Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Bill Eddy. Bill Eddy is a practicing lawyer, a professional mediator, a licensed therapist, and on the faculty of the School of Law at Pepperdine University.
He is a world expert in conflict resolution. In particular, how to resolve conflicts with what are called high conflict personalities. I should be very clear that these high conflict personalities, as you'll learn today, are not in a category of so-called personality disorders. Now, it is the case that people with high conflict personalities often also have borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, or suffer from bipolar depression.
However, as you'll soon learn, people who have this high conflict personality type could fall into any one of those three different categories, any combination of them, or none of them at all. These high conflict personalities essentially come in two flavors. Some are very outwardly combative. They like to argue.
They like to generate conflict in a way that's very overt, very obvious. The others, which comprise about 50% of high conflict personality types, are very passive. They play the victim, or they leverage other people, so-called negative advocates, in order to achieve their goal of creating a lot of conflict where they always appear as the victim. During today's discussion, you'll learn how to identify these high conflict personality types based on some very simple questions that you can ask yourself about them.
He also explains how to deal with these people in the workplace setting, in relationships, and importantly, of course, how to disengage from these people, not just in the short term, but permanently. Now, across today's discussion, you'll realize that Bill Eddy is very sensitive both to the suffering that high conflict personalities cause for other people, and therefore, how to identify them, avoid them, and disengage from them. But he also makes it a point not to demonize these high conflict personality types. Instead, as a mediator, as a lawyer, and as a therapist, he is really most interested in helping people resolve their conflicts with these people and find the best, most peaceful path forward for conflict resolution.
Dr. Bill Eddy is the author of several important books related to this topic and related topics, such as five types of people that can ruin your life. It's an excellent book. I've read it, and I highly recommend it for everyone.
He's also written books about adult bullies, which are becoming increasingly common online and in real life, and about mediating conflict resolution and separations and things like divorce, and in family court situations where he spent a lot of his professional career as a lawyer. By the end of today's episode, you will have a lot of new practical tools for being able to identify these high conflict personality types and learning how to navigate forward and, frankly, away from them in the best way possible. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
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Bill Eddy, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to discuss this with you. I've read your books.
I learned about them from perhaps one of the smartest people I know. She said, you should check out this book called Five Types of People that Can Ruin Your Life. I said, well, that's an impressive title. And I tore through the book, learned a ton.
You have a number of other books. I mentioned them in my introduction. And I suppose it's appropriate to say that you are an expert in conflict, conflict resolution, and in particular, how to deal with people that are high-conflict. So maybe you could just tell us what a high-conflict person is, how common are these people, and how does this overlap with some of the more traditional, quote-unquote, diagnoses of personality disorders?
Yeah, it's fascinating because I started out as a clinical social worker, working with children and families in psychiatric hospitals, outpatient clinics. But I really like conflict resolution. So I went to law school to get a law degree so I could do mediation, other conflict resolution, and I practiced family law. And when I started in family court, I noticed right away that a lot of the conflicts seem to be driven by people's personalities rather than the legal issue, because I was also doing mediation in my office.
I go to court in the morning, do mediation in the afternoon. Same exact issues. In the morning, people were stuck for two or three years. In the afternoon, two or three mediation sessions shook hands one separate ways.
So in family court, a lot of people aren't familiar with this. But since the 1980s, there's been the use of the term high-conflict families. And family court, lawyers, judges, mediators, therapists identified high-conflict families as repeatedly coming to court to make decisions, as having a lot of hostility, of just seeming driven in one direction, unable to be flexible, and in many ways unable to truly have empathy for their kids, so they'd fight over their kids. And so high-conflict families was a term when I became a lawyer in 1993.
I was like, wait a minute, these aren't high-conflict families. These have maybe one, maybe two people with high-conflict personalities or traits of personality disorders, which I knew about since 1980, and working in hospitals and outpatient clinics. Because you're also a clinical psychologist? Clinical social worker.
So I got a master's in social work in 1981, then I got licensed to do therapy on my own. So I'm a licensed clinical social worker in California. I can diagnose disorders. I can do treatment without supervision.
I went through that, and that's how I became licensed. So when I came into family court, I go, this is the same patterns when I was working, say, with people in the psychiatric hospital who had addictions, depression, all these problems. And my job as a hospital social worker was to help them with their outside problems, their family problems. So I did family counseling for the patients with their job.
Maybe their employer wanted to fire them because of their behavior, and I tried to help keep their job. Maybe they were getting evicted, their landlord couldn't stand their behavior. And I solved one problem, and I go, I've got you into marriage counseling, and your husband or wife's committed to working on the relationship. And I go, yay, I accomplished something.
Next day, Bill, my landlord wants to kick me up. Okay, I'd convince their landlord to give them one more chance. Yay, Bill, my job wants to fire me. Can you help?
