Narcissist: Socially-anxious, Schizoid
Schizoid personality disorder is characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships and interactions, limited emotional expression, and a preference for solitary activities. Schizoids are often described as robotic and uninterested in social bonding. While there are similarities between schizoid and narcissistic personality disorders, the two are distinct in that schizoids are uninterested in bonding, while narcissists are both uninterested and incapable due to their lack of empathy and grandiosity. Narcissism is not about self-love, but rather a broken ego or self that withdraws from society to protect itself.
Narcissist: Masochism, Self-destruction, Self-defeat
Narcissists exhibit self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors that are pernicious and subtle. These behaviors include self-punishing, guilt-purging behaviors, extracting behaviors, default behaviors, and frustrating, negativistic, and passive-aggressive behaviors. Narcissists are terrorized by intimacy and interpret it as co-dependence, emotional strangulation, and imprisonment. They are also fiercely independent and want to be free to frustrate themselves by inflicting mental havoc on their human environment.
Narcissists: Difficult and Hateful Patients
Patients with personality disorders often evoke dislike or hatred in their physicians, with the narcissistic patient being the worst. They insist they are equal to the psychotherapist in knowledge, experience, or social status, and resist psychotherapy. Management of personality disorders consists largely of helping the person find a way of life that conflicts less with their character, and aims should be modest. Healthcare professionals who treat patients with personality disorders may experience resentment, alienation, and burnout.
Narcissist Mother’s Pet: Her Child
The study of narcissism is still unresolved, with two central debates remaining undecided. The first is whether there is such a thing as healthy narcissism or if all manifestations of narcissism in adulthood are pathological. The second debate is whether pathological narcissism is the result of abuse or spoiling. Narcissism is a defense mechanism intended to shield the narcissist from an injurious world, but as they turn adult, it becomes the main source of hurt and the main generator of injuries. Some narcissists are forced to retreat into a land of delusion and fantasy, even into psychosis.
Children Psychopaths? Conduct Disorder
Children and adolescents with conduct disorder are budding psychopaths who repeatedly and deliberately violate the rights of others and breach age-appropriate social norms and rules. They are socially, occupationally, and academically dysfunctional, and their diagnosis changes to antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy beyond the age of 18. These children are in denial and tend to minimize their problems and blame others for their misbehavior and failures. Adolescents with conduct disorder are often embroiled in fights, both verbal and physical, and many underage muggers, extortionists, hearse snatchers, rapists, robbers, shoplifters, burglars, arsonists, vandals, and animal torturers are diagnosed with conduct disorder.
Cope with Narcissists: Abandon or Mirror
The best way to cope with a narcissist is to abandon them or threaten to abandon them. The narcissist is a binary person, and the carrot is also the stick in their case. If they get too close to someone emotionally, they fear abandonment and immediately distance themselves, acting cruelly and bringing about the very abandonment they feared. If one chooses to accept the narcissist, to live with them, to remain in an intimate relationship with them, it is a package deal. All their needs, demands, and requirements are included.
Narcissist’s Pathological Grandiosity
Daydreaming and fantasizing are healthy activities that prepare individuals for eventualities and planning. However, pathological grandiosity is different and has four components: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and perfectionism and completeness. The narcissist believes in his own omnipotence and is convinced that he can do anything he chooses to do and excel in it. The narcissist is shattered when he discovers that the collection he possesses is incomplete, that his colleague’s wife is more glamorous, that his son is better than he is in math, that his neighbor has a new flashy car, that his roommate got promoted, or that the love of his life signed a recording contract.
Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers
Narcissistic mothers can have a significant impact on their adult daughters’ relationships, with children of narcissistic parents being ill-adapted and prone to deploying psychological defense mechanisms. They can become co-dependent, needy, demanding, and submissive, fearing abandonment and displaying immature behaviors. Some children of narcissistic parents become inverted narcissists, craving relationships with narcissists, while others become counterdependent or even narcissists themselves. Narcissistic mothers micromanage their child’s life and encourage dependent and infantile behaviors, emotionally blackmailing them and threatening to disinherit them if they do not comply with their wishes.
Narcissist Never Sorry
Narcissists sometimes feel bad and experience depressive episodes and dysphoric moods, but they have a diminished capacity to empathize and rarely feel sorry for what they have done or for their victims. They often project their own emotions and actions onto others and attribute to others what they hate in themselves. When confronted with major crises, the narcissist experiences real excruciating pain, but this is only a fleeting moment, and they recover their former self and embark on a new hunt for narcissistic supply. They are hunters, predators, and their victims are prey.
Narcissists Fear Therapy
Narcissists cannot cure themselves, and gaining insight into the disorder is not the same as healing. The best way for a narcissist to help themselves is by resorting to a mental health professional, but even then, the prognosis is dim. The therapeutic situation implies a superior/inferior relationship, which is difficult for the narcissist to accept. The narcissist must shed his false self and face the world naked, defenseless, and to his mind pitiful.