PROTECT YOURSELF From Narcissists: Interview with Dr. Ramani Durvusula

obama got to where he got to because he was still very machiavellian he was willing to do what he needed to do nobody becomes a president without becoming being a narcissist i just don't see it i think he probably had a much higher empathy quotient obama did than your average bear but the fact is it's just the nature of the beast yeah yeah why did you start focusing all your research and study on this this particular area of narcissism you know it came down to and can i curse yeah yeah okay yeah you say whatever you want that's great you know how many [ __ ] can you encounter before you feel like a responsibility to do something yeah and what was interesting for me was i was working more in sort of healthcare delivery and i was an hiv aids researcher still um for a long long time and what was happening was we had a research site that i operated in south los angeles in in a neighborhood that had really been destroyed by hiv and then we ran another program at my university what was happening was the research assistants would come in tears that how badly they were treated the reception staff and then i started paying attention at the clinics and i saw how horrifically frontline medical staff were being treated by difficult patients across the socioeconomic spectrum i was like what's going on here and that led to the research that was funded by the national institutes of health i said this personality thing nobody's talking about to talk about depression we talk about substance abuse talk about anxiety but nobody talks about the elephant in the room which is personality from there on on there and on i couldn't unsee it it was happening on airplanes and at hotel check-in desks and at starbucks and i thought oh we have a problem at the same time in my private practice i had a very small practice at the time people kept coming in and saying my spouse doesn't listen he or she doubts my reality i feel like i'm not there they're so deeply entitled and i'm like and i kept sending them these really sweet emails like from today's session here's what we talked about then i realized i was writing the same damn email over and over again that's what led to that that book should i stare should i go but then i realized wow this is a problem and that led i was doing that work 10 15 years ago it led into a deep dive into narcissism and i realized the mental health profession isn't touching this it was the third rail of psychology and psychiatry and i really put myself on an academic gulag at this point like they're saying nobody does this work my own mentor said honey if you try to do this no university is going to hire you mercifully i had tenure so i could do what i wanted at that point but it's really the issue that nobody in mental health wants to talk about but i tell my students if you understand men if you understand narcissism you understand mental health i think what i've done that in a way no one else has done has brought this to the awareness of the masses and i think my frustration is if any of you know about scientific publishing the bulk of psychological research sits in psychological journals that are so esoteric nobody understands what the hell is going on it's numbers and figures and nothing makes sense and nobody takes the time to elevate that work to something that anyone in any profession or any walk of life could understand i think it's tremendously arrogant that billions of dollars were put into research and none of that research was usable by the populist everything written about narcissism is like dense and nobody gets it and it's all psychoanalytic la la la sit on the couch 20 years i said these people are suffering now we need to bring something to them and when you're an old lady who wants to bring an idea to the forefront what do you do you work with a millennial yeah and they said doc this is how people are learning and i had to have as much faith in them as they did in me and i have two gals who were once my students and i said okay with no budget whatsoever let's sit in this tiny room and figure this out and that's how we started with youtube we had zero subscribers as of this time last year we're at almost 150 000. which isn't bad for an absolutely like clueless like my kids are like you're too old to be a youtuber mom and i'm like i'm sort of not a really a youtuber but that's really what it was it was trying to take psychology and put it in the public interest yeah how long did it take you to write i mean you know actually sitting down and writing i write very quickly and i love to write you know so for me once i'd start writing i could go on 12-hour vendors and just keep going i could write 10 000 words a day like it just it kept going so the actual writing i got a book i would like you to write for me okay i love it i love it i mean i remember that's it i guess maybe that's just being a grad student all that but 14 months of writing but frankly it was five years of research so there was a lot of grinding going through the academic work the theoretical work and then trying what happened was the election happened in 2016. and politics aren't relevant here but the word came into the public purview like it had never before and i had to make a decided decision once the election happened i had to decide whether i was going to become political or try to cross both sides i decided you're going to sell more books if you could sell them to both sides of the divide so i said because there's a whole world of psychologists and psychiatrists that tank on is trump a narcissist i mean my cat knows that trump's a narcissist so it's not even that interesting a conversation but the difference was if you do if you're the mental health person that does the trump is a narcissist piece you lose a lot of people who are his supporters and i'll be frank with you joe his supporters are often some of the most brutal in some of the most brutal narcissistic relationships out there they needed my content these are people who are often more low-wage workers who can't get therapy but will watch a video about why their husband's being mean to them and i thought so let's de-politicize this now i do mention trump in here and the only negative amazon reviews i got my assistants are scrupulous at checking their reviews the only negative amazon reviews i got were from trump supporters and from people who didn't like the fact that i did use some obscenities is there any politician as a president who's not a narcissist i can't think of one ever in history of all time and i'm sure listen we like to think obama got to where he got to because he was still very machiavellian he was willing to do what he needed to do nobody becomes a president without becoming being a narcissist i just don't see it i think he probably had a much higher empathy quotient obama did than your average bear but the