---
author: Big Think
date: '2026-10-30'
guest: ''
layout: post.njk
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxQL1LP2BM
speaker: Big Think
tags:
- narcissism
- emotional-abuse
- healing
- agency
- love-bombing
title: 拉马尼·杜瓦苏拉博士谈自恋型关系中的识别、疗愈与自主权
summary: 临床心理学家拉马尼·杜瓦苏拉博士指出，自恋型关系中的疗愈关键在于恢复自主权，而非必须离开关系。他提出‘90/10法则’，建议将心理资源从有毒关系转向健康社交网络，强调幸存者可通过重新叙事实现成长。
insight: ''
draft: true
series: ''
category: psychology
area: society-thinking
project: []
people:
- Dr. Ramani Durvasula
companies_orgs:
- Yale Online
- California State University, Los Angeles
products_models: []
media_books:
- 'It''s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People'
- Should I Stay or Should I Go?
status: evergreen
---
我是拉马尼·杜瓦苏拉（Dr. Ramani Durvasula）博士，一名临床心理学家，也是《这不是你的错：识别并摆脱自恋型人格者的伤害》（*It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People*）一书的作者。
Original English
I'm Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and the author of It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People.
Original English
>> This Big Think interview is brought to you by Yale online.
Ever wonder what makes a psychopath a psychopath? Turns out there's a Yale course for that.
Go beyond true crime and pop culture to discover what science actually tells us about psychopathic behavior.
Original English
>> Psychopaths are not so much better at lying than the average person. It's just they do it more frequently. They're the type of person that like you want to talk to at a bar all the time, but you definitely don't want to go home with later.
People with psychopathy know what's morally right and wrong. Their brains just don't compute the information in the same type of way. That's what a psychopath actually is.
Original English
>> Enroll in the Psychology of Psychopaths and find your next course at online.yale.edu.
Learn something worth sharing.
And now, back to the interview.
Original English
Chapter 1: How to identify narcissism.
>> In the early 2000s, I started becoming interested in narcissism, and actually in narcissism itself, while I was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and I was specifically looking at how narcissistic people made decisions and showed up in relationships.
Original English
But where it got really interesting for me was when I was in private practice, and more and more and more clients were coming in and describing relationship dynamics and partners and family members who had personalities very consistent with what I was looking at in the lab and studying narcissism, and I thought, "What would happen if you taught folks who are going through these relationships that this is indeed a pattern? It's just not a difficult relationship. It's a pattern." And as I started to do that, for a lot of people it was a lightbulb moment. And what really struck me is that the world of mental health, there was very little literature looking at the impact of personality styles like narcissism on relationships. And I found that with a few tweaks, we really could make leaps and bounds with people who are going through these relationships and really identified as a real phenomenon that when a person is in any kind of close relationship with a narcissistic person, whether it's an intimate relationship, a familial relationship, particularly a parent or even a workplace relationship, very similar things happen to a person in one of those relationships. So, ever since, you know, for the past few decades, I've been really focused on documenting this and figure out ways that we can work with people who are going through these relationships clinically and help them feel sane and ultimately grow after they've left these relationships or even if they stay in them.
Original English
I think there's many good books out there about narcissism and a lot of them are more in the research realm. Once we jump it into the self-help personal development space, one of the big errors I see is that the assumption is if somebody is in any kind of relationship with a narcissistic person, the only solution is to get out. And that is simply not accessible to the vast majority of people.
Original English
Obviously, when we're taking on this issue of the problem with what we hear about narcissism and not everyone can leave, I'm very aware that in some relationships, it can be dangerous. And obviously in relationships where there's acute imminent danger, violence, we're now talking about safety plans. We're really talking about what traditionally has been talked about in the world of domestic violence. But in the vast majority of narcissistic relationships, there's no physical violence. There's no imminent threat of danger.
Original English
What's happening is a person who is in a very, very confusing situation. But when the books are saying, "Well, if you're in a relationship with a narcissist, you've got to get out." Now people will often double down on what's happening in the relationship because you're saying, "Oh, I don't want to get out. So maybe that's not really what's happening, right?" It's a denial of what is happening in the relationship, which is a real risk. My work from the beginning has almost been agnostic about leaving. If a person has to stay, if a person wants to leave, they can still heal. The guidance is actually pretty similar on recovery and growth and all of that. The difference is, frankly, for the people who decide to leave, they're going to be dealing with a lot of kerfuffle in the beginning. There's going to be anger and how dare you and who do you think you are and post-separation abuse. For the people who stay, they're having to sort of navigate an ongoing stressor. But I do think it's a mistake for books that say, "Well, now that you know you're in one of these relationships, the next step is to get out." That's not at all the case. And since the beginning, and I've written multiple books on it, my first book on narcissism in relationships was called Should I Stay or Should I Go? I was already setting it out there as this is a choice. And one of the biggest elements that everyone needs to know about healing, it's one of the key elements of healing is something we call agency. Agency is just another word for choice. When a person's in a emotionally abusive relationship, like a narcissistic relationship, choice goes out the window. You don't feel like you can choose anything. You're kind of along for this manipulative, abusive ride. But when healing means choice, that means you do have a choice. You might say, "I'm not leaving this. I don't want to live separately from my kids." Or "I'm part of a big family system and this isn't going to work in my culture." It's knowing that I'm making this choice to not end this relationship or go no contact or cut it off. However, I'm also making the choice to engage with it differently. And that's really where my work has focused on this this concept of choice and that it's not always about leaving. And in fact, I'd say well over half of cases, it's not about leaving.
Original English
Narcissism is definitely having its moment right now. So many people are using this word. so many people are talking about it, which actually gives me a little bit of a chuckle because I've been doing this work since the early 2000s and nobody was talking about it. In fact, my own mentor and grad from graduate school said, "What are you doing? Like, no, what is this? Like, this is a silly thing." I said, "No, no, I think there's something there." But really, anyone who's working in narcissism at that point, you were really kind of like way in the background. And then things changed. Things changed in geopolitics, social media came along, and all of these forces created this world where this in attention-seeking, this look at me became a really, really big thing. And even the patterns, the entitlement and the grandiosity, like, we were seeing this, we're seeing this in celebrity, we were seeing this in corporate spaces, we're seeing this in political spaces. And as world elections happened and all of that, this word was really kind of again having its moment. I would say pretty much since the 2016, 2018 and forward. And when we look at it, there's other words, toxic was the word of the year, gaslighting was the word of the year, even rizz, the young people's word for charisma, has even had its word of the year moment. So, all these narcissism-adjacent words are also sort of entering the discourse.
Original English
So, I think there's a lot of social tectonic plates moved at the same time to make narcissism really have its moment. But it's always been there. I challenge anyone to open a history book for as long as there was a recorded human history, everybody written about in the books was narcissistic. They were grandiose, they were waging wars and killing innocent people. If they were not narcissistic, they might have been downright psychopathic. But this idea of people focused on power, dominance, control, selfishness with little apparent empathy for other people, these are the folks we've been writing about and talking about.
Original English
Emotional abuse, physical abuse and violence in intimate relationships has been normative for a very long time, even in family systems. In fact, I'd argue now in 2026, we may actually be nicer to each other now than we ever have been in history. And even this word narcissism, it only entered the psychology space
I
Original English
don't know about a hundred, hundred twenty years ago. And even those original kinds of conversations about narcissism were more of what we think of as like that grandiose, self-enhancing, look at me kind of person. We've now developed a much more subtle understanding, but this dynamic has always been present. I would argue this dynamic has always caused lots of problems. I just don't think we became a trauma-informed and mental health-informed enough world until now to talk about it. But now, of course, that everybody's talking about it, we're not getting it right.
Original English
When we think of narcissism clinically, we're talking about a personality style, right? There's lots of different kinds of personality styles out there, some more adaptive than others, things like agreeableness and conscientiousness. Narcissism is considered more of a maladaptive personality style, because in general, the traits that comprise narcissism put a person at odds with other people, right? There's the selfishness and the low empathy and all of that. And narcissism falls under a much bigger banner of a personality style called antagonism. So, it's sort of like if you view antagonism as a moon, narcissism is one of its big satellites, and other stuff hangs out there, like psychopathy and all of that.
Original English
The most common core traits that we see in narcissism are what I call sort of the grandiosity complex, and that takes in stuff like arrogance, entitlement, sort of fantasy assumptions about their lives. I'm going to have the best car, I'm going to have the hottest partner, all of that. There's variable and low empathy.
Original English
There is pathological selfishness.
Original English
There is superficiality and vanity, really only being concerned with surface-level stuff, status-oriented things, that those sorts of issues.
Original English
There is envy of other people, or they think other people envy them, so there can be a defensiveness. Attention, admiration, and validation seeking. All of those things together, and you kind of got to have them all come together as what we would consider narcissism.
Original English
But now, when we get into where antagonism narcissism, sort of those things come together, what we start to see, too, is that narcissistic people don't do well in the face of frustration, stress, or disappointed. They can be very emotionally dysregulated, and that can mean that they lash out noisily, angrily, and reactively, or they become very silent, sullen, withdrawn, and withholding.
Original English
They can be jealous, they can be competitive, they can be vindictive.
Original English
So, the antagonism, sort of the antagonistic list, can get wider and wider, depending on sort of specific elements of the of the narcissistic person, but the key thing to remember when we're thinking about how to conceptualize what narcissism is, is that it's on a continuum from mild to severe. It's not an either-or. People ask the wrong question. They'll say, "Are they a narcissist or not?" And I'm like, "That's the wrong question." It's really a a question of how narcissistic is this person. I mean, obviously, at one level, not at all. But once we get into the narcissism spectrum, at the low end, we're talking about mildly narcissistic folks. This is where we're really talking about kind of like There's it's like a man baby. They're selfish, and they're they don't grow up, and they don't take on adult responsibilities. They are entitled, and they're grandiose, and they're still thinking and talking about the rocket ship they're going to build to the moon, or the flying truck, or whatever it is that they're trying to do. Their empathy is variable, but it's at a level that feels annoying and frustrating. You wouldn't want to be married to someone like this, because it is like being married to an overgrown teenager. If you were having to rely on them, this is a difficult parent to have, because the parent is sort of caught up in their sort of immature flights of fancy that they're not present for their child. But, a lot of us have friends who are mildly narcissistic. I mean, fun at a party, but not someone you're going to take your problems to.
Original English
When you take the roller all the way up to the severe end of the narcissism spectrum, now you're talking about traits that have a vibe that's even more congruent with things like psychopathy, with seeing things like malignant narcissism. This is where all those traits become much more severe, much more severe entitlement. But, we also see other dynamics show up more profoundly. Control and things like isolation, taking advantage of vulnerabilities, or what we call exploitativeness.
Original English
There can be coercion, there can be menace and threats, and really a sense of danger.
Original English
People in a relationship with someone at that level of narcissism are actually terrorized. They're scared. They might look like they have symptoms, or may literally have complex post-traumatic stress. Most people have who are narcissistic, and most people in relationships with narcissistic people, it's falling in the middle of this spectrum. What I'd call almost like level four to seven narcissist. And here we're talking about the moderate narcissism. This is not without harm. These are relationships characterized by all the selfishness and variable empathy, but also there can be betrayal, lies, manipulation, instability, anger, blame shifting, all the stuff, and it's there pretty consistently.
Original English
At the severe end, the person is often so controlled and isolated, we're often having to do very, very different kinds of intervention. At the mild end, it is what it seems like. Again, you're you're sort of dealing with an overgrown child. The moderate end, it does do real harm. And in fact, I think in this moderate part of the spectrum is where the field of mental health comes up short. And even the people in the relationships aren't quite sure what it is they're seeing.
Original English
So, that's what narcissism is. A big mistake people think is that narcissism's a disorder, and it's not. There is something called narcissistic personality disorder. And really, it's taking all those traits, and a licensed mental health clinician recognizing that all those traits are long-standing and a long pattern and resulting in problems for a person. So, there's plenty of people out there who are narcissistic, but who have never seen a psychologist or someone like that and gotten a diagnosis. And there's people out there who have been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and frankly, their narcissism is no more severe than someone who hasn't been diagnosed. It just requires someone going into therapy and a lot of therapists don't give this diagnosis for a variety of reasons. The stigma, insurance companies, the whole thing.
Original English
The important thing to know about personality is that it's stable over the lifespan. Now, there's some interesting work out there that suggests some flexibility, Dan Siegel's work where it can actually be there's some sense that personality can kind of be shifted through therapeutic work, but my argument would be the more maladaptive styles like narcissism are much, much less amenable to any kind of shift as a result of therapy. And there's actually a really interesting study done in 2024 by Orth that looked at this idea of the traits comprising narcissism as being stable over the lifespan. In fact, if anything, in older age, there was a little bit of a drop-off. That kind of tracks. Takes a little bit of energy to be a bragging arrogant narcissist. You got to walk around, you got to brag. It's time-consuming. I think as people get older, work means something different. Social relationships take on a different tenor. You'll see a softening in older age, but what they did show is a stability in these traits over the lifespan, which really, really hearkens to the idea that narcissism is in fact a personality style. Personality is kind of resistant to change. Even agreeable people, a flexible trait, you're not going to take an agreeable person and turn them into someone antagonistic. I mean, that's would be a strange thing to do in therapy, but I mean, theoretically, if you could change an antagonistic to agreeable, if the belief is there, you should be able to take an an person and turn them antagonistic. Now, one would argue, "No, because agreeableness helps us get along with other people." But, it's it's a personality. It's not likely to change, and it's stable. And that's what narcissism is.
