Dr. Ramani Durvasula: Understanding Narcissism Through Relationships And Addiction

and this is why information and knowledge is everything because what will sometimes happen is a person will get into a narcissistic intimate relationship in adulthood it'll go south perhaps even the narcissist will leave them or they'll leave the narcissist maybe the narcissist is cheated or something but they actually won't understand what they left they'll say that was toxic that didn't feel good but they won't understand some of the key elements like radical acceptance this is not going to change you know that no there was nothing you could have done to make it different but if there's a real examined look at like oh this is what this is this is the architecture this is what was happening and this is not going to change and when i see these particular patterns these are red flags that it can't just be blindly going through the relationship and then going into another because you will pick the same person but i'll often say when a person leaves a toxic relationship i recommend one year what i call emotional [Applause] [Music] dialysis [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello my friends and welcome back to yet another episode of i love being sober my name is tim westbrook and i'm the ceo of camelback recovery here in the always sunny and always sober scottsdale arizona where my team and i over the course of many years have helped thousands of people on their path to recovery we started this show because there's so much misinformation about addiction treatment mental illness and recovery in general there's so much more to recovery than just going to inpatient treatment than just going to 12-step programs then just seeing a therapist and i'm a huge advocate for the 12-step program aaa saved my life but there's so much more to it and to find long-term recovery my experience and what i've seen is for a person to live happy joyous and free there's there's just a lot more to it and that that comes down to the lifestyle habits and living a different life and living an honest life and um and it's much more than just stopping the drinking and the drugs and stopping the addictive behavior so um those are the types of things that we talk about on this show today i'm i'm so happy and excited to have dr romney here with me dr romini is a licensed clinical psychologist in los angeles california and professor of psychology at california state university los angeles she is also a visiting professor at the university of johannesburg additionally she is the founder of luna education training and consulting llc a company focused on providing content and education about high conflict and anti antagonistic personality styles such as narcissism and their impact on mental health relationships families and the workplace dr romney is also the founder or the co-founder of the narcissistic abuse awareness alliance a collaborative professional group of therapists and coaches working with clients experiencing these relationships she takes on entitlement and incivility and don't you know who i am how to stay sane in the era of nation narcissism entitlement and incivility she is the author of the modern relationship survival manual should i stay or should i go surviving a relationship with a narcissist and of you are why you eat change your food attitude change your life she also has a popular youtube channel that focuses on narcissism and difficult relationships her work has been featured at tedx on a wide range of media platforms including the today show discovery bravo dr romini's research on personality disorders has been funded by the national institute of health and she is a consulting editor of the scientific journal of behavioral medicine dr romney is an honest authentic and brutally honest voice on the struggles raised by narcissism in the u.s and globally dr romney i'm so grateful to have you here thank you and this is her book thank you i am and um today we're going to talk about narcissism how it relates to addiction and what are the the you know can you treat narcissism is there a 12-step group for narcissism there's a lot this is a big subject especially over the past past few years in the news there are lots of people out there um and and so we're gonna we're gonna talk about that welcome to the show thank you for having me tim it's so nice to see you again yes so tell me about your journey and how you got to where you are today so in my journey you know i was trained as a sort of a traditional clinical psychologist headed for my research and academic career which i've done and i um and then i was doing as i was doing my research i'm a professor at cal state la i started noticing what a pattern that had actually been brought to me by students that were working out in the field in a clinical setting and they'd come back to the our main setting at cal state l.a and they'd be so exhausted and they'd say oh my gosh these people are so difficult and i was listening to them and the pattern they were really describing was of this kind of high conflict antagonistic style and it never changed and these these patients were wreaking havoc on clinic staff on the front front line staff like i thought well these people really are almost sucking up more resources as one person in these places than 15 other sort of healthy people would and so that led to an area of research looking specifically at personality disorders specifically in the area of hiv and how it was associated with a whole bunch of a whole host of outcomes but then i also have a clinical practice i'm a licensed psychologist and in my practice i was seeing people coming up over and over with describing marriages sometimes families of origin characterized by similar patterns people who were just rigid and and difficult and manipulative and unempathic and entitled and i would talk them through