'I'm a Narcissist. This is what life is REALLY like' Lee Hammock Interview

so hi my name is Lee hammock I'm a diagnosed narcissist and I'm here to bust some myths and tell you what it's all about from a narcissist perspective so my name is Lee hammock I have been clinically diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder I am 36 years 37 years old um I've built a platform of over 2 billion people on social media by you know discussing narcissistic personality disorder the traits to come along with it helping people understand it from a the perspective of someone who's actually diagnosed with it as opposed to just getting information just from all over the Internet or whatever because there's you know there's a lot of conflicting things out there about narcissism so I feel like the best source sometimes not all the time is coming directly from you know a person diagnosed with it okay so we've all heard the word narcissist a lot lately Lindsay kicked things off by announcing he'd hired two psychologists to evaluate Donald Trump who diagnosed him as 10 out of 10 narcissists that's right you hear that I'm 10 out of 10. I don't know what narcissist means but if it's about me it's Gotta Be Good and there have been more than a few examples on our screens I'm sorry that people are so jealous of me but I can't help it that I'm popular what is narcissistic personality disorder diagnosed MPD is when you actually go to a clinical psychologist or therapist whoever you see for your mental health uh issues and things like that when they take you through the process of you know seeing if you meet the criteria to be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder or any other cluster B personality disorders like borderline histrionic anti-social and anything like that you know any kind of mental health issues and things like that so it's different than just being called a narcissist you actually go to therapy before and you know you get diagnosed by an actual therapist with it what are the traits of a diagnosed narcissist so some of the traits of NPD are you know a grandiose sense of self like most narcissistic people think that they are better than other people just because they are themselves I'm better than you because I'm me there's no it might not be any kind of qualifications behind that it's just I'm better than you because I am me and you are not a lot of times our suggested people believe that their way right there another one is delusions of grandeur thinking that we deserve more just because of who we are as well you know we think we deserve to be you know president of the United States or of any uh prime minister of a country or something like that just because we are ourselves again and things like that you know um sensitivity to criticism like when you're dealing with a narcissistic person toxic person whatever there's no such thing as constructive criticism it's all criticism you know it it all hurts you can't correct me in any type of way without me feeling like you are attacking me personally and things like that that was just a few off top of my head I mean there's a few more but those are typically the ones that kind of come out first hang on that sounds like quite a few people I know so most people have narcissistic traits just for survival and things like that just for for perseverance and surviving in today's world most people are just not in just today's world just surviving the planet Earth most people have narcissistic traits of just persevering and protecting themselves anyway but the personality disorder is diagnosed I think there is point five percent of one percent of the population that is clinically diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder um of course there are more narcissists out there than what is diagnosed because most people don't go get diagnosed most narcissists most narcissists are not going to go sitting in the therapist's chair and let them let a therapist or psychologist or whoever tell them that something is wrong with them and things like that so there's the difference so everybody has narcissistic traits and tendencies but the personality disorder is different because it's pervasive it's you know it's a pattern of toxic behaviors and things like that self-destructive behaviors and things of that nature right there so what's the hardest thing about being a narcissist I feel like you're not in control you're not in control of who you are or what you're doing you you are present of who you are like you know you I'm president of who I am but not all the time and what I'm doing or why I'm doing the things that I do sometimes it feels like I'm on autopilot like I'm the I'm I'm here I'm Pleasant I can see you like I'm talking to you right now but sometimes just like my body is moving by itself my hands move myself and my mouth is speaking by itself sometimes are there any benefits to being a narcissist so so this is gonna sound crazy I know what are the benefits of being a narcissist is kind of like one of those questions like you know what huh what what can what how can you benefit from being a narcissist so I feel like the biggest benefit for me is what I do is that I can you know I do I honestly think the benefit for me right now is my lack of empathy my lack of you know honestly it sounds weird but it allows me to connect to people more on a logical level and explain to them on a logical level as opposed to getting emotions involved there you know because I think a lot of people when you get emotions too involved in it it to lose your thought process you know either lose your your reactions and things like that so if I'm coming here from a lack a lack of empathy or lack of connection I can take a step back and look at the situation I can analyze the situation especially in somebody else's life and give them reasonable logical information from a perspective of a narcissist or you know a person that they're dealing with so I feel like that's actually I've made my my weakness into a strength now with my platform and stuff like that because like I can just like okay I I understand what you're going through I can I have that cognitive empathy or whatever