What they have is a pattern of conflict behavior that doesn't get resolved. And that's the high-conflict families that I saw in family court. So that's where that connection came from, which I would not have arrived at if I hadn't been a therapist and also a lawyer. My understanding from reading your book is that this high-conflict personality phenotype is equally distributed between men and women.
What is the percentage of people that have this high-conflict phenotype? And then maybe we can drill into a little bit of how that shows up. It's different forms of expression. Yeah.
Well, let me say a little bit about the difference between high-conflict personalities and personality disorders. Because we have a lot of research on personality disorders, including statistics, which I'll give you. We don't have a lot of research on high-conflict personalities. People have talked about it, like I said, since the 1980s in family court.
And my own observations with thousands of cases of high-conflict personalities is pretty much men and women. My law practice, I represented pretty much 50-50 men and women, mostly custody disputes, mothers and fathers. So I got a good impression. Personality disorders, there's a lot of research on.
And I mentioned in the book some statistics, and they came from the personality disorder research. So what they found, they studied the 10 personality disorders. In the early 2000s, a big study, National Institutes of Health, the Alcoholism, Subdivision of NIH, they wanted to see how prevalent personality disorders were with substance abuse, with domestic conflicts, with criminal behavior, and workplace conflicts. And so this study, they looked at all 10 personalities, came up with numbers for each.
Five of them seemed prone to high-conflict behavior. So these five, I can give you statistics on. And I can give you breakdown male and female, all from 20 years ago, big study, because it hasn't been repeated since. So basically cluster B, that's narcissistic, borderline, antisocial, histrionic.
But we see a lot of paranoid in legal disputes. And some research says paranoid personality disorder is the most likely to sue their employer of the personality disorders. So that's gotten attention too. So here's some numbers.
First of all, narcissistic personality disorder, they found was about 6% of adults in the United States. They found the statistics on that was 38% female and 62% male. So that's more heavily male. 20 years ago, could be different now because of environmental influences.
Borderline, also about 6%. This was 53% female, 47% male, almost 50-50. And that shocked the mental health world because we've always thought of borderline as a female disorder. But Marshall Lanahan, the big name and treatment for borderline, says she agrees, she thinks that's true.
And I think that's true as a family lawyer because a lot of the men that we see engaged in domestic violence seem to have the borderline personality pattern. And the domestic violence is much more male than female. Then antisocial, it's around 4%. And that's about 75% male, 25% female.
Histrionic, it's about 2%. And they found this is about 50-50. Which again, surprised people because you think drama, center of attention, all of that. And this may be very much environmental influence.
Our culture today teaches especially young men to try to get attention. Do, you know, ride your skateboard behind a car or jump off a building, do all these dramatic things to get attention. Or social media. And social media really incurs that.
Everyone wants attention and now you kind of have to fight for it in our culture. Men as well as women are getting out there often in dramatic ways. So it came out about 50-50. Harenoid, it's about 4%, came out, I think it was 57-43%.
Somewhere right around that. A little more heavily female. But not all that far apart. All together, it's really roughly 50-50.
Very interesting. And how does this high conflict personality cut through all these personality disorder phenotypes? Because, oh, and I should also ask, I could imagine that some people who are borderline perhaps are also histrionic. Is that possible to fall into multiple categories?
Yes. And the study actually broke down some of that. So in the research, they particularly, one that I remember, is borderline a narcissist. And it came out around 38% overlap.
A borderline also can often be narcissist. How narcissistic personality disorder. I see. And so this is personality disorder overlap.
Now, there's a whole continuum here. So many people have traits, but don't have a disorder. The current DSM says the total personality disorder is around 10%. Now, that's taking an average of studies from around the world.
The study I quoted earlier in the US at 15% have a personality disorder. So in the US, we're seeing that's significant. That's one that said 38% overlap, borderline, and narcissists. I think that fits for me.
Because when I teach lawyers, from my own experience, I can say, you have a client that comes on like a narcissist. They're very self-centered, and putting you down, saying they're superior. Here's some tips to deal with them. But they also may have wide mood swings, which is more associated with borderline.
So you need to butter up their ego, honestly, not, you know, praise them for something that's real that they do. But also they really need empathy. They have wide mood swings. That's someone that needs a lot of empathy and say, wow, I can see how upset you are.
This is so important. And they calm down. So you have to use both sets of responses to deal with someone that has that combination. You mentioned borderline and histrionic.
There's a lot of similarities. So we see overlap with that. But I've seen every combination. But what I don't know in family court is that the disorder or just traits.
And the disorder doesn't matter to me. It's the pattern that matters. Because if I see this pattern, I know I should do that. That's the key.
I can imagine that in family court, it's especially complicated given that some of these things, not all, but some of these have a genetic component, certainly a situational component. So you could potentially be dealing with trying to work out a situation for the benefit of children that have some of the same personality disorders as their parents. Could it be really tricky? Well, what's interesting, and it's very rewarding work when things can go well.
