Ramani Durvasula (on narcissism)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Reither. I'm joined by Monica Pappin. There's a Dan Reither documentary on Marketplace.

Have you seen that? No, have you? I didn't watch it yet, but I watched the little trailer for it on the streaming platform. I forget which one it's on currently, but he's got his own doc.

Wow, and do you feel really connected? Well, I think I was first in. I've been trying to get him in the peak of the zeitgeist for a while now. That's right.

The footage in the trailer is him being physically assaulted at one of these political conventions back in the day. He's been around for so long. He has, and it's a good reminder that craziness has been happening the whole ride. This has been a shit show from the jump.

You're right. Okay, today we have Dr. Ramani Dervasala. Dr.

Ramani is a clinical psychologist and best-selling author. This will interest everybody. She specializes in narcissism. She has a book out now that is so fascinating called It's Not You, Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People.

And once again, this was one of these episodes with an expert where we found out a pretty significant chunk of the population, many millions of people suffering from narcissism and or in relationships with narcissists. And one of those weird ones where most aren't diagnosed because there's no reason to go get diagnosed unless you think you have a problem inherent in narcissism that you don't think you have a problem. So it's interesting. Yeah.

Another pop word I've been saying a lot. Non-falsifiable claim. That's another. Wow.

It's kind of non-falsifiable. That's the Easter act of the fact check. Yes, it is. I admit to my words.

I've been over-indexing it. But anyways, I think for people who love the sociopathy episode, this is in keeping. And I think everyone will be listening going, hmm, am I? Hopefully you are thinking that because I think it's a pretty good indicator that you might not be.

Yeah. Please enjoy Dr. Ramani Dervasala. He's no changeful.

He's no changeful. He's no changeful. I would love to bring you up to speed on something that just happened to us recently as we enter into this discussion of narcissism because there were some go-tos you felt very free to use haphazardly. You want to describe someone as basically amoral, you'd go, oh, they're a sociopath.

And then we recently interviewed a diagnosed sociopath. You know about this. Here's the thing. I'm never going to touch the third rail of castigating a guest, but I'm not loving sociopathy's moment in the sun.

Oh, that's right now. Right. Well, because, and I said it in the interview, which is, man, is there nothing we can really throw onto the bus anymore? And on some level, I agree.

And you'll tell us how this is formed, but certainly people are born. And I really can't be upset or terribly judgmental. Like, if you're born on the spectrum, you're born on the spectrum. If you're born with sociopathy, that's something you're born with.

Right. That's different than narcissism. Yes. Okay, great.

I found myself like, wow, now I got to have compassion for sociopathy. You don't have that compassion for something. But that's nutty, right? That's like a psychopath.

Yeah. Robert Weinstein, Bernie Madoff. Do you have to have compassion? According to whom?

Well, I guess how do we define compassion? Understanding. Here's what I would aspire to have is a kind of a lack of judgment. I wasn't born with sociopathy, so I don't know what it's like.

No one chose it. How about that? No one went to the grocery store and was like, I think I'll pick sociopathy. Or I want to be on this spectrum or that spectrum.

So in that, there's no fault. I can only be so judgmental of it. It doesn't mean I don't safeguard myself from people. That's the key.

It's the safeguarding. Even with a narcissistic person, you're going to say this person didn't choose this. It's a social developmental phenomenon. The way they were parented, the circumstances of their life, some piece of biological temperament, biological vulnerability, all comes together, gets mixed up, and now you have this narcissistic person who's very interpersonally harmful, who's very systemically harmful.

No two ways about it. Now, my positioning has always been, I am not a fan of mistreat this person. If someone's narcissistic in your life, don't be deliberately cruel to them. It's never good for any of us to be deliberately cruel to anyone, but this will never be a healthy relationship.

It's not going to get better. It's never going to get better, and it's never going to feel psychologically safe. What gets tricky is a lot of people can't get out of these relationships. So they're getting harmed on the daily, and they're not inherently mean people, and they just don't know what to do.

Yeah, and then I'll be curious to find out if it also then develops a cycle that I experienced in childhood, which is an abusive guy in the house that's horrific and traumatic, but then the winning you back over part, the please forgive me, accept me back into this group, that is then heightened. So you get into this cycle of highs and lows, and you kind of get addicted to this weird cycle. It's partly addiction, but it's also what we call the trauma bonding, right? The narcissistic relationship by definition is one where every day is not bad.

People will say, we have fun watching TV together, or we have great sex together, or they know a lot about wine, and we have fun when we have a few drinks. There's these things where they'll say, you know, my mother was terrible, but my gosh, I have these really unique memories with her trying on her clothes or baking something with her, whatever it may be. So there'll be these narrow sprinklings. It's like a slot machine.

You put the money in, and why do we keep going to casinos? Why do people keep going to play these machines? It's intermittent reinforcement. Intermittent reinforcement is the stickiest version of reinforcement there is, because if I knew that every tenth time I was going to do something, I'd get $10, okay, but that wouldn't really stop me.

But the hope for a jackpot, every slot we put in the box, and five bucks comes, ooh, that's kind of exciting. You forget then, conveniently, I just put $10 in and nothing came out, and we don't walk away from the machine, because the jackpot always hangs out there as this tantalization. And that, in a narcissistic relationship, is this idea that maybe if we just get past this, maybe if we just do this, maybe if I tried this, they're praying, they're rubbing, they're dancing, and they're doing all they can to see if I can get lucky, but they don't want to walk away from their machine, especially if they've been on it for a few hours. Why don't people want to walk away from slot machines?

Because they think that the odds will eventually tilt in their favor. And let's take that a step deeper. Not only do they think it's going to work in their favor, if they walk away, then what? They wasted all that time, or go one deeper.

I like to split them in class. Worse than, okay. I don't want to walk away from this machine. It would have made all that a waste.

I lost. Keep going. You've been one last novel. Oh, this is exciting.

I don't know how this works. What happens? What happens? Shame?

Oh, you got a guess? Someone else gets. All these things. I made them better.

And now someone else is going to get this? Oh, hell no. But my job is to say, there's no better version. This machine doesn't pay.

I have heard that from a lot of people. Like, I did all this work, and I fixed them. You're leaving it. Or the narcissistic person leaves you, and you think it's, oh, well, they cheated on me with this next person, and now they're going on to live their best life.

There's no best life for them. It's really kind of hollow, not-so-nice life for them. I think what I'd love to first start with is, I have my explanations for why I was drawn to what I was drawn to, and I guess I'm most curious right out of the gates why you were pulled to study, first, psychology, and then more specifically, narcissism. Psychology might have been my one I grew up in Connecticut.

Were you in an area that had other Indian folks? I'm about as old a native-born Indian as you're going to find, because the Immigration and Naturalization Act didn't kick in until 65. So whatever Indians that were coming in before that time, coming on limited student visas and stuff like that, my dad came in probably the mid-to-late 50s, arranged marriage, a whole nine yards, so I'm as old as you're going to find. I'm 58.

Maybe there's probably a 59 or a 60 out there. There's a different wave of Punjabi immigration that came in, like in Northern California doing stuff on the railroad. There you will see, from that immigration group, people born in the states who are older than me. But at 58, I'm old.

You were born here. My mom's in her 60s. She was running here, and she came as a 6. Right, and so in that way, I was the only brown kid in small New England town.

It was very much a sense of otherness. Well, also, let's just add, even as a hillbilly, you can feel a lot of sorts in Connecticut. It's very waspy. I mean, it's the whitest of the whites.

It's like apex whiteness. Yes, and apex whiteness, and definitely multicultural was not a word people used in the 1970s, right? So people wanted to play with their kids, and they couldn't pronounce my name, and so the aesthetic was white, white, or white, so you never felt attractive. That was a profound developmental kind of thing.

We didn't fit in the town. People would vandalize our house. And did you feel like no boy was ever going to like you? I felt hideous, and was kind of told that as much as they go to the prom, like all the things.

