BPD vs. NPD

DISCLAIMER: I'm just a diletant

I made this thread in an effort to create a clear distinction between the two PDs. I believe there is a clear distinction in the ways they operate even though they often manifest very similar behavior externally. I also don't believe a person can have both and that the so called 'traits' are also misunderstood.

First I'd like to go over the most basic separation in approach to people which does produce similar external behavior in many cases.

NPDers can get elated around other people in an effort to remove subconscious fears of weakness(ability to directly control). NPDers remove their fears by validating their strength. They simply behave as if they have stregth - with an intimidating, confident manner. They demonstrate their ability to control people situations. This confidence of expression somehow intimidates other normal people into validting what the NPDer is posing for. The NPDer will intimidate/escalate until he gets his validation - he DEMANDS his validation through his aggressive posture.

BPDers can also get elated around other people but in an effort to remove subconscious fears of wrongness/nonusefullness. BPDers remove their fears by validating their rightness/usefulness. They do this by entertaining/comforting(emotionaly useful) or by providing solutions(practically useful) or by providing pleasure(sexually useful) or some other self-sacrificing way. The BPDer produces his effort for nothing - he HOPES to be validated for it - and it often fails - providing the inherent low self-esteem of the BPDer

NPD is the prototype(extreme) male and BPD prototype(extreme) female.

Similarly ASPD is also the prototype male and HPD the prototype female.

The difference between the two is that NPD and BPD are prototypes as defined externally by too much connection/reactivity to society. People with NPD and BPD are controlled by external.

ASPD and HPD are prototypes defined internally by a lack of connection/reactivity with society.

I don't beleive any person can have any kind of mix of these unless bipolar or DID and even then not at the same time.


Getting back to BPD. As said, BPDers might compensate for their wrongness in various ways which would better fit the "trait" term than the existing definitions. I believe a BPDer determines his ability to compensate for their wrongness depending on how society reacted to the BPDers qualities.

A sexy BPDer might feel validated through her sexy body and grow to (ab)use it to sustain he "rightness". She is both happy to have this sexy body to "earn rightness" with it but also at the same time and at a deeper level anrgy she must succumb to this "prostitution" in order to exist in this world. This will lead a BPDer to display HPD-like behavior. But it is not HPD. This is a covert somatic narcissist in unofficial lingo. It is really a BPDer with compensatory narcissism of the somatic type.

A smart BPDer might feel validated through providing solutions, working out stuff for someone, helping them get their way, helping them realise their desires. A BPDer who has a lot of people depending on him for realization of their desires will feel important, narcissistic and will start to hate these incompetent people depending on him. If he gets rid of them he will feel like he wants new people to please again. This makes the smart BPDer behave like a cerebral narcissist, because he constatly seems to be drawing attention to him with his cerebral abilities - bragging - showing he is useful, showing he can realize desires of a certain kind. This is a covert cerebral narcissist but IMO infact a BPDer with compensatory narcissism of the cerebral type.


The BPDers "traits" of compensating(emotional, somatic, cerebral, whatever combinations) depends what was missing in the original family abusers and what the BPDer was able to provide it and get validated for what was provided by him.

The split between BPD and NPD has neurologic correlates - NPD is vasopressin functioning(out group aggression and sexual agonism(male)), BPD is oxytocin functioning(in group support/defense and sexual antagonism(female)).

The split between BPD/NPD and ASPD/HPD also has neurologic correlates. BPD/NPD have overresponsive social fear system(kappa opioid + vasopressin/oxytocin) - making them social fear controlled - external locus of control. ASPD/HPD have underresponsive social fear system(or overresponsive desire system, not sure, they coupled together, mu and kappa opioid).

Since I found the neurologic correlates out of which I grew the behavior patterns which contrast each other even though producing similar I quite believe a person can have the mindset of two disorders at the same time and in order to have two disorders the person would have to be bipolar or DID.

Narcissism is apparent in all of the disorders but it seems the community has issues detecting the difference precisely. I seem to have a very precise notion stemming from neurology.

Vasopressin narcisssism is monumentally different than oxytocin narcissism.

Vasopressin narcissism is narcissim of power, conquest, of the alpha male.

