Hello,
In theory a self-centred person should be more focused and even stronger, aware of the personality’s importance, even being a socially potential leader.
In reality, my professional studio as a psychologist is giving me a totally different answer.
The more self-centred we are, the more we close our perspective on life and we become the only measure for other people’s reality.
This is going to create troubles in the communication with a partner, a friend, a colleague, because our rigidity and the strong convinction to be “the truth” can make it even impossible to share or to debate.
In general a person becomes self-centred as a reaction to the parents and to a certain kind of education.
When kids live a family atmosphere where the sense of duty and the rigidity of values and guilt are predominant, they typically close up into a bubble where they protect the fragility of their Ego and they can easily become a very self-centred adult.
So, if it’s the self defence mechanism creating the origin of the problem, then it is easier to think to be a “Living Bible” instead of doubting or opening to other different versions of the truth…
Plus, this present international situation is not helping at all.
Wars, financial crisis, diseases create more uncertainty and the answer to that can simply be: forming a close space where you just refer to your own safety, being in rigid denial towards all the rest.
The side effect of being “self-centred” is a huge amount of agressiveness as long as the person has to accept what’s outside the individual space.
What’s different becomes dangerous, and therefore requires immediate attack.
This risks cancelling the very important concept of dialogue opening to mutual differences…
If we are now experiencing so many conflicts, and there’s no space to accept a perspective which is not totally MINE, this is probably because in our fragility we prefer to stay in a comfortable personal area where, in front of a mirror, we say: this is ME, this is MY MENTALITY, MY WAY, THE ONLY IDEA I CAN ACCEPT IN LIFE.
If you don’t say yes to this and if you dare criticise me, get out! Disappear! Or change and accept my power.
We know this is a fake power, because in History building walls, locking free spirits in jail, has never given good results.
But unfortuntely History in our schools, many times is a memory game, just to remember episodes and heroes, without analizing the global historical process and the many issues related…
And Philosophy, we know it can be a new light in our brain, opening doors and giving opportunities, or it can remain a cold list of names with their special “formula” to read the world.
Self-centred individuals are many, and their number is growing….. they can be a cancer in society, a deep disease affecting the Ego and making the civilized communication impossible. If you grow up with a mirror being your most important partner, then in your blind weakness you’ll be unable to feel empathy, to open to wonder, to try to be in other people’s shoes…
So, like in a scary science fiction movie, we might live our human time with no other space but an individual fortress, and weapons can substitute words, and our dimension, so flat and self-referred, will be without smile, without curiosity, without light.
Giulia Remorino Ibry,
Psychotherapist.