Why Can't A Psychopath Have NPD?

Two things that cannot coexist...

Since I have been writing about psychopathy, invariably I will have someone oh so smugly inform me that I have narcissistic personality disorder, either instead of psychopathy, or along with psychopathy. Both of these claims are incorrect. I certainly do not have NPD, and NPD cannot coexist with psychopathy. Why people think that it can, is beyond me. I have even had so-called professional clinicians that have made this claim, and when I challenge them, they have no argument. They just retort with, that’s what they were taught, so…

That’s not an argument, and NPD not being able to coexist with psychopathy should just be a reasonable and logical conclusion, looking at what makes up both diagnoses, and their origin stories. We will start with psychopathy. It will be a brief overview, and one my readers will be very familiar with.

Psychopathy

Psychopathy is a genetically coded variant brain structure and chemical processing difference within the brain. It is hardwired, and it is present from the first breath to the last. Psychopathy cannot be induced, it is either present, or it isn’t. There are no exceptions to this.

The difference in the brain structure and chemical processing remove several emotions from the capability board, meaning that they are unable to be felt, ever. Many of these emotions are those created by oxytocin. A psychopathic brain comes with mutated oxytocin receptors. Our bodies produce oxytocin, but due to the mutated receptors, it never binds to them. The oxytocin passes through the system totally unused. Some of the emotions that oxytocin creates are:

Chemical love

Trust

Bonding

Jealousy

Hatred

Emotional empathy

It also affects facial memory and facial, recognition, though not to the point of facial blindness.

There are several other emotions it is thought to have a hand in, but this is a good list for this post. Psychopaths also do not have the ability to care what other people think of them. That will be important later on.

Now for NPD. I am going to be using Elinor Greenberg’s writing for this, as I am not all that educated on NPD, and she specializes in it.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)

NPD seems to have some genetic components already in place that help shape NPD in a person if the conditions of their upbringing lend to their activation.

As Elinor puts it:

Children Are Born Helpless and Dependent

All humans are born helpless. We depend on our caregivers for everything from soothing us and feeding us to making sure we are safe. If we are not taken care of by other humans, we die.

As we develop during childhood and our teens, we gradually start to take over the functions that our caregivers do for us. Eventually, if we are healthy, we learn how to dress ourselves, tell time, read, learn right from wrong, make friends, and so on. We also learn to soothe ourselves through internalizing our experiences of being soothed.

But How Do We Learn Who We Are?

Here are two theorists whose work can help us understand how we build our sense of identity and why narcissists may end up with a distorted, vulnerable, and easily disrupted sense of self.

Charles Horton Cooley and the Looking Glass Self

Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929), a noted sociologist, introduced the concept of the “Looking Glass Self.” He theorized that one way we form our view of who we are is by internalizing how other people appear to see us (1902).

In general, the younger and less experienced we are when we get this feedback, the more likely we are to take it in as the whole truth. The problem with this is that many of us had distorted “mirrors.” The people that we looked to for information about us and our place in the world—our parents, family, and culture—are sometimes too biased to see us accurately. This bias can lead to us internalizing an unrealistic view of ourselves.

The issues here are:

Our self-esteem may be based on distorted feedback that interferes with us seeing ourselves realistically.

This distorted feedback may prevent us from accurately assessing our authentic strengths and moving forward in an appropriate life direction.

Heinz Kohut and Self-Objects

Heinz Kohut (1913–1981), the brilliant Austrian American psychiatrist, introduced the term “self-object” to describe how humans use other people as extensions of themselves. A self-object performs functions for us that we find hard or impossible to do for ourselves (1971).

If we look at children, we can see that they use their caregivers as self-objects. At birth, they are totally dependent on their caregivers to interpret the world for them and keep them safe. Even when children are finally able to take care of themselves, many still rely on their parents to comfort them, tell them “everything will be fine,” and reassure them that they are competent and lovable.

Does Our Need for Self-Objects Ever Totally Go Away?

Kohut believed that our need for self-objects never entirely goes away. However, unless physical or psychological issues prevent it, our use of self-objects matures as we mature. Most of us still want an occasional hug, some praise, protection, and reassurance. However, this is optional, and mentally healthy adults will not fall apart without this type of external support.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

One of the striking features of people who have a narcissistic personality disorder is that they have not outgrown their need for other people to validate their sense of self-worth. In this way, they are still like little children, although they may be extremely competent in other areas of life.

If you are a narcissist, you can be the head of a giant company, a famous musician, universally admired as beautiful and talented, and still be quite childlike when it comes to your ability to soothe yourself, feel competent at your job, and manage your emotional ups and downs by yourself.

Narcissists still have a “Looking Glass Self.” Or, in Kohut’s terms, they need other people to act as self-objects to keep functioning well.

What Is Human Narcissistic Supply?

Very simply, these are people who the narcissist relies on to help manage their self-esteem by praising them or validating them as special.

What is your role in this?

If you are in a relationship with someone with NPD, they will try to use you as a self-object and a mirror. James F. Masterson (1926-2010), a well-known personality disorder theorist, identified three different subtypes of narcissistic personality disorder. Below is a brief summary of how each of these uses other people as sources of narcissistic supplies to help regulate their shaky self-esteem (1981).