it and say you know this is this is a pattern that's not likely to change and over time i've read more and more of the literature it's clear these people do not change if you have this narcissistic pattern that culminated in my book should i stay or should i go and then i really started going you know and it was still doing this work very quietly tim i have to be honest with you the 2016 election took this word and and pushed it into the public consciousness and what was happening was there was sort of this slow quiet buildup of people talking about these issues the word came much more into the public lexicon and then i started working with more and more clients and i'm like well this is a problem and the mental health world doesn't want to identify and i thought this is actually troubling because a lot of mental health practitioners aren't trained in it didn't think it was a thing we can work on anything don't be mad don't be mean to the narcissist they've gone through a lot too and i was like wow so what we found we'd almost become a culture made up of two sets of three sets of people the narcissists their enablers and the people who were being victimized by both the narcissist and their enablers i said uh this is not going to work well and if the mental health world won't talk about this then i will and that's how he slowly got up into launching this youtube channel so it was a and then when the magnitude of the issue hit me i thought this is really going to require me almost going off book a little bit and making creating public awareness of this issue because a lot of people either can't afford the help and a lot of therapists out there aren't trained to give the help and that's how i got here that's the journey okay awesome awesome and yeah and i've i've done a little bit of searching on the internet prior to this prior to meeting with you today and there's there's not a lot there are not a lot of people that are talking about narcissism on the internet well there's a lot of people talking about it but a lot of it's not being done by traditional mental health practitioners that make sense because there's actually over nine million youtube videos on narcissism wow okay over nine million yeah it's a lot but the thing is is that many times they're coming at for at it from the perspective of this happened to me and it's very first person versus things that are grounded in what little science there is out there and saying to people here's what we know here's what we don't know here's what you want to keep in mind and here's how you can move forward and so that's the piece that sort of people are still struggling with is how do we help people who are being affected by these relationships it turns out tim that i actually do work with clients who are narcissistic and you know i feel like sisyphus i push the rock up but we rocks back down at the end the bottom of the hill over and over and over again there's just very little change here is is narcissism on a spectrum it is on a spectrum i think at the milder ends of the spectrum you really have someone who's a bit more almost psychologically immature and emotionally stunted they're the people who are forever stuck in adolescence they're poorly regulated they concern themselves with somewhat more immature pursuits and concerns they're 60 years old and they still got to make sure they have a hot girlfriend you're like okay you know there's no there's not a lot of substance but they're not they're not harmful they're superficial they tend to be validation seeking you know at 65 they're still doctoring up their images online so they look good on instagram okay so there's a stuntedness to it but it's not there's not a the kind of malevolent cruelty at the other end of the spectrum that's where we see people who are exploitative manipulative sadistic dangerously paranoid harmful very harmful and can be dangerous in close relationships can be dangerous if they're in your family um and not just dangerous like from a criminal perspective but really dangerous psychologically right so what what is narcissism so narcissism is a personality style that is characterized by a lack of empathy entitlement grandiosity arrogance a chronic need for admiration and validation arrogance a superficiality a difficulty frustrating um difficulty a difficulty regulating um emotional states related to things like frustration and disappointment and really poor stress tolerance a need to control other people or at least control the narrative um a a really a tremendous hypersensitivity to criticism uh hypocrisy they can dish it out they can't take it and then at the core of it all though they're deeply deeply insecure and that insecurity can come out as victimhood sullenness resentfulness particularly if they don't get their own way when you first meet the narcissist because of the grandiose exterior they can come off as very charming and charismatic and confident which is why a lot of people get sucked in right right why is it important to understand narcissism or it's absolutely critical in the day and age in which we find ourselves to understand narcissism for myriad reasons i mean probably the foremost is so you don't end up with somebody like this because to have an intimate relationship like this is actually not good for you to marry someone like this is actually potentially fiscally dangerous for you to try to raise kids with someone like this is going to mess up the kids and probably you especially if you get a divorce and you face a very contentious sort of a custody fight but it also has implications for things like the workplace a lot of people say yeah this guy's toxic but it's the best place in town to work and before you know it your therapy bills outweigh any extra money you made working at such a hot shot place because that kind of toxic boss was so unsettling this could be a family of origin