When most people think of a self-centered woman, vanity comes to mind first: the mirror check, the constant concern about appearance. And that’s part of it. But self-centeredness has a subtler outlet, one that shows up every day in conversations that seem perfectly casual.
It lives in the phrases she reaches for without thinking, the ones that pass as harmless until you hear them three times at the same brunch. Every sentence, no matter where the conversation started, bends back toward her. The topic changes, but the direction never does.
1. “Oh, that happened to me too, except worse”
You’re telling a friend about a rough week at work. The commute, the impossible deadline, the meeting where nobody listened. Before you finish, she’s in: “Oh my God, you think that’s bad? Let me tell you what happened to me last week.”
Your story becomes a launching pad. Psychologist Alice Boyes describes one-upping as a signature of self-absorption: they don’t like the focus being on anyone else’s distress, projects, or goals.
If you tell them about a headache, theirs was a migraine. If you ran a 5K, they did a 10K two years ago.
The move is rarely mean-spirited. She probably thinks she’s relating, finding common ground, showing she understands. But relating would mean asking a question about your week. This is replacing your week with hers, and by the time she’s done, you’ve forgotten what you were saying.
2. “I’m not trying to make this about me, but…”
The disclaimer itself is the tell. Nobody says “I’m not trying to make this about me” unless they’re about to make it about them, and they know it.
What follows the “but” is always a redirect. Your engagement party becomes her wedding. Your promotion becomes the time she was passed over. Your miscarriage becomes her pregnancy scare from 2019.
The disclaimer buys her one sentence of immunity before the conversation changes addresses.
The line is so common it barely registers, which is exactly why it works. By the time you realize the conversation left you behind, she’s already two stories deep into her own version of your news.
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3. “You should do what I did”
She gives advice the way some people give gifts: the present is always something she’d want for herself.
You mention you’re thinking about going back to school. Maybe nursing, maybe education, maybe you’re still figuring it out. She doesn’t ask what program, what field, what’s pulling you there. She tells you about her MBA.
The recommendation is her autobiography, offered as a universal blueprint, and it never accounts for the fact that your situation has nothing in common with hers except the general category.
The phrase passes for generosity, but generosity would start with your details, not hers. The question she never asks is what do you want? because the answer might not have anything to do with her, and then she’d have nothing to say.
4. “I already knew that”
Somebody at the table shares a fact, a piece of news, a restaurant recommendation, and before the sentence finishes: “Yeah, I knew that. I saw it last week.”
She can’t let someone else be the source of new information. Allowing the group to learn from another person, even for thirty seconds, feels like losing a position she didn’t realize she was holding.
It’s a small phrase with a big job: making sure no one in the room gets credit for knowing something before she did. The restaurant still sounds good. The news is still interesting. She isn’t disputing the information. She’s disputing the timeline of who had it first.
5. “Nobody even asked how I was doing”
A friend goes through a breakup. Everyone rallies. Texts fly, dinners get organized, somebody drops off groceries, somebody else takes the dog for a week. The whole group shows up. A week later, at brunch, she says it: “Nobody even asked how I was doing through all of that.”
She was in the room for someone else’s crisis, and she’s now auditing who noticed her there.
Sociologist Charles Derber at Boston College calls this kind of move a shift response: redirecting attention from the speaker back to the self. The breakup wasn’t about her, but somehow her needs during someone else’s emergency are now the topic.
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6. “I don’t know why people tell me everything”
I don’t know why people always come to me with their problems. I guess I’m that person.
She knows exactly why she’s saying it. The line positions her as chosen, sought out, uniquely trusted, while sounding like a complaint. It’s the equivalent of shaking your head about how packed your schedule is when what you mean is, look how needed I am.
The conversation was heading elsewhere, and she slipped the line in sideways, creating a portrait of herself as the person everyone leans on. No one in the room requested the portrait. No one knows what to do with it, either, so they nod and the topic drifts back to her, which was the point all along.
7. “I would never do that, but that’s me”
A friend mentions she’s letting her kids skip a grade. Another one says she’s quitting a stable job to travel for a year. A third is moving in with a partner after three months. And the response comes, palms up, every time: “I would never do that, but that’s me.”
The phrase is a comparison. That’s me implies and you should think about why it isn’t you. Psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford named the tendency the false consensus effect: the assumption that your own preferences are the default and everyone else’s choices are deviations from it.
She didn’t say it was wrong. She didn’t have to. The I would never did it for her, and the friend who mentioned the career break will spend the drive home wondering if she made the wrong call.
8. “Anyway, so what I was saying…”
Someone else spoke. Maybe for thirty seconds, maybe for a full minute. They told a story, asked a question, made a point that three people at the table were clearly interested in. And now, without acknowledging a word of it, she picks up her own sentence exactly where she left off, like a show resuming after a commercial break.
“Anyway, so what I was saying” treats the other person’s contribution as an interruption to her broadcast, not a turn in a shared conversation. The whole exchange has, in her mind, been about one thing from the start: her talking, with occasional pauses where other people’s mouths move.
She doesn’t set out to dominate the room. Most of the time she can’t see the pattern from the inside, which is part of what keeps it running. Perspective-taking is a skill, and for some people it never fully developed, not out of malice but out of a gap that nobody pointed out early enough for it to close on its own.
She isn’t thinking about what she’s taking from the conversation. She’s thinking about what she has to say next, which is all she was ever thinking about.
