The Narcissism Doctor: "1 In 6 People Are Narcissists!", "Are Narcissists Better In Bed?", "Can A Narcissist Change? - Dr. Ramani Durvasula
嘉宾：Dr. Ramani Durvasula
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§01Transcript — part 1
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. Ramani Dabasala, licensed clinical psychologist, the world's leading expert on narcissism. All narcissism is on the spectrum. At the lowest ends, it's Instagram saviors. But 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. And 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 gonna 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. Ramani, 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 a narcissist has had on someone's life that you've seen? Where do I begin? I'll tell you, 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 who, 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 experiences and my academic background is I have a PhD in clinical psychology and my minor is 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 of 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 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 that. 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 yeah. 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 with research is we study populations. We study samples, right? 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, it's a very different thing. 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.
So 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 in 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, that 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. They can go out in the world and they're able to be charming and charismatic and confident and smart and the center of attention and running companies.
And behind closed doors, they psychologically eviscerate the people they're with. spouses, partners, family members, close friends, maybe people who are below them in an organization, people where they can kind of get away with it. So the people they're harming, the world thinks this person's fantastic. At least the person who's in a relationship with an addict, people say, okay, I get it. They're using, this is hard. But for the folks in narcissistic relationships, a lot of people say, aren't you lucky that you're married to that guy?
And the person's like, oh my gosh, are these people, their mind like, so what do they do? They blame themselves. Okay. What is narcissism? Because I've heard the word used so often, but I couldn't tell you the definition of it. And I feel like I'd butcher the definition of what it is. So I'm almost curious to ask you, before I almost contaminate you with what my definition is, what's your working definition? What's your working model of what narcissism is?
Um, delusions of grandeur, someone that thinks they're like super important and that they are better than everybody else. Arrogance, um, and they're cruel. Okay. All right. So I, I would give you probably like a C plus B minus if you're a student in my class. I mean, I, I, I cut students a lot of slack back in the day. So I'll give you a C plus B minus because you're in the neighborhood, right? The grandiosity, the arrogance, um, The meanness, but that to me is even more sort of a manifestation of the traits, like the grandiosity, the arrogance.
They have variable empathy and typically have low empathy. They're deeply entitled. They truly think they're more special than everyone else and that the rules should apply to them very differently. They have a excessive need for admiration and validation. They're very superficial. They don't really have the capacity for deep, sustained, intimate relationships. They're very much referential to the world out there, outside of them to set goals. They don't have a good internal sense of like what matters to me.
What do I want to do? They just want to do what they do again to get that admiration and validation and There's a shallowness, a real emotional shallowness to narcissism. Those are the patterns and traits we sort of see. They're very, very self-centered, very preoccupied with themselves, the good parts of themselves, the bad parts of themselves. It's very rare for them to sort of lift their heads up and genuinely notice the experience of another person.
That's what narcissism is. How does it show up? It shows up as devaluation, dismissiveness, manipulation, gaslighting, being They get angry very quickly, especially when they're frustrated or disappointed. And that can show up as overt rage or overt anger, yelling, screaming, or even violence. That can show up as passive aggression, withholding, and withdrawing. They are prone to betrayal. They lie. They cheat. They make promises about the future they never keep, but they do that to keep people around so they won't leave them.
So it's part of a larger sort of a manipulation. They will dominate people. They have to get the last word. They will shift blame onto other people. They will rarely take responsibility for their misdeeds, even when they're clearly caught in them. And if they do, they'll still blame the other person. They're very neglectful and careless in relationships. That is narcissism. How can you tell the difference between someone having a bad day, an asshole, and a narcissist?
Because some of those things there, I thought, Jo, on a bad day I might do that. Yeah. You know, the whole collection together, no? But on a bad day when I haven't slept, okay, do you know what? I might blame someone or whatever else. What's the distinction? When a person has a bad day, and we all have bad days, and on those bad days, we might look, if the only tape someone had of us was of that day, right? But here's the piece. When people are not narcissistic and they have bad days, they will...
take accountability, they will make amends, and they will change their behavior and say, I'm not doing this again. This is not okay. Why wasn't it okay? Because it was none of those people's fault. You didn't get enough sleep. And whether that means we reach deeper to be as kind as we can to the people, in some cases, especially if it's people we know or we see, again, you may not know the random person at the gym, but if someone we know or work with, we step out of ourselves to say, the way I conducted myself yesterday wasn't okay, and I'm really sorry about that.
And so that they're having that experience of you taking accountability. That's where I know we're not dealing with a narcissistic person. We're dealing with a bad day. And a bad day is just that, a day. It's not every day. With a narcissistic person, many days, I'm not going to say all, but many days are characterized by these machinations, these manipulations, and these invalidations that... The person in a relationship with a narcissistic person feels like they're constantly on their back foot, that they can't be themselves.
They can't express a need. They can't express a want. They can't even express a feeling for fear of it being shut down. So there's your not narcissistic person. What about an asshole? I do think assholery and narcissism are pretty, we use the terms interchangeably. I think, though, that here's my asshole belief, since this is something, I think the construct validation on asshole is probably still needing to be done. I think assholes tend to be pretty consistently assholes.
So whereas narcissistic people can really, they have a much better. wider behavioral repertoire, to be absolutely charming. This is a person who can be absolutely charming on the golf course with the CEO of their company, like charming, nice, warm, remembering the ages of their kids and asking about the wife and remembering that their grandmother is sick and all this stuff. And get home. Forget it was his anniversary. Scream at their partner. Why does the house look like this?
Why do I have to put up with this? Make those damn kids shut up. But they were Mr. I remember that your little girl's birthday is February 6th when they were on the golf course. That is not assholery. That's narcissism. Can you cure narcissism in your opinion? No, I don't. Because I think that would imply changing a personality, which I don't think we can do. Hmm. Is there any evidence, have you ever seen in your 20 years of working with narcissists and their survivors, any sign of a narcissist becoming a not narcissist or a non-narcissist?
I've not seen them become a not narcissist. I've seen them make micro changes because I measure and monitor and make my notes in therapy. So I'll see, interesting, they're no longer trying to mess with coming in 10 minutes later and asking me to keep them for the whole hour. They are honoring the therapeutic frame. They're paying the bill when they decide not to show up at the last minute. I'll see tiny tweaks. I'll see people who'll come in and say, I screamed at my girlfriend again last night and that wasn't cool.
So I was like, oh, whoa, that's insight. Like I'll run with it. But here's the rub, okay? These micro changes. And they are micro changes, but they are changes and they're in the right direction. that much water under the bridge for the family members and partners and other people that have been harmed. They're saying, you want me to stay in this relationship because this dude remembered to say thank you once this week? I think not. To me, the thank you is progress.
To the people in their lives who've been harmed, that one thank you is not going to be enough. When I was looking at the subject of narcissism and I was looking at what people are searching around the subject matter, I could see no searches online for, is my wife a narcissist? But I saw lots of searches for, is my husband a narcissist? Yes. So I wondered... Is narcissism a gender-specific thing? And in what proportion do you typically see men and women being narcissists?
Yeah, no, it's not gender-specific. I'm so shocked at that because I've worked with so many men who have narcissistic wives or female partners. And I've worked with many lesbian couples. I mean, I've worked with cases where clearly there's a woman, female-identified person who is narcissistic. It is definitely not limited to men. So here's what we know. Grandiose narcissism, much more common in men. Malignant narcissism, much more common in men.
But there's a form of narcissism called vulnerable narcissism. Vulnerable narcissism isn't so much of the showy, charismatic, charming, look-at-me, arrogant, salesy, attention-seeking narcissist. The vulnerable narcissist is more socially anxious, victimized, sullen, resentful, aggrieved. And often we sort of see a failure to launch, right? There's sort of a, I'm angry at the world. How come I never got my turn? How come she got that? And I was better than him.
I should have gotten that. There's a victimhood. Yeah, victimhood. Okay. That's called vulnerable narcissism, right? When we look at vulnerable narcissism, gender balanced. Okay, so these other types of narcissism, you named four types there. Grandiose narcissism. Right, so that's our traditional sort of garden variety narcissism. The showy, charismatic, pretentious, preening, charming, attention-seeking, actually quite often quite successful narcissistic person.
Unlike the vulnerable narcissists who are a failure to launch, the grandiose narcissistic people often have big, big dreams and they'll execute. Not always, not always. And they'll often burn bridges because they are, in fact, narcissistic. So they'll anger people or do shady deals or cut people out and all that stuff. But the grandiose narcissistic folks are often the larger than life folks. Now, if they are angry at you, if they feel let down by you, they will let you know.
They can be very vindictive. They are not going to be very honest in a relationship. They're probably going to betray you. They're going to be mean to their partners. We can count on that, too. but to the world at large, larger than life. That's the typical model. Now, the vulnerable narcissism is what I, narcissist is what I just shared with you, that more vulnerable, victimized, sorry, victimized, socially anxious, angry, aggrieved, sullen, resentful, failure to launch narcissist, okay?
Some people would argue they're one in the same, that as long as a grandiose narcissistic person is well-supplied, things are going well, they're getting lots of attention, they're the person, they're good, then they're going to stay in their grandiose mode. However, if the thing tips and everything goes wrong for the grandiose narcissist, they lose the money, they lose the job, they lose the partner, they lose social status, the vulnerable stuff will start showing up.
