What Does NPD Feel Like?

you know a lot of people talk about NPD or narcissistic personality disorder from the outside but what does NPD feel like we always hear these horror stories of I dated a narcissist or I had a family member that was a narcissist that it was the worst experience of my life and it's always focused on the other person being a narcissist but when you're the narcissist what does that like isn't that something we should know I think that a lot of people with their personal experience with narcissism or at least what they're calling narcissism they feel like somebody who is a narcissist they're just like all day on a power trip always going around smashing people like destroying egos and they have this kind of like feeling of power and they feel great about it you know they're evil and they like to do all these things I think that's kind of the impression I've gotten anyway when I've read information about NPD and narcissism online but let's take a step back here back into maybe reality and realize that MPD is a mental disorder and as a mental disorder it has you know things that caused it and one of the things that caused NPD really what's at the root of narcissistic personality slaughter is having a low self-esteem which is kind of the opposite of everything that you're hearing I do know that NPD manifest in different ways for different people and some people might be more outgoing about it and they may be more in-your-face about how much better they are than you and how competitive they are and other people they may shy away from things and they may be more avoidant and may try to stay away from social situations because they get hurt more either way it's low self esteem that's driving and PD now there's a lot of mental disorders where people have low self-esteem don't get me wrong but NPD is where people trying to cup and save for that low self esteem either with grandiosity or putting themselves above other people or attention-seeking and trying to always get people to notice them pay attention to them over and above what other people want attention for basically they're always the most important thing right now since these are antagonistic traits which basically means that they rub up against people it makes it hard to relate with people it makes sense that other people would look in and think like oh this person must love like they must get off on getting me angry and pissing me off and making my day hard but that's not how it feels for somebody with NPD I mean sure maybe if they're the person who is more grandiose and they compensate more by feeling better than other people they may get into rages and they may have their hissy fits and they may get angry and they may feel the confidence and the power that comes along with that rage like anybody does won't be raged tell me you've never went off on somebody and they've felt good about it afterwards it feels good sometimes because you're getting out all that emotion you're expressing yourself and you're showing that you matter I think we all to some degree feel a little bit important after we do that but eventually that feeling wears off nobody is 100 percent raging all the time from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed and if you know somebody like that they probably have a larger problem than just NPD I do think it's useful to look at the two different like types of people with NPD even though there's not true types people can go back and forth between both but there's types there's vulnerable and there's grandiose I think it's useful to look at that because you may see different aspects of someone who has NPD by looking at those two aspects so what does it feel like for somebody who is more on the vulnerable side maybe somebody who they may get angry they may have those rageful fits but once that wears off like they realize I didn't like the way that felt I didn't mean to do that why did I do that like they may be confused so there's confusion right there right away there's a there's a feeling that's not just anger and pissed off and confidence and all that stuff that we associate with NPD there could be some confusion there could be some misunderstanding of why they do the things they do and why did I get that way but I think for somebody who's more on the vulnerable side who the low self-esteem is more prominent and it's pervasive in their life they probably always feel like the other shoe is going to drop they're probably walking around anticipating that something bad is going to happen basically that somebody's gonna poke a hole in their armor and they're gonna be found out they're gonna be put on the spot and they're going to look weak and they're not going to look like they can handle things and everyone's gonna know and it's gonna be like the worst day in their entire lives every day that fear is probably in the back of their now that doesn't mean that they're like consciously thinking at every moment of the day but it could be just like a background feeling of oh no if I don't put up this face if I don't show that I'm confident if I don't tell people that I'm better than them if I don't get all the attention for myself something's going to happen that's what's going on in the background it's that nagging anxiety that something is going to happen to them and they have to prevent it and to me this is very much the opposite of what I think people usually think with narcissism people usually think of narcissism as being that confident strong person who is you know look at me hahaha that is not how it is it's low self esteem we got to get this image out of our heads that it's this person who like loves destroying lives that's just some weird monster creation that people have created out there somebody with especially vulnerable narcissism does not feel confident the reason why they do these compensating behaviors is because they feel crappy about themselves and truthfully they may have voices in their head telling them like you suck you're the worst you're never gonna do this everyone's gonna laugh at you that kind of stuff can constantly be cycling through their head and motivating them to show the opposite to people and so if we want to talk about how that person feels I think what they feel it's a lot of fear they feel a lot of frustration I think they probably feel like they always have to put some kind of armor off like they have to put up a wall because otherwise their whole life is gonna fall apart that's a scary feeling that's very vulnerable and that's hard to show to anybody because it's like you just have a piece of paper between you and the real world and anybody can just slice their finger through it and Britt busts through it and that's it it's like your whole heart is spilling out onto the floor for anybody to stomp on and if you can visualize it that way that they're so vulnerable that any little tiny thing can poke through and destroy them which is the opposite of what everybody thinks that they're destroying everybody else that's why they do the things that they do and they may feel really bad about the things that they do like I said the person who's more vulnerable feels they're low self-esteem they have a little bit of an awareness of why they do what they do and just not know another way to do it they may just be stuck in this cycle in