Oxytocin narcissism is narcissism of love, support, engulfment of the alpha female.

Desire narcissism is narcissism of self. Desire makes us internally controlled.

Fear narcissism is the combined absorbed narcissism of others applied to self. Fear makes us externally controlled

The vasopressin/fear narcissist(NPD) is focused on detecting all the signs/symbols/behaviors of social power/conquest and create a false self to match this notion.

The oxytocin/fear narcissist(BPD) is focused on detecting all the signs/symbols/behaviors of social love/support and create a false self to match this notion

Narcissism itself is simply infact the paranoid-schizoid mind state of M. Klein. Bad out, good in. Amygdala arousal - uncontrolled by PFC - providing a continuous notion of self and relation to others that normalizes the level of narcissism. All PDs fail at exactly this point, PFC -> Amygdala connectivity.

DISCLAIMER: I'm just a diletant

I don't beleive any person can have any kind of mix of these unless bipolar or DID and even then not at the same time.

My ex who I believed had npd/ bpd traits was actually diagnosed bipolar when he was a teenager. He was on boatloads of lithium back in the day after he burnt his girlfriends parents house down.


But every word out of his mouth was always a lie so it was hard to separate fact from fiction.

addx wrote:BPDers can also get elated around other people but in an effort to remove subconscious fears of wrongness/nonusefullness. BPDers remove their fears by validating their rightness/usefulness. They do this by entertaining/comforting(emotionaly useful) or by providing solutions(practically useful) or by providing pleasure(sexually useful) or some other self-sacrificing way. The BPDer produces his effort for nothing - he HOPES to be validated for it - and it often fails - providing the inherent low self-esteem of the BPDer

Thank you for this post. The whole thing is brilliant, but this part especially resonated with me.

I'm starting to think what you're saying might be correct, addx. I've heard others report being like two different people, and I too have felt that way in the past. I never thought it had anything to do with being bipolar, but what you say does make sense and backs up what others have said. (about being more of one PD while in the bipolar depressive phase, and being more of a different PD while in the manic phase).
It does make sense to me. I do disagree that you can't be one or the other full time, because I can tell you, that no matter how depressed or manic I am, I am always borderline. But I definitely think bipolar states can exacerbate things.

blank identity wrote:I'm starting to think what you're saying might be correct, addx. I've heard others report being like two different people, and I too have felt that way in the past. I never thought it had anything to do with being bipolar, but what you say does make sense and backs up what others have said. (about being more of one PD while in the bipolar depressive phase, and being more of a different PD while in the manic phase).
It does make sense to me. I do disagree that you can't be one or the other full time, because I can tell you, that no matter how depressed or manic I am, I am always borderline. But I definitely think bipolar states can exacerbate things.

Not sure what you meant but I did make a bad typo in that paragraph.

I do think a person can NOT have any mix of those 2-3-4 "mind states"/PDs at the same time(meaning same moment in time).

Narcissism apparent in all 4 PDs makes it seem like they overlap but my claim is that there is a precise difference in the source of narcissism and it can be clearly detected in the behavior.

I do think most people with PDs have only one of them for the length of their lives. And there is no "traits of this and traits of that". The basic underlying PD makes the traits work differently. A cerebral NPDer will manifest very similar behavior to a "cerebral BPDer". You have an example on the forum of VirginiaEsquire and me. Our behavior is very similar at a first glance, we are both "educating" others with various threads, we both like the sound of our thoughts, see the written, glance over them 10 times before posting. Pretty much the same. But if you look at the content you'll find that I'm often trying to solve world problems while he is describing NPD behaviors similar to vankin. I have much passion and obsession about my texts and I am very anxious to see on how my texts are accepted and my mood depends on this. I'd say virg is not that emotionally invested in his posts. We both seem to be validating, but I'm validating that I'm usefull and smart and he's more validating that he smart - with the intention of increasing his strength with the validation. There's a very clean distinction between him and I although at a first glance we have the same "trait". But even the trait functions differently because of out different PDs. So I'm basicly invalidating the future DSM now. What can I do, cerebral BPDs get too arrogant while being cerebral, it seems cerebral NPDers do not make that mistake ever. It's a function of BPD low-self esteem, inability to delay gratitude and inability to use own confidence to "run a situation" but rather cause a situation by overreacting and have others run it for him. etc...

