Narcissistic Personality Disorder

How to Unmask a Narcissist: The Two Question Narcissist Test

No wonder this world is a hot mess express to Hell.

When I first began studying Cluster B personality disorders to understand my childhood and adult trauma, much of what I read centered on victim blaming: “If only you'd not engaged with a narcissist to begin with, you wouldn't have been abused. If only you'd learned boundaries, the narcissist wouldn't have targeted you.”

Victim blaming is a narcissist abuse tactic, and many so-called experts — or even psychologists — are narcissists themselves reverting blame away from abusers through this narrative.

They ignore (gaslight) the fact that narcissists abuse vulnerable people, and the abuse is not always consensual. The narcissist could have been your rapist, or they could have been your parent. They could even be your politician or boss.

Narcissists also abuse children, the mentally handicapped, and animals. They abuse whole communities they scapegoat via racism, sexism, and homophobia/transphobia in their relentless need for superiority and grandiosity.

The victim blaming rhetoric also ignores that narcissists wear masks and manipulate. They don’t advertise themselves. They often appear as incredibly nice and loving people, especially the covert or vulnerable types. They design their masks after their scapegoats: empathetic people who they envy.

But because I'm a borderline, I was eager to self blame, and, just as I did in my childhood, I tried to correct the things that I was told were my fault.

Therefore, I had to figure out ways to spot even the most covert narcissist so I could avoid them.

AND I FOUND THEM.

***

My tried and true test of narcissist detection are two questions that never fail me.

One of them, they can answer; the other, they can’t.

THE QUESTION THEY CAN’T ANSWER:

HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?

The narcissist survives by living in a fantasy world and denying their real self by wearing a mask and mirroring kind people.

When they deny their real self, they must suppress all their emotions.

Their baseline emotions that they're suppressing are all negative: despair, grief, insecurity, jealousy, anger, revenge.

These are all feelings that they’ll never admit in the fantasy self, because they're shameful.

Even love is a shameful feeling to them — it's the one they fear most — because to love someone means they have power over you, and a narcissist cannot handle feeling powerless or out of control.

So they don't articulate any feelings at all. They cannot talk about them.

Not any of them.

This is one of their traits that puts NPD on the autism spectrum. The inability to identify, understand, or speak of emotions is called alexithymia.

This is also why they are so lacking in empathy: they can't even understand or feel their own emotions, let alone yours. They can't grieve and they've never felt guilt.

They only know they have a compulsion to hurt others in order to relieve their own stress. Typically, they don't understand why they do that either, though they know they abuse people. They simply tell themselves everyone deserves their abuse, and they see their abuses as heroic and deserved justice.

They project their self hate so they hate those they abuse deeply and see them as "all bad" due to their split thinking.

Real examples of when I asked this question to sniff out an NPD:

How did you feel going to your brother’s grave today? Not good.
Going to prison so young is traumatic. How did you feel? Butthurt to lose my girlfriend. I still have her name tattooed on me.
How do you feel hearing about my BPD diagnosis? Well, it makes sense.
How did you feel when your daughter won her pageant? She is just like me! It’s so exciting!
How do you feel about your dad being in the hospital? I feel like everyone is walking on eggshells around me because I get mad about the responsibility of caring for my dad.
How do you feel about the divorce? I’m a man. I don’t let feelings cloud my judgment. But she’s a dumb bitch and she cheated on me.
How do you feel about your ex that you say did all these horrible things to you? How do I feel? How do I feel? Hmmmm…I don’t know. I just move on. No use in dwelling, you know?

THEY CANNOT TALK ABOUT FEELINGS. THEY NEVER EVER MENTION AN ACTUAL FEELING.

The only time you’ll see their actual feelings is in a collapse. You'll see them voice all their negative feelings openly and you’ll see them cry and become toddler like: this is the true self that the mask suppresses. It's their true age.

They feel their feelings of rage and worthlessness all the time: they deal with it by projecting them through abuse. They find others to abuse to make them feel what they are feeling. When you absorb those feelings — like jealousy, anger, or worthlessness — they feel relief, because they feel powerful and superior, which restores the narcissist fantasy.

Power and superiority is always narcissistic fantasy: no one is better than anyone else.

Even power is a human invention, an idea we all buy into to disastrous effects (as NPDs/ASPDs pursue powerful positions).

No one actually has power over anyone else like that. It’s an illusion we accept and it allows abuse to flourish. It's antithetical to freedom and human rights.

That’s why the mighty often fall, and all empires collapse.

That’s why all systems of power were constructed through violence, fear, and theft — power comes through abuse, but it’s an unsustainable illusion always.

And violence isn’t power: violence is an expression of fear. It means a narcissist or sociopath has LOST CONTROL.

Their fantasies are fed entirely by something they aren’t capable of: love.

