The DSM-V (bible of the mental health field) criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) requires someone have 5 of the following 9 criteria in order to be diagnosed with NPD. Lucky me! My husband ticks every box!
The 9 criteria of NPD are:
- A grandiose sense of self-importance without actually doing the things to warrant the importance.
- Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love.
- Believing they are special or unique and can only be understood by or should associate with other special/unique people.
- Require excessive admiration.
- A sense of entitlement.
- Being interpersonally exploitative.
- Lacking empathy.
- Often envious of others or believe others are envious of them.
- Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors.
Criteria 1: A grandiose sense of self-importance (inflating achievements; bragging)
- He claimed to be a Navy SEAL and veteran with 9 years of military service. He didn’t serve a single day.
- He also claims that he “has 2 bachelor’s degrees.” This isn’t even a real thing. They say they have a DOUBLE MAJOR. This is because nobody is going to take 40+ credits of general education twice (which you would have to do in order to earn “2 bachelor’s degrees). They take the general education classes once and add on the credits for an additional major if that’s what they want to do.
- He claims to have been “in law enforcement.” This amounted to, as far as I can tell, riding along with the local cops when they were on patrol.
Criteria 2: Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
- His big fantasy was winning the lottery. He admitted to me that he spent hours thinking about what he would do with the winnings.
- He was also preoccupied with inventing business ideas, fantasizing about their success and the life he would live.
Criteria 3: Believing that they are “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
- Again the (fake) Navy SEAL status applies to this category.
- He joined the American Legion online in 2004 and rose to be Commander of the local legion. (He has since been kicked out.)
Criteria 4: Require excessive admiration
- As I said, he claimed to be a Navy SEAL. He wore a ball cap that he had made that he had custom embroidered with his Navy nickname and the Little Creek Navy base. He had Navy SEAL stickers on his truck. He loved the attention that brought him when we were out and about.
- He claims to have “150 kills” as a Navy SEAL.
- He claims to have 2 purple hearts.
Criteria 5: A sense of entitlement (unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations)
- His sense of entitlement was huge. I could write an entire blog post about just this one aspect of his narcissism! His entitlement ranged from expecting to get premium parking spots at the fair to expecting people to wave to him when he drove by in his truck or on the ATV. If they didn’t wave, he always made a comment about how “mean” people were nowadays.
- He also felt entitled to yell or rage at me or his children (my step-children) at the smallest perceived slight or infraction.
Criteria 6; Being interpersonally exploitative (taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends)
- He used his (fraudulent) Navy SEAL status to gain veteran’s discounts at each and every business he frequented, including Home Depot, Verizon, Sirius XM, mom and pop diners, Marriot Hotel and many others.
- After he found out my parents had money, he became serious about our relationship. He jokingly told me after we were married that he had previously told his friends, “The next time I marry, I’m marrying for money.”
- The night I found out he was a fraud, I told him to move out of the house I bought prior to us getting together. He is still living there nearly a year later. He sends me only $200 a month to help with expenses (he makes around $8000/month!) while I am paying half my salary renting an apartment because he refuses to move!
Criteria 7: Lacking empathy: unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
- He had no empathy for his children and constantly personalized anything they did that he didn’t like. He called them names and was generally awful to them. Many times, I tried to explain interpersonal skills to him, but I know now that he didn’t want to understand, nor should I have been explaining basic human behavior to a full-grown adult man!
- He drove recklessly in the car when I was with him, overturned the ATV when I was 2 months post-op, disregarded my need for sleep, and on and on.
Criteria 8: Often being envious of others or believing that others are envious of them
- He always has to have the best of everything: a fully decked out ATV, best underwear (yes seriously!), best socks, best tools, best phone, best clothing brand. And if you didn’t want to wear the same underwear, socks, clothing brand, he would punish you with the silent treatment or criticize your choices. I dared to switch back to my preferred phone brand from the brand he had convinced me to try and got the silent treatment because of it!
- He is jealous of anyone who has more money than he does. He ridicules people from the city as “yuppies” or “flatlandas” and this is largely because he feels jealous of their money and status.
Criteria 9: Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitude
- He is quite covert about showing arrogant behaviors and tends to couch his arrogance in being “helpful.” He will do helpful things, like plowing the neighbor’s driveway or stopping to help a girl change a flat, but he never does anything helpful unless others know about it. He would never give a gift anonymously.
- He believes he is superior to everyone else because he was a (fake) Navy SEAL and (fake) smokejumper.
If you are at all unsure if someone in your life is a narcissist, it might be helpful to create your own list for each of the criterion. Remember for a diagnosis of NPD, someone only needs to have 5 out of these 9 criteria. Even if your person doesn’t tick every box, that doesn’t mean that their behaviors are not problematic or toxic. You get to determine what is tolerable in your situation. And the person with the problem behaviors does not get a vote in whether their behaviors are, in fact, a problem for you.