Autism and Narcissism

These three weeks I've spent at home - 2 on leave, 1 on sick leave - have been pretty stressful and intense.  Lots of stuff going on, both in my head and in my life.  Problems to figure out.  Small things some of them.  Like I said somewhere else, though - these things are all small drops of water, but taken together they're a tidal wave.  I've had a huge backwash from mum's death.  Things have caught up.  I've gotten myself into a bit of a state - as evidenced in the 'Goodnight, and Good Luck' thread - and worried a lot of people.  I've felt guilt, shame, remorse.  I've felt fluctuating senses of doom, then optimism.  The booze has fueled a lot of this.

I've also done a lot of self-analysis, and have given myself a bit of a hard time - and perhaps I've deserved to.  I've tried to look at myself from the outside.

I was watching some interesting videos earlier: interviews with Dr Ravani Durvasula, a prominent US Psychology Professor.  Interesting to watch if you've never seen her before.  She was talking in one interview about narcissism (her pet subject), and explaining about the four different basic types of narcissist.  I sat up and took notice when she spoke about the 'covert narcissist': the one who thinks the world hasn't given them what it should;  who thinks they deserve more.  She talks about the basic elements in all narcissists - someone who is grandiose, who lacks empathy, who has a high sense of entitlement, is constantly seeking validation, is arrogant - and how it's a disorder of self-esteem.  It seriously got me to wondering about myself.

Am I a narcissist?  Or is it that, as a result of my autism, I demonstrate traits that could be mistaken for narcissism?

I don't think I'm grandiose.  But I've been told I can come across as pompous and high-minded.  I realise this.  I looked back over some of the things I've said - on here and on Facebook - and have found myself saying to myself "You pompous, arrogant p***k!"  I've upset people on here and on other social media - but usually when I've been drunk, and the Dionysian side is rampant: the side I've always held inside for fear of reprisals.  I think of it as a manifestation of years of being put down and ignored, and not speaking up for myself - and the booze lets it flow.  At last, I get to say what I think - and you're all gonna hear me!  Basically, then, that's self-esteem that's been repressed suddenly asserting itself.  Or over-asserting itself, as is often the case.  And maybe it's grandiosity, too.  Posturing.

Sometimes, again usually after drinking, I've posted status updates on Facebook.that can easily be read as passive-aggressive - as making indirect digs at people.  The social distance, of course, makes it easier to do.  Except most of the people on my friends list are people I work with.  So, they're seeing one side of me at work - and then another side of me on Facebook.  Maybe a little spiteful.  Maybe a little pompous.  Maybe not quite so 'nice' after all.  And I really wonder - because people never tell you what they really think - whether I actually come across as quite arrogant, emotionally manipulative, self-centred.... basically, narcissistic.

As Robbie Burns wrote:  'Wud some pow'r the giftie gi'e us, to see ourselves as others see us.'

Be interested to read others thoughts on this issue.

PS Incidentally, I found Facebook too toxic for me in the end, so I've disengaged from it.  It's a good move, I think.

  • I'm related to a couple of narcissists - there is no way that an autistic person can do what narcissists do.

    In essence, I think you're correct; to be a successful narcissist involves subtleties of behaviour and understanding which most autistic people would find impossible. However, we should be cautious that we don't idealise autistic people and so blind ourselves to the fact that we can have negative personality traits just like anyone else. My own episodes of being vile to other people have certainly been characterised by all of the behaviours that you mentioned; in fact they may have been all the more damaging because my lack of ability in those areas made my selfishness all the more apparent and distasteful to the people around me ("are you really so arrogant that you think you'd get away with that!"). The negative characteristic here, whether we call it narcissism or just selfishness, is not in whether we are able to manipulate people successfully, but that some part of our psyche occasionally drives us to attempt it, even when rational consideration would tell us that we're unlikely to succeed and what the potential consequences might be.

    I've always been a 'people-pleaser'

    I don't always, or even often, manage to please them, but I'd certainly describe myself that way, or even just "doormat". As well as the conflict aversion that you describe, it has many other repercussions too; an inability to ask for help, overloading with too many tasks for fear of saying no, poor self-esteem and sense of identity, passive rather than pro-active behaviour, inability to begin a conversation, and probably many more.

  • I found this, which I think is enlightening.  Forewarned is forearmed...

  • Thanks Tom.

    I do believe they target us as they need people they find easy to hoodwink and manipulate.. another reason I am even more wary of people in general!

  • Thank you, Lou.  I've recently fallen victim to another one - though a minor thing in comparison to the 30-odd years of dealing with my sister-in-law.  I kept the peace for my mother's sake, while she was still alive.  After she passed away, I decided I had to cut my brother and his wife out of my life.  It was the only way.  My aunt (my mother's only surviving sibling) always says to me 'Your mum wouldn't have wanted that.'  I have to remind her, kindly, that mum would have wanted me to be happy.  With them, I can't be.

