“Me, me not”, “me too”. We all know someone who always brings the conversation back to themselves and it’s really exasperating.
With this kind of person, it’s impossible to place one. You feel like you’re spending your time listening to the other person, without an ounce of reciprocity. Never a “and you?”, the slightest sentence is a way to bring the conversation back to you. Worse still, some take pleasure in interrupting you as soon as you try to bounce back to speak again. As a result, you feel like you’re not interesting the person in front of you and that you’re not valued at your true worth. Let’s be clear, this is absolutely not personal. People who bring everything back to themselves act this way with everyone. But how can they monopolize the discussion to this extent?
This unfortunate tendency to always bring everything back to oneself often goes back to childhood. Some parents encourage their children from a very early age to be the best, pushing them to shine the spotlight on themselves as soon as they have the opportunity. They feel obliged to highlight their qualities in order to exist in the eyes of others. In this context, it is difficult for these people to realize their temperament since they have been conditioned from a very young age to be the center of attention.
For Pascal Anger, clinical psychologist, there is an obvious element of egocentrism in always relating everything to oneself. “Maybe because there is a lot of emptiness around these people and they have not realized that the rest of the world exists. So they will not only talk about themselves but every time you tell them “this or that happened to me”, they will retort “ah but me, it happened to me even better! The conversation is one-sided, they will only be focused on themselves and the other will not interest them too much or if he interests them, it is to benefit from it to add to it. These are egocentric people who will refuse criticism and refuse to question themselves because from their point of view, only their vision counts and is important” he decrypts.
The problem is that it is difficult to make contact with these people because after a while, we will realize that the conversations are sterile and that there is no listening, no sharing, no reciprocity. “To the extent that these people are unable to question themselves and do not know what frustration is, it is impossible to co-construct any kind of link.”analyzes the specialist. So, what to do: run away or find the courage to point out this behavior? Perhaps we can point out to our interlocutor that very often, it is impossible for us to say one and that it damages our relationship. Because it is likely that he is not even aware of it, so used has he been to functioning in this way. And if nothing changes, there is only one solution: stop seeing this individual.