Why I am Pro Cure

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10 Jul 2013, 8:09 pm

Isn't it possible that you don't have NPD, and the NPD-like traits you do seem to possess are actually a product of your black-and-white autistic thinking? The belief that one is a total, worthless failure if he or she is not rich and popular is just as likely to be the result of faulty autistic thinking as it is to be of NPD. The two conditions can have similar symptoms, albeit due to different underlying causes. If such is the situation in your case, I would think it best to forget about NPD and focus on the autism, or, in your case, the NLD.

Of course, that is exactly what you're trying to do. The point I'm trying to make is that perhaps you are operating under a false premise. You want to cure the autistic part of yourself because you believe it hinders the ability of your NPD self to succeed. Perhaps there is no NPD side to yourself at all? Perhaps the explanation is much simpler than you are willing to consider? After all, is it logical to believe that every professional you've ever seen is wrong and only you, a nonprofessional, are right?

Isn't it better to investigate other possibilities before resorting to treatments that may very well physically harm or even kill you? You are still very young. Even among NTs, wild success at your age is very rare.

Schneekugel
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12 Jul 2013, 9:36 am

Tyri0n wrote:

Thus, I literally cannot live with my condition. I naturally have lots of ambition and desire to be an awesome person whom people respect. NLD and Asperger's make this impossible, so I literally cannot live with my condition.

NLD and Asperger dont make it impossible to be a good neighbor, to help your friends and familiy from now and then, when they really need help, to care for others. There is a big difference between "being known" and deserving respect.

For the last one, the first mentioned has no influence.

What about being the awesome and respected person, helping in an animal shelter or church collections?

I mean my jr. chef is rich and known because of the company being one of the first doing the stuff we do, but he is simply a pampered 38 year old kid, that isnt even able to live on his own. Being known =/ respected.

Tyri0n
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12 Jul 2013, 7:49 pm

Schneekugel wrote:

Tyri0n wrote:

For the last one, the first mentioned has no influence.

What about being the awesome and respected person, helping in an animal shelter or church collections?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if being a "good person" was enough to get people to like you and to be successful? The problem with society is there's a disconnect between what moralists and priests says is "good" and what normal people the social consensus say is "good." Guess which one most people pay attention to? And guess which definition of good is based soley on pomposity and hot air? Yes, it's no wonder nobody pays attention to it.

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13 Jul 2013, 10:25 am

Tyri0n wrote:

Schneekugel wrote:

Tyri0n wrote:

For the last one, the first mentioned has no influence.

What about being the awesome and respected person, helping in an animal shelter or church collections?

So what do you need, people that live 100 miles away of you, and that you dont have social contacts with them, to like you? Does an person liking you, that you yourself dont even know, have any impact on your life? - Nope.

Maybe you should make yourself aware, that the only reason why people with NPD are so in need of other people giving them the feeling to be "a good an right person", is because they themselve dont believe in that, so they need other to tell them that, so they can feel normal. Do you hide little kids in chains in your cellar? Do you slaughter people in dark backstreets? If not...what makes you think, that you are no good, worthy person, so that you would need others to tell you that? Being normal, dont make you a bad person, you have to be ashamed of. Being bad, makes you a bad person, you need to be ashamed of.

vanhalenkurtz
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13 Jul 2013, 10:00 pm

I believe the 'cure' is decent jobs for us. I don't want a pill or a shrink to help me become a chattering phony.

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Tyri0n
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13 Jul 2013, 10:32 pm

Schneekugel wrote:

Tyri0n wrote:

Schneekugel wrote:

Tyri0n wrote:

For the last one, the first mentioned has no influence.

What about being the awesome and respected person, helping in an animal shelter or church collections?

I just don't think the "good" that preachers and moralists talk about really means much. What's good is what the majority of people in a society say is good. That's about it. The majority of people in my society say that being introverted is bad. Therefore, it is.

I actually feel good about myself when people call me an a**hole, cold, mean, manipulative, liar, dick, and and douche. It makes me feel powerful while being called awkward, clueless, naive, inept, or klutzy makes me feel weak and incompetent. I'd much rather be called the former set of terms rather than the latter, but I have been called all of these at various points in time.

Callista
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13 Jul 2013, 10:50 pm

Quote:

I actually feel good about myself when people call me an as*hole, cold, mean, manipulative, liar, dick, and and douche. It makes me feel powerful while being called awkward, clueless, naive, inept, or klutzy makes me feel weak and incompetent. I'd much rather be called the former set of terms rather than the latter, but I have been called all of these at various points in time.

