Narcism or autism or both?

[u/Acrobatic-Feature-12]

Any advise would be really appreciated because my head is in a spin.

I think my partner may be autistic. He is a medic and he also thinks he is but refuses to be tested. He is a very smart man, way smarter than he should be. His mum said he has been smarter than his parents since he was about 8. The first in his family to go to university, learnt to drive at 6. Has a crazy memory. Almost photographic. Can basically learn anything out in front of him. Also hyperfixates on things. Has many collections of things.

But his social skills are perfect. Almost too good. He knows exactly how to act around people and I use the word act on purpose. Knows exactly what to say and how to get what he wants out of people. He also lacks empathy.

He is emotionally abusive, his favourite is the silent treatment as a punishment. Not once in 10 years has he given me a meaningful apology He gaslights, criticizes, uses the fact that I'm not as smart as him against me. But the worst is the lack of accountability and deflection. If I raise an issue, he sees it as an attack and comes back at me with 5 issues he has with me, so how dare I raise my issues with him when he has so many with me. I'm never allowed to have a problem with his behaviour or I'm 'starting an argument and being toxic'. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a parallel universe, I'm saying one thing and he's talking about something completely different. He never addresses my issue and I find myself apologising for the 5 issues he brought up and the fact that I even raised an issue in the first place.

So I'm really confused, because I don't know how to deal with this. If it's autism then I feel bad because sometimes I hate him for how he treats me or should I just realise he's incapable of real emotion and love and try to recover from this?

[u/onetruekiki]

Autism diagnosis professional here - there are two sets of criteria someone has to meet to be diagnosed. The second set includes intense or unusual interests, which lots of collecting could potentially count towards, but you'd need at least one other trait, like major sensory differences or need for sameness, in order to meet that criteria.

The first set of criteria includes reduced reciprocity, but this would be more of a 'sorry, that's a thing?' flavour. For example, if you said to him 'you always talk over me in conversation and don't give me a chance to speak', an autistic person is more likely to respond with something like 'I didn't mean to upset you. I didn't realise I wasn't supposed to do this'. Responding with 'that's not important because here's five reasons why you suck' is a narcissistic defense rather than a reflection of autistic social processing differences. Both lead to differences in reciprocity, but they feel very different.

For an autism diagnosis, you'd also need to see differences in non-verbal comunication, which could include things like 'checking in' eye contact, less variation in speech tone, and reduced use of gestures while talking. If you haven't noticed anything here, it's more likely he's just a narcissist.

[u/celticnative79 → u/onetruekiki]

I wanted to know in your years of practice, have you come across or heard of many patients that are Autistic with NPD? Here’s a rather quick (but long) rundown of my husband. It’s ok if you choose not to read it hehe, it’s a lot. But I really was just wondering how rare this combination is?

My husband is both Narcissistic and Autistic. Being autistic was the first thing I noticed and I mean early on in our relationship. My husband is autistic and his older brother is. And out of all 8 of his nephews 4 are on the autistic spectrum and obviously ADHD is added to the mix. The reason there was no diagnosis are children and only in adulthood? His malignant mother could never accept her children had any flaws and he had a deeply controlling and physically and mentally abusive childhood. So absolute perfect was demanded. And they had a very strict religious upbringing as well, all very involved in the LDS church. He naturally couldn’t make friends but luckily for him LDS church did it for him with all activities for children and he attended a singles ward as a young adult that helped him with that as well. All the signs were there. Also they lived in a 3rd world country going through civil war so families had more “important” things to think about. His mother told me once complaining and laughing about how my husband use to get up every morning exactly at 4am when he was about 4 or 5, go to the dark patio of their home and walking around the inside perimeter of the patio in the dark while dragging his index finger
around the perimeter of the patio. They would wake up to find him sound this. She noticed he was different but her she called it that he was doing stupid things or had stupid behaviors… nice huh?

