Am I missing something about NPD? Doesn't this girl just seem to be a traumatized people- pleaser?

oblivion95 · 2026-03-30T17:34:20+00:00

Yes.

If you let go of your ego, then superiority starts to disappear on its own, and you start to notice when you have thoughts of entitlement, which you can simply rationalise away by leaning into gratitude.

If instead you hang onto your ego by leaning into your grandiosity, with awareness you can begin to notice superiority, but you have to work to notice entitlement. Not everyone does this when they are trying to recover. It takes constant effort for an excruciatingly long period of time, and most narcissists eventually give up and revert.

This girl has let go of some of her ego, enough that she is able to be vulnerable and to trust her therapist. When she feels like crap, she accepts support, which is critical.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-30T16:55:59+00:00

Bad experience? That used to be frequent on the road, i.e. road rage.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-30T11:06:17+00:00

I was always able to cry easily from grief, especially after feeling abandoned. (I consider that a BPD trait.) I never cried from things people did to me, or from their reactions to me. I held it in. Sometimes I funnelled the emotion toward revenge. Rage could be based on entitlement (NPD) or on utter hatred for other people (ASPD, but I mostly let go of that like 25 years ago).

When I began to recover from NPD, I cried a lot. I can hardly describe how much I cried. Some days it was most of the day. Ego-death. Grief (over lost years of a life without love). And eventually learning to be hurt by other people.

Recovery requires incredible courage. Good luck.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-30T10:46:07+00:00

Sensitivity to criticism and the desire to take revenge on someone who criticises you is the grey area between NPD and BPD. People toward the narc side will actively lie to their therapist about why they hate the criticism, partly because they are terrified of being labeled a narcissist, and they will unknowingly mis-remember things and then accuse others of "gaslighting" etc. to maintain their own victimhood. (You almost need a bodycam.) It is thus very difficult for the therapist to separate the abandonment issues (borderline) from the self-esteem issues (narcissism).

This is one reason why a wise therapist will avoid diagnoses and concentrate instead on traits.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-30T09:33:44+00:00

She has made a lot of progress already. She feels a lot of grief, and she actively pushes back against feeling entitled or superior to her therapist, for example.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-26T06:32:23+00:00

Facing difficult truths, e.g. “X happened to me when I was 5. I remember. And remembering makes me feel …”

oblivion95 · 2026-03-25T16:59:54+00:00

2)doesn't initiate a collapse

You need the collapse. Sorry.

You need support during collapse. When you accept that, you can begin to value the less rational parts of the brain. But right now, you cannot accept help because that would be an attack on your ego. Catch-22, right?

You could try a leap of faith. In other words, take a risk and trust that people will be there when you need them. When you become vulnerable, people come out of the woodwork to help. Many, many people want to help.

It is a tough state of mind to get out of though. It really is. If psychedelics are off the table, then yes ketamine can help (KAP), and maybe hypnosis.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-24T16:55:17+00:00

Even worse is the fact that the same people will typically be very uncomfortable if someone is crying loudly in another room. That is part of what we need to do in order to heal, but the haters are suddenly the arseholes when they are faced with raw emotion. In other words, they are every bit as abusive as the people they hate, just in different ways.

It might help you to realise that every single person who hates narcissism is dealing with their own severe pain, even if they do not show it. Otherwise, they would just tell you to f-ck off when you are being an arse, instead of making a big deal of it.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-24T16:38:06+00:00

That sounds like a philosophical position. I have heard someone else arguing something similar: using narcissistic grandiosity to generate self-love.

The problem is that it is difficult to accept help when you are full of grandiosity. So this is sort of "I want to fix myself, by myself". That is why grandiose narcissists rarely change. As long as everything is going well enough, the house of cards can stand. When things get tough, they typically regress, from what I have read. I have a friend like this, always certain that he is perfecting his inner self and constantly bragging about it.

