The counsellor I saw after my NPD now-EX husband abandoned me and our 6 month old baby, taking twenty grand and leaving me with no money, no job and a ten grand overdraft, to go to Thailand and spectacularly lie his way into a grand university job and shack up with a Burmese girl almost immediately ......said that without Ns she would be out of a job - meaning, it is their victims that end up in counselling/therapy.
I can only find about 4 threads on the main page in Relationships, that refer to NPD and two of those are started by the same poor girl who is desperately still looking for answers.
Let us do the maths:
4 x threads-on-NPD, divided by the number of mumsnetters (many thousands apparently) = Buzzword.
In RL I have only met a massive two people who know anything about NPD or have any experience of it. One of them was on the Women's Aid Pattern Changing course I did after H pissed off. The other is another poster on here who has become a firm friend.
But the fantastic thing about the internet is that it brings thousands of people together from all over the country and therefore, mathematically, it is more likely you are going to find others who have similar experiences. So, we have been able to talk the same language - call it cod psychology if you will - and recommend literature to each other and comfort each other.
It makes an incalculable difference to be able to 'label' what we have suffered, because living with a clever psychopath and narc, which is what my H most certainly was, is unlike any other relationship experience.
Perhaps because of the threads on MN that have been around over the last year-and-a- half and which have talked about NPD and its classic traits (idealise-devalue-discard for instance,) more people have come to recognise it in their partners, realise the awful truth about the condition and get out.
I had never heard of NPD until my H actually diagnosed himself with it in the days leading up to him abandoning me. Ns can have brief moments of illumination but then go straight back into denial - which is what he did.
When he had gone I read and read and read and read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It took me months of agonising over whether he was just a selfish bastard twat or had a mental health issue. Well, he was and he did.
Ns are selfish bastard nobboids indeed. They suffer from first class tw**ttism. But they are mad bad and dangerous fuckers too who will steal, lie and severely abuse to get what they want.
End of essay.