can you be both?

but everything I am reading about NPD says that they like to talk all the time and be the center of attention. My mom isnt like that, she HATES having company, even her kids. So I wonder if she is really a narcissist?

She sounds more antisocial. Narcissists feed on attention. If she were full blown narcissist, she wouldn't be without it for even one day. She'd be out visiting stores telling clerks her life story. If broke, she'd be at the public library doing the same thing with the information desk person.

Anagrammy

That was my ex, totally.

So what do you call a very manipulative, anti social mother that loves church and is constantly critical, guilt triping, with holding and disappointed in everything her daughter does?

that is what I have and I would like to get help in dealing with the situation.

I call her mom.

Asshole. ;)

A lost soul.

She should be pitied. She projects her problems onto you as a result of self-inflicted pain. Not from anything you do.

Religion is an excuse to not think and to feel loved by people who put up a fake loving persona. So of course she loves church. It's a symptom of the problem, which basically self-loathing. Don't think you can fix it either. Work on loving yourself and un-doing the damage she's caused.

They know what they're doing. And they don't care.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/27/2013 03:07PM by Beth.

Been married for one of these for 20 years. Soon to not be. They distort everything in their minds. It's a kind of self delusion similar to what affects pathological liars. In their minds, they know they're right. That's the insidious part. They're so sincere that they suck you into their drama. So, I think it's more crazy than malice.

No. That would bring down the whole house of cards.

It doesn't matter if the person is an introvert or an extrovert.
Narcissism can be expressed either way.

And anti-social behavior can also be expressed either way: aggressively or passively. It has nothing to do with being an introvert or extrovert.

My husband is both a narcissist and antisocial. He doesn't even like the kids to come visit. Yet, he uses facebook and e-mail to let them know that he feels put-out and hurt by them not visiting more.

He wants them to want to come visit and make him feel needed and the center of their lives but he wants to be able to tell them no, that he is way too busy for them to come.

You can definately be both. Narcissists can get their "fix" from lots of different sources. Work, church, family, but none of those have to be done face to face.

Just remember that all sociopaths are narcissistic. But not all narcissists are sociopaths. So anti socials will have narc traits. Having been raised in a den of narc,I can tell you that they have differences. Not all need to be the center of attention. But all need to feel worshipped like God. They feel quite superior and deserving. They decude who they feel are worthy of anything or nothing in life and treat accordingly.

I've known a few of non and anti-social narcissists. From personal experience, they can be a hell of a lot scarier than the social ones.

The distinction is largely for classification purposes, and sociopaths are scene as having a total lack of a conscience while narcissists may have limited empathy for others and restricted feelings of guilt involving their own wrong-doing...

In a grad class I took twenty years ago, we were looking that the etiology of borderline and narcissistic disorders; there's a demonstrable "gender gap" in that far more women are diagnosed as borderlines than men. There's a strong belief that "male borderlines" are actually sociopaths...

There was also some interesting information on the distinctions between NPD and BPD with one author noting that if a clinician successfully identified the trauma that gave rise to a "narcissistic wound," then NPD would be offered as DX while if it wasn't obvious, then BPD was diagnosed.

Given that Freudian nonsense held sway for a half century in the psychological community, it's easy to see that psychology is still an "infant science," (and alas, with the fall of Freud, a lot of very valid "clinical impressions" were tossed by the wayside as well; pyschoanalysis was a useful therapeutic motif). As I was leaving the field (having decided my co-workers' pathologies were toxic to my own well-being), the "dysfunctional family" literature was being discussed widely, and the research was dovetailing. Unfortunately, that meant the clinicians and clinical researchers had to "deal with" their own family-of-origin issues, and most opted out of that difficult challenge.

I "did my own work" incidentally (with some genuinely skilled sorts), and one result is I worry less about distinctions, and I can spot a "buzz word phony" a block away...

I'm worried about rumors I've heard that Narcissictic Disorders may be removed from the DSM (which is pretty much strictly a consensus device developed for insurance billing purposes); it appears to me that some of the "in-deep-denial" crowd has decided they're nothing wrong with them...

I'm really trying to understand why anyone thinks removing Narcissism from the DSM is a good idea. That's all we need- Narcissists feeling even MORE validated there is nothing wrong with their pathological behaviour.

Yes, the DSM is really a political tool whose job is to make itself appear to be a scientific instrument.

Hi,

I struggle with this.

We know that depression is real. We can measure levels of serotonin, dopamine, and other neurotransmitters, and we can observe psychomotor retardation.

