I am a narcissist

[ohyesido]

I am. But I'm not a horrible person.

I lack empathy but I've learned that it isn't nice to manipulate people.

Yet I still do, only in such a way that no one can ever really accuse me of it. Because I twist my words to indicate that I have everyone's best interests at heart.

Everything I do is calculated to ensure I get my own way while maintaining a facade of good intentions

Can anyone relate?

Thank you
Like all parents I am doing my best to raise my kids to be better than my using the tools I have.
I expect I am like I am due to my upbringing but I think there is a genetic component as well. Unfortunately 2 very damaged people (for different reasons) married and had children - me and my brother. If you think I have issues you should meet him, now he IS scary!

I don't know, you'd have to ask the people who replied thus.
I wonder if you're actually hearing yourself? We're not talking about occasional manipulation (which as parents we all do sometimes, motivated by a child's best interests, not our own), we're talking about it being your entire modus operandi.

Uncomfortable thread really. I'm not qualified to diagnose my late mother and the relationship would preclude it if I were, but as an adult I know she had a great many narcissistic traits including a high degree of grandiosity. She in mid life also had a couple of MH episodes where she was acutely unwell and sectioned a couple of times but I am unsure of the relationship between that and a possible personality disorder. She functioned most of the time and would never have sought a diagnosis becasue she thought she was marvellous.

Her modus operandi was that she was never, ever wrong, ever, about anything. She would have sworn that she was the best mother who ever lived and that any issues were entirely on others, including her 3 children who had been estranged from her for varying amounts of time when she died. She could be enormously verbally cruel (and laugh when you were crying) and cut you off at the first sign of resistance or if you were not that useful to her at the time, including booting 16 year olds out with nowehre to go because they had angered her. She tended to try harder with my brother as he was the most materially successful and she liked the benefits but in the end even his tolerance gave out.

The worst aspect was her capacity for "love bombing" that to a child gave all the appearance of love and fun and could be withdrawn in the blink of an eye, leaving you bereft and blaming yourself, always. That changed with becoming an adult though in all of us and her fury was something to see, until she reverted to switching off and going 10 even 20 years without an expressed regret that their child/ren weren't in her life. To the rest of the world she looked great.

I was interested to read that people can reveal themselves/find it harder to mask after the death of an "authority figure". Her behaviour became much worse after the death of her father and especially after her mother some years later.

I can't really say anything to the people on this thread who think they have NPD/narcissistic traits. There is no point. All I can say is that from my own experience, I am very alert to the behaviours my mother showed and I will run a mile IRL from anyone exhibiting them, because I (and my siblings) have been through enough.

Oh I can believe it (I can’t detail why as I’m not anon, using my actual username. 🤫)

You might identify as being a sociopath, and obviously I’m only going on what I’m reading here and what you’re choosing to reveal, but you actually seem like an alright person. I hope that doesn’t offend you 😆

Sorry you had such a shit upbringing. You have my genuine empathy if you’d like it. ☺️

Thank you
If I seem like an alright person then the effort going into that is worth it.
I don't like being like this, its exhausting having to play every single interaction like its a game of chess. Unfortunately despite what some people think its not possible to just switch off. I see people with genuine uncomplicated relationships and think that it must be nice but then I also pity them for their weakness. I KNOW on one level thats wrong too but its my first thought.
My shit upbringing did give me some things, I had some incredible experiences as my Parents (especially my father) didn't stop to consider if something was a good idea. If he wanted to do something he just would - some of it just wouldn't be believed. Plus nothing phases me at all, if something terrible happens I am largely unaffected apart from some outrage that something so mundane could happen TO ME. Makes me incredible in a crisis 😁

The last two posts have reminded me of a diagnosed & therapised psychopath I knew, who described the business of hurting other people (or animals) in terms of game rules. She's learned that it's against the rules of the 'life' game and she made a commitment long ago to play by the rules. So she actively avoids hurting people in 'life'.

She's a lawyer. There are different rules for her 'work' game; she goes for the kill. It's completely compartmentalised, she says, and there's no reason to doubt her.

I envy this! To an extent, I think we are all playing by rules - but the 'life' rules are much more internalised for most of us, more instinctual than intellectual (though we would literally kill if we really had to). I feel like it would be more straightforward to have a clear set of rules.

They were all diagnosed as young children with neurodiverse conditions.

Someone I know was a sociopath. He was described by his family as having a chip missing.

He wasn't manipulative as such, he just didn't care about anyone else. His sister was in an accident once and no one knew if she would pull through and he said "If she dies, she dies."

He was in and out of prison from a teenager. He stole charity money, set fire to houses and robbed everyone including his own family.

His family were half destroyed with stress and he didn't care.

@Uricon2 "I can't really say anything to the people on this thread who think they have NPD/narcissistic traits. There is no point. All I can say is that from my own experience, I am very alert to the behaviours my mother showed and I will run a mile IRL from anyone exhibiting them, because I (and my siblings) have been through enough".

I'm sorry you experienced that, kudos to you on your resilience and insight.

The contrast between those of us who have experienced it IRL and those who haven't is interesting.

I'm having a wry smile, in spite of myself, at the abundance of admiration being bestowed. The OP has exited given the hostile reception she got, but she should've stayed, she could've learned a thing or two from the experts 😉

I would never ever hurt an animal. I love animals and have a few.
I volunteer at a Wildlife rescue and also a Community farm
I actually find animals easier, they are more instinctive and less messy from a relationship point of view. I don't need to manipulate them, they generally just do as they are told.
I would happily hurt someone who hurt an animal though and I know a lot of people say that metaphorically but I would. Having said that I do fear public punishment so I would probably have to come up with a less obvious way of harming them.

