I would love to hear your thoughts on this disorder. Do you know anybody with NPD and how has it affected your life?
I think my dad has it, or at least he has something like it. In a nutshell, in his eyes, all of his family and friends exist for his benefit, must do whatever he says, and must look upon him as their god in life. Any situation presented to him must be looked at from all angles of “how can this benefit me the most?” In other words, there are invisible arrows pointing directly to him, from anything that is around him. If that makes sense.
ETA: I found as an adult that I’m not willing to play along like his behavior is perfectly normal and healthy, and at the same time, I can’t change him, so I just don’t deal with him. Best 14 years of my life so far.
My mother has it. She’ll approach grieving widows at funerals to ask them about genealogy and not understand why they don’t want to talk with her. If someone gets sick it’s “who is going to drive me to church”. Talking with her is a nightmare she starts every story with getting up and getting breakfast and continue on with every detail. Try and get her to cut to the chase and she gets belligerent. People like that have no boundaries. Invite them to stay for a weekend and they’ll try and stay two weeks. Just no comprehension at all that someone else has a life to live of their own.
Alice, makes perfect sense about the arrows. It’s ALL about them. No boundaries. Dan, thanks- I thought for years it was ME who was dysfunctional. Although I do have my charactar defects, NPD hurts more than the person who has it.
I think it is rare to get an actual diagnosis of NPD because the person doesn’t think there is anything wrong with them so they do not seek treatment.
I believe my mother has it. She has few friends and almost no one wants to visit with her. She has said that the sadness in her life " It’s not me, it is everyone around me."
She will behave better if anyone nearby is in a position of authority. She will also be less agitated if she believes that people are doing something for her that they just do not do for everyone. If you are sick, she has been sicker. If you are in trouble, you should have considered what that does to her. She hasn’t done anything extraordinary with her life, but expects to be treated as if she has. She does not understand that people like others who are nice to them. She talked loudly through her sister’s funeral services. Mine prefers to be the star of her own little melodramas, constructing arguments and little fights and slights when none existed. She has no sense of humor. She knows when things are supposed to be funny only by checking the reactions of others. She is extremely jealous of the good fortune of others, even if those others are her own children or grandchildren.
Mine is very bright; she just has no compassion or empathy for the rest of humanity.
meanoldman- Wow, this is my Stepmom to a T. NO sense of humor, and she’ll even say “I don’t get it”- alot. It’s almost like she doesn’t WANT to get it, because then she wouldn’t be the unique person at the table, if that makes sense. ALL about her. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I needed help and asked my Dad- her response was derrogatory, basically kicking me when I was down. She totally denied it. She called my two year old “too fat” to her face. DENIED it. Didn’t happen.
My mother’s not NPD, she’s borderline, but she has narcissistic traits.
One of the defining moments in my understanding of my mother occurred when I was in a psychiatric hospital due to severe depression at the age of 20. This particular episode was triggered by her refusal to leave me out of discussions about her marital issues – marital issues she had with the man who abused me. She kept calling me and going back on forth on whether or not she should divorce him. Just to clarify: the man molested me for six years, she knew it, and was calling me to ask me to vent about her relationship troubles because she felt he was so unfair and abusive to her. And when I asked her not to talk about him she accused me of being selfish and trying to break apart our family.
When I called and told her I was in the hospital, the first words out of her mouth were, ‘‘Why? What did I do?’’
When she came and visited me at the hospital, the psychiatrist took us aside to brief my mother on my condition. She immediately launched into this endless sob story about how difficult the situation was for her. For her. And she said, ‘‘I never believed he could abuse you, olives, but maybe he did it just so he could hurt me.’’ And on and on and on with the doctor – how hard it was for her to live with a mentally ill brother and now daughter. And on and on.
And the doctor’s face just transformed into this total expression of insight, and she gave me the saddest expression. And I just got it. For the first time in my life I realized how completely unfailingly narcissistic my mother was and that insight would eventually lead me to establishing healthy boundaries and living life to please myself instead of her.
I am now 27 and while it’s fascinating to hear about the alternate reality my mother lives in, it doesn’t quite bother me the way it did before. So yes, narcissism sucks, but really it’s all about how much power you allow narcissists to have over you. Compassion helps. My mother is narcissistic because most teenagers are – and I would say, emotionally and psychologically, she’s usually about 14 years old. Keeping in mind that she’s basically a scared, traumatized, confused teenager really helps me from getting too bent out of shape about it.
