If you observe most people, you will see that they are rather like alligators or turtles, in the sense that they walk around inside thick shells to protect themselves, to hide, to cover up their basic vulnerability. This is because we experienced as children, and we still experience, that we can be completely flooded by feelings. When you’re sad, your sadness can feel miles deep, and when you’re angry, you can feel like a ball of fire, and when you’re hurt, you can feel completely devastated, and when you’re jealous, you’re burning with suffering. Our capacity to feel is tremendous. The basic reaction to it at a deep level is to feel that it’s too much: “I don’t know whether I can handle this. I’m at the mercy of these storms.” So we slowly and diligently build thick shells to protect ourselves and, we believe, to survive.
Believing that we need to be thick-skinned to survive is not something we hide from ourselves; it’s completely accepted in our society. We are told that to get ahead, we have to become more thick-skinned and not feel things. And this point of view is actually rationalized with all kinds of philosophies.
But something happens when we build a shell and hide inside it, which is the source of most human complaints. When we cover up our vulnerability so that we’re not open to hurt and pain, fear and influenceability, we also become insensitive to joy, love, happiness, pleasure, and aliveness. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, Ch. 13
To truly deal with the narcissistic issues one must go through the shell in a very specific way. It is not enough to experience only the narcissistic emptiness; understanding the shell is an important part of the process of understanding and working through the narcissistic constellation. The most important part of this work, the part where a school and a teacher are almost indispensable, is that of exposing to consciousness the narcissistic situation. Most people are not aware of the narcissistic nature of many of their expressions; in fact, they resist such awareness. The student needs to experience directly that her sense of identity is not real, that what she takes to be her identity is really nothing but an empty shell. Most people do not have this awareness; they walk around taking their normal sense of self to be real, that it is who they truly are. They do not question their normal sense of self in the conventional dimension of experience. So a major body of work, which in some sense begins the whole process, involves inquiries and practices which lead to the realization that what one is taking oneself to be is not the real thing, but an empty thing. When a person arrives at this understanding the process begins.
– A. H. Almaas, The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization, pg. 223