I often wondered if I was narcissistic.. It often used to come up in therapy with Kat who would remind me that each one of us exists on a spectrum of narcissism, however empathic people are only too willing to take on board the fact they may be at fault, and often that attribute may be used against them since they were conditioned from childhood to need or want nothing.
Ross Rosenburg addresses some of these issues in the video below, he has also coined a phrase : Self Love Deficiency Disorder which tends to make us empaths very co-dependent. We learned to try to please others in order to gain conditional love from a distant parent. We also suppress our own needs to not to upset the narcissist or unavailable shaming parent and our deep grief of the pain of this is denied.. In recovery we have to learn honesty because often our behavior can be manipulative in ways we don’t fully understand, but we also need to learn how the truth of the conditioning is denied, diminished or turned against us by narcissistic gaslighting : “There is something wrong with you!”
I hope you find this video useful.
Emerging From The Dark Night 