Couples Therapy With A Narcissist? My Experience As A Licensed Therapist…

in my Psychotherapy practice of 20 years most of the time when I had a client who had narcissistic personality disorder he or she or they were part of a couple so usually it was within the context of couples therapy so I'm going to talk to you today about what would usually happen when somebody with narcissistic personality disorder came in for couples therapy I also want to say here that in general when people come in for couples therapy almost everybody really truly in their heart of hearts wants their partner to change this is really normal the relationship isn't going well you've hit a lot of snags things might be really like very very difficult you go into therapy and you are really hoping that the therapist can help the other person change I know but with a narcissist yeah that is to an extreme so just coming back to the regular couple most couples when they came in they often wanted to look to me as if I was a judge or the like perfect parent who is going to sort it out and punish the bad one and help the good one right yeah that's not what couples therapy is about so when a couple goes to therapy the couple the relationship is the client and if the goal of both people coming in is that they want the relationship to work well then that's the focus of the therapist but in order for change to happen within the relationship it's very important that each person is able to take responsibility for what they're doing that's destructive to the relationship or if not destructive not helpful right the opposite it could be passive it could be not helpful but each person has to take a certain amount of responsibility so there's a leading researcher in a couple's therapy very very well known who will ask each member of the couple ship to take a hundred percent responsibility for what's happening in the relationship I wouldn't go that far I would pretty much ask each person to to take responsibility for 75 percent of the problem and the reason I didn't go to the hundred is that given that so many people grew up in Dysfunctional homes where they had a very rigid role some of those roles were the ones who would take responsibility for everything even the things that weren't theirs and the other roles some of them are ones who took no responsibility so if I had a couple where one person grew up taking responsibility for nothing and the other one grew up taking responsibility for everything and you say that you know what's going to happen the person who's used to taking responsibility for everything will continue to do so and that was not a helpful construct in the therapy room but I would say 75 percent because if you want to improve this relationship to everything you can and once you've done everything you can if the other person hasn't changed adapted improved the relationship you have your answer right so that's why I would sort of suggest that each person and take 75 percent responsibility so what happens if one of the people is a narcissist well core treats of somebody with narcissistic personality disorder is that they don't take responsibility for their actions they don't ever take on the blame and often they don't have remorse for the harmful things they do and so if that's a personality trait it's going to be very very hard for that person to actually participate in couples counseling in any kind of meaningful way and I also want to say here that I am talking about people who fully qualify for narcissistic personality disorder in this video and of course that personality disorder exists on a spectrum but that core issue of not taking responsibility along with a core issue of manipulating and lack of empathy that's part of the personality disorder no matter where the person is on the Spectrum and all three of those things make couples counseling very hard so usually somebody with narcissistic personality disorder would only come into couples counseling if there was an ultimatum they felt like their feet were to the fire the person's going to leave them and they don't want the person to leave them or they really want their partner to change and they think they can get the therapist on their side to get their partner to change they were pretty much forced to go or willing because they thought the therapist would help their partner so what would that mean if that's the reason they show up in the counseling room what are their goals their goals generally were not to change themselves their goal was to meet the ultimatum get the other person to change and impress the therapist because somebody with NPD must impress everybody and in particular might choose a therapist who has some kind of accolades wrote a book went to certain schools there was something about that therapist that they thought made the therapist extra smart like them or special like to them and therefore they're going to be able to impress this person so those would be the goals of the narcissist now narcissists know how to manipulate people they know how to play the game so it could really take a long time as a therapist I don't know a long time but definitely a few sessions to really figure out this person's probably Personality Disorder so as a therapists we are trained to empathize with our clients we know how to get in their shoes we know how to utilize our own feelings our empathy to understand really deeply how the other person is feeling and a skilled smart person with narcissistic personality disorder will know how to manipulate the therapist they know what to say they know how to appeal to the therapist's kindness and empathy and they know how to hide the parts of themselves they know they need to hide so how does the therapist figure this out right it as I said could take a little bit of time and generally the therapist figures it out when they begin to put a little bit of pressure on the person with NPD to change their behavior but the minute that the therapist kind of pushes or questions the person with NPD there's a strong reaction there's pushback it could be polite pushback it could be not returning to therapy or it could be very angry so as a therapist even when you figure out while this person might have a personality disorder here narcissism you know you're going to have to negotiate this very carefully if you come out too directly boom that person's not going to stay in therapy you will not be able to help the couple but at some point that's what's going to happen because the narcissist won't take responsibility for making changes and if the therapist is really trying