Original English
Those are the traits. Narcissism translates
Original English
into a whole bunch of behaviors, manipulation, gaslighting, invalidation of other people, blame shifting, lack of accountability, all that stuff is associated with those traits. But, the other piece to remember about narcissism is we have these traits, the low empathy and the entitlement and so on and so forth. But, underlying all of that, what appears to be the case is this unprocessed insecurity, shame, vulnerability, and this very, very fragile ego, fragile sense of self. So, what that means is the best way to think of it is that the narcissistic person is this cauldron of insecurity, and they develop this suit of armor, the entitlement, the grandiosity, the selfishness, to kind of walk through the world as though they're somehow more special than anyone to keep all that insecurity at bay.Original English
But, it also explains why narcissistic people get angry so quickly, get they're reactive so quickly, because if anything pings all of that unprocessed shame, it's like, boom, it comes right at you. So, it could be a bad review at work. It could be a passing comment at home. It could be the sense that you gave too much attention to an attractive waiter. It could be that you showed up late to their birthday party. You never know what's going to set someone one of these personalities off. But, whatever it is, it hits that shame. And instead of being vulnerable with that shame, the narcissistic person lashes out at anyone who activated it. And so, that insecurity is always there. It's like, think of it as a volcano. It always feels like it's puffing out a bit, and then at one point it's going to blow. That's what it is. But, the core of the narcissistic person is very, very unprocessed shame and vulnerability.Original English
There was a really great study that came out, oh, I want to say 2018 by Krizan and Herlache. And they were talking about this thing called the narcissism spectrum model, the vulnerable and the grandiose, and the different presentations. And one thing that these authors came to was this idea of sort of entitlement kind of being the trunk of the tree. This consistently cut through all subtypes of narcissism. Whereas the grandiose narcissist may be more arrogant and anti-great and extroverted, we don't see that in vulnerable narcissism. But both groups remain very, very entitled. That Again, entitled to special treatment, entitled to not have to follow the rules. Just this general sense of I'm special. Bad things should never happen to me. Nothing is ever fair to me. Those tend to be the rants. But the entitlement tends to be a universal.Original English
I think if we cut looked across all narcissistic people, we might see some of the qualities to greater or lesser degrees, but the entitlement remains consistent. Entitlement is challenging because even that isn't always exactly We're not always clear what it is that we're looking at. Like for example, the entitled person really feels like they should not ever have to experience stress. How can there be traffic? I can't believe there's traffic on a day I have to drive. You know, like, well, because there's traffic every day at 8:00. This is not a newsflash, but it's the day they had to drive. So how dare there be traffic? So even some of those things we don't always immediately clock them as entitlement, but it's such a universal quality of these relationships. And so that research I found that study really fascinating because it really tied together this idea of what does sort of organize this very kind of subtle, nuanced, varied trait. And I agree with their assessment that it's entitlement.Original English
The key to remember about a personality style like narcissism is that it's made up of multiple strands, right? So some people say, well, is every selfish person narcissistic? Isn't a person who's just entitled and a jerk in a restaurant? Is that person narcissistic? Maybe.Original English
But it's if you think of it, all these traits have to hang together. Selfishness by itself does not qualify a person as narcissistic. Entitlement by itself does not qualify a person as narcissistic. Think of it this way. If I gave you an egg, you don't say, "Thanks for the pasta." You don't say, "Thanks for the cake." You say, "Thanks for the egg." Because for that egg to be pasta, for that egg to be a cake, for that egg to be egg salad, it has to be combined with other things, right? So we An egg is an egg until it starts combining with other stuff. Entitlement is entitlement until it starts combining with other stuff. Now, is the probability that an entitled person could be narcissistic higher? Absolutely, because it's a defining trait.Original English
But in and of itself, for example, a person who may have grown up with tremendous wealth and power through family connections may present to the world as entitled, but it may you may actually find out their empathy is quite intact. So they might expect special treatment cuz they've always gotten special treatment. But if you say like, "Hey, you weren't very nice to that person." That entitled person may be very accountable and say, "I'm so sorry. I was rushing. I had no right." You wouldn't see that accountability in a narcissistic person. So it's not just one trait, it's all the traits together.Original English
It's the traits all the traits together also showing up in these behaviors. And then we'll see, for example, the absence of certain things. Narcissistic people don't tend to be, for example, genuinely accountable. So to say a selfish person is narcissistic is a bit of a leap. We'd have to establish other conditions before we take one trait and jump it, but this is a real problem in the current, especially the online conversation about narcissism. There's people out there saying, "My boyfriend cheated on me. He's a narcissist." I'm like, "Maybe he is, but I need to hear more of your story." Like give us more. If all the guy did was go to Las Vegas and cheat on you, he may be a jerk. I'm not sure he's narcissistic. We'd need to ask more questions. So, it's not that simple, and I think we're trying online and in other spaces to simplify something that's actually a kind of nuanced and subtle construct.Original English
The evidence base supports the idea that narcissism is not something someone is born with, but it's more of a social developmental phenomenon, just like all personality. Personality isn't Someone's not born narcissistic. Someone's not necessarily born agreeable. Now, there is a biological piece to our personality. That's called temperament. Okay? We're born with temperament. That's inherited. That can set up a biological vulnerability depending on the child's temperament. Some Some kids do have more difficult to soothe um behaviorally difficult, if you will, temperaments. What happens then? The rest of personality is largely shaped by the environment. Does a child feel safe? Are there safe adults to attach to? Is there consistency? Is there freedom from violence? Is the child attuned to all the stuff, right? And you put all that together, and personality shapes.Original English
Now, personality doesn't really kind of I always say call it like a Jell-O mold, right? It's pure liquid when somebody's a little kid. In adolescence, the Jell-O mold's kind of bouncy. And by the time we get to somewhere between 25, 26 years old, you now have a Jell-O mold that'll pop, and it'll hold its shape. And that's really because the frontal lobes of the brain are the last part of the brain and a lot of stuff that comprises personality sits there and its relationships with other parts of the brain, especially things like inhibition, holding back on some of our behavior. Teenagers do and say what they want. By the time we get into adulthood, we learn to hold back on that. Even things like empathy tend to be a little bit more conditional in adolescence, more consistent in adulthood. So, over that 25 years, our first 25 years of life, personality shaping, I personally don't feel comfortable using the word narcissistic in any consistent way unless somebody's well over 25 years of age.Original English
And I always say narcissism is one of those stories that could be told backwards, but not forward. Show me a sullen, combative, difficult, selfish and I'll say call me in like 10 years and we'll talk. But show me a difficult, combative, selfish, unempathic 27-year-old, I'm like, yeah, probably. And we're going to look back and they were very likely a really tough 17-year-old, too. So, difficultOriginal English
teenagers don't always become narcissistic, but difficult adults were almost always difficult teenagers, if that makes sense. And listen, other than one time in my entire career, I have very, very rarely encountered cases where every sibling in a multi-sibling family was narcissistic. It's usually one, and then the other siblings are not. I mean, they may be anxious, they may have other stuff going on, but they're not narcissistic.Original English
And so, the question being becomes, when do we really know someone's narcissistic? And I would argue, probably not until they're over 25 years of age, but the signs and the signals were there all along. It's just I don't like using that word in people, where especially adolescents, where there's a kind of developmental appropriateness to sort of I don't know. We call it I calling it a self-centeredness is that it's a lot of work to be an adolescent. An adolescent is kind of this really difficult combination of a toddler and an adult, right? So, they're still having tantrums like a little kid, they're being viewed as adults by the world, and so a lot of teenagers are great with their friends and terrible to their parents. So, their parents think they're narcissistic, their friends think they're cool.Original English
By the time that all tracks into adulthood, many people will notice like there's something a little off about this person, but the challenge with narcissism is they can present different ways with different people, but that real core antagonism, it needs a minute for that to sort of set.Original English
There's this concept that I wrote about write about called the C-suite when we talk about narcissism, which is fitting, right? That's C-suite leadership. But the piece we have to remember about narcissism is if a person was leading with just selfishness, entitlement, grandiosity, even stuff like victimhood and all this other stuff that, you know, woe is me, why isn't everything going my way? Wouldn't be very attractive, would it? And yet, narcissistic people seem to be very attractive, having their moment, getting all the attention. Why is that?Original English
That takes us to this idea of the C-suite. And the C-suite are these traits, which all happen to start with C. Things like charm, charisma, confidence, credentials, comfort, curiosity. What do I mean by those? These are traits that when you first meet a narcissistic person, they're often what you're going to encounter. And they're traits and qualities that the world often encounters with a narcissistic person. So, they think they're meeting the most interesting, engaging, successful person.Original English
So, charm and charisma are exactly what they sound like. The very sort of socially successful, smooth, attuned, work a room, raconteur, be able to hold a conversation kind of a person. They really there's a magnetic quality. Not to all narcissists, but to many narcissistic people. It's why they're so great in politics. It's why they can be so great in business.Original English
Then we get into the stuff, the confidence part. The confidence part is really interesting, because in the leadership literature, there's been a real suggestion that the reason narcissistic people so often get promoted, and especially get promoted into leadership, is because they're so good at communicating their sense of confidence, even when they don't have any capacity. They may not know anything, but they're able to say like, I know that and I've got that. Whereas most of the rest of us have a probably more than that more neuroses than we need. We're like, oh, I'm not sure if I know that enough. Narcissistic person isn't fettered by things like, do I know how to do something? They'll communicate that, and the people making the decisions are like, well, this person seems to got it all together. Let's promote them. So, that's what I'm saying comes out initially at least as this communicated confidence.Original English
And the credentials part is they may not even be true. The narcissistic person is that person who manages to stick where they went into college in the first or second sentence after they meet you. So, it's you know, it's it like, yeah, well, yeah, I've been working at a Fortune 500 company for a while. Yes, well, well, I know when I was at Harvard, da da da da. So, they're really quick at being able to say like, yeah, when I worked with that famous director, they just get it in quickly. So, it's sort of like, I'm a player. I'm interesting.Original English
The comfort piece, that was something that hit me about again, it goes along with that communicated confidence. Narcissistic people initially when you meet them or in certain settings, can communicate, I've got it all figured out. I know how to do this. I'll take care of it. Don't you worry about a thing. It's very related to their sense of or their need for, I should say, their control. So, there's this comfort people may feel with like, well, this person's going to take care of everything. Everything is going to get figured out. And so, they can really sweep in as though like, I got it. I I got this. I got this. Don't you worry. And that can create comfort.Original English
And why does that comfort piece matter? Because it can make this narcissistic person seem very attractive, right? The charm, the charisma. We're told that these are valuable characteristics in a person, potentially in a partner, certainly in the workplace.Original English
And it also sets up this issue. The C-suite creates this really, really interesting problem or puzzle in the world of narcissism. The less contact you have with a narcissistic person, the less likely you are to see all of the unpleasant traits. You're more likely to see the kind of confidence, charisma, all the stuff that they want you to see. The more time a narcissistic person spends with people, the more some of those masks come off.Original English
And so, that's why an intimate partner, a child, a family member, an employee is often going to see the worst of the narcissistic person. There's a power differential, and like I said, the masks are coming off. They the narcissist no longer has to win that person over. But it's for why for the longest time people who are in any kind of narcissistic relationship feel sort of unheard or unseen cuz everyone's saying, "Oh, your mom's the best." Or, "Wow, you're married to such a great guy." And so, the person in the relationship has got to be, "I've got to be the one reading this wrong cuz everybody seems to like them, and everyone thinks they're great." And it's like the emperor's new clothes. I can't be the only one who sees this. And that's one of the more sinister elements of narcissism because what does happen is all these C-suite traits can lead the world to think this person's terrific. Initially, you might have thought this person was really cool. Then you see the truth of it, but the world still holds that initial kind of take.Original English
As I see it, there five distinct forms of narcissism. Grandiose, vulnerable, malignant, communal, and self-righteous. Each has very different features and different presentations. The core is the same, but the frosting on the cake is quite different.Original English
Grandiose narcissism is the form of narcissism that we've almost always traditionally equated with this word narcissism. The word grandiose tells us everything. These tend to be They have all the same the low empathy and the entitlement, but the grandiosity's really taking center stage. They're arrogant. They brag. They're snobby. They have all the answers. They can often be quite extroverted. So, in this form of narcissism, we see the person who holds court at a party. The charm and the charisma can really be on tap here. But they need a lot of attention. So, there's a lot of attention-seeking, and validation-seeking, and admiration-seeking, and self-enhancement. They have to be the center of attention. And so, as long as they're center of attention, everything's fine. And they usually set their lives up to be the center of attention. So, that's the grandiose presentation. Again, it's sort of that garden variety of narcissistic person that we often think of.Original English
Vulnerable narcissism is a model of narcissism that really only in the last 25 to 30 years has really gotten focus. And it is a It's very, very different. Again, core is the same, but it's very different than grandiose narcissism because at first blush to a lot of people, it doesn't even look like narcissism. Vulnerable narcissistic folks can actually beOriginal English
socially anxious, have negative mood states like depression, they're often victimized, sullen, disenfranchised, aggrieved, angry at the world, suspicious, feel like life has passed them by, but there's also the low empathy and the entitlement. But people will say, "If somebody is that down on their luck, how does this grandiosity show up?" Well, it shows up in what I call sort of aggrieved entitlement. "I'm smarter than everyone here. How am I not making more money than them?" Well, "It's easy for him to succeed. I'm 20 times smarter than him. I just didn't have the trust fund." So, it's this kind of "I'm great. I'm really smart, but the world never saw how great I was." And this "Well, why should I have to try so hard?" Or "I'm not working for some dum-dum where I'm so much smarter than them. I'm not taking orders for someone." It's not unusual for vulnerable narcissistic people to go from job to job to job and have troubles with things like hierarchy in a job because they can't get along with other people. They think they're smarter than everyone. That's the grandiosity.
