Skepticism-inducing lines in the article: "Experts aren’t sure how common NPD is. The disorder is underdiagnosed, partly because symptoms can be confused with other personality disorders and partly because most narcissists aren’t rushing into therapy."
Here's the popular YouTube doctor who calls herself the "#1 source of guidance about healing from narcissistic relationships."
Posts
40 comments:
I suspect - admittedly based on slim personal experience - that most lay-diagnoses of Narcissistic Personality Disorder are simply cases of “cope” after a toxic person has become enraged by rejection by a normal person.
- Rafe
Maybe it's me, but it seems pretty narcissistic to create a YouTube page for yourself to market yourself as the expert on narcissism and narcissistic relationships.
Giving bad relationships a label is just a way to satisfy the urge some women have to want to be part of a group.
I've noticed a huge uptick in people calling anyone they don't like or has done them wrong a narcissist.
I don’t know, I have seen one play out, and it’s not even hard to spot. But if you have never seen one, I can see how you might imagine that they don’t exist. I had a neighbor who was always frazzled, but two years after her divorce, she had changed and looked healthy and happy for the first time.
It reminds me of a line from The World According to Garp, “did you ever notice that grandma finally seems happy after grandpa died?”
…the popular YouTube doctor who calls herself the "#1 source of guidance about healing from narcissistic relationships."
Isn’t that narcissistic of her to call herself that?
"I really wonder where the normal people are."
No you don't. You wonder why you can't eschew the obligations or even the notion of virtue and social mores yet still reap the benefits of a society of normal people. That's what really troubles you. You fear it may have something to do with the rejection of absolute moral rules, and you don't want it to be so.
And you can start by realizing that the normal people aren't reading or commenting at the Washington Post.
"Normal" is a misunderstood concept because it follows from statistical "norms" or averages. What is normal is what is most common or typical for the group as a whole. Before electronic media and smartphones rotted people's brains and reduced IQ by 25%, normal involved lots of face-to-face interaction and seeing others as three-dimensional beings. But they were also vain, selfish, narcissistic, genocidal, and cruel back then. Sometimes worse, because they acted in the physical world with fists and fistfights instead of anonymous online cowardice.
What this person means is more likely "mature" or "engaged" or "conversational" during social interactions. Our post-iPhone norm is to be juvenile, detached, impulsive, and narcissistic at every opportunity.
Fifteen years of living in a smartphone Idiocracy.
The last place to look for normal people are comments sections anywhere- including here.
Rocco said... @ 7:42 AM, 7/2/24
"Isn’t that narcissistic of her to call herself that?"
Yah. That's what I was thinking myself. More WPP from the state media here imo. WP do like to obsess about this stuff, especially AWFLs. With everything that's going on right now this is what they worry about?
I really wonder where the normal people.
My sons found them in church on Sunday. Now I have been to two church weddings and have four grandchildren to spoil.
Joe Biden is an obvious narcissist. There is tons of evidence for it, which is why it was so important for them to put out the accusation against Trump. Their playbook is to look at their own candidate with a realistic eye, and accuse the other side of whatever faults they think that they won't be able to hide, and Joe Biden's pathological lying and his obvious narcism are two of them.
What's the solution, you asked? Well you accuse the other guy of being a narcissist, so when your guy's narcissism rears its ugly head, the normies say "well, everybody says that everybody is a narcissist" and Joe's narcissism is hidden in plain sight. Same with his constant lying. They just call Trump a liar, without evidence, then Biden's lies are once again, hidden from the normies in plain sight.
It's a proven technique. Goebbels laid the foundation of the plan for how to seize control of a liberal democracy, which is what Germany was before the Nazis got there. Are you destroying democracy? Accuse your opponent of destroying democracy. Stealing an election? Accuse your opponent of trying to steal an election. Don't have the support of the people? Well, a false flag will get them to rally around you, Riechstag Fire, J6, Charlottesville, Maidan, the "chemical weapons" in Syria, whatever you need, false flags are the go to technique.
Normal people just can't comprehend how sociopaths operate, or narcissists either. Most politicians are sociopaths and narcisiists. I think that Trump's big weakness is that he isn't either one.
Will no one relieve my burden is a poetic ode with progressive themes.
And for the record, there is no such thing as a lefty extremist who is “normal.” Since there is no such thing as a Post writer who is not a lefty extremist, how would they even begin to know what “normal” is so they could write about it?
Is it safe to say most of the "survivors" and "experts" are women?
I suspect feminists are more likely to look for labels to describe "men who don't like me."
I've got way more experience with pathological Narcissism than I ever wanted, and I can assure you that **at a certain level** it's no fad or "cause du jour". The challenge is that narcissistic beliefs cover a very wide spectrum ranging from normal and healthy levels of self-interest and trying to get things to work out to our personal benefit and delight ... all the way to ferociously abusive and violent.
