Is it possible to have AvPD and be an Inverted Narcissist?

Well, after some thought I'm going to try to push her online for some answers. As such, I think there is a little too much information here. Take care all.

Balderdash wrote:Along with that, I'd love to hear your ideas on what you honestly think she needs.

A therapist. Seriously. She sounds like a toxic person to be in a relationship with.
If you want to be friends and helpful to her, by all means offer to hang out, but it just doesn't seem like a good idea to push it too far.

She's mentioned therapy before, so I think that part's covered. As for the toxic bit, while reading about the different personality disorders I realized that my own personality probably comes closest to the Schizoid pattern. Things don't get to me I don't let get to me, and I've got a skin like a rhino. On top of that, completely normal people tend to bore me. As long as I feel like I can get out if I don't like the way things are going, I'm kind of interested in seeing what happens.

Well, after reading more about Narcissism and also the comments on the AvPD vs NPD thread. I'm leaning more then ever towards the inverted narcissist theory. She might even be a closer match for INPD then AvPD.

The thing is, if that's the case, I'm not sure what to do. After looking into it, if I'm tough on her that just makes me part of her "secondary supply". If I'm normally supportive, I'll probably just get ignored. Honestly, I'm not sure what I can do for her without a major commitment.

Oh well, either way, I learned a lot looking into this, and it is an interesting problem. I found all the recent posts in the AvPD vs NPD thread quite helpful in putting things together, but since I'm leaning more towards an INPD issue, I think that's where I'm going to be concentrating my efforts.

For the record, even though I can come off a bit gruff, one of the reasons I decided to ask here is because you guys seemed like a nice and supportive group of people. The world contains many different types, but the best are those willing to try and put themselves out for other people. Here's a little secret that I use. As long as you like yourself, it doesn't matter what others think.

I mean it. Find one thing about yourself that makes you absolutely happy and confident, and next time you're in a stressful situation focus on that. Ok, I'll admit, that's just an off the cuff thing, but what would it hurt to try? Another idea I've read about is thinking of a point in your life where you felt a certain way, and while you're focusing on that experience making a gesture. The idea is that once you've anchored the memory to the gesture you can bring back those feelings by making the gesture when you need them. My idea is kind of like that, except having you deliberately focus on the memories themselves should also provide a bit of distraction to also help relieve stress.

Either way, you seem like a good bunch, and I wish you the best.

i dont really think thats fair to try and diagnose her with something serious like a personality disoder, even to speculate it really. you say shes just a casual freind and you cant see yourself hanging out with her if she moves into an area that is to inconviniant for you(45 minutes away?) it makes you seem like you dont really care so much about her, but you care enough to delve so deep into what her personality problems might be? maybe you should spend more time thinking about your own problems than other peoples? im sorry but i wouldnt like to have any freinds like you.

Fair enough. Like I said in my letter, if it was just AvPD, I doubt we'd be friends. I am definitely not the most gentle and thoughtful person around.

As for thinking about my own problems, trust me, I do. I'm finding the information on Schizoids quite interesting. I wouldn't say I'm to the point of a disorder, but I would say that in a lot of ways I have a Schizoid personality.

As for trying to diagnose her. Well, I've known there was something... off about her for a long time. I'm consistently the one putting the effort into making the friendship work, and I was honestly surprised when she indicated that she was willing to put in effort to keep the friendship going when we weren't living next to each other. Friendships need to be a two way street to work, and there's a difference in the level of friendship between someone you know in your apartment complex, and someone you go out of the way to see.

It's basically a case of moving to the "next level" in a relationship. I honestly hadn't thought about doing so beforehand, and since she is the way she is, I needed to look for other ways of figuring out what I was getting myself into. In the end, does it matter if it's a full blown disorder? If she shows all the signs of being a Compensatory Narcissist with an inversion caused by our initial fighting, then I can say, "this fits what's been driving me crazy about her!", and I can have a better understanding of what she's looking for. Now, I do think it's a full blown disorder, but in the end people are more then a bunch of medical terms. She has had serious issues living her life due to the way she is, but it's her life. I'm just trying to make sense of it.

On top of that, I've always liked to learn new things. Trust me when I say that a lot of my research has not gone into this case. For me, learning new things about the world around me is just fun.