Identifying a narcissist

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), gives the following diagnostic criteria (301.81):

 

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

 

1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements;

2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;

3) believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associated with, other special or high status people (or institutions);

4) requires excessive admiration;

5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e. unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations;

6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends;

7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others;

8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her;

9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

 

As long as a person exhibits at least five of the nine of these characteristics, it is probable that they are a narcissist.

 

Narcissists have no empathy for others and have no way to care about anyone but themselves.

 

A psychopath is a narcissist who has no conscience.

Experiences

Almost everyone has some narcissistic traits, but being conceited, argumentative, or selfish sometimes (or even all the time) doesn't amount to a personality disorder. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a long-term pattern of abnormal thinking, feeling, and behavior in many different situations. The traits on this page will seem peculiar or disturbing when someone acts this way -- i.e., you will know that something is not right, and contact with narcissists may make you feel bad about yourself. Narcissists are often outstanding in their field of work but have a history of alienating colleagues, co-workers, employees, students, clients, and customers because they do not value other people or their opinions. They tend to listen only to what they want to hear. Narcissists seem unwilling rather than unable to respect others thus narcissism is termed a personality disorder, but is often discussed as a character disorder.

Characteristics of a narcissist

Interaction with narcissists is confusing, even bewildering because they neither have empathy nor do they care about anyone else but themselves in any meaningful way. They seem to have all the maturity of a six year old.

• Narcissists have their own distorted perceptions about facts

If you disagree with them, they will claim you are lying, making stuff up or are crazy. Expect to hear: "Wrong!".

• Narcissists are incapable of love

They are focused on themselves. They have no empathy. They cannot exhibit outgoing concern. Expect to hear: "So what?!" and "That's your problem!". They will also try to find a worse life experience when you tell them about your problems and it makes no difference how much you have suffered.

• Narcissists will banish you if you do not provide them with what you want

• Narcissists practice benign cruelty

It isn't that they are mean spirited: They just don't care about you; you are irrelevant. Only they are important. They only pay attention to things which have them in it and affects them personally.

• Narcissists lack emotional context with others and cannot relate to the needs of others

They fail to take other people's feelings into consideration. They cannot understand other people's reactions to being abused, neglected or exploited because they believe in their own entitlement.

• Narcissists are immature

Not only do narcissists lack a mature conscience, but they have spiritual immaturity as well. They always think they are right and consider you self-righteous. Expect to hear about how self-righteous you are right to your face in front of others, particularly if you point out their faults and problems.

• Narcissists complain

To the mind of the narcissist, nothing is ever good enough. Everyone is incompetent but them.

• Narcissists are envious, competitive and usually paranoid

Since they believe that they are the most important people in the world, they cannot fathom how anyone could be superior to them in any way. When they encounter someone who is, they often react with anger, practicing slander, libel and anonymous character assassination. They are also possessive in their selfishness. They compare themselves and everything in sight they feel belongs to them to other people and their possessions. Expect to hear how incompetent everyone is. Expect to hear how much better everything they possess or think they possess is better than everything else.

• Narcissists have no perspective

Besides being grandiose and thinking they are better than anyone else, if they feel that someone else is superior to them in some way, then the narcissist feel they are worse than everyone in the whole world--and sometimes the whole Universe

• Narcissists are subject to great extremes

The best, the biggest, the worst, the smallest, the highs, the lows--it matters not: They are either the best of the best or the worst of the worst with little in between. This lends itself to great instability.

• Narcissists do not share power and authority

Since narcissists believe that they are better than anyone else, they believe that they make the best decisions and do the best work, when, in fact, they are often quite pathetic and would have benefited from listening and considering the advice of others. Expect to hear the word "NO!" a lot--quite a lot.

• Narcissists are contemptuous of others

You are inferior. They are dismissive to other people's feelings, wishes, needs, concerns, standards, property, work. The list goes on. "You are worthless." Expect to hear words to that affect.