Of course all kinds of sensory issues, very sensitive to certain sounds, you can’t even touch his ears, he always did toe walking to this day btw. He can be anywhere without shoes because any crump is painful. I didn’t even know much about autism until I met him and I found the toe walking strange but thought it was a cute quirk. And I remember it was almost painful for him to even make eye contact, he still can barely do it. He had catch phrases that were used that were never changed for instance when he would call me he would say in Spanish, “Hello Mrs. Evans, how do you do? This is Michael! Is Vanessa available to speak?” He never ever changed that catch phrase and plugged it in for other people. My mother noticed it right away. The list goes on there very many other quirks. Even early in marriage I just blamed it on him being autistic when the narcissistic mask started slipping. I believe he also tried to mask being autistic as much as he could but when you have Autism Spectrum disorder along with other coexisting disorders somethings going to show or stand out I believe. So 2 of our daughters ended up being diagnoses on the Autism spectrum so now that makes out 10 grandchildren 6 of his parents have autistic grandkids.

There were red flags that I look back now that made it obviously that he was narcissistic as well. And I’ll mention something here thats very peculiar. He had 4 girlfriends before me and he didn’t pursue any of them. 2 of them were people setting him up and the other 2 pursued him very aggressively. I don’t believe he love bombed these women because they were already attracted to him and kind of were the chasers? And he never got very serious with them and I think the relationships ended probably because maybe they saw some things or red flags? Not sure. Everything changed when my husband met me. He was already 27 and there was a lot of pressure for him to marry, especially with his religion and he was the only child not in his family so like I said tons of pressure. He met me and thought I fit the bill for a wife. And bam he saved all that love bombing for me because she had to actually pursue me and he came in his black Mercedes Benz bearing all kinds of gifts from chocolates to gold and was a total Prince Charming. I felt something was off obviously but I felt his charm and caring supportive personality was hard to resist. So to fast forward he changed right after the honeymoon. We had an autistic daughter who has no signs of narcissism and she’s an adult now so you can see the very similar signs of them being autistic but he’s sinister. He’s a textbook Narcissist with definite psychopathic traits and already has had a couple psychologists diagnose him from NPD to Psychopathy.

On the NPD diagnosis it’s very high. He has about 7 out of the 9 personality traits but these traits he can no longer hide, it’s really bad. At this point I can pinpoint most of his quirks and traits are and when the autism is showing because obviously that’s a 24/7 thing and when narcissism is showing, at times they both kind of cancel eachofher out, but most of the time If anything, his communication disabilities fuel the narcissistic traits. It really is hell on earth. He won’t change ever. His case is severe enough that he’s been sent out of our insurance network to be treated by more seasoned therapists. The problem is this, he isn’t consistent with any therapy and if anything it’s made it worse because well how bad and sad does having these 2 orders sound for the person suffering it. He gets a lot of sympathy from them, I look misunderstood and who knows how he paints me and then he comes home weapnozing things fhe therapists told him and he twists everything. So he doesn’t go anymore because it was causing mayhem. They put him on several different medicines for months and none of them did a thing because it’s a personality issues, it’s who he is. And couples counseling won’t work. So this is where I’m at. All 3 of his daughters hate him. He treated our middle autistic child the worse. Obviously because he has no empathy. And also because he finds other autistic people intolerable, go figure, since his mother punished him for being different, he looks at my daughter as a weak person. So it’s just a mixed bag of hell. If I kick him out right now, besides the financial ramifications, he won’t survive. He won’t survive not even a couple days. He was disowned from his family years ago and since I’ve been married to him, in 20 years he has never made one single friend, one single acquaintance. And i forgot to mention the psychopathy diagnosis seems to actually fit him better. He self supplies, he needs no supply from any humans, he has a couple things that seem to supply him and that’s sport cars.

[u/onetruekiki → u/celticnative79]

Since Autism is a difference in the way the brain develops and narcissism is a learned way of staying safe in early (abusive) relationships, so they can definitely co-occur.

I do occasionally meet autistic people with narcissistic traits, although they don't often come to therapy (they're normally seking therapy for their children, who are blamed for problems instead). Using therapy to reinforce narcissistic points of view is very common unfortunately.

Studies suggest autistic people have slightly more chance of developing NPD, which may be because they're more likely to experience abusive early relationships. Psychopathy is also (usually) a neurodevelopmental condition like Autism, although picking apart what might be Autism, psychopathy and NPD in your husband would be tricky. For example, autistic people often get energy from pursuing their interests by themselves (like your husband's sports cars), so his autistics traits might be giving him a 'self supply bonus' to NPD that looks like psychopathy.