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Transcript

How to SET BOUNDARIES · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: So the way gas slighting works is it's a denial
• 0:03
  of a person's reality. That's step one. I never said
• 0:06
  that that never happened, z. I'm very authoritatively saying to
• 0:11
  something didn't happen. That by itself is not gas slighting.
• 0:14
  Now the step two of gas slighting is the best
• 0:16
  selling author on the Post, the number one health and
• 0:19
  wellness podcast and Purpose.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: With Jay Shetty. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose,
• 0:26
  the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to
• 0:28
  each and every one of you who choose to come
• 0:31
  here to become happier, healthier, and more healed. And I'm
• 0:34
  so grateful to our incredible audience. It's been phenomenal to
• 0:38
  see how much you've been listening, learning, applying in your
• 0:42
  lives over the past few months. I love seeing the reviews.
• 0:45
  I love seeing all the tags on Instagram and on Twitter,
• 0:48
  and the videos on TikTok. It means the world to
• 0:50
  me that you're also sharing and passing this forward. And
• 0:54
  today's guest is someone that I've known for a couple
• 0:56
  of years. We've interacted in some really interesting environments. I
• 1:00
  have to say that whenever she speaks, I'm like wow,
• 1:05
  like I'm completely in awe. Her insights are phenomenal in
• 1:10
  real time. I've been parts of like almost group thinks,
• 1:14
  and whenever today's guest shares an insight or shares some
• 1:18
  wisdom or shares a perspective, it's so powerful that you
• 1:22
  know that there's years of experience, there's decades of learning
• 1:27
  that go behind it, and so I feel really honored
• 1:29
  that I get to have this conversation. She's been on
• 1:31
  the show once before, but we were just talking beforehand
• 1:34
  about how he was doing the pandemics that was very
• 1:36
  pandemic focused. But I think today is going to be
• 1:39
  really truly powerful for you. I'm speaking about the one
• 1:42
  and only Dr Romany, who's a licensed clinical psychologist in LA,
• 1:47
  a professor at California State University LA, and the founder
• 1:51
  and CEO of Lunar Education, Training and Consulting. Doctor Romeny
• 1:56
  is an author of several books. I recommend them all,
• 1:59
  including Should I Stay or Should I Go? Surviving a
• 2:02
  Relationship with a Narcissist and Don't You Know Who I Am?
• 2:06
  How to Stay Sane in an era of narcissism and
• 2:10
  titlement and incivility. Now, Dr Romony will be adding the
• 2:15
  role of host to a resume. She launches a new podcast,
• 2:18
  Navigating Narcissism with Dr Romeny, a show that focuses on
• 2:22
  narcissism and its impact on relationships. Now I know all
• 2:26
  of you are fascinated by relationships, narcissism, and your mind.
• 2:30
  There's no one better than doctor Romedy. Doctor Romney, thank
• 2:33
  you so much for doing this.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: That's a very big introduction. So I hope I can
• 2:36
  live up to you.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: It's true, and I think we have.
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  Speaker 1: We've been in so many rooms.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: We have a lot a mutual vigan. We people that
• 2:43
  we work with, and I really mean it, like, I
• 2:46
  love the way you listen, and I love the way
• 2:48
  you articulate what you're hearing and connecting and putting the
• 2:52
  DUTs together. And you're so in demand, so that actually
• 2:55
  have you here today is really really special. I wanted
• 2:59
  to start off by understanding a bit about how you
• 3:01
  came to this work and like how narcissism, because today
• 3:05
  you're known as the person who knows literally everything about narcism,
• 3:10
  was deeply studying it. When did narcissism become an obsession
• 3:13
  or a focus or a point of study for you?
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  Speaker 1: Sort of around two thousand and four, two thousand and
• 3:19
  three thereabouts, and it was it was in a research
• 3:22
  capacity looking at what was happening in healthcare settings when
• 3:25
  you had really demanding, antagonistic, entitled patients and the toll
• 3:31
  that was taking in healthcare settings, which seems so obvious,
• 3:34
  but that led me to do a deeper dive and
• 3:36
  I realized how little this had been researched in sort
• 3:39
  of healthcare situations. I was specifically working in the area
• 3:41
  of HIV, and so that started a research program. At
• 3:45
  that same time, I also had a clinical practice, and
• 3:47
  in my clinical practice, you know, more and more people
• 3:50
  were kind of coming in with the same relationship story
• 3:52
  because I was studying narcissism in my research, I'm thinking,
• 3:55
  how interesting, let me just shed this light on the
• 3:58
  patterns they're seeing that are quite antagonistic and that just
• 4:02
  knowing that, and they said, well, can this change the
• 4:04
  answer to that's pretty much no. Once they knew it
• 4:07
  could really be shifted that much, it totally changed their
• 4:10
  point of view and lifted a lot of self blame.
• 4:13
  So those were the two things kind of happening, and
• 4:15
  that honestly, should I say or should I go? My
• 4:18
  first book on narcissism came from after the sessions. These
• 4:22
  clients were so overwhelmed they'd often say, could you just
• 4:24
  put this in an email? Right? And I really felt
• 4:27
  for them because I could see it was a real,
• 4:29
  real deer in the headlights experience. So I'd knock out,
• 4:32
  you know something in an email. It also helped me
• 4:34
  organize my thoughts, and then I thought, okay, I keep
• 4:36
  writing the same email, so let's just make that a book.
• 4:40
  So when the world started sort of going upside down,
• 4:44
  I thought, this is interesting. I am going to approach
• 4:47
  this topic because I thought, well, this is actually what's
• 4:50
  happening right now. And everyone was using the word A
• 4:53
  lot of people weren't using it correctly, and that's where
• 4:56
  that came from. Then from there, where where it got
• 5:00
  interesting was I'm a writer, That's what I do. But
• 5:05
  two young people approached me, former students and had said
• 5:10
  there were students they were finishing school at the time.
• 5:12
  They said, you know, you should really be on YouTube.
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  And I said, that's ridiculous. You know, at my age,
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  it didn't make sense. It wasn't how I consumed media.
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  And I said, let's let's take a few months. Let's
• 5:22
  see what kind of how this space works, and over
• 5:27
  time years of sort of honing it and tuning it
• 5:29
  and all of that, that was actually where, all of
• 5:31
  a sudden, this reach happened on this YouTube channel. So
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  it was an evolution. But what I found was where
• 5:39
  the real sort of pivot was for me, the world
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  of mental health was not recognizing what was happening to
• 5:46
  people in these relationships. And that's when I got angry.
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  And to me, anger is a great motivator. I thought
• 5:52
  these people had going to therapists and being invalidated, and
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  maybe it's how you communicate, and maybe you weren't trying
• 5:58
  hard enough. And I thought, oh my goodness, and that's
• 6:01
  really for me when it sort of felt like a revolution,
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  I thought, something's got to give. And if this means
• 6:06
  that people are going to say, you know what's wrong
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  with you and you have a target on your back,
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  I mean I've been called every name in the book,
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  and people said this is an unempathic therapist. How could she?
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  And I thought, oh my goodness. I thought people are
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  trying to shut this discourse down through shame, and I thought, nah,
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  let's just keep going. I'm old enough to not really
• 6:24
  care what people think about me anymore, and so that's
• 6:28
  really where it came from. And now that's just sort
• 6:30
  of the focus the narcissism peace to me is interesting
• 6:34
  from a scientific framing and all of that, but the
• 6:36
  real passion for me is working with people who have
• 6:41
  been through these relationships and have never really felt recognized,
• 6:44
  seen or heard to help them with their healing and
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  help them find themselves so they feel that they can
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  stand on their own in the world and actually have
• 6:53
  their voice again. That's the mission.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, so important and so needed, and I'm so glad
• 6:59
  that you're doing. You feel like this is more common
• 7:02
  as an occurrence today than ever before. And do you
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  think that's because narcissism was somewhat hidden for many years
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  in the sense that it just happened behind closed doors,
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  or like, why is it only now that we're talking
• 7:16
  about it so much.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: That's such a good question, Jay, you know, and it's
• 7:18
  almost like, without giving you two pedantic a history lesson
• 7:21
  is that people have been the word narcissism in this application,
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  like about other people, didn't really even start coming into
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  the literature, and until maybe the very late eighteen hundreds
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  early nineteen hundreds. Then some psychoanalytic theorists talked about it,
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  but it was a really quiet backwater in the world
• 7:39
  of mental health. And mental health and psychology are new fields.
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  It wasn't even until nineteen eighty where we saw it
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  come with the idea of narcissistic personality disorder, which is
• 7:49
  its own issue. That's very recent to me. What is
• 7:52
  that you know forty not even fifty years ago, and
• 7:55
  so this people have been narcissistic since they have been people,
• 8:01
  and actually an interesting framing on it can actually come from.
• 8:06
  There's fascinating work and if you've never read it, I
• 8:09
  can't recommend this book enough. The book Behave by Robert
• 8:12
  Sapalski maybe one of the most extraordinary books I think
• 8:16
  has been written in the last ten years. And to me,
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  Sepalski is a giant in all fields related to psychology,
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  and he makes this incredible. He's talking about aggression sort
• 8:29
  of why why do people behave aggressively? Why do people
• 8:32
  behave badly? And we do know the science has shown it.
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  Narcissism is associated with aggression and violence, like this isn't
• 8:40
  just like these people are handful. There's actually a risk
• 8:44
  here and we're not addressing this risk. But when you
• 8:47
  look at what he says, they say, look, when you
• 8:49
  look at the evolution of human history, he said, what
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  we do see is a greater level of antagonism and
• 8:56
  people who came more from cultures where they were hurting animals, goats, whatever, cows.
• 9:02
  Why because you could steal those things. But people who
• 9:05
  are pastoralists, people who farmed, you really can't go get
• 9:09
  up and steal a field. I guess you could steal
• 9:11
  some of the ears of corn, but you're not going
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  to make off with the whole field. Farming is more collaborative,
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  hurting is more individual. So if you go back and
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  that is we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of years
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  of human history, how people sort of interacted through the
• 9:24
  world economically, you look at history lessons. I remember if
• 9:27
  my daughter was taking world history, we had a very
• 9:30
  long drive to school, so I said, why don't you
• 9:32
  teach me what you learned on the way to school.