• Narcissists are extremely sensitive to personal criticism

Narcissists have a need to be seen as perfect, superior, infallible, next to god-like. If they are not divine, then they sit on the right hand of God. Screw that. They are God for all intents and purposes. They can't stand the smallest of disagreements. They hate direct confrontation. They will attempt to prove you wrong at every turn. They continually self-justify themselves.

• Narcissists are extremely critical of other people

There is no pleasing them. They criticize, gripe and complain about almost everything and almost everyone almost all the time. There are usually a favored few whom narcissists regard as absolutely above reproach, even for egregious misconduct or actual crime, and about whom they won't brook the slightest criticism. These are people the narcissists are terrified of, though they'll tell you that what they feel is love and respect; apparently they don't know the difference between fear and love. Narcissists just get worse and worse as they grow older; their parents and other authority figures that they've feared die off, and there's less and less outside influence to keep them in check.

• Narcissists will punish their critics and even their friends when they do not provide the narcissist with his addiction--the narcissistic source that provides him or her a mirror to enable them to even have an existence

Narcissists are very empty people. There's nothing inside. It's all appearance, smoke and mirrors. They have no way to gauge who they are because they really aren't anything at all, so they rely on other people to reflect an image they can use to prove that they exist and validate their existence. The narcissistic source is the unfortunate person who is caught up in providing the narcissist what he or she needs to prove that they exist. Anyone who is insufficient in providing that source will be dumped and expected to grovel. The narcissistic source is bled dry by the narcissist who takes all they have to give mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially, mentally and physically. Because the narcissist has such great overwhelming needs, they need an effective source to continue their pathetic existence. Expect to be dumped when you are too drained to give any more. When they find a better source, they will abandon you. Their radar is always attuned to find a host upon which they can prey as a parasite.

• Narcissists are generally passive and lacking in initiative

Narcissists usually don't reach outside themselves. They may be hostile and ferocious in reaction, but rarely do anything to change what dissatisfies them. Expect them to turn on you when you resist them.

• Narcissists are naive

Narcissists are vulnerable and pathetic, no matter how arrogant and forceful they seem. They are so out of touch with other people and what goes on around them that they are ironically susceptible to exploitation. They are so inattentive and so disconnected from what other people are doing that they often don't recognize it when people are taking advantage of them and can be quite borderline.

• Narcissists are paranoid

Everyone is out to get them. Really. People can't stand them and would like to see them fail. The government has a conspiracy. Food is poisoned. The water and air are tainted. Expect to hear about black helicopters.

• Narcissists are grandiose

The high concept fantasy about themselves go on and on. No matter how preposterous or impossible, they see themselves doing things that earn them honor, glory, love, riches, fame, and they see these fantasy selves as personal potentials, however tenuous, something they'd do if they didn't have to go to school or go to work, if they had the time and the money. Narcissists often have very odd religious ideas, believing that God is doing a special work with them and has exempted them from what they know everyone is supposed to do. Expect to hear expansive fantasies. Expect them to be immoral, unethical and illegal not being able to tell right from wrong for themselves, but certain about how wrong other people are when they do the slightest thing immoral, unethical and illegal.

• Narcissists generally lack a sense of humor

They don't get jokes, not even the funny papers or simple riddles, and they don't make jokes, except for sarcastic cracks and the lamest puns. This is because, lacking empathy, they don't get the context and affect of words or actions, and jokes, humor, comedy depend entirely on context and affect. They specialize in sarcasm about others and mistake it for wit, but generally narcissists are entirely incapable of irony. You may discover that something you've taken as an intentional pose or humorous put-on was, in fact, something the narcissist was totally serious about. Which is to say that they come mighty close to parody in their pretensions and pretending, so that they can be very funny without knowing it, but you'd better not let on that you think so.

• Narcissists have a weird sense of time

They live in their own little world and often seem to wear a calendar instead of a watch. Expect to stay up all hours. Expect them to never follow a schedule. Expect them to be late.