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The tricky bit with vulnerable narcissism, you don't see as much of the charm and the charisma. You can sort of see this kind of sullen victimized confidence. Like, "Yeah, I know more than them. Obviously, I could fix that, but nobody ever trusts me to." So, you get this kind of double dose of arrogance and neurosis, and you're not quite sure what you're looking at. And because they're not as socially skilled, they're not walking in and dazzling the room, we don't even read it as narcissism. It's just that that It almost like hit you from behind all that again that being aggrieved and the angry and the sullen. It's a And if you're in a relationship with someone like this, it's like always having to carry around this big wet blanket. They're always unhappy. Like, "How long do we have to stay here? This wedding makes me sick. How could they spend so much money?" So, like everything becomes heavy and ick, and there's no capacity to be happy for other people. But because they look anxious, because they can look sad, because there's a lot of failure to launch in vulnerable narcissism, it tends to evoke emotions like pity from other people. So, whereas grandiose narcissism, you're like a bit dazzly, vulnerable narcissism is a bit sad.
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And what is interesting is that in grandiose narcissism, they actually do have pretty strong egos. Like, well, solid, healthier egos, I should say. Which is to say that if you put a grandiose narcissistic person in therapy, you could actually probably tweak things a little bit. But with vulnerable narcissism, the it's such a so much more complicated. There is so much more victimhood that can be a little bit harder to access that from a therapeutic standpoint. But it it looks different, but that core entitlement, grandiosity, low empathy, selfishness, even attention-seeking, but the attention-seeking isn't so much the "Look at me. Aren't I great?" but rather it's more of the I mean, I can't believe you're watching that nonsense on television. I could I could do that 20 times better right here and now. I could cook that meal. You're watching a cooking show. So, it's the "I could do Look at me. I could be better." But it's not put me on the stage.
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Malignant narcissism is often considered to be the most severe manifestation of narcissism. It's here that we see more interpersonally dangerous traits. Things like Again, the same old stuff, the low empathy and the grandiosity. All of that is present, but now we're also seeing things like lots of control, power, dominance, meanness, exploitativeness, vindictiveness, coercion. The malignant narcissistic person is much more cold, much more callous, much more fearless, and and um again, willing to take advantage of the other person.
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That's not to say that the malignant narcissistic person initially won't appear and as charming or charismatic, they can. But that kind of dazzly element, that fades pretty quickly. And it goes into a much more controlling. We'll see things like for example, pathological jealousy is not unusual in a very malignant narcissist. And you'll see more and more dynamics of things like isolation in these relationships.
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The key difference that we'd observe between narcissism and psychopathy. Psychopathy is much more rare, but also in a psychopathic person, we're not seeing that internal cauldron of sort of shame and and vulnerability and fragile ego. That's not That's not operating. The malignant narcissistic person still knows some of what they're doing is wrong. The amount of guilt they're going to feel is far less than in less severe or different forms of narcissism, but they're still going to feel a little. Whereas in a psychopathic person, there is a very very cold-blooded kind of feel to that. So it would be things around again, the the sense of guilt, the sense of remorse, the coldness, the severity.
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And a big difference too is in psychopathic people, we see what was called a down-regulated autonomic nervous system. The stuff that in a normal human being gets us a little bit aroused and like scared, you know, even the idea of doing something bad. Like go, take that take that $20 bill off their desk. You'd like, I can't I can't do that. I can't do that. That's wrong. Our eyes get wide, our hearts start racing even at the thought of doing something bad. That's our autonomic nervous system. It's sort of it's sort of a driver to higher order things like a conscience. Psychopathic person, their autonomic nervous system doesn't do that. They'll do the bad thing and they won't even get a rise out of it. In fact, that's one argument of why psychopathic people can do more and more and more and more dangerous things just to feel something because they don't get that autonomic arousal. A malignant narcissistic person won't have that similar absence of autonomic arousal and then we will still see some real fear. A psychopathic person for example, let's say even we're thinking about like white collar corporate crime. A psychopathic person could pull off that kind of white collar crime and not give a damn about what happens to their family or their former business associates. A malignant narcissistic person will probably get in there and try to put some resources aside and feel bad that they hurt their family like that or try to make sure that some of the people at the company walk off at something. That would be sort of an example of where we'd see some of that splitting off point. Malignant narcissist is still going to think, "I didn't do anything wrong." but they know they're going to get caught and they will feel bad for the people who are close to them. Psychopathic person's not going to care.
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Communal narcissism's an interesting form of narcissism because almost all other forms of narcissism are about self-enhancement. What can I get from me? What can I do for me? How can I look good? The communal narcissistic person though really focuses on doing for other people to get that thing we call narcissistic supply. That validation to sort of pump themselves up. So, the communal narcissistic person will actually look to the world like someone who's very humanitarian or very rescue-y. They rescue animals and give to charity and and bring people meals when they're sick and they're that person. So, you'd think, "What the heck's narcissistic about that? That feels very empathic." Well, it's being done in the service of other people giving praise. "Wow, you're amazing. Like you do so much for so many. You saved all the puppies. You saved all the elephants. You fed all the people. You did so many good things. You've raised so much money. If they do those things and they don't get all that praise, they will get prickly. And in other relationships in their lives where they're not being told that they're the humanitarian of the world, they will they can be as prickly as all other forms of narcissism. What is interesting is the communal narcissist will, for example, make a big meal you didn't ask for for an occasion you didn't ask for. You'll even say, "I specifically said I'm going to be coming for an hour." They would spend 4 hours cooking. They'll say, "I spent 4 hours cooking for you. I told everyone I've said." And they'll even put on social media, "Just spent 4 hours cooking for the fam." That the
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fam specifically said, "We all have to be other places." And the communal narcissist will then get enraged because the communal act wasn't met with the validation that they wanted. So, that kind of gives someone a feel. And then the the communal, especially like a narcissistic parent, will say, "You know, all I do is love. All I do is give. All I do is try. All I do is love on you. And all I get back is this nothing. I'm a saint. I'm a saint for all I do." One could see how it would be so maddening and how it would play on people feeling guilty in these relationships, often giving in just to prop up that saintly version of the communal narcissist.
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When we shift to self-righteous narcissism, this was once There's an old word we used in the world of psychology and psychiatry called anankastic, which nowadays we use the term obsessive-compulsive. Not hand-washing obsessive-compulsive, but obsessively ordered and controlled about the environment obsessive-compulsive. In self-righteous narcissistic people, we see an almost excessive adherence to the rules, but in a way that serves them in a very morally superior way.
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"I do everything about it by the book." And if so, somebody bends even bends a rule, bends a rule, they'll say like, "Uh, I'm not going to cancel that reservation." They will treat you as though you've now committed a mortal sin. So, it's very judgmental, very moralistic, very dismissive if you veer from the rules that the self-righteous narcissistic person thinks are right, then they will often just sort of kick you out of their life. Self-righteous narcissistic people can be very financially controlling. They can also be very miserly. They have plenty of money, but they will they never use it to help someone. They might loan it to a family member, but at an extortionate loan rate. I mean, it's it's they're very very strange about money, and if they did give someone money, they'll hold it over them for the rest of their lives. But again, it's very judgy, very almost workaholicky, too. It's work or activity or doing to the to the neglect of like close relationships. And again, the usual stuff, the low empathy, the selfishness.
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The attention-seeking is less about the look at me, like my social media posts tell me I'm great, but it's more of the being seen in a certain way, of this most morally upright kind of person. And the one thing to remember about all these narcissistic types, the grandiose, the vulnerable, the malignant, the communal, and the self-righteous, they often combine and blend. So, for example, it wouldn't be unusual to see a narcissistic person with both malignant and vulnerable features. It's very very common to see a grandiose narcissistic person, but when things stop going their way, the vulnerable features pop out. It's like one of those weebly dolls, wobbly dolls, that once the thing falls, the other side pops out, and that's that vulnerable piece. If a vulnerably narcissistic person all of a sudden made a lot of money and became all that, we would see a very grandiose presentation pop up.
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A malignant narcissistic person who has communal features, that would be a cult leader, right? I'm going to save the world. Allow me to save the world, and then I'm going to exploit all of you. So, all those features come together. So, in all of my clinical practice, very rarely do we see someone who's a clean sort of example of just one of these. We see them intersperse and a lot of it has to do with context. What else is going on in that narcissistic person's life? If things are going well, more of the grandiose stuff comes up. If things aren't going well, more of the vulnerable narcissistic stuff. And even in more severe malignant narcissistic folks, that can be peppered with any number of these dynamics.
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There are many myths about narcissism. Some of the biggest myths about narcissism and the ones I often find myself having to correct is that this is always men. Um all narcissists cheat. People in narcissistic relationship are codependent. People equating narcissism and psychopathy. Um if you're in a narcissistic relationship, you have to leave. So, there are a lot of myths floating out there about narcissism, but can really really complicated. Another big myth we hear about narcissism is that it's just vanity. These are people who just want to look in a mirror. Why are you having so much trouble with somebody who just wants to look good? So, a lot of these myths are either an oversimplification, an abject denial of the data, or an oversimplification of what these relationships are about.
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A big myth about narcissism is they can't help it. They can't help it. This is just who they are. But, they can help it. And the most classic example that anyone who's been through one of these relationships would know is one would be you're at a party, house party, dinner party, there's a group of people around. The narcissistic person's holding court. Some people are even making jokes with them, about them. They're ha ha ha, gregarious, warm. It's all They're They're just being lovely, right? And you're thinking, "Hmm, even after my brother-in-law gave them a little dig, they kept it together."
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Then it's time to go and you get in the car, the car door closes, and you're on the road going home, and the narcissistic person just goes off on you. How dare your brother-in-law? And you just sat there. How could you? My gosh, the way you talked about me. But not even 7 minutes before they were the life of the party.
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Another example would be narcissistic person goes out on the golf course with their boss, who they're trying to impress, and it's all charm, charisma, how's your little girl? Isn't her fifth birthday today? You look great. This is great. Warm, warm, warm. How can I help? Da da da da. Then they come home after said golf game, and they just go off. Angry, sullen, banging things around.
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The narcissistic person can read the situation and change their behavior accordingly. I have had so many people tell me that the narcissistic person will call them when they're when they're in the car. They'll answer the phone, and the narcissistic person will say, "Hey, hey, um you know, where are you going? Are you Who are you Who are you with in the car?" And the person who received the call will say, "No, I'm alone in the car." And then the narcissistic person's off to the races. They know there's no one else in the car because had there been someone else in the car, the odds are they'll say, "Oh, no worries. Well, you know, I hope you guys get there soon. Call you back." So, the narcissistic people are very aware of what looks good and what looks bad, which is why they can turn it on and off between the dinner party and the car, the golf course and getting home, whether or not there's other people in the car when they call you and they're on speaker. So, they can't help it because if they couldn't help it, they would be acting out of control with the boss. They would have yelled at that brother-in-law dinner. Now, some people say, "But, you know what? The narcissistic person in my life does yell at the brother-in-law. Like, they're combative." Now, that's that spectrum of severity. Also, it comes down to familiarity. If this narcissistic person regularly sees, for example, that brother-in-law, now that brother-in-law is in their central purview. They're within the group of people that the narcissistic people will not care as much as looking good around. So, if that that how big that network of people they need to look good around, that can shift. So, if it's you live in a close-knit family where everyone lives close to each other, the narcissistic person can actually behave badly with that. But then, if that circle got bigger, I don't know, could be a bigger family event, a wedding or something, the narcissistic person may keep it together there and then become dysregulated when they're with a smaller group. But they absolutely are in control of this. Narcissistic people actually are very very um socially perceptive. They know They know how to read a room in many ways. They don't care about the people in the room, but they can read the room in their own self-interest, which is actually kind of a sinister quality cuz you're like, "Well, how could they read the room and not care about me?" I'm like, "Well,
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cuz those are two separate things. You think cuz they could read the room they care?" No. They know what They know what's happening in this room. So, everyone else in the room will say, "Well, they're kind of getting it cuz that's how they're acting in this room.