• 9:34
  She'd study. I'd learned something. But what I thought over
• 9:36
  and over again over five hundred years of world history,
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  a lot of drives over many years, is that what
• 9:43
  we were seeing is that these people in the history
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  books were all very antagonistic. They were all very narcissistic.
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  They didn't have empathy. They were arrogant, they were aggressive,
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  they were controlling, they lacked empathy. They had to be
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  the hero like it was always the same story. So
• 9:59
  I actually think narcissism, narcissistic relationships, all of this has
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  been around since time immemorial. It was only because psychology
• 10:08
  is a field in its relative infancy that we're only
• 10:11
  talking about it in this way now, And it is
• 10:14
  only in the last fifteen years that we have actually
• 10:17
  started paying attention to the harm this personality style does
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  to the other person in a relationship.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: It's incredible, isn't it when you look at it from
• 10:26
  that perspective about how long people have suffered from or
• 10:31
  suffered with something because our learning was still catching up
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  with its experience, and you think about anyone who hasn't
• 10:38
  lived in the last fifteen to twenty five years, they
• 10:41
  potentially were called names, outcasts, misunderstood, unheard, unseen. As you're saying.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: Absolute, I mean, Jay, I have worked with clients who
• 10:51
  are older, Okay, so they've been in thirty forty fifty
• 10:54
  year marriages that have been difficult from the very very beginning,
• 11:00
  and they said, you know what, it wasn't until I
• 11:02
  watched your videos. It wasn't until I read your books.
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  It wasn't until the last five to ten years that
• 11:07
  this finally had a name. And until then I assumed
• 11:10
  it was my fault. I wasn't trying hard enough. I
• 11:13
  was complaining. I was being unrealistic about what a marriage
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  should look like. That's what they were. They were basically,
• 11:19
  in essence, turning it back on themselves, blaming themselves, and
• 11:23
  culture wasn't helping, you know, people saying, well, I guess
• 11:25
  you're not. Marriage is tough. You have to make compromises.
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  That's just how they are. They don't mean it. Their
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  bark is worse than their bite, and so people would
• 11:33
  internalize that. And if you really want to look at
• 11:35
  it this way. Even historically, we didn't really start talking
• 11:39
  about domestic violence until the late sixties into the nineteen seventies.
• 11:44
  That's when Leonora Walker made the whole sort of you know,
• 11:46
  the circle of abuse in a relationship and all of that.
• 11:50
  This is all new, and that was in the seventies.
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  To this day, we still do not accord emotional abuse
• 11:58
  this same level as we do physical abuse, and yet
• 12:01
  I've got to tell you everyone who's physically abused is
• 12:04
  emotionally abused. But emotional emotionally abused people are showing up
• 12:09
  with the same level of symptomatology, often the same level
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  of post traumatic kinds of decrements and functioning, you name it.
• 12:17
  So we're seeing is this is all slowly evolving. Interestingly,
• 12:22
  the field of mental health is still slow to catch up.
• 12:25
  That's something that's got to change.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, no, I'm so glad we're having this conversation,
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  and thank you for letting us go on a history lesson,
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  because I think it's really important, quite frankly, to understand
• 12:35
  to really get context of where we are. Seeing, as
• 12:39
  you said, these words are thrown around now and they're
• 12:40
  also everywhere, and you've probably done this a million times
• 12:43
  before our audience. Could you please define narcissism and then
• 12:46
  narcissistic personality disorders because I do feel now, as you said,
• 12:51
  a lot of people are using this on a daily basis,
• 12:53
  and while it's healthy that our language is evolving, I
• 12:56
  do often find that people also get wrongly labeled or
• 13:00
  early labeled or whatever it may be.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: I totally agree, and this is a big problem struggle,
• 13:05
  call it what you will.
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  Speaker 2: Is that?
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: So narcissism's a personality style, okay, So if a personality
• 13:11
  style could be anything including narcissism, agreeableness, introversion, neuroticism, those
• 13:18
  are all personality styles, right, So narcissism's on the shelf
• 13:22
  with them. Now we would view narcissism, which sits under
• 13:25
  a bigger umbrella called antagonism, as a more maladaptive style
• 13:29
  because their behavior can often put them at odds with
• 13:33
  other people. Things like the entitlement, the arrogance, the manipulativeness,
• 13:37
  the grandiosities are sort of really uncomfortable patterns. That's narcissism, Okay.
• 13:43
  Now when we jump the rails to narcissistic personality disorder,
• 13:48
  it's a whole different game. The reason people really get
• 13:52
  kind of a b in their bonnet about this needs
• 13:54
  to be diagnosed by a licensed mental health practitioner is
• 13:58
  because in order for a person to be diagnosed with
• 14:02
  a mental illness, not only do they have to have
• 14:05
  a laundry list of whatever is associated with that, whether
• 14:08
  it's depression anxieties, because aphrenia, bipolar disorder, substance use disorders
• 14:13
  doesn't matter, personality disorders are the same. So you have
• 14:16
  to have that list, and this is the ringer. You
• 14:20
  have to be able to show that that person is
• 14:23
  either experiencing something we call subjective distress meaning that they're uncomfortable,
• 14:29
  or social and occupational impairment meaning that their life is
• 14:33
  kind of getting wrecked by this and they're aware of it.
• 14:37
  It's a lot of awareness and discomfort that many people
• 14:41
  who are narcissistic don't have. In fact, they're kind of
• 14:44
  sitting on top of the world. They got a partner,
• 14:47
  they got a side piece, they've got a they've got money,
• 14:50
  they've got success, they've got power. They're think, I ain't
• 14:53
  got no problems. Now they're burning down everyone around them.
• 14:57
  But you cannot diagnose someone because someone else is unhappy
• 15:03
  with their behavior. That's not what our diagnostic systems were
• 15:06
  designed to do. So when we get into these antagonistic
• 15:10
  disorders like narcissistic personality disorder, it's pretty rare that people
• 15:15
  with these personalities get into treatment, and when they do,
• 15:18
  it's for some other reason. Their marriage is blowing up,
• 15:22
  they're using substances. In some cases, they're depressed, something's gone
• 15:27
  wrong at work, they've been involved in something sort of
• 15:29
  publicly that makes them look bad, so they go to
• 15:31
  therapy to save face. So the thing that gets them
• 15:34
  into therapy is not like, oh, I've noticed I don't
• 15:37
  have much empathy and I'm really entitled and arrogant. I'm
• 15:40
  looking for help with that said, no one ever. Okay.
• 15:44
  So when they're coming in with something else, often very arrogantly,
• 15:48
  like okay, I see your fancy certificates on the wall, doc,
• 15:51
  So how long is it going to take you to
• 15:52
  fix me? I'm paying a lot for your time. Very dismissive,
• 15:55
  very arrogant. Now, every so often you'll see a narcissism,
• 16:00
  not every so often, not uncommonly. In people who have
• 16:02
  narcissistic personality disorder, they may also have something else going on,
• 16:06
  like depression or anxiety, or, like I said, a substance
• 16:10
  use disorder. The therapist is going to focus, as we do,
• 16:14
  on the more acute issue, the depression, the anxiety, substance
• 16:17
  use disorder, and they'll try to manage that right through
• 16:21
  combination of therapy, maybe medication, whatever they use. Time goes on,
• 16:26
  the mood's lifting a little, or the anxiety's managed, or
• 16:29
  they're sober, but they're still really awful and entitled and
• 16:33
  arrogant and all this other stuff. And because a lot
• 16:35
  of therapists don't bring personality stuff into the room, they
• 16:38
  don't think about it. They're thinking that maybe I'm not
• 16:41
  doing this right. This person still is not like, they're
• 16:44
  still not behaving nicely, but they're not using anymore, and
• 16:47
  they seem to be Their sleep seems to be better.
• 16:49
  And so you see what I'm saying is the personality
• 16:51
  is like the baseline. It's the thrum under the other
• 16:55
  stuff that's happening on top. That's the disorder a person.
• 16:59
  You have a personality. I have a personality. For example,
• 17:01
  I'm introverted, Okay, believe it or not, incredibly introverted person
• 17:06
  That is my personality. It is not going to change
• 17:10
  next week. I am not going to be the life
• 17:12
  of the party, Okay, on any given Saturday night. I
• 17:16
  tell you the probabilities. I am home reading a book,
• 17:19
  watching TV, or doing something ridiculous at home. But I
• 17:21
  am at home, Okay. I can't change that. If you
• 17:26
  said to me, well, come on, doctory, We're going to
• 17:27
  make you extroverted, I'm like, no, you're not. And if
• 17:31
  you said, but you have to become extroverted. I might
• 17:34
  be able to stretch myself, but I'll collapse or I'll
• 17:37
  be exhausted, or you know what I'm saying. So that's personality.
• 17:40
  It is who we are. It's a psychological fingerprint of sorts,
• 17:43
  but it's always right under the surface. So you're not
• 17:46
  going to make the introverted extrovert. You're not going to
• 17:49
  make the neurotic person more sort of relaxed and impulsive.
• 17:53
  You're not going to take a conscientious person and turn
• 17:56
  them into someone who is sort of acts out, impulsive
• 17:59
  and doesn't play. These personalities sort of set who we are.
• 18:03
  And so this is in the case of people who
• 18:06
  have narcissistic personalities, they have very disagreeable personalities, they have
• 18:10
  antagonistic personalities. That's the difference. And so before people say it,
• 18:16
  I'm like, I'll say, does this person have a lack
• 18:18
  of empathy? Are they entitled? Do they seek validation? Sometimes
• 18:22
  people say, well, I think he's narcissistic because he cheated
• 18:24
  on me. I'm like, well, he cheated on you, that's
• 18:26
  all I got here. I don't know if this dude's narcissistic,
• 18:30
  you'd have to tell me a little bit more about
• 18:32
  this person's behavior. And I think people are using this
• 18:35
  as a buzzword to label or talk about someone who
• 18:40
  did something that aggravated them. And you've got to remember,
• 18:43
  narcissism is not a one off. Okay, so if one
• 18:47
  day someone did something, they're having a bad week. But
• 18:50
  in general, they're a very even tempered, warm, compassionate, kind, mindful,
• 18:57
  a self aware person. That's who they are most of
• 18:59
  the time. But then twenty things are going wrong. Parent
• 19:04
  are sick, child is sick, job is going badly, and
• 19:07
  they're a little bit more short fused. But they're even saying,
• 19:11
  I am not at my best, I am so sorry,
• 19:13
  cut me a wide berth, you know, I'm so so.
