Autism and Cluster B families

Post Reply New Topic

This is a bit controversial, but in researching Narcissistic and Borderline personality disorders with regards to my family of origin, I’ve noticed that a lot of Aspies seem to come from cluster B families. A lot of times there’s a narcissistic mother, sometimes with borderline personality disorder and a Narcissistic father who may or may not be outwardly abusive (covert narc).

I’m not saying abuse directly causes autism or anything like that, but I do find it a bit odd that so many people in the online abuse recovery communities are on the spectrum or claim to have a sibling who is. I always wondered what the reason for this could be.

Is there some sort of genetic link between ASD and NPD/Borderline? Could some of these parents have started out as autistic and developed a personality disorder as a result in order to compensate? Some have suggested this about my mother.

Could it be that trauma and ASD have overlapping symptoms and some are misdiagnosed?

Maybe people on the spectrum or more likely to end up as the black sheep in a toxic family which would make them gravitate more towards these online communities?

Maybe well adjusted parents encourage effective coping mechanisms in their ASD children. Your post is a fascinating observation.

I don't know what Cluster B means. There's been quite a bit of research on parents of autistic children, and from what I recall the mothers used to be blamed for being narcissistic. They were called "refrigerator mothers". I haven't studied it myself so I don't really know, but I think a lot of that research was debunked. That's not to say it's entirely wrong or impossible, I just think it's a bit sexist that the mothers were blamed more than fathers, and of course there are many families with wonderful, warm, loving parents (or a single parent) who have autistic children.

In my case my mother might be considered narcissistic but I can also see a few autistic traits in her, although they manifest completely opposite to my traits. My father on the other hand was very loving and probably on the spectrum himself. There's no way he was narcissistic.

I was reading some true crime information today. The suspect is considered narcissistic, and eventually people started to comment "I wonder if he's autistic". I had a feeling that would happen, from people who didn't know better. I kind of lost my shite over that because narcissism ≠ autism. That caused me to google this info so I could educate people:

https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/narcis ... ce-1114174

This article isn't great at explaining autism but it does a good job differentiating it from narcissism.

I know you aren't saying that autistic people are narcissists. I just thought you might find the article interesting!

Unsure. Parents I met so far don't have a form of personality disorder.


But not mine. If it were true, I would've ran away or worse, dead.
I almost did only because they're a bunch of clueless NT laypeople who can't explain how their instincts work.

Both my parents not narcissistic nor borderline.
They're just utterly clueless and helpless on their own when it comes to my case. They'd rather cry over me because of that.


As for emotional adjustment... I decided to take charge of mine by the time I was a teenager.

Had explicitly told my mom that she won't start any intervention or whatsoever without my say so.
But then, I get to observe her -- and she happened to be an excellent social model.

Thankfully she is that kind of person and will actually respect that.

Love and acceptance or not, they're still the kind of people who won't get it -- not me as an autistic.
So they just have to make do with me as a weird person with autism.



I don't know any personality disorders on both sides of my family.
Only a few issues here and there, mine incidentally got the angry bits that had originated from my paternal grandfather.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.

I've been thinking about these things too. For a while, I thought my mom could have BPD. Now that I'm reading more about autism, I strongly suspect I am autistic (Cynthia Kim is basically me) and that my mom also might have autistic traits and has never been able to cope. But obviously, I cannot diagnose anyone.

A married woman I knew who tried to mother me a bit had a daughter with Borderline.
A single woman I knew who was both attracted and repelled by me probably had an aspie ex.
My mother had AS, and mild narcissism.

I really don’t know much about this, so perhaps not a reliable opinion.

I wonder if there is an increased likelihood of a ‘cluster B’ person entering a relationship with an autistic person than average, therefore bringing both sets of genetic material into the same family? One doesn’t cause the other, just that they’re more likely to be attracted to each other and therefore influence future generations?

Neither of my parents are narcissistic or have any personality disorders or whatever. My mum has always been an anxious person and I think my dad might have some traits of ADD but I can't be sure. But otherwise I grew up in a normal, stable, secure and loving household. Yet me and my brother are on the spectrum.