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Narcissistic people also have intact theory of mind. And theory of mind is actually interestingly related to things like empathy, but narcissistic people can even read someone else's emotional state. Doesn't mean they're going to respond to it. They're too self-centered and often too contemptuous of other people. So, narcissistic people know, but for all the things, the arrogance, the lack of caring, the low empathy, all of that contributes to, even if they know, it doesn't necessarily that they're going to curate their behavior in an appropriate way, especially with people they're around a lot and that they perceive as a sure thing, like family and intimate relationships.
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Narcissism in the macro, if we looked at all five types of narcissism, is more prevalent in men than women, okay? That's if we took all the narcissistic people in the world, grandiose, malignant, and vulnerable, put them all in, we'd have a bigger bucket of narcissistic men than women, okay?
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However, and here's what's interesting, Grijalva did a study, and what she found was that vulnerable narcissism in their study they found equal rates in men and women.
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So that particular form of narcissism characterized more by negative mood states, abandonment and rejection fears, victimhood, passive aggression, that's much more common in women than in men. But the grandiose, the malignant are much more common in men. I haven't seen any studies of communal and self-righteous narcissism to speculate there. If I were to speculate though, communal narcissism potentially could also have gender equality on that one. Self-righteous narcissism I I don't even think I'd hazard a guess on that one.
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But grandiose narcissism, malignant narcissism, the power, the dominance, control, the higher archical orientation, all of that, that does tend to be gendered because in many ways it's how the difference between how boys and girls and ultimately men and women are socialized and the qualities and the behaviors that are reinforced as a function of gender. So I think that's why we see that disparity. You know, again, there's a lot of research showing that women tend to lean more to affiliation. Narcissism definitely doesn't promote affiliation, so there could be that element of it too. It could be hormonally related. There's a lot of moving parts in there. But are there narcissistic women women? Lots. Look at all the people out there who have narcissistic mothers and they can be all types of narcissism. Women can be psychopaths, women can be sociopathic. I mean, it there's it's just far, far less frequent and
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we I certainly as a psychologist and amongst therapists, there can be a real mistake that oh, well you're talking about a woman or female partner, they can't be narcissistic and I'll say not necessarily. They absolutely can. You No matter it doesn't matter who the person is, we have to assess the patterns of traits and behaviors before we can say whether or not someone's narcissistic, but it's a big mistake. We often assume that narcissism is only men and while it is majority men, it's not by any means only and there are many, many men who have been in relationships with narcissistic women who have gone through all the stuff and have said it was exactly the same, equally brutal to a woman being in a relationship with a narcissistic man.
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One issue that comes up is the question of whether people in narcissistic relationships are codependent. I have a big problem with that codependency issue because I don't think it's true. The construct of codependency is also relatively misunderstood. The origin of this term codependency was in the 1950s and it very much came out of the addiction literature. This idea of a person, the word enabling came out of that, too. Enabling a person in their midst who had a substance or drug use problem to keep using, to keep drinking, you know, sort of stay in that sort of addiction space and that somehow there was a secondary benefit to the codependent person. So long as this person was a drunk, this person was serving them, they were kind of nobody's leaving, the the alcoholic wouldn't leave and there was sort of a safety in that. And what it did was it sort of cast a a lens of dysfunction. I mean, who would ever stay in such a relationship, right? I really believe that the term codependency is not trauma informed, is is not antagonism informed. It doesn't take in the myriad reasons why people would remain in relationships that are unhealthy and continue to engage in relationships that are unhealthy.
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And the biggest reason I push back on this whole codependency characterization, not not the least of which it pathologizes the person. Well, if you're in a relationship with a narcissistic person, then there's something wrong with you, which is what's kept people stuck for such a long time. It doesn't account for what trauma and loss of safety does in a relationship. When a person doesn't feel safe in a close relationship, especially when it's an intimate relationship, they will do things that look like they are trying to fix or change or are ignoring the dynamics. Things like keep having the same conversations, do everything for the other person, not set boundaries. You know, things like um give in on everything, right? So, this idea that if a person's not just coming in to an antagonistic relationship as strong and firm in their boundaries and clear on what they want, that they're automatically codependent, which is absolute sheer nonsense.
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A person who's in an antagonistic relationship, especially if they don't know what they're dealing with, with the narcissistic person or otherwise, they feel overwhelmed. They feel like they could be reading it wrong.
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Remember that all people want human beings, most human beings, the vast majority of human beings, want to attach to other people. That's what we do. We attach. We are a social species. We are a tribal species. We live and thrive in small social groups, and that requires attachment. So, now a person's attached to someone who's not healthy or safe. Okay? Narcissism's really tricky because that narcissistic person is still viewed well by the world. So, but the person in the relationship with them is getting yelled at, invalidated, manipulated, gaslighted, all this stuff.
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The person in the relationship doesn't feel safe, but they're still trying to attach to this person. And over time, they keep clipping more and more parts of themselves. They'll do things like fawn and and sort of dissociate from themselves so they can keep engaging with this person.
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They did try to set boundaries once, and when they set boundaries, they were shut down and told, "You're selfish, you're ridiculous, you're demanding, and you're needy." But there was enough about the relationship that felt okay. So, this person isn't codependent. They just don't know what they're dealing with.
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And I can say as a clinician, in the majority of cases of people in narcissistic relationships, once they got an understanding, once they felt safe in therapy, and they got an understanding of what was happening in their relationship, they're like, "Oh my gosh, every damn relationship book out there tells me I should communicate, and I should have set boundaries, and I should have gratitude, and we should have date nights, and I did that for 30 years, and now you're telling me all the date nights in the world were going to change this?" And the answer is like, "Yep." And then the person's like, "Oh hell no." And some people I mean, I don't have I don't have enough If somebody gave me a dime every time someone said this to me, I'd be a very rich lady. But I'll say, "The minute I got it, I was out. Like, I'm not doing this anymore. I thought there was hope. I thought there was some way I could That's not codependency. That's a person not having a framework. And they're not setting boundaries, and and they're giving in. That was a person trying to feel safe. So, I don't buy the codependency piece. I think it's an antiquated concept that doesn't at all take in what we know about relational trauma and safety. The whole conversation
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about red flags and narcissism, I find it to be pretty problematic. Everybody wants to know, "What are the red flags? What are the five red flags? If I see these red flags, is that a narcissist?" First of all, human beings aren't that simple. But secondly, it puts the onus on the person being harmed to do with this big red flag hunt, but most importantly, a lot of the more problematic patterns in narcissism don't show up for a minute.
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Again, narcissistic people have this capacity to show up really well, whether it's charm, charisma, attentiveness, confidence, gregariousness, generousness, detail orientation, whatever it is. Initially, when a lot of us meet narcissistic people, we're like, "Cool person" or "Interesting person." Typically not put off.
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The problem traits kind kind of percolate into what feels like a really nice picture, and our tendency, interestingly, is to say, "Well, maybe that's a blip." So, the challenge with the red flag piece is that in many ways it's not what I call antagonism informed. It doesn't account for the unique presentation of narcissism showing up as actually almost a very socially successful trait, and then the gradual gradual showing up of problematic patterns.
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A great example would be you meet a narcissistic person, they're charming, they're charismatic, they're attentive. You then go from drinks to dinner, and you don't get the table. You're not seated in the table that they specifically requested to make a strong impression on you, and they get really prickly, and they're actually a little bit short and entitled with the the person doing the seating in the restaurant, and then you sit down, and they say, "Oh, I'm I'm sorry. You know, I had I had really wanted to make tonight special for you, for us. I had a really tough day. I was so looking forward to tonight. That wasn't cool."
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So, now you've actually seen one of the cracks, but they've patched it up right away with an excuse. "I had a bad day. I was trying to make it a nice day." But, they may not fully lean into "Oh my gosh, what I just did, that was not okay. I am so sorry if that was, you know, how that that that must have really felt terrible for you." There's no sense of that. It's here's the excuses. But, 99.9% of people wouldn't pick that up because they pointed out, they comment on it, and they even make it about how they're trying to make it a special evening for the other person.
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So, that's the subtlety of the red flags, and also there's another flip side to why this red flag conversation's a problem. If you spend your entire getting-to-know-you period with somebody overly focused on what the red flags are, you're going to miss the opportunity to also get to know this person, and you may overreact to well, they were 2 minutes late even though they called. They're late. That's it. They're disrespecting me. So, we may almost become over-sensitized to these red flags.
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This is what makes this so challenging, and boiling it down to something as simple as red flags misses the bigger picture of what happens, particularly in the early months of a narcissistic relationship. The first thing I'd want someone to know after you've heard everything I've shared about sort of the basics of narcissism is look for patterns. Don't say, "Well, this person's selfish, they must be narcissistic." Look for patterns. Look for consistency. Look at how close in you are to this person. Are they able to show up differently with some people where maybe there's less of an intense relationship than you?
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But the pattern piece is so, so important. A lot of people are using narcissism as sort of like a throwaway term, but when you really see all this stuff stick together and stick together consistently, you know what you're looking at. And many Many of you who are watching this are like, "I thought this was the case."
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And most of us don't want to just write off someone close to us as just being narcissistic. In fact, most of us in close relationships, whether it's family or intimate relationship, or a close colleague, or a close friend, we're not rubbing our hands with zeal and saying, "I hope I find out they're narcissistic." There can even be this icky feeling you have after hearing this of like, "Oh my gosh, this really describes this person I care about." All is not lost. Just because someone you're close to is narcissistic, doesn't mean you got to pack it in and walk away.
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There are paths forward to healing. There are paths forward to taking care of yourself in the relationship, and there is grief around recognizing that the limitations you sort of suspected might be present in this relationship are real. But above all else, don't make this about one episode of entitlement or someone just being selfish. You're looking for a bunch of stuff that's happening together a lot and over a time.
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>> Chapter two. Signs you are in a narcissistic relationship.
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>> I've often characterized narcissistic relationship as death by a thousand cuts. It's not one big dramatic moment, but it's often years and years and years of a combination of neglect and small jobs and sometimes bigger betrayals, but all of that is also embedded in a larger context of good stuff, what feels like normal stuff, and fun times, a nice vacation, good sex, um a family you built together. Whatever it may be, it feels like there's something sort of normal happening. But in in interspersed in that is all this stuff that's very hurtful and confusing.
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The death by a thousand cuts happens because so many people so many things are happening at the same time in a narcissistic relationship. There was a lot of good stuff, especially in a narcissistic intimate relationship. They often can start quite strong. Sometimes they can even feel very fairytale or magically timed or something like that. People might feel uniquely attuned to in these relationships for a variety of reasons. Then over time, the more unhealthy patterns sort of start streaming in, but not only is there the memory of all that good stuff, there's still some good stuff happening.
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So, as the little things happen, and not even so little things, broken promises, all kinds of betrayals, lying, being insulted, being criticized, being doubted, breaches of trust, you name it. As those slowly start to accumulate, again, combined with stuff that feels normal, people aren't sitting there saying, "Oh my gosh, I'm in such a terrible relationship." Some people even rationalize it saying, "Well, relationships aren't always easy." So, there's a lot of relationship talk out there that can actually prop up the sort of subtle kind of for lack of a better term, indoctrination that happens in a narcissistic relationship.
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By the time a person starts seeing what's happening in their relationship is actually more of a pattern, in many, many cases it's been going on for a very, very long time. And the way human beings work, especially when it comes to their relationships, most people aren't walking around saying, "Well, there's bad thing number 532. There's bad thing number 647." We don't attend to them. It's almost like once life becomes normal again, we're kind of rolling along. We're sort of these little inertia creatures. So, we keep going and going and going. But it wears down on us.
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And what we see over time is people in narcissistic relationships start to lose belief in themselves. They stop trusting people as much. They start feeling more incompetent, foolish. A lot of negative stuff comes up. So, what's also happening simultaneous to the thousand cuts is people are actually believing they kind of deserve some of those insults. Well, I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe I'm too too demanding. Maybe I'm greedy. Maybe I'm selfish. Maybe I'm unrealistic. Maybe I'm not carrying my weight. Maybe I'm not trying hard enough. And the accumulation of that, that I'm a contributor to this, too, can mean that not only do the thousand cuts not get registered, a person feels like they're behaving as badly as the narcissistic person is.
