(it/her)
stormykat
Karma: 20
Oh yes I’ve seen that paragraph of yours about NPD vs folk-narcissism before. This actually relates to the cover / overt distinction think? With overt narcissism referring to the more folk-y grandiose narcissism, while covert manifests as hyper-insecurity. The study you posted about NPD patients getting the same as controls was using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I took a look at the items and they’re all very stereotypically grandiose. I actually score only around average on grandiose measures like the NPI myself, while scoring very above average on ‘covert’ measures like ‘The Maladaptive Covert Narcissism Scale’. My guess would be if you got NPD patients to do these more ‘covert’ scales then you’d start getting the expected results (covert narcissism also gets called ‘vulnerable narcissism’ or ‘hyper-sensitive narcissism’). Anecdotally from looking at people talk about their experiences with narcissistic ex-partners or parents or such, as well as seemingly falling close to that cluster of symptoms myself, their behaviour seems much more vulnerable / sensitive than grandiose / boasting. This might be a case of the folk concept of narcissism impeding scientific research into the real phenomenon?
The only part that’s confusing me: if this is a thing that can happen, why does it happen in so few other people? (Why isn’t it in the literature / DSM / whatever? Or is it? Or you’re just unusual? Or the literature / DSM just sucks and I shouldn’t pay much attention to it?
I feel like autism research has been stunted by seeing autism as fundamentally about ‘social deficit’ in some sense rather than some underlying shift in sensory priors à la the Intense World concept. I guess the correlation you’d be looking for here is ‘early life emotional hypersensitivity’ with ‘later life emotional empathy deficits’ (or something like that) which from my brief Googling has simply never been studied. So it may be just that no one’s looked yet. But it links into the general Intense World concept pretty well I think? Like if ‘eye contact is ultra arousing’ seemingly can cause ‘I avoid eye contact’, then I see no reason why it wouldn’t generalise to ‘expressing sympathy and care is ultra arousing and difficult while ignoring/self-blunting is calming’ causing ‘its extremely difficult to feel care for others and I tend to ignore others feelings’. There is pretty good evidence implying above average empathic distress (1) (2: meta analysis) in autism that supports the idea. If the Intense World Model is even approximately true-ish you’d expect a ton of heterogeneity, which you could look for, but would also make results look inconsistent and maybe make practitioners miss the pattern. Perhaps I just found empathic concern particularly distressing and/or was particularly capable of suppressing it relative to the typical autistic person. I don’t know :)
With the horseshoe theory thing: I guess this is how you end up with people diagnosed with / who have strong clear clinical-level traits of both ASPD and autism (I have met such people).
When different adults (in the same general country / culture) have different personalities, I generally prefer explanations in terms of them having different strengths of their innate drives (and related things), rather than how their childhoods differed, mostly because of the heritability literature
Ah you believe like most personality differences between same-cultural individuals are mostly due to genes and not early-life experiences? I’ve seen that this applies to ‘big’ traits like the Big 5, but do you think this’d carry over to individual facets / smaller traits too? (like ‘dominance’ or ‘empathic concern’) Question: do you feel like this kinda invalidates narratives of personality that centre childhood experiences? Or might they still be useful as like- ways of predicting / understanding the specifics of how one’s dispositions might have been reinforced / triggered during development, and the day-to-day specifics of the ways they manifest in adulthood?
Oh wow thanks for the response! Also sorry I’m so late in replying as well, long story.
In terms of your NPD thing about having an unusually strong reaction to others attention- how might you explain the difference between overt and covert narcisissm through this? Its always seemed to me like narcasism is surely a reaction to or coping mechanism that arises from persistent insecurity early in development, or something like that. But is there not actually good evidence for this? I guess maybe the early-life insecurity in general and the narcisissm more specifically are both mutual effects of the ‘unusually strong reaction to others attention’… But then you would expect sensitivity to others opinion to correlate with narcissism far above and beyond insecurity specifically.. I will look into this (I guess it depends on whether you think the heightened reaction is the root cause, or if its just downstream of ‘early-life insecurity’ or something like that. by default the second feels more intuitive but i dont know) (EDIT: did research. you’re probably right. there seems good evidence narcissism and self-esteem are pretty strongly dissociable and its more just that people higher in narcissism simply fluctuate in self-esteem way more depending on the approval/disapproval of others, which matches your hypothesis)
I think your alexithymia comment makes a lot of sense and matches anecdotally very well. I was hyper emotional as a child, I even originally had a righteous sense of justice and could become very horribly distressed at watching my beloved heroes on TV lose battles and such (vivid memory of being a pre-adolescent watching a documentary on Hitler scream-crying fantasising about torturing him for eternity in my mind- a very very alien kind of reaction to the present-day me). Cue teenage years with a lot of dissociation and emotional-suppression, followed up by an adult me who has learned how to act kind pretty reliably but feels little for others and has little to no ‘moral feeling’.