It makes me happy, though, to see the power of younger Indian women. It's everything. But I had that. It's not that far from the tree, unfortunately.

And I saw daughters who are mixed race who struggle with that sense of like, oh, no one's going to fit in, because my elder daughter resembles me. She's probably about your skin tone. So you went to a very special, you could do this integrated study where you would bring together film, literature, psychology. I'm like, well, that sounds cool.

So my rebellion, no, I went to University of Rochester for a year. I stayed on East Coast. I stayed there only a year. I ended up finishing my degree at UConn, which was such a blessing, because the University of Connecticut had one of the strongest departments in the country.

It's like, as an undergrad, you don't even know the genius you're in the midst of, and that was UConn. In fact, I'm their commencement speaker on Sunday. I hope you cry like I did. I can't even believe they asked.

I'm still in a state of shock that they asked. It's such an honor. But that was where my interest got piqued. It's sort of the why.

I struggled my whole life. Why do people do the things they do? And then I went to UCLA. Sorry, did you have a parent whose behavior was inexplicable to you?

Yes, but that was not what was driving me. I think I really sort of felt, why do I feel so odd, so out of place, so out of sorts? Did you think you might feel safer if you truly understood how people thought? Absolutely.

And so when I finally got to UCLA, I worked in New York City for three years doing HIV research, actually. And that sort of the psychosocial. It was a really extraordinary and painful time to do this work because there were no meds yet, so people get HIV and die. And so the privilege, this little research, tiny person, because I was so junior, to work in this huge study in New York City, which ended up becoming sort of the turning point for me because it got me introduced to the area of HIV, which would be a research focus for me for years.

Oh, really? And then at that time, we were focusing on injection drug users and women who got HIV at that time either got it through sex work or injection drug use. And so it was a whole different game. And then I came to UCLA, and I got my PhD.

This is neither here nor there, but now that you've done all this work in this, I think this might interest you. I'm an A. Several of the gay dudes in my meeting, while COVID was happening, pointed out to me, they're like, we already did this. To be intimate is to potentially die.

The way they reacted to it was just interesting. It was observable, and they actually vocalized it, which was really cool. Gay men went through it times a million because of the bias and the stigma and the fear and the unwillingness to do anything about it. Yeah, they deserved it.

Exactly. So that's part of what drew me to it, because it was the othering. HIV was such an othering state, so I think anything that involved othering, I was drawn to it. You become a champion for all underdogs.

Monica has this, too. Sometimes she thinks certain underdogs are underdogs, but maybe they're not. No, they still are. I don't know who you're talking about, but I'm sure they are.

Yeah, especially with justice a little bit. Yes, and then I did a post-doc at UCLA, then I took an academic position, and it was there where the narcissism thing got hit for me the first time. I had student research assistants that were going to labs and hospitals around the city. They'd come back with me.

One day, one of them came back, and they looked like they'd been through war, and I said, what's the deal? You kind of come back very demoralized from these sites. What's going on? And they said, it's just like this one or two patients, and they come in.

They're terrible. They're abusive to me. They're abusive to the nurses. They're abusive to the doctors.

And I'm listening to them. I'm like, this is interesting. They're describing people who sound quite narcissistic. Entitled.

Selfish. No empathy. Everything's about them. Really dysregulated.

And for context at that time, this is what? 2001. Okay, and in 2001, the understanding and the studying of narcissism out of 10 was what? How much did we know at that point?

We were probably at a 5 or a 6. I still think we're only at a 7 or a 8. Okay, okay. We were most of the way there.

We're where we're at today. I think when I say most of the way there, the psychoanalysts have been writing about it forever. If you go back, late, late 1800s, we saw the first mentions of it. Otto Rank was in 1912.

Freud then writes on narcissism. It's a bedrock that nobody pays attention to. It's a bedrock that no one studies because it kind of makes you feel helpless. It doesn't feel good to be the doctor, if you will, who takes on the incurable condition.

Well, of course, it appealed to you because you were taking on HIV when there was no cure. Well, I was trying to understand what would make people more vulnerable to HIV. And was it possible that these people who were angry and acting out, were they more likely to behave more irresponsibly sexually or around substance use? Those are the things I was interested in.

But interestingly, what I did come to find out is the narcissistic people actually did wear condoms and did protect themselves. They did use substances. I mean, addiction and narcissism are highly overlapping. Do they over-index or is it the country average?

I think they over-index. And I think that part of that is one would argue either the substance user is trying to manage the negative emotions of the narcissism. They're also great for self-aggrandizement. I was going to say that either you're a simulant user who's using it to get the pump up or you're using alcohol, weed, opiates to manage the negative emotionality.

So it really depends. And I've worked with substance users using so many different substances that were narcissistic. The backstory had a lot to do with how that would show up. But that's how I got into it.

And then at the same time, I had a private practice. And people kept coming in with the same story about their marriage. It was always about these very antagonistic, unempathic, entitled, manipulative, gaslighting, cruel partners, but who to the world seemed like, well, put together, successful. And so that actually led to my first book in 2016 because I actually kept writing the same notes to my clients.

I'm like, I'm going to get paid for this. I'll just grab anyone's notes. And so yeah, it was a 2, 3, 4. Let me guess he denied he had any wrongdoing and you've never heard an apology from him?

It's all right. We'll get that done for often. So that's what led to that book. And then, ironically, people say, was this your origin story?

It wasn't until I was deep into doing this research and I was in therapy. I've been in therapy for a long time. And I thank goodness for that three line in my life. Well, can I just add, ironically, a lot of therapists aren't in therapy.

And that's not cool because we have to carry way too much pain to not address this. Do you know what I'm supposed to do? I hear it. Because you understand it doesn't mean you're above it.

Hell to the no, I have a nervous system and that nervous system is getting activated by what I hear in the room. And if I'm going to be present and not triggered in that room, I better have a place to work on it. So my therapist, years into it, she's like, I was wondering how long it was going to take you to get to this. And I was like, bitch, why didn't you talk about it?

That's the side note we should talk about. But nobody talks about it in the field of mental health. I'm still a bit of a renegade and a pariah for doing what I do. And I'm willing to take that on because this is not meant to be grandiose.

I think just this conversation on narcissism has helped millions of people who are saying I no longer feel crazy. This is one of the rare positive outcomes of social media. I think it's getting amplified because some people are finally addressing it. But we kind of blew past the therapist said, okay, when were you going to get to this?

So I imagine what you discovered is that you... I've been through it in family relationships. I've been through it in intimate relationships. I've been through it in friendships.

I've been through it in workplaces. And they all harmed me. But they were often turning points. Like I ended up leaving careers I thought I was going to stay in because it got to be too toxic.

I thought there was something really, really wrong with me. And I sort of integrated that into my sense of self. And so once you lifted the lid off of it and I said, oh, now I see it clearly, that was it. Yeah, because I would have to assume you yourself have been a victim of it to be so passionate and driven to expose it.

Let's start with how do we define a narcissist right out of the gates? What would be the clinical? Is there a DSM criteria? One thing I always tell folks is the way I want to have a conversation about narcissism is not diagnostic.

It's a personality style. You've got a personality. You've got a personality. I've got a personality.

And they were shaped by the experiences we've had in our lives. We had a biological temperament and that came up against all the experiences we've had. And that now results in an adult personality. Personalities are kind of who we are.

They're like a psychological fingerprint. The healthier the personality, meaning the more pro-social, the more flexible, the more amenable it is to a little bit of change. An agreeable person could learn to set better boundaries because they'd be open to that change, but it's not going to be easy for them because they're agreeable and they want to be warm and connected. I'm giving you this backstory only because I want people to understand what I mean by the word personality.

People have kind of gotten too caught up in this idea of narcissistic personality disorder. I hate the diagnosis. It's not helping. It's muddy this conversation.

What is that doing that has a negative outcome? The vast majority of people who are narcissistic have not been in a clinician's office. There's a great explanation of this in the book. They're not suffering.

