Late onset NPD/questions regarding "self death"

Hi cool people from the NPD forum,

Too long, didn't read (TL;DR) - I was a narcissist still in contact with the true self but didn't have a full blown personality disorder until now. After experiencing a trauma I think now I do coupled with PTSD (Posttraumatic stress disorder.) I am asking for clarification if the "sensitive/real self" can actually die or if I just can't access it anymore. I am also not sure how fast your brain can turn to evil if you never harmed anyone before and you've started hurting people after experiencing trauma. I now lost contact with the real self and I am also dissociated 24/7- I'm also not sure how much is related to my narcissism and how much of the problems like emotional numbing/depersonalization comes from the PTSD

I was a close to being a NPD narcissist but I always was in contact with my true self until I was traumatized a year ago. I am very introspective and I observed a narcissistic pattern arising when I was 12 years old so I was mindful not to hurt anyone and always be aware of how this problem is developing. I didn't take a lot of drugs, I tried my best to understand my issue and I was unsually empathetic my whole life and this was actually a problem as you can imagine given our society. (especially for a narcissist, I had/have high cognitve empathy)
I acted a lot, felt misunderstood, I was correcting my behaviour according to norms in real time and "fooled" friends. The only person I was vaguely attached to was my first girlfriend. My parents were horrible cowards and in the end they even caused more trouble when I was an adult. I ended all my relationships before people could do the same to me although in hindsight I was just paranoid and sometimes bored. I wasn't capable of real intimacy but since I was still in contact with my true self people never questioned my personality or anything like that. They sensed an authenticity and I was in contact with my feelings although not close to normal people emotions.

So I did everything right until I started therapy. Yes. Therapy. I would advise anyone to find a therapist who is really good or don't go to therapy at all. Therapy, foul friends and my horrible family were some of the most damaging influences. End contact with abusive parents! I'm serious. Sure they're horribly damaged people but why bring a child into this world then? They will never change. I confronted them and they just twisted the truth until my head exploded.

So fast forward now I'm not so sure what's going on with me. I had a traumatic experience and developed PTSD and with PTSD my Narcissism went into overdrive. I tried a lot of stuff to keep my ego in check and safe my old self but with no success in the end. I became bitter and I did things I never did before like yelled viciously at a family member or tried to suck the energy out of people, feeling antisocial.
After all that happened I wasn't in contact with my true self anymore. I can not sense any emotions except anger. For some time I thought it was depersonalization/emotional numbing caused by the PTSD but my gut tells me that something went missing. I can't feel my real self anymore although I'm not sure if it's still there or if I will never be able to access it again which would be devasating after all I've tried to safe my emotions.

Now I feel like my soul/emotions are not there anymore. My eyes and my apperance changed drastically. They look more lifeless. I look like a shadow of who I was. Hollow somehow.

I am really interested in your opinion, I appreciate all answers and I can always provide clarification if you wish to know more about certain aspects of my problem.

bla22

If you want my opinion your problem is rather obsessiveness and your conscience. I dunno of course what kind of a crappy therapist you had, but there is one interesting thing in your text, where you say that your false self became stronger and you yelled at your parents. But letting out anger is actually an aspect of the true self. The true self/false self dichotomy was used by Donald Winnicott to describe the dichotomy between the [biological] drives and their spontaenous manifestation and the defensive framework that blocks these. So its very much possible that the bad developments that you were seeing weren't bad at all, but were developments into feeling and acting more akin to your feelings, but your self-controlling mechanisms didnt like that.
If you never managed to learn integrating your natural stuff and try to control everything its also no wonder you end up with a lack of emotions and dissociation. Happened to me, at least.
As to late-onset NPD, such a thing doesn't exist, a personality disorder gets created when a disordered personality grows. Existing disorders can of course make it hard to find more adaptive defenses / coping mechanisms, so that people end up with mechanisms like dissociation, splitting, depersonalisation etc.

Hi Akuma. Thanks for you answer. There is a lot of truth in your post and I think it is an accurate description of my problems to some extent. I also may have misunderstood the concept of the true self. I also have problems with expressing anger properly because I am enraged easily and very often so that I told myself if I let it out every time it's too much for myself.
I am not even sure if it's my narcissism that was in overdrive after the trauma but I feel like my soul or inner child died. It's coupled with deep depression and the feeling that my life is over. It sounds very new agey but it is a kind of "soul loss".

bla22 wrote:Hi Akuma. Thanks for you answer. There is a lot of truth in your post and I think it is an accurate description of my problems to some extent. I also may have misunderstood the concept of the true self. I also have problems with expressing anger properly because I am enraged easily and very often so that I told myself if I let it out every time it's too much for myself.
I am not even sure if it's my narcissism that was in overdrive after the trauma but I feel like my soul or inner child died. It's coupled with deep depression and the feeling that my life is over. It sounds very new agey but it is a kind of "soul loss".

No I think it makes a lot of sense. Basically the more low-level the coping strategies are the more wide are their effects.
Theres usually no easy way of fixing this though; aka you can't hope to unearth some underlying personality problem and then all the top-level stuff will go away. My experience at least is that when theres lots of dissociative and splitting that a therapy can move extremely slowly, also for the purpose of not endangering further "degradation" in the soul of the patient by unearthing stuff too quickly that can't be handled. In your case for example your anger could be something that gives you a sort of stability. In my case in comparison its excessive intellectualization, which keeps me from drifting off into psychotic territory.

I realized you were spot on with your posts because I tried to solve the trauma as quick as possible. I took the pain killer as an experiment to process my trauma but it turned out badly. I lost contact with my soul. I hope I just lost the contact because it felt like a switch was turned off and life had no emotional coloring to it anymore, no soul-ish depth after the fight with said family member. What might have happened there? Depersonalisation? Really "soul loss"? I now think that it was a somewhat healthy overrreaction to obnoxiously unempathic behaviour but why was the result that I didn't feel anything from there on? It's not really better at the moment..

I had a lot of revelations the last week. I vastly underestimated my (emotional ) naivete and I also didn't see a lot of people clearly in my life due to my narcissism which caused me a lot of trouble. I idealized other narcissists who were handling their issue far worse than me. I didn't accept who I was fundamentally although I was a really decent guy. And drugs made it all worse which I never touched before another narcissist convinced me to do so.
My therapist was also a narcissist who really told me that all my observations, thoughts are basically wrong but now I realize I was right all the time. He just couldn't handle that a patient understands more than him. He subconsciously sabotaged me because he didn't like someone smarter than him. My god people can be monsters. What they all have in common is that they are still in contact with abusive parents or excuse them. I attribute my moral nature to my natural skepticisim towards my parents. I always knew it but society tells you that they did the best they could etc. which is utter nonsense in most cases. I also realized that I barely have any relationship with myself. I don't talk to myself, I don't feel like a real person sometimes and I don't pick up emotional vibrations from other because I myself don't have any/don't experience them.

I can really relate to the last thing you said about intellectualization. At the moment this isn't an issue (thanks drugs..) but years ago I also did the same thing to prevent myself from going insane and also to keep my narcissism in check but I didn't realize that I overdid it so much I barely registered my feelings anymore which are after all a very important source of information and pleasure.