I understand how I should feel and how you should feel but I still can just not connect to it and give you a perspective logical perspective which I think helps out a lot of people I connect to people I'm not saying I don't connect at all but I don't connect to them just deeply and I'm just like crying with them and stuff like that you know I'm just like okay I can remove the tears and I can just process I can kind of dig through it and see it you know it helps me out a lot just in that aspect the other thing what's the biggest myth about being a narcissist so I think self-confidence comes with narcissists I like it's the the appearance of self-confidence I think a lot of narcissists are super a lot of narcissists are super insecure people so it's the periods of self-confidence it's the bravado this that the outward appearance sometimes that makes up for the actual inner insecurities so a lot of narcissists appear to be self-confident but they we just aren't you know so the confidence myth is busted what are some of the other common misconceptions I wow I think one of the biggest myths I heard that all nurses are intentionally hurting people you know I think that's one of the biggest myths like do do a lot of nurses hurt people absolutely yes a lot of narcissists do a lot of bad things but the intent is not to hurt people all the time sometimes the intent is just to make that make themselves happy but the impact is different my I intend to make myself happy by doing they might by cheating sometimes you know or lying I intend to make myself happy by doing this but the impact hurts you did I know it would hurt you if you found out yes absolutely but the intent wasn't to hurt you the intent was to make myself happy but the impact was hurting you you know so I just like not all narcissists are out to intentionally hurt you and things like that um and another myth I was just saying is that narcissists don't don't love at all there are you know all narcissists are not the same you know some narcissists do they do at the beginning of a relationship they do think that they are in love with you you know they do think that they are in love with you and they want to be with you they become like this obsessive super love with you and stuff like that but they fall out of love and once they fall out of love they start they start to treat you horribly and like whatever it's like we love you until we don't and then like some something in our minds disconnects from that person and then the love it's like a love the love switch just turns off it's just like blank the love switch goes the love switches goes off completely and then it's like you don't know the person anymore it's like I don't know you anymore so I don't care about you the same anymore because you don't look the same to me in my eyes like my heart doesn't feel the same way that it used to about you and things like that Lee how did you come to being diagnosed so when I was about 32 years old I was um at home watching my young son and I was I was yelling at my six months seventh or some seven month old son about how he was holding me back from life and my goals and dreams and things like that and my wife happened to come home during that argument and when she came home we me and her got into an argument of course because I was yelling at a six month old um and then on her way out the door on her way out the door she said it's so hard to live with a damn narcissist and I was just like you know I didn't know what narcissist was I thought it was just some kind of egotistical person somebody you know just held themselves in high esteem so I called her narcissist on the way out the door and she left and then I just I looked it up you know because I had I looked it up I found out the traits and symptoms of it and things like that and I was like dang because I always my entire life I have always felt different I always kind of felt like I was out of place in the world just because I felt like an alien pretty much you know I felt like an alien in the world because I my thoughts you know I just felt like my thoughts clicked differently than other narcissists and then other human beings and other people so I just thought I just thought I was different I didn't have a word for it what I discovered narcissistic personality disorder it gave me a word or a term to describe how I felt to describe my feelings and who I was and why I do the things that I do and why I feel the way that I feel about certain things and yeah and whatnot how can NPD be treated so me personally I just do Psychotherapy which is talk therapy because like I said I talk a lot my Pro my platform is talking 100 you know so I do a lot of talking and things of that nature so in therapy all you do is talk and you you know she asks you the right questions it's kind of like digging it's kind of like taking a shovel and digging but but it's just you just start digging by talking you know and you kind of and the more you talk the more the therapist can guide you to the answers to why you do the things that you do can guide you to the answers as to why you feel the way that you feel so I've been spent five years talking to someone about this and being open and honest and vulnerable because I can go into I can go to therapy anybody can go to therapy and talk to the therapist and lie and manipulate the therapist by giving them half truths and things like that I go to therapy and I'm just telling them straight out what's going on in my mind you know because when I tell them what's going under my mind it helps it helps her it helps her tell me what's going on it helps me understand what I need to work on what I need to process for the after that appointment you know so it's really for me what's worked best is talk dirty just go in there just talking it out and being open and honest and vulnerable which a lot of people see a lot of narcissists see vulnerability as you know as a form of weakness pretty much can gnosticism be cured just because I've been a therapist so long I do feel like my control over my disorder has increased but the the disorder hasn't went away you know my control has increased but the disorder hasn't