The tricky part here is that when we hear somebody has NPD, we assume that it's more severe than them. Frankly, I've met walking out in the wild narcissistic folks who've never seen the inside of a shrink's office who are the most severe narcissistic people I've ever seen. And the people walking around with the NPD diagnosis just happen to be in therapy. It's almost evidence that they're low on this.

Maybe it's not as bad. So, narcissism. The personality style is characterized by entitlement, low invariable empathy, selfishness, egocentricity, self-centeredness, an excessive need for validation and admiration, superficial kind of vapid quality, difficulty with intimacy, closeness. They really view relationships as benefiting only them.

There's no care for the other person. There is a need for control, power, domination. I just want to point out that if people are listening the same way, I'm listening, you say one and I go, ooh. Everyone's sweet.

And then you say another one, I go, ooh. And then you say another one, I go, ah. And then you say another one, oh. Is it narcissistic that we're thinking of ourselves?

Some dude, I think, put out a TikTok video recently. Some of you haven't seen for a while, but he did it really cutely. And he's like, if you think you're narcissistic, then you're not. And frankly, a lot of people who've been in narcissistic relationships, they're the ones who walk around wondering if they're narcissistic.

Interesting. That makes sense. So the grandiosity, the low empathy, the entitlement, the need for admiration and validation. Because I have that one.

We don't need to highlight every single one. I just want to own my. They don't tolerate frustration or disappointment well, so they'll rage. That's the stuff of narcissism.

Now, it's on a continuum. So the mild side is your annoying, immature Instagram narcissist who at 55 is still wondering if they got a lot of likes on their sunset cocktails picture. That's going to be tough to hear for a while. And the thing is, they're getting upset, they're not getting likes.

It's one thing you want to say. I love when people post their happy cocktail pictures. I'm like, good for you. But when they're angry, I can't believe people don't think.

