If You’re Googling “Am I a Narcissist?” Read This

When you’ve dealt with someone who plays mind games, there’s a moment where you start questioning your own character. Not your behaviour in that one moment. Your whole personality. Am I the narcissist? Am I the toxic one? Am I imagining this?

It usually happens after you’ve been pushed, pulled, criticised, dismissed, mocked, or subtly undermined for long enough that your nervous system stops trusting its own read on reality. And because you’re an empath (or just a deeply self-aware person), you don’t default to “they’re the problem.” You default to “maybe I am.” That’s the trap.

People will tell you to stop diagnosing and stop searching for signs. I agree with the intention, but I also want to say this: if you’re spiralling, Googling, checking lists, replaying conversations, reading and re-reading texts, trying to “be sure you’re not the villain”… you’re already in the nervous system loop. You’re not looking for truth anymore. You’re looking for safety.

Here’s the thing that snapped me out of it fast. I asked the suspected narcissist directly. It wasn’t even planned. It just came out. I asked my “friend” if they thought I was a narcissist and their response was: “LOL you’re not pretty enough.” Got my answer pretty quickly.

Not because it “proved” anything about narcissism, but because it showed me the energy I was dealing with. I was being vulnerable, asking a sincere question, and the response was humiliation dressed up as a joke. A healthy person doesn’t meet vulnerability with a jab. Even if you don’t agree with someone, you don’t kick them while they’re open.

Now, I want to be careful here, because I actually do believe that the narcissistic person can have wounds too. Deep ones. Shame, insecurity, rejection, abandonment stuff. The difference isn’t always the wound. It’s how it gets managed.

Empaths tend to turn the pain inward. We self-reflect. We over-correct. We take responsibility for the whole room. We try to “understand” our way out of disrespect. We soften our truth so other people don’t get uncomfortable.

Narcissistic traits (and I’m talking about behaviour patterns, not labelling a person as permanently “bad”) often turn that same pain outward. The wound gets protected by deflection, superiority, minimising, rewriting, mockery, power plays. When someone can’t tolerate their own shame, they’ll try to hand it to you. That’s why this topic is so confusing. Because both people can be carrying pain. One is trying to process it. The other is trying to avoid it.

This is where the chakra lens becomes really useful, because it explains what’s happening inside you without you needing to pathologise yourself. Most people blame the solar plexus straight away. Confidence. Control. Self-worth. That “am I enough / am I too much” cycle. And yes, solar plexus is involved, but it’s rarely the starting point.

The deeper seat of shame often sits lower. That’s sacral energy. The sacral is intimacy, attachment, emotion, receiving, desire, pleasure, creativity, and the feeling of being safe to be fully yourself. It’s also where many of us store the old emotional rules we learned early: what gets accepted, what gets punished, what gets laughed at, what gets abandoned. Sacral shame isn’t “I made a mistake.” Sacral shame is “there’s something wrong with me.”

So when you’re around someone who chips away at you, especially in that sly “it’s just a joke” way, the sacral takes the hit. You feel rejected, reduced, embarrassed, not chosen, under valued, unsafe to be real. Then your system tries to restore connection, because connection feels like survival when you’re wired for empathy and attachment.

That’s where people-pleasing comes in. People-pleasing is usually a sacral-root strategy. Root wants safety. Sacral wants belonging. So you start adapting to keep both. You read moods. You anticipate needs. You give more than you have. You swallow what you want to say. You keep the peace. You try to be “easy.” And it works… until it doesn’t. Because the cost is always you.

Then the solar plexus steps in as the manager. Solar plexus coping looks like controlling outcomes, overthinking, fixing, explaining, defending, replaying what you said, rehearsing what you’ll say next, trying to “prove” you’re good, trying to be perfect so you can’t be criticised. The solar plexus is trying to protect the sacral wound from being touched again. It’s trying to keep you safe by keeping you in control.

This is where the “am I the narcissist?” loop lives. Not because you are one, but because your system is trying to find the reason you’re unsafe so it can correct it. You become the project. You become the problem to solve. It feels productive, but it’s actually self-abandonment disguised as self-awareness.

And when gaslighting is involved, it ramps everything up. Gaslighting doesn’t just hurt emotionally. It hits perception and voice. Third eye and throat. Your throat learns it’s risky to speak, because speaking gets twisted. Your third eye gets overloaded because you start doubting what you saw, what you felt, what you heard, what you meant. You replay. You collect evidence. You explain yourself in circles. You go quiet when you should speak, or you speak too much trying to be understood by someone who isn’t interested in understanding you.

Underneath all of it is root. Root Chakra is safety, stability, support. When root is shaky, your nervous system goes into threat-scanning. That’s why you can be intuitive, capable, strong, spiritually connected, and still get pulled into a loop. Your body thinks it’s preventing loss.

So the chain often looks like this: Root insecurity creates hypervigilance, sacral takes the hit as shame and belonging wounds, solar tries to control and prove, throat edits itself, third eye spirals.

Once you see it like that, the path out becomes clearer. You don’t need to “figure out” if you’re a narcissist. You need to stabilise your system and stop negotiating with people who use your openness as a target.

If you want a grounded way to interrupt the spiral in real time, start here. Bring it back to the body before you ask the mind for answers. Put a hand on your lower belly, feel your feet on the floor, lengthen your exhale, and ask yourself one honest question: do I feel safe and respected with this person, or do I feel like I’m constantly managing myself to avoid being shamed? That question alone will save you months.

From there, your healing work becomes less about analysing them and more about rebuilding you. Strengthening root so your safety isn’t dependent on anyone’s mood. Healing sacral so your needs don’t feel like a threat. Settling solar so you stop proving your worth. Opening throat so you can speak simply and cleanly. Clearing third eye so you trust your own perception again.

And sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is block. Not as punishment. As protection. As a choice to stop handing your nervous system to someone who can’t hold it with care.

If this hit home and you’re ready to start rebuilding from the inside out, I’ve got some pretty powerful guided meditations infused with healing energies on my website. They’re designed to help you regulate, ground, clear the mental noise, and come back into your own authority. Just sign up and you’ll gain access right away. No cost whatsoever.