I have the opposite reaction. I feel powerless when people call me mean in some way. I feel like I've failed, horribly, like I can't control anything--not even myself. It's not nice to be called out as being incompetent, but at least that's just a lack of ability, something I can't help. If someone accuses me of making a willful choice to be a dick to somebody, that hits home. If I had my choice between incompetence and malevolence, I'd rather be totally incapable of doing anything useful, ever, than be the kind of person who willingly hurts others. My mom knew that about me when I was little. When she wanted to make me feel bad, when she wanted to manipulate me or take out her annoyance on me, she'd tell me I was a horrible child who was going to give her a heart attack, that I was lazy and rebellious and she was under so much stress because I didn't help her enough. She didn't call me stupid or ugly or any of the usual insults; she insulted my moral character. When I got angry at her and said I hated her, she would bring it up over and over for months as an example of what a hateful child I was and how I was ruining her life. It really hurt when she did that, not least because I knew that I had been wrong to get angry at her like that and throw that insult in the first place. It made her accusations seem all the more legitimate.

I don't know if you've ever been on the receiving end of that kind of thing, but trust me--it's not something you want to experience, ever. You'll doubt, your whole life, whether you're capable of ever doing anything good, and no matter how much you try you'll always feel inadequate. No matter how nice I am or how much I help others it's all somehow still selfish and horrible. With those ideas running through my head, the only way I've managed to find peace in all of it is to realize that it doesn't really matter how I feel about myself, or whether I feel I'm good enough; the only thing that makes a difference is that my actions--however selfish I feel they are--can be judged objectively. If I judge my actions objectively, then I can circumvent my feelings about myself. Even if I really turn out to be as nasty a person as my mother accuses me of being, just doing nice things because I like the warm fuzzies or the attention, I can still create a better world along the way. So maybe some of it is false guilt and some of it is real; well, I tell myself, I can stop angsting about it and just get on with my life. It's the choices I make that matter.

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Tyri0n
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13 Jul 2013, 11:05 pm

Callista wrote:

Quote:

Yep, my parents often called me things in the evil "genre," as have ex-girlfriends. And all are incredibly surprised when it doesn't have any effect, or I just laugh. But then some off-handed, indirect comment about lack of ability would always have a devastating effect. Like someone saying I have bad social skills. That's the worst. Being called manipulative or a crook is the best.

I wonder how much of both our strange reactions is due to having ill-fitting gender roles crowded down our throats as children. Both men and women with Asperger's or related conditions often have gender atypical brains, abilities, and behaviors.

I have an extreme hypersensitivity to anyone thinking I'm weak. Or to myself thinking I'm weak. Which is why this is an unlivable condition. NLD is the epitome of "weakness." I'd feel really great if I could be a conniving Wall Street banker without an ounce of conscience. As this is an anonymous forum, I have no problem saying what I actually think, though I would never say this in real life.

Last edited by Tyri0n on 13 Jul 2013, 11:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Callista
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13 Jul 2013, 11:12 pm

I guess I don't really get that. A person can't help having bad social skills, but being manipulative is a choice. So if someone criticizes something you can't help, that's just them being vindictive for no good reason, because how are you to be blamed for something you never chose? In those cases, my response is mostly, "Well, you're showing your true colors now, aren't you, looking down on me for something that came about by chance and genetics. I didn't choose that, and you know it, and somehow you still think that means you can deride me for it. You need to go back to logic class, because you're not making sense." It's as bad as jeering at someone for being black or gay or female or young or tone-deaf or any number of other things that people are just born being. It says a lot more about the person doing the name-calling than it does about the person they're trying to make fun of.

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13 Jul 2013, 11:16 pm

Callista wrote:

It's not about what makes the most sense from the other point of view. It's just the fact that being called weak makes me feel horrible while being called evil can, under some circumstances, make me feel un-weak, which makes me feel good. For example, being called a successful manipulator is about as good as it gets. That's because I have a special insecurity about social skills, so this actually can be processed as a compliment.

There's another side to it. Although I like thinking of myself as evil, I absolutely hate being compared to Hitler. Why? Hitler had no real allies and got surrounded and defeated. That's how I feel sometimes, so sometimes, being called evil does make me feel bad based on the context, but only if it makes me feel weak also, which it often does. On the other hand, I love being compared to Mao Zedong or Julius Caesar or other successful dictators.

So being called a dick or "insufferable" actually can make me feel bad if it's in a context that indicates I might lose friends and end up surrounded and defeated.