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There are many common signs that you may be in a narcissistic relationship. Invalidation, dismissiveness, that things that are happening to you aren't nearly as bad as they are to them or just for anyone. There is a lot of gaslighting, manipulation, there can be a lot of betrayal. There's a lot of blame shifting. It's not my fault, it's yours. I
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only did this because you made me do it. There can be other manipulative tactics, things like what we call future faking. You again, making promises, not following through on them. And there can be also things like vindictiveness. So, if you really do something that sets a narcissistic person off, they may very much focus on not just punishing you, but really punishing you, like giving you 10 times the consequences back. So, there's all the things that tend to happen in the relationship are things that destabilize you, that make not only the relationship, but even you yourself feel less safe, though most people don't call it that initially. You kind of feel disoriented. You feel off-balance. But, those things like gaslighting, manipulation, dysregulated emotion, all of that all of that contributes to a person feeling disoriented in one of these relationships.
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So, love bombing is kind of the toxic off-ramp. It's the dynamic that brings people in to a narcissistic relationship. Love bombing is tricky. A lot of people are using the term. And what it really means is it's the tactics that are used early in a relationship to draw somebody in. And these really fall under the rubric of idealization, seduction, intense attunement, paying attention to somebody, obsessive focus.
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So, it could include anything like um wanting to constantly spend time with you in early in a relationship, buying gifts, being of tremendous service to you early in a relationship, frequent communication, text messages, DMs, emails, phone calls, video calls, social media engagement. It could be wanting to do things very quickly, going on an intense trip together, wanting to meet friends and family very quickly, even suggesting structural things happen quickly. Let's move in together. Let's get engaged quickly. Let's get married quickly. The pace is very much set by that other person, but people who are caught in the love bomb sequence will say, "I just felt like I was in this intense fairytale." The word intense is very important. There's so much happening. It's very easy to get overwhelmed and almost distracted by love bombing.
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But it is a tactic. So while some of this stuff may feel fun and nice, "I'm going to fly you to another city for dinner. I'm going to buy you this extravagant gift. I'm going to loan you the money you need to do whatever you need to do. I'm going to help you meet this work deadline." It all feels very attuned. It all feels very attentive. But as soon as a person in the love bombed phase of a relationship tries to exert what's important to them. Great example would be the relationship feels very intense, like it's moving what very quickly. And a person were to say, "I am so enjoying getting to know you, but could we slow down? Like I think seeing someone every night of the week is a lot."
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And the tactic will be, "Huh, you really kind of misled yourself. You were talking to me about how you wanted to meet someone for a serious relationship and make a life with them. I can't get enough of you. I can't spend enough time with you, but it seems like you may not be looking for the same thing as me." So that tactic works.
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Because a person's like, "No, I do want those things, but this is a lot." And very quickly a person will almost find some plausibility in what the love bomber is saying and saying, "Oh, I guess maybe if you are into someone, you do spend all your time with them." Other places where we'll see that the love bombing is a tactic is when it comes to boundary setting.
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A person will say, "You know what? I have this pickleball game I play with my friends every Thursday evening, and it's just a girls thing." And that's the boundary, like this is our girls thing. We do this every Thursday. And the love bomber will say, again, same sort of thing, "I thought we were in this together. Like are you embarrassed of me? Are you do you not want your pickleball friends to meet me? Is that what this is? Um okay, I get it. Like okay, it's fine if we're all behind closed doors, but I guess you just don't really want me in your life. That's not true. The person just has this wonderful healthy friend space,
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but not only can you see that that boundary isn't honored, there's a the love bomber wants to start insinuating themselves into every space in the person's life. So, boundaries, when you try to set them, you're being told that you don't really care or that you're being rigid. So, all the things that a person would do in the midst of all this intense stuff is pushed back on. Another great example would be the frequent communication. It's fascinating. I've been doing this work since before there were all the cell phones and all this. And when cell phones came around, I was like, oh no, this love bombing thing's going to get a lot worse. And indeed it did. Good morning, my queen. How's my afternoon, baby? You thinking about me during breakfast? What are you doing? What are you wearing? What are you seeing? Who are you talking to? It's all day, message after message. Good night, my sweetheart. Whatever the heck these people are texting.
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Well, here's the challenge. It's not just that you have to watch all this garbage come into the phone all day. The person who's being love bombed is expected to respond.
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So, now all of a sudden love bombing starts becoming a full-time job.
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And if you don't respond, the love bomber will say, "Oh, I guess like, you know what? Isn't a relationship about communication?" So, they'll take what is a healthy thing, communication, but they'll distort it. And a person being love bombed, who may in many cases be treated really well, will get confused and say, "Well, I guess." And you'll say, "I'm really busy." "Oh, well, you have time to do your job." Well, it takes 2 seconds to answer a text message. Plausible, plausible, plausible. Right? So, that as all of that piles up, a person is feeling sort of worse and worse. And then the other thing that's sinister about love bombing is how it operates in your social circles, right?
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Isolation is a very common dynamic in narcissistic relationships, but with love bombing, love bombing is where the isolation actually begins.
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And it but it doesn't happen all at once. It's not like a person meets you and says, "I'm going to lock you away from the world." No, no.
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They'll actually very quickly want you to meet people in their world.
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And then even turn that around. So like you meet their mother 10 days after meeting them. And then 2 months in you might say, "Okay, this is too much for me." And when you start talking about discontent, the love bomber will say, "Wow, I brought you into your my secret space. I introduced you to my mother. This isn't just about leaving me. This is about leaving my family. So now you're being brought into a system that you shouldn't have been brought in so quickly into. And then even in your own social network, many love bombers will insist and want to meet everyone in your world, okay? But and this is a big point, love bombers, narcissistic people, all of them are actually again socially perceptive. They'll pick up on whether maybe one of your friends or family members doesn't really like them.
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And they will then use that as a triangulation point. Like, "I don't know. Like your sister is salty. It's It's almost like she's competitive with you. She certainly doesn't like me." And so now the person being love bombed, their interest in wanting to spend time with that sister is now viewed as disloyalty. So what love bombing is, it's it's a it's it's this sort of almost like a viral process where the person kind of infects the host and then bombs off more virus throughout the body.
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But because again, there's so much good stuff happening, it feels like the fairy tale. And it might even be in contrast to past relationships. A person will be in a past relationship where they were neglected. They never responded to texts. They never wanted them to meet their family. They didn't ask them to marry them. So now this person is coming in with buckets and buckets of attention and obsession and all of that. It can be It can really throw a person off and say, "What am I complaining about? This person's bringing everything." And then when you throw one last piece in the love bomb mix, which is the enablers.
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There's a whole world of people around you will say, "Wow, like this is a fairy tale. This is a extraordinary." It will look and sound like what everyone wants you to have. So, even if the person being love bombed is saying, "This feels too intense." Sadly, we still have like a cartoon romance Cinderella trope in our society. And so, when people are in a fairy tale, we somehow think that that is a good thing versus it's not at a pace that works for you. So, in the United Kingdom, love bombing is now officially recognized as a tactic that is a part of emotionally abusive and coercively controlled relationships. It is formally now recognized as part of the entire process of an emotionally abusive relationship. And I think we need to get out of the mindset that love bombing is just somebody who shows you a good time. It's not that. It is a tactic. It is a setup. It's getting a person against the ropes of emotional abuse. And when they're finally in position, that's it. It's much harder to get out.
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Gaslighting is a word that everybody's using. In fact, gaslighting was Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2022. That is how much this word is getting used. And even I would argue almost 10, maybe 15 years ago, nobody even knew what it meant. In fact, most people don't even know the origin story of this term, which is merely from a play and then a film. And that's like 1930. So, it it's it was a strange to watch this word climb in, but it speaks to sort of the ubiquity this phenomenon. The challenge with the word gaslighting is a lot like the challenge with the word narcissism. A lot of people aren't using it right. And the big mistake that people make is a lot of people think gaslighting is when somebody lies to you.
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And other people think that gaslighting is a difference in opinion. It's not those things.
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Gaslighting is a very calculated abusive and manipulative tactic. It has steps to it. There's there's sort of a kind of a a step-by-step kind of approach to gaslighting. Number one, gaslighting requires some level of trust. It's hard for a perfect stranger to gaslight you. You're you're kind of going to look at them like, "What? What are you saying?" You have no relationship with them. So, this is why gaslighting most often happens in close relationships, intimate relationships, family relationships.
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It can also happen with people who are trusted authorities. A physician, a healthcare professional, a lawyer, an accountant, a financial advisor, even a contractor, someone who knows something can gaslight you because you have trust in them. The next step of gaslighting after having You have to have the again, you have to have the foundation. I guess I'd call the trust the foundation of gaslighting.
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The first step really then in gaslighting is a denial of reality, memory, experience, or perception. That's why a lot of people think it's lying because lie is really a denial of reality, right? I I never said that. I didn't do that. I didn't take your money. You know, I never talked to him. And they did do that thing, okay? That's the That's the denial of what it You know, whatever it is, perception, memory, reality, any of it. That's just part one. And if you stopped there, that's not gaslighting.
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For it to be gaslighting, you have to have the second part. And the second part is where the person is dismantled. And by that, I mean part one, "I never said that." Part two, "I think there's something wrong with you. You make stuff up in your head. I think you're crazy." The "I think you're crazy" part is the second part that cements it as as gaslighting. Denial of reality, dismantling the person. Those two things together make it a gaslight.
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Other parts of the gaslighting process is that if somebody gaslights us once, it can make an impression. It can make an impact.
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But for gaslighting to really, really qualify as the emotionally abusive dynamic it is, it happens repeatedly. I never said that there's something wrong with you. I put it right back where I found it. I think you have memory problems. I never agreed to that. Stop telling me that. You make everything about you. I think you're narcissistic. So, it's this slow shaping away of your reality and your perception. And remember, many narcissistic relationships can be quite isolated. So, if you're in a relationship with a gaslighter and you're being gaslighted a lot, and you don't know you're being gaslighted, it can be a real shift in how you perceive yourself and how you perceive the world, frankly, and how you perceive reality. It is such a nefarious dynamic.
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And when you're in it and you know it, even then it can be destabilizing. Even I, to this day, still get gaslighted. I'm thinking, "Damn, this person's gaslighting me." But if a person gaslights you when you're tired, overwhelmed, coming off a difficult experience, you're eminently gaslightable. I think the more exhausted, more worn out we are, the more gaslightable we are. The less we trust our abilities and ourselves, the more gaslightable we are. And the more this happens, people who are gaslighted over the long term, they give in. They stop fighting back. They stop trying to explain themselves. And in the worst case scenario, the person who's fully gaslighted just goes along to get along. And to the world, it looks like the person who was gaslighted is just living in long and quiet harmony and agreement and just does everything that the gaslighter tells them to do and doesn't question them.
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That's the end point. Now, if anyone's ever seen the movie Gaslight, they'll know that Ingrid Bergman did get pulled back from the brink. And how did she do that? It took one person in her midst to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa." It was the detective. "This isn't true. This isn't happening." And that was all it took to almost break Ingrid Bergman's character out of the spell. Because when we're gaslighted, we do look like we're under a really, really bad magic spell. But one person coming in saying, "You didn't say that. You didn't do that." That's often enough to break the gaslighted cycle. As a psychologist, as a therapist, I have to say, in many, many cases, the work I've done with patients was the client telling me what was happening in their lives, and I'll say, "It seems like they're gaslighting you." And when the client realized that, they'll say, "Oh my goodness. I just assumed they were right." So, you're just breaking someone. It It is like breaking a spell. Because with enough time, enough gaslighting, that's what it That's how it works. It feels like a really, really bad magic spell.
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Future faking is a manipulative dynamic in a narcissistic relationship. I personally think it qualifies as a form of betrayal. But what future faking entails is controlling a person or keeping a person in a relationship on the basis of making a future promise. So, let's say a person is starting to feel like they want to get out of a relationship. The narcissistic person, the future faker, will say, "I'm going to go into therapy. I'm going to change."
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Or maybe there's something that somebody really wants in a relationship. Let's say, "I promise you, as soon as I make partner, we're going to go on a vacation." Or "As soon as you become pregnant, we're going to move closer to family." So, the thing being offered is something that the person in the relationship really wants. But really, what the future faking is about is to maintain the status quo in a way that works for the future faker. When the time comes, partner has been made, what they Whatever it may be, or in 6 months have passed, whatever it is, the goal post moves.
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And the promise hasn't been given. So, now a person has spent that much more time in the relationship. Future faking then, once you get to the point, whether it's a period of time like 6 months, whether it's the making partner, whatever, then it turns into a new manipulation. The person who's future faked will say, "Hey, you said you were going to go into therapy." And they will be met with, "Stop pressuring me. This is a very personal decision." Or the person will get the promotion at work to go on vacation." And the future faker will say, "Wow, you just make everything about you, don't you?" So, even when that promise is made, the promise is not seen through.