• 19:16
  And they're very aware that they're not behaving well. They
• 19:19
  they're not they're not behaving well. In that case, isn't narcissism.
• 19:22
  It may just be a bad week.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: That's such a great explanation, and I hope everyone who's
• 19:27
  listening and watching, I hope that's giving you a real
• 19:29
  context and a wider perspective on how this all fits together.
• 19:33
  Thank you so much for that genuine masterclass. I guess
• 19:36
  what I want to start is do we have any
• 19:38
  understanding or how much is our current understanding on how
• 19:42
  people end up with a narcissistic personality, because I think
• 19:46
  that's healthy for people to have context over too. Like
• 19:48
  you said, like whatever personality we are, we can't change
• 19:51
  that core root base of it. So it's worth knowing
• 19:54
  how we ended up there because again, whether we're parents,
• 19:58
  whether we're thinking of being parents, whether we're navigating the
• 20:01
  world and concern about ourselves or someone in our life,
• 20:03
  it helps us understand what are some of those facets
• 20:07
  or elements that brought people into being narcissist as a personality.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Right, So this is where it gets interesting.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: So personality is a funny little thing where it's it's
• 20:15
  there's a little bit of a genetic piece to it,
• 20:17
  and that genetic piece is something we call temperament. Okay,
• 20:21
  So we all have temperaments and we see it even
• 20:23
  in babies. Some babies you hold them in their arms,
• 20:25
  your arms, they soothe like this. They're easy, they're smiley,
• 20:29
  they're often they're just content, you know, and they and
• 20:33
  they're often kind and even as soon as that point
• 20:36
  where they're sort of aware of who other people are
• 20:38
  in toddlerhood, they come into preschool age, they're very aware.
• 20:42
  They'll take their cookie, they'll split it and have There's
• 20:43
  some kids like that. Right then there are those kids who,
• 20:47
  no matter what you do, they arch their back and
• 20:49
  they cannot be soothed, and they're and they always need attention,
• 20:54
  and they always want attention, and they're mean to their siblings,
• 20:56
  and they take not only the one cookie, but they
• 20:58
  take all the cookies. Right. That stuff, that biological stuff,
• 21:02
  is foundational in many ways to our personalities. I'd say
• 21:05
  to everyone, if you have access to anyone who knew
• 21:08
  you early in life, see how well like they describe
• 21:11
  your infancy or your toddlerhood, and how well it tracks
• 21:14
  to who you are now. Every so often as a shrink,
• 21:17
  I get to talk to like a parental figure in
• 21:19
  that person's life. Never been wrong, yet every time that
• 21:23
  baby temperament, toddler temperament tracks And I'm sure you were
• 21:27
  a sweet baby. I am so sure. She'd say, Jay
• 21:32
  is as sweet as little baby. Oh my god, no,
• 21:36
  they'll say, oh, this one, you know, definitely not. And
• 21:39
  I was a super super super sweet baby, you know.
• 21:42
  And I think I'm a pretty sweet adult actually, you know,
• 21:45
  but a little intense but sweet, you know, but I
• 21:49
  bet you were. And so that temperament forms like a seed.
• 21:53
  All right, that's a seed right there. That temperament is
• 21:56
  how the world reacts to us. That kid who's had
• 21:59
  and won't be sooth and needs attention, it needs to
• 22:02
  cartwheel through the living room. The world doesn't like that
• 22:06
  kid that much, right, They go through Babysitters don't like them.
• 22:09
  Parents are just a little bit of eye rolling. Kids
• 22:12
  are perceptive, and it might even affect attachment because the
• 22:15
  parent is so exhausted they're dealing with that tough child.
• 22:19
  It could even impair attachment experiences. And then they go
• 22:22
  into school. Teachers don't like them as much. Even peers
• 22:25
  might be frustrated by them. They're having more invalidating experiences. Right,
• 22:30
  that's a little bit of some of the seed of
• 22:31
  what we see can be narcissism, right, because narcissism also
• 22:35
  has an attachment piece to it. In general, people of
• 22:38
  narcissistic personalities often have more anxious or avoidant attachment styles,
• 22:43
  a little bit more anxious than anything else. And why
• 22:47
  that be It might be that there was chaos in
• 22:49
  the family, there may have been, you know, a bad
• 22:52
  relationship between the parents. The parents may have been distracted
• 22:55
  with their own lives they couldn't be bothered with having kids.
• 23:00
  May have been literal violence, mental illness, whatever substance use.
• 23:05
  Something was happening in that early environment that may have
• 23:08
  impacted the attachment experience. That's also associated with narcissism. We
• 23:13
  know that in some cases trauma early in life is
• 23:16
  associated with narcissism. But that gets tricky because in the
• 23:19
  vast majority of cases it's not because the person might say, well,
• 23:22
  I had trauma in childhood, I'm not narcissistic. Yeah, that's
• 23:24
  the bed I would take. But we do see that sometimes,
• 23:27
  especially if that impacts attachment, that's going to make a difference.
• 23:31
  Those are sort of what I consider more of the
• 23:34
  sort of the difficult early circumstances, the adverse childhood experience
• 23:38
  origins of narcissism. However, there's another side to it, which
• 23:42
  is the overindulged kind of pathway to narcissism. It's like,
• 23:46
  think of narcissism as rome and multiple roads coming into Rome, right,
• 23:52
  and in the sort of over indulged pathways, this is
• 23:55
  where you see sort of your standard spoiled kid. The
• 23:59
  parents will give the kid anything, things and experiences and money.
• 24:05
  But here's the ringer. And it was a very interesting
• 24:07
  study that came out a couple of years ago, where
• 24:10
  it's not just the spoiling, but it's telling the child,
• 24:15
  you're more special than any of these other kids. Not
• 24:19
  just that you're special. That's a lovely message, but you're
• 24:22
  more special. You don't that line's not for you. You
• 24:26
  know the other kids wait in that line. I'll figure
• 24:29
  you you're too special to wait in that line. That
• 24:31
  sort of that you are better than the others, you're
• 24:34
  more special than the others, which a narcissistic parent may
• 24:38
  do to their child. And that's how we'll sometimes see
• 24:40
  narcissistic parents may beget narcissistic kids, but not as a rule.
• 24:45
  So but all these pathways I'm describing don't always end
• 24:49
  up in narcissism. Why some end up that way? I
• 24:51
  do think the temperament piece probably pays a bigger role
• 24:54
  than we think. And I've worked with many, many narcissistic
• 24:58
  clients over my years of practice, and I've seen all
• 25:00
  of these ideology origin pathways play out. But depending on
• 25:05
  the origin, that will affect how the narcissism looks in adulthood.
• 25:09
  The more kind of traumatizing neglect origin will result in
• 25:13
  narcissistic people who are a bit more sullen, resentful, aggrieved, sad,
• 25:20
  socially anxious, whereas the spoiled child narcissism will end up
• 25:24
  a little bit more grandiose. So that if hope that
• 25:28
  makes it clears.
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: A lot of color. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of color, right,
• 25:32
  I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges we
• 25:34
  see is that when I speak to people, whether I'm
• 25:38
  working with them or I meet them, or when they're
• 25:40
  working with a therapist and then I'm connecting with them
• 25:42
  in another part of their life, most people don't realize
• 25:47
  they're with someone narcissistic until after they leave. Like when
• 25:51
  you write a book should I stay or should I go?
• 25:54
  I found a lot of people figure it out towards
• 25:56
  the end. It's not something you spot very quickly, at
• 25:59
  least when people I know, and I would love to
• 26:00
  hear your experience. Obviously you've done this for so long,
• 26:03
  You've had so many conversations around this. I found that
• 26:07
  it's not something that people spot very early, or sometimes
• 26:11
  their early signs of it even seem positive or it
• 26:15
  seems that it can be attractive. Like you said, a
• 26:17
  lot of people are narcissistic, can be ambitious, they can
• 26:20
  be successful, they could have achieved a lot of things
• 26:23
  through that pain, that trauma. So walk us through now,
• 26:27
  if we're in that should I stay or should I go? Mode?
• 26:29
  That's the name of doctor Rohmany's book as well, So
• 26:31
  as we're talking about it, feel free to order that book.
• 26:34
  When you're in that position and you start to sense
• 26:38
  there's some narcissism in the person you're with, A what
• 26:41
  are you going to sense? What are the things that
• 26:43
  people usually notice? Why don't we notice it early on? Like?
• 26:47
  What about narcissism is somewhat? Is it? Can it be attractive?
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: It's very attractive. And here's the bringer in these relationships.
• 26:54
  People want the narcissistic people to be the cartoon villain, right.
• 26:58
  They want it to be in your face bad, mean, lying, deceitful,
• 27:04
  betraying all the time. Right, Well, that would be easy.
• 27:07
  No one's going to put up with that. The challenge
• 27:10
  with these relationships, whether it's a parent, whether it's a partner, colleague, friend, sibling,
• 27:16
  you name it, is that there's often enough good days
• 27:20
  in there to keep you hooked. All these qualities, charm, charisma, confidence, ambition,
• 27:27
  being fun, loving, being extroverted, wanting to have all kinds
• 27:31
  of interesting experiences. Narcissistic people are very sensation seeking, they're
• 27:35
  novelty seeking. It can be really fun. That's why we
• 27:38
  talk about the love bombing that happens at the beginning
• 27:40
  of these relationships. And what happens is when I've worked
• 27:44
  with people, especially those who have been in longer term relationships,
• 27:46
  I'll say, Doc, it isn't always bad, it wasn't always bad,
• 27:51
  but the bad is really bad. Like the bad leaves
• 27:54
  me wondering if I'm any good, and I feel like
• 27:57
  a bad person, and I feel like I'm the one
• 27:59
  with the problem on and on and on right, But
• 28:02
  then there are those good days and the person will
• 28:04
  often says, see, I was the one who is wrong.
