Dad-of-three Lee Hammock, 39, from North Carolina, is a diagnosed narcissist. He explains below how narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) has impacted his career, relationships and family life, and the moment he realised he had to get help.
So what is narcissistic personality disorder? It is a pathological disorder of the mind which causes the sufferer to exhibit symptoms like lack of empathy, grandiose sense of self, delusions of grandeur.
It doesn't necessarily cause people to be pathological liars, but it does cause the sufferer to protect themselves by any means necessary, which could involve lying, manipulating, gaslighting, and blame deflection.
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Not only do people with NPD manipulate other people, I feel like the very first target of our manipulation is ourselves. We have to convince ourselves that we are a certain type of person to be able to fit into certain types of circles.
‘I would go to work angry’
I worked in a distribution centre in Greensboro, North Carolina from 2011 to 2017.
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One of my bosses, he was older than me, but I was more educated than him.
I'm like, ‘How in the hell are you telling me what to do?’ I would go to work angry because I felt like I was supposed to own the company.
A lot of other narcissists that I talk to have problems holding down jobs because they feel like they're overqualified just because they are themselves.
I'm me, so I deserve more, and that's the way they justify it.
‘It’s like an out of body experience’
There was this person [at the warehouse], I could not stand this person. I was suddenly turning everybody else in the warehouse against this person. Like other people liked him, and I didn't like him, so I wanted to turn people against him.
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I was spreading little rumors. Like, "Y'all, he kind of weird." Later on, people would say his name and just like, "Y'all know he's kind of weird," and I'm like, I started that.
I did it in such a subtle way that people didn't realize I was doing it. It's kind of like the movie Inception. You plant an idea three levels deep, and now it's their own idea.
Honestly, I even didn't realise I was doing it until I got into therapy.
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When I was manipulating people, it's kind of like an out-of-body experience. It’s like a different part of my personality took over.
I was conscious of it happening in that moment, but it's like I didn't have any kind of control.
‘Narcissism destroyed my relationships’
Narcissism has destroyed most of my relationships. Most of my relationships follow the cycle of narcissistic abuse, love bombing, devaluation, discard.
All my relationships had fallen apart in the same exact way. I'll be madly in love with somebody, and then one day I will wake up and I will view this person in a different light.
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I'll be out of love. I'm like, ‘What the heck? What am I doing with you? I know there's somebody out there better for me.’
So I'll start treating this person badly because I thought there was somebody else out there better for me.
I would always try to find a reason it was their fault, because that helped me justify my behaviours.
If you wouldn't have said this to me, I wouldn't have behaved that way.
‘I’ll be jealous of my kids’
The worst thing that I've done that I would attribute to having NPD is probably my behaviors towards my kids. My oldest two kids have gotten the worst version of me.
My middle son, just yelling and screaming at him, just making him feel, like, not enough.
My older son, just always, ‘Here’s the iPad. Let dad work.’ I've been emotionally neglectful to him, because I wasn't able to connect to him on a deep emotional level.
But my daughter, my three-year-old, she gets the best version of me.
A few years ago, honestly, I'll be jealous of my kids. They were better than me. But like, now I'm just like, “Y'all need to be better than me.”
‘Why I looked the word narcissist up’
At the end of 2016, one of my best friends, his son had passed away. I remember going to his son's funeral and thinking life can end at any moment, and I'm not happy. My behaviour started becoming more and more erratic.
Me and my wife got into a huge argument. I was blaming my six-month-old son for holding me back in life. I always think he has this core memory of his dad yelling at him when he was a baby.
And she came home and heard me yelling and screaming at my son. And that's when she first called me a narcissist. And she ended up leaving, and that's why I ended up looking the word narcissist up.
I was like, “Damn, that sounds exactly like what I've been doing for 20 plus years.”
‘It’s destroying me from the inside out’
When I first went to therapy, the very first email I sent to my therapist was saying, “Hey, look, I'm 99.5 percent certain that I have narcissistic personality disorder and since becoming aware of it, the constant inner battle is debilitating. It's destroying me from the inside out, and I need some help.”
Even after seven years of therapy I still have the personality disorder. It just doesn’t go away.
Getting diagnosed with NPD is not a very simple process. You have to build a relationship with your therapist.
I took two psych evals [psychological evaluations]. One of them is 100 questions, and the other one is 200/300 questions. It takes an hour, two hours to finish that test.
They have built in deception sensors to tell if you've been lying, because they ask you the same question a couple times in different ways to catch you up. So you’re even more of a narcissist than we thought you were at first, you've been lying through this test.
They came out not only saying that I had narcissistic personality disorder, but also had general anxiety disorder and clinical depression as well.
‘Apologising can actually hurt’
Since I got diagnosed, it's allowed me to take accountability for a lot of things that I normally would have passed blame to someone else for.
For a narcissist, apologising can actually hurt. You get chill bumps, you start sweating, you get hives.
It's painful to apologise because when I apologise to you, I'm giving control to you. You can determine whether or not you want to accept the apology.
I've been in therapy so long, I understand that apologizing actually gives me the power. Like whether or not you accept my apology is outside of my control.
‘Narcissists can love’
The one thing people misunderstand about NPD is that I think most people think narcissists are robotic meat sacks.
Most narcissists can care, can love. They just have this internal blockage which prevents them from experiencing that for real.
Something happened to them in their childhood, outside of their control, that makes them behave the way they behave.
This is not an excuse for their behaviours. Something happened to you in your childhood, you have to deal with it.
It’s not the burden of your partner to make up for something that your mum or dad did to you.
Lee Hammock now runs YouTube channel Mental Healness, along with coaching sessions for narcissists and victims of narcisstic abuse. He is also working on his first book.
Topics: Mental Health, Originals
Simon Fearn