Root Cause of Narcissism: Trauma, Control & Society

Written by Roland Bal

Consciousness moves cyclically from expansion to contraction in lesser and larger degrees. You can see this reflected in patterns of nature, as well as in the phases of growth and expansion, and the decay and destruction of societies and human behavior.

Looking back in history, you can see the rise and fall of empires and civilizations.

What we see unfolding before our eyes is no different. Western societies have dominated global trade and thinking for the last several hundred years or longer; now, those same western societies are involved in collective destruction, and so the pendulum swings.

The Larger Perspective & Cycles of Consciousness

It is necessary to take a step back and look at what is unfolding from a larger perspective. That larger perspective provides an overview to what may seem to be madness and senseless destruction, but is still part of nature — the natural cycle of consciousness.

That larger perspective — in which there is no choosing or judging one side or the other — can provide some sense of calm and non-duality. Having established that larger perspective, it might be interesting to explore the psychological patterns that are contributing to the current state of affairs from a trauma perspective.

Whatever Is Unresolved Repeats Itself Over Time

Whatever emotion is unresolved repeats itself over time, and grows in both force and complexity. When overwhelmed, you deal with that overwhelm through a fight, a flight, or a fawn response. When none of these three responses seem to work for you, you default into a freeze-shutdown response.

When that feeling of being overwhelmed stays in your body without being addressed and resolved, you often move between periods of shutdown and being depressed, then back to being highly activated through anxiety, anger, or sadness.

Whatever emotion is unresolved repeats itself over time, and grows in both force and complexity. When overwhelmed, you deal with that overwhelm through a fight, a flight, or a fawn response. When none of these three responses seem to work for you, you default into a freeze-shutdown response.

Your survival responses of fight, flight, and fawn turn into hardwired behaviors that are marked by attempting to overcome or avoid that initial hurt of feeling helpless, invalidated, abused, or overwhelmed.

The Root Cause of Narcissism: The Fight Response and the Need for Control

The behaviors demonstrated in a hardwired fight-anger response are a need to control, a need to subjugate others, a need to dominate to get a sense of validation, to impose a particular view of reality onto others, and to shame and gaslight in order to make others comply. When taken to an extreme, this fight-anger response, alongside the above-mentioned behaviors, makes for a psychopath or sociopath; the applied techniques fall under the banner of narcissistic abuse.

This is the root cause of narcissism — not a personality flaw someone is born with, but a survival response that hardened into a way of being. The trauma that created it is often buried so deep that the narcissist has no conscious access to it. All that remains is the compulsion to control, dominate, and seek validation through power.

At the opposite end of the fight-anger response is the fawn response. The fawn personality acts out to minimize or avoid their initial core hurt of helplessness and feeling emotionally overwhelmed, but tends to subjugate, to anticipate other's actions and behaviors to minimize abuse or to get validation, and is highly sensitive and empathic but at the cost of a loss of boundaries and sense of self.

The Fawn Response: Why Narcissistic Abuse Needs a Compliant Target

Those with an established fawn response will, out of a need to survive, have great difficulty in fighting back or setting boundaries out of fear of harm or rejection. Furthermore, they often have a constant need for outside validation in order to have some sense of self and/or to minimize further abuse, and might have some form of denial or cognitive dissonance regarding the abuse or abuser that protects them from not having to act and from feeling emotionally overwhelmed again.

The fawn response lends itself to conformity, to acceptance, and to subjugation, which in turn is the ideal personality for the narcissist, psychopath, or sociopath to take advantage of. To understand how this dynamic plays out in relationships, read the dynamics between a narcissist and a people-pleaser.

This brings us back to the current state of world affairs. What happens on a smaller scale is also reflected on a larger scale. These patterns of character and survival response are perpetrated through continuous institutional trauma.

Why Narcissism Is Rewarded in Society

If we look at the last few decades, we can see how questioning the dominant narrative — in any domain — has resulted in people and institutions being gaslighted, shamed, ostracized, silenced, or censored. Narratives and goalposts have continually been changed in order to maintain control and impose a particular world view; there has been abuse by proxy of those who identify with the narrative, and a whole lot more control, manipulation, and attempts to subjugate.

Society rewards the fight-anger response. Ambition, dominance, control, and the ability to impose your will on others are celebrated as leadership, success, and strength. The narcissistic pattern is not punished — it is promoted. And the fawn response, the compliance and conformity that makes it all possible, is equally rewarded — through praise for being cooperative, agreeable, and easy to manage.

This is how narcissism becomes not just an individual pattern but a cultural one. The institutions that shape society — corporate, political, educational — are often built on and maintained by the same unresolved fight-anger dynamics that drive individual narcissistic abuse.

Fight vs Fawn: How This Dynamic Plays Out at Every Level

On the other hand, we have had the majority of people comply, conform, subjugate, and accept the removal of their freedoms — whether in personal relationships, workplaces, or broader society.

What is unfolding is no different from what has happened throughout history. The dynamics between an unresolved fight-anger response and the fawn response have always been there. What might be different now is the scale of it.

Again, there are continuous cycles of consciousness, of contraction and expansion to lesser and larger degrees. What we might be seeing right now is a contraction of consciousness to a larger degree. To understand how this same dynamic operates at the individual level — how unresolved trauma creates narcissistic personalities — read what makes someone a narcissist.

Creating an Overview and Non-Dual Perspective

There isn't space in this article to go into how to stay safe, or how to navigate the current challenges and terrain; however, an awareness of the underlying, unresolved, emotional patterns might help you to see what you need to work on personally, and might also help you to hold that larger non-dual perspective without getting lost in choosing a side and becoming part of an opposite, of conflict.

For a deeper understanding of how these survival patterns form and how to start working through them, explore the narcissistic abuse recovery article.