It has been four weeks since I sprained my ankle but the last week I've started to push it by starting to jog. So far it seems to be therapeutic but I bears some risk. Every sprain is different, the result of a very specific incident with its own torques and forces to an ankle with its own idiosyncratic strengths and weak points. There are three grades of sprain. The ultrasound which revealed five partial tears was sufficient to show I had a grade two sprain, and a 4-8 week recovery time. Easter has been a time to make sure I do my exercises and focussing on the exercises to recover.
I thought the injury would have opened a lot of writing time but I have only done a few bursts of creativity and production. I have been thinking about and listening to many things which sometimes is related to what I am writing and sometimes something parallel. One person I have listened to a great deal is Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist with an interest in pathological narcissism (AKA narcissistic personality disorder, NPD). As a complete layperson in matters psychological, the idea that there is that there are personality disorders at all; I understood mental disorders of various shades, but personality disorders are different in essentially they are strictly about the personality, and not a mental condition. I would be suspicious about a personality described as a disorder, and though I have known my fair share of people I regard narcissists, I would have not considered it necessarily as a condition.
For example, if narcissism were a disorder, it would be something that narcissists would be in all aspects of their lives. For whatever reason, I may have mistaken thought that narcissists acted narcissistic with particular people, or in specific situations. (To be clear, I had not really thought about the subject.) I could imagine someone being a narcissist in a relationship but who works fine as a colleague and does not manipulate the boss; or someone who grows up as a narcissistic child in a family but at school is not abusing others for their own aggrandizement. That may be because there is a borderline between something pathological (NPD) and just the everyday selfishness or our innate tendency of egocentrism that we all exhibit at times, or during phases of our lives. Or perhaps I did not know whether those nasty pieces of work are as nasty in the other environments and with the other people in their lives. Apparently based on the evidence, they are, or can be so, thus NPD is in the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fifth Edition).
Ramani spends time distinguishing psychopaths, sociopath and narcissists, and estimates that narcissists are different from the other two, and are much more common. Some of the typical phenomena outside of those in a relationship are the berating the customer service staff; they are also the ones who have hugely selfish (and hypocritical) driving habits and attitudes; they are the ones who if another person does not feed their self-esteem or give them their needs will tend to cut off and treat coldly.
If it were a common personality disorder, I would be able to spot many within my sphere. In my working life, I think I have only met a few that I would be able to state with any confidence, and without any psychiatric credential, are likely NPD candidates. For past colleagues, EG seemed to be one. SB another. Back in China, LB and RG were probable. But that was from my own experiences with them, in a professional capacity. But if they weren't NPD sufferers, then there aren't too many others to choose from. It could be that now that I deal with more people in lower positions than me within my small professional pond so fewer people in my working life can afford to show me their darker side. Not that I want to have such a person acting out and affecting my peace of mind.
How well we know others, how well we know ourselves and how perceptions of the world are a big interest to me and disorders that affect perception are curious.
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