The victimhood, the resentment, this is a witch hunt, everyone's out to get me, can almost feel sort of low-grade paranoid. But, You're either more one than another. So the vulnerable narcissist could definitely have a grandiose moment if everything turned for them. But some people are just more grandiose. Some people are more vulnerable, but they do have the other underbelly. That's just, that's how that looks. Now, the malignant narcissist, which is another type I talked about, this is where we see the most severe form.
And when I say most severe, most severe in terms of how it shows up in relationships, I'd say the most problematic form of narcissism. And here's where we see a form of narcissism that shows up as manipulativeness, exploitativeness, the willingness to take advantage of people, coerciveness, isolation, using menace as a tool of control, very vindictive, dangerous. It could be quite dangerous. I always say malignant narcissism is the last stop on the train before you hit psychopathy station, because this is as close to psychopathy as you're going to get without it being psychopathy.
And in fact, there's a personality model called the dark tetrad. And the dark tetrad is comprised of narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, which is sort of like that willingness to use other people for your own advantage, and sadism. I personally think there should be a fifth bit, which is paranoia, because I think these folks can be really think everyone's out to get them. But the model right now is those four pieces, right? Malignant narcissism has a lot of those top notes.
The calculated callous coldness, the shallow charm, the shallow superficial charm, intelligence, the lack of empathy, the in some ways getting some... pleasure out of seeing someone who wronged them being hurt. So again, it feels more dangerous. And that's malignant narcissism. Is that your serial killers? I would say the serial killers are probably more psychopathic and psychopathy is definitely a different subtype. It's different. Psychopathy is something different than malignant narcissism.
They're not the same thing. They look different even genetically and they look different, probably look different in the brain. Psychopathic people have, they don't have remorse. They don't feel guilt. Whereas malignant narcissistic people may, they know they did something wrong. A psychopathic person, it's almost as though they don't understand what they did wrong, not because they have a mental deficit, but because they literally have zero capacity for empathy.
And the fourth type of narcissism. So I gave you vulnerable, grandiose, malignant, and the fourth type is communal narcissism. Right? Grandiose, malignant, vulnerable. Yes. The fourth type is communal narcissism. Communal narcissism is very interesting. It's a relatively new construct in the field. It came around 2003 is when I started reading some of the first papers by a guy named Gebauer. I think he was writing. He was at the University of Munich at the time.
And... I loved the work. I thought it was absolutely compelling because it was this idea that there were people out there who were going to get their narcissistic supply, not to the usual, look at me, I'm so great, I'm going to do things so people tell me I'm great. but by doing good deeds, by being perceived as saviors, by being perceived as grand rescuers, humanitarians. So the communal narcissist is a person who gets their narcissistic supply, their praise, their admiration, their awe.
by doing these good deeds. And that's the motivation for doing the good deeds, not the good deed in and of itself, not because you care about a refugee group, not because you care about the plight of animals, but because you want to be viewed as a good dude. And so that's the communal narcissist. Now, What gets interesting, like with all forms of narcissism, all narcissism is on a spectrum. It's not an either or. From mild to severe, all of mental health is on a spectrum.
There's no such thing as a black and white dichotomy in mental health. It's mild to severe, mild to severe. And what's interesting with communal narcissism, at the lowest ends, it's sort of like you're more like... Instagram saviors. Like, look at me, I'm saving the world. But you know, like they're cleaning up the beach in their bikini. And I'm like, is this about how attractive you are? Is this about really trying to save the environment? Like it really is about we're talking about apps?
Or are we talking about trash in the street? Like, what are we talking about? But they want the validation, like what a cool person you are for spending your weekend saving elephants. They're relatively harmless, they're moderately ridiculous, but they do get angry if people don't give them a big bravo for how humanitarian they are. You take communal narcissism all the way to the severe end of the spectrum, you're talking about a cult leader. These are now people who are saying, I have the answer to the universe, I know everything, I know you better than you.
They'll bring people into cultic systems. They will completely separate them from their sense of self and their sense of self-worth, have no problem doing it. and tell them that they're doing them a good thing the whole time. That's, to me, your severe cult leader, or I think all cult leader, forget severe, a cult leader is really probably where communal and malignant narcissism come together. The big question, how many people are narcissists? This is a big question because our problem is this.
There's really no good studies about this. It's tough to measure narcissism. Who's really going to cop to being really entitled or really manipulative? You often don't get people who are going to answer those questions in an honest, open way. When we look at the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder that are done in what we call large-scale epidemiologic studies, we see the rates to be somewhere between 1 and 6%. But that's the diagnosis.
And that's in really structured research settings. Narcissism is a person who has enough of the narcissistic personality style to be noticeable, to be experienced by others. It's a spitball number because we've never done the numbers. So I'd say if the spitball number is probably sitting somewhere between... 15 and 18 percent. I think that's a good guess, about one in six people. I think if you're in a major metropolitan area, it's going to be a little higher.
I think in certain industries, it's going to be higher. I think in certain, maybe even cultures, it could be higher. So, but if you were going to just give me, ask me for a global prevalence, I mean, I think that's, it's my, it's my best guess. And I think a lot of folks in the field might agree with me again, enough of it that you would notice it enough of it that people are being affected by it. So you've met six team members of mine, including me.
I have not. I've only met four of you. So you're still two men down. You're okay. You might still be coming it through. Because my next question was, which one do you think it was? So far, so bad for you. Each one of us has been sweeter than the next. So, Stephen, you're in the hot seat right now. Oh, gosh. Sugar. Okay, interesting. Okay, so, I mean, one in six as a spitball number is scarily high. That's interesting. You think it's scarily high.
I mean, I think it's about... I mean, listen, we know how, I actually don't think it is. I think if you went to a small town, you might hit closer to one in eight, because I think a small town is almost based on a greater need for sociality. I think there's more interdependence in that kind of a situation. So narcissism isn't going to probably work as well. But I mean, one in six, I think if any of us really went home and did the soul searching, listed out the names of everyone we knew, the number is probably going to track.
Is that number increasing? Are we breeding narcissists because of the sort of social and societal changes that have occurred? I'm thinking about Instagram when you said that. I was thinking is social media a narcissist creator? I think it's a narcissist amplifier, but I don't think it's a creator. Narcissism is a personality style and like all personality styles, it's a social, emotional, developmental phenomenon. That happens from infancy into adolescence.
So somebody jumping onto Instagram when they're 18 and posting lots of selfies, they're a decent person. That's not going to turn them narcissistic. It might turn them boring, but I don't know that it would necessarily turn them narcissistic. I think it could take, if somebody's got the traits, they have the tendency to need the validation and admiration. And again, a person posting selfies is... That doesn't make them narcissistic. Because Jack went on holiday up this mountain and he posted loads of photos.
Okay, so, no. But we have to, if Jack's a nice person, right? Jack is excited to share his trip with everyone, right? But if he was kind of like rubbing it in. Okay, so that's all right. Jack just lost some points there, poor Jack. But it's a, but I would say this, what we'd wanna know with anyone who's posted a lot of vacation photos, right? And they keep doing it. How present are they when you're actually with them? If you say like, listen, Jack is the loveliest person in the world and Jack loves sharing his vacation trips and there's a little bit of schadenfreude in there, like, you know, but he's a sweetie, then Jack's off the hook.
I think, though, that what social media has become is it has taken... Once upon a time, and you're probably even... You're not so young that you wouldn't remember this, but I remembered it as a full grown-ass woman, is that I can tell you that if I go backwards to when I first heard about social media, I was already in my 40s at that point. And I remember looking at it, and I was already studying narcissism, and I said, oh, God, what And it was really like, it was almost like Houston, we have a problem kind of thing.
Someone else had shown it to me. And I thought to myself, this isn't going to create more narcissists. But once upon a time, for a narcissistic person to get validation, they'd actually have to have a shave and a shower and get out of the house. You couldn't just sit home. and get validation. You had to go to work, get it in a family sphere, get it in your town bar or pub or something like that. But it wasn't going to come home from you just sitting on your ass at home taking pictures of yourself.
Because I don't know if you've ever tried to take a picture of yourself with a camera. You're either going to catch your head or your mouth. Like that's how we used to try to do it, right? So now there was a tool. Right. For these people to have a megaphone to say, look how wonderful I am. So a person who was already narcissistic, this was going to harness it. And sort of it was an accelerant on a fire that was already burning. But it's going to keep it in the house though, isn't it?
§02Transcript — part 2
Which sounds like it's a safer place for it to be than wandering around the streets. Well, the point is, what, keeping them at home rather than that? But I still think that what it did, though, is now we get into a bigger philosophical question. This many people depicting lives that are, look how much better my life is than yours. Look how together I am. Look how great I'm doing. While that might be something the narcissistic people will do to offset their sense of insecurity, because that's sort of the core wound in narcissism, there are other vulnerable people who are watching that content who are not narcissistic, but already feel like they don't measure up.
