You hit the nail right on the head, Underground, thanks so much for you insight! It's so true, it's a brain that sees a purpose in everything and tries to make a game of it all. Nobody can understand. You try to provide insight into how your mind works and people just sit there with their jaws dropped. They can't even begin to imagine what true numbness feels like, when nothing matters, when you can't even care less anymore. I am becoming more convinced by the day that I have NPD too. Am I proud of it? No, of course not, but you are who you are, right? Nobody will ever get it. You are one of the few people I think I've ever "met" that gets how I feel. Look, I don't know if I'm NPD or not, but I can identify so much with what you say your last post. I don't wish to put a dampner on your inspiration, but I think maybe CBT might not work for you. If you are like me, you can totally see through it. By all means try it, just don't think too much about dismantling it to understand it's processes though. That's what I did, and now it will never work for me again. I wish you all the best, Underground .

To Shakespeare47, it's so true what you say, narcissism is viewed as a negative trait, so too borderline p.d., but even autism too. It's when people don't understand how it is or how it works then they say it's bad. As for personality, I'm an INTJ too, which just amplifies everything. Yeah, I dunno, it's hard, but if I could think of one good place where an NPD/INTJ would work well would be somewhere where decisions have to be made that cannot be influenced by emotion. That's not a great role in society (associated usually with mean bosses or shrewd businessmen, or some high level CIA guy who CAN keep secrets from even their own family), but it's that role nobody else wants to be in. I think that's the only place INTJ (Intro, iNtuitive, Thinking and Judging) people would fit in, or as you asked, one "good" or "useful" property of NPD/INTJ.