I don't know. I've heard that it's easy to confuse narcissism with AS, presumably because Aspies are often seen as aloof, uncaring, into their own heads, isolated, abusive, antisocial, etc. I guess both groups tend to feel that it's them against the rest of the world.
I thought one partner of mine was simply an Aspie, and was proud of my ability to relate to her while everybody around her seemed to misconstrue her behaviour. But when we lived together I found out that she was full of paranoid and grandiose delusions, and was frequently abusive and astonishingly hypocritical about hanging onto her ex as a close friend while raging against an ex of mine with whom I had no contact. She even tried to castigate me for being "unfaithful" to her by having a relationship at a time before I'd even met her. Her vocabulary was littered with pejorative terms for groups who had never done her any harm. I realised that while she had some clear Aspie traits, she wasn't just an Aspie, but it was only when she suddenly fell out of love with me, for no obvious reason, that I took a good look at other pathologies, and the only one I could find that was characterised by sudden loss of interest in a relationship was NPD.
A common question that people she'd removed from her life asked of her was, "how could you?" - in other words, they were gobsmacked by her utter lack of compassion. Her apparent "love" for me had (I think) been nothing more than narcissistic need.........hugely infatuated when she barely knew anything about me, I was merely a convenient substrate for her to attach all her frustrated desires onto.......she was worryingly compliant whenever we tried to make decisions together, so compliant that I couldn't believe it was genuine, and ultimately, it wasn't.
But once I'd found out what NPD was, I realised that it explained very clearly my behaviour in my first marriage back in the 1970s, and it also showed me that even now, I'm prone to attach myself to women because of narcissistic needs rather than any proper judgement of the actual person's compatibility with my own. It's been rather a shock, to say the least. One thing in my favour is that I've been fostering a more benign view of people for many years, correcting my initial presumption that practically everybody is a jerk. Another is that these days I have some awareness of the other person's traits, and I think about how it really might be if we were to get together. Not wanting to be partnerless is a powerful emotional reason for accepting anybody who seems reasonably presentable, but it's a very bad reason if that's all there is. There has to be something more, otherwise when the honeymoon effect wears off, one runs out of road.
I think it's part of the DSM that one cannot be diagnosed with AS if there is evidence of another condition, and it's probably true of NPD as well, so I've no idea how they characterise a person who has both conditions. It's very confusing to try..........one thing I'd expect from a "pure" narcissist would be very skilful manipulative tendencies, which an Aspie would be unable to emulate because of their inherent social ineptitude. My partner wasn't very convincing to me as a manipulator. She didn't tell obvious lies, but she made a lot of vague declarations which didn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. So if she said "all these years I've thrown people out of my life and now I realise they were just trying to help me," I'd ask "what people?" and she couldn't answer. And a lot of the things she told me turned out to be complete flannel, though it was impossible to know whether she had just been mistaken or was deliberately lying. Aspies are said to often find it very hard to tell complete porkies.
16 Mar 2012, 5:10 am