The development of Narcissistic Personality Disorder has three basic components:

The child with his or her inborn genetic endowment including temperament, intelligence, and adaptability.

The primary caregivers with their temperaments, values, and caregiving styles.

The culture in which they reside with its values, status hierarchies, and events.

One could think of these as concentric circles of influence that surround and affect the child.

Children naturally do their best to adapt to their family in order to maximize the amount of love, attention, and support they get.

There are three basic paths to acquiring a Narcissistic Personality Disorder that can occur individually or in combination.

• Narcissistic Parents

Your parent or parents are Narcissists and teach you Narcissistic coping mechanisms and values. As such, they do not themselves have the capacity for “whole object relations” or “object constancy” and are unable to model emotional empathy in their interactions with you. You may not be abused in the normal sense of the term (although that could very well happen). Instead, you are raised to be a Narcissist.

• The “Inadequate” Child

This child feels inadequate compared to other children or to their very accomplished family. The child compensates by adopting Narcissistic coping methods.

This can happen when there is a marked difference in ability between the child’s natural endowment and the group within which he or she is growing up. The child feels stupid, awkward, or merely average while seeing those around him or her achieve at a much higher level. These constant negative comparisons to other, higher achieving people can devastate the child’s self-esteem.

• The Devalued Child

This child grows up in a family where they are treated badly and despised. They may be abused, ignored, or bullied. They comfort themself with fantasies of how great they will be when they grow up and how they will take revenge on everyone who hurt them. They feel despised, dominated, and powerless; so they compensate by over-valuing power and status as a path out of their dilemma.

A person with NPD has this ongoing struggle with finding a personal presentation that will gain them the most value and admiration, from what I have gathered. In my own personal experience with the few people that I know with NPD, with two of them, they would shift who they were on a pretty regular basis. The situations that they would do this in seemed to have similar aspects.

1. The personality they were currently wearing had worn out. Their internal issues caused too many problems with the groups of people they were around, and it was creating chaos for them. When their internal issues bled through, and the varnish tarnished, they didn’t get the same amount of admiration that they required. This led to step two.

2. They totally cast off everyone that they knew, garnered a new personality, gathered a new group of friends, and then demonized the last group as evil abusers. There was a need to be considered a “strong victim” in two of them. I don’t really remember the personality issues of the third, so I don’t recall if this was also their pattern. However, with the other two, it was a consistent rinse and repeat. As far as I know, it is still rinse and repeat.

All three of them had difficult families where there was a need to reach certain heights in order to be noticed. While they may be noticed otherwise, it wouldn’t be for good reasons. In the case of one of them, their father wanted a “genius child” and began teaching them math and physics even before they could read. This person must have had a fair amount of intelligence to, at the very least, make it appear that they understood what was being taught. I don’t know if that was an act, or if they did have some comprehension at that age, but no longer grasped it in their later years. I don’t know enough about how child development works, and what we might understand, and then lose later on, compared to how well we can play a part at that age.

Anyway, in that case, if this person didn’t perform well, their father was “disappointed”, and by that I mean, overly critical and, well, mean. There was no room for failure, and the only correct outcome was, “genius child”. Their mother, on the other hand, was overly indulgent, and when I say that, I mean to the point of likely mental illness. She believed she had given birth to the second coming, and when I say that, I am not kidding. She truly thought she had the Christ child reincarnated, and told them this. On the one hand, they couldn’t measure up because their father had impossible standards, and on the other side, they couldn’t measure up because they weren’t a divine child here to ring in the rapture. As you can imagine, this caused a lot of emotional damage, and I am sure that NPD was just part of the outcome that their parents inflicted.

Now that we have talked about the basis for both things, let me explain why thinking these two things are incongruent with one another, and why they can never coexist.

A child that develops NPD is one that harkens to what their parents think of them. They are shaped by it, they are molded by it, and it infiltrates all aspects of their personality building, that leaves them with a Potemkin village in place of a whole person. It’s really unfortunate, but it definitely means that people’s opinions matter to them, and they are deeply affected by negative thoughts about them.

A psychopathic child is likely best described as a child from hell for anyone that gets one of us. A lot of child-rearing appeals to that child’s emotions and desire for approval. A child will bend to the will of the parent for several reasons.

1. They are the adult, and a child often looks for guidance.

2. The child experiences negative emotions when they are criticized by their caregivers.

3. They experience fear, and it is the caregiver that can protect them and comfort them when they feel it. Primary caregivers are important sounding boards for children to tell them when they are doing things wrong, and to praise them when they do well. These are critical aspects of a child’s upbringing, and so long as the parents have healthy expectations, they will grow and mature well.

Not with a psychopathic child. With a psychopathic child, you, as the parent, are a mere fragment of our world. It never occurs to a psychopathic child what our parents think of us.

When I was young, if I did something bad (which happened quite a lot) and I was criticized for it, or punished for it, I didn’t care.

When I was young, and I did something good (less often) and I was praised for it, I didn’t care.

