Quick answer: Conversational narcissism is ‘feeding’—stealing attention by turning someone’s moment into your own. Sociologist Charles Derber named the ‘shift response’: they mention a bad night, you mention yours, disguised as ‘I know how you feel.’ From the inside it feels like generous sharing, which is why it’s never named. The cure is letting others keep the floor.
A woman sits on a bench outside the building where she works, staring at a point in the air that holds nothing. Her father died this morning. A colleague finds her there and sits down, and within a minute the colleague is talking about her own father, dead in a submarine when she was a baby. She means it as comfort. She wants the grieving woman to know she is not alone. The grieving woman turns and tells her, in effect, congratulations, you win, you never had a father and I had mine for thirty years, so I suppose I have forfeited the right to cry.