They couldn’t even abuse us unless we loved them, or had a love for and empathy for humanity.

Which means the power is always in the supply.

And deep down, they know that. And hate you for it.

THE QUESTION THEY CAN ANSWER:

WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ONE OF YOUR PARENTS IN SOME WAY?

The mark of the golden child narcissist is that their name is after the narcissist parent. The narcissist can only think in simple terms — all good or all bad — and the golden child is considered all good and perfect at birth.

There is only one person in the narcissist’s world who is all good and perfect: THEMSELVES.

They see the golden child as an extension of the self, and can think of no better name for them than one that is very close to their own.

It is commonly Jrs, but it also can be rhyming or mirroring names: Kandi Lee and Kathi Leigh, or John and Jean, or Eleanor and Theodore, for example (Hey, Ted Bundy!) Or, they give their first name as the child’s middle name or they'll have the same middle names. Occasionally, the names will have the same meaning (like Janice and Sean both meaning "God is gracious"– hey P. Diddy!) or it'll be a nickname of the narcissist (Like how Barron was the name T***p used as an alias when checking into hotels).

Sometimes they get creative with it. For example, Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooter, had a father named Thomas. His favorite poet was Dylan Thomas: ironically, that writer is famous for an anti-suicide poem.

They’ll either tell you that the parent who golden childed them is a saint or the devil. If they hate them, they often go by a nickname, initials, or a middle name.

As a pro-tip: scapegoat children are always named after someone who died tragically or former supply of the narcissist who they hate or a rival in the family. Invisible children are given common names or names that fall outside of family patterns.

They all do this as if they have a playbook, but the reason for it is due to split thinking about people. People are either all good, all bad, or irrelevant/invisible. This applies to their children even at birth.

And all good will always be THEM.

They have no idea this naming pattern is a smoking gun.

Narcissists get angry when you point out the pattern, because they get angry at truths that cause them to self reflect or take them out of their fantasy self and into reality.

It's possible that someone named after a parent doesn't have NPD, but I’ve yet to meet a person named after a parent who didn’t reveal themselves to have NPD through their pathological patterns of behavior and abuses later. So, I avoid enmeshments with them at all costs.

However, it's very common for them to have a victimhood mentally and deny being narcissistic or anything like their parents. Narcissism as a trauma response operates in denial and fantasies of grandiosity, goodness, and perfection.

They’ll talk about being victims to narcissistic abuse, and they are — they frequently bond to narcissists like their parents due to child trauma and they were victims to their parents— but honest self reflection about their own behaviors is very difficult for them, because their brains cannot process shame.

They also have no stable identity as a part of their disorder: they have no self to reflect upon.

Narcissists generally hate narcissists, because narcissists hate themselves. It’s the same reason they’ll talk about hating cheaters and valuing loyalty, while they cheat on loyal people or accuse their victims of cheating when they’re the ones having an affair — because they hate themselves, but also cannot process that hate or see outside themselves.

Others who they project hate onto serve as a mirror of themselves that they can smash. They need scapegoats to blame and hate to rid themselves of their denied self hate.

This is why they must create a fantasy self to love to survive and why they must delude themselves to believe their victims deserve abuse.

They’ll even say they are empaths, though empathy would prevent them from abusing others in the ways they have. They only understand empathy cognitively, not emotionally, as they’ve never actually felt it.

Empathy doesn’t develop in the brain until high school years, and narcissists are emotionally stunted to early childhood.

Their masks are designed after who they want to be, their false selves…

…who are, ironically, most often their scapegoats who they abuse the most: empathic, loving, moral people.

Whenever a mass shooting happens, I look up the names of the shooters and the parents’ full names.

I also use this method for insight when there is a heinous crime, such as Casey Marie Anthony’s murdered golden child, Caylee Marie Anthony, whose mother is named Cindy Marie Anthony…

You can figure out which celebrities you love are narcissists this way too. (A lot of them).

Now, how many US presidents, world leaders, and warmongers in history are Jrs or share rhyming names, mirrored names, or middle names with a parent????

A WHOLE LOT OF THEM.

No wonder the research estimates that world leaders are 250x more likely to have NPD than the public. Narcissists pursue power and control and they seek the freedom to abuse and hate without consequences.

We live in a world run by angry, envious, overgrown toddlers with no self awareness, empathy, remorse, or accountability who gaslight us, brainwash us, and sell us fantasies. No wonder this world is a hot mess express to Hell.

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

I’m blogging about mental health & true crime, popular culture, and personal essays on my new blog, Blooming on the Borderline: check it out at the links below.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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Anne M. Champion is the author of This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (KDP, 2024), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.

THE QUESTION THEY CAN’T ANSWER:

THE QUESTION THEY CAN ANSWER:

They also have no stable identity as a part of their disorder: they have no self to reflect upon.

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