My father has no diagnosis, but fits the bill very well indeed for NPD. I was the golden child and he spent my childhood quite explicitly brainwashing me to believe all his s**t about how I was the most wonderful person alive and that I would be prime minister and telling me how to think and feel. He saw me an an extension of himself and my childhood was like a secret society of him and me, he confided all his problems and all these big 'truths' about the world as he saw it. I was an offensive, arrogant brat who was unpopular got thrown out of schools. I was well on the way to NPD myself when, as a teenager, I had a kind of awakening to the fact the other people have feelings and have been working though it slowly since though I'veonly gained any clarity recently. I didn't know anything about NPD until the last year or so but my relationship with my dad has become more and more distant to the point where he wants access to DS (for brainwashing purposes) and I've asked him to adhere to some rules some topics that are off limits so he's not speaking to me :-)
Throughout my life I've felt on edge, rushing from one thing to the next, very little sense of who I am, very prone to depression which was only alleviated by a new grand plan. I've never had a serious relationship despite being in my late 30s and only in the last few years have developed the capacity to love and figured out such basic things as my sexual orientation. I still have a rather weak sense of self.
Whilst I'm a lot better now I still sometimes do things that make me feel ashamed - being self-centred, attacking people backhandedly, being jealous or catty (the more so when life is difficult). I set off on projects that are ambitious to the point of arrogance and self-aggrandising and still care more than is healthy about what people think of me - and being depressed always makes these behviours worse. For a while I had been thinking it might be bipolar with the combination of depression and grand, world-changing projects but it never seemed quite so extreme and now I'm getting a good handle on what's been the matter all this time.
Now I'm worried that I'm passing it on to DS who's 6 - he's violent and not good at empathising and he seems to feel that he's either the most special wonderful person in the world and deserves special individual treatment, or he's nothing. I could see his self-esteem collapsing last year as he has SEN and wasn't getting the right help so I spent lots of time trying to put it into context and tell him about what he's great at as well as trying to get him to understand the things he has to work harder at than most children. I'm aware that black-and-white thinking is normal for a 6-y-o but it feels so close to NPD I'm wondering if I just don't know how to help a child develop a healthy sense of self.