My sister called me from California last month, upset about a coworker who’d taken credit for her project. She was mid-sentence, voice cracking, when I heard myself say: “That happened to me once at the marketing firm. I remember feeling like the ground had opened beneath me.” There was a pause. Then she said, quietly, “I wasn’t finished.”

She was right. She wasn’t finished. And I hadn’t meant to hijack her pain. I was trying to say I understand. What came out instead was let me tell you about me. The gap between those two intentions is where a lot of good relationships quietly start to erode.

We’ve been culturally trained to slap the narcissist label on anyone who steers a conversation back to themselves. It’s become reflexive: if someone can’t hold space without inserting their own story, they must be self-obsessed. But having spent years in therapy unpacking my own version of this pattern, and watching clients in my coaching practice do the same, I’ve come to believe something different. Most of the time, this behavior has nothing to do with an inflated sense of self. It comes from a deeply held, often unconscious belief that personal experience is the only currency worth anything in a relationship.

The Difference Between Narcissism and Transactional Relating

Narcissistic personality disorder is a clinical diagnosis with specific criteria. It involves a persistent pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a fundamental lack of empathy. The person who redirects conversation to themselves at a dinner party and the person with NPD may look similar on the surface, but the internal mechanics are profoundly different. As research from Psychology Today notes, self-centered behavior exists on a wide continuum, ranging from mildly self-absorbed to clinically narcissistic, and the distinction matters.

The conversational redirector often feels more, not less. They feel your pain acutely. They just don’t know what to do with it except match it with their own. It’s a clumsy empathy, not an absent one.

My therapist put it to me this way a few months ago: “You’re not trying to center yourself. You’re trying to prove you belong in the room.” That landed somewhere in my chest and stayed.

Where the Pattern Usually Starts

I grew up in a household where emotional airtime was scarce. My parents argued frequently, and the unspoken rule was that vulnerability without utility was unwelcome. You didn’t just say “I’m sad.” You said, “I’m sad because of this specific thing that happened,” and then you proved that your specific thing was significant enough to warrant attention. Feelings needed a résumé.

Children raised in homes like this, where affection was demonstrated through acts of service rather than words, learn early that love is transactional. You earn your place by offering something. For some kids, that’s achievement. For others, it’s humor or caretaking. And for a specific subset, the offering becomes their own narrative: their stories, their experiences, their pain converted into connection bids.

The belief crystallizes into something like: If I don’t have a matching story, I have no right to be in this conversation.

Research on insecure attachment patterns supports this. Children who grew up with emotionally inconsistent caregivers often develop compensatory strategies for maintaining closeness. One of those strategies is over-sharing personal experience as a way to create a sense of reciprocity, to make sure the emotional ledger stays balanced.

What It Looks Like in Practice

You tell them about your rough week, and before you’ve finished the second sentence, they’re launching into their own rough week. You mention a health scare, and within thirty seconds you’re hearing about their cousin’s surgery. You share a professional setback, and they respond with a story about the time they got passed over for a promotion in 2019.

From the outside, this looks like someone who can’t listen. From the inside, it often feels desperate: I need you to know I understand. The only proof I have is my own experience. Please don’t leave me out of this moment.

I’ve done this more times than I’m comfortable admitting. During my first marriage, when a friend would confide about feeling lonely, I’d immediately pivot to my own loneliness, sitting three feet from my then-husband feeling invisible. I wasn’t trying to one-up her. I was trying to build a bridge. The problem was that every bridge I built led back to my own front door.

The three common drivers

• Validation seeking: If I share something vulnerable and you accept it, that proves I’m worthy of being here. The conversation becomes a testing ground for belonging.
• Empathy through mirroring: Some people genuinely believe the most empathetic response is to match someone’s experience with their own. They learned this somewhere, often from a parent who did the same thing.
• Anxiety about silence: The space between someone’s pain and your response can feel unbearable if you grew up in a home where silence meant something had gone wrong. Filling it with your own story feels like safety.