issue and i think by understanding what these patterns are people are less likely to personalize what happened in their family of origin and a an invalidating manipulative parent instead of it being the the narrative one may carry of well i'm not enough it's rather that person was not fit to raise kids and that wasn't my fault it was just my bad luck and so it's really by understanding this you can be a better gatekeeper for yourself we really do live in a world that enables these patterns oh come on give them the benefit of the doubt give them a second chance ah that's just how he talks that's what she said she doesn't mean it they don't mean it and so we hear that all the time and people are like every cell in my body is telling me this isn't cool but i don't want to be the person who seems judgmental and dismissive and that's how it happens is there's so many enabling voices out there we're so obsessed with forgiveness forgive no you don't need to forgive you can let it go but you don't need to forgiveness somebody who had no problem dehumanizing you and invalidating you and i tell people abuse is abuse regardless of the back story so if a person people will often say ah you know what this person had a rough start they their dad was really rough on them and other parent was an alcoholic it was really hard so it's hard for them to be have it's hard for them to connect intimately with other people i say i feel for them and i work with clients like that all the time however you were not put on this earth to be their punching bag abuse is abuse regardless of the backstory that's why this is important to understand right and it's one thing to be compassionate and understanding of their situation however having boundaries incorrect it's like i don't need to get into a really it's i i can be sympathetic to this person or empathic empathetic yeah however like these are my boundaries i don't need to get into a relationship with this person no you don't and i think but it go i call it compassion from a distance you know that what i don't want people who've gone through these relationships to find themselves in this position where they feel really they feel as though they've become the monster right they've gone into nietzsche's abyss and they've become the monster that's not a good feeling either but i said there's a there's there's a difference there's a it's not about becoming the monster and cutting off all compassion but there's also not about throwing yourself in headline and continually getting hurt by this person that at some point you can say that person's got a rough back story i hope they find their path that path is not going to include me right yeah and a lot of times people attract the same type of person into their life so if a person attracts a narcissist are they likely to continue attracting a narcissist the next time the i think the reason that that sort of endless cycle happens of people getting into relationships with people who have these kinds of you know these narcissistic styles is because they don't understand it and this is why information and knowledge is everything because what will sometimes happen is a person will get into a narcissistic intimate relationship in adulthood it'll go south perhaps even the narcissist will leave them or they'll leave the narcissist maybe the narcissist cheated or something but they actually won't understand what they left they'll say that was toxic that didn't feel good but they won't understand some of the key elements like radical acceptance this is not going to change you know that no there's nothing you could have done to make it different but if there's a real examined look at like oh this is what this is this is the architecture this is what was happening and this is not going to change and when i see these particular patterns these are red flags that it can't just be blindly going through the relationship and then going into another because you will pick the same person but i'll often say when a person leaves a toxic relationship i recommend one year what i call emotional dialysis stay it's like what's recommended in sobriety right to folk stuff is not being a relationship the same thing with narcissism i say give yourself a year because by giving yourself a year you will become really well acquainted with your rhythms your values what's important to you and a new person will be less likely to come in and attempt to co-opt that because you really had a chance to build that muscle god that's so true and when i first got clean and sober i followed the suggestion i didn't date for a year and i'll tell you it was the best thing that i did yes it was the best thing i did because i got to dig i got to learn more about myself i got to learn to be with myself i wasn't relying on another person to make me happy i wasn't relying on external validation and and next thing you know that the type of person i i was a healthier person and therefore i attracted a healthier person my life that's right that's right and you learned you know you learn you're saying this doesn't feel good you learn to value yourself enough to lay down the boundary boundaries are something that people often don't feel that they deserve to set so when your person almost needs to get themselves elevated to learn their no right what is gas lighting so gas lighting is a form of emotional abuse and manipulation where a person's reality is doubted or denied in its most simple form it would be me saying to you something like you have no right to feel that way or saying that didn't happen or it didn't happen the way you said and it's really you so then if someone is out to you enough you'll say maybe that didn't happen people start doing things like surreptitiously recording conversations saying aha it did happen right sometimes it can even be literally physical manipulation of an environment where for example to mess