And we've created this really messy space of people who already devalue themselves, looking at these lives far better than theirs and wondering what's wrong with me. Roughly one in six people have a podcast. So I was just wondering. I mean, that many people think they have something that interesting to say, right? So, and like I said, everybody's trying to put their voice out there, their vacation pictures out there, their breakfast pictures out there are not narcissistic.
I think in some cases, I don't think we should over pathologize what has become a new way of interacting. I've got, it's interesting, I have children. My daughters are now both in their early 20s. And I'll watch their facility, but it's not, I see what they're doing. It's not narcissism. It's actually communication. And they're staying in touch with a very large net of widely spread friends. And there is a lot of intimacy there. So I think young people whose cognition kind of also grew with it, they use it in a more sort of seamless way.
Listen, what's it been around? We're going to soon come 20 years, around 20 years since social media has been around, right? We're rounding that horn soon. Mm-hmm. We're going to get, it's going to take a minute to get the data. We're going to get our first set of data from the kids whose lives were captured from the day they plopped onto a delivery table all the way right through adolescence. That data is going to be very telling. I don't think it's created more narcissism.
I think we've always had grandiose narcissists. I think they make history. They've been our leaders. They're the people we've always looked to. They've been the town mayor, whatever. I think what it has done though, it's taken this problem of vulnerable narcissism and it's really blown it up. Because the vulnerable narcissistic people get super resentful when they perceive other people as having these awesome lives that they don't. And they get more angry.
And this is sort of the advent of the internet troll. A lot of that is explained by vulnerable narcissism. So where does narcissism come from then? It's one of the big questions. From what you said there, I assume it comes, there might be a genetic component that's brought out by our childhood or? So we're all born with a temperament, right? I don't know if you're an only child, if you have siblings or anything like that. Youngest of four. You're youngest of four.
Okay, so this is harder for you. It'd be interesting for you to talk with them is that, and your parents, whoever was parents, whoever were around, every one of you, you and your siblings, had slightly different experiences. personalities from the day you were born. And that rolled out in early childhood. So you'll see that one kid who's just easy breezy from the day they're born. You'll sometimes see that kid who's just a clenched up ball of nerves from the day they're born.
You'll see that kid who just doesn't want to chill for a minute from the day they're born. That stuff is called temperament. And what we know about temperament is that there are certain temperaments that make a child more biologically vulnerable, a little bit more difficult to soothe. They may be more They just sort of need more, right? So they're more of a demand on a caregiver. With that more vulnerable temperament, if that comes up against an environment that's at all invalidating trauma, neglect, other adversities, chaos, domestic violence, substance use in the family, and even emotional abuse where the child is just being told, stop, sit down, shut up.
Why can't you be like your sisters, right? That combination is... can actually set up a real risk for developing narcissism. So that's pathway one. But pathway two, and this is actually coming out of really interesting work by a guy named Eddie Bromelman from the University of Amsterdam. It's fascinating work. And he is studying more sort of what's the other pathway? Well, the other pathway, and other folks like Masterson and others have written about this, which is the overvalued child.
These are the children who are told you're more special than any other child. Not that you're special, but you are more special than him and him and her. So you shouldn't have to wait in a line. You're more special. You should get the teacher you want. You should get everything you want. Those children often, they don't learn to self-soothe. They often aren't as well regulated. They actually kind of believe the hype that the parent is giving them, which is not doing them any favors.
And Bromelman is suggesting that this could sort of be a foreshadowing of what could turn into adult narcissism. So I'm guessing you need that temperament on board. I think if you had a sweet-tempered kid that constantly being told that they're special actually might leave the sweet-tempered kid feeling a little bit guilty, actually. But the kid with that more vulnerable temperament, they might buy into the hype. So you sort of have this one pathway of adversity.
Yeah. You have the one pathway of sort of these are kids who are told, you're great. You can have anything you want. We'll do anything you want. Let's go on this vacation. Here's this device. But they're also kids that are often very emotionally undernourished. They're not, they're not, their emotions are not valued. They're not reflected. They're not mirrored. So these are kids who are get, get, get, but it's a very tenuous existence because they're still not in touch with their emotional world, which has to happen in childhood.
Otherwise, you don't get that. that you don't get that atlas of your own emotions, right? So those tend to be the two primary pathways. Not every kid who goes through those pathways will become narcissistic. In fact, the vast majority will not. So I think that it's very complicated and what we call it's very, it's multi-determined. It's a very multi-determined series of pathways to what leads to adult narcissism. And because of that, I always say narcissism is one of those stories we can always tell backwards, but it's really difficult to tell forwards.
don't show me your 17-year-old who has a lot of attitude and won't empty the dishwasher and calls you names and don't ask me if he's narcissistic. I usually tell those parents, call me in 10 years. And in 10 years, you're going to see if this tracked or he pops out of it, like every adolescent who's trying to kind of individuate from his parents and settles down into a decent guy. You mentioned that narcissism exists on a spectrum. So does that mean that someone can be a little bit narcissistic?
I would say somebody can have milder narcissistic presentation. So what I mean by milder, the mild narcissistic people, the best adjective I could use, they're annoying, they're annoying. They're emotionally immature. They're superficial. They're shallow. They're vapid. And they're also very self-centered. So these are people, when they're having a problem, they expect the world to stop for them, take their calls, talk to them for hours. But the day finally comes that you need your friend, they're nowhere to be seen like, oh, I don't have time for this.
So it can feel like a very, very imbalanced relationship. And when you're with them, the mild narcissist can actually be kind of fun, right? They're like, let's go to this new hot hip, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And they're fun and laugh and dance and attention seeking. Could be fun for a minute, but it would be very difficult to have a long-term committed relationship with someone like that. It'd be difficult to raise children with someone like that.
It would have been very difficult to have been raised by someone like that. Are narcissists more successful professionally? Yes. They're much more successful. That's the problem. And not, I mean, again, and I'm not going to make this a blanket statement, but I'm going to tell you now that they are, they're more ambitious. Success is life or death to them, right? Because it's validation. It's the blood that flows to their psyche. So the stakes are much higher for the rest of us.
We want to succeed. But at the end of the day, we would say, I've got my family. I got my friends. I got enough money in the bank. I got some food in my belly. Like, I'm good. But for them, it's the air in their lungs. So they're more represented in leadership. They make more money, especially narcissistic men make more money than agreeable men. They're more successful at dating. They're more successful. And unfortunately, the way our economy is set up, it is set up so that the narcissistic people win.
Narcissism and capitalism go together really well because it's a competitive system that rewards the person who does the most. And we don't look at process. We look at outcome. And anytime you have an outcome-heavy metric, narcissistic people are always going to win. I'm thinking about some of the greatest companies that have been built that changed the world. You know, Apple being one of them. Oftentimes when you hear about how these people treated other people, it sounds like the narcissistic characteristics that you described earlier.
But then we often excuse that because of what they brought into the world, the great innovations, the great companies they built, how they helped change the world, how they maybe led us through or out of war. So what do you say to that? Is it sometimes worth their narcissism for what they gave the world? So here's a rub. I completely agree with what you're saying. I actually think that some of the greatest innovations, greatest creativity, in fact, many wartime presidents and prime ministers have, were it had to be narcissistic, right?
And might have gotten countries, people through messes, might have made the, had the decisive postures that were necessary, that might have made the really, really kinds of difficult corporate decisions that needed to make with little regard for how the human beings were going to get hurt, treated people, might push them to an inhuman limit. And then there was this thing that came out of it, Was it worth it? I mean, now we're in, now we're in philosophy, honey, and I'm a psychologist, but, but suffice it to say, you know, there's some, there's always been talk, like even inventors like Tom Alva, Thomas Alva Edison wasn't a night, was not a nice guy, right?
Some archival research, loving these light bulbs, right? Would someone else have done it? It's a moot point. He did. And so... I think the innovations are important. I think narcissistic people are built for innovation. They're grandiose. They're dreamers. They want the agile. They want to do the big thing. They want to be on the big tech stage and have all the lights on them and have all the attention while they have the beautiful video and the simple thing.
And they want that. That is their everything. And what I tell people is we're never going to have a world without them. We have gotten lots of cool stuff in our lives from them. Just don't marry them. Is it possible to be the person on the stage to build the incredible thing, to have the insane ambition to put little computers into our pockets and do all of that and not be a narcissist. I fully believe there. Absolutely. 100%. I think it's harder though.
I really, really do. I think that the empathic CEO is a unicorn. It's tough. You know, because they're answering to so many masters, right? They're answering to shareholders. They're answering to rank and file. They're answering to management. Yeah. I wouldn't want that job. I'm a very agreeable, empathic person. And I got to tell you, I'd rather do any job than that one. I'd love the money, but it sounds terrible. And I think that the kind of shape-shifting and chameleon-like qualities that require, I would say that an empathic person would get a bit more swallowed up in that job.
Because if you actually stopped to care about everyone you were serving in that position, you would burn out real fast. The not caring, I think, is what actually can protect a person in that position. And that's not to say all CEOs are narcissistic, though a lot are. Because it's a competition at the end of the day. It is a competition at the end of the day. Narcissistic people are built for competition. They're built for it because they have to win at any cost.