• 28:06
  I'm being too demanding. I've got this silly notion of
• 28:10
  what a relationship supposed to be, and I can set
• 28:12
  a clock on the fact that it's going to go
• 28:14
  back into the downward. So I think that that's one
• 28:17
  thing I want everyone listening to this to know is
• 28:20
  that people say, well, maybe this person in my life
• 28:22
  isn't that antagonistic. Maybe they're not that narcissistic because we
• 28:25
  have these good days. Plan on the good days. It's
• 28:28
  like being in a relationship, or it's like living someplace
• 28:31
  where the weather is always extreme. It's either like eighty
• 28:34
  five degrees in sunny or like the most horrific hurricane blizzard,
• 28:38
  and that weather alternates like on an every few days
• 28:41
  basis sometimes, And so as a result of that, it
• 28:45
  confuses people to no end. It isn't always bad. There
• 28:50
  were good moments, There are good memories, and that's what
• 28:52
  confuses people. So this idea of recognizing someone. In my
• 28:57
  own podcast, Navigating Narcissism, we've done now thirty episodes, right,
• 29:02
  thirty episodes, thirty conversations about narcissism, and in every in
• 29:07
  many of these cases, what I've seen, especially in the
• 29:09
  intimate relationships, somewhere around one two three years, things were
• 29:14
  becoming clear. Although you see the red flags as soon
• 29:18
  as like the first month, the piece is turning into
• 29:21
  somebody's like pixels, right, A couple of pixels teach you nothing.
• 29:25
  Lots of pixels make a picture, and it takes a
• 29:28
  couple of years for a lot of folks to get
• 29:30
  enough pixels to say, okay, there's no not seeing this.
• 29:34
  But by then they may be so deep into it
• 29:37
  that cognitive dissonance kicks in, and you want it to work,
• 29:40
  so you tell yourself whatever story you need to tell
• 29:43
  yourself so the relationship can sustain. Well, we have enough
• 29:47
  good times. Maybe it's my fault, I'm being too demanding.
• 29:51
  And you'll see this, especially if a person is trying
• 29:53
  to find a relationship at a pressured time of life.
• 29:56
  They want to have kids, they feel pressure to get married,
• 29:59
  whatever it may be. But even in a family, person
• 30:01
  will say I can't walk away from my parents, even
• 30:04
  though every interaction the person has with them is wretched.
• 30:07
  And my job is to help people find that middle
• 30:10
  ground of having realistic expectations. But I do think that
• 30:15
  when people red flags are always a story that can
• 30:17
  be told retrospectively, like, okay, there was a red flag
• 30:20
  on the first day, there's a red flag in the
• 30:22
  first month. No, yeah, everyone will say like, okay, all
• 30:26
  that being late or you know, all that telling me
• 30:30
  that they told me not to apply to that school
• 30:33
  because they cared about me and didn't want me to
• 30:35
  feel like I was. You know, they didn't want to
• 30:37
  watch me go through the school, telling me that I
• 30:40
  couldn't get in. But in fact what they were doing
• 30:42
  is holding them back on their dreams, like the pixels
• 30:45
  turn into a picture, and I think that that it
• 30:49
  does take time, and a lot of people will feel embarrassing.
• 30:52
  How did it take me two years to see this?
• 30:54
  To which I say two years is fast, good for you.
• 30:57
  And when the love bombing ends, and love bombing lasts
• 31:01
  anywhere from six weeks to a year, I think that's
• 31:05
  about the range. And so when the love bombing ends
• 31:08
  and the devaluing starts, people are almost on this weird
• 31:11
  addictive treadmill of like how do I get back to
• 31:14
  that ye? And what do I need to change in myself?
• 31:18
  Never stopping to think, okay, this person brought their A
• 31:21
  game for about three months, they've shifted. I have not changed.
• 31:26
  So if you can see it clearly, you can see
• 31:29
  the patterns clearly, things like, you know, they'll get incredibly
• 31:33
  sensitive to criticism. That's a very common pattern in narcissistic folks.
• 31:37
  And so everything will be going well and a person's
• 31:40
  feeling more comfortable and they might give them feedback I
• 31:42
  don't know what they're wearing or the restaurant they chose,
• 31:45
  or their job, and a rage that feels like a
• 31:48
  tsunami will enter the relationship and the person will be like,
• 31:51
  what the heck just happened? Those ego injuries can really
• 31:55
  result in these volcanic kinds of you know, sorts of
• 31:59
  shows of emotion, and that's when people start getting confused
• 32:02
  and saying, maybe I was harsh, maybe I should have
• 32:04
  said that. And so what we see invariably is the
• 32:08
  survivors in these relationships take it upon themselves to try
• 32:12
  to change everything about themselves, believing they can change the
• 32:16
  other person. And if there's only one takeaway here, it's
• 32:18
  that narcissism, like all maladaptive personality styles, is really resistant
• 32:24
  to change. The more maladaptive the personality, the more rigid
• 32:29
  it is. The more healthy and flexible the personality, the
• 32:34
  more give and takes. So agreeable people are incredibly flexible.
• 32:37
  So even if they don't want to do something, they
• 32:39
  might think like, I love her, you know she wants
• 32:42
  to go and I'm you know what, They've always been
• 32:44
  there for me, So I'm going to go to the
• 32:46
  horror film festival might cover my eyes, but then think
• 32:49
  that that's the give and take of a relationship, and
• 32:52
  won't be angry about it. That's the flexibility. Narcissism is
• 32:55
  the opposite. It's like it's solid as a brick.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah wow, And I think that. But when people end
• 33:01
  up in those scenarios, those experiences we have this You
• 33:05
  raise this point that we almost try and counteract bad
• 33:09
  memories with good memories. That's how we like to make
• 33:12
  sense of someone. Is well, if they do a bad thing,
• 33:15
  how many good things did they do? Or if they
• 33:17
  do a good thing, how many bad things did they do? Right?
• 33:19
  If we don't like someone overall, will come up with
• 33:21
  the list of mistakes they made. If we like someone,
• 33:24
  will come up with the list of compliments they made.
• 33:26
  What's a healthier way of making sense of someone? Because
• 33:29
  I don't find good and bad to be that healthy.
• 33:32
  As you said, it could mislead you.
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: I always say to people, you've got to be able
• 33:36
  to be comfortable with this concept of multiple truths. Okay,
• 33:39
  multiple things can be true at the same time. You
• 33:42
  could have had a wonderful courtship, You may have great sex,
• 33:47
  This person may regularly gaslight you. This person lies to you.
• 33:53
  You really love how they cook spaghetti. They're wonderful with
• 33:57
  your infant. They often raise their voice at you. You
• 34:00
  see what I'm saying. All of these things are happening
• 34:02
  at the same time. The hardest thing I believe a
• 34:06
  human being can do is to sit with those multiple
• 34:10
  truths and not run away. It is the ultimate test
• 34:14
  of mindfulness because we want cognitive dissonance. Our brains are wired.
• 34:20
  They're not wired for inconsistency. They're wired for consistency. And
• 34:25
  when things are inconsistent, we feel very tense, we feel
• 34:28
  very uncomfortable, and the human species gears towards homeostasis. I
• 34:33
  need to not feel tense. The best way to not
• 34:35
  feel tense is figure out, Okay, I want to stay
• 34:38
  in this relationship. So he's a good father. What more
• 34:41
  coad you want right now? You can argue the flip
• 34:45
  side of that too, And a person for some reason
• 34:47
  feels ready to leave a relationship. They may say they
• 34:51
  may cherry pick all the few bad things and forget
• 34:56
  how much you know that this person's actually really well
• 34:59
  regulated and hind and compassionate and all of that. I
• 35:02
  think part of the struggle becomes what constitutes a healthy
• 35:06
  relationship in any culture Without that agreed upon definition, I
• 35:11
  think that's half the battle. And so when people say
• 35:13
  to me, what's a healthy relationship, I'm like, oh, easy.
• 35:16
  It's kind, it's compassionate, it's flexible, it is respectful, it
• 35:21
  is cooperative, it's collaborative. There's there's you know, equitability, and
• 35:26
  it may not it may be that there's very clear
• 35:28
  roles but there's a perceived sense of equitability in the relationship.
• 35:32
  There's self awareness, and there's an investment in the growth
• 35:35
  of your partner. That's a healthy relationship. And people they'll
• 35:39
  look at the narcissistic relationships that say, I don't have
• 35:41
  any of those, okay, But unfortunately culture will often dictate
• 35:46
  what makes things healthy. And then they'll be like, well,
• 35:49
  they have a good job, they make a lot of money.
• 35:52
  We are of the same religion. I like how they look. Yeah,
• 35:56
  that stuff is I understand why someone would value it.
• 35:59
  It's not this of a healthy relationship.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, those are the things we start convincing ourselves through
• 36:04
  and coaching ourselves through and walking ourselves through. It gets
• 36:08
  harder and harder and harder because we get so addicted,
• 36:12
  especially going back to what you're saying about love bombing,
• 36:14
  Like being love bombed is really addictive and it's really
• 36:18
  intoxicating because it's like, Wow, this person's really into me.
• 36:23
  And if I could count the amount of friends I
• 36:25
  have this year that have been love bomb like, it's insane,
• 36:28
  like how common it is. And it's at the shorter
• 36:31
  end too, it's at that six weeks mark or you know,
• 36:33
  three months mark where people are showing their full self,
• 36:38
  I guess is the right way of saying it. How
• 36:40
  do you stop yourself from being love bombed? Like how
• 36:43
  do you avoid being love bombed? Or how do you
• 36:46
  navigate being love bombed? Because I think that's the conversation,
• 36:49
  Like we're not going to be able to stop being
• 36:51
  love bombed, but you are going to be able to
• 36:54
  slow things down, You are going to be able to rethink,
• 36:56
  you are going to be able to But we just
• 36:59
  love being loved so much, and you know, it's kind
• 37:02
  of like the confidence boost we never had, and it's
• 37:05
  it's the influx of positive compliments we never had. So
• 37:09
  how do we what do we do?
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: It's a tough one, Jay, you know, I mean listen,
• 37:13
  if you put like a bunch of idut copcake to
• 37:17
  a sweet inn of me is starting to eat it
• 37:20
  right knowing that okay, rominy, you don't need to You
• 37:23
  don't need the sugar. You know we're going to turn.
