Is There a Link Between Narcissism and Addiction

People with AUD or NPD might resist getting treatment or looking for help. It’s possible for people with AUD to successfully stop using alcohol when they have the right support and treatment. In both NPD and AUD, childhood trauma — including abuse and neglect — may be a risk factor.

What Are the Common Misconceptions About Narcissism and Addiction?

Millions is there a connection between narcissism and alcoholism of people in the United States live with alcohol use disorder (AUD). AUD and other forms of substance use disorder (SUD) can be very challenging to treat. People with co-occurring disorders, including personality disorders, may face additional challenges during addiction recovery. Dual diagnosis refers to the simultaneous presence of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and alcohol use disorder (AUD).

Grandiose narcissism/overt narcissism

People with NPD have a higher rate of relationship failures, legal issues, and difficulty making healthy social connections in their personal and professional lives. Sometimes, self-destructive tendencies cause people with NPD to make impulsive life-changing decisions, including cheating on a spouse or failing to follow proper workplace procedures. AUD increases risk-taking and self-destructive behaviors by lowering inhibitions and increasing symptoms of both conditions. Many people with narcissistic behaviors are highly controlling of their environment and health.

Narcissism and Alcoholism: Exploring the Relationship

In Pennsylvania, where access to comprehensive behavioral healthcare is expanding, alcohol rehab centers in Pennsylvania play a vital role in addressing these intertwined issues, providing specialized care for those in need. Narcissism, formally known as narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and alcoholism, now referred to as alcohol use disorder (AUD), are two distinct mental health conditions. NPD is characterized by inflated self-importance and lack of empathy, while alcohol use disorder involves an inability to control alcohol consumption despite negative impacts. When these two disorders co-occur, their effects can amplify each other, leading to more severe emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal challenges.

In the general population, grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are largely unrelated 6. With increasing levels of grandiosity, however, grandiosity and vulnerability become more intertwined 8, consistent with pathological narcissism defined in terms of concurrent grandiosity and vulnerability 9. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as operationalized in the DSM, in contrast, is defined along extreme grandiosity 10, which can or cannot be accompanied by vulnerability 3. While no definitive link exists between narcissistic personality disorder and addiction, the two can occur together and have similar cycles of behavior. Many people grappling with addiction experience cravings, develop a tolerance for the substance, and experience withdrawal when they stop drinking or taking drugs. Individuals with narcissistic personality disorder feel superior and seek new ways to feel better than others, leading to cravings for drugs or alcohol.

In the world of psychology, connections are rarely black-and-white – it’s all shades of grey. We’ll take a look at how these two conditions can intertwine, exploring both narcissistic personality disorder symptoms and various types of addictions including alcohol and drug addiction. Dive into this exploration with us – you’re not alone in your curiosity or concern. Chronic alcohol misuse changes neurotransmitters in the brain and affects how the body responds to alcohol. According to BioScience Trends, “Alcoholism is a global socially significant problem and still remains one of the leading causes of disability and premature death.

Is There a Link Between Narcissism and Addiction

Due to time restraints, participants did not fill out the SUMM for every substance they used but only for the two substances they reported as the currently most relevant ones. We computed total coping motives and total enhancement motives as the sum of the two substance-specific scores for each participant. The SUMM has shown good internal consistency and convergent validity 66. The SUMM is not available in German and was therefore translated into German and back into English by two independent individuals within the scope of the larger project.

Many people struggling with substance misuse have co-occurring mental health disorders. Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and alcohol use disorder (AUD) share unique risk factors and often overlap with other conditions. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), in 2021, “29.5 million people ages 12 and older (10.6% in this age group) had AUD.” Individuals with NPD have a higher risk of developing AUD. Pathways Recovery Center uses evidence-based treatments to help clients with narcissism and alcoholism. Even if their behaviors hurt others, alcoholics do what they feel they need to continue drinking. For this reason, it’s crucial to treat co-occurring disorders simultaneously.

The Clinical Affairs Team at MentalHealth.com is a dedicated group of medical professionals with diverse and extensive clinical experience. They actively contribute to the development of content, products, and services, and meticulously review all medical material before publication to ensure accuracy and alignment with current research and conversations in mental health. As another option, mentalisation-based treatment (MBT) focuses on improving the person’s ability to mentalize, i.e., to understand the thoughts and feelings of themselves and others. Many people with NPD struggle to take another person’s perspective, especially during conflict.

• Longitudinal designs with three measurement points including repeated measures of all variables in the model are warranted for testing causational hypotheses.
• The frequently reported association of sensation seeking with substance-related problems was explained by an underlying association with the degree of substance use.
• Due to time restraints, participants did not fill out the SUMM for every substance they used but only for the two substances they reported as the currently most relevant ones.
• Excessive drinking has numerous impacts on your body and mind, ranging from mild to severe.

How to Get Help for a Narcissist With an Addiction

• Experiences of abuse, inconsistent parenting, or excessive praise may contribute to narcissistic tendencies.
• The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
• Chronic alcohol misuse worsens symptoms of untreated NPD, enhancing narcissistic personality traits.
• Living with both alcohol use disorder (AUD) and narcissistic personality disorder can significantly complicate a person’s mental health.

In addition to the preregistered hypotheses, we also investigated whether dimensions of narcissism explained incremental variance in substance-related problems beyond the degree of substance use. However, these conflicting results highlight the necessity to move beyond the two-factor model and to control for the degree of substance use in the analyses to resolve these inconsistencies in the literature. SUDs are characterized by substance-related problems such as the inability to reduce or stop using the substance, or the failure to comply with social duties due to substance use. These substance-related problems are reflected in the symptoms of SUDs (DSM-5 A-criterion; 3). Critically, only a fraction of frequent substance users develop substantial substance-related problems and thus SUDs (for instance, 22% for alcohol, 31% for cannabis, or 29% for cocaine; 28). Thus, a high degree of substance use alone is neither sufficient nor necessary for an SUD diagnosis, rather, substance-related problems are crucial and distinguish substance-users with and without SUDs.

“Object love” is one way to describe relationships narcissists have with others. Instead of genuinely valuing others, they see friends and loved ones as objects through which they experience various aspects of self-love. Individuals with these types of relationships may not consider how their actions affect others. It is important to note that people with an addiction do not always show signs of a narcissistic personality disorder and that people with narcissism do not always develop an addiction. A 2019 study involving young adults with vulnerable narcissism found that the disorder can cause overwhelming feelings of shame in the individual. The person then seeks out alcohol or substances to mediate these feelings, leading to more feelings of shame, and so on.