When the lawyers get it, the judge gets it, everyone gets it, what's happening. They can make orders that fit the situation and help protect children from bad behavior and help get parents some help. So substance abuse is a bigger issue in family court than personality disorders. But almost neck and neck, we talk about substance abuse all the time.
Openly, there's treatment. Everyone recognizes the signs. We don't talk about personality disorders in our culture. And that's like flying under the radar.
Sorry, I'm just going to pause you for a second there. I think it's such a key point, you know, in a very interesting paper that you sent me, which by the way, I'll provide a link to in our show note captions. It essentially kicks off by saying that, you know, the movement toward explaining to people what alcohol, I think they now call it alcohol use disorder or alcoholism, was and is in the 1970s and 80s, was a crucial move forward for the judicial system. And I think nowadays people generally understand that addiction is not just a lack of willpower, that there are brain circuits that become hijacked by substances or behaviors that these brain circuits were designed to promote our adaptive evolution, but they can be hijacked by behaviors and substances that render people really just unable to control their behavior.
I think nowadays that box is checked. And it's wonderful that the judicial system understands that, right, because then it can work with that. I don't think that the general public has yet come to the full appreciation of these personality disorders and these high conflict personalities and how pervasive they are, probably because of their prevalence. It's just sort of all around us and in all sorts of interactions.
And here's the question. High conflict interactions tend to be, quote unquote, dramatic. And there tends to be a, almost a reward for dramatic behavior, as you said, online, in politics, in the media. The more dramatic, the more salience, the more salience, the more people click, the more people watch.
And then the algorithms are designed to look at, you know, like dwell time, which is nerd speak for how long people look at stuff. And so you could see how this stuff could be fed in the same way that for nearly, you know, 75 years leading up to the 1970s, alcohol use disorder was sort of fed by the culture, the other 5 p.m. happy hour. Coming up in science, I would go to scientific meetings and was like, okay, five o'clock hits, let's all drink.
And I always thought this is kind of crazy, especially given that there was also a lot of concern about the kinds of interactions that drinking can create in the work environment. So high conflict behavior. Exactly. So anyway, I don't want to riff too long on this.
But first of all, this is just lauding the important work that you're doing. Second, how should we think about this high conflict personality phenotype? Should we be calling people out? Like, you know, hey, that's an narcissist.
Hey, that's a borderline histrionic person. Or is there a more, I guess, something that embraces a little bit more of the humanity and the real issue at hand? I think that's what you're trying to do. Yeah, absolutely.
And you may seem to be shaking my head. No, we should be pointing this out to people. That's the last thing you want to do. In fact, don't do that.
And the reason why is personality disorders, oh, let me just quickly distinguish between personality disorders, high conflict personalities. The difference, and there's a chart in the beginning of the book with two circles overlapping, but the main thing about personality disorders is they're stuck in a narrow range of interpersonal behavior. So some aren't high conflict people, some aren't. The thing about high conflict people is that they're preoccupied with blame, that blaming others is a big part of their life.
So when you're dealing with a high conflict person who's blaming and has a personality disorder, you get a stuck pattern of behavior. You get high conflict personalities or high conflict people. So they're persistent in acting that way. That's the overlap with personality disorders is they don't reflect.
They don't change. They just keep blame as everybody out there. So recognizing that difference and similarity. So about half of people, I think, with personality disorders, and this is just my estimate, have high conflict personalities, and about half don't.
I work with borderlines in the psych hospital, narcissists that don't blame other people, narcissists that are just self-centered, and borderlines who are more frustrated with themselves than anybody else. So that's an important distinction. You beautifully distinguish between high conflict personalities and these personality disorders. And I just want to make sure everyone hears again that about half of people with personality disorders would fall into this high conflict personality.
In my estimation, I don't have research yet. And the distinguishing feature seems to be that high conflict personalities are often or constantly casting blame on others for the difficulties of their life, essentially. And that's why they have conflicts. That's why they escalate instead of getting worked on and resolved.
So I can imagine that the high conflict person doesn't always appear as high conflict. In fact, this is something that you've alluded to many times already in this conversation, and certainly in your book, that sometimes these high conflict personalities come in kind of under the radar, and that can be confusing to people, or they can go undetected for a long time. Yeah, so part of it goes with the specific personalities. So high conflict people with borderline personality traits or histrionic personality traits are often more openly dramatic.
And so they might really shock you. Suddenly they start yelling, screaming, throwing things, just because you're having an average conversation, very disproportionate. But some, and it tends to be more of the anti-social personality, some narcissistic personalities can look really reasonable on the surface. And they've actually had a lifetime of experience at looking good, which kind of covers up all the stuff under the surface.
And I think of a couple of examples. So for example, and I deal sometimes with domestic violence cases. So let's say an abuser says in court says, oh, well, I was helping her because she was so upset I took her keys away and I held her down on the bed because I was afraid she would leave and get into a car crash. Now, there may be rare occasions where that's true, but that's a common story that we get from domestic abusers.
