Narcissistic Personality - Personality Disorders

Personality Disorders

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Personality disorders are extreme and rigid extensions of personality traits. For example, NPD is an extreme and rigid extension of narcissism. It's due to a consistently distorted fundamental pattern of thinking.

Previously, I gave an example of how a distorted fundamental pattern of thinking extends into widely different situations: the rapist hates the twelve-year-old girl for being purer than him; the pedophile priest hates the altar boy for being more innocent than him; and the man flat on his back in the hospital hates his visitors for being well and on their feet. It's the same warped thinking pattern underlying each perversion.

Due to this consistently distorted way of thinking, a personality disorder not only affects the patient's behavior, it also affects his experiences. For example, a narcissist experiences pleading for his affection or compassion as an attack.

Yes! as an attack. By pleading for his affection or compassion you are attacking his grandiose image, you see. How? Because a bug like you insult God Almighty by expecting him to treat you as worthy of his regard. You are acting as his equal, and doing so is an insult to God Almighty, attacking his delusion of grandeur.

So, shame on you! Quit "attacking God" = you must act like a bug, beneath God Almighty's notice.

But, of course, you have to be twisted to experience a plea for your affection or compassion as an attack. And that's what people with personality disorders are, twisted by their delusions. So, don't ever assume that they feel the same way about something that a normal person would.

If you drill deeper into the psyche, you can see that a personality disorder affects:

Cognition (knowing) — ways of perceiving and interpreting oneself, other people, and events (fidelity to the truth and reality).

Affectivity (emotion) — the range, intensity, lability, and appropriateness of emotional response to things.

Interpersonal Relations

Impulsivity (self-control)

Here I note that affects may not be the best word. If you say that a personality disorder affects these things, you imply that the disease is a "thing" and that it acts on the diseased person. These effects may be willful, however. The personality disordered person may willfully distort their thinking and have been doing so since childhood. Consequently, the perverted thinking patterns are a habit, so they seem like a knee-jerk reflex but are actually voluntary behavior. Similarly, the emotional abnormalities may be due to willful and even strategic pumping up or suppressing of emotional states. The impulsivity may simply be a refusal to grow up.

The experiences and behaviors of a personality disorder also form a pattern. An extremely inflexible pattern that originates in adolescence or childhood. So, unlike the symptoms of mental disorders, which may come and go and vary in intensity over time, the symptoms of a personality disorder form an enduring pattern. A pervasive one too, one that impacts a broad range of personal and social situations through a consistently distorted way of thinking, expressing emotions, controlling behavior, and interacting with others.

This is not to say that all people with a personality disorder are severely affected by it. A narcissist, for example, may be as mildly (and hilariously) affected as Hyacinth in the British comedy Keeping Up Appearances or as severely affected as Ted Bundy.

My own experience leads me to believe that narcissists get worse with age and opportunity. In other words, the more they get away with, the further they push the envelope. The worst I personally know of was a school administrator with unlimited/unsupervised power who left a vast trail of human wreckage in his wake. One therefore wonders about men like Josef Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and Saddam Hussein: They did such openly horrendous things because they weren't just businessmen or factory workers, because people raised them to positions of absolute power = because they could get away with anything and had to prove it.

Abnormal Psychology: Chapter 12 - Personality Disorders by Nietzel, Speltz, McCauly, and Bernstein (PDF, 595 KB).

© 2004 – 2008, Kathleen Krajco — all rights reserved worldwide.
The URL of this page is: http://www.narcissism.operationdoubles.com/personality_disorders.htm.
It was last updated on 3/9/2008.
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