We believe one in six people are narcissistic and exposure can become a life or death situation, but the key step to identify narcissism is Dr. Romney Kvasala, licensed clinical psychologist for the world's leading expert on narcissism. All narcissism's on the spectrum. At the lowest ends, it's Instagram saviors, but at the severe end of the spectrum, you're talking about a cult leader.
They have low empathy, they will dominate people, they have to get the last word, they get angry very quickly, and that's just the top of the iceberg. What about the impacts of narcissism on relationships? Narcissistic people, they can go out in the world and they're able to be charming and charismatic as narcissistic relationships start strong. They want to get you quick and then it becomes dismissiveness, manipulation, gaslighting.
The world thinks this person's fantastic. A lot of people say, aren't you lucky that you're married to that guy? And behind closed doors, they psychologically destroy you. Narcissism in work.
How do I know if my boss is a narcissist? You're going to feel it in the sense of you don't feel seen, you don't feel valued, you feel like the workplace is unpredictable, you might even feel that it's psychologically unsafe. What about world leaders? If our adversary in another country is a narcissist, would we rather our leader be a narcissist as well?
That's a fantastic question, and I think... So, the big question, how do you know if you are a narcissist? And can you cure narcissism? So here's where we get into some interesting muddy waters.
Dr. Romney, you've committed so much of your life and your energy to the subject of narcissism. Why does it matter? Oh, it matters so much, because exposure to people who have narcissistic personalities shapes how people's identity develops, shapes how their personality develops, or if the first time you encounter a narcissistic person is in adulthood, it can actually sort of hijack that sense of identity.
It can really steal a person away from themselves. And we, I think it's so important, because we haven't given ourselves permission, I think as a culture, as a field of mental health, to identify this as a problem and allow people to have better responses. In a way, it's almost viewed as sort of not being very nice to say the narcissistic people are not very nice. It's a strange paradox in the world of mental health.
That's why I do it, because nothing more than me wanting to return people back to their authentic selves. You must have seen the cost of narcissism. Can you give me some examples of the cost that an narcissist has had on someone's life that you've seen? Where do I begin?
I'll tell you what cost is. A person who so doesn't believe in themselves, that they may give up on their path of education and never pursue an interest. So we never got to see the work product that that would have created, not to mention that person actually getting to unfurl their wings and fully be who they wanted to be as a creative or as a professional. It's the person who knew what they wanted to be, that they had a very strong identity as pick something, and they ended up choosing something else because they knew the only way they could be loved was to be what that parent demanded of them.
And it was so clear to them, they wouldn't be loved unless they fully gave in to what that parent expected of them. It's the person who is an absolutely glorious human being, lovely, empathic, and warm, but feels so damaged after years of being told you're not enough, you're selfish, you're greedy, you're foolish, that they get into relationship after relationship that duplicates that theme and don't get the real collaborative, compassionate love story that they deserve because they don't think they deserve it. And that's just the top of the iceberg. And your academic background, the experience that you're drawing from, what is that experience?
So my experience in my academic background is I have a PhD in clinical psychology and my minors in something called health psychology. And so I got really interested in how various elements of mental health and mental illness showed up in people who had co-occurring medical conditions. So it's a very almost like strange point to enter. But what we do know is people, personality affects how we take care of our health, how we might engage in behaviors that might put our health at risk.
For example, narcissism and addiction have a really high overlap. So here's a case of now a personality style, putting a person at health risk due to using substances to regulate and then all the things that would come up to that. But it's tough to measure personality, Stephen. It's really hard to measure.
It's not one of those things. It's not like a blood test. It's not even like measuring depression. Frankly, depression is eminently measurable.
Yeah, there's different variants and there's different severity, but we're very clear diagnostically and phenomenologically what makes depression, what qualifies. Personality is like the Wild West. And so from a research perspective, it's something that people would often shy away from because we couldn't get the constructs right. But I said I welcome the challenge because I truly in my heart believed if we could understand and study personality more, we'd actually be understanding all this unmeasurable noise in the mental health research because I thought that's probably where it was.
And I think more and more of the research is supporting that. And you spend time even today dealing with patients who are the victim of a narcissistic relationship or the victim of a narcissist. Every week, every week. I mean, it's probably one of the, if not the most gratifying part of my week.
I'm a big believer that if you're a mental health practitioner, you practice mental health. So that's a privilege to be able to be in that room and to work with clients. But it would be so easy when you're dealing at a macro level, large populations going on YouTube, writing books to get distanced from what is happening to individual people's lives. One of the tricky bits of research is we study populations, we study samples, we study hundreds of people.
What happens in the room is something very different. And you start to recognize, A, how badly these relationships harm people, their schemas of the world, their schemas of themselves. And B, how much potential for intervention there is with these clients through very, very simple approaches around education about narcissism, validation of their experience, breaking through self-blame and teaching them to trust themselves. How many patients do you think you've seen that have been victims of narcissists?
I mean, hundreds, hundreds, really. And I even use the word survivor. I hate to call them victims because I don't even think they're that passive. I mean, I think that they just weren't.
No one ever taught anyone this, right? I'll give you the example. When people are in a relationship with somebody who's living with addiction, it's very clear what they're dealing with, right? You have a person, they're using a substance, that's altering them, that's altering their behavior, that's taking them away from who they are.
A person, people in relationships with addicts will say, I'm in two relationships. I'm in a relationship with a sober person, and I'm in a relationship with somebody who's using or intoxicated or denying or defending their use, right? Two people. And it breaks the people in those relationships, and we're willing to call it that.
The experience people have in narcissistic relationships in a way is no different. With the added bit, though, at least with addiction, people can say, I see what the behavior is. I see what the issue is. Addiction's a disease, and we know it's treatable.
Narcissism, not so much. And on top of that, the narcissistic person has this very well-developed, very successful behavioral repertoire.