Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and “Narcissistic Abuse” #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter N post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I want to talk about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder. I’ll also talk about the controversial topic of “narcissistic abuse”.

When looking up the definition of narcissism, several different descriptions come up, but an overarching theme is an extreme sense of self-importance. In psychoanalysis, narcissism is thought to be due to a person’s inability to distinguish themself from external objects. This is thought to occur naturally in infants but may also arise as a result of a mental disorder.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as a pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, excessive need for admiration and a reduced capacity for empathy. Symptoms include:


  • A grandiose sense of self-importance.

  • Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty or ideal love.

  • Belief that they are special or unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, specific people/institutions, usually those with high status.

  • Requiring excessive admiration.

  • A sense of entitlement, such as expecting especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations.

  • Being interpersonally exploitative.

  • Lack of empathy: unwillingness and inability to identify with the feelings of others.

  • Often being envious of others or believing others are envious of them.

  • An arrogant, haughty attitude.


There is also an alternative model of describing personality disorders, which lists NPD as having two main criteria: grandiosity and attention-seeking.

There are two main subtypes of NPD: malignant and vulnerable. The malignant type is how most people see a classic narcissist, whereas those with the vulnerable type display more negative affect and shame.

As I look over the criteria of NPD, I can somewhat see why some people have called me “a little narcissistic”. I, after all, do see myself as unique and feel that I can only be understood by a handful of people. Unlike actual narcissists though, I don’t think of myself as “better” than others and, as a result, the people who will understand me are most certainly not high-status people.

Now on to “narcissistic abuse”. This is a term used to describe abuse, mostly psychological, perpetrated by people with NPD. However, it is more commonly used for any long-standing pattern of psychological abuse. As such, many people have come to call their toxic parents, partners or other abusers “narcs” even when these people don’t have a formal diagnosis of NPD. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it’s stigmatizing a mental disorder and also providing excuses for abusers (after all, they can’t help being a “narc”). On the other hand, well, it’s a major thing in abuse survivor circles and I need support regardless of what my abusers are or are not being identified as. I lean towards not believing in “narcissistic abuse” as its own thing.

I Am Not Alone: Reflections on Being Different As an Enneagram Four

Posted on by Astrid

I have been watching videos about the Enneagram recently. One I watched, talked about the differences between a 5w4 (Enneagram type Five with a strong Four wing) and 4w5. One of the distinctions the YouTuber made was that Fours tend to take pride in their being different, while Fives try to hide their difference. That kind of hit a nerve with me.

I always saw myself as so uniquely different from others that it’s almost impossible to be true. Not just in the “You are unique, just like everybody else” type of sense. In fact, I always thought that I belonged to just a little too many minority groups to be real. I thought that there must not be anyone else in the entire world who could relate to my combination of minority statuses.

At the time, I was about fourteen and just identified as blind and possibly queer. Well, I know quite a lot of blind people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community now.

Then came being autistic, having dissociative identity disorder, my childfree status, etc. My fourteen-year-old self would certainly have believed no-one in the entire world would belong to all of these groups. Well, quite truthfully, I’ve met several people who belong to most if not all of these minority groups. That’s the great thing about the Internet.

About ten years ago, I read something on Tumblr that should’ve struck a chord with me, but didn’t. I read that, if you are white, but belong to a hundred minority groups, you are still white. Of course, the point was to prove that white privilege isn’t negated by other minority statuses. I at the time started writing a list of ways in which I was privileged, but didn’t realize these are also ways in which I am part of the majority. Ways in which I belong to the human mainstream.

Instead, I still focused my attention, aside from that one blog post and acknowledging when I’d reacted out of privilege in safe spaces, on ways in which I’m different from the mainstream. And still I somehow couldn’t believe there were people who genuinely belonged to at least as many minority groups as I did. I still somehow saw myself as the most special person in the world.

Isn’t that a bit grandiose, narcissistic even? In fact, feeling that only a select group of “special” people will understand me, is the only legitimate narcissistic personality disorder trait I have.

The truth is, everyone is special and everyone is unique and everyone has some parts of themselves that ar ordinary at the same time. At the core, no-one is fundamentally different from everyone else. And isn’t that a wonderful thing to realize? After all, it means that, at the core, we all have something in common which connects us to each other. That of course doesn’t mean I need to associate with all seven (eight?) billion people in the world. It just means that there will always be someone out there who can relate to me. Just like there is no-one exactly like me (God created us all individually for a reason, after all), I am not radically different from anyone else (we were all created equal, after all).

Working On Us Prompt: Stigma

Posted on by Astrid

For the fourth time, Rebecca of Beckie’s Mental Mess hosted the Working On Us prompt last Wednesday. I didn’t get to participate before and I really wasn’t sure I could make it this week. After all, I couldn’t load the post at first and then it was my birthday yesterday, so I was occupied all day.

The topic of this week’s prompt is stigma. I forgot the exact wording of the questions, but I’m just going to use the opportunity to ramble.

In 2013, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. This is, as many sufferers will know, a highly stigmatized diagnosis. Borderlines are thought of as manipulative, unfaithful, volatile, generally awful.

It wasn’t like I wanted this diagnosis. I didn’t feel I fit the criteria. I mean, I had at the time been in a relationship for over five years and it wouldn’t cross my mind to cheat. I wasn’t particularly attention-seeking either. I didn’t go around manipulating my therapist into offering me more and more support and threatening to kill myself if she didn’t.

Yet these are stereotypes. I do have a really unstable sense of self. I do have a lot of rapidly shifting emotions. I do fear abandonment. I do self-harm. I do dissociate and suffer with stress-related paranoia.

I must add here that my diagnosis of BPD replaced DID and PTSD, which generally get a lot more sympathy. The reason my diagnosis got changed, is that my therapist went along with a DID peer support group leader’s opinion that I had imagined my dissociative symptoms.

Years later, my BPD diagnosis got downgraded to BPD traits, but I got an additional diagnosis of dependent personality disorder. DPD is characterized by an inability to stick up for oneself, passiveness and clinginess. I don’t think I meet the criteria at all. The reason I got labeled with DPD is because I thought I neeeded long-term supported housing and my psychologist thought I didn’t. She told my mother-in-law upon my discharge from the mental hospital that I can stick up for myself really well. She said that the DSM diagnosis that comes closest when a patient suffers institutionalization, is DPD. Well, there is a difference between a dependent dynamic and a dependent person.

The same goes for all personality disorders: they describe patients, not dynamics. A person with a personality disorder may be more likely to engage in a certain dynamic, but the disorder isn’t the same as that dynamic. This is the reason narcissistic abuse really isn’t a thing. Yes, people with NPD are more likely to be abusers than those without NPD, but abuse is a dynamic, whereas NPD is something affecting the patient. Let me tell you here that I’m in Facebook groups for narcissistic abuse survivors, but only because they’re the only groups that acknowledge the specific psychological damage dysfunctional families can cause.

I fought the BPD and DPD diagnoses, because I didn’t feel I met the criteria. However, this does allow the stigma to continue. Of course, I do have BPD traits. That doesn’t make me a monster. And of course I was a pain in the ass of my last psychologist. That doesn’t mean I have DPD.