went away my thought the thoughts are still there you know the thoughts are still there I still have those same symbol or similar thoughts but the control in my way my way of reacting is better instead yeah my my way of responding to people is a lot better than what it used to be because I used to just react to two people immediately I didn't let them finish talking I would just jump down their throat now through therapy and working on myself I take I take what that person is saying I listen to the person and then I respond to the person as opposed to reacting to them I still react I still react sometimes I'm I'm not a perfect person by any means you know I'm still going to react negatively or angrily sometimes when I shouldn't but this part of this part of the process I don't do it as much as I used to you know I used to be I used to rage out and get angry a lot but now I have months or a lot I have a long period I have long periods of Peace when I'm doing this now you know I have I can have peace while I'm you know raging out and stuff like that I can have peace when I speaking to people so that's helped me out a lot on this you know just on this this journey of self-development personal development now let's talk about NPD and relationships has your narcissism impacted yours my experience of all my relationships so I'm still married to the same person now she did leave but uh she came back because I was in there I'd be working on myself you know and show consistent change Behavior like I tell most people like don't come back unless they're showing consistent change Behavior but my relationship it has had its ups and downs you know she's left uh We've married we almost got divorced um because again I I lose the emotional I used to lose the emotional connection because I didn't know what was going on in my head you know so I would lose the emotional connection from her and I would treat her like I didn't care about it I would treat her like I didn't love her you know and she felt that deeply but she would stick around to try to fix me and try to work on me because she saw the potential in me to to love me she's like I listen if I just love him I love him harder he'll be better for me he'll go back to the person he was in the beginning of the relationship but it doesn't work that way you know so at the end she had to leave because she realized that there's nothing she could do to fix me she had to leave for herself you know so now she's she's been back for about two years now we have a a new daughter you know she's a little bug but you know we love her and whatnot but like it's been hard work it's not easy I think people one of the main questions that I get on my platform is can you have a normal relationship with a narcissist and I don't think I don't think normal exists in a world but a narcissist I don't think a normal you it doesn't work that way you know Canon narcissist be in a happy relationship yeah if if it's hard work you can do it if that person is willing to do it for themselves they had like I like my wife left and I still was going to therapy I think that's one of the reasons she came back I didn't stop going to therapy because she left she left and I was still going because I go to therapy to work on myself to make everything else around me better but I have to do it to work on myself you know she left and I was still going because most people if they go to therapy if you leave them they'll stop going to therapy because the only reason they're going to therapy is to keep is to keep you there she left and I was still going you know it's just like because I know therapy is not just to keep her here it's for me to live a better existence whether she's here or not a lot of people have found themselves in relationships with narcissistic people what are the biggest changes so I feel like the biggest danger in being in relationship with a narcissist is losing your own identity you know I feel like that's one of the biggest dangers of being in relationship with a narcissist person whoever is losing who you are trying to fix this person and trying to help this person be better you know no narcissistic person can be better without themselves without them themselves wanting to be better you know without them themselves wanting to put their work in on themselves a lot of people think that they can heal a narcissist or they can fix a narcissist or they see that they are broke they feel like they are dealing with a broken person so you try to you give pieces of yourself trying to fix this broken person maybe you know you cannot out love the trauma that made somebody a narcissist you can't do that they have to want to go work on themselves so I feel like the biggest danger is lack of a loss of identity loss of self and typically like law you get isolated and you lose pretty much a lot you lose a lot you know how does narcissism develop in people oh so for me uh more than anything it comes from just trying most times it comes from trauma in your childhood like on trauma that you haven't dealt with yourself in your childhood that is unresolved trauma that makes you develop this narcissistic personality you know I'm not a narcissist at my core my core is a wounded inner child the but the outside of that core the you know like this it's like kind of like the Earth you know that the Earth has its core the core of the earth is the inner child of the narcissist the rest of it is narcissists so it is you have to hack away through that surface level to get to the inner child to even begin to work on a narcissistic person you see what I'm saying their trauma creates the narcissistic part the trauma creates the narcissistic personality disorder you know so most narcissists are created through trauma and some some I think I've seen some evidence of people saying that narcissistic it doesn't require trauma sometimes it can just be you know you grow up and your parents don't tell you no like you you grow up with no boundaries and you just become narcissistic because nobody ever tells you no you know you just grow up and you kind of raise yourself because your parents are doing other stuff so that's I've heard of that as