• 37:25
  Then I say, you don't need the sugar. You know
• 37:27
  that's not good for you. Then that's easy, I think
• 37:30
  easier when it comes to food. I think that what
• 37:33
  happens with love bombing might actually be more addictive than
• 37:36
  drugs because it's often addressing a deficit many people believe
• 37:41
  they've experienced in their lives that they weren't seen, they
• 37:45
  weren't recognized, they weren't valued. A lot of people didn't
• 37:48
  get that in the early part of their lives, so
• 37:51
  that someone's coming along or in their dating life, they
• 37:53
  didn't get it with other people. So when someone comes
• 37:56
  along and is offering it, it's almost feels like an
• 37:58
  offset to the other relationships where a person didn't feel
• 38:02
  valued or seen or any of that. I think part
• 38:06
  A Number one is that you need to know what
• 38:08
  it is, so when it's happening, you're more aware of
• 38:12
  It's like it again, using a hurricane analogy, it's like
• 38:15
  preparing for it. So if a person says, oh, hurricane
• 38:17
  is just rain and wind, I'm like maybe not, Like
• 38:21
  let's get those you know, let's board up your windows,
• 38:23
  let's sand bag your house, evacuate, like, it's not just
• 38:27
  a rain storm. So knowing what it is means you're
• 38:29
  going to prepare yourself in a different way. That's one thing.
• 38:33
  The second thing is love bombing becomes a place for
• 38:37
  you to test the waters. Okay, so I tell people,
• 38:41
  pull back on that throttle, let's come down in altitude.
• 38:44
  Let's fly this plane a little slower now. In most
• 38:49
  narcissistic relationships, if a person tries I'm not saying end it,
• 38:53
  but tries to pull back, like can we go a
• 38:55
  little slower, or you know what, we don't need to
• 38:57
  go to that place, Let's just go to this simple restaurant.
• 39:00
  Or I don't know about traveling yet, like i'd like
• 39:03
  to get you note to know you better. You put
• 39:06
  those lines down and set those boundaries. In the majority
• 39:10
  of cases, the narcissistic person's going to jump. They're going
• 39:13
  to do things like doubt your commitment. I guess you're
• 39:15
  not that into me, or oh yeah, okay, I get it,
• 39:18
  you're not You're not vibing, because what you've done is
• 39:20
  you've taken away their game. Right now, if they were really,
• 39:24
  really a good, solid person who just happened to be
• 39:27
  super into dating you, then they'd say, oh, you know
• 39:32
  what I was, I'm so interested in you. Let me
• 39:35
  slow this, Let me slow my role. I think I've
• 39:37
  got I let my enthusiasm and they'll be I let
• 39:40
  my enthusiasm get the best of me. They'll be self
• 39:42
  aware of what they're they're doing and might say, you know,
• 39:46
  I think that I just you're really wonderful, and but
• 39:50
  thank you. And they'll receive the feedback and say and say,
• 39:53
  you know what, let's go to that hole in the
• 39:55
  wall restaurant. That sounds great and it won't be an
• 39:58
  ego injury and they won't view it again because you're
• 40:01
  taking away their game. That's the example of gas lighting, which,
• 40:04
  by the way, today was designated as the word of
• 40:07
  the year. What Yes, Merriam Webster Dictionary called gaslighting the
• 40:12
  word of the year, which, to me, let me tell you,
• 40:14
  I literally started crying. I thought, after fifteen years of
• 40:17
  talking about this stuff quietly, I cannot believe that this
• 40:20
  is finally entering into the mainstream, but people still use
• 40:24
  the word wrong. But the fact of the matter is
• 40:26
  when when you simply say something like I'm really enjoying
• 40:29
  getting to know you, but can we just step it
• 40:32
  back a bit and a person says, well, I guess
• 40:34
  you're not that interested in me, then you're being gaslighted
• 40:37
  because that's actually not your experience. You actually are quite
• 40:39
  committed and want to slow it down to see what
• 40:42
  it's like. But that's a great way to test the waters.
• 40:45
  That would be like, that would be me saying, can
• 40:47
  you take all those cupcakes away? I'm not interested, and
• 40:49
  I'd still be like, really, what you know?
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: So it's that exactly. Yeah, now that you've said that,
• 40:56
  I didn't realize that. That is incredible that it's the
• 40:58
  word of the in this is that at least we're
• 41:00
  understanding it. It's sad that it's the word of the
• 41:03
  air because it means more people are experiencing it. It's
• 41:05
  like that, you know, but can you again properly clarify
• 41:09
  us what gaslighting is again so that we don't misuse it?
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: And absolutely, And when I saw that, I'm like, I'm
• 41:15
  going to bring this up with Jake. Yeah, when it
• 41:17
  came up as the word of the year gaslight. A
• 41:21
  lot of people are confused by gaslighting right now. The
• 41:23
  origin of the word is actually is only in the
• 41:26
  last less than hundred years. It was a name of
• 41:30
  a play that became a film, and you know, it
• 41:33
  was literally about the psychological manipulation of a woman by
• 41:37
  her husband and how she psychologically sort of falls apart
• 41:41
  because that's happening fast forward. The only people who talked
• 41:44
  about gaslighting were therapists. It was this therapist talk and
• 41:48
  we talk about it. Oh god, her husband's gas lighting him,
• 41:51
  you know kind of thing. My shrink would say it
• 41:53
  to me, right, and I'm like, oh, if you're being gaslighted.
• 41:55
  So it was shrink talk. Nobody else talked about it,
• 41:59
  and then those of us working in this space, it was,
• 42:02
  you know, like, that's the primary tool of the narcissistic
• 42:05
  person because it's a tool of domination. So the way
• 42:09
  gas lighting works is it's a denial of a person's reality.
• 42:14
  That's step one. I never said that, that never happened.
• 42:19
  You're what are you saying, Like, I don't even see
• 42:21
  what you're talking about, right, So you're like, I didn't
• 42:24
  or this isn't happening. So now you're already a little
• 42:27
  off balance because I'm very authoritatively saying to you something
• 42:31
  didn't happen. But that's not that's that by itself is
• 42:35
  not gaslighting. Oh okay, no, you gotta go now. The
• 42:39
  step two of gaslighting is then I tell you there's
• 42:42
  something wrong with you. You're so sensitive, like why do
• 42:46
  you see this everywhere? Or like ooh god, you know
• 42:49
  paranoia much? I you know what, I'm gonna get you
• 42:52
  the name of a shrinks. You need to talk to
• 42:54
  someone because you keep imagining things that aren't happening. Okay,
• 42:58
  So imagine a person in a relationship or there's infidelity
• 43:01
  and they're getting suspicious. They're partners hours whatever it is,
• 43:04
  messages and they say to their partner, what is this
• 43:08
  thing at work? You keep staying and you know you're traveling, like,
• 43:12
  is there anything going on that I should know about? No,
• 43:15
  there's nothing going on. A step one. We am not
• 43:18
  gaslighted yet, though gaslighting is. But you know what I'm
• 43:22
  sick of. I'm sick of living with an unhinged, paranoid lunatic.
• 43:26
  That's what I'm tired of. There's the gaslight. Now there's
• 43:29
  A step three is that it's not a one off,
• 43:32
  one time. Yes, that's a gaslighting episode, but the true
• 43:36
  gaslighting abuse happens over time, over and over and over,
• 43:41
  and it won't just be about one issue. I never
• 43:43
  said that what is wrong with you? Oh, I'm just
• 43:45
  getting so tired of your paranoid you're so sensitive. And
• 43:49
  what happens then is that other person being told repeatedly
• 43:53
  by someone they do trust. Because gaslighting is predicated on trust,
• 43:57
  it's harder for a stranger to gaslight you, partner, family member,
• 44:02
  healthcare provider, teacher, people who have some power over someone.
• 44:07
  Politicians in gaslight, entire societies, gaslight right when everyone is
• 44:13
  coming in on one party line and denying reality and
• 44:16
  then telling the people who don't believe that that there's
• 44:19
  something wrong with them, and do it over and over
• 44:22
  and over again. You break the other person's spirit. You
• 44:26
  leave them completely doubting themselves, completely blaming themselves. And so
• 44:31
  what happens is when a person's chronically gaslighted, you'll see
• 44:35
  things like that, no, no, you know what, this is
• 44:37
  my fault. They start saying, they start apologizing before they
• 44:40
  get into the door, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and I'll
• 44:42
  be like, what are you sorry for? It's just they
• 44:44
  got so used to saying it, so there they really
• 44:49
  get shattered by this where they literally lose a sense
• 44:53
  of up and down night and day. They're just it's
• 44:56
  a it's such a cruel thing to do to a
• 44:59
  p it is qualifies as emotional abuse. So this idea
• 45:04
  of gas lighting great that it's in the public consciousness,
• 45:07
  but it's not just lying. Everyone says doctor Romeny, what's
• 45:10
  the difference between lying and gas lighting? Lying is a
• 45:14
  denial of evidence. Right, so today we had our time
• 45:18
  to get together and make it up. You say, oh, okay,
• 45:20
  you're gonna be here at two o'clock, and I'd say,
• 45:23
  that's not true. You told me to get here at
• 45:25
  one o'clock. It was one o'clock, one o'clock, one o'clock.
• 45:28
  I know it was one o'clock. And I insist on that.
• 45:31
  Then you'll be able to show me the email and say, Romeny,
• 45:33
  look that's two o'clock. And then and then I and
• 45:36
  then I went with that. Right then we're just clothed.
• 45:39
  The lie got lies get shut down by evidence. Gas
• 45:43
  Lighting is a lie, but wrapped up in this invalidating bow.
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: And that I mean when I hear that, it breaks
• 45:51
  my heart because I know so many people who have
• 45:53
  been on the end of that. And you see how
• 45:58
  someone may even have started off with an anxious or
• 46:00
  avoidant attachment style, and now that anxiety is through the roof,
• 46:05
  or that self criticism is you know, the self doubt
• 46:10
  is even greater. Now that person can't trust again. Now
• 46:14
  the person's struggling with their value and their worth. And
• 46:19
  I know this is a bigger question, and I do
• 46:20
  want to get into it, but that individual, what could
• 46:25
  they have done differently to avoid going inward? Because what
• 46:30
  I've found is that when someone is potentially probably one
• 46:34
  of the other personality types, it's natural for them to
• 46:38
  think that there's something that they need to change. That's
• 46:40
  the natural default of the other personality types. It's like,
• 46:43
  if something's not working out, maybe I should change because
• 46:45
  then it could be better, right take responsible or take
• 46:47
  responsibility exactly. And so and I've seen that in myself
• 46:52
  when even when someone would say the meanest thing about me,
• 46:55
  even if I know it's not true to my core,
• 46:57
  there's a part of me that will still reflect on
• 46:59
  it because I'm like, what if maybe it's something I'm
• 47:02
  missing about myself. But how do you avoid letting it
• 47:07
  affect you? Or are you saying there is no way
• 47:09
  and it is going to affect you.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: I think that it's a mix of things. And it's
• 47:13
  interesting when people get savvy about gaslighting and they know
• 47:17
  they're being gaslighted in real time. Now, the one thing
• 47:20
  you can never, ever, ever do is tell a gaslighter
• 47:23
  that you know that they're gaslighting you, because then they're
• 47:25
  going to double down. Yea, yeah, okay. So when it's
• 47:28
  happening in real time is and this is what's so hard,
• 47:32
  because it becomes sort of a cart before the horse thing.