Or in court, I've seen this, where there'll be a very reasonable person kind of explaining the situation. And their partner, more often a woman, is just emotional, is a mess, maybe even in tears. And people don't realize about 80% of divorces in court today, people represent themselves. And so there's these conversations.
And the judge is like, well, this guy's being really reasonable, and this woman's a mess. And I'm going to go with what he's saying. And so a lot of stuff slips under the radar that way. But gender-wise, it could be the reverse.
And a lot of relationships people get into. People make themselves look really good. And then the negative stuff comes out weeks, months, maybe a year later. So that's why we say wait a year until you decide to commit.
Because nowadays, who knows? You may have someone that really is good at covering their bad behavior. Yeah, let's hover on that one particular point, because this is perhaps one of the most important takeaways from your work. Could you just spell out this first year principle?
And perhaps it's useful for us to also acknowledge that, yes, there are a great many truly great stories about people who met one weekend, two weeks later, got married. And then we're hearing the story 50 years later, when they got grandkids and great-grandkids, they thrived. Or people met, got engaged three months later, or some cases got pregnant three months later, and they have this wonderful marriage and family story to tell. We hear these stories, and they're really wonderful stories, right?
I mean, they affirm your belief in humanity when you hear those stories. And they are powerful, but in discussing a little bit of this with you offline, you probably have witnessed more cases where people rushed and that rushing to commit or to create led to more problems than it did good. Yes, and that's many, many of the high-conflict divorces that I've worked on as a lawyer, and before that as a therapist and sometimes as a mediator, are in my mind kind of the bad luck stories. I got a decent person, usually my client, of course, but something happened, they got together too fast, and then all this stuff came out.
And I really believe in today's world that it is a matter of luck, and that's why you should take a year to find out. Am I, did I draw the short straw in this relationship, if I got this perfect-looking person, great record, all these good things, but close relationships is where personality disorders come out, interpersonal difficulty, and the high-conflict behaviors, mostly close relationships. So they might, everyone might like them at work, but when you're home alone with them, they could be really terrible, yelling, hitting, doing all of this stuff. So that's why we say, wait a year, I've had a lot of cases where people tell me, we just fell in love, it was beautiful and everything was wonderful for about six months.
And then when I committed to get married, all this stuff started showing up, but I got married anyway because I figured, well, time and love will heal everything, only it didn't. So in today's world, there's a higher risk of getting a high-conflict relationship, I must say. And the description you gave is what people often tell me, they say, my grandparents got married a week after they met, and they just celebrated their 60th anniversary, they're still in love, everything's wonderful. Your grandparents tended to know who they were marrying.
In today's world, not only don't you know, you don't have a history, but high-conflict people have learned to cover up the full range of who they are. And they're not bad people, and that's something I want to emphasize. They just have a different personality, and they may have been born this way, but they don't come with markings. You know, they don't come with the music like of Jaws, doo doo doo doo.
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I definitely want to come back to this point that you made that you're not demonizing these people. You're talking about how to behave with them, or how to not behave with them in some cases, in order to try and create the smoothest possible interactions in some cases, no interaction. But if we could cover still a bit more on this first year idea, my understanding is that no getting engaged, or for that matter, married, no conceiving children, and no moving in together in year one. Are those the critical?
Except for the last one, is it's really don't commit like getting married within the first year. Sometimes moving in together is a good way to find out what it's like up close with this person. Yeah, you learn a lot by living with somebody. That's right.
That's right. And personality disorder, as part of the definition, is interpersonal dysfunction. And that's close. That's close relationships.
So if you haven't had that close relationship, you don't see what happens when you leave your socks out or the caps off the toothpaste. And some little thing is some huge storm. Or somebody sleep deprived. I always say you can learn a lot about somebody after a bad night, sleep.
You end them. Right? Right. But the key is patterns of behavior.
So one thing I want to say is everybody gets angry sometimes. That's fine. Everybody yells sometimes. Everybody criticizes sometimes.
But if they have a pattern, like their life pattern of relationship is to yell and scream and criticize and all that. Whoa. This pattern is probably going to keep going. And as I mentioned earlier, I believe with personality disorders, it's a narrower pattern of behavior.
So it's more pattern driven in several different settings. Family, maybe at work when it's closed, maybe in the community when it's closed. So these are recognizable patterns. As recognizable as alcoholism and addiction, once people learn.
So that's the key. Give yourself some time to see if this stuff comes to the surface. I think you're raising a really interesting point, which is that although nowadays we have more information about people available to us by way of the internet and social media, you made the comparison with our grandparents era. I'm 49 years old.
So my grandparents, actually my grandparents knew each other from the time. They were like in the eighth grade, they eloped when they turned 18. When it got married, I think to the dismay of one or the other side parents, but then we're married more than 50 years. And grandkids, obviously, one of them, et cetera.