with you a person might move the keys or move the television remote and you'll say where's the keys because you might have usually put them in a bowl and say the other person's like i didn't move them but they actually did and it's in so the thing with gas lighting is while any of those episodes are gaslighting episodes as far as i see it the way i see it as gaslighting is a grooming process over time time and time and time again you have no right to feel that way that's not a valid emotion um it never happened that way i never said that you seem to be losing your grip on reality are you okay you know you've been forgetting things a lot lately and you hear that enough three five ten times a day and you have some level of trust in the gaslighter they're your spouse they're your family member there's someone you know and for some reason you give some respect to them they have even more power and by diminishing you through all this doubt over time the gaslighter kind of owns the the person they've gaslighted and before you know the gaslighted person is almost just consenting in the sense that they're capitulating almost like you've seen a cult you know that they're going along with this new reality that's been handed to them and they're so confused that they don't really they they want to fight back sometimes but they almost feel as though they don't know which way is up anymore that's gaslighting and it is honestly one of the prime pieces of artillery that a narcissist uses in a relationship and and it's like once a person is down how do they get how do they get out of it it's not easy it's not easy at all tim you know what ends up happening is that you know this this term gaslighting is something that comes up in other literatures like domestic violence and coercive control people who are so beaten down in these relationships that they've literally lost their voice it often is you know some of the ways we kind of pull people out of this is returning their reality to them i mean as you know doing doing the work you do all trauma all trauma-informed therapy is based on validating the client's reality so very much the best work that's done with clients who've been gaslighted is very true therapists who are informed that you let the client tell their story without judgment you give them exercises to almost start getting acquainted with themselves like they can say i'm warm i'm saying okay then you're warm you want me to i can i can switch this thermostat instead of saying i'm not warm and then the other the other person's been gaslighted saying you're right you're right it's not warm like you let the let the client really own and be in their reality and then give them ways to practice that but then you also help them build out new support networks where they are heard where they are seen and where multiple opinions can be held at the same time you and i could have a conversation where i can share with you a feeling and you might say that's actually an interesting feeling you know can you tell me more about that or that's a hard feeling to have or it sounds like that was hard for you instead of you saying you have no right to feel that way right so if a person has mental health issues let's say anxiety bipolar depression how does being in a relationship with a with a narcissist impact their mental health so if a person has an excellent question tim if a person has an existing mental health condition like you said anxiety or depression or any any number of mental health issues and they go into a relationship with a narcissist we will see a significant exacerbation of their symptomatology a depressed person will become significantly more depressed and may not even feel like they have the resources to fight the confused fight an anxious person will get paralytic anxiety a person who is living with bipolar disorder emits the confusion there might even i mean there could even be sadly even issues with medication adherence which could then place that client at greater risk for a manic episode so it's actually there are people who go through this who go through these relationships and actually go on to develop significant anxiety significant symptoms of depression hopelessness powerlessness confusion helplessness rumination to the level that when they present at therapy they actually do look like they have generalized anxiety disorder or ptsd or a major depressive disorder but in fact it's all the core the core of it is being in one of these really confusing relationships and many times simply educating the person about the relationship can help with that symptomatology but if a person has an existing mental health issue one of these relationships could actually set them back years wow i can only imagine i mean with with all the gas lighting it's like yep so how how does narcissism affect relationships and codependency so it you know it's a very interesting dynamic and i always tell people i'm very reluctant to initially use that term codependency when i look at a narcissistic relationship and i'll tell you why that some of the issues around codependency in terms of the derivation of self-esteem by catering to the to the the more difficult um person in the relationship and often it's often an addiction framework sort of you know kind of doing the dance of two around the addiction this is more in the narcissistic relationship what we see is that one partner the non-narcissistic or the less narcissistic partner as it were will keep making justifications for the narcissistic partner which is definitely a theme we see in codependency here's the rub in a significant proportion of people who are living under these narcissistic relationship conditions merely educating them on the narcissistic pattern telling them hey did you know that this is a thing and it's never going to change you're like what wait a minute this is never going to change i'm