fact is it's just the nature of the beast yeah yeah the thing that your book has in your videos has made me so aware of is how much of the personal development industry religious leaders the people that are dispensing how to live your life advice follow me the ones that have the biggest social media followings uh the ones that in many cases talk about being honest and transparent are the biggest gaslighting [ __ ] narcissistic people on the planet and these are the ones that the world follows and takes advice from it's a very interesting thing it's interesting and it's dangerous i have a fair number of clients in my practice who are de-programming from cults but the reason they chose to work with me was being in a cult is like being in a relationship with a narcissist it's the exactly the same top notes so as we undo it that i will take their call and i'll say it did this this how did you know that doctor i'm like well because that's exactly what a narcissist does so and sometimes it is it's yoga gurus the minute you call yourself a guru and i say this as an indian woman you're already in murky waters like no don't call yourself a guru like you know so it's a um so it's just even the terming and it's the i also think that one of the biggest issues we've seen is the forced positivity of the world you've got to be optimistic you need to think positive i will never forget when a friend of mine who was surrounded by other narcissists got diagnosed with stage three cancer and the prognosis was grim indian woman as well and she pulls me aside she just had had her radical mastectomy so she's got no breasts no hair i mean she's terrified and she said if one more of these [ __ ] comes up to me and tells me to be [ __ ] positive about my cancer i'm going to hit him i said i'll help you you're weak together we will hit them you know and it's that that be positive it's a form of mental control right so the the guru can dicta dictate that for others rather than being empathic and literally meeting a person where they're at grief takes time trauma takes time to process hurt needs to be processed on an individual's time and saying be happy because i'm telling you to be happy it's completely unempathic but yet here we are so let me ask you to define narcissism and let's make some distinctions between sociopaths psychopaths because i think that'll help with the foundation here so i think the key here number one what is narcissism it's a lack of empathy entitlement grandiosity arrogance inability to manage any kind of disappointment and that tends to be manifested as rage chronic validation seeking um and but all of this an envy of other people but all of this the core of it and this is what gets forgotten is that it's all based on a deep deep insecurity everyone looks at the narcissist they say they're charming they're confident they're successful they're smart that doesn't mean if you're those things you're narcissistic but if it's built on that core insecurity that's why the person needs to be grandiose and entitled because if i was that fragile inside my temptation would be to protect it's like if you broke your arm what do we do we put a cast on it why so the arm doesn't get broken again or the bone doesn't get agitated or moved when you have a broken inside you're that insecure you're going to protect it how do you protect it i'm the [ __ ] i'm the best no one's better than me why should i have to wait in this line i'm the best after all everybody move out of my way so i can be the first in line why am i not the vip all of that's protective all of that is them putting this carapace around this fragile interior so anything from the outside that cracks it marital break up somebody else beating them at what they do getting more sales having more money having a bigger yacht having a better whatever that is going to piss them off and that's where you see the rage and the acting out that's narcissism okay there's different kinds of narcissism there's grandiose narcissism which is sort of textbook come to my you know come to my palace and be policy with me and i'm so great and you're so lucky to be my friend and i'm so beautiful that's the what we classically think of narcissism but then there's the malignant narcissist and that is somebody who's downright dangerous they are they're malevolent they're exploitative they're manipulative they smell like a psychopath but you're going to learn in a minute why a malignant narcissist isn't a psychopath they're slightly different creatures there are the more vexing covert narcissists these are people who don't look like narcissists they look like victims the world was never fair to me i never got a fair shake you know what maybe he he succeeded because he got more money to start with than me i would have been i would have been better than him if my dad gave me money up front you know what i'm too good to show up to a job why should i do that like i got all these ideas i'm the next steve jobs like let the world find me that's covert narcissism they look so hang-dogged and so sad all the time that people often think they're depressed and they come to a therapist office who thinks they're depressed and treats them for depression for three months and then wonder why they're not getting anywhere this person will the world is against me the world is against me the world is against me their grandiosity is why doesn't the world see how great i am versus the grandiose person who says look how great i am and then there's even what we call noble narcissists these are the people who do lots of charitable work and have these big rescue the elephants rescue the world rescue everyone kinds of profiles but they're doing it solely for validation that's the same as a communal no they're same as a communal same as a communal or noble narcissist these are the people who you think like wow they're saving the world they're so charitable they're so wonderful but then catch them behind closed doors and they treat their partners their families anyone wonder when their staffs absolutely horribly so they only have empathy when they're on stage or they're saving an elephant i mean i see so much of that in the especially in the stuff that i've done in in the nonprofit world and it's yeah it's it's it's cosmetic it's very cosmetic yes but it's it's so the work is being done in the name of seeking validation right versus for the meaning and the purpose or the just the the higher purpose as you will of doing the actual work that's narcissism i'm i'm sure you're wondering what's the difference between that narcissistic personality disorder there was a wonderful book by alan francis called twilight of american sanity i don't know if you've read it but it's a fantastic book out the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder only entered the world of psychiatry in the 1970s this is a late entry freud wrote about it otto rank was the