One of my best friends has been dealing with an NPD sibling for most of his life. The family used to live near me but have not for a while. But my friend calls me up once in a while to update me on the latest shenanigans.
This NPD has designated my friend Rival #1 for a very long time. This is mixed with extreme envy, which I think is pitiful. Anyone who is wildly envious of my friend must be absolutely pitiful because my friend has had little going for him forever now.
But he still feels very challenged and gets upset if my friend has any sort of serious success. Usually he gets very uncomfortable when he hears about it and then a few months later, he is going around telling everyone that he has achieved a similar success that has equaled or surpassed my friend’s success. For instance, a couple decades ago, my friend managed to get a Masters Degree. This was a serious threat to the NPD and he was silent about this for a while. A few months later, the NPD was telling everyone that he had a Masters Degree. He cannot allow my friend to have one up on him in any way, shape or form. He’s that crazy insecure.
The NPD can be generous, especially to his family. However, part of this may be that he has some money and he sees the whole rest of his family as “the pitiful losers who brought it on themselves.” He does give them money, but I suspect that part of it may be he can feel superior to them and to play the role of “successful winner helping out the poor pitiful losers.”
The NPD has a child who he cherishes with all the love in the world. Other than that, he has not much concern for anyone else. He asks my friend how he is doing, and 30 seconds later he is looking around the room in utter boredom. It is unbelievably rude, and it is quite a sight to behold. Then he starts talking rapidly, saying something like, “OK, thanks for telling us what is going on with you. Let’s move on now,” usually not in a very nice way.
He has a blustering air about him. He can very nice, and then he can turn cold as ice on a dime. He has been this way for decades. As he has aged, the condition has worsened. He used to care somewhat about my friend’s life and what he was doing at least to some extent.
I saw this person turn on his own mother, the mother of my friend. She is the nicest lady you have ever met, and I have known her forever. But at one point, I believe because he was trying to get money out of her and she would not cooperate, he turned into a complete Iceman, read her the riot act and told her he was writing her out of his life. He acted like he did not care at all that he would ever see his mother again. The coldness and brutal callousness of it was almost breathtaking to behold. His mother was utterly devastated and blamed herself for this episode, which is how he phrased things of course.
He is a master manipulator and has superb social skills except for the NPD stuff which is social retardation, yet of course he has no awareness of the NPD stuff and how retarded it is, so I assume he does his NPD stuff everywhere. He can’t see how it is pathological, so why shut it off?
He can be exceptionally devious and has cheated on his taxes before. He can lie with a straight face and maintain that lie for decades in the face of all evidence. He has no problem with near-pathological lying if that is required. He has no insight, and he’s never done much of anything wrong. It’s all the fault of other people.
He got into a serious brawl at his armed security guard job at a naval base. This ended in a first fight which got him written up. He went so far as the fake his lab work by adding blood to his body fluids in order to claim that the man he fought with had severely injured him.
As far as manipulation goes, he is a master par excellence. His manipulations are so sophisticated and convoluted that it seems he is playing 9th Dimensional Chess. The manipulated persons are often at a loss to what the NPD is doing when he is manipulating them. They simply think he is utterly baffling. I have to think about a bit, but after a while, I can take apart the Rube Goldbergian manipulation contraption and figure out exactly what he is trying to do with whatever game he is playing. I tell the manipulated person what I think the NPD is trying to do with them via the this mystifyingly confusing manipulation. It is not easy to figure out his brilliant manipulations though, and it seems like you almost have to run them through a supercomputer to figure them out. But I have him pretty well figured out.
In the family, he was the middle child, and he spent much of his childhood bitching about how the middle child is screwed because the oldest child is the leader who gets all the glory, the youngest one is the baby who gets out of all work, and the middle child never gets any recognition for anything. He developed extreme envy of my friend to the point of taking the opposite position to his on everything. If my friend liked the home baseball team, he would suddenly become a fan of the hometeam’s worst rival for no reason other than spiting the sibling.
He spent his whole life in exaggerated hypermasculinity developed in part as opposition to my friend who he felt was effeminate. My friend is simply a “soft” man who has a feminine side but is not even 1% effeminate. The NPD is a serious homophobe who baited my friend for being gay for many years. My friend is not even 1% gay. He also accused all of my friend’s friends of being gay and said my friend was having gay sex with all of his friends. Instead of being gay, my friend is actually the opposite, one of the more notorious womanizers that I have known. As a young man he was very good-looking. Furthermore the NPD has some mild homosexual leanings of his own which may be related to the homophobia.
He stole many of my friend’s friends away. My friend seemed to make friends a lot easier than the NPD did and was rather more popular. So he poached my friend’s friends and took a number of the rival’s friends away like this. This was insulting to my friend because the implication was that my friend’s friends abandoned my friend for the NPD on the notion that my friend was inferior and the NPD was superior.
The NPD can definitely be violent. As a child, he was a bully who loved to torment and beat up his siblings, especially a younger one. He blamed the sibling he beat up for all of these assaults. In adolescence and adulthood, he displayed violence in some cases, mostly within the family. He is very strong and can hurt with one swing. He seemed to delight in hitting people, and every time he did it you got the impression that he had been saving up months waiting for this cherished moment.
As a security guard, the NPD got to roust people a lot, and he beat people up once in a while, something he very much enjoyed. Bottom line he likes to beat people up. For a while he worked as a prison guard, and I suppose he got to beat people up there too. He derives so much pleasure from beating people up you get the impression that it is one of the peak experiences of his life when he gets to do this. Of course he tried to be a police officer but failed the exams, possibly due to failing lie detector tests about drug use and especially dealing.
I heard that one time the NPD actually beat a man in the head with a baseball bat. This is a charge that he denies to this day, and he will deny it on his deathbed. In fact, he blames the man he assaulted with the bat for the attack, stating that the victim “attacked” the NPD, and the NPD was forced to “fight back.” That is not what happened. It was a straight-up assault.
Around college time, he spent most of his time complaining that his friends’ parents paid them to go to fancy colleges while his parents could only afford to send him to the local college, where he had to live at home.