• 47:34
  Most people haven't done the therapeutic work of who am I?
• 47:39
  What am I about? What is my identity? How do
• 47:45
  I stand as a person? What do I believe in?
• 47:47
  What do I care about? Right? Very few people do
• 47:51
  that work because then when you do that again, I
• 47:55
  get this. I get this a lot in online spaces
• 47:57
  because a lot of people out there who are very
• 48:00
  pro narcissism apparently, and so when I come out, but
• 48:03
  it's their big organized community. Doctor Romney is a terrible
• 48:08
  therapist and she's very unempathic. That was one of last
• 48:11
  week's comments. Okay, it has less impact Jay, because I
• 48:15
  don't know this was a stranger on the internet. But
• 48:17
  I have to catch myself because I know there's parts
• 48:20
  of me that have that neurotic structure where I believe
• 48:23
  that's plausible, just because that's just sort of how I've
• 48:25
  been wired. That's what I'm right. The work then becomes
• 48:30
  I have to to literally talking myself out loud, like Romaney,
• 48:35
  you are empathic, you're solid, you are a very good therapist.
• 48:41
  You've seen really meaningful change in clients. Literally, I'm saying
• 48:44
  this out loud. However, and this is the interesting rub,
• 48:49
  this hurts you, even though this is from a stranger.
• 48:52
  To give yourself a second. And that might be talk
• 48:55
  to someone I care about who cares about me, to
• 48:57
  see if they can uplift me. It might be do
• 48:59
  something being pleasurable, might be doing a brief workout, It
• 49:02
  might mean whatever it means. You know that there's a
• 49:05
  moment when I'm saying I need to show some compassion
• 49:09
  to myself right now because this person has hit me
• 49:12
  someplace that hurts becomes a different call to arms at
• 49:15
  that point, does that make sense? But the initial work
• 49:18
  is who am I and what am I about?
• 49:21
  Speaker 2: You know?
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: And I think that this is why journaling becomes so important,
• 49:25
  because having these places you've written things down where you
• 49:28
  can look back and say, I really have comment things
• 49:32
  from the heart, and sure I've made mistakes like everyone does,
• 49:35
  but listen, this is a this is a high falutine.
• 49:37
  This is me having been in therapist therapy for fifty
• 49:40
  thousand years, you know, So that's also there's a place
• 49:43
  where that work's been done and having gone through a
• 49:45
  life and had to learn from all of that, that
• 49:47
  was not something I was doing when I was twenty
• 49:49
  five years old. So a therapist, though, could, if a
• 49:52
  good therapist, would be a place where somebody could say
• 49:55
  you're being gaslighted. And I can't tell you how many
• 49:57
  times I've sat with a client and said it sounds
• 50:00
  like they're gas lighting or the client big what? And
• 50:03
  then we'll walk through what is their reality? Who are there?
• 50:06
  And then when that session is done, they'll often say
• 50:09
  I feel like a big weight has been lifted off
• 50:11
  of me because I was literally doubting the very essence
• 50:14
  of who I am. And this is where therapy becomes
• 50:17
  so important because it's sort of bringing a person back
• 50:21
  to doing that work of who they really are, what
• 50:24
  they really stand for, what they're about. So in real time,
• 50:29
  it's really about listening to it. I have to be
• 50:31
  honest with you. When I went in the presence of
• 50:33
  someone who is gaslighting me and they're actually somebody who
• 50:37
  I do value, I tend to disengage a bit. You know,
• 50:40
  I'll just sort of let you know, I'll say, you know,
• 50:42
  I'll often give the okay, we're just seeing it in
• 50:44
  different ways, and I'll sort of soften and I won't
• 50:48
  get into it with them anymore. Well, I don't. In fact,
• 50:51
  one of my techniques I give the clients I work
• 50:53
  with is don't go deep, don't defend, don't engage, don't explain,
• 50:57
  don't personalize. So I'll disengage a bit and realize, Okay,
• 51:00
  this is no longer a safe space. Yeah, and that
• 51:03
  sort of feels self protective, and I think that that's
• 51:06
  almost like retraining an inner critic to say, can I
• 51:09
  also have an inner bodyguard, so that I could just
• 51:11
  have someone's like, hey, let's just pull you back a
• 51:13
  little bit. Yeah.
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so interesting. I had an episode with a
• 51:17
  coaching client because obviously that's my episode with the coaching
• 51:22
  client earlier this year, and I have a similar approach
• 51:26
  where I'm like, I know who I am, I know
• 51:28
  what I care about, I know with what intention I
• 51:31
  work towards, and ultimately, if that's an opinion someone has
• 51:34
  of me, they're entitled to that. But but I'm not
• 51:37
  going to go deep with it because I know that's
• 51:40
  just not my truth and that's not where I am.
• 51:43
  But like you're saying, that takes a lot of self
• 51:45
  work beforehand, and like you said, there's also still an
• 51:50
  openness to feedback. There's still an openness to being better.
• 51:53
  It's not like you think you're complete and you're perfect
• 51:56
  and your intentions perfect either. So I really like that
• 52:00
  you brought it back to that because I'm glad that
• 52:03
  we got back to that that at the end of
• 52:04
  the day, it's about who you are, your intention, the
• 52:08
  essence of who you're trying to be, and that's ultimately
• 52:11
  all you have to go back to before and after.
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: But it's hard. But it's hard, Yeah, it's really really
• 52:16
  and for people who've been through lifelong narcissistic abuse, long
• 52:21
  term narcissistic abuse in a relationship, they'd be like, I
• 52:24
  have no idea who I am so so I do
• 52:26
  say though honestly, and the film, the original film Gaslight,
• 52:30
  portrays this as part of the storyline. Ultimately, ultimately she
• 52:34
  got ungaslighted if you will, because it's just one person.
• 52:38
  It only takes one person. And I always tell everyone
• 52:41
  you can be the person who turns the gaslight off
• 52:44
  for someone else. You may witness something and say that's
• 52:49
  you know, it might be at a meeting, and someone
• 52:51
  might say, that's not what they said, and so now
• 52:54
  you're ungaslighting them in real time. It might be you
• 52:57
  do it after the meeting. If that's safer film, it'll
• 52:59
  tell you what's happening in their relationship, and you don't
• 53:03
  doubt them say oh, come on, it couldn't have been
• 53:05
  that bad. You don't say that, I am so sorry
• 53:08
  this is happening to you. The sounds absolutely terrible. Are
• 53:11
  you okay? Because what you've done is you've given permission
• 53:14
  to this person who's just told you they're going through
• 53:17
  something terrible. Minimizing it in many ways is a gaslighted approach. Right,
• 53:22
  It's not that bad because of our discomfort with someone
• 53:25
  else's discomfort we can hold this space for other people
• 53:29
  and sort of turn that gaslight off for others, and
• 53:31
  you'd be amazed and how quickly that can turn the
• 53:34
  ship around.
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, what are some of the realistic expectations for
• 53:38
  someone who says I think I can change them. I
• 53:40
  think I can be the person that helps this narcissistic
• 53:43
  person evolve, grow, change whatever word they use, Like, what
• 53:47
  have been realistic storylines as to how those episodes and
• 53:52
  scenarios go.
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: They don't I am in my book? Don't you know
• 53:56
  who I am? There is a letter in that book
• 53:59
  And I had been speaking in some public forum. This
• 54:02
  woman heard me and in somebody was asking me a
• 54:05
  question in this forum, and she was in a relatively
• 54:09
  new marriage. They've been together a couple of years married.
• 54:12
  All the narcissistic top notes were there in her partner,
• 54:15
  and she was asking the question, I don't know, can
• 54:18
  I stick this out for another ten years? I'm just
• 54:20
  trying to figure this out. And then this woman just
• 54:24
  did it herself. She's one of the few who's decided
• 54:27
  to stay the next ten years, and she beautifully lays out, honey,
• 54:30
  this is what's going to happen if you stay for
• 54:32
  another ten years, just basically ten more years of gaslighting,
• 54:35
  ten more years of broken heart. I've worked with clients
• 54:38
  JAY who weren't ready to go, and so they say
• 54:42
  they'd sometimes even drop out of therapy, and a few
• 54:45
  times I've had those clients call me back three, five, seven,
• 54:48
  eight years later, sometimes tearful and say nothing changed. And
• 54:55
  there's no sense of triumph in me for that. I
• 54:58
  recognize that they needed to see it the way they
• 55:01
  needed to see it. I don't get to dictate their
• 55:04
  rock bottom. I don't get to dictate when someone sees something.
• 55:06
  I do all the psycho education stuff, I do online
• 55:09
  education to see if I might be able to push
• 55:11
  the fast forward button on that, but it's still what
• 55:14
  you get there, when you get there. But like there
• 55:18
  has been, I can say it probably counts ten instances
• 55:23
  of people ten of the thousands i've heard that where
• 55:27
  people have said, you know this person actually when I
• 55:31
  said I'm done, I'm over it. In fact, recently came
• 55:33
  up in one of the seminars in my healing program
• 55:36
  and this person said I'm done, I'm out, and she
• 55:40
  moved into her own place and her husband ended up
• 55:44
  going to twelve step he ended up going to therapy.
• 55:49
  He had become more self aware, and she had found
• 55:52
  herself thriving living by herself. But she did love him,
• 55:56
  and he said, I want you to move back in,
• 55:57
  and she said, you know what, I'm still growing finding myself.
• 56:00
  So the answer to that is no, we can continue
• 56:03
  having tentative conversations. And he didn't rage at her. That
• 56:08
  was one of the more hopeful stories I've heard in
• 56:10
  the last few years, and that's one in five years.