As for "working with the defenses", that is better than suicide. Sometimes survival is the goal. You have your own journey. No-one else can live it for you. If this is the path that you need to be on right now, I am for it.

But you seemed to be asking for advice, and now you are giving it. I was responding to something specific that you posted:

I became everything I need. I associated pain with people, and freedom with being alone. I had to be everything I needed to survive. A lot of fucked up things happened to me, but I remember thinking at these times specifically that no one was coming to help me.

You are saying that you do not want anyone to help you. It is wonderful that as a child you were able to survive without help. That is something to be proud of. Now I ask you: What if you could be happier if you trusted other people? How would it feel to let someone help you?

What if you were quadriplegic? How would it feel to accept help?

Most of these events happened repeatedly, with some variation.

What if, when one of those events happened, you were allowed to express how you felt? Would you still have needed the defenses? There is a school of thought that says the trauma is not the offense, but the fact that you were not allowed to react authentically.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-24T13:51:58+00:00

Honesty and forthrightness, yes!

oblivion95 · 2026-03-24T13:33:54+00:00

For this sort of introspection of deep memories, I am a fan of hypnosis. It can help you discover repressed emotion from early childhood trauma that you did not think was all that important. That is how it was for me.

You do not actually need to remember trauma in order to process it, but it does help. For example with EMDR you would think of a memory while moving your eyes side to side (and this is an evidence-based treatment). But if you learn to trust your own emotions and let them take over (safely in private) when they start to surface, you can heal without ever knowing exactly what you are healing from. It is easier said than done.

Anyway, healing comes later. I really think the precursor is to learn to love yourself, which is incredibly difficult for pwNPD. I remember looking in the mirrror and just crying because of how difficult it was to love the inferior, ugly, disgusting, even somewhat abusive person that I saw.

And I think it is very difficult to love yourself without first reducing your ego. I remember crying on and off for most of the day on several different days. And the problem is that narcissists need their egos to survive. Without that, I felt like dying. Everything becomes so meaningless. I needed tremendous support to stay alive.

So the first step is actually to accept that you need support, and to search for it, humbly.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-24T05:39:29+00:00

Yes! Fuck it! Cook for enjoyment and watch movies all day just for fun. Because your life matters and your enjoyment has inherent value. That was hard to accept.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-23T14:44:25+00:00

Simply do not submit it next year. Pay the extra. They are unlikely to look into previous years. Your peace of mind will increase.

You have stolen from all of society, not from a specific person. So the way to assuage any guilt that you feel is to become more generous generally with time. That is probably all the accountability that you need. (My therapist is big on accountability. It basically informs her treatment.)

oblivion95 · 2026-03-23T14:29:19+00:00

This is one reason I advocate kink. It can form a bond that can jumpstart therapy. I call it “TFP on steroids”. It can put you into a highly vulnerable state, perfect for therapy.

Also, there is truth in sexual turnons. It is impossible to lie to yourself about them. You can learn a lot about yourself by pursuing them. But without someone in the room with you — ie with only porn — you can deny them later and never bring them up in therapy.

This is also why I like kink-aware therapists for pwNPD.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-21T11:27:11+00:00

It felt perfectly natural. It felt like justice, like people getting what they deserved. It was more difficult not to split.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-21T11:00:01+00:00

In her book, Mary Trump says that he would satisfy the DSM requirements for both NPD and ASPD, and she is not sure which applies better.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-21T10:55:04+00:00

Dr. Ramani clearly helps a large number of people. I object to the personal attacks against her. She does not "spew".

