January 11, 2004

• More on NPD–Narcissistic Personality Disorder

  
  

  If you’re looking for the promised blog on interesting ways to die, that is in abeyance.  One of my therapists suggested I get back to blogging about my progress in dealing with my NPD.  For new subscribers, NPD is a particularly irksome disorder for those who have to deal with us–we tend to be attention-seeking, impulsive, self-absorbed, impractical, totally incapable of empathy, shallow and grandiose–and those are some of our BETTER characteristics. One of our worse characteristics is, if you piss us off, we want to kill you.  Not just get even, I mean literally murder you–smash your head in, burn your house down, and sow salt in the ashes.  Most all serial killers have NPD, as do most politicians and entertainers.

  
  

  Since giving up alcohol and most other drugs and getting some specific therapy, I’ve gotten a little better, but I am still pretty hard to live with.  At least according to the people who live with me, and they should know. One of the frustrating things about this for me is that when it flares up, I am the last to know. Literally.  I go along being self-absorbed and obnoxious and generally acting like god died and left me in charge.  Then reality comes crashing through, my sweety points out that I am being obnoxious–again–and I start looking, really looking, at what I am saying and doing, and sure enough–the NPD kid rides again!  The fact that now I can take her observations with an iota of grace and gratitude,  instead of hitting the net looking for ricin recipes  gives me a little hope for the future.

  
  

  Not that I expect ever to be normal, whatever that is.  In our culture today, to be normal is to be pathological anyway. I have been told, and I accept as true, that I will always have a void in me, a little chip of ice as it were, where most people have empathy.  “I feel your pain” is something I will never be able to say, not honestly.  And frankly, I don’t see the point in it.  I have enough pain of my own, thank you very much.  At least the therapy is working to the extent that I no longer take so much glee in the misfortunes of others–mainly snowmachiners and rich people.  When some idiot snowmachiner plows into a moose and they both die, I feel sorry for the moose and think :”good riddance” about the snowmachiner.  But I do kind of feel sorry for the idiot’s family, which is new.

  
  

  But I should move on to the main thrust of this, which is looking at symptom #10 on my list–”jealous and envious: ridicules the achievements of others.”  I have always been a master of trying to build myself up by tearing other people down.  Sometimes I do this more or less face to face–I never kid or josh, I go for the jugular–but more often, it is sneaky and backhanded, sly and subtle so that I can maintain plausible deniability if I am called out on it.

  
  

  For instance, I went to college with a guy who is now a rich and famous novelist, even edited his early fiction when I was co-editor of the college literary magazine.  I milked this for years, as if that coincidence made me something special.  But what is more to the point, I denigrated his ability, called him a hack and worse behind his back, at every opportunity.  Never mind that he worked his ass off for years, writing pulp fiction under a variety of pseudonyms as he learned his trade, I could not forgive him for being successful.  Forgiveness does not come easy to us NPD people–after months in therapy, I was able to forgive my wife for loving me.  And if that sounds really sick, you are beginning to get an inkling about how serious NPD is.

  
  

  For years–talking about jealousy–I hated the fact that my wife loves her son more than she loves me, and would in a pinch, choose him over me to live with.  I accept that now, at least intellectually.  Emotionally, at best I am ambivalent.  I mean he IS blood of her blood, fruit of her womb and all, and besides, we have both had a bunch of other spouses in our lives, so what’s the big deal about being her hubby?  They come and go, right?  But still, in my heart of hearts, I harbor resentments.  And just the other night when I overheard her  confronting  him about being disrespectful toward her, I savored every moment.  “See, he’s not so bloody perfect,” my spiteful little NPD-ridden mind thought.

  
  

  Like she doesn’t know he’s not perfect.  She is well aware of his flaws, but she loves him anyway.  Just as she is well aware of mine–painfully so–yet loves me anyway.  I don’t know why.

  
  

  I do know, however, that I love her.  At least, I love her as much as I am capable of loving anyone who isn’t me.  That may not be much, but right now, it is all I have.

  • 7:28 pm
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