The rest of us are probably like, I'm out. I'm out. Yeah, a lot of industries are a zero-sum game. Business generally isn't, but when I say zero-sum game, I mean when one person does well, that kind of means that someone else is not going to do well. So I'm thinking about some industries, even one of my company's Third Web, we realized that it's kind of a winner-takes-all industry in the same way that Amazon is like, there's one Amazon, and they dominate pretty much all the market share.
And with Google, there's one Google, their nearest competitor probably has 5% of the market share. So there are elements in business where it is pretty winner-takes-all. And it's conceivable to think the person who is most ruthless, most willing to cut ethical corners, most willing to put profits over people... is probably going to rise to the top. That's right. You know, generally, at least in the short term. In the short term. But the thing is, then they'll cash out.
Yeah. Or their bad ethics will catch up with them. Or their bad ethics will catch up with them. And they'll end up in jail, which we see a lot. We do. We see it. And I think for some people, it was a worthy gamble. because they could have potentially won it all, right? Or they truly believed they were going to get away with it. And I think that's when we use the word arrogance. Arrogance is, at its deepest level, is I'm going to do the bad thing and I'm going to get away with it.
What about money? Does money make you more narcissistic? Here's where it gets to be an interesting conversation. And I write about this actually more in my other book. And don't you know who I am? Where I, money breeds privilege. Money breeds entitlement. So I call the sort of phenomenon of feet that never touch the ground, right? If people have enough money, they're whizzed to airports and cars. They don't stand in the TSA line with the unwashed masses like the rest of us do.
They're taken to the best hotel suites. They don't think about where their next meal is coming from. It's brought to them. They don't do all the stuff. that the rest of us do. They don't tolerate the indignities and they don't have to regulate the same way. So when a person has money for long enough, that feet never touching the ground creates what I call this sort of privileged entitlement. Assholes. Maybe assholes, but maybe not. I think it's also that bubble wrapped way that they go through life.
Like they actually don't understand how to use the self-checkout at Target. Yeah. Did you hear the Paul Piff study from the University of California? Oh, yeah, yeah. He's great, by the way. He's wonderful. Which, well, he did so many. Which study are you referring to? Um, the one where people are made to feel wealthier. And when they feel wealthier, they were more likely to endorse unethical decisions, such as stealing office supplies and stealing candy.
People who were made to feel wealthier also gave less to charity. People who were made to feel wealthier expressed happiness through feelings that were self-focused, such as through pride. contentment and amusement. And people who felt less wealthy were more likely to agree with statements that were focused on others. Which kind of suggests that being wealthier and feeling wealthier makes you more of an asshole. It makes you more of an asshole. It makes you more self-referential, right?
So I think that, you know, does that make sense? It's surprising. You'd think it'd be the other way around. Not at all. Not at all. Because I think that, again, Paul's research is great, by the way. He's wonderful. He actually did another research study where he studied, he went to busy intersections in Orange County. He's a professor at UC Irvine, I was at the time when I had met him. And they go to busy intersections, stop signs, not red lights.
And he found that people who drove luxury cars were... Far less likely to make a full stop at the stop sign compared to people who had more sort of middle-level cars. I mean, it was fascinating. And there's at least a dozen published studies that show that narcissistic people drive more dangerously. So it's an interesting kind of accumulation. But per the money part, if a person was a full-grown adult, 30, 35 years old, and they were an agreeable person, warm, self-aware person, and they made a lot of money, okay?
I don't think you would turn them narcissistic. I do think you might undercut that self-awareness because they may be sort of pulled out of the world that the rest of us live in. So there might be unrealistic expectations for how the world, like, why are we with... waiting in this line. I'm like, well, that's because what we do is wait in this line because they've come out of it, but they're not cruel about it. They're like, why are these dumb people making me wait in line?
So it's not a dismissiveness. It's almost like, how is this so inefficient? There's almost a... there's like a disconnect, I guess. So I wouldn't say money, I think what he's showing is that money creates a self-centeredness, right? As you thought it might go the other way, but I think that we sort of double down on sort of keeping it and there's an importance. I mean, money is the ultimate source of narcissistic supply because it delivers power, It delivers admiration.
It delivers a greater likelihood of getting sex or getting laid. It delivers all kinds of stuff. So for a narcissistic person, the quest for money is the surest quick ticket way to get this thing called narcissistic supply. So you'll often see them attempting to do that by any means possible. But they're driven to the money. I don't think that the money is what makes people rotten. I think the bubble wrapping at that point makes them entitled. It's a different conversation.
How do you know if you are a narcissist? Like, does a narcissist know they are one? Is there a narcissist test one can do? I don't, there's about five to six tests out there that are designed to detect narcissism in its various ways. All of them have flaws, like I said, and it's not even fully the fault of the test because this is a very difficult thing to measure, right? We're trying to measure things that are not socially desirable, right? That's really tough to measure.
So a lot of the narcissism tests will measure things like some entitlement, assertiveness, self-importance that people may not find as offensive. But the research actually shows that narcissistic people overestimate their empathy and underestimate their negative effect on other people. They do not have a clear look at themselves. They really have an almost deluded sense of... of who they are and how they go through the world. So when a person says to me, I think I'm narcissistic, I always say, hold the presses.
You need to tell me a little bit about you because there's a lot of people out there who think of themselves as narcissistic because they're in relationships with narcissistic people who have told them over the years, you are such a selfish person, because this unfortunate person is doing simple things like saying, hey, could we go where I want to go for dinner once? Or, you know, I want to talk about my feelings. And then their narcissistic partner saying, oh my gosh, you're so selfish.
And they're really sort of indoctrinated into this idea, gaslighted into this idea that there's something narcissistic about them. Once we clear the decks of that, is there a subset of people out there who are narcissistic? And are kind of in some awareness, like this might be who I am. Yes. And we call them self-aware, narcissistic people. They're out there. Some of them view narcissism as their superpower. They say like, don't take this away from me.
This is why I've got the edge. This is why I closed the sale. This is why I'm the man. I had one client who was like, I'm the man. I'm like, oh my gosh. You sound like a six-year-old, but okay. Do people, men come to you, women come to you and say, I am a narcissist. Yes. I've had that happen. It's not common. I can count on one hand the number of times it's happened. And did you agree with them? In about an hour, yeah. What were they... How did they figure out they were a narcissist?
What were they saying? They might have read my books or more likely saw a YouTube video. They might have, you know, sort of, again, seen my content. Someone might have said that to them and then they looked it up on Google and they're like, that is kind of me. But they did in many ways rationalize it, saying, this is why I always close the deal. This is who I am. Like, you know, what was it? Don't hate the... don't hate the player, hate the game.
They would try that kind of stuff with me. And I'd say, but your behavior is offensive. Like this is not okay. What you're doing, what you did, you're doing on an ongoing basis to your spouse or partner is not okay. And so they would have that awareness, like almost like from a checklist. Yeah. Like, yeah, I don't care that much about people's feelings. And yeah, I guess I kind of think the rules don't apply to me. They'll have that awareness. It's pretty uncommon.
Like I said, most narcissistic people veer into this idea of they overestimate their goodness and generosity, underestimate how negatively they're viewed by other people. So let's talk then about the impacts of narcissism on relationships in particular. What kind of people do narcissists attract in relationships? And what kind of people are attracted to narcissists? So it's such a good question. I'm so glad you asked it. What kind of people do they attract?
Everyone's attracted to narcissistic people. They're charming. They're charismatic. They're confident. And research has shown they're often rated as more attractive than other people. They take good care of their bodies. They know lots of interesting things. They're so concerned about hip cred that they are like, they know the cool restaurants. All of us have been indoctrinated to think that these are the people we're supposed to be dating, right?
Who says no to charm, charisma, and attractiveness? Me, maybe, but just nobody else would do that. So we're all attracted to them, right? And even with the vulnerable narcissistic folks, you'll say, really? Someone's going to be attracted to sullen and resentful? Well, that's not how they come off when you first meet them. Many times a vulnerable narcissistic person looks like a vulnerable child who needs to be rescued. So if you like rescuing people or puppies or any small vulnerable creature, that's going to seem actually very attractive to you.
So we're all attracted to them. What about what are they attracted to in us? What they're attracted to in us is our supply. Now, supply can mean different things to different narcissistic folks. Classical sorts of supplier, are we attractive? Yeah. If we're attractive, if we have some form of social status, if we have resource, if we have connections, the things that would get them supply. Here's where it gets wonky. Because the question, attractiveness is what attracts people.
It's almost the wrong question. The more deep question is what gets people stuck in. in narcissistic relationships. Because narcissistic relationships start strong. These are people who are running their fastest miles in the beginning of the marathon. Like they're just like, go. And this is, these can often feel like a fairy tale. It is, it's glamorous and it's exciting. And it's, the dates are really interesting and they're very attuned. They may be very attentive.
They focus on you and they figure, What's going to work for you if they really want to keep you close? They want to get you and they want to get you quick because then you're like a butterfly under glass. Then they've got you captured. Because after all this good stuff happens, you've bought in. You might even be dubious for a while saying, those things seem too good to be true or I don't know. But then people... I always say it's somewhere between six weeks and six months, the devaluing stage starts.