i'm the coolest or monitoring who didn't like this thing yeah that's um what were you doing that you couldn't put that still in the mind i've heard that a lot of people's like well you're monitoring who's like someone didn't like my thing oh who liked i'm like oh my god that sounds dark for a grown person yeah i'll cut grace until 25 okay that prefrontal's done exactly and at the far end though we're talking about malignant narcissism which in the book as i put it malignant narcissism is sort of the last stop on the train before psychopathy station and we veer into something a lot darker because that's what's confusing for the layperson is like so much of it seems to overlap with psychopathy at the severe end at the severe end it's more manipulative more exploitative you see more isolation you see more coercive dynamics it's just an unsafe relationship when you talk about sadism you take me to the dark tetrad and the dark tetrad is where we see the overlap of psychopathy machiavellianism narcissism and sadism okay this is horrible i would like to add the fifth piece of paranoia because these are folks that are very suspicious and really thin-skinned so they're really provokable they're like what are you looking at and then they'll get into a scrap or scrape or fight with them and you're literally looking at something behind them or they'll pull on the tiniest thread and assume you're criticizing them and become very vindictive so the dark tetrad and i'd love it to be the dark pentagon is that when you're five sides it gets to feel satanic but at that level what we're acknowledging is all this stuff does overlap that's the inherent flaw of the dsm is it tries to break off and compartmentalize it's like a lot of stuff is a big stew of shit we're probably dropping a landmark here and there well that's why we talk about the p factor the p factors were sort of all psychopathology constantly we really separate out psychotic versus non-psychotic and it's much broader strokes than you would think okay now what uh because were we to believe the statistic brought in by our sociopath guess five percent for sociopathy that's higher than i would think a colleague of mine just gathered data and was called a general population sample so meaning we literally dipped our ladle into not college students nothing like that and we were pulling back numbers closer to 10 percent of narcissism not sociopathy great so that's quite high but again spectrum so yeah in that case that would be narcissism at a level that would be enough for a partner to notice okay well this is a later question but you just said it so i'm now no i'm gonna say the part on the spectrum you're talking about the social media cocktail picture like feels a little bit to be more self-absorbed is there a difference between self-absorbed to be the mild side of narcissism it's not just a self-absorbed you have to be entitled to right the entitlement is sort of the one ring that rules them all entitlement is what cuts universally across all types of narcissism i'm more special than you i deserve better treatment than you and the rules apply to you and not me this is an inherent hypocrisy there and the specialness that's the grandiosity i am more special or why am i waiting in this line wait a minute what's happening here every time you're in an airport there's a person who bounds right to the top of a line that's got 200 people right what are you doing that's entitlement so you have to have that low empathy that entitlement and the selfishness if somebody is just all about why don't people like my pictures that's not narcissism it's the sense of they're being a little bit snippy with the waiter and they're twice and everyone liking my pictures and they're the friend where you listen to them talk every day for three hours a day for a month about their breakup but when you call them two months later for a problem they don't have time for you right that's what you're talking about how do people become narcissists so it's a social developmental phenomenon just like most personality style so the strongest argument would be that there's some form of biological vulnerability that's what we call temperament anyone who's a parent you're a parent you said right you have more than one child so you saw already at a very baby age they had different personalities same with mine because you're like same house same parents same everything and yet temperamentally how you soothe them all that well that temperament gets shaped by the environment around it so what we know is that narcissistic people and i'm simplifying it there's sort of two primary pathways what is the pathway of what i call pathway of adversity these are kids who had that difficult temperament difficult to soothe lots of attention seeking couldn't self-regulate or externalize and take that temperament you combine it with adversity like trauma neglect abuse attachment fails chaos in the home devaluation emotional abuse that's one formula for narcissism now the second pathway is more new research is folks in the netherlands doing this research in some folks in the united states now and they still have a little ways to go but what they're picking out is that people who tell their child that they're more special than any other child also all parents hell no like why aren't you doing better where's the age not that you're telling your child they're special it's that you're saying that you're more special than the others and these rules don't apply to you i'm going to talk to the coach i'm going to talk to the teacher and the child is really given the sense that you're better you're more special and then that starts becoming the seed that's shaping up they're being overvalued they don't learn to regulate their negative emotions they assume someone's going to fix their stuff that's going to be probably more the birthplace of grandiose narcissism these narcissistic folks the people who came to that adversity channel you're going to tend to see more vulnerable narcissism which is a more sullen passive aggressive victimized resentful narcissism or you're going to see the malignant narcissists those mean isolating coercive narcissists that's where we tend to see that so there are subtypes of narcissism it's on a continuum so it's not one flavor right and then is there any treatment to correct we interviewed phil studs he said which shocked me he said you can treat it but it takes like seven years and the person has to be crazy willing when you just don't see much is it treatable when you say treatable what does treatable mean what's the end game that you would have a set of tools you're applying that would prevent you from repeating this pattern you put partners through i don't think that's an option the reason i'm saying that some people say well what are you raising that kind of sea change to be fully aware of the other to regulate yourself to be fully present with them attuned to them that is a take it down to the studs makeover that's a lot i was giving you the example before of a person with an agreeable personality right it's a more flexible changeable personality but you know what you couldn't do with that agreeable person you wouldn't be able to turn them into someone cold entitled and cruel if i can't do that with the agreeable person why would i be able to turn around the narcissistic person and i might argue again simply because this is my experience if you are forced to go to a because your life's in danger you can make some pretty radical changes but again i think short of your life being in danger these kind of massive changes they don't think of themselves really costing though right like your narcissism would rarely threaten your existence yeah but you wake up one day fourth wife is left none of your kids are speaking to you your business is crumbled so your life has actually crumbled but does the narcissist recognize because here's my understanding i gotta give you one anecdote the bottom line is a therapist explained to me someone i was dealing with and they had met them too was a narcissist and they said to me very clearly you need to understand the rules of a narcissist you will never hear them say i'm sorry so you have to get your expectations correct about how this is going to go they will never say they're sorry and when you say you're sorry you don't need to they're going to become the victim in this situation and they're going to really indulge in that and hopefully on the other side we're going to get them to agree to this one boundary so my question is if a narcissist can never see their own fault in something would they ever even change even if the obvious landscape around them was in ruin i don't know that they would do what an alcoholic would do which is go like well i'm clearly the source of all this i have a center here it's never going to be reflexive and you bring up an interesting issue which is the issue 12 steps something i speak about a lot i talk a lot about addiction and narcissism a lot of the folks i speak with are using 12 step models in their treatment centers and this is the big question because i'm sure you're aware of the term the dry drunk to me the dry drunk is a narcissist this is a person where they're sober but they're unempathic they're entitled they're selfish so they're all the stuff the addictive character the step six stuff but they're not using and i've worked with enough families where a family member goes to treatment four to six weeks family member comes back now family member sober but family member is still a dick and the family's devastated right the family's devastated and in fact sober they're a little bit more mean so the dry drunk ellenor when i was reading the big book i'm like this is a narcissist and this is one of the interesting debates in the field is could 12 step be just as useful a program for narcissism treatment as any because so much when you think about the core to me as a psychologist is humility it's taking responsibility it's understanding that you are not all powerful that we are all just nothing more than ordinary human beings and that ordinariness is what brings narcissistic people to their needs terminal uniqueness is terminal exactly and so if you could get people to commit to the program now i've had mixed success i've had some clients narcissistic who've been in recovery for years who are very committed to working a program but the narcissism still persisted it still pushes through and there sponsors everything they're very committed my favorite step of the 12 the one if i got to only have learned one of them it would have been the four step in that i learned an actionable process through which i could discover my own culpability in every situation i've been in and through that illuminate my fears that are driving all of this behavior so they couldn't do that step step four is such an important step when we're dealing with narcissism because that unwillingness to take responsibility which is really all anyone in relationships with them want own it sometimes if a narcissistic person would own it people who love them wouldn't even necessarily expect them to change it but they don't own it so the other person feels crazy yeah yeah to your point about treatment i've had clients where worked with them for years and i don't disagree with such as characterization of seven years i'm seven years twice a week great therapist and motivated so that's a lot of unicorn stuff coming together right but i've worked with clients where we did the work they came in every week deeply motivated intelligent engaged i wouldn't put up with their bs and at the end i remember one guy came in he's like so i'm clear after just about two years what you're telling me is healthy in a relationship is that i have to listen to them i have to listen to their emotions i have to do things they want to do sometimes i don't want to do compromise i said yeah that's really much the punchline after two years and he's incredibly smart guy too if you never miss sessions i want to take next week off i'll come back in two come back in two he filed for divorce and broken up with his mistress and he said this feelings thing i can't i can't listen to this crying it's nonsense and he said but sex matters and so we have someone who's like a pair every two weeks it's consistent she leaves at 2 a.m does what i want that's the closeness i need he's incredibly successful he had a life full of friends experiences he had made a ton of money he was a stage of like where you have to work get a very rich full life ironically though other people have known of him and were to come back to me that he was back to the same old patterns with women it doesn't change you know as much as even a person has a revelation relationships for narcissistic people are a place where they regulate themselves they get their admiration they get something called narcissistic supply that's what they get in a relationship either narcissistic people are always relationship jumping or they're angry at people for not getting into relationships with them because they're entitled to a great relationship stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare okay what is the impact and is there a predictable impact and pattern for children of narcissists so the most common thing that's going to happen when a person has one or occasionally two because that's going to be a follow-up question can two narcissists mean a relationship for now when a child has a narcissistic parent the most likely outcomes are going to be very anxious self-doubting drops in self-worth brought up you often feel like you're not enough these are people who might be prone to perfectionism how can i be better how can i do more but you got to regulate mom or dad it's a reversal you have to make mom and dad feel good you can't have needs you can't have wants you can't have emotions if you do your shame how could you do this to me i do so much for you so it's very much a reversal situation okay this is interesting i know someone whose dad was a narcissist no question about it and i noticed when we're together she tries to regulate me i can feel her monitoring my mood a lot and offering me kind of some unsolicited compliments and stuff and i think because i am charismatic and a little grandiose and stuff it makes sense to me that i'm kind of reminding her of her dad and i can see the panic and anxiety like i'm someone that needs to be regulated i gotta be monitored a lot and i can feel it assuming that what your friend or this person let's take all that right but assuming what she's doing is not conscious like if she'd say you know it's funny when i'm around you i just do this that's something we call the