And so you have these stories and we love these kinds of stories. But as you point out, they knew each other very, very well and had for a long time. Nowadays, one can quote unquote do their research, go online and look for things. But would you argue that that's not complete information?
Right. I think it can be helpful. I tell people, Google your partner and find out whether there's some history there that may impact you. But don't believe that's sufficient.
What I say that you really want to talk to is relatives and friends of this person. And what you really want to do is see them in action with relatives and friends. Yeah, because that's close relationships. That's the key.
This is all about close relationships. And that's what catches people by surprise. They say, this person looks good at work. Some people have worked together for 10 years and maybe they were in other relationships and they both got divorced, commiserated with each other and get together.
And it's like, we've known each other for 10 years. You know, we're going to have a great relationship. And then they find out this is like a stranger almost because it's a close relationship now. And that's the difference.
So how people behave in a close relationship often triggers like personality disorder stuff. Fear of abandonment. Fear of looking inferior. Fear of being dominated.
Fear of not getting enough attention. The personality disorder seem to have excessive fears in these areas. Is it fair to say that if somebody has a lot of stable friendships over long periods of time, that that's a good indication that they can maintain close relationships? But it seems to me you'd also want to know, like, what is a close friend of that person?
Do they actually spend time with them, you know, and likewise with coworkers? Because some work environments that I've been in are necessarily very non-personal. You don't share much, right? Whereas other environments, like I know the partners of everyone I work with now at the podcast, that wasn't true for my academic colleagues.
I knew some of my academic colleagues' families, I would have dinner with them, et cetera. But some of them less so. So context matters a lot, right? Yes.
And I say, you mentioned the word stability and that's really a key. So if they have close friends they've had for 10, 20, 30 years, that's a really good sign. Bad signs are, I don't want you talking to my family. They're evil people.
They'll say terrible things about me. You can't trust them. They'll end up, they'll turn on you. They'll hate you.
All this stuff, you can't even ever talk to them. I can't even let you know who my family is and what their emails and phone numbers are. Oh, goodness. That's a warning sign.
Everyone has conflict with family members at some level. But you would hope that one could feel comfortable allowing you to interact with your family. Yeah. And if your family's really difficult, introduce your partner to your family and let them see, this is a difficult family and this is why I had to distance from them.
Because a lot of people to be healthy do have to get some more distance. But it's that secretiveness, it's the, just secrets in general are not a good thing for relationships. That's the biggest piece that's missing in a way compared to 50 years ago when people knew. It was hard to have family secrets 50 years ago.
Now, even though people may be all over the internet, you might really know their secrets. And that's what you need to find out. What about advocates? So, you know, I'm familiar with some high conflict individuals.
Some are more of the combative type, others are more of the kind of, what did you call it, sort of a quiet manipulative victim playing type. And both seem to be pretty good at generating advocates. I guess you call these negative advocates, people that will fight for them. By the way, this is all sounding a lot like modern politics.
And maybe we'll get into that a little bit because it is an important reflection on what we're talking about. But what about these negative advocates? If somebody has a lot of friends or advocates that they are kind of like on their side against, that are also in a blame mode, is that a red flag? What's interesting.
And I'd like to someday learn more the neuroscience behind this. But high conflict people have heightened emotions. The cluster B personality disorders are known as dramatic, emotional, and erratic. That's the DSM 5TR, says that, the manual for mental health professionals.
And so their heightened emotions are contagious. And in general, what I've learned about this work a lot is emotions are contagious, and high conflict emotions are highly contagious. So what happens, and I see this so much as a lawyer and with other lawyers. And with therapists is the high conflict person comes into your office and says, I've been terribly treated by, let's say, my ex, you know, man or woman, because it happens to both, been terribly treated.
And you've got to save me. You've got to protect me. You've got to win. You've got to.
Sometimes they say you have to destroy the other party. That's always a warning sign when their goal is to destroy the other party. It's not a good sign. But they're so emotional.
You say, my goodness, this person's been through so much. Now I have the emotions. And what I teach in my seminars is I understand a lot to do with the amygdala, that the amygdala catches the intense fear, intense anger, that those are heightened. And so now mine's going, oh, Billy, you've got to do something.
I'm like, my body wants me to take action. And I want to save this person from their evil co-parent, for example. And so what we see with negative advocates is they're emotionally hooked, but uninformed. They don't really know what's going on.
And I'll give you an example, a court case with a high conflict person, brought their whole family. And I had a case with false allegations, terrible allegations. My client happened to be the father. The mother was making false allegations of child sexual abuse.
And I've had all types of true cases, false cases. So this is a real problem, a real issue, but there also were false allegations. In this case, that's what was happening. So the mother brings her whole family.
