Narcissism

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Do any other people on here consider themselves to have a fair degree of narcissism mixed in with their autistic traits?

I do and I relate utterly to this Stone Roses song 'I Wanna Be Adored'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D2qcbu26gs

I was interested in the opinions of other people on the spectrum

In a sense. I feel like it's a balance for self loathing, and that I find it hard to have a middle ground. It's either best or worst. Maybe it's a distorted perfectionism more than anything else. I try to work past it, though.

Yes, my desire for adoration definitely comes from feeling I generally get the very opposite off people! lol

I know it's unhealthy but to be adored by everyone appeals to me immensely!

YES...and there is also a phallic narcissism, which my friend thinks I have...which I exploited for decades in my artwork. It is a two edged knife...I lots of bodyfeatures and yet i can't stop photographing myself...

The last thing I read about Paul Gauguin is that he was suffering from Phallic narcissism.

i don't desire adoration any more than most people, but i am egotistical. and i have an unhealthy love of looking in the mirror. i oftentimes feel smarter than everyone else, which is bad.

Interesting

I used to have an obsession with looking at myself in the mirror but I think this was generally far more of a fault-finding thing than a self-worshipping one as I don't photograph well and dislike having photo taken

If there's a rare good photo of me though I will want to keep looking at it though lol

It indicates a degree of self-obsession and I feel a lot happier when I don't do it

Removing the mirrors in various rooms helped me a lot with this as I had a compulsion to look at myself in the mirror whenever I went in a room as well as in window reflections at night

It's sort of a mixture of how bad/good do I look at this precise moment in time and if I look at myself in this mirror/at this angle as opposed to that one do I look any better? lol

How I feel about how I look seems to bear little relation to how other people see me though as I can not wear make-up and have unwashed hair and have a person act ok towards me but on another occasion when I will have made an effort to dress nicely and think I look ok, others won't so there seems little point in going on other peoples' opinions! I use it as a good excuse to make minimal effort lol

It's as if deep in my head, regardless of the evidence of other peoples' reactions to me, I still think I'm something special! lol

But this is also mixed with a lot of shame and self-loathing at apparently not being what most people seem to want - it's weird!

The essential message my brain appears to be giving me is 'I'm pretty good dammit, why can't these fools see it?!'

Pretty much the opposite

Could you give more details please?

When I feel like s**t, I can hardly look at the mirror at all. I think it's so easily perceivable to everybody else, that they will see me exactly how I see myself. Then, on good days, I'm all about the reflection.

I'm best when I'm not focusing on how I look as then I think I interact with people more naturally
but in society most peoples' focus seems to be mainly on how other people look and so it's always in my mind that it's a parameter influencing the interaction that I have no control over and this causes me immense frustration.

I see that hate was missing from mysentence, typo mistake, i hate to see myself in the mirror...

But I agree with you, I do look all the time, at different angels, altely also in the nude, to see what I like to improve or change, or finding imperfections. even at ge 53...as if I am able to reverse age...

I can feel I'm letting myself down with how I look and feel that people act in an oppressive way towards me because of it but I don't think I hate myself. I hate other peoples' intolerance of me more than myself. If I ever hate myself it's because I have absorbed other peoples' negative reactions too much so it is essentially them at fault not me.

And as for my naked body, I don't have a negative reaction towards it really as I haven't had it criticised much at all hence have few bad feelings towards it. It's far from perfect but it's functional, aspects of it have been admired and I am proud of certain parts but I think this is pride resulting from flattery as it's only because other people have complimented me that I feel the pride so see this as not healthy to listen to really.

I'd say I have very few narcissist traits. I have no interest in seeing myself in mirrors or in photos and I care little for what others think of me. I keep clean but wear old scruffy clothes and shoes and the little hair I have left is unkempt - it gets trimmed by my wife every few months when she notices it is getting long (I never notice). I certainly don't want people to adore me - I'd find that uncomfortable and sickly somehow. I'm happy enough to simply be accepted as I am.

But do you think you are happy to be accepted as you are, without the adoration for the very fact that generally people do accept you as you are?

I don't think people are very accepting of me at all, hence my desire for adoration has come out of this imbalance.

The concept of drawing attention to myself and wanting to be praised/comforted/pitied etc is fairly alien to me. There may be an element of exposure anxiety involved in that direct interaction often overwhelms me.

Last edited by Noetic on 15 Dec 2012, 4:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People aren't all that accepting of me either; they see me as generally polite but eccentric and some think I'm very idle and waste my abilities. I think these are general misconceptions of Asperger's anyway. I do like people to appreciate my technical skills but not really anything more than that. As a Zen Buddhist I've spent many years observing the nature of my mind and ego and see the adulation of others as not only irrelevant but also poisonous to my well-being. My sense of worth comes from within not from the exterior; it is independent of the whims of society.