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Then the person is pretty much gaslighted about it.Original English
Now, the person can feel a sense of shame. Maybe they are selfish. All the stuff that keeps people sort of entrenched in these relationship and more time goes on. And because these future fake promises may not be as short a period of time as 6 months away, but maybe years and years and years away, now a person has spent many, many years in a relationship.Original English
And the thing they'd hoped would happen never happens. This can be particularly nefarious when it is, for example, a promise on something where there is a bit of a time window on it, like having children.Original English
And the narcissistic partner will say, "Of course, of course we're going to have children. Let's just wait till this happen. Let's just wait till that happens. Let's just wait till this happens." And enough time passes and maybe there's something that happens. There's fertility challenges or something like that. And then enough time passes and there is no opportunity for intervention or the time just runs out in terms of having a child.Original English
But the future faking can lead the person to believe it's going to happen, it's going to happen, it's going to happen, and then it never happens. And what again is also doubly nefarious about the future faking dynamic is many times the person who was future faked blame themselves. Well, psh. I'm so foolish. I shouldn't have believed their stupid promise. That's on me. To which I want to say, it is not on you. They promised you something. They relented on that. When you attempted to communicate about it, they keep saying, "Well, it's too soon. It's too soon." And now all that time has passed. They betrayed you. But that's not how not only most people themselves think about it, that's actually not how most people outside of that see it, and most people will blame the person who was future faked rather than the person who did this to them.Original English
Many things happen to a person in a narcissistic relationship. Self-blame is such a common dynamic for people who are in narcissistic relationships or had a narcissistic parent, any kind of narcissistic relationship. And there are three big reasons that I can think of.Original English
One comes down to attachment. We want to stay in a relationship. We want a relationship to work, right? It's easier to blame ourselves. That takes us to reason two cuz that gives us more control. If it's our fault, then we can fix it. We can communicate differently. We can explain ourselves better. We can take it on ourselves. Kids in particular will self-blame to maintain that control because it feels too dangerous to think that the parent is a bad person. But, even in adult relationships, if we can make it about, well, maybe I'm not communicating clearly enough. Maybe I'm not making enough time for the relationship. Maybe I'm not being patient. Well, then you can do those things. You can make more time. You can communicate more clearly. You can be more patient. It's not going to change anything, but at least you then feel like you have some level of control in the relationship. Some of this also has to do with one of the key dynamics in a narcissistic relationship, which is blame shifting.Original English
Narcissistic people almost never take accountability for the things that they have done.Original English
So, what they do instead is they very quickly shift blame to the other person. This is your fault. I didn't do this. Why did you do that? And or they'll take responsibility in so far as the narcissistic person will say, "Okay, yes, I did that, but it's your fault." In fact, it's not unusual for a narcissistic person who's cheated in a relationship to say, "Okay, fine. You got me. Are you satisfied?" I mean, you're a weirdo that looked at my iPad, but okay, yes, I saw this person a few times, but you want to know why I did it? It's because you're never around, you're we don't have sex, you don't talk to me, you've let yourself go. So, now their affair is your fault.Original English
So, because of that chronic blame shifting, in some ways the only way the relationship works is if you're willing to be a blame repository. And as long as the other person's holding the blame in the relationship, the relationship kind of keeps marching along. But, there's many different ways that self-blame functions in a narcissistic relationship, but it's a pretty universal theme. Just about everyone in one of these relationships blames themselves. And also, it's so important to remember not every day in a narcissistic relationship is a bad day.Original English
There can be normal days, weeks, and even months when things are going well. Life is happening, the kids are doing their thing, you're having a good time, it's summer, you're on vacation, whatever it is.Original English
And because those good times happen, and then not so good ones happen, and then bad ones happen, there's a tendency to say, "Well, it's sometimes good." And every relationship book out there is about, "Well, it takes two to tango." Two to tango simply ends up with people who are narcissistic relationships blaming themselves.Original English
The inconsistency, the unpredictability, the confusion of a narcissistic relationship actually directly affect us somatically, in our body, in our nervous systems.Original English
Inherently, these relationships are not safe. They may not be what we consider sort of ostensibly dangerous, like nobody's coming at you with fists or a weapon, but you don't feel safe. You feel like you can't say what's on your mind, you have to feel like you have to censor yourself, you don't know what's going to set them off. So, people in these relationships get more and more and more vigilant. And the sympathetic nervous system is sort of more and more on high alert. There's a signal from your brain to your body like, "You're not entirely safe. Like, all of a sudden this can this can blow up. All of a sudden there's going to be a big loud explosion in this relationship that you're going to feel unsafe. So, we feel more vigilant. We're kind of much more on edge. There's a lot more monitoring of the environment. And what we can see often in these relationships are the classic sympathetic nervous kind of trauma responses, safety responses, like the fight response, the flight response, the freeze response, the fawn response. These are reflexive nervous system responses a person has when they're in a situation that their body is perceiving as dangerous.Original English
The ongoing chronic interpersonal stress of a narcissistic relationship also does take a real toll on the body. We know that these kinds of unrelenting relational stresses, they affect all kinds of neurohormone systems. They can affect cortisol release. They can affect They can They can impact all full body inflammation. We see a higher rate of autoimmune symptomatology and autoimmune diagnoses in people who have experienced these kinds of narcissistic relationships. People stop taking care of themselves as well. Their sleep is disrupted. They They'll say they struggle with food. Some people may cope with drugs or alcohol. There's all kinds of other ancillary kind of health things that also happen. Lots of people who in these relationships will say, "I get sick more often. I'm often exhausted. I have a chronic sense of fatigue." And that's likely a byproduct of the psychological exhaustion, but also how that shows up physiologically in a person's body. I've been doing this work for a long time, and I have seen everything from people getting chronic illnesses that will not remit to chronic autoimmune diagnoses, and even cancers and things that even their their oncology teams are saying, "It is amazing how sort of resistant your body almost seems to treatment." And I do sometimes wonder to myself, is this is a person who's just under such unrelenting interpersonal stress and feeling such a chronic sense of interpersonal unsafety that their body can't fight as well because so many of the physiological resources are just going to manage the sort of the daily wear and tear of being in a relationship like this.Original English
Narcissistic relationships are quite isolating almost by definition, but there's multiple reasons for that. At one level, it's because especially in more severe narcissistic relationships, the narcissistic person literally isolates the person from the world, from supports, from loved ones. So, that's one way the isolation can happen. At another level, we see that the isolation can be almost it'sOriginal English
something that happens very slowly and the person in the relationship may even self-isolate. Partly because they're confused about what's happening in the relationship, partly because they feel ashamed about what's happening in their relationship. They may even be trying to protect other people around them from the relationship itself.
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Number three, especially when we're talking about vulnerable narcissism, not all narcissistic people are extroverted, gregarious, you know, sort of let's go out on the town attention-seeking narcissistic folks. Vulnerable narcissistic people can be quite socially anxious, socially awkward, and may not welcome the opportunity be with other people. So, they may very well say to partners or other people around them like, "I don't want to go to that party. That's dumb." And so, it just sort of tamps that down this access to other people, to social events, any of those sorts of things.
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But these three things can com- combine and then over time a person in one of these relationships is is either being isolated, feels isolated, and then as more time goes on, a person in one of these relationships actually feels like they're losing their mind. And it is very lonely and it is very isolating.
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It's very important why anyone should be watching an interview like this because you realize that you're not alone, but for the longest time people believe that what was happening in their relationship was something weird that was uniquely happening to them. And so, that would lead people to say, "Well, I don't want people to know this. I don't want people to think I'm weird." And most therapists didn't understand these dynamics. So, when you put those things together, people didn't even quite get what was happening to them, which again would leave them feel embarrassed, ashamed, confused, and then just sort of feeling cut off not only from themselves, but from the world at large.
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Many survivors of narcissistic relationships have said to me, "It feels hard to be in the regular world. Feels hard to feel see people who are in what feel like normal and healthy relationships." And so, people will say, "Yeah, I just wasn't going out as much."
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And narcissistic people can be very controlling. So, even if a person in one of these relationships attempts to build a social network, the narcissistic person in someone's life might say, "Where are you going? Who are you with? What are you going to do? Why do you need to do that?" Um tracking their whereabouts, all of it. So, it really can combine to person just getting isolated for a number of reasons, but the social isolation does so much harm to people in these relationships because frankly one of the only ways to heal from what happens in these relationships is by talking with or being with other people. And when that pathway is cut off, we've lost one of the biggest healing tools.
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There are a lot of reasons that people stay in narcissistic relationships even when they know it's happening. And the vast majority of people have at least one narcissistic relationship they can't easily get out of. There's some common reasons why people, if you will, stay in narcissistic relationships. And these include things like fear, still having love for the narcissistic person, having hope that the narcissistic person could still change, um fear of being alone, cultural reasons, it's not okay to get estranged from a family or get a divorce, practical reasons, everything from money to housing to everything else you could think of, nostalgia, um keeping the status quo. All of these things, and it could be more than one of these things, are all reasons people would stay in a relationship like this.
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There are also other sort of more psychological dynamics that can help us understand why people stay in these relationships. These include things like trauma bonding, something we call cognitive dissonance, the tension we feel when things aren't lining up right, right? Like this is our this is my spouse and they're treating me really badly. So, we kind of rationalize why they're why they're behaving badly. So, these kinds of things, again, especially things like trauma bonding, can make it very difficult for a person to readily get out of one of these relationships even when a person recognizes that what's happening in the relationship isn't healthy.
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One question that comes up is how is it that people are able to still love a narcissistic person after they have been so abusive? Couple things to keep in mind is just like narcissism itself is on a spectrum, so too is the level of abuse, right? And especially when we're in that mild to moderate end, there's still love for this person. Even, I hate to say it, at the severe end, too, there is still love. Love's a complicated emotion, right? And I I have to say as a psychologist, I'm always very careful to say, "You can't love someone who did this to you." Means different things to different people.
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This sense of love, whatever it might be, it might be attachment, it could be things like nostalgia, it could be that they're the father or mother or parent of your children. Uh it could be a sense of belonging, it could be that sense of history. There's a lot of things that go into this thing called love. Listen, I've talked to people who say, "There's a lot I don't like about them, but I love having sex with them. I love uh talking with them. They're so smart." Love's an interesting thing because many people who go through narcissistic relationships will say, "You know, I still love them or I still have love for them. I definitely don't like them, but I have love for them." And I think because love is such a complicated emotion and it's based on so many things, including things like history and experience, it gets to be a muddy place.
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But people will say, even after they've been through some really treacherous narcissistic relationships, will say, "I still love this person. I still have love for this person." Some of the work is around recognizing you can love someone and recognize that their behavior is a problem.
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And if you need get out of the relationship. People say, "If I see their behavior is a problem, then I don't love them." I said, "No, you still love them and you can identify their behavior is a problem." The word and becomes a really powerful word of healing cuz when we view things as either or, it feels like we're having to shut down very real emotions we're having. So, I don't know that anyone gets to judge why somebody would still or even question why somebody would still love someone who's brought so much harm into their life. I just think it gets into the complexity and nuance of what love means to each individual person.
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A lot of people hear this term hoovering and they don't know what it means. It actually derives from what they call a vacuum in the United Kingdom, a Hoover. So, to Hoover someone or to be Hoovered is to get sucked back in, typically into an unhealthy relationship. And hoovering is a very common part of the narcissistic relational dynamic. And what hoovering means is it's a person getting pulled back into something either that they are communicating that they want to leave, that they have already left, or in some cases, hoovering could be that after a conflict, there's a lot of tension, the narcissistic person might do a little bit of a love bomb to sort of bring someone back into the relationship, a new episode of idealization or seduction, especially if the narcissistic person doesn't want to lose the relationship. It is extremely common and a lot of people do get hoovered back in. And what's so unfortunate is how much shame people can feel when they get hoovered back in.
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We can only reassure anyone that to get pulled back into what was an important relationship, an intimate relationship, is very, very common, right? In fact, the the statistics from domestic violence suggests on average that a survivor of domestic violence will go back to their abuser seven times. So, that's sort of law of averages would dictate that everyone's going to get hoovered at least once. And it happens because the narcissistic person does do a love bomb part two, or they do give you the apology you want to hear, and all the stuff that was keeping a person stuck and trauma bonded and all of that. That all remains. It's not like all of that
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goes away. And with enough time after a betrayal, after a conflict, it's amazing how much things shift for us. It's not that we don't remember it, but the impact of it softens. And there may be things that somebody wants to get back to, the familiar. I mean, the familiar might be one of the most seductive things there is in the world. So, all of that makes hoovering a very, very potent and powerful dynamic. And especially because, again, narcissistic people are socially perceptive. They often know exactly what to say to pull somebody back into a relationship. And because so many people in narcissistic relationships are ambivalent, it's very easy to sort of prey on that ambivalence and get someone sucked back into one of these relationships.
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The one thing I'd want to say to somebody who's watching this and has just realized that they're in a narcissistic relationship is to breathe and take it slow.
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A lot of people will say, "Well, now I know that this and I know that I'm in a narcissistic relationship. It feels like a call to action. You have to do something right away."
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And I'll always tell people slow down. Healing is less about them and getting out of it than it is for you to start feeling safe in your body again, trusting yourself, breaking out of that cycle of self-blame.
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And that takes a minute. So, to anyone watching this, and you're saying, "Ooh, I think I'm in a narcissistic relationship. What do I do?" I'm going to tell you to take a few deep breaths, take a step back, read, educate yourself, take the time, seek out therapy, figure this out so you can proceed in making choices and decisions in this that are informed by your specific circumstance, and in a way that works for you. There is no one-size-fits-all guidance for people who are realizing that they are in narcissistic relationships.