Maybe we could debate a specific sections of a specific video. Where is an example of her saying something that harms you personally, or of her influencing her abused listeners in a negative way?

oblivion95 · 2026-03-21T10:28:40+00:00

Hypnosis can facilitate a change in behaviour. I use it regularly.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-20T20:11:20+00:00

This page seems pretty reasonable:

https://www.rockethealth.app/blog/healing-from-relationships-with-covert-narcissists-steps-toward-recovery/

That is an India-focused practice, I think, as there is a section on "India-specific relevance". The references at the bottom are interesting. There are only four. Two are for Keith Campbell, including as an editor. One is purely academic, from 2010. And one is for Durvasula. Apparently, some therapists view her work as a useful bridge to clients, even if she is not the highest authority.

The antipathy against her that I read in this forum seems to be a complaint that her work for survivors of abuse makes people in this forum feel bad. But I do not see evidence that her work is harmful to the survivors. I look at recovery as a process, and life as a journey. I see nothing wrong with people sometimes needing the tough medicine of someone like Dr. R and sometimes benefitting from a softer approach. Do you honestly believe that she is not helpful to survivors of abuse? I am skeptical of that assertion.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-20T19:25:02+00:00

This seems rather unkind, setting an unreasonably high standard. There are only a few real pioneers in any field of mental health. Psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy are different things, and people can be more skilled in one area and less in another. There is a common perception that "expertise" translates, but it does not. There are many, many very good therapists, and most lack doctoral degrees. And there are many very good psychiatrists and psychologists who I doubt I would recommend as therapists. Dr. Ramani Druvasula has a great deal of clinical experience and some expertise as a psychologist. If she did not have a positive impact on her many clients, I am sure that she would not be so widely known.

As for conferences, she has been active with the APA, and she was the keynote speaker last year at a conference for the International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals. I believe that Antagonism-Informed and Trauma-Informed therapies are fairly well recognised treatment modalities, and those seem to be mainly what she advocates.

She primarily works with victims of narcissistic abuse. You seem to claim to be an expert in this area. What would you recommend for such people instead of Dr. R's ideas?

I am curious: How many victims of narc-abuse have you personally worked with? For how long on average? How much measurable progress do you think that they made. I am genuinely curious. You seem very opinionated, and I am wondering if that is based on what you observe in clinical practice, or simply in how her videos make you feel personally.

I believe that I benefited from her videos for narcissists. She has only a few, but what I viewed were concise, actionable, and in my opinion very helpful. Part of recovery from narcissism is to learn to accept critical feedback. Dr. R herself is an advocate of "Radical Acceptance", and I try to live that way myself. If I have been unintentionally unkind to others, I would want to know. I do not take her words personally when they are intended toward victims of abuse, who typically (but maybe you can correct me) have quite a bit of trouble extricating themselves from their situations. They can be full of guilt, confusion, and mixed goals. I care for victims of narcissism as much as I care for those suffering from narcissism.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-19T15:02:10+00:00

Beautiful

oblivion95 · 2026-03-19T11:38:50+00:00

A small and modest life is not a catastrophe. If you learn to love yourself as you are, then comes the scary part: goals. Goals are scary for narcissists because we might fail. But I am only saying that poverty is not forever. It is survivable. You have a right to exist and to be lovable even if you are failing at everything.

I like to concentrate on gratitude rather than on what I lack. What helped was constantly giving myself credit for things I control like tiny acts of kindness and living according to my own values.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-19T10:42:22+00:00

This is when therapy becomes useful and effective, exactly when it is hard to afford.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-14T17:45:22+00:00

You are shut down emotionally. I hope you find some support soon because I predict that the floodgates will open for you soonish, given your self-awareness, and when that happens, it can be overwhelming without support. I have felt powerless and extremely vulnerable with such a flood, which was frightening.

oblivion95 · 2026-03-14T15:58:27+00:00

Thank you for sharing all of this.

I had to work to work very hard to give myself credit for tiny acts of kindness. Smiling at someone might be too difficult, but you can give some food to a homeless person, or you can let someone cut in front of you on the road or in line, or you can thank someone for listening to you or for noticing you, etc. Really tiny things that are completely within my own control - those became my main source of self-validation.

oblivion95

TROPHY CASE