this habit of like automatically reacting and automatically putting up that wall and trying to prove to everybody that they're better than them but once they get past the moment and they go to sit by themselves in their room or they have a quiet moment they may start to really feel that low self-esteem and they may feel awful about what they did to somebody but they're not gonna go and tell you that they feel awful most of the time because that's also showing that they're weak and that they messed up and that's what they are avoiding in the first place but as we know not everybody who's narcissistic and who has MPD behaves this way other people are more on the grandiose side of things and on the grandiose or the overt side of things those are the people who totally put up the wall they're totally confident all the time you're wrong they know everything and they need all the attention and it's all about them and they don't think they have a low self-esteem problem what about those people one of those people feel like well personally I tend to think that those people don't feel much of anything I think they generally if they're gonna feel any kind of an emotion it's gonna be rage it's probably driven by fear from that low self-esteem but because they don't have the insight and they don't really understand that that's what's going on they're just always trying to put on this show of being confident and of being the best and so when you try to do that when you try to like manage your emotions and push them down all the time so that you never appear weak because a lot of times these people think that emotions are weak for some reason I don't know why but when you push down all those emotions the only emotion that really has the strength to bubble up to the top is anger and that's where you get these pout bursts and you get this rage and they might like that like I said some people they rage they feel confident they feel good about themselves look at how I hurt somebody else or look at how I showed them that kind of a thing which we all do let's be honest we all do that to some extent but somebody with MPD may do it more often and it may validate them in some ways it may tell themselves like look I do have good Steve I am a great person because look at how I destroyed them but we have to remember here that not everybody with grandiose narcissism even feels that way but in general there's still low self-esteem underneath all of that that's what's driving the car so even if they're telling themselves they're confident even if they're showing you that they're confident underneath they're not confident and if you just take a second to think about it how could you be confident if the only emotion that you can express if the only way that you can relate to your body is to express anger how could you have any confidence that you know what you're doing in the world so I tend to think that somebody with a more grandiose version of NPD they're feeling clenched down a lot they're probably always frustrated always a little bit angry like they're always a little bit irritated always a little bit on edge always looking for that moment to prove to you that they're a little bit better because that validates them and that kind of helps them push those other emotions down that are constantly trying to bubble up to the top because it's human and to have emotions it's human to react to things and have all kinds of complicated feelings in our body and in need to express them but for some reason the people with MPD you get stuck in this they don't want to do that they don't want to feel that they don't want to express that so this is what comes out the anger the rage and the opportunity in their mind to prove that everything is fine and they they are confident so anger is probably what we're seeing on the surface but for somebody with MPD that anger is really fueled by fear and anxiety about not being recognized for being great or really at the bottom of it is not being feeling good about themselves it's not feeling okay it's not feeling safe just being who they are it's relaxing and expressing themselves the way that a lot of us would for somebody with MPD that's uncomfortable that's scary and that sucks because that's how we're supposed to be living we should be able to express ourselves we should be able to listen to all of our emotions because our emotions are what guided us through life so it's really sad that somebody with MPD has to live this way well they don't have to live this way they can deal with it but this is the way that they live now there is something important to remember here NPD is a mental illness mental disorder and like all mental disorders or mental illnesses it's not always on and what I mean by that is that like moment to moment throughout the day it's not happening every single second of the day it's reactionary especially because these are personality traits these are defenses they show up in moments of insecurity and yes if somebody with NPD feels insecure from the moment when they wake up to the time they go to bed you might see these kinds of things throughout the whole day but they can have periods where they're chill they're just relaxing they're calm that's normal not every person with NPD is feeling insecure all the time and not everybody is raging all the time and angry and pissed off not everybody's trying to show you that they're better than them all the time not everybody's trying to get your attention all the time it's the pattern that makes it NPD so they may feel these things that I've mentioned like anger but they can also feel the other emotions here and they're just not as much as probably somebody who doesn't have NPD I feel like maybe I've over emphasized those things a little bit too much here so I just want to say that one more time they don't always feel these things all the time they can experience the full range of emotions throughout the day but when they're reacting to that insecurity or when they're in a position where they feel insecure that's when you're gonna see these behaviors show up because it is a personality disorder it's gonna show up a lot so I want to challenge you here have you ever felt insecure and then gotten pissed off about it have you ever wanted to prove to other people that you weren't insecure have you felt low self-esteem and wanted to show people no it's not true I'm better than that if that's true maybe leave a little story down below so we can share and understand maybe a little bit better what it feels like to have MPD ourselves and while you do that the holidays are coming if you're looking for some mental health gift ideas I have those on my Amazon store also my 500th video is coming up probably gonna be released either Friday or Monday look out for that

Channel: Ryan Liberty / Mental Health

Views: 21,039

Keywords: what does npd feel like, npd feel like, what is npd like, what its like to have npd, what is like having npd, what having npd is like, living with npd, life with npd, what it feels like to have npd, what does it feel like to have npd, what does it feel like living with npd, what does living with npd feel like, npd, narcissistic personality disorder, narcissism, narcissist, mental health, mental, health, ryan liberty

Id: n-_NdYhyzUo

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2018