• 56:15
  And so you know that in this case that this
• 56:17
  person became more well regulated. But her telling me that
• 56:20
  twelve step helped led me to realize that perhaps addiction
• 56:24
  was probably the more powerful piece of that story. We'll
• 56:26
  sometimes see sort of competing kinds of patterns, but by
• 56:31
  and large I have not. I mean, it is the
• 56:33
  realistic expectation. Though to your point, the reason that book
• 56:36
  is called Should I Stay or Should I Go? Is
• 56:38
  about fifty percent of people stay in these relationships. That's
• 56:41
  what they do, and the reasons vary from finances to children,
• 56:47
  to religion to culture to I still love this person too.
• 56:54
  I'm afraid whatever the reasons are, no one, not me,
• 56:58
  not you, not anyone gets to judge those reasons. What
• 57:02
  I believe in as a therapist is to meet them
• 57:05
  where they are at with that and say, okay, so
• 57:08
  that's I understand, I hear you. I don't get to
• 57:10
  sit here and tell you don't love this person. You
• 57:12
  love them, you love them. I'm here to tell you
• 57:15
  this is what you can realistically expect if you stay right.
• 57:19
  And I use this sort of metaphor of going into
• 57:22
  the tiger's cage when I'm talking with survivors, which is
• 57:25
  there's a tiger, there's a cage. If it's really a tiger,
• 57:29
  and you go in that cage, you're going to get
• 57:31
  torn apart. If it's not a tiger, if it's a
• 57:33
  sweet little cat, you might have a nice little experience.
• 57:37
  But maybe the only way you and I'm telling you,
• 57:39
  and even if I tell you it's a tiger, you
• 57:42
  may not believe me until you get in that cage.
• 57:45
  So I know that sometimes my clients say I have
• 57:48
  to let them go and let them go into the cage.
• 57:50
  When they get torn apart, my job is to help
• 57:52
  bring them back together again, and so going into the
• 57:56
  tiger's cage is something sometimes people need to do, say
• 57:59
  I just need to be sure that's what yeah, yeah,
• 58:02
  And I say, I understand that's part of your journey,
• 58:05
  and I'm going to support you in that. I'm here
• 58:07
  because I think some clients think, like, well, doctor Roman,
• 58:10
  he's going to be a friend that if I go,
• 58:11
  you know, And I'm like, you know, as somebody who
• 58:15
  has gone back, who continues to maintain more than a
• 58:18
  few narcissistic relationships in my life. For reasons of culture.
• 58:21
  We're both South Asian. We know that there's a tremendous
• 58:25
  pressure in South Asian releast are actually in many cultures
• 58:28
  to sustain committed relationships and family. So I can't roll
• 58:33
  into those cultures and say, yeah, you got to go,
• 58:35
  that's not an option. But saying to people that you're
• 58:39
  not going to get a depth of emotional need met here,
• 58:42
  you are going to be invalidated. The work has to
• 58:44
  be in you not believing what they're saying. They are
• 58:48
  not going to grow empathy, They're going to remain entitled.
• 58:51
  You need to develop other sources of support, and that
• 58:55
  might be through friends, through family, through spirituality. However, however,
• 59:00
  you find those spaces where you feel seen and heard.
• 59:04
  Like I said, whether through other human beings, the universe, God,
• 59:08
  whatever that looks like for you, that's your work. So
• 59:12
  when you realize that maybe the normal depth of a relationship,
• 59:15
  of a healthy relationship is this, you got this, yeah,
• 59:18
  and you're going to have to be ready for that
• 59:20
  rollercoaster of the bad days the good days and not
• 59:23
  personalize it. But in the long term, Jay, staying in
• 59:27
  that toxic setting is going to take a toll on
• 59:30
  those people, even with all the realistic expectations, it takes
• 59:34
  a toll on a person.
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: Well, I think you've just hit something there that that's
• 59:37
  the real growth that whether you decide to stay or
• 59:39
  you decide to go the work of figuring out who
• 59:42
  you are and what's important to you, what your self
• 59:45
  worth is based on what your value is, that's going
• 59:49
  to happen either way. Hopefully, Well that's going to be
• 59:52
  a path that hopefully you'll have to take either way.
• 59:56
  And so whatever you're going to do, please take that path,
• 1:00:00
  because that's a puff that stays with you forever.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: Lake, But to take that path quietly so you don't
• 1:00:05
  get to So the ultimate healing in the narcissistic relationship
• 1:00:11
  comes from a process called individuation. You become you out
• 1:00:16
  imagine like a tree, so that's so shadowing that the
• 1:00:19
  plants under it can't grow because they're blocked from the sun.
• 1:00:22
  Our goal is to get you out of the shadow
• 1:00:24
  of their branches, to no longer have to serve as
• 1:00:27
  a in psychological servitude to them. That you get to individuate.
• 1:00:31
  The problem is they don't want to hear it or
• 1:00:34
  see it. Sort of psychologically alive in a narcissistic relationship,
• 1:00:37
  you have to skirt a very challenging line of being
• 1:00:41
  authentic in other spaces, but not in that relationship because
• 1:00:45
  that's really hard because your authenticity will be shaved away.
• 1:00:49
  But if you make it a very conscious act that
• 1:00:52
  once again that inner bodyguard, I'm protecting myself right now.
• 1:00:55
  They don't get to see all of me because they
• 1:00:59
  are not able to hold me safe and I deserve that.
• 1:01:03
  So I'm gonna put authentic me away for a minute.
• 1:01:06
  I'm just gonna show up, not going to be cruel,
• 1:01:09
  not gonna be unkind I'm going to show up and
• 1:01:11
  do what I gotta do. You know, whether that's just
• 1:01:14
  sort of keep the trains running on time. I work
• 1:01:16
  with clients honestly Jay coming up with a list of
• 1:01:19
  neutral conversation topics. Someone said it beautifully the other day,
• 1:01:23
  they said, sports, news, weather, You know, like that's pretty
• 1:01:27
  much all you can talk about in these relationships, right,
• 1:01:29
  and weather tends to be the safest. Can you believe
• 1:01:31
  this rain? It's really cloudy? I wonder when it's gonna
• 1:01:34
  get warm again? I mean, And people say, but that's
• 1:01:37
  not a relationship. I said, never was. So you learn
• 1:01:41
  that piece, but you allow your authenticity to bloom in
• 1:01:44
  safer situations. It's like a plant that can only bloom
• 1:01:47
  in the night, but not in the day. Right, The
• 1:01:49
  flowers gorgeous at night, but there's reasons that can't be
• 1:01:52
  bloomed in the day. You're still gonna bloom, But you
• 1:01:55
  become a much more intentional and mindful person in your
• 1:01:59
  life that you really say to yourself consciously, even like
• 1:02:03
  you might be pulled in front of a friend's house
• 1:02:05
  and say, I can't bring all of me into this.
• 1:02:09
  You breathe in and you go and you show up
• 1:02:11
  as sort of part of yourself but not all of yourself.
• 1:02:15
  And you know what, you know who the real loser
• 1:02:17
  in that is that fool of a person who doesn't
• 1:02:20
  get to participate in the full glory, the full authentic
• 1:02:23
  glory of who you are. They lost, not you, and
• 1:02:26
  you protected yourself.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: And that part re the reason why I'm hearing from you,
• 1:02:31
  why that path after ten years in the letter, as
• 1:02:33
  you said, is even so tough, is because being a
• 1:02:39
  less version of yourselves takes so much strength and so
• 1:02:43
  much courage. It's not weakness. It takes so much energy
• 1:02:48
  to be a less version of yourself because someone doesn't
• 1:02:52
  allow you to be your full self.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: Correct, it's a restraint, but it's not. And I think
• 1:02:56
  for too many people in these relationships, they are this attenuated,
• 1:03:01
  less authentic version of themselves. They think that they're actually
• 1:03:04
  less than and I say, you're not less than. You
• 1:03:08
  are actually caring for yourself. You're learning that you can't
• 1:03:13
  bring that in and I have to be frank with you, Jake.
• 1:03:15
  When people really get this right, they're like, oh, okay,
• 1:03:17
  I'm not doing this anymore, because what they were doing
• 1:03:19
  before was they really were acting in a way that
• 1:03:21
  they thought if I do it this way, they'll change.
• 1:03:23
  If I do it that way, I said, change is
• 1:03:25
  off the table. From here on forward. You're moving forward
• 1:03:28
  with change off the table, and I'll tell you that
• 1:03:30
  press the accelerator for many people, saying even if they
• 1:03:33
  didn't leave entirely in intimate relationships, they often left. But
• 1:03:36
  in family relationships they'll say, I think I'm going to
• 1:03:38
  take a pass on Thanksgiving this year. I think I'm
• 1:03:41
  not I'm only going to go for one day of
• 1:03:43
  the family wedding. Like, they start setting some real boundaries,
• 1:03:46
  and they learn to tolerate other people saying, well, isn't
• 1:03:51
  she up aty for not showing up like that? Tolerance
• 1:03:55
  of people engaging this sort of enabling discourse of oh
• 1:04:00
  out a team player, or now you're the one who's
• 1:04:02
  difficult to recognize that when people take these rather revolutionary
• 1:04:06
  steps of taking care of themselves that again, I do
• 1:04:10
  believe that self care and that restraint in these kinds
• 1:04:15
  of toxic relationships is literally an act of rebellion.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I love the example you gave that certain cultures,
• 1:04:23
  whether it's cultural, societal, financial pressures that stop us from
• 1:04:28
  walking away, what are some of the healthier boundaries people
• 1:04:32
  can set up? So one boundary is I'm going to
• 1:04:34
  make time for myself to bloom, to be authentic in
• 1:04:37
  my own space. I'm going to find friends and community
• 1:04:40
  that I take strength from. Are there other healthy boundaries
• 1:04:44
  that people can set if they are currently staying in
• 1:04:48
  this situation based on financial, societal, or family expectations or
• 1:04:52
  pressures not.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: To engage in the same way, I think a lot
• 1:04:55
  of people would get sort of with the dog with
• 1:04:57
  a bone kind of a fight with them, right, it's
• 1:05:00
  just sort of letting it go. People will say I
• 1:05:03
  don't want to relent. I'm like, what, then, don't relent
• 1:05:06
  with people you actually who are healthy and can go
• 1:05:09
  be very sort of deep, mindful circumspect. People don't get
• 1:05:14
  into that argument with them unless you just want to
• 1:05:16
  get into an argument for the sake of getting into
• 1:05:18
  an argument. Something else that people need to be prepared
• 1:05:21
  with in these sort of narcissistic relational situations is that
• 1:05:25
  there's a lot of baiting. If you're not giving the
• 1:05:28
  arguments and being as gaslightable as you once were, that's
• 1:05:31
  not very satisfying for them. So they're going to find
• 1:05:34
  a way to go for the jugular to make you
• 1:05:35
  bleed and make you fight back. And I say to people,
• 1:05:39
  you've got to know sort of your true north, as
• 1:05:44
  it were, and you might not take ninety percent of arguments,
• 1:05:48
  but if they go after some of those things you
• 1:05:50
  hold sacred. It could be your children, it could be
• 1:05:52
  a belief system you have, it could be other people
• 1:05:57
  you care about, whatever it is. If they go for
• 1:05:59
  the that, then you're like, you know what, I'm going in.