And then they've got you, right? And you might get the passive-aggressive digs, the minimizations, the... Lack of empathy, the withdrawing, the withholding. And people will say, where did that first six weeks go to? Like, wait a minute, we had such a good time. And as the devaluing begins, people start to blame themselves. So people who are more empathic, more forgiving, more optimistic, these are the kinds of people who get stuck because they're making allowances for this.
They're saying, I mean, I can't, they were lovely and they did say they're having a really stressful time at work, but their behavior is consistently dismissive and rude. And so you keep making excuses, excuses, excuses. But then there's a few good days sprinkled in there. So one of the interesting things is a lot of people are trying to figure out if their partners are narcissists. Do people in relationships, especially long-term relationships, tend to know that they're dating a narcissist?
Or has the narcissist gaslighted them to the point that they don't know? Until recently, most people did not know. Because it feels like a disloyal thing to know about your partner. Many people say, I love my partner. We have built a life together. There are enough good days that leave them thinking like, there's something here. They're confused. People in these relationships are confused. They're... They blame themselves for everything that goes wrong.
They're walking on eggshells. They've in essence modified themselves to be exactly what the narcissistic partner wants. But it's a slow burn. It's a very slow process of indoctrination. I always say these relationships are death by a thousand cuts because it's just each of these things happen slowly over time. It's almost as though one day you wake up and you're like, who am I? What have I become? I'm literally like living in service to this other person.
It's only in the last 10 years, I'd say, that there's so much more content and the internet is more robust with making this. And I'm sure people type it in. My partner has no empathy and is really entitled and yells at me a lot, bing, and the narcissism pops out at you. I think this really created the revolution of people saying, what is this? And even when I wrote Should I Stay or Should I Go, that was 2015, I think it was. We're still in the beginning phases.
There were just maybe about a dozen books out there taking this on. And so as more information gets out there, more people are clear that this is happening in their relationships. The hope is the earlier you identify it, the less indoctrinated, the less what we call trauma bonded you become. And then the easier it would be to make clear-headed decisions about how you want to proceed. You talk about the three R's that are the hallmarks of negative relationships in your books.
What are the three R's? So the first is rumination. Okay. The rumination is, it's an obsessive thinking about the relationship. And it's usually in an attempt to either say, what did I do wrong? What happened? What is going on? It's a trying to fix it. So these are the three things that someone that's in a relationship with a narcissist will do. Mm-hmm. Yep. I mean, they do a lot more, but these are three common ones. So the rumination is a hallmark characteristic of a person in a narcissistic relationship.
In essence, you're just trying to make sense of something that makes no sense. The next R is regret. And that regret links to bigger themes like grief. People having regret that this is the parent I have and I will never have a close, loving relationship with them. The regret that this is the marriage I created and my children will never get a healthy model of marriage. The regret that I've spent 20 years in this relationship and really all I have to show for it is a whole lot of nothing except that it's harmed me.
So the regrets play out even big ways and even small ways. Like, why did I say that? Why didn't I say it that way? And then the last R is really euphoric recall, the R being for recall. By euphoric recall, I mean that people in narcissistic relationships have an uncanny ability to sort of cherry pick the good things that happen in the relationship to keep rationalizing it and justifying it to themselves. So they might be in a narcissistic relationship where the person has really treated them heinously for a month.
But on one day of that month, the narcissistic person, when they went to the grocery store for the first time, remembered to bring home two muffins so that you could have a muffin. And the person was like, they brought me home the best blueberry muffin. Wasn't that thoughtful? They brought me home a muffin. We had muffins together. So the euphoric recall is the over-focus on those good experiences that, as a way in essence to create this sort of psychological buy-in so then you can maintain the status quo.
§03Transcript — part 3
For people in narcissistic relationships, it's not as though they're waking up saying, this is a hellscape I want to get out. They're getting up saying, I'm so confused. I feel like I'm never enough. Nothing I do is ever enough. Nothing I say is ever, they're not listening to me. What is going on? Maybe I'm not being clear enough. Maybe there's something wrong with me. So that's the confusion element. So it's not like everyone's saying, I want to get out of this.
There's a lot of history. There's a lot of experiences together. So people, again, and they're also confused because there's good things that happen and bad things that happen. And that's what creates, like I said, this thing called the trauma bonded relationship. So people might even be able to say like, there's something about this that isn't okay and might even be able to articulate. These are the problems in the relationship. But the idea of leaving this relationship fills me with an absolute sense of panic.
Would a narcissist play to that insecurity and that history? Well, the narcissistic person created the insecurity and they will because the narcissistic person is an expert tactician, right? Because that's what they bring to relationships is tactics. And so they are very expert at knowing like, ah, your wound is abandonment piece of cake. So if you say, I can't do this anymore. I'm out. The narcissistic partner must say, okay, cool. Let's call it a quiz.
And I'll be like, that's not what I wanted to say. them to say, I wanted them to say they were going to fight for the relationship. You see what I'm saying? Like it's so interesting because, and part of the reason narcissistic people are so successful is because they're so socially perceptive. They have no empathy. Social perceptiveness and empathy are not the same thing. Social perceptiveness is kind of being aware of reading the room, understanding what people need, understanding what makes them tick and what they want, and then strategically giving it to them to keep them on the chain or keep them in the position you need them in.
That's not empathic. Manipulation. You used the word earlier on to describe narcissism. There's two types of manipulation you speak about, which is the sort of normal manipulation, which I think we all do in our own ways when we're trying to get our way with a deal or with sales or with someone or whatever, when we're trying to haggle for a discount, whatever it might be. And then there's this pathological manipulation, which seems to be a little bit different.
Yeah. Pathological manipulation is that there's absolutely no regard for the harm it's bringing the other person. You really are giving absolute primacy to your own needs and then making the other person think that this truly is good for them. This isn't as simple as I'm going to sell this car to someone and maybe it's not the right car for them. This is really around psychological stuff. And it's with somebody where, listen, you're going into a sales relationship.
You codes of that relationship are. They're trying to sell you something and you're trying to decide if it's right for you. We don't try to think of our intimate and our familial relationships as sales models. So our guard is not up in the same way. And yet the same tactics are being brought and we're sort of bargaining on things that are matters of the heart and matters of closeness and compassion. So it's, again, the narcissistic person is so skilled in at leaving the other person feeling that the thing they sacrificed or gave up was in their best interest.
And ultimately, the narcissistic person is so self-centered that anything that they're trying to do is going to serve them. Projection. I've heard this phrase used a few times, like he's projecting onto you or she's projecting. In the context of narcissism, what is projection? So projection is a primitive defense that any of us can use. And we do use. All of us engage in projection. We engage in projection when some of that uncomfortable, unconscious stuff inside of us is getting activated.
It's often shame oriented. And then we'll accuse someone of something that we're actually feeling, like an uncomfortable feeling. That's projection. Give me an example. How you might project onto me. Okay. We're in a relationship and I'll say something like, who are you texting, Stephen? Like, why, what are you, like, so shady. Like, you know, why don't you show me your phone? Like, oh my gosh, Stephen, like, what the hell? You need so many, you need so all the girls to like you, don't you?
Like, that's what you're all you're about. Show me your phone. Show me your phone. Show me your phone now. Guess who's got a side piece? That would be me. Oh, really? Oh. There's a life hack for you, Stephen. Okay, so you're insecure because you know that you're sneaking around. I'm not insecure. I'm doing a bad thing. Are you still pretending? Yeah. I am no longer in a religion. Okay. So we're done. That's because you cheated on me. Wow, Jesus.
But it was me. But now I can go be with my new guy. Okay. So, but it's, I'm giving you like such a low hanging fruit example. It's anytime. We might accuse someone of lying when we're lying. We may accuse somebody of even being insecure when we're the one feeling insecure, right? We'll accuse somebody of being uncomfortable when we're the one who's feeling uncomfortable. Again, all of us have different stuff we project about because all of us have different sort of psychodynamic histories, right?
Well, narcissistic people do this all the time. Let me give you sort of a sense of what the inner psychological apparatus of a narcissistic person looks like. Despite all the shiny, charismatic, charming, arrogant, grandiose stuff on the outside, what's in them is, the best I can describe it, is a volcano, right? And that volcano, the magma and the gases and the lava, is shame and its insecurity. Well, that's not very perfect looking, is it? So all these defenses, the grandiosity and the arrogance and the charm and all the rest of it, is like a manhole cover, a big manhole cover that covers the volcano, right?
So all that insecurity doesn't exist. I'm just the smartest person you know, right? So they get to show up as perfect, as extraordinary. But things can kick that manhole cover off. Criticism, negative feedback, their friend doing better than them, their new venture not succeeding, them not getting something that they wanted, some form of frustration. That means they're not perfect. The manhole cover gets nudged. The gases and the lava ooze out. And what does that look like?
It looks like anger. It looks like projection. You accuse the other. And this happens to them 20 times a day because nobody lives a perfect life. We get disappointed all the time. There's traffic on the freeway. We had to wait for the elevator. The people at the coffee shop screwed up our order. Our public offering didn't go well. It could be big things. It could be small things. It doesn't matter. But... Each time the manhole cover gets nudged, that grandiose exterior gets tinged and they explode on others.