any kind of interventions the narcissists will either get very angry leave tell their partner that therapist doesn't know what they're doing they're not qualified they're stupid bad unethical and the narcissist will make both people stop or the narcissist will be like you know thanks I'm good you've helped me so much and it's really my partner who needs the help so my partner is going to stay in counseling with you but I'm I'm not going to be coming anymore thank you so much so it never really lasts very long if you're doing any kind of real work so this brings us to another issue that makes couples therapy complicated which is what story is being told so when you are a therapist you hear the stories of your clients if you're doing one-on-one you're hearing their side of the story and you're aware of it when you're working with a couple over time you can also tell if you are hearing truncated stories so the narcissist will tend to lie not admit their wrongdoing they'll be very good at describing the wrongdoing of the spouse and if the spouse grew up in one of those roles where they take responsibility for a lot of things the spouse will be like yeah you're right I do do that yes you're right I am insecure yes I do get controlling sometimes yes I do you know leave things a mess or whatever the problem is that they're willing to acknowledge they will take it on fully and when they try to share the problems they're having in the relationship with the other person the spouse might be very reluctant to say too much so the narcissist isn't going to tell on themselves but the spouse may not either right and I'm using tell on themselves it's not really what I mean but hopefully you understand like they're not going to expose what they've done wrong and their spouse might be hesitant to do so as well because of how bad things will get when they get home so if they share too much or are too critical of their partner they're probably very well aware of the backlash we'll get so the true story isn't being told by either person and the spouse is in a catch-22 right they can't be honest because of the backlash but they also know if I'm not honest nothing's going to get fixed here but usually before they have to think about that too much The Narcissist has quit therapy so at that point if the therapist decides to keep working with the spouse which is sort of a complicated decision to make as a therapist but that's for another video but if they do continue to work with the spouse then the work really becomes around helping the spouse to validate their own feelings helping the spouse understand that if indeed this is a personality disorder unlikely to change and then I use that term the as is right like you get this person as is they don't want to change they're unlikely to change so if you get them as is what do you want to do do you want to stay because there's enough benefits to you from the relationship or you have kids together or like you are willing to adapt to this or not right but you get this person as is so really the work becomes around helping the spouse figure out what choices they want to make once they've accepted fully accepted the reality of the situation so building self-esteem and tools to help the person move forward I do include them in my course on boundaries which is super helpful if you are in a toxic relationship or you tend to get into toxic relationships but it takes more work than simply like knowing how to set a boundary or how to say something correctly it takes really knowing yourself validating your own emotions building your own self-esteem and then learning how to set boundaries whether the other person agrees with them or not and what you can do about it keeping them a focus on what you can do about it so I'll show the boundary course here there should be a link on the screen as well and then I'll also put the link in the description check it out I think it could be super helpful for you but just let me come back to how a therapist might keep working with you hopefully they're not going to tell you you have to leave the relationship unless it's like very dangerous or and even there it gets very complicated but hopefully the therapist is not telling you what to do but asking you questions like wow he doesn't seem to Value you when when do you feel valued in the relationship she doesn't seem to really take your feelings into consideration like do you feel that's true or also like if you're thinking of trying different things like well have you tried that before is this Behavior consistent has this happened before because if it's a consistent pattern of behavior it's likely to continue and then also the therapist can really help you understand that these things are not your fault because if you did grow up with that role of the caretaker the emotional sponge it will take a while and possibly some outside validation that it is not actually Your Role it's not something you have to do and in fact you can't do it it's really it's impossible and then just to end here because I know sometimes people feel like well I want to go to therapy to get the diagnosis well how is the diagnosis going to help you what difference is it going to make is it just validating is it going to do those things I was saying a therapist could help you with which is like validating your feelings or accepting the fact that change is unlikely those are things you probably know already the most worthwhile investment for you is yourself loving and caring and taking care of yourself and your other responsibilities and making your choices based on the concept of as is so if this was helpful to you please do give it a like subscribe to my channel that's a big help let me know what questions you have or what else you would want to know about with regard to people with narcissistic personality disorder put a comment below I try to respond to a lot of the comments and I'm very interested in your thoughts all right take care see you next week foreign

Channel: Barbara Heffernan

Views: 10,589

Keywords: barbara heffernan, Couples Therapy With A Narcissist My Experience As A Licensed Therapist, Couples Therapy With A Narcissist, Therapy With A Narcissist, Couples Therapy, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Relationship Counseling, Narcissist in Therapy, Narcissistic Partner, Couples Therapy Experience, Couples Counseling, Narcissism in Relationships, Therapy for Narcissists, Couples Therapy Insights, Licensed Therapist Perspective, Relationship Challenges

Id: c8VWESLreUM

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 08 2023