And the judge realizes what's going on in the case because of the evidence presented. And sanctions the mother for knowingly false allegations. What does that equate to in the legal system? So my client, the father spent about $40,000 getting a psychological evaluation, having a trial doing all of this attorney's fees.
And so the court made her pay $10,000 of his attorney's fees and costs. So that's what the sanction is. And there's a code section that said knowingly false allegations of child abuse are a basis to make one party pay the other party's fees. So she's ordered pay.
She never paid it, by the way. And she had no property. We weren't able to get it because she had property in other people's names. The idea was that she brought her whole family there.
She brought her mother's boyfriend. She brought her roommate, who was a psychology grad student, who was like encouraging her. Oh, your daughter is being abused. You've got to do something.
These were all negative advocates. And when the judge made her ruling and spelled out the information, that was very clear. I mean, we caught the mother lying. She persuaded other people to lie for her.
We caught them in lies. It was a really surprisingly open case. And the family started yelling at the judge. I said, this is a crime.
And this is a shame. And the judge said, you take yourselves out of here immediately, or I will have the bailiffs take you out. And they stood up and laughed and shouted. This is an abomination or something like that.
These were the negative advocates. They didn't know what the full picture was. They believed their family member, who was a skilled liar. I believe, and it's very interesting.
I got to talk to her therapist. The therapist she had, it was released to talk to her. And the therapist, it was in the open was she has borderline personality disorder. And that was an open thing.
And the therapist said, and there's something else. And I said, anti-social personality disorder. And she said, I can't say, but I wouldn't disagree with you. Which is effectively a yes.
Yeah. And with anti-social, that's where you get a lot of lying and stuff like that. It's a rare case. But since I have the social work background, and I've had many true cases of child sexual abuse, especially as a therapist, I can see the difference whereas a lot of lawyers don't know what to look for.
But this was an exceptional case. Anti-social and borderline personality disorder. She had a lot of traits. And at first, the judge was very critical of my client and us.
And he would have supervised contact. But the supervisor said, this is fascinating. When the child would be exchanged, the girl would like kind of walk kind of tentatively towards the father. The mother dropped her and left.
The supervisor brought her to the father. She was like kind of tentative. She'd see the father. And she'd look.
The mother's out of sight. She'd jump on him laugh and have a wonderful time. I do have one question. It's not a litmus test question, but do you recall from the particular case you were just describing?
Whether the relationship had started very quickly, had they moved in together quickly? Excuse me, had they decided to have children together quickly? You married quickly? In other words, was your client oblivious because of the rate at which he were moving?
And the analogy that comes to mind is if you're moving very fast, it's hard to read the road signs. I think you did. And what's interesting is they got together when they were quite young. I think maybe she was 18.
He was 20. Something like that. It's pretty young by today's standards. Yeah.
And so excitement knew all of that. I'm pretty sure they did. And what's interesting is they had gotten divorced. The issue I described was after divorced custody issue.
But they had gotten divorced maybe four or five years into their marriage. And she assaulted him. And he had discouraged all of this. So he had actually custody of this girl who was eight years old when the story I just told you happened, which is also helpful because she was verbal.
She could describe. She actually described how her mother coerced her to say things that weren't true. But yeah. So they got together young.
I think quick. They got divorced. But the patterns continued. And that's one thing we see.
A lot of high conflict divorces keep going even after the divorce. The actual divorce date is like a speed bump in the lifetime of high conflict if they have children together. Hence the weight to have children with somebody. Yes.
If possible. You asked about emotional contagion and you made reference to the science. If I may, I'll just share something that might be of interest to you and to those listeners. You're certainly right that the amygdala is a central hub for threat detection.
What a lot of people don't know because it's just not discussed enough in the popular coverage of neuroscience is that the amygdala can learn in the sense that it's highly prone to context-dependent plasticity. So, you know, this idea that getting emotionally charged is either negative valence, like fear or positive valence. Like, oh, I like that. That's true to an extent.
But over time, the brain changes to, in some cases, like the feeling of adrenaline, to get an associated dopamine release with that. But a really interesting set of brain structures that aren't discussed enough, I'll just mention because you asked about neuroscience. I had a postdoc in my laboratory by the name of Hijiang Jung, a fantastic postdoc, who was looking at emotional contagion. We were interested in human subjects, but these were animal studies.
You know, by one member of a species is observed and then mimicked by another member of the species. It's a very powerful aspect to human and non-human behavior. And there's a structure in the brain called the cloud strum. Most people don't know about it, which seems to be critical for this.
And she did a beautiful set of experiments of showing that when animals observed other animals, either in a positive or a fear state, but in this case a fear state, they would, or threatened their own cloud strum to enter a cingulate cortex circuitry and, of course, amygdala, et cetera. Those would light up as if they were in the experience, but not to the same degree. But over time, what one could see was a kind of heightening, a plasticity of these circuits, so that smaller threats started to create larger internal responses. That's both combining Hijiang's work and other work that's come out since.