My aunt is an undiagnosed Aspie but her daughter is NT.

lots to untangle there. My mother was narcissistic, and( I thought) selfish, childish, manipulative, and cruel.She deliberately said and did things to cause emotional pain as a way of controlling me and others in the family.

Then when I learned of my autism in my late 60's ( I am 70 today) I got a different perspective. She was autistic!
Our mother was raised in a time when nobody knew about autism, she was spanked and slapped for any mistakes, and she raised her children the same way.
She was not able to "think outside the box" about other ways to do things, she stuck to what she had been taught.

She used the tools she had in a world she was poorly equipped to cope with and she raised 4 children, kept us clean and fed, and we all became productive law abiding citizens.

Our Mother was not able to understand other's point of view, she was not able to feel sympathy or empathy if she saw something as bad or wrong or evil.
She was autistic and struggling to do what she thought she "should" in a time when people were judged severly by their behavior. ( 1940's/1950's) . she could barely read or write at a 2nd grade level. She was dyslexic.
I learned ( after she died) about her autism, when I finally figured out my own. So many things were finally explained.



So many of the new "definitions" of personality disorders according to today's psychological categories seem to cross over into other definitions or could be interpreted other ways.

There is a lot of speculation about "borderline" actually being autism, and about ADHD being a form of autism too.

Things in psychology are not specfic or hard facts, it is all about defining certain behavior which can be attributed or interpreted in so many ways. It all depends on who is looking and what they expect to see.

When my mother was in her 50's she was given a diagnosis of dementia, because of neurological tests and the behaviors she had.

In truth, many of those were autistic behaviors that she had for all of her life.
Seen from a neuro psychologists point of view, one who specialized in dementia, mother's behaviors fit perfectly.


So much depends on who is doing the Looking, the categorizing, the analyzing, and the "seeing". The defining.

There are so many perspectives we can see our situations from, and autism is not known for its insight. Many times we have to have things explained to fully understand them.

I think all the behavioral categories and psychological profiles of "disorders" are works in progress which science and medicine just barely understand. We certainly know this is true for autism. I don't think the other behavioral "sciences" are much more advanced in knowledge than we are about autism. (the state of psychology today).
That said, I am quite sure my family genetics play a role in this, and have done so for as many generations as I can go back in time to find records of. Exactly what it is we are inheiriting remains to be seen. In every generation of my mother's family there have been suicides of women under 30 and of men over 50. Every generation. Something is definitely genetic there. What it is may eventually discovered. I have no faith in today's classification and categorization, definition of behaviors.

My 2 cents, others may differ.

Some NTs instinctively alter their behavior depending on whom they're dealing with, including their own children. It's possible that some of these NT parents pick up on the child's autistic differences subconsciously and treat them worse than they would if the kid was "normal."

I have heard of this possible connection between cluster B and autism. My anecdote absolutely follows this pattern. My family is full of people with a mix of narcissism, BPD and yes even psychopathy. It has been an impossible challenge for me to survive this family setting with my health intact, I have symptoms of trauma, neglect and chronic illness from extreme stress. If I had taken an abnormal psych class at uni maybe things would have been different, but alas, I burned out too soon and didn't learn what I needed to to overcome these obstacles

I'm not sure. I think my family suffers from intergenerational trauma, which can show pretty cluster-B-like symptoms. Is it connected to autistic traits running in the family, too? Or is is just a coincidence, as half of this country has good reasons to suffer from intergenerational trauma, after all?
No idea.

Perhaps cluster B traits in those people aren't that divorced from the similar traits that show up in ASD and the issue is more learned coping traits and internalized norms, or perhaps there's several pieces to the puzzle and getting piece 1 and 3 makes for a different outcome than pieces 1 and 2.

I'm also curious how much it has to do with how much someone gets away with being domineering. Obviously if you get away with it all the time you'll be more prone to do it, but if you're raised by people who domineer that trait will likely end up suppressed, at least in the presence of those people.