Anyway, got carried away, back on topic

I do also think that a small number of people with PDs switch around temporarily due to very varying chemical balances caused by bipolar or by other switching disorders like DID.

I have spoken with you a lot and I do think your official diagnosis is correct. BPD is the PD that will cause/manifest the most side-kick disorders due their lowest self-esteem resulting from BPD patterns of behavior. BPDers offering self-sacrifice in order to be accepted - which gets rejected easily by normal people who do not understand what it means for a BPDer. BPDers compulsively do this until they run their naturally low self-esteem unto the ground or develop compensatory narcissism which stops them from banging their head against the wall like that. The BPDer is increasingly trying to make sense of the world which keeps rejecting his self-sacrifice or abusing it, he can't seem to find a balance so he rationalizes, ponders, makes plans to preempt bad stuff that happened to him before, it all gets complicated to convolute all that weakness into something that looks strong. This is also a recipe for obsessions.

blank identity, as said many times I'm a diletant.

But still I'll give myself the right to say a few things.

I think you should reevaluate your bipolar meds. The fact that you had this episode means it's not under control. Consult your doctors for this, this shouldn't happen. There are various other meds you can try to control bipolar. Lamogritine can replace lithium. There are also other antipsychotics. I wont really delve to deep into my diletant reasoning about meds, but rather just want you to think about telling your docs to seriously reevaluate meds because of what happened.

Addx, while I highly respect you as a very intellectual person, I have to say that you are no more qualified to diagnose me than my best friend, or anybody else for that matter, save for doctors.
I appreciate your input on certain personal subjects as well, but as a whole with the direction your theories are taking, I just cannot get on board with them.

That is not meant as a slight against you at all. I appreciate your input a lot, but I do not agree with you in this case, and quite frankly, I'm not in the mood to discuss it.

blank identity wrote:Addx, while I highly respect you as a very intellectual person, I have to say that you are no more qualified to diagnose me than my best friend, or anybody else, but doctors.
I appreciate your input on certain personal subjects as well, but as a whole with the direction your theories are taking, I just cannot get on board with them.

That is not not meant as a slight against you at all. I appreciate your input a lot.

I don't want to brainwash people into my theories either, but rather have them challenge them to make them better, so I appreciate your opinion and your experience. Some of them have formed part of my concepts so thank you. I do really hope you find your emotional balance in any way possible regardless if it invalidates what I say or not.

It is a good informative post. I am gong to copy some info from here. Some of the info was too technical for me to understand. What does PFC mean.

As for my own experience, there are remarks people have told me and since then I have noticed them myself.

People who related to me on the NPD forum were infact only people who sees themselves as covert narcs and infact the long-term NoNs who have an N who infact seem to have BPD - pretty much all of them. So, "covert NPDers" and BPDers related to me. I wrote a lot of text and this relating to me was always exactly the same, it always got covert NPDers and BPDers to relate and dependant NoNs sometimes as well.

None of the true overt NPDers never related to any of my patterns, but I was able to describe their patterns quite precisely, probably due to having an overt NPD brother and feeling where exactly the contrast between NPD and BPD lies as described here.

So, the distinction is quite clear. I'm probably one of the most cerebrally narcsisstic BPDers alive and could easily pass for an NPDer because of that - and my therapist actually did in the end acknowledge cerebral narcissism but is not an official diganosis here, we don't have the DSM manual here, our manual has no NPD in it. I am actually able to hold my ground with my brothers friends who all seem to be on the NPD side of things. I am able to hold it only thanks to my very evolved cerebral narcissism, which basicly evolved for that purpose - so I can hold my ground even while having no true inherent confidence.
So, in spite of my compensatory narcissism being quite evolved especially in the cerebral field it is still controlled/modulated/infact caused by the underlying PD that is BPD in my case and not NPD. If there is a clear distinction between my cerebral narcissism and that of NPDers cerebral narcissism, then there is a clear distinction between NPD and BPD along every behavior pattern. There is no sharing of NPD and BPD traits in a single person. There is ALWAYS at least a subtle but clear distinction in how NPDs and BPDs function even when they very similar behavior outwards.