first person who wrote about it these were early early you know analysts and obviously theoreticians but we didn't make it a diagnosis till the 70s francis was one of the people who wrote about it when trump got elected he wrote this book about narcissism and he's like trump doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder why not because in order for something in the dsm the diagnostic and statistical manuals of mental health mental illness you have to in order for it to be diagnosis it either has to be causing the person subjective distress think about a depressed person they're uncomfortable they can't get out of bed they feel sad all the time they're angry or it has to be causing them social and occupational impairment you look like you look at somebody who's got a seems to the world a fine marriage or at least the person thinks it's a fine marriage or relationship they seem to have perfectly fine kids at least to the world it looks like that the person thinks that and they're not having any distress we don't get to diagnose it which is why the majority of people with narcissistic traits don't get diagnosed because nobody ever lays eyes on them yeah so that's they're that's why the the prevalence of narcissistic personality disorder is about one to five percent i'm spitballing here because we don't have the numbers the prevalence of narcissism in the american culture is probably closer to 30 percent that gap so 30 percent of i would guess so yeah wow yeah that's it's a one and three you know but now when we go to psychopathy we jump the rails narcissist insecure okay when the mask gets pulled off the narcissist and he and i were talking about his program about you know getting people ready to go to prison one of the things he's going to run into most and this has come up when i've taught at jails and prisons about this to the clinicians there is that they're so insecure now the mask is off shame you're a bad guy like they're i was once supposed to do i think an interview with steve madden i was telling him for um for this thing on narcissism and he was actually willing to subject himself to talking to me and then at the 11th hour i think he had something more interesting to do surprise surprise but he acknowledged it he said the thing he was most frightened of was going to jail or going to prison and he did yeah and so it shatters them a psychopath is not insecure they have no fear they have no anxiety and they're completely stress resistant which is why they make for example great surgeons they make great ceos they make a great anyone who needs to say completely calm at a time of tremendous danger right so they nothing bothers them that's just why they make great hired assassins i mean anything that requires you to be calm cool and collected under conditions that are difficult for people to do that they're dangerous i was i was watching a show on drug lords and uh and and gangsters and mob leaders and stuff and and they were talking about the brain scans and some of these people in fearful situations for most people it doesn't even register it like it doesn't bother them at all so does this say genetic thing yeah so the belief with psychopathy is it's definitely biological and the imaging studies have shown that very clearly there's likely the genetic piece is still being argued because think about it far far more men have been diagnosed with psychopathy than women so we don't see there's no almost no research on female psychopaths do we though we see them an interesting speculation be someone like elizabeth holmes is she a malignant narcissist or is she a psychopath like i've watched everything on her i can because you don't see women in these situations much she's somewhat i haven't talked to her so i don't know right but it's that but the key with the psychopath is they feel no remorse that's that's the issue they feel truly no remorse the narcissist actually does feel some remorse okay for anything from even smaller time stuff like infidelity to big ticket stuff i embezzled 20 million dollars so a madoff type reaction psychopathy okay that's a great absolutely didn't register like this is really inconvenient that you're doing this to me but no circumspect sense of how this impacted other people do they fake it as if they fake it they can fake it they absolutely can fake it but it really it's like an aftermarket thing like about this was about 10 hours too late like this should have been what you led with another one was that guy larry god what the hell was his larry nasser he was one of the physicians in the whole gymnastics issue of all the gymnasts who were sexually abused i dug deep into that case because he felt so psychopathic all he never ever expect express remorse to the girls and young women he harmed all he said is basically this is a pain in the neck why are you wasting so much time you're hearing similar discourse from a gynecologist who sexually abused countless scores of girls and women over 20 years at usc just know you're inconveniencing me with all these proceedings i'm like oh my god you've destroyed hundreds of lives there's no that doesn't register a narcissist would show more guilt and shame under those conditions so sociopath sociopath this is a less articulated condition a lot of people incorrectly interchangeably use the term psychopath and sociopath the psychopath is considered to be again that calm cool callous calculated smart person who's just able to barrel through in a remorseless way and we have much more evidence that that is a central nervous system phenomenon the sociopath is likely someone who was and again criminologist and everyone argued about this that may be more of something that was created by the environment somebody who was beaten up a lot by a father or a caregiver somebody who grew up on the streets or under conditions of tremendous tremendous deprivation or danger and that under different conditions the story could have probably gone a little bit differently they also tend to be more combative you'll probably see a lot more sociopaths in prison than you will psychopaths sociopath gets into a bar fight a psychopath would never you know diminish themselves in that way they'll find a way to slowly destroy that person's life or kill them and no one will ever know the difference kind of thing so whereas a sociopath they'll fight they'll get into a street fight they'll get into a bar fight they're less regulated they tend to be less successful um the big difference that's been brought up in the literature is the psychopath at some level doesn't understand the function of rules like why is this a rule like why can't she did me wrong in a drug deal like why can't i kill her like please help me understand this a sociopath knows he shouldn't kill her and still will interesting yeah so there's a there's a not knowing but that said even though there's a not knowing in psychopathy