THE RISE OF THE PROFESSIONAL NARCISSIST

DIAGNOSED NARCISSISTS ARE DISCOVERING HOW TO THRIVE-BY DOLING OUT ADVICE TO OTHER NARCISSISTS.

- Owen Long

In the winter of 2017, Lee Hammock was at home in Durham, North Carolina, spending the evening blaming his failures and unrealized potential on his 7-month-old son.

Hammock has an engineering degree, but, at 32, he was working on the floor in a warehouse. And what he actually wanted to be was an actor. As his son lay on the floor sobbing, Hammock told him, “See? This is why I’m not successful.” Hammock’s wife, Delaney, happened to walk in at that exact moment. She was appalled, which he considered another perfect example of how his family was holding him back. He shouted at her until she stormed out. She yelled from the doorway, “It’s so hard living with a narcissist!” Later, Hammock Googled the word and found the symptoms for narcissistic personality disorder: a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement; preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, or beauty; demanding excessive admiration; envy; a lack of empathy. Damn! he thought. That described him pretty accurately. He Googled the cure. Therapy. Damn! he thought again.

Hammock had always felt he was different from other people: less emotional and empathetic. But he’d never thought that there was anything especially wrong with him. If anything, he believed his callousness made him exceptionally resilient. Over the following weeks, he began to question himself—looking over his past, his every word and decision—wondering if this strange force, narcissism, had been motivating him all along. Hammock found a Facebook group for people diagnosed with NPD where a few hundred users disclosed their outsize fantasies and chatted about the shame of discovering their condition. He recognized himself in these posts and felt for the members of the group something he rarely experienced, even for members of his own family: empathy. He decided to go to therapy after all, and soon after, he was officially diagnosed with NPD.