Narcissists and their Ideal Standards

In the next two chapters of Whistleblowers, I read a part in one chapter that I found really interesting to me and that really made me think. It was when the author talks about Narcissism. He says that the “narcissist wants to be whole, good, pure and perfect,” (page 63). He says that there are two ways for people to do this. The first way is that “one lowers one’s standards of wholeness, goodness, purity and perfection until they correspond to one’s miserable self,” and the second way is that “one raises one’s miserable self as high as one possibly can so that one comes a little closer to these ideal standards,” (page 63). I found this really interesting to read. To me the two ways that narcissists try to live up to their ideal standards means that they don’t want to set high standards for themselves until they get in touch with what makes them miserable or that they already know why they are miserable and they do what they can to reach those high standards they have for themselves to make themselves less miserable. People who are narcissistic in my opinion want to be perfect, do the right thing and have perfection around them and people doing the right thing as they do but not everyone is like that. We are people with flaws and I think that the narcissistic person’s number one flaws are to put pressure on themselves to be perfect and right all the time just because of their fears and insecurities. I don’t really know how to relate this to my service learning at St. Vincent de Paul but I would think that there are people on the streets that think they are right and perfect in some respect. I have never encountered anyone through my service learning like this. I’ve seen prideful people but I don’t know if that means that they think they are right, know what they are doing and are perfect. Overall, I think that if people extremely narcissistic they really need to get a reality check if possible.