psychopathy cannot be used as part of the insanity defense in the united states that has been taken off the table what yeah i mean is there any idea how many people in the united states this example are a north america or sociopath psychopath i would guess with psychopathy merciful it's probably under two percent it's a pretty low frequency phenomenon it's rare it's terrifying and interestingly some of the professions like i was reading some research on the top 10 professions that have psychopaths in them and amongst those were surgeon ceo and clergy yeah those are the professions that attract psychopaths wow wow so statistically speaking if there's anything there then there's a 30 percent of this audience and narcissists then um maybe maybe yeah i mean in this i mean again i don't want to be the ones that you do because i love this group has been amazing yeah but what you might have find in a group like this because everyone is so successful is sort of what i consider just sub threshold narcissism like just enough cockiness to get you into trouble and i would love to sit with each and every one of you and find out what your close personal relationships are like because it may very well be that that's where it's not working as well as it could be and again you may have also gotten lucky joe because you're you and you might have gotten a hundred percent entrepreneurs where there's not a single system in the room listen is a little of it going to make you successful in business sure because if her and i are vying for the same job and i like oh she's so sweet i'm going to give her all the intel we're in this together i may not get the job but if girlfriend's like girlfriend's like yeah she's going she's like i'm not telling her everything right that's you know is that narcissism i think is that probably heavy-handed use of the word but that that lack of empathy i mean that that to me is what the whole thing sort of hinges on and then when we talk about the origins of narcissism i think people can self-reflect but i got to tell you so far my alarms maybe have gone off one and a half times today at the most how do i develop one of the most amazing entrepreneurial group of givers without narcissists in it like how awesome would that be like because i i'm part of many other groups and speak at a lot of different things and i you know and some of them are just filled with narcissists part of it is the how much of your discourse is in us them discourse you know like we're the chosen and everyone else is a loser i haven't heard that once today you know whereas other groups will say you're the chosen being here those other schmucks don't know what they're doing so if someone else was doing what you're doing and kept jason kept saying joe polish is a hack he's an ass he's an idiot that's probably going to generate sort of a more kind of a narcissistic kind of groove i have not once here heard another entrepreneurship development program been to be spoken about in such a bad way today so maybe they're out there but as a as a newbie who's here with fresh ears it's not like this group exists to denigrate and devalue others i would say that kind of uh energy would probably cultivate that you know that sort of sense we are the chosen we it's us and um nothing's better than us so that kind of you're not even though this feels incredibly exclusive and everyone i'm meeting i'm like every neurotic where's where is he tucker is like don't let it bother you i'm like oh my god everyone here's so successful smart and and yet it's um but everyone's humble yeah you know so i that but i think that might do with the curation what what's what's fine too like i don't ever want this group to be known for me i wanted to be known for the people in the group you know that sort of thing and what i've noticed about a lot of people that lead uh groups is they have to be the star they have to be this i really just try to curate right because there's people that are way smarter way better speakers of me i just am a curator right and a lot of groups they if they're not the main star there and everyone's beneath them it just doesn't work for them they they can't function that way and it's it's quite fascinating now having said that i've said this jokingly that anyone that writes a book anyone that's a speaker anyone that puts themselves out there publicly has some level of low self-worth low self-esteem wants the world to applaud them they want validation 100 how do you know if you're a narcissist meaning you know i'm point like what what are how do i identify certain traits that i could as an aware if i'm aware can do something to better myself so let me ask you this do you have contempt for human emotion meaning um contempt like you know she's let's say she also started you know like huh yeah don't be such a whiner or like she starts telling us something personal and it's like oh come on get over it i rarely say stuff like that because i i'm with the work that i do with in genius recovery with one of my main goals is to reduce suffering even with this group it's not a great i haven't figured out how to market it it's a lot easier to tell someone how to come into here and build and grow a business than it is to reduce entrepreneurial suffering but i'd rather reduce entrepreneurial suffering because if i can lower that then they're going to succeed in far greater levels but is that a long way of saying you don't have contempt for people's emotions like you know in other words yeah that's rare i would say don't feel that feeling or try to shut it down or even just be grossed out by feelings like you know people say oh my god like there's too many people talking about their feelings i don't want to be bothered with this i'd say in the past maybe i may have had a tinge of that but i don't think i don't think to me when i say people i get probably at least 10 emails a day from people all over the world who email me and say [ __ ] i've watched your videos i think i'm a narcissist and then they'll give me examples of it and yeah they're pretty spot-on like they probably are and at this point likely things have gone wrong likely a partner left them they're alienated from kids they might have lost their jobs they've had a wake-up call and now they're reflecting on that and so i think that again it is that awareness that you really don't have empathy that you do have contempt for other people's feelings and that people who really do believe they deserve special treatment for no other reason that because they're them right you know they're too good to wait in a line and that they have been that screamy person at the flight attendant or the clerk or whomever and they're like ew like i i'm i'm that person i can't handle disappointment i tell clients but it takes me probably about three to six months before we get to the you're a narcissist session wow it takes a while i really have to