    Good luck with your own recovery.  It takes time, and they're so toxic to people like us.  The worst combination.

  • Constant anxiety about fitting in, and chronic masking, have made much of my life seem like I was trying to follow a script which was being written in real-time by everyone else. Coupled with executive function deficits, it's led to feeling a lack of agency; I'm not just putting others' desires before my own, I lose the ability to even know or have my own desires. Why bother when I'm just the ball in a pinball machine? Maybe the temporary, manic bouts of narcissistic behaviour are an expression of this; a part of my mind desperately seeking a feeling of agency, which occasionally breaks it's chains and goes looking for a fix of "I am damned well going to be me now, and I'm going to have whatever I want for once, by any means possible." In the absence of a particular purpose, any kind of control over something or someone would be the obvious substitute - as is often seen in self-harming behaviour (and doing things which make others dislike us could be considered "self-harm".)

    I think that's very astute.  Putting the desires of others before my own has led me to feel that my own desires actually count for very little.  It's why I tend to be influenced and manipulated by stronger personalities.  I've always been a 'people-pleaser' - I think, in good part, because I've been seeking ways to get people to like me when they don't naturally seem to like me.  I feel like a puppet.  I'll back down in arguments because, even if I'm sure of my ground, I don't want to be tested on it further in case it undermines my self-esteem even more (which isn't to say that I'm not open to considering different points of view).

    Although I'm not a religious person, I take a lot from Buddhist philosophy.  I like the idea that we are all - all of us - composed of these different states and energies: anger, greed, desire, etc.  That we can acknowledge this, and through this acknowledgement gain a higher understanding, or enlightenment.  I think I have a good awareness of my faults, and am able to admit them to myself and others (though I need to be careful about who those 'others' are!)  I know that there is much in my power to do and to achieve, if I take the right approach.  The one thing I do agree with AA about is that a spiritual approach is probably the one that will work the best for me.  I need to try to minimise and ultimately eradicate the things that do me harm, and focus on the things that help me towards my goals.  It's partly why, for instance, I've now disengaged from FaceBook - especially the political forums I used to use.  The bunker mentality of it all.  The name-calling.  The viciousness and hatred - even among people who share the same basic beliefs.  I no longer want to get in the ring with people.  I have a work colleague - my political opposite, but we are able to set that aside like decent human beings and get along: he loves to talk about 'loony Lefties', by which he means anyone who isn't Conservative - who takes on all comers.  He spends hours and hours ranting on social media - arguing points into the wee small hours just to have the final word on something... which, knowing him, is usually a four-letter word beginning with 'c'!  I said to him one day 'Why do it?'  You can physically see the blood pressure rising inside him - the veins standing out, the eyes bulging.  He'll kill himself eventually.  For what?  For having won a point.  He keeps trying to get me going, but he knows I won't take him up - and he actually seems to respect that.  I'm beyond that stuff.  I have my convictions, the same as anyone.  I have things that make me angry.  But for the sake of my own health and sanity, I know I can't be in that fray any longer.  People generally don't discuss things rationally, it seems.  More and more, they have arguments and fights - which ultimately achieve nothing.  I've been reading (I've started reading again!) 'Stoner', by John Williams - the 'greatest novel you've never read', which was re-discovered a few years ago, and has since become a bestseller.  In it, one of the characters - a retiring university dean named Archer Sloane - is talking to a younger colleague (Stoner) about war - the First World War having just broken out.  He says "A war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we - you and I and others like us - have brought up from the slime."  That, too, seems to be the nature of much human discourse now.  It always has been, of course.  But we are supposed to have evolved as a species.  Have we?  I sometimes wonder.

    I don't know whether my path is exactly a path to wisdom.  But it's a path to inner peace.  And I need that more than anything else.

  • I mean in the sense that autism is genetically encoded in the brain - we don't 'develop' it.  The causes and risk factors in the development and pathology of personality disorders are many and varied.  Research into a genetic link is still, as I understand it, sketchy and inconclusive.

  • Hi Tom, 

    In my albeit uneducated opinion, you possess too much empathy to be a narcissist - and I'm still recovering from falling victim to one Confused

  • I'm related to a couple of narcissists - there is no way that an autistic person can do what narcissists do.

    They are just horrible. They lie, manipulate, re-invent history to suit their needs, have no conscience, are happy to abuse and bully if it's convenient - just nasty people to deal with.

    They are expert at making it look as though you are being unreasonable when they are abusing you. It comes naturally to them.

    I haven't spoken to my sister for 18 months - and it's my fault. Apparently.

