are the following common in untreated npd/cluster b?
are the following common in untreated npd/cluster b?
i know that everyone with cluster b personality disorders are different and obviously not everyone with cluster b/npd is abusive/a bully. this person just happened to be abusive with untreated npd.
she clearly needs help, and happens to have anger issues as well, taking her anger out on most everyone.
often she tried to isolate me from other people, since “no one understands you like i do, people actually hate you for your disability and see you as an animal. i know best and i know what they really think.”
she also seems to adhere to rules and gets mad when people don’t strictly follow them.
she expects people be identical to her and strictly fit into her mold, and constantly excludes people like me but then acts sweet when she needs something again.
she genuinely lacks empathy and doesn’t care about social rights for minorities nor animal rights, and seems to view other people as tools to help HER gain success, everyone else be damned. (she can have basic empathy, such as “oh I’m sorry that happened”, or care about social rights when it makes her look good.)
if, for example, someone doesn’t let her win a sort of game, she will call them some sort of insult or slur. she called my black friend the n word for not letting her cheat in a game and also not going easy on her to let her win.
she also is convinced everyone’s out to get her, that everyone is cheating if they win, that no one is better than she is, or that people are deliberately attacking her for not letting her win/not interacting with her.
she cannot take accountability, and thinks that everything bad happening to her is undeserved, as she is “the best”.
i’m sorry if i sound mean. i acknowledge that not everyone with a cluster b personality disorder is like this as i said, i just know she is and seems to show traits of an untreated cluster b personality disorder from what i’ve heard of, and have specifically been told it SOUNDS like npd (untreated).
i’m also a little upset/done because she’s been treating me and others badly for years 😓
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You can't "treat" cluster B personality (for what I know).
Stay away, it's the only thing you can do.
Eh... I don't think it's anywhere near as black and white as "you can't treat cluster B personality disorders." I don't think they're even really less treatable than non-cluster-B personality disorders. A desire/willingness to change, a good and compatible therapist, a good support network, etc are all things that can help the treatment process. I doubt any personality disorder can be "cured" or eliminated, but that's much different than "treated."
Of course, OP shouldn't be trying to "treat" anyone for PDs unless she's well qualified and the person she's treating is a patient of hers, but it didn't sound like that's anything OP was suggesting.
If the person does not have empathy, then you can't train that person to have it, and even if they "behave" in society because their psy told them how to act in different situations, they'll still always be that type of person that IMO you should just stay away from (as in personal relationship).
So, first off, I'm wanting this community to be the sort of place where people with personality disorders (all personality disorders) feel safe to participate. The direction you're coming from is more about managing what Elinor Greenberg calls "splash" in her book "Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations: The Persuit of Love, Admiration, and Safety". That is, the "havoc they cause in the lives of those around them" (a quote from the aforementioned book.)
I'm not saying anything you've said is "against the rules" or that I'm going to remove posts that talk this way or anything. And there's a lot of truth in what you're saying. It's definitely a truism that ought to be generally heeded that it's a bad idea to get into or stay in a relationship (and I don't just mean romantic relationships here) with someone on the premise that "I can change them." That virtually never "works" or turns out well. Also, it's totally justified to end a relationship if it's bad for your own mental health (regardless of whether the other party could be considered to have a diagnosable psychiatric condition or not.) If I squint hard enough at the part of your post where you say "you should just stay away from [them]" with enough charity, I can kinda maybe make out the blurry outlines of what I've said here earlier in this paragraph. But just the words you used alone sound reductive at best.
And it's definitely true that a lot of personality disorders tend to be very durable and "resistant" to treatment.
That said, to cast the "purpose" of mental health treatment as "training a person to have empathy" or "telling someone how to act in different situations" makes it sound like the patient is a not-yet-housetrained puppy and the therapist is liberally applying a water squirt bottle punitively. Therapy is for the benefit of the patient, not for the purpose of making the patient "behave." (Three caveats to this. Therapy is about changing behavior to the extent that behavior change is beneficial to the patient's goals and the patient is on board with this. And sometimes mental health intervention is required/imposed by the criminal justice system and in those cases I suppose one could argue that it's about "getting people to behave in society." Third, I think there's some controversy among therapists regarding to what extent at least some patients may require help even forming goals, and it's probably the case that sometimes it may be appropriate for a therapist to suggest that perhaps a change to behavior may help the patient in tangible ways.) But if, say, someone with narcissistic personality disorder whose behavior has consistently been well-described by the term "high splash" enters therapy and the only thing which results is less mental anguish on the part of the patient without any reduction in "splash", that's not a "failed therapeutic intervention." That's a significant benefit. Therapy has "worked" in that instance. (Perhaps arguably incompletely, but still, the wellbeing of the patient is the primary aim, not forcing them not to be mean or whatever.)
Finally, when you say that "you can't treat cluster B", I think you're off base lumping the different cluster B personality disorders into that broad statement. Just with a bit of googling, I found a study that ranked borderline personality disorder (a cluster B personality disorder) as "low stability", meaning that among the different personality disorders, borderline personality disorder was one for which patients with that disorder were more likely than patients with other personality disorders to no longer qualify for the diagnosis after a certain amount of time had passed. Narcissistic personality disorder (also a cluster B personality disorder, and the primary one we've been talking about in this thread) and antisocial personality disorder (also a cluster B personality disorder) were only ranked "moderately stable". The relevant quote from the study:
For individual PDs, rank-order stability ranged from low (borderline, avoidant, PD NOS, and passive-aggressive PDs) to moderate (paranoid, narcissistic, antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, and depressive PDs) to high (schizoid, dependent PDs). With a tetrachoric correlation coefficient (rtet) of 0.60, rank-order stability was by far the highest for cluster A disorders.
(Some personality disorders were not ranked due to lack of data.)
I haven't read the study thoroughly and it's very possible that even the "low stability" category is still extremely stable and only "low stability" in comparison to other personality disorders, which would still lend some amount of validity to your claim that "you can't treat cluster B personality". I suppose another thing I could say about that is that technically in that statement you didn't say "you can't treat cluster B personality disorders". So maybe what you're getting at is that even treatment that results in a patient no longer qualifying for a diagnosis of a cluster B personality disorder still results in a person with a particular personality organization that leans in the direction of their former diagnosis. (As in, a non-pathological level of traits from the personality disorder in question.) Which... is probably almost always true, I'd guess? I wouldn't want to stick my neck out so far as to commit to that, though.
Edit: I just happened to watch this video yesterday and right about at the 2:30 mark, he mentions that the data shows that "for the majority of people, BPD actually resolves." As in remission.