10 Signs of a Wife with Vulnerable Narcissistic Traits

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel well this is dr. grande today's question asks I can take a look at the characteristics of a wife who has vulnerable narcissism so I've had many videos that kind of cover this husband-wife dynamic looking at narcissism psychopathy and other constructs so in this video I'll be looking at the ten signs of a wife with vulnerable narcissistic traits now in this video I'm really focusing on the husband and wife relationship but of course many of these signs could apply to any long-term partnership whether or not the couple was married now I've covered the construct of narcissism many times before so I'll just cover it really quickly here with narcissism we see a sense of entitlement and need for admiration low agreeableness and self-centeredness and we have two types of narcissism grandiose and vulnerable grandiose which of course I'm not really talking about here would have characteristics like being arrogant overconfident being resistant to criticism and having externalize anger vulnerable narcissism the type I am talking about here has characteristics like not trusting other people having a lot of shame being resentful being hypersensitive to criticism being unforgiving and having internalized anger so as I go through these 10 signs when I refer to the term wife I'm really talking about the wife with vulnerable narcissistic traits it's just easier to say wife in these circumstances and I go through these signs I'm talking about a relationship where the husband does not have narcissism now having one or more of these signs doesn't mean somebody definitely has vulnerable narcissism these signs are just associated with that construct so looking at sign number one the wife is highly neurotic now many people believe that agreeableness has the strongest association with vulnerable narcissism and narcissism in general more specifically a negative correlation the lower the agreeableness the higher the narcissism now there is a strong association but neuroticism is actually much more strongly associated when it comes to vulnerable narcissism now with neuroticism of course we see a positive correlation so the higher the neuroticism the higher the level of narcissism now because we have this high neuroticism with this wife we see high levels of depression anxiety and anger those go along with neuroticism now I wanted to explain kind of the size of the difference when we talk about like neuroticism and agreeableness and compare it to mull nerville narcissism and the way we usually talk about this is we talk about the variance explained in a construct so I came up with this example to kind of illustrate how this works before I get to the actual numbers involved with neuroticism agreeableness and vulnerable narcissism say you wanted to buy a vehicle that was fuel-efficient and you could learn only one bit of information about the vehicle right so the only thing you know is just one aspect of it you would want to look at the aspect that explains the most variance in that fuel economy right so a fuel economy is the goal you'd want the variable that explains the highest amount of variance in specifically fuel economy so it wouldn't be something like the color of the car that would make any difference it might be the shape of the vehicle like drag as it goes through the air may be the type of vehicle like an SUV for example rarely has the same fuel economy as a car but the most significant factor would be the weight of the vehicle right so the weight explains a lot of variance in the fuel economy figures in the fuel efficiency well something like the engine type would be important but it wouldn't explain as much variance so if you had a pickup truck that was offered with a four-cylinder and a six-cylinder most of the time we would think of course the four-cylinder would be more fuel-efficient so that explains some variance but again the weights the bigger factor so when we look back here at vulnerable narcissism neuroticism is the weight and agreeableness is the engine type neuroticism explains 60 five percent of the variance in vulnerable narcissism and that's quite a bit when talking about mental health concepts agreeableness explains nineteen percent so if you look at the relative importance you see that neuroticism is much more prominent when we talk about vulnerable narcissism than even agreeableness which again we know has a fairly strong association with narcissism in general so moving on the sign number two we see here that the wife had a history of inconsistent discipline when she was a child but not necessarily poor monitoring and supervision so what is this mean well we look to see what explains vulnerable narcissism we often look to somebody's childhood because we know that narcissism starts early and we see that if there's a parent who for some infraction ignores that infraction some of the time but then other times gives a really severe penalty we call that inconsistent discipline and that has a very strong association with vulnerable narcissism so say when the wife was just a child she comes home late she's supposed to be home by nine o'clock she comes home at nine ten the parents don't do anything she does the same thing the next night and they ground her for a week right so that's inconsistent discipline now poor monitoring and supervision seems like something that would also cause vulnerable narcissism right so if a parent is just disengaged right that means they're just not paying attention or not supervising the child but interestingly that relationship is fairly weak so another thing in this one sign is that it wouldn't be unusual for the wife to also demonstrate inconsistent discipline toward the children from that couple right so this really supports this theory that narcissism in one sense or another seems to cause more narcissism it's transmitted in effect from a parent to a child now that doesn't explain all of it of course there's genetic factors and other environmental factors but that's a part of it sign number three the wife is highly manipulative now many people think this is a trait of grandiose narcissism and a sir yes but it's actually just as strong with vulnerable narcissism many of the manipulative tactics are really identical like gaslighting blame-shifting and guilt trips one difference though I've seen is that with the wife with vulnerable narcissistic traits there's more of a tendency to kind of play the victim to adopt the victim role so no matter what's wrong someone else is to blame and often that person is the husband right he spends a lot of time with the wife he's simply there he's available and that makes him a target there's some other reasons the husband was a target and there kind of covered a little bit in some of these other signs so moving to sign number four we see that the wife's self-esteem is contingent upon others including the husband so this seems a little unusual the wife belittles and manipulates the husband at the same time she needs the husband to admire her and sometimes if it's convenient in terms of boosting her self-esteem she'll tell others how great the husband is right so again when his positive attributes or accomplishments tend to amplify her perceived greatness right so it's kind of an unusual relationship to have disdain for somebody but yet require their admiration and say good things about them right that causes kind of an unusual circumstance that's hard to reconcile for the husband it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense at first glance sign number five the wife is emotionally distant now this may sound similar to grandiose narcissism but it's a bit different with vulnerable narcissism the wife continually says that she wants to be closer and as the husband's fault that the couple is not close that they are not connected with grandiose narcissism the wife would actively