And that often looks like projection. And that projection allows them to maintain that idealized interior. Can they take feedback, narcissists? Like, do they listen to this? Do they? No. They can't take feedback. They really don't. They cannot. The only time a narcissistic person may, may, tiny bit, listen to feedback is if it comes from somebody with much, much more power than them. Because narcissistic people are very hierarchical climbing creatures, right?
So let's say they're getting it. The CEO's up here, and there's some sort of VP level person here, and they admire the CEO. The CEO's giving them feedback. They will listen because they want to be him. They want to be with him. They want to be next to her or them, whoever the CEO is, right? So they may get some of it, but they're still going to hear it as, oh. There'll be this noise that's blocking them out from hearing all of it. So it might be compliance as a means to an end versus them actually going, oh, okay.
No, yeah. They're not integrating it into. They're just sort of, and they might even think like, God, this person's such a dick. I could do their job so much better. They're so lucky they got there. I'm going to get there. But they, again, they also envy this person. So they are listening. But like you said, it is exactly what you said. It's compliance versus this sense of let me listen to this. And I can promise you what this person's going to do if they're in a relationship.
They're going to go home and rage at their partner because they had to have that feedback session. They're going to find a more vulnerable target because they can't attack that CEO. And they'll go and find someone else to rage at. A partner, a person on the subway train, a family member, friend, someone else. I heard this word gaslighting again. It's a word I've heard a lot, but I'm not necessarily really clear on what the definition of gaslighting is.
But from reading your work, I hear that narcissists gaslight people a lot. A lot. Right. What is gaslighting? So gaslighting, at its simplest, it's a power play. It's a form of emotional abuse and it's a tactic. Gaslighting is predicated on a relationship that's ostensibly characterized by trust. So that's why strangers can't gaslight you in the same way as an intimate partner, a trusted colleague, a family member, even a person with expertise like an attorney or a physician could gaslight you, right?
Because there's a presumption of trust. So you're going to listen to the gaslighter. Initially, what the gaslighter will do is they will doubt the gaslighted person's perceptions, experiences, memories, even reality. That never happened. I never said that. You're making that up. We never went there. So now this person's a little confused. Yeah. Because their reality is saying, yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. So initially, a person will fight back against the gaslighter.
They'll say, we absolutely went there. Do you want me to show you the pictures on my phone? Then we go to the next step of gaslighting. The gaslighter doesn't want to see the pictures on your phone. They just want to overpower you. This isn't about evidence. This is about them overpowering you. So they'll say, look, here's the pictures on my phone. And then the gaslighter won't say, oh, Well, you're right. We did go there. Instead, they'll say, oh, my gosh, you are the most petty human being I've ever met.
Is this what it is? You're just going to go in your phone to find the pictures to prove something to me? Is that what this relationship is? I don't know that I want to even be in a relationship like this. Now, this poor person who's being gaslighted is thinking, I just showed them the pictures to prove a point. And now I'm the bad one. And so they're and they trust this person. So they think, well, maybe I am doing something bad. Maybe I am being petty.
But gaslighting doesn't happen once. It happens over and over and over again. It's an indoctrination process that leaves the gaslighted person utterly confused, completely out of their mind, doubting themselves. And they start to believe the critiques, the gaslighter will tell them things like, you're crazy, you're stupid, you don't remember things right, maybe you have dementia. Do you think you should be in therapy? You might need to be on medication.
Like by the time the gaslighter's done with someone, they have lost all sense of, they don't trust themselves at all. And so if they don't leave the relationship, and some people don't, They are then sort of in this, again, this form of servitude with the narcissistic person, the gaslighting person, almost relying on them to lead them through reality. So it's almost like utter submission at that point, that the gaslighter gets to dictate reality.
And then over time, there's this tactic that narcissistic and other abusive people use called DARVO. DARVO stands for deny, attack, reverse victim, and offender. It's a construct that was developed by Dr. Jennifer Fried. Deny, attack, reverse victim, and offender. So what the narcissistic person will in a very skilled, I mean, in a cruelly skillful way do is... If the person, the gaslighted person ever attempts to push back on something that the narcissist has done, like you said you were going to be home by nine o'clock last night, you didn't get home till one in the morning.
The narcissistic person will deny said, that's not true. I came, yeah, I didn't get home at nine, but I didn't come home at any one in the morning. But again, like, what is your problem? Like, what do you do? Like, you read the ADT guide all day to see what time I come in the door. And you know what? Like, I can't believe that this is my life. I work so hard to keep us in this fabulous house. I work so hard so you can stay home. And I'm the bad guy?
Like, I can't even believe that this is the issue. Like, you put me through so much. Reverse victim and offender. He was out till one in the morning and he knows it. But now he's shut down the conversation. It is an insidious dynamic because done enough, you literally strip another person of the reality. And that is unacceptable to me. That's absolute abuse. Do you see this a lot? All the time. All the time. It is the dynamic that once it had name to it.
When the word is used right, most people use this word wrong. That whole process I described is gaslighting. When the word is used correctly, it's powerful. It captures a unique interpersonal dynamic that really eats people from the inside out. I hear it. I see it all the time. by family members, by partners in the workplace, you name it. And it really messes people up because they feel like they've lost their minds and they feel like they can't trust themselves.
And I think that's a terrible thing to do to someone. What should you do if you're being gaslit When you know what it is and someone starts to gaslight you, they literally deny your reality, right? You have to take a step back and say, that's not what happened. But you don't say it to them. The importance with gaslighting is you don't engage with the gaslighter. You now know you're being gaslighted, which means... the other person in that interaction has the capacity to gaslight you.
So what that means is from your side, you need to shut it down. And that means no longer engaging. Does that make, so you cannot keep engaging with them because they're going to pull you down. Further and further. Yeah, it's almost like they're going to pull you down into being drowned or pull you into the quicksand. So when they start gaslighting, I never said that. One playback could be, we're having a different experience then. And leave it at that.
Don't go down that slippery slope. Don't go down the slope. Don't say, don't show them the text message. Don't pull out the email. Don't try to prove them wrong. Don't engage with them. It's funny you're asking me this because I was recently gaslighted. Relatively recently in a professional situation. And I'm thinking, not me. Like, I don't know much, but I know this. So don't, but they did. I was. And I got very upset. And in this particular situation, it was actually, I understand why I got, it was like, think of it as a corporate structure that was gaslighting me.
So sometimes very nice people who work in corporate systems gaslight because they're trying to prop up the narcissism of the corporation, but they're decent human beings. It was very clear to me. I've seen that happen. But in this particular case, I was being gaslighted. I got upset though. Knowing all I know, knowing all the tactics, it's very dehumanizing to have your reality completely doubted. And so I did feel a sense of upset, but I confronted the person.
I said, this is gaslighting and it's not okay. And I know you're better than this. And they happened to be. This was a lucky case where the gaslighter was not narcissistic. So we came to a conclusion. But when I've been gaslighted by narcissistic people, I just disengage. And I file it away and say, this person is capable of this. There's really not much juice here. This can only go so deep. controlling behavior, emotionally, but also, I guess, physically controlling behavior.
When we often think about narcissists, we think of like sort of domestic violence and this kind of thing. Is that quite typical of a narcissist to engage in domestic violence? So here's where we get to an interesting question. You're from the UK. And I have to say, actually, of all the countries in the world, the UK actually has had, has taken... the front, I think the highest front position in terms of being very, creating public policies around understanding the psychological elements of domestic violence.
It was actually a coercive control laws first showed up in the UK. So this is my personal belief, Stephen, and this is my personal belief, and I will hold to this personal belief 100%. I believe all domestic abusers are narcissistic without exception. And I'll tell you why I think that. The capacity to tell someone I love you. I'm going to care for you. We're in a relationship. And then to emotionally, physically, or sexually assault them, that's zero empathy.
That's tremendous entitlement. It's incredible arrogance. That's narcissism. There's a lack of self-awareness. There's a lack of awareness of the other. And I think this is why so much of the domestic violence intervention programs, they don't work. Because how are you going to undo someone's narcissism? So that's my belief. And I know that this has been a very controversial conversation in the field of domestic violence. Back in the 70s, there's a real pushback on this.
I don't think that anyone who does domestic violence work will ever doubt that there's a personality issue in these folks. But the concern was if we made it about narcissism, we'll pull the focus away from their behavior, right? But I think the two things go together. The behavior is unacceptable. I don't give a damn if they're narcissistic. And this whole idea of does the narcissism excuse the behavior? Never. If behavior is unacceptable, it's unacceptable.
I don't care about the backstory because it means it's going to happen again. And it always does. Narcissism in work. How do I know if my boss or my manager or my CEO is a narcissist and what should I do about it? Do I quit the job? So if you believe that someone you report to, a manager or a boss or someone like that in a job, is narcissistic, 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 feel like it's unfair, that it's inequitable, you might even feel that it's psychologically unsafe, you might feel that the way people are...
praised and get credit for their work. Again, it doesn't have rhyme or reason. It is inequitable. It might be a lot of gossip in the workplace. Those are the things that would suggest a workplace is not, you might be working for someone who's narcissistic. It's a tough one. A lot of this might depend on the nature of your organization. I always tell people, if you suspect that your boss or manager or someone you report to is narcissistic, Start documenting the hell out of it.
