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Andrew Feehan's avatar

The grandiose narcissists are easy to spot. However, the quiet narcissists go about their business undetected, and they are often the more dangerous ones. Years go by before the others in their lives realise they've been targeted. Your assessment of the phenomenon is quite accurate. I think the most toxic thing about so-called "vulnerable narcissists" is their lack of self awareness and their proclivity to blame problems in their relationships on everyone else. It is rare for these people to seek help. Many professionals categorically refuse to see them clinically because they don't change. People close to them often stay, thinking "if I only try harder to get through to X, he/she will finally get it", but that's a fool's errand.

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Will Hampton's avatar

Just came across this today, from a link in Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish. I was married for 20 years to a borderline, so understand this issue from that perspective. It is a nightmare, slowly unfolding. The honeymoon period is real -- ours lasted a year or so (until we were married, naturally, and I was legally hooked), and became the subject of many, many arguments: “You weren’t always like this. You changed.” “No, *you* changed, you were the one who never ...” fill in the blank with whatever I had done to cause her upset at that particular moment. The gaslighting is real. And it absolutely blows my mind that Donald Trump, an obvious narcissist (I’ll armchair diagnose right along with you), has gaslighted tens of millions of Americans into believing he was wronged and an election was stolen. What makes his claims of victim hood worse (and this is the case with these crafty crazies) is that so much of the media coverage of him that the called a witch hunt actually was bullshit (see: Russiagate). I hope and pray enough folks have lost their blinders and he won’t get re-elected in 2024, but there’s no doubt he could handily win the GOP nomination. Crazy times. Like you, I worry about the Republic withstanding such madness.

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