Npd Stigma - Tumblr Posts

"i support pwNPD!"

then people get pissed when we have low empathy or low sympathy, people get pissed when we act egotistical, people get pissed when we show traits of NPD that are 'stereotypical'.

do u support NPD or do u just "support" NPD to be seen as a good person?

the Study of Wild Narcissists (accurate version)

Reporter: And here we see the narcissist in its natural habitat. This creature is nervous and easily startled so we approach it carefully.

Reporter: When approaching your narcissist, make sure to appear unthreatening and friendly. Extend a hand and give it a compliment or ten. Let it know it can trust you and it’s appreciated.

Reporter: Once the narcissist is comfortable with you, make sure to keep reminding it that you are not a predator. Whilst displaying as predators, many narcissists have the instinct of prey. Be gentle and patient.

the Study of Wild Narcissists (ableist version)

Reporter: Oh my god! It’s a wild narcissist! I bet it was stalking me. We need to scare it off. Quick, charge at it!

Reporter *wielding a stick*: It’s growling at me! Do you see that? What a vicious and evil creature… I’m going to prod it and see what happens.

Reporter: It’s attacking! What an unfair and unexpected reaction! We should have done more research on how to kill it!

Reporter: Oh, wait. False alarm, guys. That wasn’t a narcissist. That was a random, slightly mean creature. Damn, this is the fifth time that’s happened.

Reporter:

Reporter: But what’s that over there? Is ThAt A nArCiSsIsT?

Okay, dude, I know you’ve seen some shit. I know you’re angry. You have a right. I ask you to take a step back and take a look at what you’re saying.

You’re telling people who have a disorder formed from repetitive trauma (i.e abuse) that they will never understand what it is to be traumatised. You don’t need empathy to be oppressed. There are no champions of the oppressed because it isn’t a competition.

You were abused. People were shit to you. Not everyone is going to be shit to you, especially not other trauma survivors who are trying their best to survive in a world which actively wants them dead.

I don't think you people who talk about "truthers" know what it's like to live every waking moment in fear of an abuser. You want to be champions of the oppressed, but you lack the basic empathy that requires. It takes five seconds to scroll through the narcissistic abuse tag and see someone threatening or wishing violence against an abuse victim.

First off, I didn’t call autistic people the problem. They aren’t. Just like people with NPD aren’t the problem.

Second of all, I know I have narcissistic tendencies. I have NPD. I’ve also been in therapy for four years so thank you for the astute observation that I need it. I’m also surrounded by non-narcissistic people that I talk to about things like this. My therapist being one of them.

Your statement about how you can have narcissistic traits and not narcissism is completely true. You can also have autistic traits and not be autistic.

Most mentally ill people have some degree of self centred tendencies. It’s critical to their survival. People with depression can get focused on their own misery and hurt people, people with bipolar disorder can act selfishly due to intense mood swings, people with autism can be unknowingly insensitive. It’s not an exclusive NPD experience.

I do view my narcissistic tendencies as impairing. Thank you so much for pointing out how a disorder is an obstacle to me. It very much is. It comes from years of trauma and abuse and it affects every aspect of my life negatively including my relationships, my sense of self and how I interact with the world.

I don’t think that someone’s parent having narcissistic traits is demonising me. Contrary to popular opinion, years of therapy and a deep interest in psychology can make even a narcissist self aware.

What is demonising is someone saying “my mother has narcissistic traits and therefore all people with any narcissistic traits and/or NPD are inherently awful people that I should purposefully trigger”. And I’m not making that comparison out of thin air. Anti-NPD is a tag and many websites specifically give you instructions on how to hurt narcissists and give mentally ill people crashes.

I try my best to take accountability. I fuck up. I hurt people. My narcissistic tendencies can cause harm to people when I don’t deal with them in a healthy way. Everyone fucks up. I just happen to do so more than others because of my “obstacles”.

So thank you for the lecture. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify that saying “people have narcissistic traits” and saying “people with narcissistic traits are irredeemable monsters” are two very different things.

