Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Dangerous Relationships. Narcissistic Traits Vs Narcissistic Personality Disorder Ep1.

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Dangerous Relationships. Narcissistic Traits Vs Narcissistic Personality Disorder Ep1. · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to episode two of the series Dangerous Relationships.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, like the previous episode, which was the first part, it's been broken down into parts, and this is because looking at the subject in depth shows me that it's really too much to talk about in one go.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I'd like to do is to give listeners three parts so that they can, you know, examine them in in their own time and then sort of come back for part two and then come back for part three.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I should just say that in one episode, which I've reposted of the addiction series, I think it may very well be the second episode, but there's an annoying metronome in the background.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I detected this, I then edited it and posted another version.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if you hear that uh metronome in the background and it's particularly irritating, then do just go to the next episode.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: That will help you to uh listen to it without um irritation, I hope.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: The dangerous relationships is as I said at the outset in the introductory episode, is a somewhat dramatic title, but I suppose that's because I'm dealing with things that can be very dramatic.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the first episode I focused on addiction, the effects upon families, the way in which family function and family health is eroded.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in this episode, I'm going to be looking at the subject of narcissistic traits and narcissistic personality disorder, and really looking at the difference between those two things.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't want anybody to have the the idea that by listening to this podcast you will then be able to clinically diagnose a person who you might describe as as narcissistic.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: What I want to do instead is to explore how this term, which has become part of everyday language, sh should really be understood.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you spend just a few minutes on social media, it won't be long before you encounter someone describing an ex-partner, a parent, a colleague, or anybody else as a narcissist.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now those those terms sometimes do describe and reflect very real and painful experiences, and sometimes they might not.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: The difficulty is that the word has become so widely used that it's beginning to lose its clinical meaning.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that concerns me because I don't, it's not that I want to defend harmful behavior, but actually it's because language matters.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one person tells another person their partner is a m a narcissist, that person then sees the partner through a narcissistic lens, and you know, before you know where you are, you've you've uh you have framed someone's entire identity, and yet you don't even know them.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what we have to do is certainly in this series, is I want to offer this important caveat, and that that runs throughout this entire series.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's about helping you to recognize patterns of behavior and understand the psychological processes that might lie beneath them.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not intended, as I said, to diagnose any individual.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Diagnosis is a very complex clinical process and it requires comprehensive assessment, history taking, consideration of alternative explanations, which we call differential diagnosis, a detailed understanding of the person's development, relationships, and functioning over time.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, no responsible clinician would diagnose somebody from a conversation or from a social media post, and so therefore, no should neither should anyone else.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I hope to offer instead is something rather different.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I want to help you understand the psychology that may underpin certain patterns of relating.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because once we understand those, we're often much better equipped to protect ourselves, to protect our children, and to make thoughtful decisions about our relationships.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the first distinctions we need to make is the difference between healthy narcissism, and yes, there is such a thing, narcissistic traits and narcissistic personality disorder, because they're not the same thing.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, healthy narcissism is not only normal, it's essential.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now that may surprise some people, but healthy narcissism is that part of us that allows us to feel proud when we have worked hard.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it enables us to develop confidence.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's like self-recognition.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: It allows us to protect ourselves when we're being treated unfairly.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's like awareness, it helps us to establish boundaries, and it gives us the courage to pursue ambitions, recover from disappointment, and believe that we have value.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: That has to do with a sense of worth, a sense of self, a sense of our own, what we call agency or mobility, and we would become, without it, we would become excessively dependent upon the other people's approval, upon other people's approval.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reminded of the story of narcissist, the Greek myth of the boy who fell in love with his own reflection.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Freud was describing something far more than healthy narcissism there.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was describing a self-preoccupation and one that was exclusive.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that falls much more into the realms of narcissistic personality disorder.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're talking about in healthy narcissism is self-recognition.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's not grandiosity, but it's a it is about self-awareness and self-recognition self-recognition.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: We need it really for confidence building.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not something we should eliminate or try to eliminate, it's something we all need.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now the second category is narcissistic traits.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And again, these can be entirely human.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And there are times in all of our lives when we become self-focused, when we enjoy admiration, when we want recognition, when we become defensive, when we struggle to acknowledge criticism.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And under stress, many of us become temporarily more concerned with our own needs than those of others.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the same as a narcissistic personality disorder.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: It means we're human.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And generally speaking, what will happen at those times is afterwards we will see, you know, we we we we didn't get what we were hoping for, we were over defensive, we were being self-protective, and that was under stress.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's human.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it again, I don't want to pathologize those things that are effectively normal within all of us.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the important question isn't really whether narcissistic traits exist, because as I said, they really do exist in all of us.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: But the important questions are these.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: How flexible are those traits?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Can we reflect upon them?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Can we recognize that we have hurt somebody?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Can we tolerate responsibility without collapsing into shame or becoming defensive?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Can we genuinely experience another person's emotional reality?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can we learn?