This is what happens without self awareness and a desire to present as "normal"
As someone else said, its a spectrum

No it seems more of a brain wiring that is fixed and can’t be re-wired. I know my ex will never (can never) change who he fundamentally is even if he lived to be 200.

When my Grandma was dying I remember saying to a nurse "can you just tell me if she is likely to die tonight or not because its getting really boring hanging around here"
To be fair I had no relationship with her and I WAS bored and didn't see how me being there would make a difference.
When I had a MC I was CROSS, I had decided that I was going to have a baby and that should have been that. I was pretty nasty to the nurses in the EPAU but luckily you can get away with stuff when people think you are "upset"
I am much better at hiding things now

If motivated enough we can find ways aroud the faulty wiring though.

Your assumption that you can tell who's experienced what is interesting, @SassK.

Let's just say different people take different lessons from comparable experiences.

I'm having a wry smile, in spite of myself, at the abundance of admiration being bestowed. The OP has exited given the hostile reception she got, but she should've stayed, she could've learned a thing or two from the experts 😉

yep, the start of this thread was most certainly amateur hour

There is disagreement with the idea that personality disorders are fixed wiring that cannot be altered, the issue is how the mind functions not how the neurons are firing. Personality disorders can be addressed with therapy, with medication to help with comorbidities. However, getting the person to go to therapy, acknowledge the problem and then stick to a long and hard process.. that's a different matter.

What's a spectrum?

I don’t want to presume to know you better than you know yourself, at all, so forgive me for voicing this opinion…

But I think your sociopathic tendencies are actually a trauma response. A protective measure. If you don’t care about anyone, then they can’t hurt you.

Also regarding the manipulation to get what we want. People don’t understand, unless they were raised by narcissists, that manipulation is our default. We HAD to manipulate our parents to get anything positive from them; love, attention, care, and to deflect the negative from us too. You carry those behaviours into adulthood because it’s all you know. To then become aware of that within yourself and to actively work against it to be a “better” person is actually so brave. Nobody wants to admit to being manipulative as it’s a negative trait, and especially those raised by narcissists don’t want to because it elicits shame and shame is what our parents used to keep us under control.

That, and the fact that you are breaking the cycle and actively seeking to not parent your kids the way you were makes you a better person than I think you realise you are.

So there are some strong and positive qualities you have there, regardless of the negativity you see within yourself.

We all exist to survive, that’s our main goal as humans - survival. Us raised by narcissists had a harder time trying to survive and learned some maladaptive behaviours as a result. It wasn’t your fault.

How would therapy help me?
Identify the "problem"? Done
Find coping mechanisms? Done
The one thing I am really taking away from this thread is the fact that I am not as good at masking as I thought which is genuinely intersting to me. I have friends but the ones I have kept are the ones I see infrequently in person. Someone said that after a while a lot of people will realise that something isn't quite right and back away and thinking about it that rings true. I find that really interesting, if I wanted more close sustainable friendships I would need to be even better at masking but I don't think thats worth the effort if I am honest. Relationships are pretty tiring for me. My closest friend is a trained Counsellor and has said she thinks I am a Sociopath but she doesn't care, she doesn't overtly analyse me but maybe I am a case study for her rather than a friend BUT we enjoy eachothers company so its all good.

Psycopathy, Sociopathy and NPD

I agree with your last paragraph particularly. I used to say to my ex that where his heart should be there’s an empty box and he agreed. I wish I had known about narcissism and sociopathy years earlier (I think he is more sociopath than narc) as i could have saved my self an awful lot of mental/emotional turmoil trying to work out why we (me and the kids) weren't really important to him when we had everything most people would want (ie a nice, happy, pretty stress free life). He actually became an alcoholic, though I never got to the bottom of why (long time recovery now though). I never regret breaking up with him and I’m glad to say he has a good relationship with our now adult kids, but they started to cotton on to him in their teens, drawing their own conclusions without me needing to tell them.

@FlyingUnicornWings
You are probably right, I am sure my upbringing played a large part. I do also like to "test" people who claim to love me by behaving in a way thats hard to love - its easy to love someone who is easy to love isn't it?
Being a better person or being nice or any of that isn't a goal for me to be honest though, I think I do good things for bad reasons but surely thats better than doing bad things for good reasons?
Its very complex really and it would be simple to say I can't love my kids or I will definitely mess them up etc but its not the case.
Its as if I love and care about them (and to some extent DH) but literally nobody else on this planet matters and could drop dead tomorrow without it affecting me beyond "oh dear". It extends to people my DC care about though but only because I don't like them to be unhappy.

My admiration comes purely from seeing that a sociopath can recognise those behaviours and not treat their kids that way.

Obviously that poster has admitted to some other behaviours that I don’t admire, but to have been raised the way they were and have the self awareness and intellect to not parent their kids the same way takes a lot. I’m coming at it from my own experience and emotions though, and picking the positive out of the negative.

I was raised by a pure narcissist and I don’t think the poster I’m referring to even slightly comes close to what I interpret a narcissist as being.

That is why I haven’t dropped my friend who is most definitely a narc, it’s because I only see her very occasionally due to geographical distance. I enjoy her company in small doses but I couldn’t put up with her for longer. Ironically she has been to therapy but not because she recognised she is the problem but more for how do I deal with all these problematic people in my life 🙄