Love, your dear narcissist

“Oh but not all narcissists have NPD so I’m not really demonising you by calling every narcissist an irredeemable monster”

Fuck off. Just fuck off. That’s like saying not all autistic people have autism. It makes no sense and is completely redundant.

My father, arguably, abused me because he has anxiety. It made it nearly impossible for him to regulate his anger when things got even slightly out of control, and he did and said a lot of horrible things while mid-panic attack.

I'm gonna go ahead and call that "Anxiety Abuse". Everyone with anxiety could do that to me, so I think it's fair for me to say people with anxiety are dangerous across the board. They all have the potential to abuse me because of the way they're hardwired, because of the way their brains worked. They're not the same as me. They're less than human. They're scary.

Now, my dad's been in therapy and on meds for anxiety for years, been working very, very hard at it since I can remember. He still has anxiety and shows symptoms sometimes, but he doesn't abuse me any more.

But, y'know what? He's still evil. Everyone with anxiety is still evil. They could hurt me, so it's only fair that I assume each and every one of them will hurt me, and treat them accordingly. If people with anxiety or people with friends with anxiety challenge me on this belief, it's because they are either also evil or are trapped in an abusive relationship. It's my job to inform everyone who knows anyone with anxiety of this so that they can get themselves to safety, so that everyone with anxiety can have no one in the world, so that they are alone, so that they have no support, because that makes me feel a little safer.

Does this sound fucking ridiculous? It's because it is. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a disorder, like any other, that can cause distressing behaviour and that people can recover from. If you choose to treat Narcissists as inherently evil, you are actively preventing that recovery.

I'm not sure exactly how to put this but I think the obsession in the general population with "spotting narcissists/sociopaths" and with assigning all abusers and otherwise awful people the label of N/ASPD comes from a place of trying to ignore that evil is something humans choose to do. There's already the obvious issue with acting as if any set of people is inherently bound to mistreat others, but I'm talking about the function it serves people when they make this assumption.

When you assume that there's a group of people who are innately evil because you consider them to be lacking some emotional or moral part that you consider inherent to the human experience, you're creating this group of people who you can view as inhuman. You can ascribe the worst evils in the world to them, because who else would do such things? Surely someone with human feeling wouldn't. You don't have to worry about the morality of yourself, then, because you're human, you're not ~missing something~ inside. You don't have to worry about the morality of your friends because you've seen their humanity, too. In reality abuse is a choice—not only is abuse something that N/ASPDs can choose not to commit, it's something that non-N/ASPDs can choose to commit. And by insisting that evil = N/ASPD and that N/ASPD = evil, people are absolving themselves and those they support of whatever they've done to hurt others, because they're Not Like That.

Thinking bout the time my ex therapist said "you're too nice to be a narcissist" thanks that's the masking doing it's job.

Stupid btch smh ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

yea it really seems like y'all are against abuse until you're slightly complacent in it and then suddenly you kinda just want victims to shut up

"Omg love the confidence girl!"

"Self love first!"

"You matter more than the people around you!"

"Put yourself first!"

"You need to love yourself to learn to love others!"

Until it's someone with NPD and all of a sudden it's "You're so self centered you don't care about anyone else you're literally an abuser!"

cw: ableism (against narcissists), wolfe having a *very* weird brain. also just…feeling bad? idk. also swearing a bit

so i have this…very weird thing. where i get can narc supply from negative attention, but this kind of supply only lasts a few hours, in which i have to turn it into motivation energy to do shit, before it turns bad and making me feel shitty. i call it transcient supply because it’s like transcient resin in genshin except before disappearing it slowly drains up to 50% of your hp when it expires

anyways. for some godforesaken reason, i decided to go on youtube and see just how ableist people there can get. as expected there is a fuck ton of videos about narcissists.

and for some reason i’m not getting transcient supply? like usually i get a ton of transcient supply from that typa stuff (omg you care enough to make a whole ass video about me!! yay). but today it’s just…oh. okay. people really hate narcs huh. i know bad people exist but can we, good people who are narcissists, not be lumped in with them.

not even feeling sad it’s just. no emotion.

sometimes i really wonder who did what to me to make my brain…like this. i’ve met a lot of shitty people in my life it’s hard to pin it on one specific incident or person.