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14 Jul 2013, 2:50 am

Regarding the "weakness" issue, don't you think the real problem there is that you base your self esteem completely on the evaluation of other people? Even if everyone would agree that you're the best person ever, you'd still be weak and dependent because you need them to tell you that. Strong people aren't perfect in the sense that you could not find weakness in them, they just don't use other people's opinions to define themselves and instead they simply do, think and say what matters to them and let that do the defining. The alternative approach of trying to always be strong and never be perceived as weak strikes me as a pretty vain and unrealistic fantasy.
It seems to me that developing an internal locus of control over your self-esteem would be of great benefit.

It would be interesting to know where this big issue with being perceived as weak is coming from. Maybe there has been a traumatic event that has led to this belief that you absolutely must not be weak, in which case understanding it from a grown-up perspective might help finding healthier ways of dealing with inevitable weakness.

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14 Jul 2013, 3:06 am

1401b wrote:

Social skills, behavior, and coping are easy to target, once one understands how the practical mind operates.

Geez, did that sound arrogant or what??

I don't understand why that's arrogant. I should have thought it was true. From a neurological perspective I thought we already knew where social skills, coping and behaviour originated, the problem is, we just don't know how to use gene therapy or medication to alter the way the brain works or grows to prevent the problematic patterns of ASDs occuring.

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motherof2
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14 Jul 2013, 8:22 pm

Tyri0n wrote:

1401b wrote:

Social skills, behavior, and coping are easy to target, once one understands how the practical mind operates.

Geez, did that sound arrogant or what??

Yes, for someone who has explored nearly everything traditional and alternative medicine has to offer, kind of.

Let's start with behavior. I did behavioral therapy. They didn't really find anything to target. I did a group therapy class for social skills with Aspies, Schizoids and Borderlines and a few others. I think I got corrected on something twice. Once, it was for talking too quietly. Another time, it was because I said something shocking on purpose to see if they would even notice because I had gone for 4 weeks without feedback. The other participants got tons of feedback all the time. At the end, they said "your social skills seem fine. Why are you even here?"

But they aren't fine because I get selective mutism, and people get tired of me quite fast. The human connection and emotional parts of my brain are completely broken. I also don't really have interests or hobbies due to having Anhedonia. I get comically lost, can't do anything, am always making dumb mistakes, and am always running into people and things. Some of these things also work against therapy working because NT therapy works with the assumption that things like depression, low self-esteem, and anxiety are false beliefs; in my case, they are rational beliefs. Coping is impossible if they are willfully blind to my hidden Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Trust me, if you've heard of it (fad diets, vision therapy, probiotics, gluten free, supplements, and even whacky stuff like eliminating salicylates, and even Russian brain repair drugs [which, OMG, worked but had to quit due to side effects], and all the traditional stuff like "behavioral therapy"), I've probably tried it.

Well, not hyperbaric oxygen therapy or chelation therapy. Yeah, or shock therapy. Or suicide therapy. I have never tried that sh**. :lol:

The only thing that barely keeps me alive is the slim belief that, maybe, still, I can somehow become the powerful, wealthy, and respected person that my NPD says I should be. Probably, the older I get, the harder it is to maintain that hope for the future, and the more likely suicide becomes. But finding a cure that either cures or kills (stem cell treatments designed for Multiple Sclerosis that they do in India and Thailand) is another way out. 30% chance of fixing my visual-spatial and emotional problems, and 70% chance of becoming dead or left in a persistent vegetative state, I would surely take it. If my performance IQ became 120 instead of 89, and I didn't run into people or things or move awkwardly, my life would be completely changed, I'd still have all the disordered personality traits and bad social ability, but things like therapy would become effective towards changing those.

Otherwise, by the time I'm 30, if little has changed, the chances of becoming a powerful billionaire/politician will be about 0.00001%, so my chances of suicide will have risen to 99.99999%.

My husband is an Aspie and has taken the view of 'F- you' to everyone. It works for him. He enjoys his interests and deals with his obligations. He gets upset and out of control at times but it fades. He feels like a failure at the bad decisions we have made and thinks he should have made a better life for us. He recently agreed he is on the spectrum after denying it for years after our daughter was born. I think he is more at peace now. Our daughter is having a hard time now and it is hard for me to understand as I am not on the spectrum but have mental health and sensory issues to deal with. I hope she learns to be happy with what interests her and not worry to much about the rest of the world.

I hope you can accept yourself and find as much comfort as you can in what is important to you. Learning to accept that you will not be super successful will come as you get older. Therapy is not going to work if you can not relate to those trying to help you. Write in a diary, on this forum, or funnel your thoughts into something creative. Best of luck to you!

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