I’m sure my major professor from grad school could be diagnosed with it. For six years, I stupidly played His Girl Friday. Somehow, he’s very good at getting his students generous grants for doing almost no work, and… well money talks.
He has to insert himself into every situation. He has to try to control every communication about everything that even remotely touches him. He talks all of his students out of whatever personal relationships they’re in–not a single one I know of has gotten out with an intact marriage. All allegiance has to be to him, and anyone who doesn’t bow to him is Dumb and probably Dangerous. Anyone who doesn’t agree with his particular school of thought on his subject–which he hasn’t done a lick of work on in twenty years–is an Enemy. Any man he doesn’t like, he assumes is impotent due to prostate problems, which he will confidentially tell to anyone who will listen. I am unfortunately still in contact with him via the company we both work for, and when I began to work from home a lot (because I am pregnant, and not telling him fo sho’) he decided that I must be having fertility treatments, and has been walking around the office in my absence telling people so.
As a student, when I was still in his good graces, I was regularly regaled with oh-so-cultured and oh-so-elite opinions about how stupid all the rest of his students were, and how they were messing up their lives (unless they were allowing him to write their grant proposals–quarrel with their other professors–do their taxes).
His writing sounds, to me, like the crazy introduction to Hammurabi’s code. I’m the best! I’m the smartest! I did it thirty years before you! You have no idea what you’re talking about! You are imaging the counter-evidence! You think you need statistics because you don’t understand statistics! There is “research” to prove you’re wrong! (but no citations). In spite of the fact that he “writes” position papers by cutting and pasting from previous papers written by his grad students (and gets the grad students to teach his classes), he is perpetually angry that he hasn’t been given big enough raises and prestigious enough promotions and appointments.
His wife and daughter are both home-bound invalids, one with “fibromyalgia” and one with “chronic fatigue syndrome”. It seems to me that perhaps they’ve just given up on living their lives, since he’s so determined to control everything they do.
I got involved in his research group when I was very young and credulous. When he (spectacularly) failed to get me the tenured appointment he’d promised, I took an industry job in another state. Six months later I told him that I didn’t want to work in his field for the rest of my life, then stopped talking to him altogether. He promptly told my boss that I was about to quit my job. Unfortunately, since then he has inserted three more of his proteges into the company. Meetings are hell. He coaches them to distrust, dislike, and disdain me. Anything I say is picked apart for any part of it that could be construed as being wrong, whether it has anything to do with the line of discussion or not. I’ve stopped talking at work, point blank. One of his proteges even broke up the marriage of another co-worker who thinks our project is garbage… slept with the guy’s wife. My desk is between theirs. That was a fun few months while the divorce went through.
Why doesn’t he get me fired? So that “his” project group is bigger and more important and draws more of the company’s money as salaries and has more negotiating power. Why don’t I quit? My house is on the market and isn’t selling.
I’m surprised management tolerates him. He is just an hourly consultant, but puts on I’ll-only-go-if-I’m-the-show hysterics about company parties, wants to attend board meetings, wants to attend c-level meetings, have one-on-one talks with the CEO, write the company’s PR, decide who gets hired and fired, and then every time he travels here he books the most expensive hotel in town, eats in the most expensive restaurants in town (and meets friends and treats them), calculates every mile he drives his car, every minute he talks on his cell phone, and charges it all to his expense account.
He has many entertaining stories about late 20th century politics… about what “really” happened… about how he “knew” the people… about how he “just ran into” Mr. Famous Person’s secret first wife that nobody knows about.
shrugs He messed up years of my life pretty bad, and he isn’t even a family member. Funny… before his mother died he loved to complain about how she was completely crazy, but so good at saying all the sane things when it mattered.
We’ve had a lot of discussions about PDs lately, and yet we hardly ever hear from people on the other side. I’ve gone to message boards devoted to PDs. Even at those places, the silence from people diagnosed with certain PDs is deafening.
I guess cluster As are the Freaks and Geeks, so a lot of them feel like they belong to a kind of cool subculture (akin to how some Aspies feel). They like writing about how they aren’t disordered and how stupid society is, but then they talk about how horribly empty their lives are, how they wish their parents were dead (even though they’re still living with them and are dependent on them for survival), and how they just want to die or run away all the time. Or they’ll bore you with purple prose about their fantasy lives, the magical epiphanies they have all the time, or how the Indigo children are taking over the world one day. Meanwhile, in the next room the cluster Cs (particularly the avoidants) are holding onto each other desperately, wailing out in pain, because they’re afraid of everyone and everything else. They write about how they want to be institutionalized, how much they hate themselves, how hopeless everything is, how “wrong” they are inside, how they wish they had friends but it’s never going to happen, so why try? They’re more depressing than people with major depression. You feel sorry for them, but you also want to take them by their collective shoulders and tell them to get their acts together, for Pete’s sake!
