Tuesday, February 20, 2007

How to Recognize Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Do you ever get that eerie feeling that the people in your life are not actually people at all but really just a crowd of walking, talking egos? I believe that many disorders stem from one disorder, and that is the distortion of our Selves through our personas.

Aldous Huxley said that "Each man is an island universe." and he also said, "Everyone is overacting their favorite character in fiction." I've created a short list to help you distinguish the real people from those lost in the abysses of their own created egoland.

1. How often does he or she express concern or sadness for someone else? Have they ever taken action on such concern or sadness?

2. Identify if whether the person, when in conversation, is really talking "with you", which includes actual listening and response, or whether he/she is just waiting for their turn to talk. If it's the latter, you may notice he or she responding irrelevantly, consistantly cutting you off, or their eyes glazing over when it's your turn to speak.

3. Does he or she only listen to music, watch movies, read books that they come across themselves? Is recommending something to that person a surefire way to immediately turn them off to whatever it is you've recommended?

4. Is this person always seeking admiration and praise from others?

5. Does he or she tend to look at their self as this great or tragic hero and their life as this extremely interesting epic saga? Do they seem to live in a world of their own?

6. Is this person frequent to self-loathing, self-pity, and other emo-like tendencies?

7. Does he or she feel that they are of such a unique caliber that only a handful of, if any, people in the entire world could possibly understand them?

8. Has an unfounded self of entitlement, is always expecting to get what he/she wants, and automatically assumes the role that they see fit for themselves.

9. Is often envious of others or believes others are envious of them.

10. When they overhear a conversation in their near vacinity, their immediate reaction is to assume that they are either being spoken to or spoken about--even when it's just two other people having an unrelated conversation with each other. (i.e. "Were you talking to me?" "Uhm...no.")

Anyway, don't feel too crummy if you suffer from many of these symptoms--it is rare to find someone who doesn't. I'm certainly not claiming innocence.

4 comments:

Brian Musica said...

That describes me PERFECTLY!!! ;)

Splinter News said...

Well, I discovered in high school that it is no use worrying what people think about you, because no one is thinking about you at all, everyone's basically like,
'aahhmm...is my maykup lewk gewd?'

Otherwise, yeah, it's weird, one time I was walking around campus, and I had this flash of like, wait a minute, what are these bodies all around me, and do they exist on this plain,
which, i think is another topic.

otherwise otherwise, I have to be honest and say that majority of these, I was thinking, "NEW YORK!!" ...haha.

chinlingo said...

Wait are you talking about me?

grace gunawan said...

damn, i am really that narcisstic, am I?? and just about a couple of nights ago i 'drunkenly' said to my friend that i wanted to make a magazine based on me. lol.