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Dangerous Relationships. Narcissistic Patterns. Emotional Insight Vs Intellectual Insight · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back to this second episode of Dangerous Relationships, in which we're focusing on narcissistic behaviors, traits, and disorders.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: This episode starts with examining the public and the private reality of people who are in relationships with people who have these kinds of tendencies.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the previous episode, I left with two questions.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: How can somebody appear thoughtful, generous, articulate, and entirely believable to almost everyone around them?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Whilst those closest to them describe an entirely different experience?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And why do intelligent, capable people gradually begin doubting themselves rather than doubting the relationship?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And to answer these questions, I think I need to say that I've made an important distinction that's become increasingly more important through my professional life.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the distinction between intellectual insight and emotional insight.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now the two things, while looking similar and may appear the same, are actually profoundly different.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Intellectual insight is the ability to understand.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: It allows us to describe our behavior, to explain our thinking, to recognize patterns, to discuss psychology, to use language of reflection.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And some people are remarkably skilled at this and convincing.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: They can describe experiences, they can explain attachment, they can even quote therapeutic concepts, and they can appear to be deeply self-aware.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they genuinely believe they are.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: But emotional insight is something altogether different.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because emotional insight is not demonstrated by what we understand, it's demonstrated by what we are prepared to feel.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's the capacity to experience another person's emotional reality without immediately defending ourselves against it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: You could say that this is the major function of empathy, mentalization.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's also about the willingness to tolerate powerful feelings without collapsing into shame, to hear criticism without immediately needing to discredit the person offering it, to recognize that our behavior has caused pain.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And to allow that recognition to influence how we then are.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's emotional insight.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: One resides primarily in thought, the other in feelings that are then transformed into relational behavior.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Over many years of work, I've met individuals with extraordinary intellectual insight.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: They could describe themselves beautifully.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Their understanding of psychology is often impressive, and they appeared reflective, thoughtful, sometimes even humble.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, despite all of that understanding, the people closest to them continued experiencing the same patterns, the same control, the same dismissiveness, inability to genuinely recognize another person's emotional world.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it taught me something that I've never forgotten.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, understanding ourselves is not the same as changing ourselves.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Words can create the appearance of insight, but behavior reveals whether insight has become emotional truth.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the reasons relationships organized around significant narcissistic behavior patterns can be so confusing.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And actually being in a relationship with someone who has the intellectual insight means that you're left hearing the words but not feeling the sense of conviction.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's very confusing.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And very often this is a pattern.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: The person who explains themselves, the person who behaves as if they have an understanding of the effects of that, but the behavior doesn't change.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's extremely hard to be on the receiving end of you know over time.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, partners hear words, explanations, apologies, promises quite often repeatedly, and they begin believing that change must surely be close, but actually it's not, because the understanding alone isn't enough.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Until insight becomes emotional, behavior often remains remarkably unchanged.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this brings us to another defining feature of these relationships, and it's the difference between the public face and the private reality.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Quite often I'm asked questions like, How can everybody else think that this person is so wonderful?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's an important question and deserves an answer because people with significant narcissistic traits, or in some cases, narcissistic personality disorder, aren't necessarily deceptive in the simplistic sense of deliberately acting all the time.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Many are genuinely charming, many are highly intelligent, socially skilled, and have developed an exceptional ability to understand what other people admire, respect, or value.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: They know how to make a good first impression.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: They may appear warm, generous, helpful, professional, confident, convincing.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And none of these qualities in themselves are pathological.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, they mimic what many psychologically healthy people possess.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the difficulty arises when the public image becomes psychologically essential, when admiration is no longer enjoyable but necessary, when being seen as good becomes more important than being good.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: When maintaining the image begins taking precedence over maintaining the relationship, that's a very different process.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The relationship gradually stops becoming a meeting between two equal minds.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: It instead becomes organized around protecting one person's psychological equilibrium.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: At first, it's not that obvious.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, quite the opposite.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Many partners describe the early stages of these relationships as almost extraordinary.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: They speak about feeling deeply understood, special, chosen, important.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that can feel intoxicating.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: For some people, it's not like anything they've ever experienced before.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: They feel seen, appreciated, valued.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So naturally they invest emotionally, who wouldn't?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: But healthy relationships don't reveal themselves only during isolation.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: They reveal themselves during disappointment, during disagreement, frustration.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Moments when the other person's needs differ.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's here that the important differences begin emerging.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So how does this person respond when they're challenged or when they're told no?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Can they tolerate another person's perspective?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Can they remain open and curious?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can they acknowledge that they have misunderstood?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or is disagreement quickly experienced as criticism?