There are some anti-socials who socialize (troll is more like it) on message boards, but I have a feeling a lot of those are wannabe, self-diagnosed teenagers just trying to look “cool”. But you never see histrionics, narcissists, or borderlines yacking it up online, swapping stories about experiences with their disorders and how they’re coping with their problems. You can find a ton of posts from their victims, though. You find TONS of those.
I wish someone with a cluster B PD would start an “Ask the…” thread. Because that would really be eye-opening.
I would love to see that thread too, but the stigma is so thick on this board against PDs I wouldn’t blame those afflicted for not speaking up.
My personal feeling is that personality disorders are among the most misunderstood and most stigmatized of mental health problems. People with PDs are most likely to be attacked for flaws in their character rather than treated as sufferers of a psychological disorder. The problem is framed as something faulty with their entire personality rather than characteristics of an illness. In particular this judgmental view of people with borderline personality disorder has been found in a large portion of mental health professionals and has been shown to impede recovery. This is obvious just reading the subjective tone of the DSM-IV on symptomology of PDs (in particular Borderline), but there has been major talk of a total revision of these sections in the DSM-V. More than few people, including myself, find even the label ‘‘personality disorder’’ inherently stigmatizing and judgmental, and counterproductive to treatment and recovery.
Seriously, if you were struggling with relationships in your life and you didn’t understand why, would you WANT to be labeled with a ‘‘personality disorder’’? It’s basically the only subset of mental illnesses where we sit down and say, ‘‘This is basically because you’re a bad person.’’ Then we bitch because so many people with PDs won’t admit what bad people they are and seek treatment for their terrible personalities.
Yes, people with PDs often hurt the ones they love, but they do it because they are mentally ill, in the same way that addicts hurt the ones they love because they have an addiction. These are people coping in the only way they know how. Boundaries must be set and adhered to, and yeah, maybe cutting yourself off is really the only way to protect yourself, but all I see in discussions concerning people with PDs is their victims vehemently defending their right to hate a mentally ill person. It’s never about healthy boundaries, it’s about ‘‘oh please agree with me this is a terrible person.’’
Well, sorry, I don’t. I don’t think people with mental illness are terrible people, I think they are mentally ill. I don’t hate my mother for being borderline any more than I hate my grandmother for the neurological disorder that has destroyed her independence and personality. It’s an illness. Doesn’t mean I’m never angry, doesn’t mean I don’t wish it had been different, doesn’t mean she wasn’t abusive as hell – it doesn’t even necessarily mean she needs to always be in my life. It just means my mother’s sick and probably always will be. It’s a tragedy more than an outrage. I wish more people took my view. I think it would be better for all concerned if that were the case.
Listen, I know that we disagree on this point; however, I’m compelled to point out that professional therapists that elect to work with folks with BPD, including getting additional training, have an average burn out rate of 18 months.
Does that mean that people with BPD are BAD people? No - it means that they’re mentally ill but that their particular mental illness is insidious to the point where it’s chasing people out of their chosen profession. They still deserve compassion and treatment and it is a tragedy that people live this way; however, it doesn’t change the path of total of destruction they leave in their wake. The number of ruined lives I’ve personally witnessed created entirely by people with this PD is frightening.
I wish it weren’t so.
But that is part of the NPD. There is nothing wrong with them. The world really is about them. And how does it reflect on them.
Let’s see; more anecdotes about ‘life with mom’
She has 3 kids. I was driving miss daisy around helping her do her financial business etc. We came across someone she had not seen in a long while. She mentions the middle child first, since middle child is a doctor. She then discusses the oldest, since oldest was at the director level in a small business development center. Then came me, [I have a real job as a sys admin] but of me she only said that I help her around the house.
She has said of her own grandchildren that they are ugly, or severely stooped, slow witted, scrawny, etc., and that the poor things should be pitied because no one will ever love them. They will never make anything of their lives. [They are all fine, of course]. She doesn’t say these things about your kids while talking to you, but you know she says things about your kids to your siblings when she is talking about you to them. Afterall, she says it to you when talking about them.