…on a lighter note this is why i hate those ‘trump is a narcissist’ videos. i do not want to be associated with that guy in any way lmao

(i. may be mentally bashing the emotions to death with a baseball bat rn. hahahahaha i’m not really fine but give me a few hours for me to go back to silly!wolfe)

Please, if you can, take a moment to read and share this because I feel like I'm screaming underwater.

NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) stigma is rampant right now, and seems to be getting progressively worse. Everyone is using it as a buzzword in the worst ways possible, spreading misinformation and hatred against a real disorder.

I could go on a long time about how this happened, why it's factually incorrect (and what the disorder actually IS), why it's harmful, and the changes I'd like to see. But to keep this concise, I'll simply link to a few posts under the cut for further reading.

The point of this post is a plea. Please help stop the spread of stigma. Even in mental health communities, even around others with personality disorders, in neurodivergent "safe" spaces, other communities I thought people would be supportive in (e.g. trans support groups, progressive spaces in general), it keeps coming up. So I'm willing to bet that a lot of people on this site need to see this.

Because it's so hard to exist in this world.

My disorder already makes me feel as if I'm worthless and unlovable, like there's something inherently wrong and damaged about me. And it's so much harder to fight that and heal when my daily life consists of:

Laughing and spending time with my friends, doing my utmost best to connect and stay present and focused on them, trying to let my guards down and be real and believe I'm lovable- when suddenly they throw out the word "narcissist" to describe horrible people or someone they hate, or the conversation turns to how evil "people with narcissistic personality disorder" are. (Seriously, you don't know which of your friends might have NPD and feels like shit when you say those things & now knows that you'd hate them if you knew.)

Trying to look up "mental health positivity for people with npd", "mental health positivity cluster bs", only to find a) none of that, and b) more of the same old vile shit that makes me feel terrible about myself.

Having a hard time (which is constant at this point) and trying to look up resources for myself, only to again, find the same stigma. And no resources.

Not having any clue how to help myself, because even the mental health field is spitting so much vitriol at people with DISORDERS (who they're supposed to be helping!) that there's no solid research or therapy programs for people like me.

Losing close friends when they find out, despite us having had a good relationship before, and them KNOWING me and knowing that I'm not like the trending image of pwNPD. Because now they only see me through the lens of stigma and misinformation.

Hearing the same stigma come up literally wherever I go. Clubs. Meetings. Any online space. At the bus stop. At the mall. At a restaurant. At work. Buzzword of the year that everyone loooves loudly throwing around with their friends or over the phone. Feels awesome for me, makes my day so much better/s

I could go on for a long time, but I'm scared no one will read/rb this if it gets too much longer.

So please. Stop using the word "narcissist" as a synonym for "abusive".

Stop bringing up people you hate who you believe to have NPD because of a stigmatizing article full of misinformation whenever someone with actual NPD opens their mouth. (Imagine if people did that with any other disorder! "Hey, I'm autistic." "Oh... my old roommate screamed at me whenever I made noise around him, and didn't understand my needs, which seems like sensory overload and difficulty with social cues. He was definitely autistic. But as long as you're self-aware and always restraining your innate desire to be an abusive asshole, you're okay I guess, maybe." ...See how offensive and ignorant that is?)

Stop preventing healthcare for people with a disorder just because it's trendy to use us as a scapegoat.

If you got this far, thank you for reading, and please share this if you can. Further reading is under the cut.

NPD Criteria, re-written by someone who actually has NPD

Stigma in the DSM

Common perception of the DSM criteria vs how someone may actually experience them (Keep in mind that this is the way I personally experience these symptoms, and that presentation can vary a lot between individuals)

"Idk, the stigma is right though, because I've known a lot of people with NPD who are jerks, so I'm going to continue to support the blockage of treatment for this condition."

(All of these were written by me, because I didn't want to link to other folks' posts without permission, but if you want to add your own links in reblogs or replies please feel free <3)