Understanding Narcissism

[The Grand Nudger]

My biggest question is: Is it true that narcissists truly have no emotion empathy? They can coldly and intellectually put themselves in another's shoes but they will have no emotional response when they do?

That isn't true in my experience.

Nor in mine.  

Empathy is suppressed, sometimes intentionally as a part of the projection (it might be perceived as weakness and invite ridicule).  Empathy is unnoticed or unconsidered because you're too busy "doing you".  It's still present...it's just difficult to employ it and you don't always give it the time, frankly..at some point you're out of practice..so there's that.  

When people start to really grind away with negative steroetypes and subtle misunderstandings of the disorder..I wait until they've said a mountain of shitty shit...and then casually drop into the conversation that...internally, my heart was breaking in two as I watched the effect of my actions play out in others..it was the most painful experience of my entire life, I knew something was wrong but didn;t know how to stop it.  Privately, you ask yourself questions like "Why did I say or do that, I had no reason and it doesn't even matter -to me-....now it;s just another half truth or lie I have to maintain...and the list is getting long, wtf?".  Those realizations always came after the fact, though, "Doing me" was reflexive, almost on autopilot by the time I was forced into treatment. I lost my squad, I lost my job, and as such it then became an -obvious- disorder.

Manipulative NPDish jab...sure....but those people are being abject assholes...so I don;t care how it might hurt their feelings to juxtapose that admission of mine with their own statements about how inhuman people with NPD are.