Narcissist’s Insignificant Other: Typical Spouse or Intimate Partner
Living with a narcissist can be exhilarating, but it is always onerous and often harrowing. Surviving a relationship with a narcissist, maintaining a relationship, preserving it, insisting on remaining with a narcissist, indicates therefore the parameters of the personality of the victim, of the partner, of the spouse. The partner, the spouse, and the mate of a narcissist who insists on remaining in the relationship and preserving it is molded by it into the typical narcissistic mate, spouse, or partner. The two, the narcissist and his spouse, collaborate in this dance macabre.
Narcissist’s Constant Midlife Crisis
The midlife crisis is a much-discussed but little understood phenomenon. There is no link between physiological and hormonal developments and the mythical midlife crisis. The narcissist is best equipped to tackle this problem as they suffer from mental progeria and are in a constant mid-life crisis. The narcissist’s personality is rigid, but their life is not. It is changeable, mutable, and tumultuous. The narcissist does not go through a midlife crisis because they are forever the child, forever dreaming and fantasizing, forever enamored with themselves.
Eating Disorders and Personality Disorders
Eating disorders are impulsive behaviors that can exist with cluster B personality disorders, particularly with borderline personality disorders. The key to improving the mental state of patients who have been diagnosed with both a personality disorder and an eating disorder lies in focusing it first upon their eating and sleeping disorders and only then on their personality disorders. The treatment of personality disorders requires enormous, persistent and continuous investment of resources of every kind by everyone involved, especially the patient. Patients with eating disorders may be in mortal danger, and the therapist’s goal is to buy them time.
Mourning the Narcissist
Victims of narcissistic abuse often struggle to let go of the idealized figure they fell in love with at the beginning of the relationship. When the relationship ends, they experience a cycle of bereavement and grief, including denial, rage, sadness, and acceptance. Denial can take many forms, including pretending the narcissist is still part of their lives or developing persecutory delusions. Rage can be directed at the narcissist, other facilitators of the loss, oneself, or be pervasive. Sadness is a paralyzing sensation that slows one down and enshrouds everything in the grave veil of randomness and chance. Gradual acceptance leads to renewed energy and the narcissist being transformed into a narrative, another life experience, or even a tedious cliché.
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.
Pathologizing Rebellious Youth: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) labels rebellious teenagers with oppositional Defiant Disorder, which is a pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior towards authority figures. The DSM’s criteria for this disorder are arbitrary and subject to the value judgments of adult psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and therapists. The diagnosis of oppositional Defiant Disorder seems to put the whole mental health profession to shame, and it is a latent tool of social control. If you are above the age of 18 and you are stubborn, resistant to directions, unwilling to compromise, give in or negotiate with adults and peers, you stand a good chance of being diagnosed as a psychopath.
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.