I lived through a decade of severe Narcissism during eight years of which I had to protect a little girl, beginning as soon as she could walk and began to show any independence or self-will. I'll spare most details, but it began with baby-shaking and intense verbal abuse. "progressing" to throwing things, black eyes, smashing bowls over my head, and attempted strangulation.
Here's my interpretation.
a) "Narcissism" is normal and harmless when we're just working to get the things we want in life within a certain framework of MUTUAL benefit. There is nothing pathological about self-interest, and free enterprise is a great example thereof.
b) When that healthy dynamic shifts towards something much more one-sided and intentionally exploitative, the problems begin, but it's merely arsehole behaviour, not pathological.
c) IMO, the *frontier* of pathology is the desire to CONTROL others, and in particular, about **details** of life. I once got slapped and kneed in the groin because I'd not wrapped potatoes in foil before baking them. Normal people don't do that.
d) Pathological Narcissism is all about CONTROL. It starts with lying, "gaslighting", and manipulation. If that does not produce the desired control, things shift to Complaint, Criticism, and Condemnation. That last one is the "gateway drug" to verbal abuse, and the pathological process is well under way.
e) Key markers are Frequency, Intensity, and Duration. I've borrowed this concept from pest-management challenges in my careers of agronomy and production farming.
f) The intense abuse I endured for so long was my personal endpoint, but for many **women** it ends up as murder, especially when they leave. Pathological Narcissism and serious Abuse are inextricably linked.
"Why didn't you leave ?" is a legit question. #1 -- I was farming, and I lived on my primary source of income, and the entire place would have been trashed by an enraged and vindictive woman. #2 -- where I live, the courts are incredibly biased in favour of women, and Narcissists are extraordinarily good liars. She would have presented ME as the abuser, and "I was only defending myself." #3 -- to counter that, I developped an 8-year dossier of contemporaneous documentation to independent third parties.
Finally, the abuse was blatant enough, and the injuries obvious enough that my wife was arrested, removed from the home, and convicted of Domestic Violence. My daughter and I are fine. Meanwhile, the ex-wife is now up on two felony charges un related to me or the child, but closely linked to her pathologically-Narcissistic belief that she's entitld to whatever she wants, because she's special, and therefore deserves it.
This describes one situation only, but regardless of legit gripes about "trendy fad", Pathological Narcissism is a sick and very real expression of normal and healthy human self-interest.
'Narcissistic abuse' has gone mainstream. But what is it? Skeptics say it’s just a trendy hashtag. Survivors say it describes the unimaginably manipulative relationships they’ve escaped.
Now there's an article that should have a picture of Jill Biden on the cover!
#1 source of guidance about healing from narcissistic relationships
Sounds pretty damned narcissistic to me.
Is this one of those "it takes a thief" things?
God of the Sea People said...
"I've noticed a huge uptick in people calling anyone they don't like or has done them wrong a narcissist."
It's secondary to TDS.
Normal as in functional or politically congruent? Throw another baby on the barbie, it's over normal? Will no one relieve my "burden" normal? Take a NAP normal?
You told the normal people victimhood gave them status so they turned their normal occurrences into stories of terrible perpetrators.
Bart Hall knows what he is talking about. I'm well familiar with this kind of behavior myself.
I was called a narcissist here, soon after arriving. That made me laugh.
My critic felt that I was rude to intrude my opinions here at Professor Althouse's Refuge for the Mild and Meek.
The key to dealing with this type of thing in your life is to identify it quickly and take immediate action to preserve distance. I've got one of these types as a fairly close family member-by-marriage that's a notch or two below @Bart Hall (Kansas, USA)'s experience. You can't choose your family, but you can manage your distance. It does require a certain reserved bloody-mindedness at times.
Neither side is immune to being one and neither side apparently knows what one is or how to recognize one.
"Experts aren’t sure how common NPD is. The disorder is underdiagnosed, partly because symptoms can be confused with other personality disorders and partly because most narcissists aren’t rushing into therapy."
I found the problem:
Experts.
Anyone who calls themselves an expert is generally myopic and mediocre.
Everything is "underdiagnosed" because narcissism is not a condition, it is a spectrum. Everyone is to some extent narcissistic. This is situational as well. There are times when we are focused more on what we want and there are time when we are less focused.
We all start from our own point of view. Some people just go too far and it causes problems.
"I really wonder where the normal people are. Maybe someone should write up an article on what normal behavior is because it is getting hard to remember."
In this context "Normal" equals "Like me."
Journalists and experts in general have low self awareness.
You can save yourself a lot of grief in life by never dating anyone who isn't consistently nice to you.
Ann Barnhardt's nearly 10 year old video about narcissism takes it to another level. It was banned on youtube.
https://www.barnhardt.biz/diabolical-narcissism/
"The key to dealing with this type of thing in your life is to identify it quickly and take immediate action to preserve distance. "
Yep.
"Neither side is immune to being one and neither side apparently knows what one is or how to recognize one."
