I was browsing and NPD forum and came across this post by a woman who claims to be a narcissist or possibly a borderline (she is undiagnosed) and is begging to be healed (she is apparently undergoing a narcissistic crisis–which usually happens after a loss of a major or primary source of supply). What’s interesting is her memory–presented as a kind of list– of the events that led to her choosing narcissism as a coping strategy. It is a choice, after all–usually made in childhood, though the choice can be made as an adolescent or adult too. It may or may not be a conscious choice.
This could, of course, all be fabricated by someone who knows the psychology of NPD fairly well, but if it isn’t a fabrication, it’s a textbook case of how this personality disorder begins and evolves. It also illustrates my ideas about narcissists beginning life as highly sensitive people (HSPs) and how painful this illness can be for its sufferers.
In a most narcissist way I want to ask you how I can heal.
🙂
Working mom
Parents divorced at birth
Father disconnected.
Sensitive child. (nature/animals/people)
left at 8 weeks with babysitters constantly
LOVING MOTHER
over indulged (spoiled)
only child
childhood trauma at 4 (seeing something with animals)
I tipped and decided that all people were cruel.
I shielded myself for years from TV, movies and news articles that I deemed disturbing.
I learned pedophiles were real and a problem at age 40.
That is how well I shielded myself.
Now, today I am 52 years old. My husband divorced me. I changed when I was put on Prozac. I had a bipolar episode and life went downhill for 14 years. I came off all medication 2 years ago.
No help with detox. No therapy as I don’t trust people.
Now, I am having problems and after reading your articles believe that I am a narcissist, possibly borderline personality.
Depression overwhelms me when I think of offering myself to the world.
I don’t want to be rejected.
I understand this fear is from perceived trauma.
How do I get passed this?
How do I resolve anger after (feeling like) I lost 14 years of my life due to mis management of psychotropic medication.
I have searched for a therapist, I have called therapists and interviewed them. I get confused and really don’t know with whom I should place my trust.
Lucky Otters Haven 
Makes me wonder if I’m a narcissist. I always would seek help when the relationship was in trouble. But then, even though the last relationship/entanglement is over, long over in fact, I’m still getting help and working through shit like never before. And on top of that, I have no interest in hoovering him back in nor do I have interest in dating. I just want to get my own shit together.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Didn’t you say you were borderline? If so, that could explain narcissistic behaviors. I often wonder if I’m a narc too, because some of my BPD behaviors are narcissistic–but I was much worse in the past , I try to control it now and it isn’t that hard. I do not think you have NPD.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve often wondered how my mother got to be so messed up. I think she is a malignant narcissist, although she has some good traits, too, so it is confusing.
In my mom’s case she always thought that her parents were disappointed that she wasn’t a boy, so according to her, she was unwanted from the beginning. Her dad worked in the federal prison system and was being always being promoted to different prisons around the country, which meant that my mother had to start over in a new school every year or so. I remember my mother telling me that her name means stranger and she always felt like a stranger, on the outside looking in.
Our country got involved in World War Two when my mom was about eight years old. Her dad joined the army and was gone for about two years. Meanwhile, her mother drove their two daughters across country and moved in with her sister, whose husband was also off fighting the war. The two women got jobs in an airplane factory, doing the Rosie the Riveter thing. They left my litter girl mother and her baby sister in the care of an evil teenage cousin…. who sexually abused and terrorized my mom on a daily basis.
When the war was over and her father came back home, he was different. Combat had changed him. He now drank heavily. He and my grandmother fought a lot. My mother heard arguments with accusations about them cheating on each other while her dad was fighting in the south Pacific. My grandfather supposedly justified his cheating by saying he expected every day to be his last. Meanwhile, his wife, my grandmother, who was a refrigerator mom on her best day, became bitter and colder. She became a neat freak perfectionist, trying to prove her worth. She made the prettier younger daughter her Golden Child and made my awkward and homely mother her scapegoat. Around that time my grandmother had a hysterectomy, and her sudden forced menopause at a young age became legend in the family, for all the hell she put her husband and daughters through.
According to my mother, after the war, her dad often spanked her so hard that she had painful welts and bruises. Also, around the time the war ended, I think it was, my mother fell on her head on cement in the school playground and suffered a severe head injury. My mother has told me that she “never felt the same” after that. I remember my grandmother telling me that when my mom fell on her head, the school called her and, as Grammy said, “I didn’t have to ask where my child was, I just followed the trail of blood.”
My mother married my violent father at age 16. When I was 12, my dad came so close to murdering my mom that I thought she was dead. A few months later, after losing our home to foreclosure and discovering that my dad was having an affair with the head nurse of the psych ward where he had been taken after his arrest for almost killing my mom, that was when my mother tried to gas us all to death while my four preschool siblings and I were asleep in our beds.
What a crazy life, huh?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I saw that you had 998 followers and I couldn’t stand it, so I became 999. 🙂
LikeLike