Narcissism vs. ADHD

hi everyone it's dr romney and welcome back to this youtube channel on narcissism narcissistic abuse and all kinds of information relevant to understanding difficult people and difficult relationships it's my hope that this content will help you cope will help you heal and help you better be able to navigate these relationships and all kinds of spheres of your life now throughout the month of may and sort of sneaking into june 2 we are going to be featuring videos on mental health conditions to provide some basic education of what these issues look like but more importantly to

tie these issues into narcissism and narcissistic abuse and today we're going to be talking about something called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder more popularly known as adhd so adhd really has two fundamental pieces to it i'm going to be simplifying something that's much bigger but that's the nature of these you'll be sitting here all day it's a graduate seminar so we can talk about it simply the two pieces are inattention and hyperactivity slash impulsivity so let's talk about the inattention first the inattention part of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or adhd looks like not being able to

pay attention to details not being able to sustain attention not listening when spoken to not being able to follow through on stuff being very disorganized not liking tasks that require sustained attention a great example of that might be something like reading or being in a class or engaging in a job that requires you to sit down and provide attention to one task for a long time they tend to misplace their belongings they tend to be distractible and they tend to be forgetful okay so that's the inattentive piece and in many adult presentations that's usually what

we're seeing we're seeing more of an add versus an adhd because the h the hyperactivity and the impulsivity these are folks who are very fidgety they have difficulty sitting still in one place for a long time they talk a lot they interrupt people and they have difficulty waiting so they're in a line they can't wait so some of you already saying this is interesting i see these patterns where does this begin and where does narcissism end so let's take that apart now if we are going to think about it let's just sort of take it

apart in terms of where these things overlap because interestingly there is some overlap with narcissistic abuse so let's start there okay in people who are experiencing narcissistic abuse they may actually look and experience have an experience of themselves as being very inattentive people who are especially actively going through narcissistic abuse can be very distractible they can be very forgetful and this inattentiveness may not be because they have attention deficit disorder but it may all really be because of all of the ongoing stresses of narcissistic abuse ruminating about it not knowing what they're going home to

not knowing when the rage is going to happen again and then what happens too is that inattentiveness that a person experiencing narcissistic abuse often has they may get called out particularly about it by a narcissistic partner or narcissistic boss almost being gaslighted by the about the pattern being said boy you sure seem distracted all the time can't you pay attention well the reason you're struggling with the inattentiveness is because you're constantly in this really unpredictable chaotic confusing space right so it's hard to be attentive again that rumination confusion all of that it takes on takes

on some of your takes away i should say some of your mental resources right so i i think that as a rule survivors of narcissistic abuse might be looking at this and saying well i'm inattentive the interesting part is that to tease out how much of that might be an inattentiveness that's actually due to stress and with the removal of that stress things like the capacity to sustain attention and all the rest of it would be quite intact now where it gets really interesting is when we talk about narcissism a vast number of narcissistic people

will say i'm just i just have adhd as though that's an out now what is interesting is when we look at high conflict personality patterns all of them there's a high overlap between those kinds of personality styles and adhd particularly impulsivity so the overlap we can go with right but what we see like think about it what do we see in people who are narcissistic we see that they don't pay attention to detail like you know i can't be bothered with that but in a very contemptuous way those details are somebody else's problem whereas in

a person with pure adhd they don't have the contempt piece they just don't have the attention to detail you see the difference so there's a antagonistic piece that would go to the narcissism the lack of attention to detail may sit more in the adhd the inability to pay attention not listening when spoken to right so that's a big one however the difference is with somebody who's both narcissistic and might have these attention deficit kinds of qualities will be like they'll almost be like they'd be very it'd be like you know distracted and looking at their

phone whereas a person who has sort of pure adhd will say i'm so sorry could you say that again and there'll be almost a empathic awareness that their inability to pay attention isn't good or pleasant potentially for the other person the disorganization the distractibility all very much things we see in narcissism and like i said hyperactivity especially the impulsivity piece the fidgetiness the talking all the time the interrupting those are very much a part of what we see in narcissism as well but the challenges is that many narcissistic people who may not even have been

worked up formally for attention deficit disorder and i'll say in a minute how we actually do that they will often use it as a way to excuse their inattention like i can't sit here and listen to you talk i have adhd so as though i have an illness a legit illness to them that's why they can't be bothered talking now i mean i'm sorry they can't be bothered listening meanwhile they could talk for an hour about themselves that goes with the talking excessively and then in a way also using that adhd just diagnosis that they

give themselves quite often as a way to avoid responsibility or having to change their behavior i'm sorry i can't do time management i have adhd i'm sorry i can't do this particular part of the job i have adhd i'm sorry i can't listen to you i have adhd and it becomes this out and yet we'll talk about why why that's sort of a go nowhere kind of a situation so let's talk about narcissism versus adhd so we have to remember that in narcissism we have all those antagonistic symptoms all right we wouldn't see those in