When one of her grandchildren was a baby, my sister-in-law was carrying the baby over her shoulder. My mother grabbed a bit of baby-legs and loudly said “Oh, you have such fat little legs. Just like your mother.” This particular incident sticks with me more than many others, because later, s-i-l developed an eating disorder. (Probably bulimia)
My father died after about 18 months of dealing with pancreatic cancer. She says that he had it easy because she took care of him.
Growing up, if I got good grades or achieved anything at all at school (or out of school) there was always “the question”; "How did everyone else do?
Mine used to call and threaten suicide a lot. Especially if she wasn’t getting all the attention she thinks she deserves. I finally broke her of that habit by simply saying the next time she says it, I WILL call the authorities to come get her in order to save her, with sirens blaring, and then what will people think and what will they say about her. It is distracting at work to get calls from your mother, saying she is going to kill herself.
Mine has, in her head only, suffered from fairly much every internal illness one can have. And had it worse and suffered more than anyone else in the world. She’s been nearly dead from self-diagnosed cancer several times. A walking miracle she is. Liver, kidney, spleen, stomach; whatever. All have been cancerous or on the verge of systemic collapse for 50+ years. [Odd, it just occurred to me that she has never had lung cancer or other lung related unspecified yet life-threatening maladies]
Quote;" God must have it in for me, because I have suffered more than anyone else."
It wasn’t until I got to know my wife’s mother and her relationship with her kids that I came to understand why some people really seem to like their own mothers. That, to me, is the most difficult thing to come to terms with. When you tell people that you don’t particularly want to be around your own mother, that you are not really fond of them, that you only begrudgingly want to spend any time with them; other people look at you like you must be some kind of ogre. "Oh, but it is your -mother-! " they’ll nearly gasp, wide-eyed. And you know they’ll just never understand.
Excuse the double post. Missed both the edit window and the additional posts that came in after I started my response. I am just a terribly slow typist.
I agree that these people have mental illness. In fact, it is why I will still have dealings with her when neither of my sibs will. It isn’t really her “fault” any more than it is anyone’s fault for getting any illness. However, that doesn’t mean that NPD folks are not incredibly draining to be around. And frustrating. And sometimes I like to complain just to vent a little. Seems like a little MPSIMS
It wasn’t a criticism of your post. I’ve got threads all over the place venting about my mother,and it’s healthy and natural for you to feel what you do. My response was more about monstro’s question why we don’t hear from people with PD diagnosis more often. It is because of the way they are characterized. I wouldn’t want to speak up either.
There is a current thread open about a stepfather who wants to have sex with his 20 year old stepdaughter, and someone responded, essentially, ‘‘Well she sounds like a textbook borderline so it’s probably her fault and she’s manipulating him into wanting a sexual relationship with her.’’ Many people thought that was patently ridiculous, but that’s what happens when we demonize the mentally ill. Other people can no longer be held accountable for how they react to them.
I don’t think it has to be that way. I really, honestly believe that except in the case of extreme examples or blatant power inequalities like parent and minor child, nobody can ruin your life unless you allow them to.
We know that people with PDs aren’t likely to change, so practically, it seems the real power lies in how other people choose to relate to that person. That’s where boundaries come in. Just because people often feel powerless to do anything about the havoc and destruction doesn’t mean they actually are powerless. My problem isn’t when the mentally ill are held accountable for choices they make – it’s when they are held accountable for the choices other people make. And that seems to happen all the time with PDs.
I think there may also be less people with that official label around than with others, simply because, as has been pointed out, these are not people who think they have a problem: the rest of the world has it. You don’t hie thee to a head doctor because 6 billion other people have a problem. So there is likely to be people here who would fall under that “group b” but who neither know it nor care.
The thread’s not about me?
…interest waning…
Yes, it is. I would start a thread about my PD diagnosis, but I don’t feel like dealing with the kind of reactions that I have received when I have opened up in “real life” (which has just been twice, granted, but both were regrettable experiences).
At best, people will say “You aren’t sick; we all have a personality disorder!” Which, while well-intentioned, just isn’t true. Or, they’ll tell me I can change just by doing blankety-blank. Well, if it were that simple, I wouldn’t have a disorder, now would I?
At worse, people will run down all the ways you’ve wronged them…as if you need further reminding of how much you suck as a human being. People with PDs aren’t always unaware of their “bad” behavior. Not all of them blame others for their problems. It is possible for people, even self-absorbed people, to genuinely feel guilty. So if someone is disclosing their diagnosis with you (talking to everyone reading this thread, now), just shut up and listen. They may very well apologize for what they’ve done to you if you let them speak and don’t interupt by playing the “let’s stroll down the horrible memory lane” game with them. That just brings up the wall of defenses they use all the time.