like no no never i mean you're telling me if i don't do this or after he retires or after the never they're like oh thank you for telling me and they call the attorney that night that's not codependency that's lack of information now i do think there's a subset of clients even armed with the information even armed with knowing it's not going to change will continue down the rabbit hole of justification maybe i can try this differently thanks let me go find a new therapist and all of that then you might see something that looks more like a codependent type of pattern where there's such a strong trauma bond that they cannot pull out of this really really um problematic relationship but i think a pretty decent chunk of cases once they understand what the writing on the wall is because no one told them they're like yeah okay now i'm getting out i did not know this thanks right okay let's talk about the relation between narcissism and substance use disorder it's actually pretty high and it makes sense why that no pun intended but let me tell you why that is is that people who are narcissistic have a lot of trouble with regulating their emotional states particularly like i said when they're stressed frustrated disappointment or if they feel abandoned under those conditions people with narcissistic personality styles have a really really really hard time regulating their emotions so what's the best thing to turn to substances and so they do what we see with many narcissistic individuals is they have a natural draw to stimulants because it really amps up the grandiosity so they're already grandiose and now this almost seems to make those grandiose defenses rock hard however you will also see that people will use numbing sort of depressant type substances or even substances like marijuana that feel like they cut through the anxiety because there's more anxiety and narcissism that a lot of people realize there's a lot of social anxiety for narcissists who feel like they're being judged socially and all of that because of that propensity the likelihood for the co-occurrence of addiction and narcissism is actually quite high in addition in addiction we see the reliance on defenses like denial and rationalization those defensive patterns are also very prominent in narcissistic patterns we also see an egocentricity in addiction that egocentricity is also observed in narcissism here's where things get really really dicey for many many especially families out there they're like oh my gosh this is such a jerk so selfish so mean i'm gonna be so glad when he goes to rehab and comes out because he's we're gonna get our guy back we're gonna get our son back we're gonna get our daughter back we're gonna get them back and then the person goes and does 28 days maybe they do six weeks great rehab treatment they come out they're clean they're sober they're going to meetings but they're as much of a jerk as they always were the narcissism tends not to go away in rehab and i have to say tim like one of the issues becomes is a lot of rehab centers don't recognize the narcissism it's all addiction all the time and by not recognizing that pattern a narcissism is actually going to increase the likelihood of relapse why because when they're out and even if they're in um even if they're in a sober living situation even if they have a sober living companion and even if they're going to meetings every day frustration and disappointment and all that stuff is going to come into life life happens and under those conditions a person with a narcissistic personality is not going to be able to cope and they're going to go to the quickest thing they've got which are substances and in fact i would actually say if somebody's working with a narcissist who is in sobriety i'd say what you want to do is play a little bit of a game with them and put so much pride and ego into their sobriety that they fight for it because if you don't make it about that for sometimes it's hard for them to give over to a higher power because they're grandiose enough to think that they're that so you really are kind of fighting a battle within 12-step and that you almost need to sort of invite their ego along for the ride and make and get the ego invested in sobriety as though that's the noble stance and you might actually get some buy-in there but i think the families the spouses the adult children when a person leaves rehab and they're narcissistic and in fact they might even be more irritable more entitled and more nasty than before because before the substances might have even been masking some of the you know some of the key um antagonistic dynamics so it can get really messy and a lot of people feel very frustrated when they see a narcissistic person who who comes out of rehab and is back in their lives when a person gets clean and sober and they don't do the work quote-unquote yeah and really dig deep and dig into trump and change their lifestyle habits and change their behavior they call that person a dry drunk yes it kind of sounds like a so if a person just goes to rehab which is one of the purposes of this show i love being sober there's more to getting clean and sober than just the treatment 12-step meetings and so so how can the narcissism be addressed is there like how how do you go about addressing the narcissism i think there has to be an honesty about any mental health or addiction services practitioner working with these clients i think because addiction is often such a acute concern with a client like we want to get them safe especially if they're using something that's putting their health in jeopardy the acute need to focus centrally on the on the addiction and the substance or alcohol use totally makes sense the challenges is that if that becomes the singular focus that when the personality dynamics get missed the work does need to be done in in rehab around things like um