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>> Chapter 3, how to grieve and recover after a narcissistic relationship.
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>> Many people ask me, "How do we grieve and recover after a narcissistic relationship?" And there are many ways to do that. Your narcissistic relationship didn't happen in a vacuum. It's not just about their behavior. We have backstories. We have vulnerabilities that come from our histories. And those vulnerabilities and backstories can make us very vulnerable to getting stuck in these relationships.
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I don't buy into this idea that there are people out there who are narcissist magnets, or who are suckers, or who are going out of their way to pick narcissistic people. Nobody's signing up for this, and I think that puts blame on the person who is gotten into one of these relationships, or even more than one of these relationships. But, if we can view these vulnerabilities and backstories as the places where it is harder for us to detect these dynamics, and to get out of these dynamics, then I think it can help us understand how our own histories made this so difficult for us, so we can be more compassionate to ourselves.
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By having that compassion for ourselves, we can break out of this cycle of "I'm wrong. I'm bad at relationships. I'm foolish. I'm a sucker. I'm a codependent, and instead say, these elements of my life actually made it very hard for me to see this. I get that now. And now that I am seeing it, I can understand why this unfolded. And some of the most common sorts of vulnerabilities and backstories, I mean, they're actually quite varied. I mean, some of the more classical ones are obviously coming from a narcissistic family of origin. That can definitely make someone more vulnerable to not spying the dynamics because it's what you know. It feels normal to you. You know, that can also be taken to people who grew up with trauma, adversity, or neglect. Anything that could have happened that would have impacted a child's ability to trust themselves and others. But interestingly, coming from a very, very happy family of origin can also make you vulnerable to getting stuck in a narcissistic relationship.
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Why? Because you got the message that we can love through this. We can power through this. We can talk it through, that there's always a way to find a solution. So, there's actually this kind of optimism that can come from that sort of growing up like that and having that kind of family behind you. The good news, though, is for people who did come from those close-knit, healthy, safe families, once you get into this and perhaps get out of it, you'll have a support network waiting for you. And to that point, optimism can actually be something that makes people vulnerable to getting stuck in these relationships, as too can being somebody who is a forgiver by nature. Like, I forgive people. I believe in second chances. That works great in a lot of places. It does not work well in these relationships. Second chances become 10th chances become 500th chances because you keep forgiving. And what we do know is narcissistic people typically don't take forgiveness as a call to change, but rather as a permission, I'm going to well, I'm going to keep getting away with this. So, there's not there's that lack of caring, that lack of awareness how their behavior or yeah, the not giving a damn that their behavior is hurting somebody else. We also see that people have a propensity to being fixers, rescuers, and problem-solvers can get stuck in these relationships as well. Like, anything can be fixed. There's a book I can read. There is a weekend retreat I can attend. There's couples therapy. There's this. There's that. There's got to be something. I mean, I have had people say, "Don't tell me nothing can be done." I'm like, "By nothing, if you mean can we change them? You cannot change them. So, that's off the list. We can certainly work with you." No, I believe everyone can change. And those people can definitely get in this sort of recursive loop. All of these backstories and vulnerabilities in them, it becomes really clear how that would get someone stuck. But these are a byproduct of the experiences we've had. And by the way, there is no high school class out there on how to detect a toxic relationship. Nobody is ever formally taught this. And until very recently, there was no way to learn about this anyhow. So, we're just getting to a place where we can shed light on these dynamics. So, if a person does have some of these vulnerabilities, had does have some of these backstories, they're in a position where they can say, "Ooh, I better pay attention to this. I better understand these dynamics cuz it would be really easy for me to get stuck in something like this."
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Radical acceptance is one of those terms that hits people hard, but a lot of people aren't sure what it is and what it's not because there's a lot of confusion about it. It's that word acceptance that throws people off cuz a lot of people take acceptance as I'm accepting this, which can feel like I'm signing off on this. And it's not that. Acceptance is a sort of this is how it is.
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This is it. And radical acceptance is not only is this how it is, it is not going to change. You would think, "Well, that's the moment the angels will sing. I get this." Not so simple.
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When we finally get a person to radical acceptance, and that's not an easy place to get to in the first place, the first reaction to that is often grief. because so many years have been invested in thinking I can change this, I can fix this, this is going to get better. We even future fake ourselves like it's going to get better when this happens, when that happens, when they get older, when they're an empty nester, when they have a kid, when they make money and none of those things ever happened, right? So radical acceptance becomes this moment when we're we have to realize and again with tremendous grief, it's the death of hope. It's this loss of innocence. Is it this is never going to be the thing I wanted it to be. This is never going to be the parent that I'd hoped to have or I wanted. This is never going to be the marriage I wanted. This is not what I wanted my kids to grow up in. These are heavy heavy things to metabolize and take in. So the first reaction people have is so much grief because that radical acceptance also has to be accompanied by realistic expectations and radical awareness that this is it. That I have to ratchet down my expectations for this relationship.
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I have to manage my expectations for this relationship. So once a person gets to radical acceptance, I often say like we need to have a rest stop here at the road because there is so much grief and so much sadness that people almost need a beat before they can go on to the next phases of the much harder work of healing.
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Until you radically accept what this is, the nature of these patterns, the nature of these traits, the nature of these behaviors, and even the things you were doing to keep this relationship going. And what by that I mean things like you were constantly appeasing the narcissistic person, reassuring them, walking on eggshells, taking care of everything yourself. All this stuff that you were doing in this relationship to keep it afloat. It's the awareness that none of that was also going to ever work. So it becomes the gateway because until you can see the unchangeability of these patterns, the person is going to keep spinning in this but this could be done, but this could be done or this is my fault, this is my fault, This is my fault. It is this understanding, full stop, that the behaviors and the things that have happened in this relationship are unacceptable.
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That is a heavy, heavy moment because the minute you see that they're unacceptable, and you can slowly give yourself permission to say, "That's not okay." That two things are happening simultaneously. You see the relationship more clearly, and a part of you is now coming alive of "It's not okay to treat me this way, anyone this way, but I'm part of that anyone. I should not be treated this way." This is a person now sort of emerging as a person separate from the narcissist that because for so long we were just sort of stuck in their kind of their command and control sequence, that that's how the relationship worked. But once we see it, it that's the only way to heal. You cannot heal unless you know what you're up against here.
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One of my favorite tools to build radical acceptance is actually probably the most painful tool to build radical acceptance, and it's something that it I call the ick list. And just cuz it's ick. It's really writing down all the terrible things that happened in the relationship, the terrible things that were said, the special events that they ruined, the ways you were put down. This is not an easy thing to do, and I'm so even calling it an ick list almost in some ways downplays how hard this is.
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I've had people say, "I started doing this and I slid into a depression. I could only do this with the help of a therapist." And that's all understandable because when you start seeing that list accumulate, there can be a lot of shame. Like, "Why? Ew, why did I put up with this?" There's also a lot of grief of goodness, like how did I spend so many years in this? There's a lot of strong negative emotion. But the ick list serves a very important function because there is again this this phenomenon called trauma bonding that's created by that intermittent going back and forth between good stuff and bad stuff, and good stuff and bad stuff, and normal stuff and abusive stuff. Just when we think we get it, it feels regular again.
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So, at those moments when we go back to the what feels like regular in one of these relationships, or that there's a hovering time coming up, like they're trying to suck you back into the relationship, you can look at this list and say,
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"No."
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"No, no, no, no, no. This isn't okay."
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Because when we're in those moments of euphoric recall, when you're like, "Maybe it wasn't that bad, and you know, we did have some good times." You got to be able to pull this list out and say, "Oh to God, no. I cannot. This is not okay." That is the function this ick list can really, really serve. It's a bit of like It's a bit of someone showing you a picture of yourself after you've had a hard night drinking. It should be enough to say, "Yeah, no, I don't think I'm going to drink tonight. Thanks, no." So, it really has that feel of you being reminded, but I've actually, as a as a psychologist, as a therapist, have sat in in session and we've constructed the ick list together, because they brought it all into session, so I remember it all. I'm saying, "And, yes, and And we'll make it together." And the client will say, "This is such a complicated process, cuz it hurts, but it's also really liberating, because this wasn't in my head." And this is the thing with keeping things in your head, especially in an abusive relationship, it's not just like a file cabinet in there. It's a very fussy file cabinet, and that file cabinet in our hippocampus is always trying to keep us safe. So, when stuff doesn't feel good, it'll sometimes push it aside. So, when we remember it, we got to get it down on paper. So, the ick list is a big one to me. And that relates to other practices of getting stuff out of here, out of your head and into the paper, including things like journaling and writing things down.
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It can really help people. When they can go back and even look at the narrative of what this relationship was, they can even start to see the up and the down and the up and the down.
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When it When we can write it down, it just takes on a different kind of heft, and it goes It's way to really promoting radical acceptance. And another big one, keeping on with the writing, one thing you never, ever, ever, ever, ever want to do with a narcissistic person once you go through radical acceptance is say, "Haha, I'm going to tell them I know they're narcissistic."
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Do not do it. But it's so tempting. Like, "Ha, I got your number."
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So, I I get tell people to do this thing. It's the the email or the letter you're never going to send, right? And if you are going to write it as an email, please don't put their their name cuz it is so easy for the cat to jump on exactly the button that's going to lead you to send that email. But write it out. Write the letter you've always wanted to write. All the you I see you and those things and how you broke me down and da da da da.
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And don't send it. I can't tell you how many said letters like that I've read in session with a client who wrote it. We break it down there. Some people give it to a good friend. Some people write it and burn it. They just needed to do it to let go of it. The thing you just don't want to ever do is send it to the narcissistic person. But anything that can release it for you, there is a tremendous power in getting stuff that's turning in your head out of you and someplace else. If you do write an ick list everyone though, please don't put it in a place where especially if you haven't left the relationship, it can be found on something like where there's a cloud account. I can't tell you how many people have written these on an iPad and then they were found. So, it could be a piece of paper. It could be something that's in a different device that's not on a network. You need them, but you also have to be sort of digitally wise when you do this kind of thing.
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There is so much grief that happens as a person heals from a narcissistic relationship.
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But a lot of people scratch their head and say, "Exactly what am I grieving? Have I really lost something here?"
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Grief happens whether or not you leave the relationship. Grief happens whether or not a relationship ends. Grief is how we process loss. And when you really step back and think about all the things we lose as we go through radical acceptance and healing, we lose a part of our history. We lose the dreams and aspirations and hopes we had for this relationship. We look back and recognize the family of origin you wish you were from, you lost that idea. It's a loss of innocence, right? It's a loss of time. It's a loss of what you hoped for your own children and the kind of household you wanted to raise them in. There's so many losses, right? It's the loss of yourself because of how much we had to abandon ourselves and sacrifice ourselves to make this relationship work.
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So, as we process these losses just using the word grief helps so many people say, "This was a loss." Cuz it's so easy to say,
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"Great. This was an abusive relationship. How glad am I to be done
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with it?" It's not how this works. This felt very real while it felt real. Your family feels real. So, having to say, "This is not ever going to be what I want." Cuz remember, the narcissistic person in most cases is not dead. They're still very much alive living their best life at this point or whatever life they're living. So, it is easier to grieve the dead than it is to grieve the living. And so, when someone is alive but has caused you a lot of pain and you're trying to figure this out, there is a lot of sort of again, letting it go. And I think one of the most important first steps is naming it as grief. Because when you can see it as loss rather than some triumph, "Ah, I'm so glad I got rid of this person." You're kind of bypassing the process, which doesn't work. You have to recognize it as a loss, to feel it as a loss. Listen, I've even told folks that to feel it as a loss, to be aware of the things that you've lost because you can't again, bypassing and saying, "All right, time, whatever. Glad to be done with them." When you do that, that stuff's going to sneak back on you. And I even tell people,
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go through grieving rituals. Whatever that looks like. When we're going through grief, there's things we do. We have funerals. Um we say eulogies. And I've had people do everything from they've taken objects from the relationship and put them in a box and buried it in something that looked like a little coffin. They've written things down and and like for example things that they were told about themselves that weren't true or parts of themselves that they gave up on and they take those and they write them on something that degrades in the water and they throw them in the sea or they drop them in a campfire just to sort of release that to sort of create that as sort of a loss that they're no longer going to do that to themselves anymore. It really depends but you can really kind of turn this into some form of a ritual to turn it into real grief. We have grief rituals to be able to process loss when somebody passes away. There's no reason that same kind of idea ritual can't be harnessed here. I've even said to folks that some people will say I feel like I I grieve places I used to go. Like I feel like I can't go to those places and I've even said to people when you feel ready you can do it alone. You can do it with friends. Maybe go back and reclaim those places. Maybe it's a hike. Maybe it's a restaurant you used to go to. Uh maybe it's a a town on the shore or something. But give yourself permission when you're ready to do that and revisit it.