The Confusion Between Being Useful and Being Present

I wrote before about the painful realization that I had confused being needed with being wanted. This is the conversational version of that same wound. When you believe your experiences are the only currency you have, every interaction becomes a transaction. You’re not having a conversation. You’re making a deposit.

The tragedy is that the deposit rarely lands the way you intend. The other person doesn’t feel connected. They feel interrupted. And the more you try to fix that by offering more of yourself, the more they withdraw, which confirms the original fear: I’m not enough.

My husband David pointed this out to me gently about a year ago. His friend had been going through a difficult time, and after we’d both spent an evening with him, David said, “You know, when Marcus was talking about his dad, you didn’t need to bring up your father’s death. He just needed someone to sit there.” He wasn’t critical about it. He was right. And it stung precisely because I’d thought I was helping.

Why the Narcissist Label Does Damage Here

When we call every self-referencing conversationalist a narcissist, we do two harmful things. First, we dilute a meaningful clinical term. The distinction between personality disorders matters clinically, and casual overuse of “narcissist” makes it harder for people dealing with actual NPD (their own or someone else’s) to be taken seriously.

Second, we shame people out of examining what’s actually driving the behavior. If someone believes they’re a narcissist because the internet told them so, they’re less likely to look beneath the surface at the attachment wound or the childhood belief system that’s actually running the show. They either accept a label that doesn’t fit and spiral into self-loathing, or they reject it entirely and change nothing.

Neither outcome leads anywhere useful.

What Sits Beneath the Redirect

In my own experience, and in what I’ve observed working with clients, the person who can’t stop redirecting conversations usually carries one or more of these core beliefs:

This idea connects to a video I watched recently from Justin Brown called “The Real Reason You Never ‘Heal’ (It’s Not Your Fault)” — it explores how therapeutic frameworks can sometimes trap us in cycles that reinforce the very patterns we’re trying to escape, which feels deeply relevant to understanding why people get stuck repeating these conversational habits even when they recognize them.

• My presence alone isn’t enough. I need to bring something.
• If I don’t relate your experience to mine, you’ll think I don’t care.
• Silence means disconnection. Disconnection means abandonment.
• The only way I know how to love is to show you I’ve been where you are.

These beliefs don’t come from grandiosity. They come from scarcity. From a childhood (or an early relationship, or a first marriage) where emotional bandwidth was limited and you had to justify your claim to it.

People who become quieter as they age have often learned, sometimes painfully, that presence without performance is its own kind of gift. Getting there requires unlearning the belief that you need a story to earn your seat.

Learning to Stay in Someone Else’s Story

The shift, when it comes, is both simple and excruciating. It means sitting with someone’s pain and resisting the urge to translate it into your own language. It means trusting that “I hear you” is a complete sentence. That you don’t need to prove empathy with evidence.

I practice this now, imperfectly. When my sister calls from California, I try to notice the moment my brain starts scanning for a matching anecdote. I’ve started writing down what I want to say instead of saying it, a trick my therapist suggested. Sometimes just the act of noticing the impulse is enough to let it pass.

The hardest part is tolerating the emptiness that comes when you stop performing relatability. For a while, you feel like you’re offering nothing. Like you’re sitting across from someone with empty hands. But that emptiness is actually space. And space is what most people are really asking for when they start talking to you about something that hurts.

My father never learned this. He’d respond to every emotional disclosure with a story about his own career, his own struggles, his own version of whatever you were going through. When he died last year, I stood at his funeral and realized that I’d inherited that pattern as surely as I’d inherited his brown eyes. The difference is that patterns, unlike eye color, can be examined and slowly, gently, rewired.

If you recognize yourself in any of this, you’re probably not a narcissist. You’re probably someone who learned early that your experiences were the only thing people would accept in exchange for closeness. That belief served you once. It kept you in the room. But the room has changed, and you’re allowed to just stop performing and sit in it.