It's very concerning how quickly people throw around medical terms like NPD or BPD. The blog seems anonymous so there is no indication of whether the person who wrote it is qualified to diagnose. My guess is no because there are many blanket statements and few qualifying statements. People without training are likely to read about a few characteristics and, well, you see what you look for.
I upvoted this comment, since it's important to retain a skeptical perspective, anywhere. Reading psychology is very liberating as it can be an immense help in understanding your personal experiences, but it can also become a vessel for projecting your preconceptions on those around you. Labeling others with mental disorders is also a way to dehumanize them and certainly not a healthy way to engage with the world. In the end, psychological labels are just shortcuts that help pattern the world in the absence of real understanding.
I agree. On the note of shortcuts, I see one in how we label any obligation outside of debt as “abuse”. That it’s inherently evil for someone else to expect something in return after doing something for them.
A lot of people on the internet use that moral confusion to whitewash their ingratitude. Framing their obligator as morally reprehensible or psychologically unfit, by recalling other peoples sob stories, in order to reduce their own personal recompense. It’s like leveraging the legitimate tragedy of a few for the convenience of the many.
And I’m saying this as someone who sponged off my parents for years and didn’t pay them a dime on rent.
Yes, the child can get everything they want from the parent. The parent must sacrifice it all. Then, when they child has no need for the parent, they can find some excuse to call abuse "you birthed me, how dare you" and get rid of their parent forever. It's a convenient view for a convenient life.
I should know; I've been there, done that, and I grew out of it (I think). Something about my future children being as ungrateful as I was really rankles me.
That’s an uncharitable version of what I said, but sure.
My own parents were not abusive, and I wish distance didn’t make it so difficult for them to be a larger part of my family’s life. They’re flawed and have their poverty/alcoholism/death baggage - but I feel really fortunate to have had them as parents.
On the other hand, I have other people in my life whose parents were abusive (including being legally defined as such). Depending on the specific dynamic, most are trying to sort out how to ‘shrink’ the relationship in a way that maintains bonds and contact but with boundaries to soften the negative parts of the relationship. For others, the relationship is actively unsafe, and they’re minimizing contact.
There’s clearly some hard stuff behind your version, but the answer isn’t to swing full tilt the other way.
It’s all messy and fraught - but adult children do have agency over their lives and the shape of the relationship with their parents.
I sympathize with a lot of their writing but their response to “ What are your credentials?” is awfully defensive. I think a simple “I’ve read some books and I’ve made my own observations” would have sufficed.
Informal diagnoses can be useful as hypotheses to present to qualified practitioners, and may even help in cases like those at the linked site to give the affected parties peace of mind and a feeling of insight, but I believe there is something unscientific about labeling people with medical disorders without the qualifications to do so. IMO such diagnoses should always at least be taken with a grain of salt. How relevant that is to this particular discussion is certainly open to interpretation.
"The narcissists I see online don't write about their relationships with their children and close friends; they hardly write about their own partners, except as props in the narcissist's ongoing drama."
The writer seems very confident of their assessment of various people online.
So? Swap "narcissists" with "people who exhibit some specific shared traits between one another that are also often described as part of the diagnostic criteria of a narcissist" and you get the same effect.
It's a shortcut, not a diagnosis. Layperson English tends to be that way, and getting caught up on the different definitions between medicine and "common" speak is likely a waste of time.
Considering that some degree of narcissism is part of everyone's psyche, using it as a label and associating it with extreme cases makes it close to an epithet. I have no doubt that many of the people one might see as extreme or "obvious" narcissists might have the same opinion of those who use that language. It's nearly comical at that point.
Narcissism is something that normal adults grow out of, although they can still act childishly _at times_. But for some people, the growth never happens at all.
"Narcissism" is generally thrown around as an insult and it has a confused history in the psychology literature going back to Freud using it in two different ways that were both confused and undeveloped.
"Narcissism" essentially means "self-love" and it is something that is part of everyone's psyche. Having something wrong with your narcissism is like having something wrong with your heart and there are many things that can go wrong with your heart such as heart disease, heart failure, bad valves, arrhythmia, heart attack, etc. In the middle of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Asuka Langley Soryu makes a passionate defense of self-love ("you are all you've got!")
There is "narcissistic personality disorder" as well as the (widespread) narcissistic disturbance that Kohut talks about which itself is more or less complicated by borderline and other disturbances at more archaic levels.
It is all front of mind for me right now because I was talking to my therapist and volunteered that I was concerned about an incident of "Dark Triad" behavior on my part and she said at one point I was "talking like a Narcissist" (I agreed) yet when I took a
I found I was midrange on Machiavellianism, below average on "narcissism" and close to the bottom of the range on psychopathy. (Hmmm... I felt remorse about what I did so I guess I'm not psychopathic.)
and marked it up with a highlighter and drew my version of Kohut's horizontal and vertical split on my whiteboard. I oscillate between grandiosity and worthlessness sometimes and definitely can point to merger, twinship, and mirror transferences. (It was twinship transferences on two people that got out of hand...)
I'd point to at least some of this phenomenology being widespread and almost normal... I think almost anytime somebody blows up for what seems like no good reason there is a grandiosity -> worthlessness transition going on.