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And again treat it as feel it in your body as the grief that it is but also give yourself permission to reclaim it. One of the hardest things to grieve is injustice and narcissistic relationships are a monument to injustice. The other challenge in narcissistic relationships is there is very rarely ever closure. You're never going to get the great explanation of what happened. They're not going to say I took you for granted and I see that now and I will spend the rest of my days angry at myself for losing a good person like you. There's never that moment, right? We do not get that closure moment and yet you still have to keep on keeping on.
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Then there's the bigger issue of repair. It is very, very hard to heal without repair, without justice, but it it can happen. And when we think about repair, we're thinking about things like accountability and taking responsibility. We're talking about apology. We are we're talking about somebody acknowledging that they did something that hurt us. That's not going to happen, either. So, in the absence of closure, in the absence of repair, in the absence of accountability, and frankly in the absence of justice, any trauma writer, even the great ones like Dr. Judith Herman, will say, "In the absence of justice, healing from trauma is harder, but it's not impossible."
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And maybe the justice is merely that you did finally see it. That now you're moving into a life where you get it, and you're not going to spend any more time trying to please and appease and be what the narcissistic person wants. You're no longer going to abandon yourself anymore. You're going to show up as yourself in the safe spaces. You're going to get this. You're going to do things to not reenact these cycles again and protect other people around you, particularly your kids, from from these sorts of cycles again. So, there's meaning, there's purpose, there's these higher-order things, but it does feel like an injustice, and I'm not going to lie, folks, that injustice piece can keep people stuck in their heads for a long time. You want justice, and it's hard cuz it does feel like the narcissistic person walks off into the sunset into their best life ever. Why? Because it's really easy for narcissistic people to pick up and start again because they don't feel as deeply, right? To them, finding a new partner within a week of you ending a relationship with them, or probably they already had that partner queued up before the relationship ended, and starting a new life, and starting a new family, and having a new wedding while still continuing to torture you in a divorce, that doesn't feel fair. That doesn't feel right. And the again, it's about grieving justice.
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Because life isn't fair. Narcissistic relationships remind us of that. And sometimes we'll get ourselves caught in these other loops like, why did this happen to me? Everything happens for a reason. No, it actually doesn't. Everything happens. That's the end of the sentence. And this relationship happened. And you will learn from it. And it really you're you're still standing. And I am always reminding survivors of narcissistic relationships who still believe in love, who still want an intimate relationship. That is a sheer act of courage that you got through that and you still have this belief in the human spirit and the capacity of love. I know that it feels like they won, but that narcissistic person still has to walk through the world as their hollow selves. And sure it seems like they're killing it on Instagram and they're on yet another vacation and they're buying another new car, but you can lift the hood. You know what's under there. And so many people also even live with the fear that the next person's going to get a better version of them. I'm like, there is no 2.0. There is no better version. This is it. And the next person is going to get the same version that you got. What's interesting though for a survivor of a narcissistic relationship, the next person's actually going to get a much more evolved version of you. You will have changed. The narcissistic person will not. There is some justice in that, but it takes a while for our hearts and our souls to catch up to that rationality.
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Some of the most common misconceptions about healing from a narcissistic relationship relate to ideas that you have to leave to heal, you have to go no contact to heal, that one of the ways to heal is to quickly get into a new relationship. and those things aren't they're not true. Plenty of people heal just fine, even though they can't get out of every narcissistic relationship. Now, I'm not going to pull punches here. If you can't get out of the narcissistic relationship, healing's a little harder because you're still in the presence of the bad behavior. You're still having to, you know, be a party to the gaslighting and the entitlement and the rage and the dysregulation and all of it. You're still having to deal with it and it still triggers you and it still doesn't feel good, but now you know what it is. And hopefully you've built up other sources of support and all of that. It's possible. It's It's a bit like a um It's like weather, right? You know, you There's some sunny days and then all these really stormy awful days come up, and then there's some good days. Like, there's going to be these moments when you have to interact with the narcissistic person that makes it harder, but you're still going to heal. You don't have to get out of the relationship to heal, and I think that that messaging has been so harmful to people who can't just readily get a divorce, who aren't going to go no contact with a family member. And that
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raises this issue of no contact. No contact is a term that's gotten very popularized, and it's gotten a lot of sort of media coverage in the last year or so. And no contact is really defined as a person just really ending contact with another person. And people who are survivors of these relationships will sometimes opt to do that. Say, "I can't do this anymore. This is too harmful. This is too abusive. I don't want anything to do with this person anymore."
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No contact is very painful, but it's simply not an option that is available to everyone. It often works. It's one of those things where when people do it, um it works. I'm not going to disagree with that. When you no longer have to have contact with someone who's emotionally abusive, you feel better. It's not exactly a surprise.
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But for so many people, you can't go no contact with the person you are raising children with. You can't go no contact with a um with certain family members, especially given cultural variables and all of that that you just don't family you're like in my culture people are not family a stranger just doesn't happen or it can't happen at that stage in life. If there's financial interdependence may not be able to go no contact. So there's a long list of reasons why people can't. So when it's put out there as the only way you can heal it's sheer nonsense and it also leaves people feeling hopeless.
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Sometimes you don't get to go no contact now, but down the road you can and sometimes you might go no contact and then life happens and you have to then spend time with a narcissistic person again, but you likely got a lot of healing out of the way as you were in that no contact period. But just because you can't go no contact doesn't mean you're going to you're going to be stuck that you can't heal. It really comes down to engaging differently and that's why I always say like let's make it less about no contact and make it more about disengagement.
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You know, it's definitely engaging differently, engaging in a more limited way. One of the mistakes we make with narcissistic people is we still think that they care. Don't tell them what's going on in your life. Don't tell them the good news. Don't tell them the bad news. Don't tell them what you're worried about. Just kind of stick to the weather. You know, or stick to really banal kind of superficial topics.
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That in and of itself can leave you feeling more whole saying I protected me. I didn't go to them like a little kid running up to their mother when they're 5 years old. Look at my picture. Look at my picture. And the mother can't be bothered. We learn that there's other people in our life who will receive us with safety and love, not that person. So we may still have to talk to them, but we can choose what we share.
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One of the most crucial ingredients to healing from a narcissistic relationship is social support. There's no way to I think heal without that in some way, shape or form. Now what social support looks like can look different for different people. In some cases it may be a group of friends. In some cases it may be colleagues in a workplace, some people may be a 12-step community, for some people it might be therapy or a support group, for some people it's you know their family of origin. It In some people it's the family they've created. And for a lot of people it's a hybrid of people picked from all these spaces.
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You know again, Judith Herman very wisely and many other trauma writers have suggested that trauma that happens in relationship can only be healed in relationship. And narcissistic abuse or what happens in a narcissistic relationship is relational harm that happened in a relationship. We have to learn that relationships are safe again.
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It is so tempting to think, I'll tell you how I'm going to heal. I am going to move into a castle and I'm going to pull up all the bridges off the moat and nobody's getting close to me again. I suppose you're never going to get hurt again, but you're really going to miss out on the entire human experience. And so it's the it's that ability to slowly find safe places. It's even the willingness to connect to our bodies, to recognize that our body's already telling us when we feel safe or unsafe.
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We can pay attention to how we feel after we spend time with people. I always say, after you spend time with a healthy safe person, you feel about 2 in taller and you feel kind of like there's all these new things I can do. You feel full of hope. And after you've spent time with somebody who's unhealthy, maybe antagonistic, just unsafe, you feel crushed. You feel like, why bother? You might you might even devalue yourself more. You feel it. You feel it in your body. You feel more comfortable. You might feel more tense. You You almost carry the tension and the toxicity of the interaction. So, we can pay attention to all of that. We can attend to all of that.
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But it becomes so important to realize that discernment is such a key element of healing. And by discernment I mean it's very easy after you've gone through a narcissistic relationship to view the world as black and white. People are terrible or great. And also, we might doubt our capacity to recognize if a person is safe or not. This isn't about red flag seeking, it's about how do I feel when I'm with this person. We can take things slower. Again, we can pay attention to how we feel, and that discernment can slowly make meeting new people a safer process. So, slowly but surely building up places where you feel validated, where you feel seen, where you feel valued. Again, and using therapy as one of those places as a sounding board, this all becomes really a crucial, um, invaluable, necessary part of healing from relational abuse like we see in narcissistic relationships.
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So, rewriting your story is such an important part of healing from a narcissistic relationship. And what do we mean by that? Even when a person goes into, for example, a therapist's office, you're kind of asked to relate the story of your life, right? We all maintain a narrative, but it's not an objective set of facts. And when we've been through a narcissistic relationship, it's very easy for that narrative to be one of us being damaged, of us being foolish, of us being a sucker, of being played, of not being strong, of not being able to set boundaries, of being bad at relationships, right? It's easy to get into that kind of thinking. But the other way to think about it is what did you learn? Like even from the worst of circumstances, we've learned something. Right? You may have very well learned that the part of yourself that you devalue, the flexible, accommodating, kind part of yourself, it's actually a really great part of yourself. You're not a sucker. Right? So, you can start thinking about yourself in very different ways.
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I actually in my book, and it's not you, I use the trope of the hero's journey. And I did that because every time I read a myth or watched a film about the hero's journey, I'm like, "This looks like something was getting over a narcissistic relationship cuz it kind of always is. It makes me wonder if that entire mythical structure of every story ever written by human beings was about getting over a devastating relationship. Because what really happens is a person has the courage to one day radically accept that this is what this relationship is. This is an important relationship and seeing this clearly is going to upend my life. And then start a very complicated process of healing where other people will come and go, those fellow travelers who may be therapists, friends. Heck, I even consider a book or podcast to sometimes be a fellow traveler. There's going to be that sort of rock bottom moment when you think maybe I'm the problem, maybe I'm the bad one, I'm going to die alone. What is my life ever going to be? I'm a ter- I come from this terrible family, all of that. And slowly but surely, and we talk about this in trauma healing, all the ways we had to break ourselves into all these pieces and parts to survive this relationship. The self-abandonment, the self-silencing, the self-suppression, the quitting ourselves. We can reintegrate all of those parts together into someone who looks very different than the person who was in that
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relationship. And we can really understand, no, we weren't a sucker or a fool. But all we were trying to do was keep ourselves safe. Our great sin was that we believed in love and we believed in the goodness of people and we just did it with the wrong person. And in doing that, we can really turn what we feel is a story of our weakness into one of our strength, into the courage of being willing to see it.
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And so many survivors actually find it very helpful to pay it forward somehow. They talk to other survivors, they'll write blogs, they'll make art. I have worked with thousands and thousands of survivors who have shared that I mean endless numbers of ways that they've attempted to help other people. They'll volunteer in domestic violence programs, they'll they'll volunteer in other ways in their community knowing for example a food pantry maybe getting food to a person who is in a really really abusive relationship and this food may be what she needs to get back on her feet again. Like people start finding meaning and purpose in very different ways.
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But it does mean the willingness to go back and not tell the story of yourself as somebody who was a sucker who got played but rather someone who was courageous enough to love and is actually willing to walk it back and keep giving life a chance. That's a very very courageous thing to do. I have seen thousands and thousands and thousands of people not only survive after these relationships but thrive. I have seen people go back to school, finish high school, get trained in a new field. People who've gone on to dream jobs. People who've gone on to fall in love again, write books, make films, change the world.
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And the possibility is unbelievable because the moment you stop self-abandoning to try to attach to someone who is unsafe and unkind, you open up these reservoirs of strength in yourself. And really it is a transformative energy. I think we're in an amazing time in history where we're understanding these dynamics. I actually shudder to think how much human potential we've lost to people being in invalidating relationships, but I take a lot of hope from the belief that now people get this and they're turning their lives around. They're taking their lives back and as a result we're all going to benefit from all of the great stuff that happens as people take their stories back.
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So to anyone who's watching this and is now realizing that yep right now I'm in a narcissistic relationship. I want people to realize that there's nothing that you're going to do to change their behavior. And that the effort can't be on changing them, but rather to sort of shift the lens, shift the light back onto yourself and say, "Now that I get this, how can I engage with this differently? How can I find spaces in my life where I can actually show up as my real self? That now I can give myself permission to stop devoting most of my psychological bandwidth to making this relationship work. That somebody abusing me is not my fault. And there is no boundary or communication I can pull out of my hat to make this better.
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So it's really about no longer throwing the good money after bad as we do in these relationships, but to really invest in yourself and in the safe, healthy relationships you have. I write about something called the 90/10 rule. What we do is we put about 90% of our psychological resource, self, time, energy, all of it into the most unhealthy, harmful relationships in our life, probably with hopes of avoiding conflict and keeping them stable, giving only 10% to the best, growth-oriented, safe spaces. Flip the math. Phone it in to the unhealthy relationships, take that 90% and put it into this big, lush, fertile garden that are the healthy people in your life, because from that will come more and more not only healthy social ties, but now all of you in a mutual, reciprocal way, all of you in that healthy network of people are all growing because you have someone who's bearing witness to the goodness that is you. We just got to stop putting our time and effort into trying to make difficult people not be difficult and put it into the things that we already know are working.
Original English
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