Traits of a Narcissist:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is one of the three vestiges of what’s called a “Cluster B Personality Disorder,” along with Histrionic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. 

Some of the traits are quite similar and you may find traits of all three in a female narcissist.  Specific diagnosis or not, narcissists can be quite easy to spot if you know what to look for, but before I give you those, one caution:  We throw around the word “Narcissist” a lot in our world and use it to describe someone who is self-centered.  There are self-centered people in this world, in fact, everyone is self-centered to some degree.  But a self-centered person isn’t necessarily a narcissist, nor does any one of these things we’re about to list here below, from time to time, give you or anyone else NPD.  So be careful how you use this list, and be slow to label anyone.  Again, only clinicians are trained to diagnose people.

Beyond people we call “narcissists” in this world, there are people who truly have this disorder.  We’ve seen them, and up close.

Here are the hallmark traits of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

They have no empathy or compassion.

What do we mean by that?  If something goes upside down and you need someone who will empathize with you, help you, or have compassion for you, put simply– you’re on your own.  This particularly is the biggest trait of someone with NPD.  It’s not like they have compassion here and there or empathy here and there–  they just literally don’t ever have it. They are consistently without it and you can count on their not having any empathy in all situations with you.

They are completely unable to see beyond themselves to your needs, ever. 

If you bring up a need, theirs is more important, it doesn’t matter what it is.  When you try to talk to them about your needs, they’ll deflect and talk only about theirs.  You could be in the worst of situations needing help–  and they can’t see beyond their own nose, consistently. 

Not only that, but they’ll only filter what you need through their own needs.  In that, they’re terrible gift-givers. In fact, when you get a gift from them, normally your first thought will be, “Do you even know me???”  You can send them to the store and ask them for sugar and they’ll bring back flour (or ignore your ask altogether), and then wonder why you’re upset. 

Now everyone forgets sometimes…. but this remains constant and consistent.  Other times they’ll walk into a room and immediately declare their level of comfort with the room.  “It’s too hot!”  “That’s too loud!”  “I’m too cold.”  “It’s too Noisy.”  “It’s too bright.”  Whatever their comfort level is, you’ll hear about it.  It doesn’t matter that you’ve been sitting in the room watching TV for hours. As soon as they walk in, they expect you to change everything to suit them. 

A narcissist’s needs supersede all others. 

Gaslighting. 

What’s that?  Put simply, They constantly make shit up.  They’ll often call it other things far less abuse-sounding than lying, however.  They’ll call it “minimizing,” or “not making a big deal out of things,” we more often call it “pretending.” They literally live in a fantasy world inside their head and there’s only room for one person who matters, and it’s them.  So they’ll make things up, tell stories, lie, exaggerate, and consistently. 

You could have a conversation, come to an agreement on a direction to take, come back that evening, remind her of the conversation, and she’ll say, “What conversation?” like it never happened.  This is constant and it’s horrific. 

What winds up happening is that it makes the victim think they’re literally losing their mind and going crazy because no story or description of a set of events is ever as it happened. They are terrible and completely unreliable historians.  Especially if what happened was their fault. 

Ask them to explain why something happened that they did wrong, and you will literally get a different story each and every time you ask.  This makes closure with any given situation near impossible.

Because there is no opportunity for resolution, painful feelings remain and turn into open emotional sores that push the victim closer to insanity. 

They Never Own Their Failings or Bad Behavior. 

You can point it out, nicely or not, it doesn’t matter, they’ll never admit fault.  They’d rather you just pretend it never happened like they’re going to do.

This is their method of coping with failure–  pretend it doesn’t exist.  In that, they never learn from their mistakes and continue bad behavior.  Like a child who touches a hot stove, gets burned, and forgets they ever touched the stove the next day–  they’ll just continue these negative and hurtful behaviors, over and over again. They will not stop, and it matters not how much it hurts you.

Logical Incongruity/Child-Like Reasoning.

The things they do and the things they say NEVER make sense.  You will never be able to figure it out, no matter how hard you try.  It’s like asking them “What color is the sky?” and their response is “Automobile.”  It doesn’t make sense, and it never will.  They have terrible reasoning skills, and cannot follow a train of thought to conclusion at all. 

They can treat you horrifically, you can call them out on it, yell at them, and they’ll accuse YOU of being verbally abusive because they can’t follow the path from their horrific treatment of you to you yelling at them for it. 

They really do reason like a child.  Like a small child who, when you hide a cookie from them, thinks that it ceases to exist rather than it being hidden–  so is a narcissist, and they use child-like reasoning in all things. 

Not only that but like an infant, whatever is most “emotionally real” (not actually real because they don’t deal in actually real ever) to them the current moment is all that matters.  They worship their feelings at the moment. They can’t think beyond that.

Lack of Introspection. 

Whatever skills people have to evaluate in their head their own world, their own behavior, other people’s behavior, and to learn from it, narcissists are completely deficient.  You can’t ask them to go figure out why they did something–  they are incapable of doing that in any kind of meaningful way. 

Again, like a child who slugs another over a toy–  “Why did you do that?”  Answer:  “Because I wanted to.”  Depth of thought doesn’t get any deeper for that from them.  They cannot see their failings, don’t look for them, and don’t learn from them because this mechanism is broken. It doesn’t even cross their minds to introspect.  They’d rather just act out and blame you, which they frequently do.

People Around Them Are Nothing but Orbiters, to Do their Bidding. 

Life with a narcissist can be fine if you just realize, acknowledge, and live like all that you’re good for is taking care of their every need. 

Like the sun is the center and the planets orbit around it, they want orbiters, people to use and never love.  In fact, they don’t love.  They don’t know how.  Love is an enigma to them, and only for the weak.  Once you have outlived your usefulness, they’ll abandon you, either emotionally, physically, or both, because you were never of value to them in the first place.

They Have No Sense of Self. 

When they first meet you, they will take on and embrace your traits like they are their own.  This starts off in what’s called the “Love bombing” phase–  where they basically worship the ground you walk on in a relationship, and you’d think you’ve met your soul mate because you have so very much in common emotionally and in other ways.  They continue this til they hook you, and you enter into some more formal kind of commitment, a girlfriend, a wife.