cannot allow yourself to feel some kind of misguided loyalty or feel that you have to stay with a person like that if you cannot help them. You have no obligation to do this. You could even say that, there is always the question people have: “Well, what if I have karma with this person from past lives? Wouldn’t I then have to stay with that person until I have resolved the karma?”
Yes, but, my beloved, you need to recognize here that a person with narcissistic personality disorder is not going to resolve the karma they have with you because they are not willing to change themselves. So you cannot wait until all of the karma is resolved. What you need to do is focus on your own growth and resolving the karma, meaning the unresolved psychology, in yourself. When you have done that, you are free of your karmic obligation to that person, and therefore you have a right to move on if you choose to move on.
You can, of course, also choose to associate with them, and you can now associate with them in a new way, where they are not disturbing your peace. They are not pulling you into a reactionary pattern, and therefore you can have a more free relationship with them. You can choose to stay in a relationship, which I would especially recommend for parents and children, not so much for spouses, but you are not obligated. You should not feel that you are obligated because if you feel obligated, then that is part of the karma that you have with such people.
This is again one of the questions that spiritual people come up with because some of you might feel that: “But what if I did something wrong to that person in a past life, and therefore I have karma, and I need to pay back that karma before I can move on?” When you are dealing with a person with narcissistic personality disorder, it is not very likely that you did something wrong to them in a past life. What is much more likely is that in a past life you went into the state of consciousness of wanting to save them, wanting to change them, and that is why you have a tie to them. So there is often nothing you need to compensate for in terms of having done some bad action, but you need to overcome that sense of wanting to change the person that you cannot change.
It is sometimes, for some spiritual people, necessary to recognize that when you are on a planet like earth, that has such a low collective consciousness, but still free will reigns supreme, and there are some people who are narcissists, thinking you can change other people can have an element of spiritual pride. Because truly when you recognize free will, when you recognize how difficult it is to make a narcissist see what they are denying, then it is spiritual pride to think you can accomplish this.
As I said, if we of the ascended masters realize we cannot help these people, but they must experience through the school of hard knocks, then if you think you could do better than the ascended masters, that is a form of spiritual pride. So it might be necessary to recognize that in yourself because many avatars have that certain sense of spiritual pride.
It could start even before you came to earth, where you looked down on earth and you thought: “Oh, I must be able to do something to help them.” You were aware that ascended masters exist, you were aware as an avatar that we were working with the earth and seeking to raise things, but for many of you it was not that you felt superior to the ascended masters. What you reasoned was: “Oh, but the ascended masters are not in embodiment, and that’s why they can’t reach people. But if I go down and take embodiment, then surely I can reach people. They will listen to me because I’m in embodiment just like them.”
There are indeed some of us who have ascended from earth, who descended to earth as avatars for precisely that reason. But it is a certain spiritual pride that you can have as an avatar because you are so used to from a natural planet, that if you show people the limitations of their beliefs, they will accept what you are saying and change. And you are not even thinking that this is not the case on earth. You cannot even fathom that this is not the case on earth. You really cannot fathom it until you experience it. That is why we of the ascended masters could not even tell you ahead of time what a shock it would be for you to actually take embodiment.
What you see here is that sometimes it’s necessary for you, when you know a narcissist, to recognize that you can have a certain element of spiritual pride that makes you think you can change these people. And you just need to see it as coming from a separate self, and let it die and realize that because of the dynamics of free will and the dynamics of the narcissistic personality disorder, you cannot convince these people—you cannot make them see what they are not willing to see. They will always be able to twist whatever you say, and change it so that they can feel justified: “Oh, I don’t have to change. I don’t have to accept what these people said.” Because for whatever reason they come up with, they can always say that they are at a higher level than you are and therefore they don’t need to pay attention to it.
A person with narcissistic personality disorder does not suffer from an inferiority complex. They suffer from the opposite: an superiority complex, but they don’t see it as suffering because they feel superior. They can dismiss anything anybody says, and feel that they are validated in not changing. And the simple question to ask yourself is: “Given what I now know about free will, why would I want to change a narcissist? If this is the experience they want to have, and need to have, why would I want to change them?”
And that’s when you can then let go and say: “Well, if I can’t change them, why would I want to be around them?” And again, if you have close family ties, you can certainly still be around them. But when you look at yourself and your own reaction to them, when you free yourself from your reactionary patterns, you are not disturbed by being around them. You’re not pulled into their games, you can be yourself and express that, and then it isn’t such a burden to be around them. And certainly you can handle that the few times a year where you have family events. I’m not saying what you should do or shouldn’t do. I’m just pointing out to you that it is quite possible to maintain a certain civil relationship to your family members with narcissistic personality disorder, without it disturbing your path and your peaceful state of mind.
Copyright © 2019 Kim Michaels