get them to trust me you know how do they respond and they're like yeah you're right or you've got my number only once somebody got mad but by and large they they they're like yeah you know i'm down with that and so and then we start doing the work which never really works but that's okay let me ask you about that because there seems to be the notion that there's not a lot of hope for these people depends on what you call hope right and i think i was sharing with you a particular story of somebody else working on a real titan in his field like probably if not the most one of the most successful and in the entertainment industry at that so kind of household naming and what was fascinating about this guy was when we got down to it and he's like he was copped to being a narcissist then he got mad at me he said you know where you [ __ ] me up you made me a self-aware narcissist now i know i'm an [ __ ] like i was pretty blissfully like not owning my being an ass no i know i'm an [ __ ] and but then he became very aware of his contempt for people's neediness for people's emotion for people's feeling like that really really bothered him and it and then where we really ended in the long story short towards the end of our course of therapy he became a little bit more mindfully aware he was but in all that awareness he said i'm not made for human relationships he said i will he's heterosexual i will never be able to give a woman fully what she needs it is wrong for me to be doing this and i said thank you i was waiting for you to get there on your own yeah and so he has lots of friends he has a very robust social network he has kids i mean it's not like this guy's sitting in an apartment somewhere i mean he's got a very rich life but that idea of intimacy that one-on-oneness he does not have the bandwidth he does not have the interest he does not have the capacity and he finally had the that sense to say i don't have it i said how about you don't ruin any more lives like how's about you pull out of that game for a while maybe forever he's older and so he's like yeah i'm done and we figured out how he was going to have sex because he still likes sex and you can pay for it and pay for it with the same person so it didn't feel unseemly and she'd show up at a regularly scheduled time every other week and but she'd be out at 2 am he got what he needed in terms of touch and closeness he'd get massages and you know things i mean we really thought this through and but then he's like yeah i said really you should stay away from close relationships this ain't your game boy yeah is that a win i think so yeah better than the alternative he was fine with it because he's like he said i have been swimming upstream my whole life on this one three marriages you know i mean like he just couldn't do it he couldn't do it some people kind of can sometimes we can get people to be okay at work but they can't do the relationship thing because i think the intimacy bandwidth you need for a job is obviously far less than you need for a close relationship hey i hope you're enjoying this video and i want to let you know that i have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there let me ask you because it brings something up so all the work that i um it's interesting that i built one of the you know this this wonderful connection network of of people uh when i grew up feeling so disconnected right and feeling abandonment and abuse and sexual and physical and everything in between uh and there's a guy years ago uh that he's a 70 year old gay man i never met him in person but i talked with him on the phone and he gave me a definition of intimacy and he spends his time sponsoring people with sexual addictions and he said intimacy is a mutual exploration of a shared safe place abuse is anything that takes away the safe place and addictions are what we do to make ourselves feel good when we don't have a safe place and i i thought about that a lot saying okay you know because i never felt safe when i was growing up especially if you had any sort of abuse if you don't hear the words i love you if you don't have anyone to go to for help if you're getting abused it's it's very it's very scary and with um narcissist or like even psychopaths are you saying if the so that definition i just gave addictions are what we do to make ourselves feel good when we don't have a safe place is narcissism a coping mechanism or is it how would you describe it in terms of because i don't know if they feel safe or unsafe or how to because i'd like to almost ask you about connection and intimacy from the experience of the the narcissist in some ways it's and again and tucker made also he was i had ate lunch with him that's why he's featuring this conversation but yeah he um you know a lot of it does go back to early experience narcissism is made and it's made by circumstances these people are not born this way okay it's made by circumcision it's made by circumstance now may a child be born with a temperament that makes them more likely to become narcissistic yes they tend to be a little bit intense you know probably like the colicky baby can become a colicky adult kind of thing like there is sort of an intensity they're not an easy going sort of a kid by any stretch and some people are they're just more easy going even if terrible things happen to them i would say 85 and 80 of my clinical population has experienced sexual trauma before the age of 16. it's pretty normative men and women and so obviously that does something to boundaries and trust however the bulk of them go through the world i mean they're wonderful parents i mean it's not like this is a guarantee that you've all but this person's all but doomed to you know a terrible future they've found their way through it what they tend to do is be much more self-denigrating but for many narcissistic individuals there are early histories characterized by neglect frank trauma inconsistency chaos but they're also early histories characterized by being spoiled like too much material indulgence without feeding the emotional needs of the child listen a person of means may want to be able to give their kids a really nice bike and a trip to disney world and all that but if at the same time that child is also not being given a rich emotional vocabulary an opportunity to share feelings in in a appropriate way and parents that are present psychologically more often than not when you have that indulgence the over-indulgence of the material with the under-indulgence of the emotional that's actually the classical way we create narcissism and then again and then the people who experience some trauma neglect neglect is a parent who may actually put them in a beautiful home with lots of things in the best schools but the parents are nowhere to be found this is a huge problem in los angeles i see it on my kit my my kids peers i'm like these i think listen