My own therapist knew that I had a PD for a long time before I “forced” her to spill the beans. She told me she didn’t want to believe that it was true, even though she couldn’t deny the facts. How would she be able to empathize with a schizoid? It would be much easier to empathize with someone who was simply dysthymic–that she could understand. According to her, telling someone they have a PD feels like you’re insulting them, since the stigma is so great. But we’ve moved passed that. Now we’re able to deal with the label and not deny it or try to dress it up into something it is not.
My therapist didn’t do me any favors by “hiding” my diagnosis, because once I realized I had it and that she knew about it all along, I felt like that meant it was something so horrible and bad that she was embarrassed for me. The moment I took the MMP-II, we should have had a conversation about personality disorders and what they meant. She should have talked to me about my scores in more detail (we spent all of five minutes on the topic, and most of it was about how the scores were calculated). But instead, we let almost an entire year go by until I felt bold enough to remind her what my scores were. I had done the research by then. I knew what they indicated; but I needed her to tell me the truth out of her own mouth.
I think framing the discussion honestly but gently is key. People with PDs might be kinda crazy, but they aren’t stupid.
I think it’s alright for people to feel both sympathetic and outraged. People can’t help how they feel, and if someone’s been jacking their shit up all their life, then they are entitled to feel some resentment about it, at the very least.
And while I know that it’s conventional to believe that people with PDs “just can’t help it” or “will never be fixed”, I don’t agree with such blanket statements. I know good and well when my behaviors are following the “pattern”–and I know I have the choice to go with them or act against them. Usually I choose the former because they aren’t hurting anyone; perhaps I would feel differently if I had a different PD. But once someone accepts that they have a PD (which is half the battle), they CAN change. I believe they have to believe they can change for it to happen, so it doesn’t help when people give them such a poor prognosis. Because then they have no motivation to improve themselves.
I have made some changes that already to attest to improvement. I know I’ll never be “normal”, and it still bothers me when I think about it too hard. But I’m not allowing myself to wallow in helplessness either. That’s why I try to stay away from PD message boards. They tend to promote complacency and inertia rather than self-improvement.
Question: I thought NPD folks had extreme charisma and were manipulative, like a sociopath without the really bad stuff. I’m wrong aren’t I?
Had a college boyfriend like that and was always curious.
NPD? Like those afflicted with ODD –Oppositional Defiant Disorder, aren’t these people just simply assholes?
Seriously. Why the need for the fancy nomenclature?
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say people shouldn’t be able to have feelings; I’m a strong proponent that people feel whatever they feel without censorship or judgment. My problem is when the boundary between feeling and action is crossed and the PD-afflicted person is blamed.
For example in the OP, the narcissist mother made a nasty comment about SIL’s weight, and now SIL has an eating disorder. This seems to imply it’s Mom’s fault that SIL is bulemic. But from where I stand, SIL had a choice whether to internalize Mom’s statement or not. Mom is responsible for her nasty, bitchy, inappropriate comment, but SIL is ultimately the one responsible for her own ED. We can’t point to SIL as an example of a ruined life Mom left behind.
I’ve also seen examples where a person with a PD is claimed to have ‘‘created a hostile work environment’’ by lying or trying to break up the team. No thought is given to assign blame to the individuals who contributed to the hostile environment except the one PD-afflicted person. Everyone behaves as if the participating parties were helpless puppets dancing on the strings of an awful, manipulative person. If Suzy said something divisive to John, Joey and Rob, and they all start fighting and decide they hate each other, the responsibility is with John, Joey and Rob for failing to resolve their differences effectively. Suzy may be in the wrong, but she cannot be blamed for the choices of her co-workers.
In general I just think way too much power is attributed to people with PDs. They are frequently blamed not only for their choices, but for the choices of others as well. And ultimately I believe that attitude is disempowering for everyone involved.
This is a pretty entrenched belief but I agree with you, at least in the case of borderline. Research on people diagnosed with BPD finds that within about ten years the vast majority no longer quality for said diagnosis (though they may still qualify for other mental health issues, functionality is much improved.) There is also strong evidence that personality disorders are highly contextual, meaning when the environment is changed, the person changes. My mother is certainly not the same person who raised me. So yeah, absolutely, I believe change is possible. I just don’t think people with loved ones afflicted by this condition should work more on changing how they relate to that person than trying to change how that person relates to them.