Narcissistic personality disorder symptoms may include:

• Believing that you're better than others
• Fantasizing about power, success and attractiveness
• Exaggerating your achievements or talents
• Expecting constant praise and admiration
• Believing that you're special and acting accordingly
• Failing to recognize other people's emotions and feelings
• Expecting others to go along with your ideas and plans
• Taking advantage of others
• Expressing disdain for those you feel are inferior
• Being jealous of others
• Believing that others are jealous of you
• Trouble keeping healthy relationships
• Setting unrealistic goals
• Being easily hurt and rejected
• Having a fragile self-esteem
• Appearing as tough-minded or unemotional

Although some features of narcissistic personality disorder may seem like having confidence or strong self-esteem, it's not the same. Narcissistic personality disorder crosses the border of healthy confidence and self-esteem into thinking so highly of yourself that you put yourself on a pedestal. In contrast, people who have healthy confidence and self-esteem don't value themselves more than they value others.

When you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may have a sense of entitlement. And when you don't receive the special treatment to which you feel entitled, you may become very impatient or angry. You may insist on having "the best" of everything — the best car, athletic club, medical care or social circles, for instance.

But underneath all this behavior often lies a fragile self-esteem. You have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have a sense of secret shame and humiliation. And in order to make yourself feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and efforts to belittle the other person to make yourself appear better.

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By training the mind (faith willing and Grace working) one can see oneself as an unconditionally loved child/spouse of God, always "filled" with the Holy Spirit...and in so doing, experience the following...

■Believing that you're as unconditionally loved by God as all other people

■Indifferent about worldly power, success and attractiveness

■Being ruthlessly honest about your achievements or talents, strengths or weaknesses.

■Eschewing constant praise and admiration of others

■Believing that you're just like everyone else before God and acting accordingly

■Recognizing other people's thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. particularly God's. (Never seeking to "greive" the Spirit)

■Taking others (especially God) into appropriate consideration with with your ideas and plans

■Never taking advantage of others

■Non-judgemental; unconditionally accepting

■Having empathetic joy and compassion

■Able to keep healthy relationships

■Setting goals with "reasonable hope for success", assuming God's Presence.

■Having equanimity; Not easily hurt and rejected

■Having a balanced, indestructible self-esteem and self-worth grounded in God's love

■Able to be "all head" and "all heart" simultaneously, in the power of the Holy Spirit

Basically, the fruit of the Spirit COUNTERACT the workings of NPD in the suffering human.

But only freely chosen, reliance on (and obedience to) the Holy Spirit makes this possible!

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/3/2010 5:44:27 PM (GMT-5)

The reason that narcissists need constant supply for their narcissism is because of the THOUGHT that they are NOT immutably loved and beautiful...by anyone, not even themselves.

When God finally breaks through this lie...and convinces the sinner that NOTHING can separate them from God's love, then there is no NEED for the narcissistic supply anymore.  The self-esteem and self-worth are then grounded in the "self-denial" in the "secret place of the heart" such that NOTHING can change or disturb it.  The false narcissistic fragile self is tranformed into the DIAMOND SELF of the "new being in Christ."

One the "fragile self-esteem" becomes a "Diamond Self", then you have "I" becoming "I, not I, but Love (Christ)" 

The flourishing of the new being in Christ working against the "law of sin" in the mind of the narcissist.

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/3/2010 6:50:01 PM (GMT-5)

Repost...

In the Secret Place of the Most High God
by Father Stephen

"Every human being has a 'secret place' – that within them that is most intimate – that is beyond words – that is made for God. Learning to enter this place is a very difficult thing and only comes with time and practice. Our culture, the world where the most secret things in our lives are shouted from the rooftops, tells us to profane even our secrets and shout them to the world as well. And thus we lose something at the very core of our Personhood. Violated, every man and woman becomes a harlot."

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Tom hit it squarely...

We AGREE that a human being's identity as a PERSON doesn't come from the memories she has, the actions and behavior she engages in with her context, her relationships with other human beings, nor from anything else in the created realm. Nothing in creation and tell me WHO I am. Only God can do that. So there has to be a place, a moment, an experience where God and I get this done, where I experience God in Christ through the Spirit telling me that I'm a priceless beloved son, that the very sustaining core of my existence, where the potential for fulfilling my 'logos' resides, is an indestructible grace-gift from God that doesn't derive from anything in the created order.

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Let's you and I stay in that "Secret Place," Tom. We are not our sin.  

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/3/2010 6:11:13 PM (GMT-5)

Kierkegaard established earlier that conscious despair is either in weakness or in defiance. Here he says that when we posit the individual before God as a sinner, weakness and defiance exchange roles. The weakness of not willing to be oneself, becomes defiance, since the sinner refuses to admit what he is—a sinner. Conversely, defiant despair, willing to be oneself, that is, willing to be and remain a sinner, is weakness, in that there is no forgiveness. Despairing sin, when it refuses forgiveness, is the most intense sin of all. Kierkegaard seems to be saying that both types of conscious despair are at work in the person who is presented forgiveness, but consciously refuses: He refuses to acknowledge that he is a sinner, and also refuses forgiveness. Kierkegaard is not contradicting himself, since he said earlier that "No despair is entirely free of defiance; indeed, the very phrase 'not to will to be' implies defiance". This explains how weakness and defiance can appear to change roles. All despair shares the same underlying function. Kierkegaard again returns to the theme of the individual before God and the offense.

Kinda like the Lutheran "simultaneous saint and sinner" thing.