So what it says is that our brains are very tuned to the emotional states of others. This is good. Empathy, for instance. But that over time our brains change to actually require a lower stimulus to activate that kind of negative advocate part of ourselves.
Yes. And so perhaps this is a good segue into a discussion about what we're observing societally now, not just in terms of politics, but it's one thing to be recruited to a camp. But then once you're in the camp, it turns out, if we think about through the lens of this work, it seems that it requires less negative stuff in order to stay in that camp but want to fight more and more stridently in order to protect a cause. Does that make sense?
I think exactly. And as I mentioned in my book about bullies, I think polarization really demonstrates that. So once you're in your group, and you see the other group as not only having a different point of view, but as the enemy, then your brain doesn't need to work on it anymore. That's case closed.
They're the enemy. The only question is, what do we do now? And the research saying that when you talk to the people in your group, rather than coming together, you move farther apart. And to me, what's fascinating in terms of legal cases, and especially in family law, is you have, like the family I described.
You have the family talking to each other. You pull a lawyer into that. The lawyer talks to them. The lawyer gets heightened anger, maybe, or commitment to save this person.
And maybe get a therapist into the picture. And they all just talk to themselves. They pull farther and farther apart. And that's often when we have our high conflict court cases.
They come back to court every six to 12 months. Sometimes for years, I have cases where people have been in court like every year for eight or nine years. And these are cases where the divorce was done long ago. But people don't realize it's the worst custody disputes tend to happen after the divorce is over.
And I think it's because people are spending more and more time talking to their own team, to their own group. And that pulls them farther apart. Their view of the other side is worse and worse and worse. And that's why I think the structure really matters.
So I think politically, we have these two different universes that not necessarily talk to each other. And they really create a sense of community. People are looking for a community and they find it. But it's fed by, I think, the media ecosystem.
Everyone has their own media. And so we have these two universes talking to themselves growing farther and farther apart. And that's why elections don't seem to have made a difference in any of this. Because elections kind of decides who does government, but they don't resolve the adversarial communities.
And they get a lot of attention. And sad to say, I think our culture has shifted from government that politics has about government and the details in nitty gritty and the values of government are what's good for our group, good for our country, unity, citizenship, we should be together in this. That politics have shifted to entertainment. The values of entertainment are, be extreme, be emotional, and entertainment is driven by drama, you know, for thousands of years.
And drama is opposing us against them. And as I mentioned in the bully's book, there's a terrible crisis, there's an evil villain, and there's a superhero. And if you have someone tell that story to their community, they will love that person. So now we have two communities in politics loving themselves and hating the other.
And the elections don't resolve that. That's a speed bump on the road to high conflict. And that's not a good sign, and we have to find ways to bridge the gaps. And there are ways to get people one to one talk to each other.
There's a lot of groups trying to say, let's connect rather than separate. And if we get too far out of balance, we're going to have bigger and bigger high conflict problems. So we have to, the more people's eyes are open to this pattern, the more they can say, hey, I seem to be part of this group, but I want to, you know, my neighbors think differently, I'm going to listen to them. It's listening that's missing.
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On the suggestion of my friend and former guest on this podcast, two-time guest, Rick Rubin. I started watching a documentary about the history of professional wrestling, which everyone agrees is made up. So let's just acknowledge that. I recognize that.
But it's a remarkable portal into some of the things that you're talking about because it all hinges on being able to create emotional responses in the crowd. And just a very brief history of it, as I understand, and I'm by no means an expert, but I took notes on this documentary as I do. I take notes on most everything. They used to have good guys and bad guys, good gals and bad gals, you know, because it's men and women's wrestling.
Typically, not against each other, although sometimes. In any case, there was a transition that occurred at some point where they couldn't get more excitement and literally couldn't get more attention to the sport by having good guys and bad guys, good gals and bad gals. So what they ended up doing was making everybody bad. And the ratings just skyrocketed.
Everybody bad, right? The underlying premise being that both teams are cheating, and so therefore they had to behave poorly also. And it created this whole era of just bad people doing bad things, generating even greater emotional responses. And this fits very much with the neuroscience of emotion.
Emotions like awe, happiness, joy, meaning, pleasure. These are powerful emotions. And I will not say because there's no data to support the idea that fear, anger, being threatened, et cetera are more powerful emotions. But they tend to drive more behavior.
In other words, people will do more of this as well-known in the field of behavioral economics. People will do more to avoid losing something than they will to gain something, sadly. But this is how our species is wired for generally meaningful reasons. So the point being that I think societally and perhaps interpersonally because the two things mimic each other at every level, individuals all the way up to culture, seem to be engaged in this increasingly amplified emotional states.
And now it just seems like combat is the rule of the day. And it's so sad, and you kind of have to wonder where it goes next. But it does seem like it rewards these high conflict personalities because they go undetected. So now that the co-worker who's super angry about something they saw on the news and is trying to engage people or something or create an issue around something like, is this really an issue?