A psychopathic child is immune to people’s opinions, their expectations, their wants, desires, fears, criticisms, whatever it is, we are immune to it. It isn’t that we are hearing what they are saying and ignoring the emotions that it brings to us, it just doesn’t register. The only time it registered for me is when it was something so ridiculous in my parents’ opinion, that I would still hear about it years later.

A psychopathic child won’t try to garner praise, nor will they care about anger or disappointment. That isn’t an ‘us’ problem, that’s a ‘whoever is mad at us’ problem. This also will vex teachers. There isn’t anything that they can do to cajole us into expectations. Bribery is the only way forward with us, but if there is a way for us to get whatever it is they are using to bribe us so we do better, nuts to you, we’re going to just take it, won’t care when you’re mad about that situation, and now you have lost your bargaining chip.

For a person to develop NPD, there has to be emotional investment in the opinions of those that are the primary caregivers. It is a required aspect for that child to develop that adaptation. A psychopathic child cannot care. There is no wiring for that to even cross our minds. We are frustrating children, even for a saint to raise, because the playbook that is generally used for shaping a child has no effect on us. Instead, a whole new playbook must be crafted in order to gain any ground, and that ground can be lost in an instant if we can figure out how to get whatever it is that is our current currency without any input from our families. Once that happens, it’s do over time, reset, go all the way back to the beginning.

NPD is a reliance on others for the internal ego support necessary to function.

Psychopathy is lacking the emotional needs of neurotypicals, but learning how to coexist with the world regardless, because the world is stingy with its good stuff when you don’t care about the gatekeepers of said good stuff.

These are two extremely different things. The reason that they cannot coexist is because the one that comes hardwired, psychopathy, disallows for the behavior that creates the other, NPD, to have any effect on us. We wouldn’t even notice the poor behavior of the parents. Their wants and needs regarding our behavior wouldn’t even register as a suggestion. They would have a better outcome from pounding their heads into a concrete wall. We wouldn’t notice that, either.

For NPD to be created, you have to first have the ability to care what other people think of you, and their opinion of you has a deep impact. One of the most challenging aspects of having a psychopathic child is figuring out that you basically are either entertaining to us, or you are not. If you are not, we will not listen to you. If you are, you might have a chance. As the parent of a psychopathic child, you have to be the bringer of all things good. You have to be the firm and unwavering gatekeeper of those things, and the only place they can be dispensed. If you aren’t you have lost our attention. That is not a good place of negotiation for that parent.

Parents that create NPD require that child bend to their will.

Parents with a psychopathic child have to bend to that child in order to get them to learn enough to not kill themselves. Otherwise, they will have no chance of peace in their lives and their kid is unlikely to survive childhood.

They are fundamentally irreconcilable with one another. Youu cannot have NPD, and also be a psychopath. Those that would tell you otherwise have a deep misunderstanding of both things. Unfortunately, many of these people have alphabet soup after their names and will confuse their own patients, because they are apparently incapable of a singular critical thought that would make it evident that this is not possible.

The last place this confusion comes from is the ASPD/psychopathy conundrum. That is, antisocial personality disorder is not psychopathy, nor is it related to psychopathy. It was a behavioral diagnosis only that acts as a trashcan for people’s bad behavior, without looking for the cause of that behavior. Most people diagnosed with ASPD are neurotypical, and as a diagnosis, ASPD is about as useful as paper in the rain.

A person with NPD can certainly have antisocial personality disorder.

A psychopath can certainly have antisocial personality disorder.

The problem arises when a person with NPD is also told that they have ASPD. Without understanding what ASPD is, that leads them to think that they are a psychopath. They aren’t. They have narcissitic personlity disorder with antisocial traits. That’s not remotely the same thing as psychopathy.

There you have it. That is why NPD and psychopathy cannot coexist in the same person. What creates NPD is absent in a psychopath. People claiming otherwise fall into one of these categories.

1. The uneducated. This can certainly include clinicians that apparently believe their degree stands in place of knowledge. They have the degree, so they don’t have to continue learning, and they don’t allow for themselves to be challenged. They also continue this misinformation with their patients, and leave them in a quagmire of confusion.

2. Those that self-diagnose. These are those that read the buzzwords and decide that they apply to them. That is when you will see people that have lists of diagnoses on their social media bios like:
   
   BPD
   OCD
   Anxiety
   ADHD
   CPTSD
   Bipolar
   Psychosis
   Psychopathy
   NPD

Yes, that is from a real person who claims all of that, and more. Whether this is an account of someone grossly misinformed, or someone that is larping, I have no idea. What I do know, is all of that cannot coexist in a person. My understanding is that with responsible diagnostics, that once a person is diagnosed with something like psychosis, that is where is ends. They don’t keep looking for new things to tack on. It is the most serious diagnosis trumps all others, and that is where they focus.

Anyway, that’s it. Hopefully that answered your questions about why they cannot be in the same person. If you have any more questions, let me know in the comments.

Why Do Narcissists Need Other People to Validate Them?

If personality disorders are learned behavior, why can’t a narcissist unlearn what they have learned and relearn? Does that mean the capacity was never there to begin with?