Do you have problems knowing when your feelings are valid?

I'm a narcissist and I feel like I have a lot of problems trying to figure out when my feelings are valid or when other people's feelings are valid.

This affects my ability to resolve conflict without alienating people.
It also seems to affect my ability to be assertive.
I find it hard to tell when I've been wronged or when I've wronged other people
Before I became self aware I always felt like I was being treated unfairly by everyone all the time

Does anyone else feel this way? Is it a common thing with narcissists? Has anyone found a way to improve?

Arthur wrote:I'm a narcissist and I feel like I have a lot of problems trying to figure out when my feelings are valid or when other people's feelings are valid.

This affects my ability to resolve conflict without alienating people.
It also seems to affect my ability to be assertive.
I find it hard to tell when I've been wronged or when I've wronged other people
Before I became self aware I always felt like I was being treated unfairly by everyone all the time

Does anyone else feel this way? Is it a common thing with narcissists? Has anyone found a way to improve?

Its hard becouse you dont live in the real world. You live in "pathological narcissistic space". WIthout object constancy its impossible to view other people as people. You have an internal script, and you are surprised when people dont conform to that. I would advise learning what object constancy (or whole-object relations) are and work on that.

Arthur wrote:I'm a narcissist and I feel like I have a lot of problems trying to figure out when my feelings are valid or when other people's feelings are valid.

This affects my ability to resolve conflict without alienating people.
It also seems to affect my ability to be assertive.
I find it hard to tell when I've been wronged or when I've wronged other people
Before I became self aware I always felt like I was being treated unfairly by everyone all the time

Does anyone else feel this way? Is it a common thing with narcissists? Has anyone found a way to improve?

I dont think thats a narcissism issue, but a result of being brought up in a way where your needs and feelings weren't acknowledged; so where you grew up never being sure what is right and wrong and when you are allowed to be like this or that, where caregivers couldnt deal with possibly normal [emotional] requests etc. - so where for example you had a normal emotinal need and the caregiver responded with stress, so you associated "having needs" with "being a burden".
From what I've heard so far from my therapists, your feelings are always valid. And its kidn of the first necessary step to acknowledge them - as long as you dont suffer from dissociation and you can't access them of course. Thats a kind of relearning or even reparenting thing then, where you have to reassure yourself (and possibly get outside reassurence) that your feelings are just your feelings - to support self-integration.
If what those feelings communicate or what they ere based on is objective or correct is another matter of course. But that then turns into a question of affect-tolerance and impulse-control.

Arthur wrote:Before I became self aware I always felt like I was being treated unfairly by everyone all the time

Does anyone else feel this way? Is it a common thing with narcissists? Has anyone found a way to improve?

From the other side of the fence, I used to always be afraid to be the one wronging people.

I started to ask a person I trust their opinion on a regular basis. Always the same person, someone I know to be bluntly honest while caring. It is always an option if you reach a place where you can trust a little.

This is the kind of relationship you may develop in a therapeutic setting. I was not able to cultivate such relationship in a therapeutic setting but I could outside of it.

Arthur wrote:This affects my ability to resolve conflict without alienating people.
It also seems to affect my ability to be assertive.

It might also be a personality thing too.

Some people have too much faith in their ability to be objective, that's undeniable.

But there are also people for whom emotional subjectivity is what matters most. If all emotional experiences are valid, then it gets hard to discriminate between when you deliberately hurt someone versus when you were deliberately hurt, "it's all a matter of perspective".

In this context, lack of assertion can come from feeling icky about assigning objective merits to behaviors.

Akuma wrote:...but a result of being brought up in a way where your needs and feelings weren't acknowledged; so where you grew up never being sure what is right and wrong and when you are allowed to be like this or that, where caregivers couldnt deal with possibly normal [emotional] requests etc. - so where for example you had a normal emotinal need and the caregiver responded with stress, so you associated "having needs" with "being a burden".
From what I've heard so far from my therapists, your feelings are always valid....

Well put. When our fundamental emotional needs are treated as a burden over and over, the effect is profound. I wonder too, how many people with cluster B personalities ended being a kind of caregiver to a parent? It's a double whammy, not only must you put your own needs aside, but you have to somehow carry the emotional load of an adult.

I think your therapist is right on, but it's not easy to do. Step #1 is to relearn our feelings are valid. We don't need to justify them, or feel bad for having them. Easier said than done.