Self Love vs Narcissism

 What most people do not understand about personality disorders, including Narcissistic Personality Disorders, are they are characterized by extreme rigidity. Self-love or the lack of self-love has absolutely nothing to do with why NPD is characterized as personality disorder. You can lack self-love or have lots of it and still not have a Narcissistic Personality Disorder—or any type of personality disorder.

What is the basic definition of a personality disorder?

It is a rigid, maladaptive, highly limited and predictable way of viewing and responding to other people. Here are 10 basic defining characteristics of personality disorders:

1. They start in early childhood and continue through adulthood.
2. They are stable across time. The person does the same things their entire life or until they get appropriate therapeutic help.
3. They are enacted with almost everyone in some form.
4. They are highly resistant to change.
5. People do not grow out of a personality disorder with life experience.
6. Having a personality disorder limits spontaneity by locking the person into a set of repetitious responses to life.
7. People with personality disorders have a very limited set of behaviors that are characteristic of that personality disorder.
8. This means that they do not have the freedom to act in other ways that might be more productive or appropriate to the situation. Acting in other ways does not seem like an option.
9. Because of the above issues, the thinking and behavior of people with personality disorders are very, very repetitious and predictable once you get to know them.
10. They never reached the normal developmental stage of acquiring whole object relations. This means that, instead of seeing themselves and other people in a realistic, integrated, and relatively stable way, people with PDs split and can only see people (including themselves) as either all-good or all-bad.

What about Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

People with NPD have all of the above issues plus quite a few others. To touch on the most common:

1. They lack emotional empathy. They cannot automatically care about anyone else’s pain and or share other people’s joy.
2. They need constant external validation to manage their self-esteem.
3. They are status driven and mistakenly believe that the only way to really be happy is to have high status.
4. They are highly competitive and believe that life is made up of winners and losers.
5. They only want to associate with winners.
6. They believe that if you cannot be the best at something, you should not do it—even if you want to do it.
7. Their fall back defense is to devalue other people and their achievements.
8. They often take credit for other people’s work or ideas—and often do not realize that is what they are doing. If it is a good idea, they think it must be their’s.
9. They blame other people for their mistakes and failures.
10. They envy other people’s successes and are relieved and happy usually (but may pretend otherwise) when other people fail. It boosts their self-esteem.
11. Their version of the all-good or all-bad split divides people into two categories: special, perfect, and high status or flawed, low class, worthless garbage.
12. They cannot maintain a stable, fair, mutually enjoyable longterm relationship.
13. They have tantrums or sulk when they do not get their way.

Punchline: Narcissistic personality disorder has more to do with rigidity, an inability to adequately regulate one’s own self-esteem, and a lack of emotional empathy than self-love. Asking when self-love is healthy vs becoming NPD, misses the point. Like the song says: “What’s love got to do with it?” In this case, very little.

Elinor Greenberg, PhD, CGP

In private practice and the author of the book: Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations.

www.elinorgreenberg.com