Because one thing HR doesn't care is you cannot roll up to an HR office and say, I think my manager is narcissistic. You're going to need documentation, which means saving emails and text messages and voicemails and minutes of meetings. And you're going to need as much information. Try to avoid meetings alone. All that stuff to have that sort of evidence base. Yeah. If you're in a large enough company where you might be able to switch to work under someone else's management, especially if you still believe in the company, some people might say, I love the organization, I can't stand working with this person, they may find that working with someone else will allow them to preserve in the institution.
But in a smaller employer or where that is not possible, some people might try to stick it out the best they can, but documenting is not going to make it easier. So some people will find that ultimately if they can't outlast the narcissistic boss or manager, which they often can't, they will look for other employment. Some people also find a lot of solace in collaboration. So just because you work for a narcissistic manager doesn't mean your colleagues are narcissistic.
And there's some interesting research suggesting that some really powerful collaborative relationships can come when the leadership is narcissistic, but the teams actually come together even stronger. enemy. I want to make sure I've given enough advice to someone who is currently dealing with a narcissist. All of the things that you've said to them ring true. They can relate to everything you've said. Are you telling them to get out of that situation?
No. And it's something that's very, very important to me is that people don't feel compelled that they have to get out because they can't always get out. And I think if we put that forth as the only pathway, then people who can't get out might say, that now what? I'm just supposed to sit here and suffer. And the answer to that's no. In my book, what I talk about is this idea, if you're going to stay in a relationship like this, for whatever reason, it could be a family member and you still don't want to fully walk away from your family of origin.
It could be a long-term marriage and you've got minor children or there's financial or cultural reasons. It might be a job you've had for a long time. You're not financially in a position to step away from it. It might be a friend. Right. You've had a long time. Your reasons are yours. And so I always say to people, you must never feel pressure unless it's dangerous. Let's take dangerousness out of the equation, right? You don't feel compelled to do what people say.
It's going to be harder. If you stay, it is going to be harder because you're still being exposed to their manipulative, invalidating, unkind, unsettling, destabilizing behavior. However, the first step, the key step is what I call radical acceptance. Right? This is not going to change. This is it. There is going to be no someday better. It's not going to get better when he gets a promotion. It's not going to get better for her when the kids grow up.
Your mom's not going to soften with age. This is it, folks. You now know what this looks like. It is not going to change substantially. Their behavior is not going to change substantially. So if you're going to stay in it, Your workarounds are going to be based on knowing that. You have to have very realistic expectations. Now, what happens, though, is when people initially have this level of radical acceptance, they have a tremendous amount of grief.
Because a lot of hope was keeping them going. I thought it was going to get better someday. I thought maybe that someday would come. The staying means that someday is not going to come. And so that means that once you radically accept, you're not as surprised by their behavior. Because a lot of people get exhausted from the number of times over years or decades. They're like, I can't believe they did that. I can't believe they did that. I'm like, can we just stop that part and say, of course you believe they did it.
In fact, we could have set a clock. by the idea that they would have done it, by the fact they would have done it. That's a big piece of this. But the grief of letting go of what you wanted these things to be, that's its own process, and grief takes time. But, you know, as you come around through that, as you come around the bend on that, and you really do radically accept, you need some tools. And probably the biggest tool of all is social connection with people who are healthy, empathic, attuned, responsive, compassionate, and respectful.
Whether that means you might have friends who already are this for you. It might be enhanced by getting into therapy. You might join a support group. You might meet friends at work. There's many ways you might try to do this, but you're going to need it. Because if you're going to stay, you're going to need spaces where you're not gaslighted. You're going to need spaces where you are seen, where you are valued, where you are cherished. That becomes the pathway to surviving.
And then it doesn't feel good to feel like you're in a marriage where you're phoning it in for the rest of your life. But people say that now that I'm not as surprised by their behavior, it's a little more bearable. I've constructed a rich life almost around this marriage. And I just sort of view that as sort of the kind of annoyance of the I happen to adore my sister, but I can't stand my narcissistic parents. And, you know, I, so, but I'm going to stay in touch with them.
So I can also have the family gatherings that matter to my sister, but I no longer have conversations with my mother. Or one person I know said she would regularly visit a narcissistic father because nobody else would give him the time of day. And he needed a little bit of assistance. She said, I'd set a timer. 90 minutes max. Once the 90 minutes rang out, I'd say, whoop, I got to jump. He'd always yell at her. She said, but better to yell at 90 minutes than at three hours.
Either way, he was going to yell. So people get into the space of accepting what this is and its limitations. Some people over time may still decide to leave, but not at that moment. But staying and not radically accepting it will destroy you. Can you be happy in a relationship with a narcissist, do you think? You can be happy, but not with the relationship. So you don't think you can be happy with the relationship? I don't think so. No, I think you can see it with its limitations.
And I think, you know, I've met people who said, who have told me everything about narcissistic partners who said they happen to be able to do this one sex thing I love. And so that's just, I mean, all the rest of it's awful. We can't end anyhow. So we do the sex thing and it works for me. Some people will say, we both love watching period dramas, and they're my person to do period dramas with. Someone else said, we're obsessive about collecting antique fountain pens, and I really can't stand spending time with them, but we get excited when we find a new pen.
Someone else said, he's a hell of a Scrabble player. You find the one or two things that work for you. Is it happy? I mean, again, we're getting back into philosophy there. That sense of, you know, what's happy. On that point of sex, are narcissists better in bed? Depends on what you call better. I actually just recently did a big piece in USA Today on this that I've been interviewed for. They are very performative lovers. They are, as you can imagine, they almost want applause after the sex act, right, because they need admiration and validation.
So they actually can be rather invested in getting a partner off because they want to be told, oh my gosh, you're the best lover ever. They might want to be very like mirror-y sex so they can see their body or your body because it's all, again, very performative. But some narcissistic folks are very selfish lovers. The sex can be a little bit porny, like it's a bit, you know, like a bit over the top. And like I said, it feels performative. But for some people where it gets into dangerous waters is when people are in narcissistic relationships and they feel like they're having sex just to go along, just to keep the trains of the relationship going along.
And that's a very unhealthy precedent. So it can be on a spectrum from sort of ridiculous performative sex to maybe their skill that they want to sort of show off. But then they're like a little six-year-old who wants to get a lollipop for having done a good whatever on you. And then all the way up to stuff that feels almost coercive. Superman has kryptonite. And in the context of the Superman story, kryptonite is the thing that he's kind of allergic to.
The thing that kind of defeats his very strong set of powers. For a narcissist, what is their kryptonite? What is the thing that makes them fall to their knees and that they run from? But when they see it in a person, a trait maybe? I think that for a narcissistic person, there's a couple of ways kryptonite can show up. I think that the kryptonite that we could bring into it is not engaging with them anymore, right? Not giving them the satisfaction of the fight, not getting into the mud with them, but we have to be strong in the face of that because they are gonna want the fight.
So they're gonna push and they're gonna push and they're gonna push and push and try to poke us and make us take the fight because they're really good at fighting. Another thing that's kryptonite for a narcissistic person is a person who's much, much more powerful than them. because they do feel, they sort of feel cowed by them. So if they meet, like I said, they gave you the example of the sort of middle level narcissistic person working in a large organization, and then they meet the big CEO.
And it's really, really great if you had one of those empathic CEOs. And then the narcissistic person who's almost trying to get into the good books with this empathic CEO and all their usual tricks aren't working, that would definitely be a bit of kryptonite too, that the very person that they envy wants them to be sort of warm and fuzzy and all the things that they have contempt for. But I have to say not engaging with a narcissistic person is the ultimate kryptonite and not sort of oohing and aahing.
Narcissistic people are very used to people oohing and aahing over them. What about authenticity? I saw you talk about that once, that they don't like people that are authentic. They feel threatened by people who are authentic. So, and to show up as your authentic self in a narcissistic relationship can actually be, I'm going to say dangerous. I put dangerous in quotes, it's not like they're going to beat you up. But they're not going to have it, right?
§04Transcript — part 4
Your true self, your authentic self, they're going to mock it. They're going to have contempt for it. They're going to, if you're not solid in that authentic identity, they're going to attempt to dismantle it, which is why many people struggle. If they don't know they're dealing with a narcissistic person, they may struggle with authenticity. in a narcissistic relationship because it gets dismantled. It's hard enough for us to get to authenticity.
If somebody wants to dismantle it, especially when we're younger, I think authenticity, the odds of it happening grow with age. It's hard to be a young, authentic person. But if you remain solid... in your authentic identity around the narcissistic person, they'll actually probably get bored and leave, which is always the hope, right? They may ramp up for a little while, but then you're just not an interesting target to them anymore, so then they'll sort of slowly lose interest and walk away.
Famous narcissists. What famous famous? Oh, shit. You think all famous people are? I don't think all are, but I think a lot are because the quest for fame is a very narcissistically driven interest, right? So I think most normal people don't want to be famous. They really don't. If you talk to average person, do you want to be famous? They'll be like, hell no. I want to be able to go to the grocery store and have no one know who I am. I want to be able to live my life without being recognized.
