Joe Polish describes encounters with narcissists in family, work, and personal life, and explains why distancing from them matters. He calls narcissism the "secondhand smoke of mental illness" because prolonged exposure harms you over time. Moving away from one narcissist redirected his entire career.
Chapters
You know, anyone who's been through a relationship or a really bad business dealing. And I've had it happen in three interesting spaces, in a family space, in a professional space. And it turned my career around permanently. Like it was. Like it was literally where my career should have gone left and ended up going right, much to my toll, and then end up ended up exactly where I wanted it and then once in a personal space. And I think that what does happen, though, is what you have to be able to endure, and I don't know if you've run into this, Jo, is that once you become the person who identifies that narcissistic individual, whether as colleague, whether as potential partner, friend, whatever, the first play is to distance and to distance quickly. You know, I hate to say it, and I've been criticized for this, but I'm just going to put it out there. I called narcissism the secondhand smoke of mental illness. Because you're just being near them is probably going to make you sick over time.