fawn response and the fawn response is a sympathetic nervous system response that's not unusual for people who've had an narcissistic parent to engage in it's not only just a form of regulation what i'd argue for your friend is that it's how she keeps herself safe it's a survival message it's safe i'm exhibiting these familiar character qualities and she's waiting for the shoe to drop i think yeah exactly and i want to say hey you know the shoe never drops i never can fly off the handle or do any of this stuff you can breathe easy she's trying to feel safe around you so she's doing what she did with dad she's complimenting you and that is how she can feel more in her body when she's with you because if she doesn't then i don't know what her fear is everyone has different fears depending on what their origin story was but that's what's happening but one thing i want to make clear is that the fawn response is involuntary we often think of fawning as an active state i i'm gonna compliment that person so they like me a lot of people think it's voluntary because that feels manipulative oh no i think it's not panicked yeah it's a fight like it's a fight like fawn freeze yeah that doesn't feel manipulative it just feels exhausting to her but i think just that awareness and it doesn't need to be this but also patience with it because it takes a minute i have a friend actually writing a book on the fawn response we talk about it a lot it's really misunderstood and under addressed but i think when people start to understand it and it doesn't go away sympathetic nervous system responses are actually really great because they're designed our bodies keeping us safe so we can't just say oh i'm not gonna fall around to decks anymore it's more to be kind to herself when she does yeah yeah yeah not fall to herself and self-likely i would imagine people who had a parent who was narcissistic they disproportionately find themselves in relationships with narcissists a lot of people have this framework of if i had a narcissistic parent then i'm a magnet i'm choosing these people we choose narcissistic people because they're charming charismatic confident compelling attractive successful like who doesn't go for that person right so there's that piece of it the narcissistic people are also not going around sniffing for the person with the broken light like the lion with the broken gazelle the narcissistic person is looking for people who are good source of supply so that could be someone who's successful attractive helpful whatever is their supply that's what they're looking for and what i've heard as well is adding to their own facade they're an extension of their accomplishments if you're tall if you're rich if you drive a great car to ride from the right family what happens is when a person is a narcissistic parent it's not that they're more likely to get into these relationships they're more likely to get stuck in these relationships because even as the red flags start popping up because it's so familiar well i would imagine too that they're going to be easier for that person to extend because they know the place like someone else would have to learn it why is he in a bad mood oh i find if i tell him he looks handsome you know they already came with the instruction manual that's right because what also happens is pretty early on there's gaslighting stuff happening when any of us are gaslighted in most cases the first few times we push back like yo that's not what happened i didn't say that but then like narcissistic gaslighters are so skilled and get especially if you get a narcissistic parent and there's any of that self-doubt inside of you they're so skilled at playing on that vulnerability and now you are doubting yourself now that doesn't happen once or twice it happens many many times a narcissistic relationship is death by a thousand cuts that's chapter every book thank you that's it at home mark i'm a high-functioning narcissist i'm a high-functioning narcissist so that vulnerability is you're more willing to fall for their subjugation that's really what it is it gets sucked into it it goes from love-bombing to subjug subjugation and you don't clock that transitional moment right did you happen to watch couples therapy some it's a little bit of a busman's holiday i was like yeah what's a busman's holiday a busman's holiday is when the busman went on a bus to go on his vacation because it's her life it's hard to listen to the podcast even though i do love succession i love succession i watch succession succession was like the mother love of narcissism so like that kind of show i watch because it's fiction but when it's real people's lives it's just well that's what i was going to say and again i'm not in a position to have labeled one of the participants as a narcissist but what appeared to be one to me but watch the dynamic what this man was putting this woman through i was thinking boy if i was a therapist i can handle it one i want i can sit and talk to a narcissist all day long but it'd be very hard for me to watch it all unfolding and not call it out immediately i'm curious because i didn't watch the show what orna was great at was letting the wife know the reality you just told me is the reality and you could see that when she had a comrade in the room it wasn't being overpowered by that so i think maybe her focus which was probably smart because there's nothing to do with this guy so i'm just going to let her know that her reality she's ungaslighting her yes the role of a therapist is to ungaslight the gaslighted client and it only takes one person sometimes it only takes one time i bet like the woman in the couple was there to get that that's what she needed she needed someone to just see her that was not wrapped up in this bad dynamic but for anyone that might feel the shame i would imagine some of the shame about being in one of these relationships is similar to that of having been conned where there's a very underreported crime because you feel stupid all the time and so what i observed is man you gotta be real quick to outmaneuver this narcissist this gentleman was fast the way he could be caught dead to nuts and then just by himself enough time is fascinating to watch and then the counter move yeah because he would take things and i was like i guess that does kind of make sense but i know that's wrong you yourself as if you are like getting gaslit by him they're clearly good at it that's why they can do it yes right well it works at the end of the day we are rats and amaze for the narcissistic person their central motivation and intimate relationship is power domination and control nothing else it's not affiliation it's not love it's not connection it is power so they're playing a ground game that's designed to get them power which means destabilizing the other person okay now can two narcissists be in relation all the time happens all the time how do they coexist these are incredibly volatile relations it's like all the reality tv is predicated on two narcissistic people getting together there's a lot of jealousy there's a lot of criticism there's a lot of arguments there is breakup makeup cycles that go on over and over and over again so it happens all the time you just kind of hope they don't reproduce i'm like good for all of you put you all together now what would be interesting is i assume they have to somehow assume the other role at times for it to function so they are probably a narcissist at one point but then they are also serving the other role that's required to a point but i think actually it just stays volatile i remember working with a couple like this and he was 20 years older than her so there's already a power difference he had a lot more money than her but she knew how to get him off and so that was her if you will power but he definitely was the more powered person because he held the money she was in it for the money i hate this stereotype but i feel like it would over index in these couples where it's like a super rich old man and a super bombshell yeah it doesn't make sense he's using him he's using her exactly it's parasitic it's like a remora i'm shocked but ultimately i guess good for them no i mean i'd rather them pair up than one of them pair up with a nice guy it tends not to last i was speaking with someone recently where they had an affair with someone and then they got to a committed relationship with that someone and they were shocked when that person cheated on them i'm like past behavior predicts future behavior there's a lot of exceptionalism here i will be the exception in this narcissistic relationship sure is it equally distributed through the gender it depends on the type of narcissism so grandiose and narcissism it's more men kind of a male thing vulnerable narcissism again that more sullen socially anxious resentful sad victimized equal gender distribution okay and are there occupations that over index ceos and high corporate positions entertainment athletics well there's a lot of money and power finance politicians and then from there any occupation that is high status high pay and hard to get tech has a lot of narcissism so these are high return high status risk taking any job that has those characteristics i could imagine a narcissist coming about later in life this is why i say he's not but we were with bill gates for a solid week in india and we're watching him move through the world and he does bend the whole reality around him it's not his fault everyone's bending to him and he's not asking for it's just like there is a force field you know what i'm saying the reality becomes now i'm very fucking clear he's not all but i was watching it thinking how does he not become him because everyone around him is putting their best foot forward you bring up something i actually wrote about it in my second book the one we're talking about is my third book on narcissism my second book on narcissism i get into this topic and it's when we get into ideas of privilege and entitlement so to your point this idea can something develop over like his feet don't touch the ground that doors are open jets are waiting he's not going through tsa preaching nothing he doesn't do he doesn't do stuff like regular people he doesn't wait in line he's from the human experience so that can result in a the only word that fits here is supercilious i've never met a man so i don't know but i've been in the presence of people who have that kind of feet never touch the ground money there's a remoteness to them there's a can't quite get in there with them i was worried for him because he actually is a really beautiful sweet man and i thought this feels very isolating i don't know if you're aware of your presence when you're around you never get a down moment like i imagine the queen of england might have had but you walk through the world in a very certain way i'm guessing though i don't know i've met people like i haven't met him also i've been around a million movie stars and i myself have some fame i have to police it all the time i'll say this to my wife she's a very wonderful optimistic person and believes the best in everyone and we'll walk into starbucks and the person will like bend over backwards and get a thing and she'll go that person was so nice and i'm like well and we're on tv we can't necessarily assume that person is that i try to be aware of it because it just becomes reality and so if you're not constantly remembering my point about this whole idea of privilege entitlement feet not touching the ground folks is are they checking themselves and how are they treating those more vulnerable around them so how are they treating household staff how are they treating people on the set let me just say my wife couldn't be nicer to everybody no one thinks she's a narcissist no no not at all she's not but she has such a benevolent view of everybody she also misses that we do get special treatment sometimes that kind of blows over her head but that's just because she really trusts and believes everyone it's kind of a beautiful quality yeah it's a beautiful quality but it's a tricky but i have to tell my kids like i point out to my kids hey we got in because of this thing and that's not how it works and just so you know like this is an abstract thing that we got lucky right so it's the awareness of that but it's how dismissive someone might be because they have that power in the world i don't know that they're necessarily narcissistic imagine if somebody had like a bazillion dollars people must always be hitting them up for money exactly all the time so there has to be something that you ultimately must create a i'm gonna say that it like makes them a narcissist but i just think if you're not really on top of it and i don't even fall to them just like the whole world change around them but they have a responsibility because they don't have to deal with the stuff while the rest of us have to so with that one tact that should be on them is look alive because everyone else is struggling yeah exactly okay so what's important about it's not you is i'm asking you to just explain in great detail with narcissists but this isn't just a manual about narcissism this is to help people to find themselves in relationships with narcissists so let's talk about death by a thousand cuts what is the pattern of the relationship that people might recognize what's tricky is especially when we're talking about intimate relationships these relationships can start like a fairy tale attention great experiences good night my queen how's my princess this morning you know like it's all that kind of stuff it's a lot of attention within whatever means someone has it might be reservations at an impossible restaurant or picnic on the beach it's gifts it's little scavenger hunts sometimes it's that gamesmanship of you have a great day it's a good night queen and then crickets for three days now they're already playing the slot machine early in a relationship because they know three days later when they drop that message in the other person's like whoo they're flooded with that relief and now you're buying in that's actually how addiction works it's that taking away that bad feeling reward is not how people become addicted it's taking away icky feelings is how people become addicted and so you're so relieved and you're like i want to be the cool girl i don't want to tell them that i didn't like that they didn't text me and so now you get caught in the subjugated system quickly this love bombing phase can last anywhere from six weeks to six months usually not much longer than that because i don't think the narcissistic person can play that game and once they feel confident that they