i worked from the day my oldest maya was six weeks old forward just was it was required i did the best i could but i'm shocked that people were like we're going off for three weeks and we're leaving you with top flight nannies well fast forward that 35 years and they're in my office and they're dealing with that trauma of abandonment they were left with the best caregivers possible they just want their parents and so this this is not something that is just a child that's abused and neglected because they're impoverished this happens across the spectrum and so i think that that narrative often fuels narcissism why the world isn't safe so that lack of safety fuels insecurity that insecurity that unempathic lashing out and in this way my goal and it's a tough one to create is to say please be compassionate to narcissistic people because they've often had a rough start and then get the hell out of dodge and don't engage them because you can't win at that game so i'm saying you do not need to be cruel you do not need to call them out in a cruel way you don't have to do a smear campaign but you're not going to make this work so it's a it's a it's you're almost telling two stories at the same because the nurse is saying why doesn't anyone want anything to do with me i'm like you're not a nice person to them you know and i understand why you're not a nice person but that's the balancing act here people that are here or will be watching this that are in a relationship uh with a narcissist currently or are tethered to one because of exes or relatives or things like that what suggestion i mean you cover this in the book you know but i'd love to have you touch on uh some of this because i think you just really understand it well i say things like i hate to say and it's gonna sound very dismissive don't engage with them a lot of people once but you start engaging you find yourself defending yourself you find yourself over explaining things there's a classical behavior in narcissistic personality styles called gaslighting and when a person gaslights you they deny your reality the most classical manifestation of gaslighting is when somebody says you're being too sensitive or that never happened you know you're being gaslighted when you start recording conversations with your phone surreptitiously in your pocket for no other reason that you can play it back later and say i'm not crazy they really did say that the number of times people in these relationships will put the text up and say you see you said it to which the narcissist will say you're a vengeful [ __ ] you know that so they'll still turn your evidentiary base into a scathing analysis of your character okay you know what's interesting i have an individual that i've dealing with currently dealing with in my life that i've recorded conversations for that exact reason because i know that if it wasn't this person would say a reality that's not at all reality and i needed to get evidence of that so the the gaslighting sets this tone in a relationship where you feel chronically invalidated chronically devalued and frankly sometimes downright crazy you know again to the point where you're recording conversations and your your house looks like the pentagon for all the cameras and they don't care about the reality because i will tell you i've worked with couples one narcissist one not in my office and they will show video you say you didn't do that and they'll play the video clearly they said it and then the narcissist gets up and walks out of the office right you see so they're not going to engage in it so the engagement is where people get hurt so i tell people don't engage you're saying how the heck are you supposed to talk to someone if i don't engage with them so let's say he and i are sharing custody of a child and he's narcissistic i'm not going to get into how's work going how you doing like five o'clock i'll be there to get the kids that we're done we're good he's got all the information he needs okay what's wrong with you why aren't you talking to me more come on say i know you know we we're good we have our pick-up time now your heart's racing as this is happening this is taking a physiological toll on you if you're dealing with a narcissist sorry but you know but it's um but you know it's the he's a lawyer so i'm not engaging him then the other mistake people do is they start explaining themselves no no what really happened was this but you misheard and then i'm like oh man you're screwed now like you're not coming out of this one right maybe there's a reason why sometimes narcissists are drawn to professions where arguing works like being a lawyer because they argue better than anyone because they're able to lift a lot of the emotion out of situations because they don't bring it in so where we're often arguing from heart they're arguing from logic which anyone who's ever been in a relationship knows that doesn't work yeah okay so it's though i would say don't engage don't defend don't um don't explain and don't personalize this is them this is their madness leave it housed in them so while they're like this you just stay i always say you in fact somebody one of my clients put it beautifully he said i have a cone of protection i now have so he literally is like i imagine a cone on me and it keeps me perfectly still so while they're going off i'm completely serene and i really say find that inner serenity meditate find some sort of mantra you can use while you're dealing with them you're not even listening to them now and you're like you know it's time to go it was so good to see you and you use calm voice you i call it a hostage negotiator voice you know it's very easy to inflame them so you really have to keep evenly toned and so there's that piece of it too and also don't make excuses for them the reason so many narcissistic individuals get so deep into our hearts and get so deep into our careers is we give them a second chance a fifth chance a 55th chance we make excuses he had a tough start in life i say those are two separate conversations he had a tough start in life and he's treating you like [ __ ] right okay you don't need to be mean to him he did have a tough start in life he is treating you like [ __ ] you need to get out of this relationship yeah so it's about so exactly it's about self-preservation the beauty of the of this though is man i've become so more aware of noticing this behavior in subtle ways that i never did before it's almost like when you get really stung by one then you start to see you know you do start to see it and you also start to become especially you've really been hurt you know anyone who's been through a relationship or a really bad business dealing and i've had i've had it happen in three interesting spaces in a family space in a professional space and it turned my career around permanently like it was like it was literally where my career should