• Narcissists are totally inflexibly authoritarian

Narcissists expect to be treated as an authority--often on every subject on earth. They are suspicious and expect you to prove your credentials without particularly showing you theirs. They expect their word to be law, always. They have to be in charge. They do not work well with others. They do not form consensus. They expect to be leaders, not followers. Expect them to use other people's strength. Expect coercion.

• Narcissists have odd work habits

Narcissists only work for power, authority, adulation. They think that other people achieving power, glory, high standing is all arbitrary, it's all appearances and it is all about who you know. Narcissists can put an alarming amount of time into a project because they expect honor, not because they expect a paycheck. They have no empathy so they don't know why some work is valued more highly than other work and why some people's opinions carry more weight than other people's opinions. They are not invested in the work, they are invested in their own self-glory. Narcissists want an A for effort, but often don't want to put in the real thought and effort into producing quality. It's all about how they can score the narcissistic source they need to exist. Narcissists tend to value things in quantitative ways and in odd quantities at that -- they'll tell you how many inches of letters they received, but not how many letters or from how many correspondents; they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Narcissists may hold themselves to a grueling work schedule and look like a workaholic as a manic defense against depression from the realization that what they produce is next to worthless.

• Narcissists believe in entitlement

Narcissists exploit other people without any trace of reciprocation. They expect privileges, indulgences and the world to make exceptions for them at every turn. Never expect to hear "Why, thank you--that was really nice of you!".

• Narcissists tend to be stingy and give you what they got for free and expect you to be excessively grateful

Expect to get leftovers.

• Narcissists have weird diets

Expect a self-invented eccentric dietary regime which may range from red meat for the heme iron and olive oil to avoid the evils of macular degeneration to eating excessive sugar and having two or three glasses of wine every night when they have diabetes. Expect eccentricity. Expect the narcissist to come to the potluck and bring nothing.

• Narcissists have no idea what other people like or dislike and often give completely inappropriate "gifts" expecting gratitude

Expect disappointment.

• Narcissists expect you to be delighted with them and their gifts even though both are a sham and a ruse

• Appearances are all there is with narcissists

• Narcissists appear secret about their private lives but that's because they really don't have a life of their own

• Narcissists don't recognize the autonomy of others

• Narcissists are negative, pessimistic, cynical, gloomy, sarcastic outlook on life

• Narcissists truly believe that they are perfect and everyone else is a hypocrite

• Narcissists are impulsive

Narcissists conduct themselves with behavior that seems oddly stupid for people as intelligent as they are. Somehow, they don't consider the probable consequences of their actions. Expect a lack of respect for the consequences of the narcissist's actions.

• Narcissists hate to be alone

The inner resources or a narcissist are skimpy, static, and sterile, with nothing interesting or attractive going on in their hearts and minds, so they don't want to be stuck with themselves. All they have inside is the image of perfection that, being mere mortals like the rest of us, they will inevitably fall short of attaining.

• Narcissists will demean you

• Narcissists will trivialize you

• Narcissists can't stand each other

They are in competition with each other to find a narcissistic source. Why would they associate with one another?

 

There is a notable exception to this.

 

There are two basic types of narcissists [there are actually others, which do not count for our purposes here]:

(1) The narcissist who believes themselves to be beautiful and attractive;
(2) The narcissist who believes themselves to be exceptionally brilliantly smart.

When these two types get together, it is a marriage made in hell! One tells the other how beautiful / handsome they are and the other tells how smart the other one is.

 

In other words, they feed off each other to provide each other their narcissistic source in sort of a cannibalistic relationship. Such relationships are generally stable and can last for a lifetime.

 

Unfortunately, everyone else around them will be miserable because together they will take over everything in sight without the slightest care about who or what might be consumed or destroyed.

And with all that said, there is truly no such thing as a narcissistic Christian.

Interesting and useful information about narcissists can be found at:

• 20  TRAITS  OF  MALIGNANT  NARCISSISTIC  PERSONALITY  DISORDER

• The Bully Online