Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: Dr. Ramani on Self-Blame, Grief, and Trauma Bonding

Narcissist's Playbook is out now and available to rent at https://narcissistsplaybook.uscreen.io/

From July 24th to 26th, we held our Narcissist's Playbook launch weekend, and Dr. Ramani Durvasula was one of our featured speakers. I got to sit down with her for this conversation, and this time we didn't talk about the narcissists. We talked about the survivors and the road back to themselves. PLEASE NOTE THE EMAIL MENTIONED IS NOT AVAILABLE NOW. THAT WAS ONLY FOR THE LIVE WEEKEND.

We get into the fog, that disorienting space where you finally start to see the pattern but don't trust your own memory anymore. Dr. Ramani explains why time itself feels lost in these relationships, and why self blame shows up first, before anger, as a survival mechanism rather than a personal flaw. We talk about the fantasy people hold onto and the fear underneath it, and about grief, not just for the relationship, but for the person you were before it.

Then we open it up to audience questions, covering narcissists at work, grieving a narcissistic parent, custody battles, trauma bonding, and how to leave when someone threatens to hurt themselves if you do.

Narcissist's Playbook is out now and available to rent at https://narcissistsplaybook.uscreen.io/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey everybody, so by now I think a lot of you know that Narcissus Playbook is out. It is available for rental. And the website I'm going to keep on mentioning it is narcissistplaybook.uscreen.io. Narcissistplaybook.uscreen.io. You can go there to rent the film. I know many of you have said, where is it? We're waiting. Yes, we've been busy doing all kinds of things. So check it out. Very excited for you guys to see it. July 24th to the 26th, we held our launch weekend, which we showed the film. We had panels, QA's, screenings. We opened up, you know, to the audience to have them ask questions. And one of the people we spoke to was Dr. Romani, who's well featured in the film. She's sort of the, in some ways, the heart of the Narcissus playbook. She is to some degree the moral center. And she's somebody that I call a friend. So we had an amazing conversation during the launch, and I wanted to post this here on the podcast. We got into something that we call the fog, that disorienting space where you finally see the pattern, but you don't trust your own memory anymore. And Dr. Romani explained why time itself gets lost in these relationships and why self-blame shows up first before anger as a survival mechanism rather than a flaw, which I thought was very interesting. We talked about grief as well, not just for the relationship, but for the person you were before. And can you ever get back to be that person again? Then we opened it up to audience questions. Uh, we spoke about custody battles, grieving a narcissistic parent, um, what to do when someone you love won't leave a controlling partner. And there was one particular tough one, which is how do you leave when they threaten to hurt themselves if you do? So, yeah, it was it was an amazing conversation, and I wanted to have give you guys access to it. Anybody who donated, anybody who bought the weekend was gonna have access to everything in a few weeks' time. So, once again, in order to now rent the film, which is now out, go to narcissistplaybook.uscreen.io. Enjoy this conversation, and at the end, imagine me saying, as always, stay curious.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Mark, it is so it's so nice to see you. It's so nice to be a part here, and it's amazing when I think of how long this journey has been. We we were shooting parts of this film so long ago, and so a chance to you know get to know you, but really we this this film has been its own journey, which I guess any form of healing is. So I again I'm so honored to be here. I'm so happy to see how this is really amping up this conversation about what people are going through in these relationships. These are very difficult times. And when the world is paralleling what's happening in people's homes and in people's families, it can actually make it much harder for survivors to feel heard and seen. You almost feel like the whole world is in on this mess.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

Good Lord, you're so right. So let's let's launch right in because the the audience wants to hear from you. And the way I want to frame this, and this is something you and I discussed back at UCLA a while ago, is not we don't talk about the narcissists here. Like the film does that a lot. We want to talk about the survivors and the path back to themselves. And so the first thing I want to ask you is about what I call the fog, and I'm sure you've used that word too. When somebody finally gets out or that or the truth lands, a lot of survivors describe this fog, the sense of they can't trust their memory of what happened. What's going on there in that in that time?

