When I was 20 I was diagnosed by a psychologist with having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. At first I was in denial about but over time I come to terms with my narcissism and the diagnosis started to make sense to me. A lot of my problems can be traced back to my unrealistic self image and lack of ability to relate with others.
There’s a lot of stigma towards NPD. I hope by making this thread I can help others understand that having NPD doesn’t inherently make you a bad person and NPD hurts the person with it as well.
“Has being diagnosed helped you?”
Yes, definitely. It gives me a lot more insight into myself and I now understand myself better.
“If you don’t mind sharing, what lead to the diagnosis?”
Good question. That’s for the therapist to decide. With that said it’s never just one thing. It could have been a whole series of factors that let to the diagnosis. If I meet that psychologist again I’ll ask him.
“For a small background: psychologists who have worked with my stepdaughter have expressed that her bio-dad (my wife’s ex-husband) has displayed some traits that could indicate NPD, but of course he would have to be formally evaluated for a diagnosis and that’s difficult to get someone with the disorder to do. The last time they were in court the judge was flabbergasted by his behavior and during the judgment expressed that he was close to ordering a mental evaluation, which I think is the only way we would ever know for sure. It’s pretty obvious that if he has the disorder then it has caused many negative impacts for him, but it is also hard to feel any sympathy towards him when I see how much harm he has done to two of the people I care about the most. It might be hard to accept if he ever was diagnosed and some treatment actually helped to counter the destructive behaviors simply because of how much damage was already done.”
What an awful story. It goes without saying that not everyone with NPD is like that. If you don’t mind me asking why was he in court?
I was really more just curious what lead you to see a psychologist in the first place. My understanding is that’s rare for people with the condition. With the diagnosis helping you, it’s almost like you had a lucky break to be seeing a professional that most people with NPD don’t get.
I probably can’t go too much into specifics, but that last time was primarily because he’d stopped paying child support. He was also trying to change the visitation agreement to be larger chunks but less frequent. He hadn’t been making use of the time he already had, though, so that wasn’t going to happen, and the judge actually reduced it while requiring all visitation to be in a public place or using the court’s supervised visitation program.
If he does have NPD, there might be other factors in play as well. Odds are we’ll never really know what’s going on there. We just have to try to make sure whatever happens, things stay as healthy as possible for the kiddo.