I'm terrified I might have NPD

Hello! It's my first time on this forum and I'd like to get some opinions.

I'm 16 years old and have been pretty spoiled all my life. My parents and grandparents always tell me how good I am, how pretty I am, how nice I am, and how I'm an angel. All my life I've been given the best and have not had very much suffering at all. I think this could explain part of why I am as selfish and attention seeking as I am. I'm pretty sure a lot of the things I'm told aren't true and I'd just been wanting to believe them. Now I don't know. I conned my parents into letting me go to online school so I could be lazy at home and I think thats made me worse. I'm isolated and all I can think about is me, me, me. I recently decided I should go back to real high school to experience people better and possibly try to gain more understanding of them.

I've been surfing the web a lot lately on NPD and it struck me about a year ago I might have this. I kinda brushed it off for a while but when I looked into it again I started to get scared. The more I researched the more I found that this fit my behavior. I have obsessively looked at the symptoms how they do in relationships and such. I have terrible anxiety about it and have gone to a therapist very recently. I don't think she particularly specializes in personality disorders but she has been able to tell me a few things about them. She says it seems like I'm not a narcissist because it looks like I feel empathy.

I try to tell myself I'm not a narcissist and then a while later after thinking it over I think I really am a narcissist and it keeps going back and forth and I hate it. I don't want to be this way. All my life I have done bad things and not really thought of others. It was only until recently that I felt that I should start trying. I used to have a lot of fantasies of being famous or being in front of a crowd and having someone be interested in who I am. I say things to people in hopes they'll be interested.

I used to lie almost all the time about my achievements and ridiculous stories and I would lie about tragedies to get sympathy from people around me. It was only this year that I decided it needed to stop. I have since stopped trying to do that and have tried to keep quiet. I take "interest" in certain things so people will see me as interesting and cool and relate those interesting things back to me.

I listen to people when they have problems and try to offer advice but I think I also do it because I want to seem like a good person I think I do a lot of things so people will see me as a good person. I want to be genuine not a faker. I'm not sure if I really care about their problems or not. I just can't decide. I've been trying very hard lately to try and understand their pain and try to imagine how it must feel. I'm not sure if that is really empathy or what.

The most horrible of all is that I love sympathy from others. This may be because I never had any tragic events so I feel like I need them too. I don't understand why I need it so bad. I felt like offing myself a lot because I don't want to be this person and be rejected and be alone. Recently I've tried to tell my parents to stop complimenting me so much because my ego was already huge. I know they mean well but I'm scared if they keep doing it I'll really just think I am the best thing ever and continue to feed off of their compliments. That's something else to convince myself of too. I know that I am not the best thing in the world but something makes me want to believe I am.

I have heard that its too early to diagnose NPD in a teenager but it seems so evident in me that I keep hoping I can change before I hit adulthood. Is there anything that I can do? Am I really a narcissist or am I just really self centered?

Hi hiirako,
From your retell you are recognizing you are reflecting a true self and trying to tame the worst of your behaviours. This is the process of self development. A narcissist does not commit to this process like you are doing. They are about improving their faking to get more attention and better manipulate to get control. You might have done this with your parents in the past and now feel the guilt. It is not the way you want to head with your life.
The obsessive thinking is an area of concern. Perhaps you are right in thinking you need company from the school system. Learning how to get along with all different sorts of people is a vital component of healthy maturation. Time alone is time to dwell and create these obsessions. I would be more concerned that this isolation and your tendency to look inward to find the fault is not a healthy mix at your age. You are missing the opportunity other people provide. You can change this by recognizing that other people matter in your life. Marg

hiirako wrote:Am I really a narcissist or am I just really self centered?

what, is this some kind of trick question?

I didn't see the correct answer of 'mostly normal' listed.