SPEAKER_01 3:45

When a person is sort of there, there's this liminal space when people start understanding what's happening in the relationship, right? So there's the whole period of relationship, you don't even understand what's going on. It becomes normalized, you just get used to enduring this. This can be really pronounced if you grew up like this. So you're just going along. You're suffering, your body is suffering, but a lot of people just think, eh, this is this family, this is this relationship. The liminal space kicks in when you start to get it. Maybe you watched a video, maybe someone talked to you, maybe you were in therapy, but you're starting to see the signal and the noise, you're starting to see the pattern. This to me is actually one of the most treacherous parts of healing because for a long time you didn't know what was going on and you didn't even question it. The first time you start questioning it, you feel overwhelmed with you think you have a choice, but you don't really have a choice, right? There's no, you feel stuck in something you don't know how to get out of. You blame yourself. So you're bouncing between appeasing the narcissistic person, wondering what's wrong with you, feeling really uncomfortable in your body, not knowing what to do, feeling guilty if you think badly about the narcissistic person, still feeling a little bit of anger at what they do, but then wondering if you're a bad person. So you're just, and what happens is the relationship absorbs all of your mental bandwidth. The rumination at this stage can be overwhelming. It's as though your entire, your entire brain has gone over to anticipating what the narcissistic person's gonna do, reflecting on what the narcissistic person has already done, constantly scanning your environment in this vigilant way. You know, Mark, one thing we found is sort of universal across survivors is walking on eggshells. Every word is carefully chosen, every action is carefully chosen. But you're still not sure. There's that not sureness. And obviously, then the real push, the hand behind your back in terms of healing, is getting to this point of radical acceptance. This is a thing. A lot of this is not me. This is definitely a pattern. It's really not going to change. And there's its own their own terrors associated with radical acceptance, but that liminal space, that fog, is you know something's wrong, but you're not quite sure what it is.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Yeah, and I was thinking as well about, I know I had this feeling too. Like, why does it feel like time gets stolen? Like people say sometimes they can't account for years. And I keep thinking to myself, is that dissociation where we compartmentalize in some way? What's that?

SPEAKER_01 6:15

It's important to, I believe, think of what happens in a narcissistic relationship as relational abuse and in most cases relational trauma. And that's to differentiate it from sort of what we consider more big T trauma, sort of traditionally what has driven the definitions of trauma, combat, um, crime by a random stranger, your house burning down, watching somebody get injured or killed. Those traditional big T traumas. Relational trauma is sort of late to the party on this understanding of trauma, even though it's probably long predated, you know, all it's always been there. It's always been there. But now we're actually talking about it, I think for so long, we're like, ah, this is just what relationships are. And when we're going through trauma, our central nervous system, our sympathetic nervous system, our bodies are really almost singularly focused on one thing, and that's keeping us safe. So when all resources are going to safety, time does take on a different tenor, right? You're surviving. It's almost like think of someone ticking away time in a prison camp. It's time slows down, time speeds up. Before you know, days are ticking away, something, nothing's really happened, everything stays the same. But also, memory is not being integrated in the same way. When we think about the parts of the brain that are affected by trauma, the hippocampus and the limbic system, organs like like the amygdala in the brain. That process, emotional memory, things aren't getting integrated the same way. So not only does it feel like time takes on this very different rhythm, we're not integrating. We're not actually encoding some of the things that are happening. So it does feel like time is lost. And I will tell you, Marcus, I've worked with so many survivors. It's fascinating to watch the layers of the onion peel away as a person does the work. And it'll be years later, and they'll say, Dr. Romney, I had the, I totally forgot about this da-da-da vacation. I totally forgot about this da-da-da event. Those memories could not safely be sort of absorbed into active recall for this person because at the time, well, they were in the relationship, it would have threatened attachment. It would have threatened the status quo. As safety happens, now there's the opportunity to sort of metabolize these memories and then sort of not have them sit there as this nascent danger all the time. People who've been through narcissistic relationships and haven't had a chance to process them sit there with that same level of hyper-vigilance, that on-edgeness, the I can't trust anyone kind of monitoring their surroundings. But it is a, we do feel like we've lost time. And then, Mark, frankly, we literally lose time. We can look back. I don't know how many, I can't tell you how many people I've worked with who said, I was in a 40-year marriage with someone who's narcissistic. And I think of all the time I lost, the things I didn't do, the people I didn't see, the relationships I lost, life gets lost because we abandon ourselves, we abandon our interests, we abandon our people, we abandon the true nature of ourselves, our values. That's all stuff that has to be grieved. We can't get the time back. And so people literally feel like they've lost time.

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Right. 100%. I know exactly what you mean. Such a good explanation as well of why why memory is like that, because I was wondering why it was. That makes perfect sense. You're not actually imprinting it properly, so to speak. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

It's not safe. As I always say, healing is about helping a person feel safe enough to see what happened to them. It it is not, while you're actively in the relationship and you don't have adequate supports, you're not safe seeing it. And I actually think it would be premature to shove someone's head and say, look, you got to see what's happening to you. You can't do that. It would actually lead someone to almost retreat further into that dangerous relationship.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

That's that's fantastic. Not that that's fantastic. Your answer is fantastic, is what I mean. So I want to talk about self-blame. Um, so when people first are coming out of the fog, you know, the dominant feeling isn't anger at first at the other person, it's it's the certainty that that they did something wrong. I was just wondering why do we go there first, that we did something wrong?