avoid emotional topics right there's no depth there and the wife wouldn't claim to have depth but with vulnerable narcissism the wife says that she is emotionally complex the husband just doesn't get it he doesn't understand she says she wants a relationship that's deep and meaningful and she blames the husband for not providing that relationship so kind of missing the idea that it takes two people to form a positive relationship now it's interesting here because even though the wife is saying this she's also demonstrating a tendency to devalue the need to have close relationships with other people so her behavior points in one direction and her words point in another this isn't uncommon with vulnerable narcissism one can make the argument here at signed number five this emotionally distant sign that this is essentially one version of an avoidant attachment style and the research actually supports this fairly strongly some theorize that the wife cannot have a real relationship we see this too in the research the goal of some counselling is to develop an actual relationship free of toxicity distortions deception and shallowness so in a way the counsellor is struggling again to have a real meaningful relationship with that client ironically the wife with vulnerable narcissism will not let herself be vulnerable signed number six the wife appears to be shaken to her core when criticized by the husband sometimes this is a manipulation tactic but often with vulnerable narcissism the pain is real criticism or failure leads to shame and disappointment and the wife to the point where she will question her own worth as a human being now this often has kind of a rebound effect like a rubber band is at work here so I'll explain this so the wife will question her self-worth be despondent full of shame and from that dark and painful place it's also kind of a lonely place rage starts to build the shame and self-doubt are converted into anger directed at the husband the wife wants to make the husband suffer as she suffers the husband doesn't suffer because he made a criticism he suffers because of the wife's emotional reaction to criticism so from the husband's perspective the reaction is disproportionate way over the top compared to his criticism so the wife has difficulty regulating emotions vulnerable narcissism is associated with regulatory deficits these deficits lead to maladaptive strategies like arguing yelling manipulating and aggression sign number seven is that the wife has difficulty maintaining a positive self-image so she can create a positive self-image sometimes but has trouble keeping it there and she compensates by developing and maintaining an inner attitude of specialness and entitlement so this is where we get that sense of entitlement we see with narcissism she places herself above and beyond the typical conventions of society so failures are turned into successes and big failures are turned into big successes now often I've heard that people are kind of frustrated or perplexed by this type of dynamic how can a larger failure lead to a larger success why does the narcissist do this well what happens here is there's no room for the wife to have a low positive self-image for too long again it creates kind of that rebound effect right like a rubber band gets stretched and it contains more energy that gets released so small failures only need to be converted into small successes but big failures really need to move all the way across to the other extreme and be regarded as some reason the wife is really truly incredible or great one example I've seen a few times is the wife will be fired from a job and it's clearly devastating the lost money the damaged self-esteem the embarrassment of having to tell people or try to cover it up so the wife will take this process of being fired and say that it proves that she was too good to work for that company so maybe she'll even try to make it look like she was doubting her worth a little bit and that employer proved how valuable she was by firing her so again usually being fired would be considered a failure at some level and the wife converts it into like a major turning point in her life you might say well if I hadn't been fired I never would have been successful right now sometimes that's true people get fired and it leads to success but with the wife with vulnerable narcissistic traits we would to see this every time there's a major failure sign number eight is that the wife's insight is compromised so when the wife is talking about her own motivations she'll say that it's hard to explain right the wife will have trouble explaining her own motivations and also her own feelings when actually it's hard to understand so the theory here is that there's a secret fragile core that the wife protects right she keeps it out of her conscious awareness so the wife really doesn't understand that she's narcissistic which of course precludes understanding why she's narcissistic right so there are many levels to understanding and the wife isn't really even moving into that first level a pronounced lack of insight interestingly however the wife does have more insight than a individual with grandiose narcissism so one could argue that vulnerable narcissism is where there is actually some insight starting to form not enough that somebody could refer to that person as having a lot of insight but more than we see with grandiose sign number nine the wife puts the phrase taking something personally into an entirely new perspective right so the wife is unable to separate opinions ideas thoughts facial expressions and many other activities from herself as a person for the vulnerable narcissist everything is taken personally because there's no other way to process stimuli the self-centeredness and the hyper vigilance to insults routes everything through the wife's ego so she internalize his disagreement from others for example if anyone has a different opinion than what the wife has that person is automatically labeled as foolish or bad the wife doesn't criticize ideas she criticizes people and she attacks with such passion because from her point of view she is defending herself right so when somebody's defending their ego that's kind of a major deal to them right the ego has to be protected those defenses have to be maintained it's not something the person can just let go it takes a lot of work and the development of insight signed number 10 envy which is common with narcissism in general is converted into schadenfreude oh so schadenfreude is when somebody takes joy and others pain so the way it's thought of here is that schadenfreude is a way for the wife to manage her envy a way to eliminate the need to be envious so she converts an object typically a person for which she has envy into someone that can be laughed at and ridiculed so the schadenfreude a kind of again just washes away any need or really understanding of envy envies a painful experience for the wife so when she has that initially she's looking for other ways to deal with that to convert that into something else and again that's where we end up with the schadenfreude so those are the ten signs of a wife with vulnerable narcissistic traits I know whenever I talk about vulnerable narcissism there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comment section they always generate a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of vulnerable narcissism to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 163,549

Rating: 4.9373178 out of 5

Keywords: wife, vulnerable narcissism, covert narcissism, shame, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, introverted, defensive, avoidant, anxious, depressed, socially awkward, neurotic, shy, manipulative, blame-shifting, gaslighting, self-esteem, FFM, big five personality traits, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism

Id: ISzascLvq7U

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 11 2019