I do agree the alexithymia certainly matters a lot in my phenomenology- for example one of the worst things I ever did I did feel an unpleasant pressure in my head when thinking about it, which was definitely in retrospect a kind of guilt, functionally speaking at least. It didn’t have the default phenomenology of ‘I can’t believe I hurt this person, how horrible, I must apologise to make up for it!’ that the average person seems to describe guilt as having, but it played a similiar-ish role in my behaviour, and did seem to be ‘punishment at hurting someone you’re not supposed to hurt’, so…
I don’t think its just ‘its there but you don’t notice it’ though- given how intense the reactions were in early childhood I do think I could notice. Like I can notice very strong, straightforward emotions in myself but I have done / seen things that would trigger any typical persons guilt / empathy very very strongly but I feel no meaningful physiological symptoms at all. Because of this I think its also largely just that guilt/empathy got heavily inhibited/surpressed over time from being so exhausting and miserable for me to feel. Empathy was often awful for me to feel and I’m happy to feel much less of it (‘empathy’ here meaning emotional contagion, not empathic concern specifically).
The thing with empathic concern is that from what I understand, it requires a kind of additional component on top of emotional contagion empathy? Like ‘youre in pain and that hurts me’ + ‘so i will care for u’. Even when I was young and the first component was in full swing I’m not sure I ever really developed the second. So that might be less of a ‘alexithymia’ + ‘emotional suppression’ thing and more of a social stunting thing?? Because even when I absolutely did not know how to suppress those feelings the care still never naturally came, so that seems like something is lacking beyond the influence of those two components. I had friends in early childhood who never really showed sympathy ever and if anything tended to ignore or make fun of me for crying when hurt and stuff like that. Given these sorts of childhood learning experiences plus the intrinsic difficulties growing up with autism, it seems plausible to me I just never quite learned how to turn second-hand distress into concern reliably, so that social instinct just never really healthily developed. But I could be wrong.
Even nowadays very occassionally when I’m presented with extremely strong stimulus I will feel emotional contagion- such as feeling really awful because my girlfriend feels awful, but this will never really become any meaningful impulse towards helping or attempting to alleviate that suffering for her. (If anything it will often [although far from always] tend to become anger or irritation). Thanks to my narcissism issues i tend to have anger issues where if my loved ones aren’t behaving the way im supposed to, such as feeling distress when i dont want them to, i can develop regular bursts of anger. this ties into ur ‘anger issues’ thing i think. writing this out it seems to my ‘sociopathy-like symptomology’ are maybe just quite polycausal in origin >//<
I’m also very sadistic which is a final thing that I guess could be influencing me, I can get a very strong rush of pleasure from cruelty, even when its not totally fake / consensual. This probably hepls surpress any empathetic response further depending on context.
so then perhaps… alexithymia + emotional suppression + autism in general + childhood experiences + some kind of subclinical narcissistic anger thing? = the reason why.. ?
By writing this out I think I’ve developed a historical model of myself. Although I’m interested if you think I’m very likely mistaken about any of this. Thank you!!! Fun!!
Wondering how you’d characterise someone with characteristics more like me.
I’ve been described as sociopath-like by my partner, a close friend and a psychiatrist. I have essentially no capacity for empathic concern or guilt (although this is confounded by being highly alexithymic and autistic) - even at times when I’ve intentionally done very obviously bad and harmful things that seriously distress loved ones. I don’t have the instinctive sense of taboo / repulsion that seems to come naturally to most people and have socially gotten in trouble for this (talking to people about the moral nature of bestiality for fun not realising people were becoming genuinly repulsed at the concept- not understanding when I’m supposed to ‘boo’ vs ‘yay’ if you know what I mean).
However I have a very strong drive to be liked and have always been hyper sensitive to peoples opinions and perceptions of me (maybe related to this: I score very above average on covert narcassism scales). I am also a woman which might have something to do with the patterns I’ve learned too, I don’t know.
Ah your explanation of this makes a lot of sense yeah! Thank you!
Just checking but its not like the proximal cause explanation applies always? Like it’s not as if personality is >85% genetic, things like spontaneous trauma unrelated to innate dispositions presumably can often still play a major role. (?)
What on earth this is wild. I was actually going to particulate in a TMS study to enhance social cognition a while back but didn’t go through. Kind of scary although its not like this is typical obviously. I wonder how this happened.