well you know for me that's how I look at I look at narcissists the person I disorder as a defense mechanism to protect their inner child you know like when I was young and when I was young and vulnerable being vulnerable got me hurt so it developed I developed the narcissistic shell around my inner child to protect the inner child from vulnerability and stuff like that so it is it is absolutely a defense that's why you if you try to criticize somebody like a narcissistic person they they come at you it's just like right they attack you you know if you're criticizing them a whole try to hold them accountable or something like that they come at you big time it seems like there's been more discussion of narcissism now than ever before why is that so I think narcissists have been around for a long time but I think social media has shined a spotlight on narcissists more than anything now it's like kind of like drug drug narcissistic personality disorder and toxic behaviors out of the cave that it's been hiding in for so long it's like shining a light on it right now um I feel like it's also a social media provides a lot of nurses uh platform to get validation from and things like that by pretending to be some something something that they're not some narcissistic people are online pretending to be survivors of narcissists you know some and you know telling telling the world the stuff that that they telling the world the stuff that they did to someone they pretended like it happened to them I'm a victim of this right here but they actually are the ones who've actually done it you know so I feel like social media has both it helped a lot of people heal you know but it's also provided a platform for a lot of narcissistic people to just pretend to be someone that they're not and just get you know supplied validation whatever you want to call it now I don't think that there are more narcissists around because of social media I think social media has just like I said shined the light on narcissists it showed because our grandparents could have been narcissistic and there was no camera in their face to show how just you know there's no camera in their face to show them who they were or what they were doing or show your grandma that your grandpa was a narcissist they'll show your grandpa that your grandma was a narcissist you know what I mean there's no DSM-5 for them to read through together and diagnose somebody else or see the toxic traits that they were going through and things like that so those a lot of those grandparents are still alive today being toxic narcissistic people and social media didn't create them you know I just like generational trauma like their parents could have been narcissists their grandparents could have been narcissists it's like a system of trauma being passed down from generations to Generations to generation and nobody's working on themselves nobody's trying to heal that trauma they're just putting it to the side just like accepting it like a lot of times especially in oh especially in the older days you could you couldn't really get divorced it was like embarrassing to separate the family so your Grandmama could have been a narcissist and your grandpa could have been a good person but they had to stay married so they raised your parents in this toxic ass household because they couldn't get divorced you know so I think narcissists have been around for a very very long time it's just like the light is of owner is is on it right now you know and I think a lot of people are realizing what they're going through because of social media yeah it's you know I don't think social media creates narcissists I think it's just shining a light on them more more than anything okay Lee advice time what should people do if there is or has been a narcissist in their life so my advice to people who are dealing with narcissists or who have dealt with narcissists I always tell people to go to therapy first of all because they can help you heal but second of all understand that it's you know I feel like the abusive part was on the narcissist or the toxic person the healing is on you it's you know you can't heal by being just remaining angry as hell to that narcissistic person you can't you can't heal that way you have to you the healing starts within so you have to look with it you have to start working on yourself self-love helps you know working yourself in healing taking time to heal understand like I said understand that that you can't change that person you you you and nothing you ever do will be enough for that person either you can change every single thing that that person wanted you to change then they still wouldn't be happy with you they still would be fun they're still find faults in something that you're not doing that they want you to do you would never you would never be enough for the wrong person but you can be enough for yourself so work on you love yourself from the inside out and then do just be as strong as possible Empower yourself stay empowered that's what I say okay and if people want to get help where can they find you so my biggest platform is Tick Tock uh I'm on Tick Tock Instagram Facebook uh YouTube everywhere uh mental illness like mental heal h-e-a-l-n-e-s-s illness on all platforms um I could be reached through email mental illness 85s and number 85 I was born in 85 y'all uh mental illness85 gmail.com and I also have a website up for you can reach me otherwise mentalhillness.net.net.com will take you somewhere else dot net mentalhillness.net [Music]

Channel: My Big Story

Views: 1,130,021

Keywords: my big story, documentary 2022, documentary, inspired existence, medcircle, mental health, narcissism, types of narcissism, types, narcissist, psychology, psychologist, social skills, mental illness, grandiose, covert, men, women, social media, malignant, communal, interview, expert, good, evil, therapist, author, ego, millennial, vain, tips, signs, gaslight, tedtalk, nature, nurture, mental, illness, sociopath, psychopath, date, discussion, podcast, conversation, advice, lee hammock narcissist, lee hammock wife

Id: iLYkzYAgiVA

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022