mindfulness mindful awareness of how a person speaks to other people self for the building up of self-reflective capacity on how the the narcissist impacts other people like are you aware of how you just spoke to that person are you aware of how other people are experiencing you can you please wait before you speak humility like getting people you know having them get their hands dirty inviting them into other people's stories and for them to be present with other people's stories without contempt it really means a well-trained staff that's able to see through that and watch some of that narcissistic stuff play out even in their nonverbals eye contact engagement with the process ability to engage in entitlement oh come on man come on 1001 let me have my phone 1001 come on man like i could buy and sell you 1001 like one more minute and then no the answer is no now you might have people lead it leaving against medical advice you might have i mean you're used to that you're an old pro at this right but you've seen that entitlement and so it's really about how do you set that boundary and still keep people engaged and then it's also to understand that sometimes you can't break through the narcissistic defenses and you're going to create whether it's this dry drunk kind of you know this sort of you know rubric once they leave but it's really those interpersonal dynamics like some of them will say i want to stay sober because i don't want to lose my business right so sobriety is entirely linked to the business it's not the work but it's like i still want to be a pillar of my community i still want to make a million trillion dollars and it's not about you know this this really engaging in the true deep work of 12 step of of um of getting your life back from addiction and so it then becomes this um they take the ongoing antagonistic patterns continue and the investment in sadly in sobriety isn't really an investment sobriety it's an investment in their business which is all but guaranteeing they're going to not be sober at some point because the business is going to let them down so it's not easy and i would say that however many times the average relapse is post um you know post uh rehab i would say multiply that by at least two with a narcissist you're going to have that many more relapses wow is there is there a 12-step program for for narcissists there's actually not and i think that it's an interesting way to think of it right like you know from the outset that they have to accept it that that this is what they're always going to be to commit to change to making amends like i think a lot of the steps actually could be quite interesting in in narcissism the challenge is is that the substantial proportion not by all means all but a substantial proportion of people who are narcissistic have absolutely no awareness that this is their pattern and when it's pointed out to them they may cop to it for a minute but then immediately return to it and become so barbed and difficult with anyone who tries to point it out a lot of people say this isn't even worth the fight and you know or the narcissistic individuals are 61 percent more likely to drop out of psychotherapy so the odds of keeping them in for the long term especially when you start trying to drill down and do the deeper work the first time a therapist says to them something they don't want to hear they'll often pack it in and leave and they'll just sort of therapist jump and then they'll sort of be dismissive of the whole enterprise these therapists will just take your money and they talk to you and they you know forget it i'll just you know i can figure this i'll just rather get a massage like they'll be very contemptuous and dismissive it's a defensive maneuver designed to protect them it's an it's an interesting thought you know the um the the challenge would be though that the motivation for change is not nearly at the level you might see an addiction because for a lot of these people their narcissism is working for them they don't think it's a problem so and i think you'd see that as a at a majority level rather than an addiction but i definitely think it's an interesting thought right i mean they're they're not happy joyous and free but on the on the outside they look good maybe they're making they're making money they have a big house they own a business so see things seems to be going well for them because that part that part they want to keep they just correct they just want to stop using drugs right right and so that that and that's different than narcissism what do you because for some of them people will say like i don't want to be a nice empathic guy like that that means leaving money on the table or i don't want to be a nice empathic person that's going to mean leaving you know money on the table or getting a worse deal and the idea like so what if you got a worse deal you know it seems like that that the the nature of this deal you're still walking off with a lot of money and now a lot more of the employees are actually going to get a better severance out of this they're like why should they get my money you see so i'm saying so you kind of hit this wall that even when the winning is so important it's so important to them that pulling them out of that unempathic space can get really really challenging and it's the the 12-step program is a a program of honesty and it's about behavior change it's about doing the next right thing it's about keeping my side of the street clean and if keeping my side of the street clean is not in line with making more money then why would they correct that's exactly right that's exactly right and so it's a tough it's it would be a tough sell in those situations and i know that 12-step programs and 12-step meetings are very much sort of user-led and user-guided i don't i mean that that feels like putting you know the foxes in charge of