We have imperfect heuristics for arriving at the truth, and they would work will enough in a small tribal band, living in the wilderness, which is what we were for hundreds of thousands of years, but when the information space is deliberately flooded, by people with the power to do so (money, access to servers, organization) and with the trillions of dollars that are at stake in one of our US elections, such simplistic rules are as easily defeated as the will of a wandering sheep. We are certainly smarter than sheep, but we are not of a different nature entirely.
This is why "first lie wins" it's because we have these simple rules we use to sort stuff out. It's how these toxic narcissists, and if you want to say that Joe Biden is not one, and you still refuse to look at the evidence on the laptop, from the testimony of his business partners, etc, if you refuse to look at the whole case against him, then you just want to be fooled. That's something that sociopaths count on too.
I have looked at the evidence against Trump, none of it logically holds together if you go to the original sources, the original quotes, just like they used to teach us to do in college. In a hundred years, this Joe Biden is going to be quite the topic of derisive discussion by historians.
Whatever happened to Character Flaws?
Everything is Personality Disorder nowadays?
Women are more manipulative than men in general and the Pop Psychology and Self Help Bullshit is 100% manipulation
Amazing world of YouTube teachers are available today. We are fortunate to have these resources at our fingertips.
As for narcissism being about mere self centered people, that is wishful thinking. Those types are here today, gone tomorrow people taking advantage of the giving types people for a season( ie., Everyday life.among the social groups that we all experience)
The Toxic Narcissist is a destructive force that wills to captures players in their mind game by offering them good will and support to enroll in a cast of characters meant for the Narcissist’s supply of self image. That requires the capture of actors playing assigned roles, or else.
Think of it as running press gang into the British Navy. Thereafter the shanghied targets are
used for the minimum of pay possible and abused for the Toxic Narcissist ‘s image needs
until one day it’s in the Master’s latest self image need to throw them overboard to drown.
Running a Toxic Narcissist system takes a very intelligent and charming Master mind.They are one step ahead of everyone always in control money but havingzero good will or mercy. The psychiatric literature on Toxic Narcissists amazes normal people and ends up with the advice to other psychiatrists not to attempt to treat one. You can never change them and will find yourself in a fight to your own destruction.
The only reason Toxic Narcissists are studied is because of the many, many messed up victims that need help after they escape or are thrown away. Thus the YouTube experts are popping up.
Bart Hall I thank you for your painful honesty.
I recently saw somewhere that the Narcissus myth has been misinterpreted. It’s not that Narcissus fell in love with himself, but that he failed to recognize Himself. I love that as an alternative explication. it explains both the monomania and the desolate depression that follows being thwarted. In reality, It presents itself much more like self hatred than self-love. When the self hatred becomes too much to bear, the rage is directed to those nearest. Love is impossible.
Without some semblance of identity, one is nothing. It sure explains a lot of what we see in the modern world. Just look around.
My previous comment seems rather trite in light of someone’s personal experience. I apologize for that. The theoretical of things always gets gobsmacked by the reality of things. Still, I do think it has some value for the layman.
I thought for years that my late step-monster had borderline personality disorder, but my sister accurately diagnosed Munchausen's (she really enjoyed ill health) and NPD. I thought that she'd squirreled away my dad's money, but she just spent all should could get hands on. Stupid bitch!
Admitted psychopathic narc HG Tudor has been doing yt videos for years now about Meghan Markle's actions and words "through the lens" (as she would say) of her NPD. His early ones explained "the prime aims" of the narcissist. South Park nailed it when they showed her as empty inside.
Bart Hall, I'm sorry you had to go through that. People who have not had any experience with a person like that tend to think narcissism is just someone with an overblown ego, but that's really the least important part. It's the manipulation and abuse - mental, emotional, physical, financial - and desire to control others that does the harm.
Freeman Hunt said...
You can save yourself a lot of grief in life by never dating anyone who isn't consistently nice to you.
7/2/24, 12:02 PM
But not too nice. Love bombing is definitely a narc thing. In the beginning, you are their world. There is nothing they won't do to make you happy.
They can't behave like that to everyone, so the best thing to do is not just look at how they treat you, but how they treat a server at a restaurant or the checkout clerk at the store. Listen to how they talk about people. Everyone gets frustrated with coworkers/friends/family and complains occasionally, but watch out for the ones who are always trashing everyone.
Normal is a setting on a washing machine.
For 40 years I've trotted out the phrase "No one has personalities anymore, we just have diagnoses."
Don't know why it never caught on.
"Narcissistic abuse" is recognizable as Supreme Court Justice Stewart said about obscenity, "I know it when I see it". Ask the long-abused adult-children of narcissistic parents, they to eventually knew it when they saw it. These abused children respond by either becoming hyper-competent high-achievers, or maladaptive irresponsible dependent adults. Hunter and Ashley Biden are both emotionally damaged adults, outcome of dysfunctional dynamics of their childhood family-household experiences.
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