  • An interesting topic, and there have been all sorts of interesting points in the thread already; I hope no-one minds if I quote where necessary rather than reply individually.

    From reading Tom's original post and watching the videos (insightful, thanks for those!), I could identify myself as having the autistic kind of (appearance of?) self-centredness, but with outbreaks of the narcissistic kind during life's darker moments. As I said to Tom in the other thread that he mentioned, my own alcoholic "Dionysian monster" was a pretty vile character, and I know that the monster must represent some part of myself.

    One difference which I think is very important is this. In psychology, there is the concept of ego-tonicity; something is ego-tonic if it is a comfortable part of your personality, or ego-dystonic if it's a trait which you find discomfiting yourself. A true narcissist finds their behaviour ego-tonic, so would not ask themself such penetrating questions about their behaviour as in Tom's top post. The very fact that we're worrying about and trying to change these behaviours is a good sign that we're not clinically narcissistic; we're finding this aspect of ourselves ego-dystonic in the extreme!

    The idea of these bouts of narcissism being a disorder of self-esteem rings true to me. Constant anxiety about fitting in, and chronic masking, have made much of my life seem like I was trying to follow a script which was being written in real-time by everyone else. Coupled with executive function deficits, it's led to feeling a lack of agency; I'm not just putting others' desires before my own, I lose the ability to even know or have my own desires. Why bother when I'm just the ball in a pinball machine? Maybe the temporary, manic bouts of narcissistic behaviour are an expression of this; a part of my mind desperately seeking a feeling of agency, which occasionally breaks it's chains and goes looking for a fix of "I am damned well going to be me now, and I'm going to have whatever I want for once, by any means possible." In the absence of a particular purpose, any kind of control over something or someone would be the obvious substitute - as is often seen in self-harming behaviour (and doing things which make others dislike us could be considered "self-harm".)

    It didn't really seem feasible that there were narcissists everywhere, seemingly hunting us down. Far more likely that, lacking empathy, we see ourselves in others?

    Or maybe, from the perspective of an autistic person with social impairments, poor assertiveness, indifference to trivial social norms, etc., the behaviour of even well-adjusted non-autistic people just seems like it could be narcissism. Relatively speaking, non-autistic people seem more interested in social rank than us. They seem to use secret (to us) forms of communication to get what they want. They seem to prefer transmitting opinions rather than facts. I think that there is some truth in what the videos said about autistic people being attractive targets for narcissists, manipulators and bullies. However, I often see autistic people jumping to the conclusion that there is malicious intent from non-autistic people when it seems more likely that there was a breakdown in communication due to either party misunderstanding the other's behaviour or having misconceptions about their psychology.

    I can care about someone and for someone.  But I can't put myself in their shoes.  And if someone's deeply upset, I really don't always know how to respond.

    The simplest axiom of compassionate behaviour is the old chestnut; "treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself." In the absence of any more nuanced knowledge about a person, that's all we can ever fall back on. However, autistic minds work differently, so this often fails, too; as DongFeng5 said, it becomes just a projection onto the non-autistic person of our autistic needs in the hypothetical situation we're trying to imagine. Had a bad day? OK, I'll not touch you, say nothing, and leave you alone for while; it's what I'd want! If we lack the pragmatic communication channels that other people have, anything else is pure guesswork.

    and have given myself a bit of a hard time

    Asking ourselves searching questions is always going to be hard work. Try to look on it as an investment in self-improvement, not as punishment.

  • The difference is that one is a personality disorder

    Caused by...?

  • Something that was posted a good while ago. 

    www.kmarshack.com/.../

  • I found this, which is interesting...

    Why Aspergians are not Narcissists

    And this... if you can tolerate the computer-generated voice:

    Is it Asperger's or Narcissism or Both?

  • Interesting.  The difference is that one is a personality disorder and the other is a result of neurological wiring - but who would be able to distinguish the difference, necessarily, except a trained psychologist?

    The 'empathy' issue is more contentious.  I don't think we are unempathetic.  It reveals itself, though, in ways that don't seem so obvious.  An Aspie friend believes that because we often experience a lot of trauma in our lives because of our 'differences', we develop a response to it that can make us seem detached and cold.  People say that I can't be autistic because I work in care.  But that's not the case.  I can care about someone and for someone.  But I can't put myself in their shoes.  And if someone's deeply upset, I really don't always know how to respond.

  • I think you might be onto something. 

    I don't think I'm grandiose or entitled - I keep trying to explain to people that none of us are entitled to anything - but like you I can see parallels between autism and narcissism w.r.t. the other traits. 

    There have been previous comments on the forum about encountering narcissists, and I did wonder at the time whether it was a case of "collective projection". It didn't really seem feasible that there were narcissists everywhere, seemingly hunting us down. Far more likely that, lacking empathy, we see ourselves in others?