My story involves being severely emotionally abused through most of my childhood and young adulthood and adapting accordingly.

My mother being narcissistic herself would constantly make me feel worthless and degrade me, use the mental health system to control me by lying to the doctors in order to have me put on 8 different medications for minor behavioral problems in order to make it easier to control me, and would even have me locked up every time I dared act out in defiance. She even wouldn't allow me to have friends like normal children or play outside because of how "dangerous" I was. To make matters worse, I didn't have any other family in my life to show me any kind of love; no father, no siblings, and no other relatives. What little family that I did have got pushed away because of my mother's lies and when they dared try to take me away from her because of how she treated me, she would uproot our life and flee the state in order to run from them and keep control of me.

I spent most of my life feeling withdrawn from society and feeling like I needed to lie and hide behind a mask in order to get people to like and respect me. I was content to live a life of solitude inside my head until I was about 19 which is when my narcissistic side began to emerge.

During this time, I had just enrolled into a trade school to seek a career in a technical field. People finally began to like me because I was one of the top students in my class and I was at a national level in a student competition program. I had began to realize what it was like to truly be admired and respected by people and I craved more. I quickly became one of the most popular people in school and almost everybody was in line to be my friend. I became adept at over exaggerating my achievements to make people like me even more and even lying to get ahead when it suited me. I would lie both to make people like me more and to advance myself in my chosen career. I was basically a dictionary example of a highly machiavellian individual who would do anything to get ahead in life; nothing mattered to me more than success and all people were expendable to me. I even scored in the top 97th percentile on the dark triad test for machiavellianism.

Of course, my desire for money and power came back to bite me later which is why I'm seeking help for my "condition". I lost many friends because of my recklessness, selfishness, and my lies including a girl that I loved with all my heart that I had a date in Paris planned with not even a year ago. It's taken a great amount of loss and suffering to make me see that I have a problem and I need help.