So I think we talk famous people. You're saying that is it one in five? One in six seems like a lot. I'd say famous people were at 40 to 50%. 40 to 50% of famous people are narcissists. I do. I really think it's a coin flip. What about world leaders? Now we might be closer to 60% to 70%. I mean, think of what you're signing up for. Yeah, that's crazy. I need to run a country. I believe I can run a country. And you know what? We have in over history had some good people do that.
But when you look at the circus politics has become, which is performative and ridiculous and bombastic and cruel and critical and manipulative, I don't see how someone non-narcissistic could ever win at that game. Why do we vote for narcissists? Why do we put them into power? Well, I mean, I think that we still do what I call, or many of us call, we still fawn in the face of their charisma. I think we believe somebody who walks around thinking that they're all that, that they actually have the goods.
Yeah. I still think we fall for the circus barker. We fall for the person who is sort of selling the story. We vote for them. We choose them. And I think we want, you know, this is the best example I can give you, Stephen. When we go to a magic show, right? I don't know if you've ever been to a magic show. It's a place called the Magic Castle in LA. You should try to go sometime because I find it intriguing. But when you go, there's no such thing as magic.
It's all sleight of hand, right? But for a moment, I don't want them to show me the trick. I want to be lost in the magic. And most of us, most of us, not all, I think some people want to know how the trick is done. But once we're shown how the trick is done, the magic's gone. Now it's just, it's dexterity, right? Most people don't want to know how the trick is done. We want to believe in magic. And that's why narcissistic people don't get called out.
Because there's something about them. you know, there's a confidence they breed because they have so much conviction, but it's misplaced conviction. It's not conviction backed by facts or integrity. It's just, they just believe it because they think it's true and it's going to fall with their cause. So that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Exactly. But we believe most of us don't have that kind of conviction. We doubt ourselves. We question ourselves.
And so when someone comes in with absolute 100%, I wanted to bang my hand, but I didn't. 100% conviction. We're like, wow, then they must really know what they're talking about. Leaders have conviction. But in fact, when we see a leader who's circumspect, who might say, well, give me a minute, I want to weigh both sides of this, those leaders are often viewed as more weak-minded and are less likely often to get the vote. If our adversary in another country is a narcissist, you know, like a Putin or Kim Jong-un, whatever he's called, would we rather our leader that's against him be a narcissist as well?
That's a fantastic question. Do we want a narcissist fighting a narcissist? I would say that. The problem with a narcissist fighting a narcissist is they lose track of what is good for their people. So they could drag them into a conflict or a problem that could harm the populace economically, physically, battles, wars, the whole nine yards, right? And that's what a narcissistic person is more likely to do because they can't be the smaller one in the fight.
It's all about, it's two egos fighting each other. They can't just say, okay. No, but an overly empathic leader might do a little bit of saying, okay. And then a narcissistic or a psychopathic leader will absolutely sort of railroad that person. That sort of perfect mid-level sort of wise... circumspect, aware of the needs of the populace, but aware of the psychology of the perpetrator is what we want. I have to say if I ran the world, Stephen, and I don't, not even a long shot, and I wish I was more grandiose because really my career would be fire if I was, but I'm not.
But one place I wish we really brought more narcissism training is into diplomacy. I wish more of the diplomats around the planet, secretaries of state and UN representatives understood narcissism. Because I think a lot of times people are making bad deals where a lot of people are getting hurt and they're trying to negotiate with people you cannot negotiate with. Anyone who's ever tried to negotiate with a narcissistic spouse knows that it's impossible.
It's no different with a world leader. And I think a lot of innocent people have been incredibly harmed as we diddle around and try to negotiate with narcissistic world leaders and just simply aren't willing to call them out for what they are. What is the most important thing we haven't discussed that we should have discussed? I would say the most important thing that we've discussed is that I don't want people to leave this conversation thinking it's all doom and gloom.
People can take themselves back from these relationships. This isn't like sort of some terrible deterministic destiny that I've been through a narcissistic relationship, so I'm never going to be authentic. I think what's remarkable is once people learn about this and they're taught about this and the dynamics of it, and they're to call abusive behavior what it is. They're able to slowly but surely start coming back into themselves, no longer shaming themselves for having a need or a want or a feeling or a hope.
People do heal. And I've seen remarkable stories. of people coming back from familial narcissistic abuse, marital narcissistic abuse, long-term committed relationship narcissistic abuse, workplace narcissistic abuse, and out of it have come out so much wiser, stronger, finally enacting their creative selves. I really want people to leave this episode knowing all the dynamics, but that not only is healing possible, it happens all the time to people, but it's work and it's not an easy process.
We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. Oh! In the diary of a CEO, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question here that's been left for you is... Which was your darkest day and how did you turn the lights on? Hmm... I was stalked by someone who sexually assaulted me. And it was sort of this nightmarish collegiate experience before you would report these things. Again, I'm quite a bit older than you.
And it was horrific. I mean, it was just absolutely horrific. And there was, I didn't understand, I talk about not knowing what narcissism was. I was much younger as I'm still in my teens, early 20s. But... But that one experience, you learn so much about what trauma does to us. But it was absolute terror. I was being stalked all the time. I didn't know what to do. We didn't understand this stuff then. We did not understand. We did not talk about it.
We didn't have cell phones. It was still back in these dialing phones days. And the person just kept breaking me down, breaking me down. I didn't know what I was dealing with. I didn't have a lot of self-esteem. I didn't know who to ask. And, you know, it was sort of, and then it was, yeah, it was what it was. And so probably is what propelled me to want to work with people who are doubted by systems and who are, to help me want to understand trauma.
A system that doubted you? There was nowhere to go with that stuff. To this day, when women bring trauma. Reports of sexual assault or abuse on college campuses, they're not believed more often than they are believed. They're blamed. There wasn't even, I didn't even know where to go. I didn't know where to take it. I didn't know who to tell. It's fine. I mean, when I say it's fine, I've done the work. I've been supported through therapy. But you just didn't know where to take it.
With a narcissist. Yeah. That person who did it, I didn't know them well enough at the time. There was someone who was sort of peripherally known to me. Yes, for sure. I'd say vulnerable narcissist, actually, which I think by far even in some ways is at level with the danger of the malignant narcissistic person. And in that time, Stephen, very frankly, like... I don't know what your experience has been as a public person, but maybe as a woman, woman of color, it's a little more risk is that I've had people say very dangerous things to me in online spaces and issue some real threats towards me.
And it all came back at me. In fact, we had something like this happen in the last few years. And it just flooded me. I'd really compartmentalized that piece. And it all comes flooding back. When you went through something like that, when you felt... Again, back then it wasn't online stalking. It was using phones. It was following you places. It was following you places. My things were being stolen. It was a lot of gaslighting. My things would be stolen, then my things would be put back.
So the campus police didn't believe me. They'd said, you said your stuff was stolen, but your backpack is right there. But the person would take my backpack and then put the backpack back in its place. Can I ask, how did that end? I left the university. Is that why you left the university? Has that inspired why you were focused on working on this subject matter at all? No, no. I think I'm like most people, if it's your trauma, I don't mean to laugh about it, but I compartmentalized it, you know, and I'm saying like, as we mostly dissociate from our pain.
And so... Consciously? No, not consciously. I think dissociation is a very protective mechanism. I think that... the way the mind and the body work when we've gone through trauma, I think the body's beautiful in how it tries to protect us. Um, I think the mind is also trying to protect us and together, like these, these are painful things, but the problem is them getting pushed away actually doesn't do us any favors, if you will, you know what I'm saying?
And so, um, but yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for taking the time to write such brilliant, important books on a subject that is still... not well-known enough. And the way that you go about both your videos, your content more broadly, but especially your books is so important because you're giving information in a very, very accessible way. And information is always, and awareness is always the first step in being able to do something about your situation.
And there must be so many thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people that have been exposed to your work It's heightened their awareness. And because of that, they've taken a step out of a situation that wasn't serving them, that was hurting their health and happiness and towards a better place. And that is a really remarkable thing. That is a really, really remarkable thing. This book was, I've heard about the word narcissism, but this new book, It's Not You, turned the lights on for me.
in a really, really important way. To be honest as well, as a CEO, as a business leader, it also made me ask myself a lot of questions about myself, about behavior that I have. I don't consider myself to be a narcissist, but as I was reading about the behaviors of narcissists and also the impact that it can have on someone, I thought, fucking hell, like... You know, it's, as you said, it's insidious. It's insidious. And I think I'm right in saying that we can all exhibit some traits of narcissism sometimes.
And we kind of, you know, define that as being an asshole or whatever. And it really made me want to be a better person. It really, really did. Really made me want to be a much, much better person. So thank you for that. Thank you for shining a light on this subject matter. And thank you for all the millions of people that you've helped through your work. It's really important. I love that. I mean, I think that that's such an interesting take on is that we do sometimes do these things that are narcissistic, but we, you know, not even because we are narcissistic, but to even recalibrate those behaviors.
I think the better we all can be, the more we're fortified should someone who has these qualities come into our life that we don't give up on ourselves. And I think that that's the more good we can sort of create in our universe is that bad's going to happen. It's the nature of life, but we'll be stronger in the face of it. So thank you.