kind of gotcha whether it's i love you whether it's you move in then they start pulling back and i always say you know for a while it feels like 99% great only 1% bad then that's 90% good 10% bad 80 20 70 30 at those numbers you feel like oh that's just a relationship it's settling in pains i did want to flag that because i do have some concern that we're also talking about overlap of just falling in love with a non-narcissist well wait till you hear the rest of this trajectory okay so 70 30 people are still saying like this is life everyone put their best foot forward at the beginning at 50 50 starts becoming a problem because half the time it's good but half the time it's gaslighting and manipulation and being lied to and narcissistic relationships the consistent core of all of them is about betrayal not necessarily lying cheating betrayal but just not being attuned not being mindful not being aware then it becomes 40% good 60% bad 30 70 now when you're at 10 90 10% good 90% bad as soon as we get under that 50 50 point that's when we get into this trauma bonding where the person in the relationship is justifying it trying to make sense of it blaming themselves on trying to be perfect for this person and thinking it's me maybe if i lose weight maybe if i make more money and so they keep digging themselves into a deeper and deeper hole more and more and more confused why is nothing working nothing is gonna work that's sort of the lifespan so what happens is when many people don't end their narcissistic relationships but when they do it's often the catalyst to that wasn't even the big i caught you in bed with my best friend it's they gaslit them in front of a boss there's one more thing i can't or they get into therapy the therapist is like you know this is not okay yeah oh man yeah it's intense it seems like a pretty well-worn strategy for the narcissist to isolate the person from outside people a is that a pattern and b is that a conscious move on the narcissist part the more severe the narcissism the more i think awareness there is of the isolation yeah you hear about this boyfriend's like i don't hang out with your friends i don't like your friends and i don't like your friends i don't like your mom no man i can't take all your asses off social media and i wonder how aware they even are that they're doing it because obviously the threat to them is that they will run one of these ideas by a trusted friend and discover that they are being gaslit but the narcissistic person's not seeing the threat that specifically you're isolating your supply and other people are competition it is support if it's a couple and their best friend's always like oh come on don't say that she's so great that narcissistic partner's like i don't need her to have her agent in the room out okay what is the fallout of this relationship it's bad people in these relationships are confused they're anxious they feel helpless and powerless they ruminate all the time like could i say that differently what's happening so you get very distracted people are very hypervigilant they're on edge say it the right way did i say it the right way let me make sure the house is clean let me not mention that people are lonely they're isolated they feel like nobody gets it they feel like they look foolish there's a lot of shame how did i let it get this bad people have trouble with sleep some people get physically ill okay so if someone does recognize that they are in a relationship like this you have a prescriptive course of action one of them being radical acceptance so what is radical acceptance and how does someone embrace it in its most simple term it's aware of this is it it's not going to change and have realistic expectations for what this relationship is moving forward stop taking responsibility for their behavior and nothing you do or say is going to change their behavior that's it it's that simple and it's that complicated it's funny how similar that is to dealing with an addict as you'd imagine i get called all the time with people who are dealing with someone they love in their addiction you're not gonna like this you gotta throw them to the wolves that's how this works they have to have consequences they gotta get abandoned they gotta get to a low point that's how it is that becomes a slightly different conversation than this person you love who a lot of people in the world think they're cool and great because remember the narcissistic person is great at public appearances but once they're in a car with you or once they're closed inside of space with you they'll go off so you will be at a dinner party with them and you're having a great time you're even thinking oh i've read this relationship wrong everybody loves them and then you're in the car on the way home and it's like did anyone see that no one saw it yeah so they just think you're a great guy i am realizing when you describe that there's only one person i think i dated that wasn't actual narcissist and i do remember when i wanted to break up with them i was conscious of the fact that everyone else liked them and that i was losing something everyone wanted yep it was a pretty powerful force to be honest it's also a self-doubting force how could everybody be right about this person i'm the only one who doesn't see it have you ever heard of solomon asher's research basically in that psychological research think about eight people in a circle right and two people in the circle were in the know they were confederates right everyone else just students they were given a piece of paper with three lines clearly one was longer than the other right and they picked the longest line and then the people in the study were like obviously line b's longer line b's and then they get to the first confederate like line a you start to see people changing their judgment this is kind of halo effect but it's also just that social occasion effect and all that happens like we're very affected and we have some level of suggestibility but there is the sense especially when it's human beings and especially after you've been through this relationship for a while and you're indoctrinated and you're already full of self-doubt when everybody likes them i don't it's got to be me well also there's something deeply primitive from an anthropological lens which is we are a social primate obsessed with status so when we are linked to something with high status for all of time until now that was our road to high status which increased our survival and the survival of our children so you're really breaking a very primitive instinct to turn your back on status and we're hominid species but we obviously broke off and we are status oriented species but even the way status works also if you take it back anthropologically you know this better than i studied it we also see differences in terms of were they herding cultures were they hunting cultures farming cultures all of that would even change how status would be involved in those kinds of communities have you interviewed robert sapolsky yeah and he talked about his baboon research oh yeah i taught that study every semester i taught from the beginning of my career to when i retired tell me your favorite part in that one troop of baboons that the alphas all got killed by eating the meat okay so they ate the tainted meat in the safari park they all died leaving an alpha-less troop and sapolsky watched very carefully what did he do kept measuring cortisol levels and what did he find they all dropped they dropped you remove the alphas and the stress went away cooperative grooming remained between the non-alpha males and the females the health of the troop improved think of it institutionally you work in a job where there's a bunch of narcissistic people and then the narcissistic person left and the cohesion and the harmony was palpably felt well it's just like an abusive person then the relief but also the challenge is it's so complicated that sometimes you sort of still feel in it and so the radical acceptance you would think like okay now i get it huh no there's a grief i've lost i thought i was going to be in a happy marriage i thought there was something that could be done i thought i came from a normal family of origin so all the dreams come crumbling in and now you realize that this marriage will never be happy or i may have to get a divorce and now my kids are going up in two separate homes people will say i don't miss the narcissist what i miss was the life i thought i was going to have that's a lot of grief you got more than that and you do some people say i should be happy they're gone i said no you shouldn't because you had invested a narrative and you in it so grieve it it is a loss and we call it ambiguous because a lot of people don't identify it as such but grieve it and then when you come to that grief giving it the time and space now we can do the big work which is the discernment the awareness the disengagement because not everyone can leave i say all of us have at least one narcissistic relationship we cannot get out of it's a family member it's a colleague it's just someone we just can't get out of the relationship we still have to interact with them that's where radical acceptance makes a big difference because i always tell folks i know radical acceptance is working when you're no longer surprised by their bad behavior interesting yeah because if you have a parent that has it that's the hand you're dealt and so you're deciding whether your kids are gonna meet their grandparents or not and so you're highly incentivized to maintain some version of a relationship interesting so you think if those people just had radical acceptance over the reality of the dynamic it would have us impact stop reacting but also stop being surprised if you have a narcissistic person in your life you're still in contact with never share good news with them never share bad news with them stick to the weather stick to there's an eclipse stick to topanga canyons closed i'll tell you one part of that equation that benefits the oppressed in my personal experience with it is this very very tasty habit we have of self-righteous indignation so there is a great deal of pleasure when you observe the narcissist be narcissistic and you call it out amongst each other and there is this kind of moral superiority that falls in that in its own way can get a tiny bit addictive we get to go into the betterment and be like oh my god you see this and then i recognize we're getting a little bit of a bump out of this we also enjoy the righteous indignation i'm gonna pull it away from you as a bump tax i'm gonna say it's an intimacy it's a shared experience that you could have with each other in a workplace it's actually some really interesting literature that shows in the face of a toxic boss the cohesion that can happen like can you believe this can actually lead to innovation and the better mental health in those people i think this happens on sports teams too i agree yeah like it bonds the team against the coach well also two people are then validating each other's experience like not one person is the craziest we can see this is not helping that's true i just know to police myself when i'm enjoying something a lot or i'm like i'm really enjoying this we love telling the stories of the bonkers behavior yeah i don disagree with you and i think where it gets challenging is if the status quo doesn't shift in any case where there's a narcissistic person and people are sort of talking to each other if you will creating greater alliance around that that's all good as long as it doesn't keep in a static toxic thing going but if it's someone who might publicly see it's a consultant that jumps into an organization from time to time everyone's like here we go and then you all chuckle about it but it beats the heck out of going home and staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m and saying i can't believe this person said this and to your point monica there's this attunement and intimacy empathy you know shared ickiness can actually bring people together when you're sort of able and it unguesslights people yeah because you feel like i did see that correctly how can someone become narcissist resistant know what it is and know that it won't change so that when you're in the face of like oh i see this and we often feel this in our body we often feel something about this person is making the hairs on the back of my next stand up most people say yeah i wasn't thrilled with them but i thought i was being judgmental by thinking i'm like no your body always tells the truth your mind gaslight your body but your body's usually on point so trust that experience number one number two you need good social support you need people around even if it's just one person who will say whoa that was messed up and you're like really i thought so too but i wasn't sure that one interchange can save a person to say okay i am not crazy and you might learn to slowly trust your judgment and i know a lot of people talk blah blah about meaning and purpose in this case where it matters is you need something that gets you out of bed in the morning that has nothing to do with a narcissist it could be work it could be a creative pursuit the kids help sometimes kids can help a lot as you start observing the narcissist do to the children because i find people can be more protective of their children but the key becomes there's a radical acceptance around a narcissistic co- parent is only going to participate in parenting in a way that works for them that aggrandizes them that regulates them that satisfies them that fits with their schedule so i think a lot of times people get frustrated because they're saying i'm doing everything and the radical acceptance piece when i've worked with so many people in the situation i say and you're always going to do everything and you're going to actually make it more messed up for your kids if you keep getting into the argument about why they're not helping with this they're not doing it if one day he's feeling it besides to take the kids to the water park just take it as a gift it is instead of trying to get this person to get up and do the breakfast thing with them because they're not going too consistently that's not spectacular enough stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare for more armchair expert if you dare Okay, so learning the fine art of discernment. Are there really obvious things people can look for right out of the gates? Is it too nuanced to actually give something quite prescriptive? I would imagine a narcissist, that's good, is smart enough to on a first date ask you about yourself, whether they're listening or not.