I mean, there's some real issues in the workplace and at school, but is this really an issue? That person 10 years ago, everyone would have been like, this is a problem person and would have backed away. Now it just kind of, because the mean has shifted, I think it goes, it's no longer signal above the noise, as we say in science within the noise. Well, what we're seeing is that these kind of media systems, I call them, are attracted to high conflict personalities and high conflict personalities are attracted to attention.
They want attention. So there's this almost marriage of media exposure and high conflict personalities. And so that's what pulls people together. I think everyone's looking for community these days.
And it used to be around work like a shared task. But now we do so much of our work alone or tiny groups. And so you get a real sense of community, people used to get it from church or synagogue or mosque or whatever. And that's weakened.
And so we get that now a lot, the intense emotional community from politics. And so there's a community for you. And there's a community for you. So they pull themselves together.
They get that, I don't know, dopamine hit or whatever it is and strengthens them. So what's happening is we're pulling apart. But to me, the answer is exposing the patterns and understanding our brains is recognize what's happening. This person's probably exaggerating when they say that, you know, those people are evil.
This person's probably exaggerating when they say those people are stupid. Whatever it is that we have to realize, okay, don't buy that completely. And what's fascinating to me, I don't know how it happened. But I get text message solicitations to contribute to campaigns from conservatives and liberals.
I get both. And guess what? They look like each other. And they're like, the end of the world is coming.
You've got to give $10 or $100 to save the world. And the end of the world is coming because of them. It's all fear-based. But it hooks your emotions.
I know this stuff so I can go, okay, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe away. But a lot of people don't know that this is happening. They don't understand how emotions are contagious and how I think high conflict emotions are more contagious. So to me, it's educating people about these dynamics.
So you don't engage so much with them. Like I won't watch more than a half an hour of TV news. But you can have 24-7 TV news. And since 1995, 1996, when they allowed, they gave you licenses for radio and television that didn't have to tell the other side of the story.
Before that used to the fairness doctrine, you have to say what the other side is. You're for a candidate. You have to hear from the other side. You didn't have to after 1995, 1996.
So we had like MSNBC and Fox News slightly off center, slightly conservative, slightly liberal. Well, now we've had 30 years of that, much farther apart, and communities around each of these. And yet if you go, okay, I'm probably hearing some exaggerations here. So I can check myself.
And this person's trying to be a hero and demonize those people. I'm not going to do that. So I'm not one for government regulation. What I want is for everyone to be able to say, okay, I see what's happening.
I'm not going to get my emotions hooked. And I think to me, that's one of the goals is for people to learn. I don't have to absorb the emotions because that's where the problem is. People are emotionally hooked and uninformed.
What are some of the signs of a high conflict personality? Because in an ideal world, we avoid these people. And again, we're not trying to say that they're bad people. Some of them are bad people.
Some of them aren't. But since I'm not a clinical psychologist, you are. You can make the assessment certainly better than I can. What are some of the ways to avoid these circumstances besides the first year rule?
And then let's talk about some ways to disentangle from these people based on their unique phenotypes. So is there a question or a set of questions one should ask themselves when they are potentially dating someone, potentially becoming friends with somebody, potentially becoming co-workers with somebody, and so on? Yeah. So what's interesting is often your gut feeling tells you something's up here.
Like the person suddenly has a shocking opinion of somebody else. They say, you know, that person's a total jerk. And yet you know that person and they're not a total jerk. Suddenly something's disproportionate.
I think disproportionate emotions is often a trigger. I put in a lot of my books now, what I call the web method, is pay attention to their words, your emotions, and their behavior. So starting with words, do they use a lot of blaming words? You know, it's all that person's fault.
Do they use all or nothing words? They seem to see things through a narrow lens. You know, there's all good, there's all bad unmanaged emotions, which they may or may not show. Like I explained, some people are good at hiding all that, even though it drives them inside.
And the extreme behaviors, do they do things 90% of people would never do? And I'll give an example here. And this is, I won't say the city, but there was a mayor. There was someone who worked, who was a Congress person.
And they decided to run for mayor in their city instead of flying to go to Congress. But when they were flying to go to Congress back and forth, this is in California, I'll say that much. People can easily research this. So this person flying back and forth one day, one night standing, you know, there was a line to get your bags at the airport after you got off the plane.
And he was told to wait in line to get his bags. And he said, don't you know who I am? And he pushed his way to the front of the line and had an argument with the person behind the counter, said, don't you know who I am? I want my bag right now.
And she said, we don't have it now, you can't have it right now. And he pushed her and knocked her over. He shoved this airline worker behind the counter and knocked her over. This was a mayor of a major.
Not yet. He wasn't mayor yet. He was a Congress person. Sorry.
I know some sort of decent Congress people, but like, okay. Yeah. So he's going in any case, right? This person could be any number of different purposes.