have gone left and ended up going right much to my toll and then it ended up it ended up exactly where i wanted it and then once in a personal space and i think that what does happen though is what you have to be able to endure and i don't know if you've run into this joe is that once you become the person who identifies that narcissistic individual whether it's colleague whether as potential partner friend whatever the the first play is to distance into distance quickly you know i hate to say and i've i've been criticized for this but i'm just going to put it out there i i called narcissism the second hand smoke of mental illness because you're just being near them is probably going to make you sick over time and there was a recent situation i'd been in professionally i'm part of an advisory board that convenes regularly in washington dc around mental health issues there was one guy i mean like if narcissism had a smell it was common off this guy very arrogant lots of swagger people who are charming and charismatic terrify me like when i meet a charismatic person i'm like i gotta go you know all my friends felt like when i was trying to date they were kind of like he's charismatic i'm like oh no absolutely so i was looking let's find someone awkward who's sitting in the corner doesn't have friends that's my guy and so um but uh you know what what got interesting is that you should be a spokesperson for every non-charismatic person that wants to be absolutely because the non-charismatic people are where the magic happens i mean they're so sweet and kind and loving and i think i understood what you said that uh psychopath and sociopath there may be a cns or a genetic component with psychopaths and then a environmentally created with sociopath do i understand you're saying there may be with narcissism there could be a neuroplastic rewiring is it something that we can reverse in terms of treatment yep and have you seen any connection with sensory integration disorder and narcissistic tendencies that's a great question so to your first point if you look at the research by elsa ronningstam and she's at at harvard medical school she has written some really neat really great theoretical and empirically based stuff on narcissism the biggest problem with narcissism research is it's based on very small sample sizes so the generalizability of the findings isn't not so great because there's not a lot of good treatment work done because they don't come into treatment they're you know 80 more likely to drop out of treatment so it's hard to do that work she does believe though that there's a potential with a narcissistic individual of what we call a corrective emotional experience that they cut they have an experience that engages in exactly the kind of rewiring you're talking about now here's where my role in this whole world gets interesting because i work more with survivors of narcissistic abuse than i work with the survivor with the actual narcissists a lot of people out there with stars in their eye eyes with mr charisma that they met at the cocktail party want to believe that they're going to be the corrective emotional experience the odds of you being the corrective emotional experience is the odds of you winning your sort of your march madness you know ticket like you're not it's not going to happen you're not you're not going to win in vegas you're not going to be the corrective emotional experience the corrective emotional experience is actually something we as therapists can watch unfold but even during my lunch my lunch period today i spent 15 minutes talking a narcissist off the ledge because he's 48 the girlfriend's 22 and he can't get his head around why she doesn't like spending time with him and i was like give you a couple reasons but i'm sorry you're hurt you know and so it's that entire you know i don't think and this is the fourth time i've walked him through this rodeo with four different inappropriately young women and so he's not getting it now i hate to say it but sadly sometimes the corrective emotional experience can be a tragedy it can be losing someone significant to you we don't want to program that well once your kid dies i'm sure everything's going to turn around for you like we don't want that as an intervention so it's the question of does that happen every so often the stars line up going to prison can sometimes be that corrective emotional experience i'd say for about two out of ten narcissists that go to jail or prison it ends up being a wake-up call like i don't want to do that again and i've let everyone down so i think that in a very small subset because of the lack of self-reflective capacity in narcissists they don't have the ability empathy is equal parts out and in the out part is me caring joe are you okay did you eat enough lunch is he you know is he bored right now like i'm worried about joe i'm worried about all of you but the in part is am i reflecting on my contribution to this like am i aware of how i'm reacting am i aware of my stuff they can't do either they can't do the out they can't do the in but so there is some possibility for that in terms of sensory integration stuff we could even argue this and extend it to people on the spectrum right there is a lot of argument like people say to me what's the difference between autism spectrum and narcissism there's a big difference okay people on the spectrum have a processing issue they cannot uptake and process social interaction and other environmental stimuli the same way because of a central nervous system issue that we're still trying to fully unravel that said in a child or an adult with autism spectrum when the empathic miss is pointed out to them they do not become defensive they do not become angry they very quickly said i say i didn't know and sometimes will express very authentic emotion at the thought that they may have hurt someone we see this all through the age span and immediately that's when we know because i have a lot of folks who come in women who will say i don't know if my husband's on the spectrum i don't know if he's narcissistic so we'll try some stuff i'll give him questions to try with him the next week and we're pretty much able to unplug it so that processing issue means that they can integrate new information and say i'm so sorry i hurt you i just didn't know and so that's and i think that would that would also go to other sensory integration experiences yeah that would be like that's what i'm wondering about because i've seen that the retraining of sensory integration disorder but it's a it's a minimum kind of a two-year if you're really on the spectrum and that survival mentality is number one right it's a two-year rewiring process before you kind of go okay we can hang out together a little and it's the same in narcissism any published research shows people have been in therapy for 18 months to 24 months good luck