You’re still thinking about NPD as if it is equivalent with the term “narcissism.” NPD has a specific list of characteristics, and you have to meet them all to have NPD.
For example, one of the characteristics is a lack of empathy (this is not peculiar to NPD, other diagnoses have this as one of the characteristics). A lack of empathy means that NPDs have absolutely no ability to put themselves into another person’s shoes.
As an example, one of the people I know lies constantly. About everything, even innocuous things. And he simply doesn’t understand that when you lie about things constantly, people will assume that you are lying when you talk to them. He is completely confused when I don’t believe what he’s telling me. He simply cannot make the connection that I’ve stopped believing him because of his past behavior.
Actually, I’m clear on that. My post may not have been clear about that, but I am.
I can tell that I have narcissistic tendencies. I’m confident I don’t have NPD.
It just seems to be a strange sort of condition:
The tendencies are normal, but when taken to the extreme they become a problem.
It’s a condition that hurts other people, not the person with the condition.
People who have it don’t think there’s anything wrong with them.
The people who are supposed to treat them “reported feeling anger, resentment, and dread in working with narcissistic personality disorder patients; feeling devalued and criticized by the patient; and finding themselves distracted, avoidant, and wishing to terminate the treatment.” American Journal of Psychiatry
None of that is particularly strange when it comes to mental illness, and especially personality disorders. And you’re wrong in saying that having the condition doesn’t hurt them. It hurts their ability to have and maintain relationships with others. As such, it can hurt their career prosepects, their ability to fall in love, their social networks, and so on.
We really are talking about jacking up those normal traits to the nth degree: when someone with NPD sees their kid get hit by a car, they think “why do these things always happen to me?”
Here is what appears to be the entire book called “Malignant Self-Love” written by someone who claims to have NPD, but has insight into his own disordered thoughts. I read this online some years ago, and was a bit :dubious:, but it was an interesting and thought-provoking read.
The key to personality disorders is that while we all may have some of the traits of any of the personality disorders, a person with the actual disorder has those traits to an atypical extreme, causing themselves (or much more commonly, others) distress, and to an extent that is maladaptive.
We were once discussing a local woman whose son was the victim of a murder/suicide by his father. One listener said “Well, nobody has it worse than me. I had to bury my mother & father.”
Thats a narcissistic thing to say but not necessarily NPD - NPD like other PD’s has to bb diagnosed n the basis of behaviour occurring in a wide range of situations over a significant period of time.
People tend to over diagnose people with PD’s, even as professionals. Its generally best to be very cautious about its use, as it can be extremely tempting to label annoying people with a disorder of some sort, and PD’s are tailor made for this as you’re bound to find a few traits that can be made to fit in anyone that irritates us enough.