• 1:06:04
  I'm Tiger's cage. I'm going in, I am going to
• 1:06:07
  I can't listen to this, I can't do this, but
• 1:06:09
  recognize it's not going to change anything. And it's a
• 1:06:12
  question of which depletion is worse at that point, holding
• 1:06:15
  yourself silent at such a point or actually having the argument.
• 1:06:19
  And then I tell people, if you decide to go
• 1:06:21
  in and do that, you need to engage in some
• 1:06:23
  form of just coming back down, whatever that looks like
• 1:06:27
  for you after these kinds of interactions, because many many
• 1:06:31
  people will say after they've had to spend time with
• 1:06:35
  a very toxic, difficult, antagonistic, narcissistic, call it what you will, person,
• 1:06:40
  they'll feel really depleted. And if you keep having those
• 1:06:43
  episodes of depletion, you're going to get sick.
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I've also found that, I mean more from an
• 1:06:48
  experience point of view, that the more you're associating with
• 1:06:52
  that energy, the more likely you become or adopt certain
• 1:06:55
  behaviors too. I don't know if you've seen that where
• 1:06:58
  some people start adopting similar pattern similar behaviors in order
• 1:07:01
  to be able to fight back and defend themselves as
• 1:07:04
  a defense mechanism. Not saying that you become narcissistic, but
• 1:07:07
  that you also respond by gas lighting or trying to
• 1:07:12
  you know, you're using that person's game against them because
• 1:07:14
  that's the only play to survive, and you're doing it consciously.
• 1:07:17
  But eventually, I mean, it just becomes unconscious to some degree.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: And if you've seen I've seen that. I've definitely seen
• 1:07:24
  it where people will say change you know that.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: I think that people will say, I don't know how
• 1:07:29
  often you'd be willing to steal food, but you'd steal
• 1:07:32
  it if you were hungry. Yeah, it doesn't make you
• 1:07:34
  a thief.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: Yes, that's yeah, yeah, you know, and.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: That's the we would all do things we don't ordinarily
• 1:07:41
  do to survive. And I think that some people, until
• 1:07:44
  they understand this personality style doesn't change that you have
• 1:07:48
  to have these realistic expectations all of that. Until people
• 1:07:51
  get that, they do keep sort of getting into the
• 1:07:53
  tango with them, which may mean, you know, shifts in
• 1:07:57
  terms of frustration just regulation, and their own empathy may wane.
• 1:08:02
  We know that there's something called compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue
• 1:08:06
  is very contiguous to burn out, and people in these
• 1:08:08
  relationships will say, my empathy has gone to hell, Like
• 1:08:11
  people are telling me their problems. I'm like, I don't
• 1:08:13
  have it anymore. And it's not that your empathy has
• 1:08:15
  gone away, but it's almost like it's been a one
• 1:08:18
  where you've just it's almost like a vessel where the
• 1:08:20
  compassion's only going out and very little coming in.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, do'gor rominy. This has been incredible to talk to you.
• 1:08:26
  And I just want to recommend the books because we
• 1:08:29
  only touch the tip of the iceberg the book. There's
• 1:08:32
  two books here that I highly recommend. One is called
• 1:08:35
  Should I Stay or Should I Go. You're going to
• 1:08:38
  hear about chapters about how did you get sucked in?
• 1:08:41
  How do they make you feel? And of course answering
• 1:08:44
  the question should I say or should I go? If
• 1:08:46
  you are a friend or in a tough position in
• 1:08:50
  this kind of a relationship, then this book's going to
• 1:08:52
  help you make that decision to me practical applicable advice.
• 1:08:56
  And the other book is called Don't You Know Who
• 1:08:59
  I Am? How to Stay Sane in an Era of
• 1:09:01
  narcissism and titlement and incivility. This book is also available
• 1:09:07
  right now, and so I highly recommend both these books.
• 1:09:10
  Dr Robinie, is anything that you didn't share that you
• 1:09:12
  really want to share from your heart, or something else
• 1:09:13
  on your mind, or something in the moment that you
• 1:09:15
  feel inspired or called upon to share with us today?
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: I think that for me is the I'm tired of
• 1:09:23
  the loss of human potential I'm seeing in these relationships,
• 1:09:26
  whether it's a five year relationship or a sixty year relationship.
• 1:09:31
  And while it is very hard for a person to
• 1:09:34
  actualize and give light to their best self while they're
• 1:09:39
  in these relationships, it's not impossible. And I have worked
• 1:09:43
  with people who have been in long, long term relationships
• 1:09:47
  like this, and yet I see this. They're empathy and
• 1:09:52
  compassion are deeply retained. They still do laugh deeply, and
• 1:09:57
  they'll say, you know, and they'll say, listen, we I
• 1:10:00
  can't in in my world, in my life and my culture,
• 1:10:04
  I can't end this. But that doesn't mean there's not
• 1:10:07
  joy in my life. And I think for me, what
• 1:10:09
  I want to do is, I think everyone's been misplacing
• 1:10:12
  their hope in the narcissistic relationship. The hope needs to
• 1:10:17
  be in oneself and that the hope has to be
• 1:10:21
  that there is this this tremendous, untold story in you
• 1:10:24
  and it is your story, not the story of them
• 1:10:27
  in your life, but you and yours, and to give
• 1:10:30
  sort of flight to that narrative of you, that to
• 1:10:34
  me is that's the work, that's the healing. And to
• 1:10:38
  let people say does this ever fully go away? And
• 1:10:40
  the answer is no, it doesn't. It is something that's there.
• 1:10:44
  And I'll say, survivors have a unique beauty. Right. It's roomy,
• 1:10:47
  and it's the wound where the you know, the wound
• 1:10:49
  is where the light enters you and all of that there.
• 1:10:52
  I always say the survivors can see each other in
• 1:10:54
  the room, right. They're the ones in the audience that
• 1:10:56
  are sort of like, you know, with I'm finally being
• 1:10:59
  heard in scene kind of thing, and they've had a
• 1:11:03
  different journey. It's I'm not saying it's better or worse
• 1:11:06
  or more virtuous, but there is a there can be
• 1:11:08
  this sort of depth you bring into your life after
• 1:11:11
  having been through it. It's a loss of innocence. Yeah,
• 1:11:14
  I have to say you will. You'll never sort of
• 1:11:17
  laugh and be in the same way, but you may
• 1:11:20
  sort of When the laughter comes. It feels like a gift.
• 1:11:24
  And I think that that many survivors say I'm ruined.
• 1:11:28
  Not only not ruined, there's a depth to your inner
• 1:11:33
  beauty that really comes out. I'm not saying anyone should
• 1:11:35
  seek it out, by the way it will find you.
• 1:11:38
  That's the problem with narcissism in our culture. And so,
• 1:11:41
  like I said, this is being done through storytelling. In
• 1:11:44
  my podcast, I try to teach about it, but above
• 1:11:47
  all else, to me, the work is helping people heal
• 1:11:50
  from this because I don't believe anyone is defined by this. Yeah.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: No, that's so powerful. Everyone's been listening and watching the
• 1:11:57
  podcast is go navigating narcissism makes you go listen and
• 1:12:01
  subscribe YouTube channel as well. Dr Romedy and of course
• 1:12:04
  on Instagram. Make sure you tag us across platforms. Whether
• 1:12:08
  you're sharing clips on TikTok, whether you're sharing in your
• 1:12:11
  stories or your posts on Instagram, makes you tag Dr
• 1:12:14
  Romney and I letting us know what stayed with you,
• 1:12:16
  what stuck with you, what you're going to share with
• 1:12:18
  a friend. Maybe there was a moment that you know
• 1:12:20
  someone in your life needs to hear. Make sure you
• 1:12:23
  pass this episode along to them. I hope this episode
• 1:12:26
  very clearly defined and described for you narcissism, gaslighting, love bombing,
• 1:12:31
  really trying to break down what these terms actually are,
• 1:12:34
  how you can get an instinct for sensing them, knowing
• 1:12:37
  when they're there, and then the steps that you can take,
• 1:12:39
  which are laid out beautifully in the books and the
• 1:12:42
  content that we've recommended. Really hoping that you find the
• 1:12:45
  help and support that you need in order to navigate
• 1:12:48
  narcissism in your life in any form. And we're going
• 1:12:51
  to be welcoming Dr Romedy back onto the podcast many,
• 1:12:53
  many times to have future conversations about this theme in
• 1:12:57
  different areas of our lives as well. So Dr Romney,
• 1:12:59
  thank you so much for your time and energy. Honestly,
• 1:13:02
  your work is so needed and so powerful, And what
• 1:13:04
  I love from sitting down with you every time is
• 1:13:07
  not only is my mind stimulated, not only do I
• 1:13:11
  feel my intelligence has gained, I always feel moved by
• 1:13:14
  the words you share as well. In my heart space,
• 1:13:16
  and I really appreciate that, so thank you, so thank
• 1:13:18
  you so much for opening your heart and letting that
• 1:13:21
  happen too. If you want even more videos just like
• 1:13:24
  this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the
• 1:13:26
  boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you know
• 1:13:29
  that you can now get my book, Think Like a
• 1:13:32
  Monk from Thinklike a monkbook dot com. Check below in
• 1:13:36
  the description to make sure you order today.