the hen house i don't even know who's going to run that meeting you know bless their hearts but i just don't know how that would happen right right right right i'm a i'm a grateful recovering narcissist yeah yeah that if they're recovered narcissists they're like i don't want to be in a room with all y'all i'm cold right right right wow okay okay so um are there some treatment centers that are i guess geared more for people that are narcissists that are narcissists you mean in terms of um psychiatric or just an inpatient treatment center for somebody that's an alcoholic or drug addict but it's like hey all the narcissists should go to this one or are they just the more expensive ones tim bless the hearts of the people who actually if anyone figured this one out a a treatment program i don't think it could be 28 day i think it would have to be longer that was able to master the narcissism alongside the addiction they i mean it would be worth its weight in gold i think some people proclaim to do it right but i don't think they're doing it but i'll tell you why this isn't the fault of the treatment centers my read on the literature is that there's absolutely nothing convincing in the narcissism treatment literature that shows long-term efficacy and so what happens is is that even in the in the um in the in the scientific literature on the treatment of people with narcissistic personality styles or narcissistic personality disorder it tends to be research done on very small samples sometimes it's more like case reports you can't generalize from case reports these are often courses of therapy that last 12 to 18 months two to three times a week and i'm thinking i don't know many people in the united states of america that can afford therapy with a highly trained therapist two to three times a week and stay in for 12 to 18 months that is that is available to less than one tenth of the population so in in when you're talking granted rehab is a much more condensed so you've got the person around the clock so it's not outpatient extended for a year but you're talking about someone so specifically trained in these specific models and really work at them while you're still trying to manage sobriety it's a very tall order and you need a uniquely motivated client and then you need outside of that one heck of an outpatient therapist to work with them in perpetuity that setup is almost impossible to achieve i suppose if you had all of that then sure you know but i feel it's a silly thing to proclaim that's like saying if you moved a personal trainer a personal chef and a personal something else in my house i'd lose weight look like a million bucks i'm sure i would i don't have those things so it's the same thing here well and the other thing is that they would have to want it they'd and always they'd have to want it my point is even if they want it is that without that absolutely pristine top drawer level of treatment the first time frustration or disappointment or abandonment or stress cross their path they'll snap yep yeah so i mean what does that mean then you create a life that doesn't have those things in it i don't know what that means like living in some strange bubble right right right is there in your experience are there certain addictions that narcissists are more prone to so when we think about the i would actually say that they're equally prone to all addictions because their addictions at the core are regulatory deficits right the desire to regulate with something outside of the organism rather than to self-regulate so drugs and alcohol are probably going to top the list but people who have a narcissistic personality style struggle a lot with gambling addiction with spending addiction like spending and acquiring shopping i guess um food struggle with food and you'll see co-located with them eating disorders or at least very dysregulated eating behavior either like sort of extremes of starving for reasons of looking a certain way getting um almost obsessive compulsive i'll only eat this i'll only eat that in a very certain way and it is it's sort of over controlled to almost offset the chaos of the narcissism so you definitely see a whole host of dysregulated patterns that will sit alongside narcissism and often more than one dr romini we need to wrap up here um how can people learn more about you and find find out more about uh more about dr ron probably the best place to go is my website drromany.com d-o-c-t-o-r dash r-a-m-a-n-i dot com and if you go there you'll see you know links to everything i do in the workshops i do the other place i'd suggest is people go to my youtube channel which is just dr romini that is a trove of hundreds of videos on narcissism so as it relates to families as it relates to relationships to workplace why narcissists do the things they do why do survivors of these relationships do the things they do and so all of that's there in a massive library of videos that you can look at for at no cost so there's lots of different ways i have two books but all of that information is on my website here's her book once again don't you know who i am and her youtube channel is amazing she's got hundreds of videos that are awesome dr romney thank you so much again thank you tim enjoy the rest of your evening and thanks everybody for watching have a great night [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Camelback Recovery - Sober Living

Views: 6,344

Rating: 4.9819818 out of 5

Keywords: substance abuse, alcoholism, codependency, mental health, symptomatology, gaslighting, gaslighting emotional abuse, gaslighting in relationships, codependency in relationships, codependency no more, narcissism in relationships, substance abuse disorder, codependency meditation, codependency recovery, gaslighting explained

Id: JdjotXCFB90

Length: 41min 33sec (2493 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021