finding an insurer that's going to pay for that and that so you've got almost two years of multi-time a week therapy and still only a subset of those clients improve no one's got that kind of access so on a population level i'm not clear on how we're going to improve this what's the link between narcissism and addiction oh so strong think about it this is a person at the core of it narcissism is about emptiness i always say it's like a bucket with holes in the bottom no matter how much water no matter how much validation you put in it it's always coming and there's not enough times i can tell you you're wonderful and you're beautiful and you're smart and you're successful there's not enough anything to keep it full right so when someone feels empty what do they do they fill the hole and there ain't nothing that fills that hole like drugs and so it is so common and here's what i find when i work or behaviors right behaviors and i find this when i work with rehab centers addiction centers in fact you know tim you'll be able to speak to this too is i work with families who now are having a family member go into rehab right and their hope is well now they're clean they're sober they're home this is gonna be great everything's great and they come home and they're still an [ __ ] i'm like oh yeah they couldn't get rid of the narcissism sweet now he's just not using coke anymore now he's a grumpy narcissist because he's not using coke anymore so it's a you know i think that the two go together and what happens is we do know that narcissistic traits make maintaining sobriety a thousand times more difficult i would imagine again i would defer to you that people who are narcissistic are much more likely to relapse because the first time they come up against a disappointment it feels like the bottom has fallen out right so the easiest way to get back you know to get that soothing is to turn to drugs and alcohol so i i really do think that they're highly highly highly correlated i mean i would say well over 50 percent of the narcissistic personalities i've worked with in therapy had comorbid or past addictions wow interesting um i was going to ask you about the the forgiveness yeah that's a good note to end on yeah forgiveness is such a tough space because you know a lot of the psychological literature describes forgiveness as sort of a major mental illness antidote mental health antidote right you can get you will feel better if you forgive and you'll feel lighter and all kinds of peace and reconciliation work and all of that is written around forgiveness here's the rub in the west we like to put people on a schedule like hurry up forgive forgive everything's going to be so much easier if you just forgive your dad and can we just get over this no we cannot put these human processes on a schedule to me forgiveness is sort of a two-part kind of a process there's a letting go piece and there's forgiving forgiving is a much higher order concept because it involves no longer feeling resentful about what that person did to you and you know what some people are never going to get there i work with many like i said survivors of child sexual abuse and they say to me i don't want to forgive the person who did this to me and they've gone from therapists to therapists that say you need to forgive and i said [ __ ] them you do not need to forgive the person who did this to you i want you to let this go because you're carrying this weight you're making that more of your heavy soul weight can we help you put it down and no longer take responsibility for what happened to you and let you move forward but you don't have to forgive forgiveness is very much a something we try to sell in the west it's very much built into religion but here's the problem with forgiveness for a narcissist forgiveness is permission they're like this is cool i did i cheated on you and you're great that's permission to do that again rarely sadly does a narcissist integrate forgiveness as someone doing the divine for them right if i did something bad and someone forgave me i'd be like oh my god thank you and i mean you would forever monitor never to make that misstep again but for all the couples especially couples but i've also seen this happen in professional consultations i've done when the narcissist got forgiven nine times out of ten they went out and committed the same transgression again thinking that she forgave me before he forgave me before he or she is going to forgive me again and then what it does is it screws up your ability to forgive even in the healthy parts of your life because now that very that incredibly what i consider honestly divine space has been abuse so i think forgiveness is personal it doesn't always happen and for me the real goal is letting go and if you can get to the letting go which is really a sense of i am no longer going to carry this burden around but you know what i do feel resentful because you changed my life in a permanent way and i'm not okay with this change i feel different and i don't want to feel this and you made my [ __ ] life a little more unsafe so no i don't forgive you and that and i my practice is very focused on giving people enough forgiveness some people come around and sometimes the best i hope for is letting it go with indifference they see the cheater on the street 10 years later or they even see the abuser on the street 10 years later i'm like you know what i didn't feel a thing and that's when they feel empowered and then it doesn't even matter forgiveness becomes almost irrelevant okay i hope you found that video awesome and useful so if you want to get a free copy of my book i want you to click here and if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome click here go ahead they're over here do it now come on thank you watch them [Music]

Channel: Joe Polish

Views: 718,632

Rating: 4.8600135 out of 5

Keywords: dr. ramani, ramani durvasula, mental health, divorcing a narcissist, dr ramani, narcissistic abuse, toxic people, dr. durvasula, surviving narcissism, ramani durvasula narcissism, ramani durvasula borderline personality disorder, joe polish, joe polish genius network, genius network, mental health podcast, divorcing a narcissist husband, narcissistic abuse healing, narcissist, narcissistic personality disorder, narcissism, narcissist relationship

Id: qbFBOAmmu7Y

Length: 50min 42sec (3042 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Dominant_Claire]

Live Abuse Free on youtube (I honestly don't know her name) also talks a lot about narcissistic abuse if it helps anyone. She's also an expert

[u/pinea99le]

What a small world, I happened to find her YouTube channel 2 weeks ago when looking for psychologists on YouTube. I didn't know the book Rachel read was written by her.

[u/weeooweeoowee]

Her channel is https://youtube.com/c/DoctorRamani. I just wanted to share this interview as I really enjoyed it.