Ask Lemmy

I'm specifically asking if the person that expects someone else to apologize is driven by their own narcissism.

Two things come to my mind:

• It all depends the context.
  Context will tell if there is or there isn't narcissism involved, which is more frequent than one would like to think imho. I would say it's narcissistic when it's used against someone else, to give oneself an edge against that person, to make them feel bad, or when it's expected because one thinks they deserve apologies, something like that (it's just raw thoughts). It's not when apologies are expected not because one deserves them but because, the roles were switched, apologizing is what one would do if they had done something similar to someone else .
• Apologies are never a single person action, a single direction act.
  I mean, apologies are always at the same time received and given, given and received. It's an interaction between at least two persons (or one person and the entire civil society, in the case of most criminal affairs: they're public for a reason). It's never a monologue... or it should not be, if it is to mean something. Whereas narcissism is all about the self: it's Narcissus admiring its own image in the water, considering nothing but himself.

So, a sincere apology is always something bidirectional, and not about oneself. It's a tool used to create/reinforce/fix a weakened or a broken bound between two or more people.