We know that anxiety is real. We know that mental retardation is real. These are in DSM-IV as well. Take OCD, a form of anxiety disorder. I know what a pathological obsessive thought is like. I also had this amazing experience, once, where after taking Buspar for three weeks, exactly such a thought simply *stopped*. I even remember saying to myself: "Whoa. What just happened? That thought...stopped three seconds ago!" It was there for weeks, and simply stopped cold. You can't argue with any type of pharmacological intervention when it actually works, and when it does work, it leaves one wondering: How did it do that? My own best guess is that somehow, it created a short circuit in a pathological brain circuit, thus cutting the obsession off at the pass. This shows pretty compellingly, I think, that at least some things that are called disorders in DSM might really be disorders that are caused by faulty neural circuits.

I think the controversy seems to be with the personality disorders. Are NPD or BPD real disorders, or are they political inventions? If you doubt the reality of NPD, you should have been my father's child, rather than me. Your doubt would quickly vanish. But still, we're left with a problem. At what point does behavior become pathological? Can't someone be "just a little" BPD? I think they can, yes, and so does the working committee for DSM 5. With the fifth edition of DSM, the disorders come down to a matter of degree, and not a binary category of being absent or present.

By having DSM labels, we benefit by knowing that we're not completely crazy, ourselves. Behavior exists which causes the individual who exhibits it to suffer, and it causes those around him or her to suffer. Usually, the individual doesn't want to exhibit this behavior, but can't help himself or herself. That behavior may be culturally relative, but the bottom line is that within a culture, it's pathological, and removing oneself from one's culture usually isn't an option. Even if it were, the problematic behavior would find a way of repeating itself in another culture.

Let's say that you have a father with BPD. He grows elderly. He have significant health problems. Eventually, he'll die. You're his only child, a daughter. You've been abused by your BPD father for your entire life. What happens when there's no one to take care of your BPD father except for you?

Under such circumstances, does BPD feel just like a political label to you?

We need some way--some classification system--for understanding and having a way to cope with pathological behavior. I think that DSM tries. The devil may be in the details, but I personally think that we're much better off with DSM 5 (which will be out within one month) than without it. And I don't believe that it's a political document, but a medical one. It can be politicized--and it will be. But fundamentally, it's about categorizing human suffering, and trying to find a way to treat and alleviate at least some of it.

Thanks,

Steve

Thanks for responding, Steve.

When I say that the DSM is a political tool, I mean that its diagnostic categories are produced by human deliberation and, in some cases, domination. And, that it plays a role in controlling access to resources, like medication and treatments. The fact that entire diagnostic categories can be removed in response to political pressure -- the way homosexuality was in 1986 – illustrates that the DSM’s validity is not grounded in scientific knowledge. Its validity is grounded instead in consent. Consent is the result of social and political processes.

Related to this, the DSM has always been a document that attempts to define abnormality, but it does so statistically, without a construct of “normal”. This is in part because what we think of as normal and abnormal is culturally created and historically specific. Whether a set of symptoms is felt as real or not is not the issue here.

Narcissism, for example, references investment in the self. In order to be healthy, productive people, we need to learn how to invest in ourselves in ways that are self-affirming but also enable the levels of empathy and sociability our culture demands for us to be considered “normal.” Cultural expectation is key, here, in my view. But also, there are lots of things that can go wrong in a person’s development that can result in him or her feeling some very real feelings and acting in ways that coalesce under the construct “NPD.” The experience is real; it is not political, but the label is.

Labeling concretizes an abstraction. Language is the only vehicle we have for creating and expressing meaning. So, a label is important because it gives us something to work with to try to better understand people. On the other hand, labels become dangerous when treat them as the “truth” of a person. To me, that’s dehumanizing. Does being labeled NPD mean that this person is the illness? It shouldn’t, but we use labels in ways that make it seem so.

Historically, we bear the burdens of a label’s legacy. For example, you might pay a visit to your dermatologist because you notice some slight discoloration on your skin. Your doctor diagnoses you with “Hansen’s Disease” and prescribes a course of antibiotics to clear it up. You go home, take your meds, and that’s it. If, however, the same thing happened to you some places in the world, you would be diagnosed with leprosy. Depending your circumstances, you might lose your spouse, your job, your kids, your family. This is not because the condition can’t be treated as effectively elsewhere, but because the burden of the meaning of this disease is so powerful that people who are diagnosed with it can still be stripped of their humanity.

This is why I worry about the DSM and its labels.

Here's preliminary personality disorder screening quiz.

http://psych.med.nyu.edu/patient-care/screening-tests/personality-disorders-screening-test

Which only works if the subject answers honestly.

DSM still recognizes narcissistic but they've put their personality disorders in "clusters" .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorders#Cluster_A_.28odd_or_eccentric_disorders_and_fears_Social_relation.29

Some people are very unlucky and got stuck with mean parents.


Whatever the reason, your mother is toxic and you need to distance yourself from her.