Q. I work with a guy who is incredibly self-centered. He makes sure he gets the best of anything, is pushy, demanding and obnoxious. Is there anything I can do to make him get under my skin less?

A. Yes, the people that drive us the most crazy at work are usually people that have a lot to teach us. Our annoyance is nature's way of bringing attention to a skill we need to develop.

In your case, consider how good you are at taking care of yourself? Pretend you are ranking yourself on a scale where zero means not at all and 10 means all the time. Where do you fall on the looking-out-for-yourself scale?

Most of my clients who find entitled people obnoxious would rank themselves far below 5. You can see why your coworker may make you itch emotionally.

Narcissism is a term we use in psychology to describe self-love or how much we care for ourselves. In popular language narcissism has come to mean selfish brat.

In psychotherapy, many clinicians could use the scale of zero to 10 to evaluate a person's capacity for self-love. Some people who were neglected or abused as kids don't have enough of it, and some people who were hurt as kids have too much. The healthy ideal is to land in the middle.

The irony of repairing narcissistic (self-love) wounds as an adult is that people who score under 5 need to aim for 10 to get even close to an actual normal range. People who don't take care of themselves feel embarrassed about being perceived as selfish. They bend so far backwards in the other direction that they become doormats.

You don't need to worry that you will become your coworker if you take better care of yourself. There's actually research on what causes children to either lose empathy and become utterly self-centered or become not self-centered enough.

Children who have higher thresholds for pain endure difficult childhoods and become keenly sensitive to others' pain. They develop so much empathy that they will sacrifice their own needs to avoid hurting another. Continued...