Narcissism and ASD

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You have my support. No one should ever be judged by a label, or by their occasional slips. It's the totality of what we say and do in life that matters. I have residual moral outrage against my former friend, but that is one person who actually did me wrong.

have issue with the concept of being a Narcisstic person and the Autistic association . Realize many comparisons
were made in this thread . But I just do not see it ....and possibly could be bigoted against Nacisstic personality types
Have suffered much abuse by these types of persons . ( the op here seems to create many loose associations that do not have much merit to me)

It's very good to have some boundaries. My girlfriend's brother(I'll use W) has been diagnosed with Aspergers since he was very little but he also seems a lot like a covert narcissist. W experienced LOTS of problems growing up including some serious medical issues. However he also got a lot of special treatment at home & Cass & their other two siblings were kinda ignored & fell through the cracks so to speak. Their family has lots of various issues & their parents were doing the best they could considering. W sometimes talks like family owes him for his childhood but he doesn't grasp how hard his 3 siblings had it & how much their parents were trying. He talks like he believes others only care about themselves while completely unaware that he is protecting his own mindset onto others. Cass is very likely also on the spectrum but she's very empathic. Her & W have a lot of the same issues & W sometimes talks like Cass is bringing her issues onto herself & could overcome them if she tried. When she gives W his own advice back, he gets very defensive & sometimes accuses her of blaming him or making him angry or anxious. W feels his issues are the only 1s that matter & he expects Cass to push through hers to spend time with him on his terms when he wants her too. Cass is the type to feel very guilty if she cant make others feel better so she usually gives in. However she's starting to assert herself more & is slowly setting more boundaries partly due to my insistence & I'm very proud of her for trying. W is handling the friction well considering. Cass wears herself out dealing with others & cant really focus on taking care of herself & she gets angry or shuts down when she gets back. She's fine with me being around because I usually don't require her to be very social with me. I can just hang out & quietly do my own thing next to her till she feels like talking or something & if she asks me to do something I'll go do it. Cass actually says I'm easy to be with which seems very odd to me because my mom has often accused me of being very demanding & has called me a narcissist before. In my case I think it's due to me having various disabilities mom could not relate to or really understand & her methods of pushing me to be independent because she was worried about me were just not right for me. Cass says my mom is very lucky she didn't have W for a son instead & that W is lucky my mom wasn't his mom. I think W woulda been a lot better off if he had better life circumstances growing up, like if his parents had a bit more money, his mom wasn't stressed to her limit partly due to her own issues, & his dad didn't have to spend most all his time at work making minimum-wage with no overtime pay. Me & Cass tend to be very accepting & supportive of each others issues so we get along really well most of the time these days thou we still have some arguments & fights.

Go on...

I don't know very much about NPD, so I may be off, but it seems to me that the correlation just doesn't hold up. As far as I understand it, a narcissist is actively massaging a given situation to create some benefit for themselves, even if it's just an ego boost and admiration, whereas someone with ASD is incapable of doing something which involves any degree of being manipulative, because that requires a fine-tuned understanding of how other people tick, which autistics generally lack.

I find I agree with the reader's response, not the original premise.

This is objectively incorrect, many of us have experienced or witnessed manipulative behaviour from other autistics.

I don't know any autistic people in real life, so I don't know, but I believe you.

For myself, I know I am utterly incapable of being manipulative. I also don't want to be, but if I did, I would not be able to because it would require me to understand how other people can be influenced to do what I want them to do, which is an ability I lack.

Have the manipulative autistics you have witnessed been successful in their manipulations? Granted, I understand that every autistic person is different, so I know I am wrong to generalize.

My tuppence -

When I finally heard Narcistic Personality Disorder described as it feels from the inside, sudden I could relate to it a lot. Not so much from an autistic point of view, but more as someone who has chronic General Anxiety Disorder with a side order of social anxiety. It felt like the narcissistic mindset was driven by a lot of the same fears, insecurities and distorted viewpoint I experience, just expressed through a very different set of dysfunctional coping strategies.