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Does criticism become an attack and therefore requires defense?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: These questions are far more informative than chart.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, many partners begin describing subtle changes, nothing dramatic, nothing obvious, not at first.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Small corrections, tiny criticisms, a raised eyebrow, a dismissive laugh, being told they're too sensitive, being informed that they have misunderstood, having their memory questioned, reframed, being reassured that events happened differently from the way they remember them.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: And each individual incident appears almost insignificant.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And taken separately, they're easy to dismiss.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: But relationships are not experienced in isolated moments, they're experienced as patterns, and patterns shape minds.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Slowly, almost imperceptibly, something begins happening.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: The partner stops asking, Why are they saying this?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And begins asking, What's wrong with me?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the most significant psychological turning points in any dangerous relationship.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Reality begins moving away from objective experience and towards self-doubt.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: The person who once trusted their judgment begins seeking reassurance, like checking, explaining, apologizing.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: But before you continue, I think it's worth making one further observation.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: People sometimes ask whether narcissistic behavior differs between men and women, and I've met both.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is yes, but only up to a point.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: The underlying psychological organization is the same, and the diagnostic criteria do not differ according to sex.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: What often differs is the way those underlying psychological needs are expressed.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: So broadly speaking, and these are clinical tendencies rather than fixed rules, men are somewhat more likely to organize their identity around achievement, authority, statement, success, or power.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Consequently, when that identity is threatened, the response may be more overtly confrontational, controlling, or dominant.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Women, by contrast, may be somewhat more likely to organize their identity around relationships, emotional influence, social standing, or indispensability.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: When those aspects of identity are threatened, control may be exercised more through the emotional field of the relationship, using guilt, withdrawal, triangulation, or emotional dependency.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to stress something important.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: These are tendencies, not rules.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Many men present in ways more commonly associated with women, and vice versa.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, the more clinically useful distinction is not between male and female narcissism, but how can how control is established and maintained.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Some people control through fear, others through guilt, some through withdrawal and withholding, some through intimidation, emotional dependency, some through dominance, others through quiet manipulation.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're different methods but the same psychological purpose.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately what matters is not whether the individual is male or female.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is the effect that their way of relating has upon the lives of people around them.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Children in particular don't experience a narcissistic father or mother.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: They experience a parent whose emotional needs repeatedly take precedence over their own.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And from that perspective, in a child's development, the distinction is far more important than the parent's gender.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, but in any event, the results are the same.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: The person who once trusted their judgment begins seeking reassurance, checking, explaining, apologizing.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But not because they've become less intelligent, but because their confidence in their own perception has gradually been eroded.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why I've come to believe that one of the greatest dangers in relationships that organized around pathological narcissism is not that you stop believing the other person, it's that over time you stop believing yourself.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: That loss of confidence does not usually happen through one event, but repetition, small experiences.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Repeated often enough that they begin reorganizing how somebody understands themselves.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And this is emotional contamination.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very real phenomenon.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Another person's internal psychological world gradually becomes the lens through which you begin seeing yourself.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: You no longer ask, What do I think, you ask what will they think.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: You no longer ask, was I hurt?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: You ask, Am I overreacting?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: You no longer ask, was that acceptable?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: You ask, perhaps maybe I deserved it.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now when those shifts begin occurring, something important is taking place.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: The relationship is no longer simply influencing behavior, it's beginning to reorganize identity.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why these relationships can become so psychologically dangerous.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Once someone loses confidence in their own emotional reality, they become increasingly dependent upon somebody else's version of it.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: The dependence isn't imposed, it develops quietly, which is precisely why it can remain hidden for so long.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: In our next episode, we will follow that process further.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: We'll explore what happens when the parent, sorry, when this pattern continues over months and years.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look at its effects upon partners, children, families, and upon safeguarding.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Most importantly, we'll begin exploring the question that sits at the heart of recovery.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: How does somebody recover their own voice after spending so long listening only to somebody else's?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: There will be people listening who will identify with these experiences, and there will be people listening who may have been described as narcissistic.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who may have, and this is an irony, may have been described as narcissistic by a narcissist.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: It happens.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it is very interesting, and I can recall cases where that's been so, and where in fact the person shouting loudest was the person who had the most to answer, or the most to answer for.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in a sense, there's there's a kind of um parallel here with egotism or egocentricity when a person experiences the world through themselves, and anyone outside of that who disagrees is regarded as a persecutor.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And such people are called blamethrowers.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, their own inability to see their part in a given situation, or the lack of preparedness to see it from somebody else's point of view, is a big indicator in terms of narcissistic behaviors, traits, etc.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what we have to do in this next episode is to look really closely at how you recover your own reality and also how you protect yourself in the future.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.