They must have a playbook, to some degree, to dodge detection at the beginning. What are some telltale signs? A couple things. One is, are they interrupting you a lot?

Is the conversation just sort of have that jagged edge of you feel like they're interrupting you or they're not really listening to you or they're distracted or looking at their phone a lot. It just sort of feels like they're not present or they're just sort of rude. Number two, watch how they drive. Narcissistic people, the research is very clear on that.

They are bad, scary drivers. If I was in a car, I'm like, no, I can do this. Oh, God. At least a dozen published research articles.

Really? You mean, what do you drive fast? They come up behind someone quickly, they zig, zig, zig, zig through the lanes. There's a lot of entitlement.

There's a lot of entitlement. I exhibit that. You've got to stop that. Because you don't want to be on the freeway and not know who you are and say, narcissist.

They will. Okay, but then this is where you start parsing everything out, right? Because yes, on paper, that's not good for you. No, it's not a good look.

But also, you grew up, you race cars and you grew up in Detroit. Let me ask you this. Someone's in the car with you. And they're like, hey, hey, hey, could you slow down?

I'm a little anxious. Every trip I'm with my wife. Okay, and what do you say to her? I don't know.

There's the test. If you said, oh my gosh, grow the hell up. What is wrong with you? Stopping a baby.

That would be the narcissist. I'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just barely out of the way. You can't get into their car with them.

But other things that you might see in the beginning is, how do they take feedback? You might even give them the most innocuous feedback. Like, hey, the theater's over there. We could park here.

What do you think? I don't know how to park the damn car. Now they do park in the wrong place, and you're walking this long way. And now they realize they're wrong.

They're like, oh, I know. Yes, you're the genius. Who knows where to park the car, and I'm the idiot. And you're like, oh, wow.

Okay, that's a lot. You're a no-it-all. They're a victim. One woman told me how she had been dating a guy early, and he had worn, I don't know, what, it was like a jacket or something.

It was blue, and he had blue eyes. And she said, I love that you're wearing that jacket again. And I love how it brings out your eyes. He's like, what are you trying to tell me?

That I only have one jacket. I have a whole closet full of clothes. So she's like, oh, my God. And so run away.

That kind of sensitivity. Sensitivity to criticism of any kind. Or even just sort of pointing something out. You might see that kind of early on.

You might see how they treat people in any kind of a service profession. L.A. Parker, are they either inappropriately flirty, or are they rude, entitled? What do you mean my table's not ready kind of stuff?

Those would be some of the ringers that I would say that we often see. That sort of dysregulation, the entitlement, making fun of someone who's struggling, kind of getting off on humiliation. That's an early sign. Okay, do you have any fear?

Because let's just back out of narcissism for one second. Most people leave a relationship, and they can list you all 10 things the other person was doing wrong. That's very common. You break up.

Why'd you guys break up? She did X, Y, and Z. He did X, Y, and Z. Then they have 10 relationships, and same thing.

They have that. And it's never what they did. Are you at all fearful that, because that might be a little bit of a predisposition of us, that we might be arming people to quickly assess someone as a narcissist and just hop out of relationships and never explore what's going on with them? I don't, because the vast majority of people, first of all, these signs I'm giving you, whether it's the driving fast or being sensitive about the blue sweater, are embedded in all these other things that feel dazzling.

So in all that dazzle, the one little argument in the parking lot, now you go into the best concert ever and you have a great time, you've even forgotten about the parking lot. I think that actually most people will never attune to the icky stuff that happens in the beginning. That's number one. We're a social species.

We are an attachment-oriented species. We want to be with other people. So when a person finds someone they're attracted to, drawn to, and enjoying their time with, they're much more likely to stick around for more abuse than they are to leave with a sign of red flags. That's another thing that we know.

Unless somebody really has been burned in these relationships before. And what's very interesting is that modally, when a person's been through a narcissistic relationship, even as they're going through a breakup, as a therapist, I'll tell you what I hear in the room. I'm so confused. I hope I did the right thing.

I was upside down. I'm like, he cheated on me, but it's still a lot of self-blame. More of what I hear in that room is not, he did this, he did this, he did this. It's, is this me?

It's not you. That's why the book's called, it's not you. It's like, what's wrong with me? What did I do wrong?

Maybe I didn't try hard enough. Narcissistic relationships pull from much more of a strong thread of self-doubt by people who are not narcissistic in those relationships. Yeah. Now, quick question.

You're listening to this. How does someone, I guess we've laid out a bunch of them, but how do you know if you yourself are a narcissist? It's very promising if you're actually asking yourself that question, number one. Number two, are you present with other people?

Then you've got this group in the middle. That is an interesting group that might have some of those unicorny features. Yep. Now that I look back at my divorce, there's a little bit of taking accountability, going over what's happened, saying, I've been told this by other people.

I've noticed that I've burned a few bridges. You might have some people who are doing that. To which I'd say, get the two-way therapist's office and talk it out and talk about what's happening for you. Now, narcissistic people are 60% more likely to drop out of therapy.

They tend to drop out when the heat gets turned on, when the work becomes more vulnerable, when it becomes more emotional. They can't guess like the therapist. Well, they can often guess like the therapist if they're not really experienced. But the other thing is, when the therapist puts their feet to the fire and doesn't want to just engage in storytelling.

Because a lot of narcissistic people will come into therapy and just tell stories. It's an audience. And when you try to push them, the feeling they'll often sort of brush off the therapist contemptuously. If you push too hard, they won't come back.

Yeah. I had a moment when I was making an argument that I wasn't a narcissist. This is what happened. I was driving to work and I weirdly was a narcissist to tell the story.

But here we go. I was driving to work and I was kind of just like going through my checklist. I have a great fear of being a narcissist. I'm not sure why.

Well, I exited some of these behaviors. But I went to work and we're in a scene rehearsing. And one of the actors, she is complaining about her dialogue. And this is going on and on.

It's taking up all this time. And I just had this one moment where I was like, okay, well, here's something that I think is unique to a narcissist. I don't like my dialogue either, but I recognize no one likes their dialogue. I don't think I uniquely have bad dialogue and the rest of the script's brilliant.

She thought everyone else was brilliant. Again, specialness. Yeah, special. Like she was being uniquely punished.

She was victimized by it. Yeah. And I was like, I might be thinking I'm being put upon. But I recognize everyone else is being put upon in the exact same way.

It was like helpful. I was like, okay, well, don't do that. Yeah, but it's that perspective taking. And there might be times in an airport and you're waiting and there's a weather delay and they change the airplane and you're in a different seat.

