Autism vs Personality Disorder

Beaten or Born that Way

If you read my Stack, you know more about Narcissistic Personality Disorder than most self-proclaimed professionals and experts in the field of general psychology.

I have also tapped into the subject of Autism and how it looks, how it differs and is similar to Dark Triad personality disorders.

Now, let’s look at how Autism requires prime narcisistic traits in order to survive, and the dangers of it becoming Autistic Narcissism.

A foundation is established in a good home with a good enough mother. When that foundation is established, and the needs of the child, integral and otherwise, are seen and fairly met by a mentally healthy good enough mother, the child then has a powerful, unshakable launching point from which to venture into the world and face its difficulties and travails. The child adopts some prime narcissistic traits naturally in order to establish their own sense of self, a constellated self, an ego core, and maintain it when challenged by the big bad world and the nature of it. Some behaviors will change and the child will adapt, while others will remain steadfast as they are tested to be true and good enough for proper social interaction.

It’s the foundation, the safe harbor, that enables the child to separate, become a person unto itself, and to venture out from that home base with a measure of confidence. When injured, the child knows mom is going to be there to bandage the wound, clean the dust away and reward braver with ice cream. This encourages the child not to make mistakes, but to brave the world again.

By age 4, the Kingdom of Self must be broken. The child should develop social interaction skills conducive to being seen without screaming, being heard without offending, and meeting some of their own basic needs in the most basic of ways.

By age 6, the hard part is over. The self has constellated, the child is ready for life, the child has become their own little person, though not at all an adult, a person still. They will need guidance from this point on, not absolute control. Train the child up in the way that they will go and they will not depart from their core teachings and their foundation of love, safety, security, their home base into which to run when the nature of the world overcomes them time and again.

By age 8, the child should be learning a whopping 10,000 new words per year, interacting with others their own age successfully, and learning the social mores that will improve their chances of a lifetime of healthy socialization, healthy attachments, lasting friendships, respect for others without feeling the need to change in order to be accepted or survive.

By age 12, some of the best friendships a person will ever have will have formed for the child. The best of times and the worst of times for the child, their friends, and all of the families involved. Think back to when you were 12, the friends that were in your life at the time, and the adventures you went on together.

Then comes puberty. The parents need to maintain life-long boundaries that are fair and uncompromised up to this point. As congition increases and the Theta dream state of the child fades away, they will need stronger boundaries that are still fair, but from the perspective of a budding adult. They are not adults until they reach age 18. Even then, many insist that only by age 21 should a person claim adulthood. Others, age 25. Age 25 is when the prefrontal cortex completes its development.

During the teenage years, do not try to befriend the child, parents. Do not compromise on social mores, cultural ethics, creed of morality, family traditions or religious faith. Make them your child’s institutions, then, not just yours. When the teenager accepts these as part of their identity, they become the property of the growing personality core. Remember, however, that forcing such things on the child unfairly will breed contempt. This is a treacherous precipice to scale, and it is best to invite a community of like-minded people, a nation, into the mix, to create memories that solidify the efficacy of self, the efficacy of the institutions being adopted and the beneift to the community at large for abiding in the perpetuation of their inherent selection biases. Let the child / teen promulgate their adherences. Give them good reason to not olny identify as adjacent to the family’s beliefs, but for them to make those beliefs their very own.

If these things do not happen, if there are speech delays, if there is detachment, dissociation, deficits in social interaction, there may be a problem. If the criterion for good enough mother have been met, the child may be diagnosed as early as age 3 with Autism. Personality Disorders cannot be clinically diagnosed until the peron has reached the age of 18 (some say 21, others 25). Behavioral patterns can be detected all throughout a child’s development, and can be discouraged and persuaded by improving attachment schema. The development of a personality disorder can be interrupted. Autism cannot.

The core difference between Autism and Personality Disorder is the social component. Austism wants to belong to a society but fails to integrate due to deficits in cognition and/or mental development issues impairing early adaptation during the formation of white matter neural networks. If the white nets form before there is plausible reason for them to adopt certain behavior sets, those behavior sets will never be deemed integral to that brain’s wiring. The autism causes a delay, with exacerbates the social deficits.

A person requires social testing to maintain personhood, to confirm ego, to validate behavior patterns, etc. Without someone to bounce off of, you cannot have a personality disorder as there is no standard by which you might judge your actions. Without society, without neighbors, there is no reason to develop any of the skills that would be integral to success by interacting with others. But there are always others.

The deficit occurs in the delay. Autistic people just never will understand why certain activities are prefered by the majority. Thus, their inability to change or adapt due to the extremely modest morphology of white nets, requires them to educate themselves on how to speak a social language that is entire foreign and unnecessary, to them perceptually. Instead, most will adopt Autistic Narcissism as a means by which to resist the need to apply the effort necessary to fit in with the vast majority. They will insist that they are merely awkward at times, and will only ever discuss, at great length, some obscure and oddly preferred topic so as to always know more about a thing than anyone else in the room. This allows for the opportunity to educate, modify, even hold hostage the entire gathering of people, as they are lazy and averse to shame, stress and change, and their narcissistic traits disable them from merely melding in with the group, going with the flow, or even engaging in expected response mechanisms when approached conversationally.

The personality disorder internalizes everyone so it doesn’t need to interact with external objects once they have been assimilated into the confabulation of the ill mind, providing them with a culpable though entirely midguided reason to hate all of society and to be averse to becoming a part of the group at all.

They look so very similar, it’s almost suspect to the untrained eye.

The diffence is that Autistic people wish to belong but cannot manage to fit in, and the personality disorder is happy not belonging at all and manipulating the group from a distance.