People here and on mental health websites have this nasty habit of lay-diagnosing anyone who is unpleasant to them as a "Narcissist," even when said unpleasantness lies well withing the range of non-mentally-ill behaviour.

Yes, I think I'd find someone with full-blown NPD a little hard to handle. I can think of one old college friend who developed a compulsion to talk endlessly about what she was achieving. Which was a lot (she's frankly an artistic powerhouse), but however far she got it never seemed to calm the anxiety that drove her. And I struggled with the one-sided conversations....

I've seen both success and failure.

I'd be lying if I tried to insist that I had never behaved in an intentionally manipulative manner; I've also been on the receiving end of social manipulation by other autistic people (both directly and also receiving hostility as a result of someone manipulating others).

Personally, I'm skeptical of people who claim to be incapable of manipulation because I've never met a person who's actually been incapable of it. Even people who are poorly equipped for it still tend to be capable of it to some extent, sometimes by leaning into the idea that they're incapable of it and allowing others to infantilize them in exchange for getting what they're after. Pretending to be stupid and helpless, and relying on the pity it generates to improve one's outcomes might be an example of that specific variety of manipulative behaviour from someone who's poorly equipped for it.

That is true. Unless someone is showing explicit narcissist behaviours, I think it could be greatly offensive to just throw the word around whenever you get in a disagreement with someone online or someone is showing distress. Some people have dealt with narcissists in their lives and may be traumatized by it, so being called a narcissist might be triggering.

I've dealt with a psychopath in my life, not directly but he came into my family and more or less broke it up. It was temporary but at the time it was awfully stressful and nobody knew what the outcome would be. It could have been permanent. He was a wife-beater, a paedophile and a conman, plus being excellent at manipulating even the police. He was an awful person in every way, no positive traits about him at all. So whenever people accuse me of lacking empathy just because I don't understand something it really freaks me out because I think of him. Whenever you look up psychopathy the first trait of it is "lack of empathy".
I think I even become freaked out whenever I demonstrate a lack of empathy here, in case people here think I'm like that in real life too. I know I'm not, because my boyfriend was married to a narcissist who lacked any compassion or empathy, and he says he can spot a narcissist or psychotic person with lack of empathy a mile off, and he says I'm the opposite to her in every way. He says I'm nowhere near a narcissist and I'm empathetic.

It isn't just the lack of empathy that defines them, it's also things like poor impulse control, inability to delay gratification, willingness to harm others to get their way, lack of fear, poor risk assessment, etc.

People tend to assume just one or two traits makes them similar to this or that stigmatized mental health condition, but it's the entire package and how those elements interact that makes some people inherently more of a risk.

Even someone who occasionally lacks empathy and is prone to impulsive behaviours probably won't resemble a psychopath unless they've got most of the other traits as well.

I don't know, I think we might live in very different circles. I don't know anyone among the people I know well who is manipulative. Some of them would be capable of it, I'm sure, but they haven't done it that I'm aware of. For myself, I am far from stupid and helpless and no one in real life would read me as such, but I find it hard enough to just interact with people without unintentionally offending them. I can't imagine making the additional leap of not only not offending them but also misdirecting and misleading them in order to get them to do something they wouldn't otherwise do.

I'd be very surprised if there's a person who has never lied by omission (for example). That's definitely a manipulative behaviour, but most people wouldn't acknowledge it as such while in the act of doing it.

I believe most people tend to overlook their own manipulative behaviours, whether through failing to think of them as such or through intentional doublethink. This is a big contributor to why it's hard to call people out for those behaviours and why ego-saving is the standard response.

This is true. We can all lack empathy sometimes, nobody's perfect. And I am prone to impulsive behaviours due to ADHD. But I have no other traits.

Maybe we're just thinking of "manipulative" in different ways. To me, a lie is only "manipulative" if it's intended to get the other person to do something specific. I agree that everyone has lied.

Manipulation is a pretty useful tool to use in order to survive. I don't think it's altogether a negative trait to have.

Also everyone lies. I lie for a living.