Your Partner is (Most Likely) Not A Narcissist. Sorry.

So, I have this small little soapbox to jump onto with society as my audience, as a therapist who has seen my share of the varying disorders be represented in my office week to week.

First, I'd like to preface this with an observation. We all know that Facebook and Google and probably the government likes to listen in on our conversations through our phones and make suggestions to us in regards to what we might want to buy, or view, or read while surfing the internet. Now, as a regular person I get ads for the things you might expect as a result of talking about any old thing with friends (and on occasion, simply thinking about something), and generally it is stuff I can wave off and laugh to myself about ("LOL, I DID just tell my roommate that I wanted a new winter coat. Well played, phone, well played.")

But as a therapist, I also am privy to conversations regarding the various wonderings of my clients, often regarding others in their lives and the way they seem to be treating them. Although I tend to leave work at work, my phone doesn't seem to know how to differentiate, and I often get ads or posts in my feed about anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns from strangers I am not friends with, because my phone thinks it has created for me the perfect algorithm based on what my conversations are.

Naturally, I also see posts about what society thinks are the traits of a narcissist (I have the occasional client wonder if their partner is a narcissist based on various interactions and patterns which feel abusive or manipulative) and most tend to look something like this:

Now, more and more, I am not only seeing this on social media, but hearing about it in common, everyday conversation as well, and I'd really, REALLY like to set something straight about the disorder, and the effects of overusing it as a way of describing someone as a whole.

First of all, the specific criteria from the DSM-5 (the diagnostic manual therapists use to identify what kind of therapeutic treatment to give clients based on their symptomology) is this:

Symptoms

* The DSM-5 indicates that persons with NPD usually display some or all of the following symptoms, typically without the commensurate qualities or accomplishments:

* Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people

* Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.

* Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions

* Needing continual admiration from others

* Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others

* Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain

* Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people

* Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them

* Pompous and arrogant demeanor

At first glance, the picture above and this criteria seem to align pretty closely, right?

Here's where assigning this label to others without an actual therapist's diagnosis is often inaccurate and harmful.

First, there is the idea someone displaying any of these traits is a narcissist. The thing with disorders is that everyone who exists will exhibit a symptom of a disorder or several at some point in their lives, and that is because we are human beings. The symptoms we gather for the DSM are things that happen to occur in people on a regular basis, what makes it a disorder is the excess of several of those symptoms which also bleed into one or more areas of a person's life.

In the case of narcissistic personality disorder, most if not all of these symptoms could be found in behavior displayed by adolescents, children, and even adults without the actual disorder, and for myriad reasons that have nothing to do with a narcissistic personality disorder.

For example, someone displaying grandiosity, or expectations of superior treatment may have feelings of inferiority causing them to overcompensate with their expectations of praise from other people or over-appreciate their own achievements. This can come from a childhood of being emotionally neglected or even regularly belittled by a parent or sibling and a need to feel accomplished in everything as an adult.

Someone displaying fantasies of having power, wealth, and attractiveness could have been raised in a family which had high value of these things, or didn't have any of these things. Their behavior therefore is the result of having learned when young that these things were necessary for happiness in life.

Someone displaying a self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions may have been socially outcast as a child or adolescent and has placed an importance on standing out as an adult with peers and colleagues who emulate success and celebrate him or her.

Someone who is displaying a need for continual admiration from others may have a past in which his or her needs for love by way of words of affirmation was not catered to and now finds that they need more frequent words of affirmation to make up for the emotional deficit they have.

Someone displaying exploitation of others to achieve personal gain may actually be someone who learned at some point in their lives that exploitation takes the attention off of them and consequently their insecurities as well.

Someone displaying a lack of willingness to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people may actually have a low emotional capacity due to other mental health concerns such as anxiety, codependence or lack of emotional boundaries, and therefore needs to withdraw often to preserve emotional energy.

Someone who displays an intense envy of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them may have been raised in a home in which the trust between family members was low to a harmful degree, and never learned to exercise healthy trust or positive regard for others.

And finally, someone displaying pompous or arrogant demeanor may again be overcompensating for an insecurity and hiding behind that demeanor as a shield against those they do not trust to handle it with care.

All these things together, and to an excessive degree, may make for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, but believe me when I say that the majority of people who display these (or appear to by partners, family members, etc) do not actually have what a therapist would need to confidently diagnose.

It is also important to distinguish where the symptomology is coming from, as most diagnoses can be proved inaccurate when substance abuse is eliminated from the person's life, and other diagnoses such as persistent depressive disorder, and mania are proven to be more fitting.

Another point of note is that someone exhibiting manipulative or abusive behavior cannot definitely be written off as a narcissist either, as abuse, while common in relationships with narcissists, does not indicate that the perpetrator is in fact a narcissist.

In fact, most people who perpetrate abuse do so because they have experienced it themselves and have a need for emotional control in their relationships, and since they were raised to see violence as a means to regain it, that is what they are turning to, and not specifically because of the reasons a narcissist might be abusive. Most abusers do in fact have a capacity for empathy, which is a part of the pain they are trying to manage, whereas those with narcissistic personality disorder simply are not willing to consider other's emotions and don't recognize their behavior as abusive.

Here's the main point. Society has gotten too comfortable with using real diagnoses as labels to explain themselves and others in situations they do not understand, and while I can understand that as a human condition to try and make sense of things, I urge the public to exercise more caution when assigning terminology from the DSM to each other without the direct diagnosis from someone who is trained to give such diagnoses as they can be damaging and often exacerbate the situation further if done carelessly.

It is estimated that only 6% of people in the world have this diagnosis, which is a small number globally, and even smaller nationally than the general public would seem to think. That all being said, my sincere wish is for people to do more research into these disorders and themselves before using a diagnostic term as a way to explain something that could be explained in much more charitable terms and promote more positive understanding of the people around them.