Is my boss a narcissist or just a difficult boss?

You've been enduring it for months. Your boss cancels the weekly without notice, changes priorities on Friday at six, and when something blows up, it's never their fault. Someone drops it on Slack: "they're a narcissist". Everyone nods. The problem is closed without being understood.

It's almost never narcissism. It's almost always a boss who doesn't know how to hold their own anxiety without discharging it onto the team — and pathological narcissism is just the rarest and most extreme way that can happen.

The label works as a closure, not a diagnosis. Naming "narcissist" gives the feeling of having understood, when what it does is stop the question. And stopping the question has a cost: you ask the wrong boss for the wrong answer.

What makes a narcissistic boss different from a difficult boss?

There is a precise experience. You arrive with your version, with your exhaustion, with a fact that changes the story. And there is no room. They don't argue with you. They make you disappear. Your point of view doesn't fit because if it did, something in the other would collapse.

That need to erase you in order to sustain themselves is what is pathological. It's not how much ego they have, it's what they need to do with you to stay standing.

Psychoanalyst Daniel Shaw described it like this: elevating oneself by subjugating the other is the essence of traumatizing narcissism. That boss doesn't argue with you — they erase you. And from there, no negotiation is possible.

Why are most difficult bosses not narcissistic bosses?

Almost all of us have narcissistic traits. We like our work to be recognized, we struggle with unfiltered criticism, we care about our image. That is not pathological. It is human.

What changes is guilt. There are those who sustain themselves by draining the other, without guilt, without limit. Psychoanalyst Marie-France Hirigoyen called that narcissistic perversion and was clear: almost everyone shares those traits, what is rare is the structure that enjoys destroying the other.

What is common is something else. The boss who cancels the weekly at the last minute, demands impossible reports, and treats every deviation as a personal threat. They don't need admiration. They need control, because losing control makes them anxious. They don't know how to contain the team's anxiety and end up exporting their own.

The line between negotiating and enduring

It took me time to understand it. In a team I led, the goal was raised every month without changing the budget or people. The response was "that's the job". I thought it was a lack of commitment.

Years later, already trained as a psychoanalyst at the UIC and after more than twenty years leading complex and diverse teams, I saw something different: that boss didn't need admiration. They needed to not lose control. Naming it correctly didn't change them. It changed what I could do with that relationship.

This is not a diagnosis for your boss — that is done in a consulting room. What you can take seriously is what happens to you.

Feeling erased, with no place, is not the same as living in tension because everything could explode. That difference doesn't diagnose anyone, but it says a lot about your position. If what you are experiencing is making you sick, it deserves professional help, not a hallway label.

And that is where it becomes useful. When you see that the difficult boss operates from anxiety, it begins to be visible which part of their disorder you can stop carrying and what limit you can name without playing their game.

When you see that they need you to disappear in order to sustain themselves, it becomes possible to ask yourself what you are sustaining so that relationship remains active, and what recognition you are still expecting from someone who cannot give it to you. Read more about how to hold your ground when you can't change your boss.

I am Daniel Alencar, a psychoanalyst in Mexico City. I know the corporate language because I lived it from the inside. Today I accompany those who no longer find an explanation for what they feel in work problems.

If this resonates, you can schedule a first session here. Online or in person – Polanco CDMX.