Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Smoking Gun to Narcissist Detection: Your Birthday

Narcissists treat all their supply sources with disrespect due to their inherent belief that they need to feel better than others, but they're manipulative to get their needs met, so you often have good memories with them, in which they're lovebombing or breadcrumbing you with affection.

This creates the smoke and mirror effect of cognitive dissonance that protects your state of denial over your abuser.

But there's a smoking gun to narcissistic behavior.

Narcissists cannot stand you on your birthday.

On your birthday, they reveal their true emotional intelligence: toddlers.

They are infuriated that someone else was ever born!

They are enraged and jealous of you getting attention!

THEY NEED TO RUIN IT.

THEY NEED THE ATTENTION.

THEY DESERVE ALLLLLL THE PRESENTS.

IT ISN’T FAIR! Mommmmy!

This behavior isn’t actually limited to birthdays: narcissists don't like weddings, and they are often the source of fights on Christmas or other holidays.

The problem with birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and holidays is that the narcissist feels that the focus of attention is not squarely placed upon them.

Additionally, a narcissist regulates their emotional state via supply, which means they require the ability to control others’ emotional states to relieve themselves of their own shame or prop up their fantasies of grandiosity.

Therefore, if a narcissists’ supply is happy, the narcissist will feel bad.

If the narcissist feels bad, they will try to rid that feeling by making supply feel bad instead.

If the narcissists’ supply is unhappy, the narcissist will feel good.

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Personality disorders root in early childhood, so these behaviors are lifelong. From the age of a toddler until she was 12, my little sister woke up on my birthday and pitched a screaming fit.

She cried and screamed all day.

Everyone in the family knew to bring her gifts on my birthday, even though I didn’t get gifts on hers. They just needed to make the screaming stop…if only for a moment.

She’d grab my gifts and immediately tear into them, try to break them. It was normal as a toddler: she was a vicious little kid. But as she got older, it was like, WTF?!

Then she got more covert about ruining birthdays.

Here’s a list of things narcissists I knew did on my birthdays:

Gave the same generic gift every year: candles and soap.
Gave a lovely gift but gave it 2 months late — so sorry I forgot!
Showed up late to my party in a mood having had a horrible traffic experience that they must talk about nonstop.
Gave a gift of a trash can filled with things like toothpaste and razors.
Gave a gift of something HE wanted, not something I wanted.
Gave a gift of something I explicitly said I didn't like and then gave what I said I did like to their mother for her birthday.
Took me out to dinner but made me walk and walk until I was sweating and starving because they couldn’t decide where they wanted to eat.
Announced a pregnancy or important life event during the celebration.
Started a fight with me over something trivial and stormed off.
Didn’t get me a thing, not even a card, but sent an email: “Happy birthday.” Couldn’t even be bothered to hit an exclamation point or emoji (Hi dad).
Told me that the age I’m turning was the worst age of their life and what awful things awaited me.
Sent an email saying I was worthless and hateful and she bears the scars for my birth (Hi mom 👋).
Said they got asked to work a double but were actually out cheating on me.

As a bonus, narcissists will even ruin their own birthdays if the birthday makes supply happy.

I got my sister an expensive, beautiful hookah because she loved to do that with friends. Her friends were having a blast with it…she left it at my house and called it a dumb gift.
A friend’s wife planned him a party. Everyone was excited. He canceled it because he said there would be too many children there. Then he pouted that no one would do anything for his birthday.

Sometimes, a narcissist you haven’t heard from in a long time will use your birthday as a time to hoover: they know that their “Happy Birthday” text will remind you that you are not loved by someone you wanted love so desperately from. They know it will hurt you to hear from them.

After growing up with narcissists and trauma bonding my whole life, I now spend my birthday alone. It’s the only chance I have at having a happy one.

It pleases them too: they love knowing you’re alone on your birthday. They hate watching you be loved and celebrated. You don’t deserve it.

ONLY THEY DO! 🥳

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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, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.

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