adhd as a rule adhd is merely us formally assessing whether a person has inattentive symptomatology or impulsive and hyperactive symptomatology we don't look to see if they're entitled lack empathy are grandiose are seeking validation have rage or need um uh abandon they have rage or they're trying to control situations that's the antagonism right now what ends up happening is that in narcissism as i said the things that get man magnified is that the narcissist's lack of interest in what other people are saying more from a place of contempt or lack of empathy there also is

this conversational narcissism it's a concept that i've even talked about on this channel but conversational narcissism is when a person hijacks a conversation everything becomes about them someone might be talking about their i don't know their vacation to some random player vacation i don't know to bermuda and they'll say um oh well let me tell you about this house and you're on then it's all it's the them show at that point never does anyone get to speak i want someone else to speak like oh you're not gonna believe this i rented this really cool car

for a day and the narcissist will say well i've owned five of those and so there's no there's they just again hijack every conversation the other kind of dynamic we see in adhd that can be magnified by narcissistic symptoms is that they interrupt a lot and the reason they're interrupting is because they're not listening to you in the first place so you might say a word that grabs them and boom they're in instead of waiting for a normal sort of a pause um they have what i call contemptuous inattention inattention might be more of a

you see a person's like fidgeting and they're just having trouble paying attention contemptuous intentions like it's that it's the sort of the facial gestures and the the sense that you're talking is just they they don't even want to hear it and it's very negating and invalidating and then obviously the impulsivity that manifests in so many ways risky behavior and engaging in other other behaviors that are not well thought through that can harm other people now some of you may be wondering how do we actually evaluate for adhd how do we determine someone has this it's

interesting because for the longest time this is largely focused as a pediatric issue something that happens in kids we look at it in 18 and under kids jumping out of their desks at school or not being able to pay attention or daydreaming and looking out the window but however in the last few decades we focus on it much more in adults and in order to diagnose it in in general what ends up happening is a therapist will use checklists and they will give the client a checklist and they'll usually give the client a checklist to

give to someone who observes the person who may have adhd in various settings like classically it would be a child's parent would get it sometimes a child would get it if they're old enough and the teacher would get it right so we get multiple reports sometimes in an adult it would be the client gets it and then like a parent if they live with a parent or a partner or a spouse or whomever that they're with and they look at sort of what the person is is saying that they're experiencing what other people are observing

as issues in them we can also level that up and i think this is probably i i think this gold standard standard matters is also give a person what we call neuropsychological testing where we very formally and at a much more granular level look at a person's attentional abilities through a whole series of different kinds of tests and the combination of all of that plus doing a long clinical interview lets us know if someone has adhd the problem is most people who are assessing for adhd don't even stop to think about looking at narcissism as

well and so the question then becomes you would want to account for both of those things and a person who has a narcissistic personality and adhd you have more of a contemptuous manifestation of all those adhd symptoms and then there's lots of people out there who are narcissistic who've actually never been appropriately assessed for adhd and try to use it as kind of uh get away with it and explain away their sort of contemptuous disregard for other people when it comes to treatment the best and we don't even traditionally almost think of it as treatment

some people will find their adhd causes them a lot of problems in their adult life it might have caused them problems in school left them feeling insecure as a student might have even made them more vulnerable to bullying or falling in with the wrong kid so there might be some lifelong issues it may have even resulted in them having more problems within their family because their parents were upset because they would be a bit more of a handful kids with adhd have a slightly greater risk in adolescence and middle school of starting to use substances

maybe in an attempt to self-medicate maybe in an attempt to um because they're they're um they're almost trying to self um they're they're trying to i'm sorry risk take they're engaging in risky behaviors and so they'll experiment with drugs with other impulsive peers as we know some kids are put on stimulant medications um like ritalin for adhd some people highlighted you know risks and concerns and that conversations way beyond the scope of this um video but then going into adulthood people will wonder what can i do about this other than taking a sort of a

you know lower dose stimulant medication to be able to manage the symptoms and a lot of adults will say without this medication i really wouldn't get through the day so it's very important to them as part of their treatment other things that are sometimes used are structural fixes having a routine making sure things are put away and like sort of labeled very careful ways engaging in daily practices such as mindfulness and and then cutting up tasks into smaller bits instead of sitting down to do something for three hours perhaps setting little alarms for about every

15 to 20 minutes so there are logical breaks you can walk around a little and then come back it can make a task seem less onerous or overwhelming but if there's narcissism involved with the presentation of adhd just these sorts of structural kinds of fixes may not be as sufficient because then there'll sort of be all this antagonistic stuff that's making stuff worse and then for any more information on adhd please go to the video notes and i hope this helps clarify what's often a very sort of tangled relationship between somebody saying i have adhd

and yet you feel like this isn't just about them being inattentive it almost feels like it's sort of this contemptuous almost reckless disregard for what other people have to say there's a difference thanks again