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Can we adapt?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Can we change?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Healthy personalities remain flexible.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: They make mistakes, they apologize, they grow.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: They become wiser through experience.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But at the other end of the spectrum lies something very different.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, narcissistic personality disorder is not simply an exaggerated version of confidence or arrogance, nor is it simply someone who enjoys talking about themselves.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's a much deeper organization of personality.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because the person's sense of self becomes organized around maintaining self-esteem, protecting against psychological vulnerability, and regulating feelings that may be experienced as profoundly threatening.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: This often gives rise to patterns of behavior that are experienced by others as controlling, dismissive, exploitative, entitled, or lacking in empathy.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: But even here we need to be careful, because although the behaviors are obvious, the psychological reasons behind them are usually much less so.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Throughout my career I found that if we focus only on behavior, frankly, we understand very little.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Behavior is important because it has consequences, consequences that people must be responsible for.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: But behavior is also communication.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us something about the person's internal world.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the questions I repeatedly ask in my clinical work isn't simply what is the person doing, but rather what is happening inside this person's mind that makes this behavior necessary.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that question changes everything.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't excuse behavior, it starts the process of understanding and explaining.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And as I say so often, explanation and excuse are two different things.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Explanations for people like me are the foundations of good clinical practice.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another question that follows naturally from the first, and that is what effect is this person's internal world having upon everyone around them?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the question that really that sits at the heart of this entire series.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because dangerous relationships are really dangerous simply because of isolated incidents.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: They become dangerous when one person's internal psychological organization gradually reorganizes the emotional lives of everyone around them.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Children begin adapting, partners doubt themselves, families begin walking on eggshells, professionals sometimes find themselves pulled into patterns they don't immediately recognize, and without realizing it, everyone begins to the psychological gravity of one person's inner world.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why I've become increasingly interested, not merely in diagnosis, but in relationships.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Diagnosis tells us something about an individual.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Relationships tell us what happens when the individual's internal world meets the minds of other people.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it is there, in that meeting between minds, that we begin to understand why some relationships become psychologically dangerous.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: One of the greatest misconceptions about narcissistic personalities is that they are immediately recognizable.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, that is very often not the case.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes in the clinical context, it becomes apparent to me very quickly that I'm dealing with somebody who has hallmark traits that indicate the possibility of a narcissistic personality type or disorder.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: But then in the context of my work, these things, these are things I would see.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: But generally speaking, people aren't going to see that because many people with these kinds of patterns present as highly engaging.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: They may be articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, they may appear successful, generous, confident, even deeply compassionate.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: They often know exactly how they wish to be seen.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: They often know exactly the right things to do and the right things to say.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is one of the reasons these relationships can become so confusing, because the person everyone else experiences may not be the same person experienced within the intimacy of the relationship, because that is where the pretense, if you like, goes.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we're going to begin in the next part of this particular episode.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: How can one person appear so believable, so benevolent, and so convincing to the outside world whilst their partner quietly begins questioning their own judgment and sanity, their confidence and their sense of reality?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And to answer that question, we need to understand something much deeper than behavior.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: We need to understand the difference between intellectual insight and emotional insight.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, that distinction explains much more about dangerous relationships than almost any diagnosis ever could.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk more in the next episode.