And you might be like, I can't believe I'm being punished with this middle seat. And a narcissistic person would be throwing the faucets a century, but a healthier person would say, okay, number one, if the other plane was broken, thank goodness they changed it out. Number two, can't control the weather. It's like everyone here.

And so that capacity to take perspective in that way is all the difference in the world. Listen, every one of us has a moment where we've behaved in an entitled way. We snapped at a receptionist. We rushed a friend off the phone.

We were selfish and we chose what we wanted to do. And it might have hurt someone. What a healthy person does in contrast to a narcissistic person is a healthy person will register that, feel uncomfortable, and attempt to make amends very quickly in a meaningful way. Call a friend and say, I am so sorry.

I did not listen to you. And I'm not even going to sit here and give you the litany of excuses. You deserve better. I hurt you.

I'm sorry. That kind of an apology is reparative and relationships move forward from that. A narcissistic person would blame you. How could you ask me this when you know I'm so busy and it's all about projection of blame and that's a whole different experience for the other person?

Man, so 10% of the country is narcissists. That's 30 million people. That means 30 million other people are in a relationship. I mean, not everyone.

More than 30 million. Are you only in one relationship? Good point. You know how many dozens of people you work with, that are your friends, that are your family members.

So every person probably has a little world around them of 30 to 50 people. When you start doing that math, that's a lot of people. I would imagine all of us are affected. Yeah.

Fascinating. Well, this is such a riveting topic. I'm really glad that you've studied it so much and have so much to share with us. I think everyone should check out It's Not You, Identifying and Healing for Narcissistic People.

Also, you have a podcast. I did. Navigating Narcissism. The offices are still out there.

You may do other seasons. And we're doing this whole new thing with Fireside, Mark Cuban's new company, starting a network on there. It's much more interactive, so you can go check that out. I think that's going to be huge.

Again, I really feel a swell of awareness around it. There's so much awareness. But you know what it is? This isn't about being able to say, can I pin someone as a narcissist?

That's not interesting to me. It's about giving people permission to recognize when something that's happening in a relationship feels unhealthy or unsafe. Giving themselves permission to just call it out to themselves, not to the other person. And also letting people know, Ken, it's not you.

I can't tell you how much human potential we've lost because people have been shamed for who they are because the narcissistic person wants to hold power. I'm actually not even that interested in the narcissistic folks. I really care about the people who are in these relationships. I want to let people know there's always room for an act, too.

Oh, last question. Is it advisable? Is it someone's right if they are concerned and love someone that they feel like is in one of these relationships to call that out? Not call it out.

If the person's not ready to hear it, they're going to defend a bit like what we see in substance use, right? If you push that on that, the person's going to say, I'm not drinking too much. They don't have a problem, right? So what you want to do is might see a narcissistic person talk to them at dinner.

Take their friend and say, hey, I wanted to touch base. Are you okay? I saw that. And I don't know.

That felt disrespectful to me, but I just wanted to make sure you're okay. Your friend might even say, no, no, it's not there. But then you've planted a seed. I promise you that seed's going to take flight.

Okay, great advice. I wouldn't know how to do that. I'd be like, hey, dude, she's a nurse. A little bit more of a soft touch.

A little bit more of a soft touch. You need a ride? You need me to bring the truck over and move everything out? Dr.

Romani, thank you so much for coming. This was really, really fun. Thank you so much for having me. One part company, one part scary.

We've got to know. We've got to know stuff. Thank you so much. I hope everyone checks out It's Not You.

Be well. Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at. Okay.

I'm going to start by saying I'm disappointed. What? From the description of your face until now, you're right. Oh, yeah.

I just want to read what you wrote because I had the highest expectations. Okay. All right, let me just find out. Okay.

I sent a text to Rob and to ask yesterday. Warning us that your face would be, let's see. Hey, team, I got a herbal peel at my witch yesterday, and it takes multiple days, and the first part of that, all the pigmentation comes to the surface of your face, so just prepping you both, that my face is going to look absolutely hideous and crazy tomorrow. I'll bring Zofran so everyone doesn't gag.

And you said, this is like someone spattered random dark purple paint on my face, smeared it all around, and then did it one more time. One more time. Yeah. So I was looking forward to like some purple spattering, as promised.

Okay. Well, yesterday was worse looking than today, which feels- The gains last night? Well, it feels a little scary because it's supposed to get worse before it gets perfect, right? Yeah.

So when you text us, that must have been at the nadir of the experience, like the worst. You thought it was going to keep getting worse. Well, no, because it hasn't even started peeling yet. So, yes.

But the pigment part. The pigment part. I'm the most excited about the pigment. Like peeling I've seen.

Right. I've never seen someone's pigment completely change. Yeah. It looked very splotchy.

Dark purple spots. Okay. What is the process? What happened?

What is the treatment you got? What does it do? It's like a chemical peel, but not chemical. It's herbal.

So she like put all this stuff on. And then, also, by the way, it's only on one part of my face. What do you mean? She only did one part of my face.

We didn't do my full face. Tell me why. Because that is the part of my face that has the most like scarring or hyperpigmentation. The other parts don't really have it.

So no need. So no need. Don't fix what's not broke. Exactly.

Okay. So she put some goop. And it's herbal? Yeah.

Had like ginger. Had all this stuff. Okay. Did it sear your?

She has a fancy office in Beverly Hills. And she smashes that all around, right? For a bit. And what's the feeling like when it's covering your face?

That part? Any pain? It hurts a little. It does.

Yeah. But nothing crazy. But then she's putting other stuff on it. And I don't know what that is, but I think it's like acids and all kinds of stuff.

Okay. And it hurts really bad. Then it really takes off. Yeah.

Like as she's doing it, she's like, it's going to feel like glass is cutting you. Wow. Shards. And it did feel like that.

Did you scream at all? I didn't, but I did for a second have to like breathe deep. Center yourself. And before you lost control of your bowels.

Because herbal, I just want to remind everyone, like poison ivy is still herbal. Oh, for sure. Like just because it's herbal doesn't mean it can't be like terribly harmful to yours. Right.

Yeah. I don't think it's harmful because she knows what she's doing. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm just saying like, um, making it relative to acid.

Like, well, it's not acid. I was like, well, I'd rather have acid peel than poison ivy. True. Yeah.

So she puts acids on. I don't know what acids. After the chutney. Exactly.

And then, um, that kind of is. How long was the treatment? 35 minutes. 30 minutes.

30, 35 minutes. Yeah. And when you laughed, was your face on fire? Did it feel like it was on fire?

Yes, it hurt. I looked crazy. Right. Immediately.

Very, like so red. Oh, and at first it was all white. Whoa, what? How come white?

Salts and stuff. Okay. And, um, were you allowed to put like any ice packs on it or anything? No.

No. Absolutely not. You got to live through the pain. Oh, wow.

How long did it last? All day. And that was Saturday? This was Saturday.

So, and I had a lunch plan. I had to cancel it. Sure. Because I could not be in public.

You probably couldn't even move your mouth to eat. You would have been searing pain along the creases. Well, it was just embarrassing. It was one of those moments where you remember some people might recognize you.

Uh-huh. Yeah. You look insane. You look crazy.

So, so I decided that I was going to cancel all my plans for the day. I went home and I started Six Feet Under. Oh, wow. Blast in the past.

Have you ever seen it? No. Great show, right? So good.

I'm loving it. I watched eight episodes. Wonderful. Young Peter Krause.

I know. And I wanted to tell you, it's so funny to see him then. He's so good in it. And his character on that show.

His Krause of the Young Parent. Yes. Yeah, he would tell me that all the time. Because I was working with him before I'd seen Six Feet Under.

Yeah. I then fell in love with him and then watched Six Feet Under. And he said, you know, sometimes I'm envious of your role because I used to have it. And it's really fun to be the good time, Charlie.

Yeah, it was definitely. I was like, oh, these two are brothers. This character in this show is actually Crosby's brother. Right, right, right.