Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the neurological entrapment in fear

 The term narcissist has been popularized with rising interest in NPD online, but the actual neurological basis of this prolific disorder seems to have evaded both the worlds of psychology and neuroscience.   Understanding the origin of this disorder in the timeline of physical and neurological development strongly explains the behavioral and experiential realities.   

While traditional views of childhood development suggest that trauma is an important factor in the genesis of mental health disorders, what we will see in my model is that the formation of this disorder occurs well before the child has the cognitive ability to comprehend their environment.   

The challenges in understanding the origins of many disorders such as NPD is accurately capturing the subjective first-person experience from the outside looking in as well as understanding the neurological basis of these disorders.   The world is very different for people who experience this particular presentation.   

The first person perspective of NPD forms due to a neurological positive feedback loop created in very early childhood.   This like all disorders is caused by the sympathetic nervous system and the "fight or flight" reaction, but the age of the origin of this ego formation have significant implications in terms of the experience and behavior.   

When we consider the world of infant children, we recognize that they have an undeveloped relationship to reality and short duration emotions geared towards maintaining a relationship with a caregiver.   Babies are helpless, fully dependent on the mother for both protection and care.   Also of note is that fear is experienced as separation anxiety in young animals as both a mechanism to organize family units and promote retreating to the protection of the mother.   This is important to note in explaining abandonment anxiety as a pathological malformation in all adult human beings including those with NPD.   Abandonment is simply recalled childhood separation anxiety on a positive feedback loop in the amygdala as a malformed fight or flight reaction resulting in a self-sustaining experience.    What causes NPD is an arbitrary activation of the fight or flight response in children who have not developed spoken language and have minimal capacity to comprehend social or physical realities.   Any disturbances that activate the sympathetic response will result in this malformation.   When the child is triggered into fear, separation anxiety is invoked but the circumstances around this experience are not recognized by the child. 

The sympathetic nervous system captures the event as a fight or flight reaction the unknown threat of reality.  It could be triggered by any environmental disturbance like arguing between the parents, or something like the mother intentionally spooking a young child.  Animals protect their young as the nervous systems are not developed fully and the physical form of the animal is unprepared for fighting.   Human beings are afflicted with these reactions that result in disturbances in the environment, and the conflicts of adults are what cause fear reactions in children.   Since young children don't understand reality, the lacking awareness creates a permanent fear of reality itself as the neurological activity at the time of the formation of these pathways was undeveloped.   The result is the "narcissistic injury" as an outwardly expressed blunt reaction of significant intensity, rage, and fear.   This malformation is the cause of lacking empathy as the reaction is always present as a generalized anxiety that causes distrust of all sensory perceptions.  Narcissists have significant social anxiety, abandonment anxiety, paranoid ideations, distrust of others, and antisocial tendencies as a result of this significant neurologically induced state.   The narcissistic injury represents the entire contextual phenomenon of the external experience. 

Children with NPD start to speak and become aware within a different reality that other children.  The generalized fear normalizes but the lack of empathy is a result of elevated sympathetic stimulation due to the narcissistic injury.   Children with NPD compensate for the lack of empathy by emulation of behaviors observed and correlated to their perceived social relevance.   A more "cause and effect" behavior pattern results.  The other impact of the Narcissistic injury is the emotional framework of an infant child is retained, so the emotional states of others has a significant impact on people with NPD who have emotional states that involuntarily reflect those of people that encounter.   The duration of positive emotional states is short duration, reflecting the age in which the narcissistic injury was generated.  This is why they seek "supply" which is an experiential necessity for NPD sufferers to generate an experience of self.  They need emotional feedback to stave of social anxiety and paranoias, as well as formulate behaviors that reflect a need to maintain positive emotional states, protect themselves from humiliation, abandonment, narcissistic injury, or to control the emotional states of others.   

To be cont. with later edits!