SPEAKER_01 10:20

So let's go back to basics. You know, the the human draw to attachment is central to being human, right? We are social species, we are a sort of a small group, tribal species. We need each other, we need attachment. The human infant would die without attachment. So this is an in, you know, in in our again, nervous systems drive, we have to have this. And we maintain that through our lives. And in fact, it's only in a small subset of sort of mental disorders where that natural drive for attachment is not central. In fact, damage to attachment is viewed as damage to the psyche, really. So what you have then is we have to attach. If something interrupts the attachment through a lack of safety, relational trauma, narcissistic abuse is a great example, we still got to keep that attachment going. And it's very difficult to consciously attach to something that is unsafe. If we go back to childhood, if a person has a narcissistic parent or caregiver, they have to attach to that parent or caregiver. It's not like they can go into like, I don't know, like parental dating app and say, I think I'm gonna write swipe on these people. They seem a lot nicer. You're sort of stuck with what you've got. And so the child has to make all kinds of accommodations and intrapsychic modifications to attach. We talk about things like the fawn response, a lot of what Ingrid Clayton talks about. But what we above all have to do is we have to, the child, the adult even, we have to maintain some sense of control. If we blame ourselves, A, we can remain attached, the other person remains safe. And if we blame ourselves, it's something we can fix. The child can say, I can keep my room cleaner, I don't have to make so much noise, I should have cleaned that up, I need to be quiet. And the self-blame is like a big part of the whole self-abandonment complex, right? By blaming ourselves, we're we're sort of cutting off parts of ourselves. First of all, it's not true, right? In most cases, we've done nothing wrong. And what the self-blame does is it set in this whole series of reactions that will dog us for the rest of our lives. Things that are not wrong, Mark, behaviors that are not wrong, we hold as being wrong, having a need, having a want, having an opinion, holding a different perspective, wanting to wear our hair a different color, wanting to pursue a certain interest, that starts to get encoded as wrong. Because physiologically it's dangerous because it could cut that attachment. Because we are told in these relationships you're greedy, you're selfish, you're entitled, you're grandiose, you're ridiculous, how dare you! That's that's terrifying for a kid. But even for an adult, Mark, you meet someone, that whole narcissistic love bombing complex happens, right? There's something that feels you see, feels uniquely seen and heard by this person who is actually able to sort of emulate you and mirror you and bring you into this seductive sequence. You want this thing to work. You feel like you love this person, and there may be aspects of them you do. So you don't want to blow it all up by continually sort of saying, that's no, I'm not to blame. And frankly, that whole self-blame thing is part of the grooming process of these relationships. If you don't take all the blame early in this relationship, they'll probably walk and go on to a more fertile source of supply, if you will. So the self-blame is a central pillar in this relationship. Think of it as cult recruitment, right? So a cult recruiter goes around, they're looking for fertile sources of supply. They're looking for people willing to play ball. And because they're doing it at a larger scale, anybody who's there's any of that sense of pushback, they're just going to go on to the next person. Now, obviously, intimate relationships are different, but it's the same game.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Yeah, and I'm thinking what you're describing sounds very natural. And I think what happens with some people is they're angry that they blame themselves. They think somehow that there was something wrong with them, something broken about them. But I think what you're saying is this is kind of a normal thing to do. This is kind of a survival mechanism, basically, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:23

You were you were keeping, you were staying safe. And it's not as conscious as an eight-year-old child is saying, I'm gonna blame myself so mommy's not mad at me. That's not the conscious process, right? It is again, the the process is stay attached, stay safe, stay attached, stay safe, right? Whatever lack of safety looks like, it could be yelling and screaming, it could be actual physical violence in the environment, whatever it is, the child is actually just taking on whatever role they can to keep this all calmed down. So again, the attachment is preserved, if you will. But that that does not, even though attachment may not have the same literal survival feel in adulthood, right? An adult could go out and get their own food and have their own residence. We we hold it as we did in that primal child part of us. So, and if if those attachment disruptions happen in childhood, they're much more likely to be reenacted in adulthood.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah, makes perfect sense. So, your amazing book, which you sent me when uh was published, um, It's Not You. Can you just talk us through why you wanted to write that book? Because I do believe it's related, of course.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

So It's Not You came from the idea there are actually a fair number of books on the narcissism shelf. What is narcissism? What are the kinds of narcissism? How does narcissism work? Isn't that ironic? They're doing all the harm and they still get all the books and they get all the press. And um, my work had really gone into this area of what happens to people in these relationships. So I thought, how can we tell that story? You know, we we in a score, you know, sort of like the scorpion and the swan. We always tell the story of the scorpion. What really happened to the swan there? Like what happens on the other side of the story? Because it's it's a it's a very unique, a unique, not unique because it happens to everyone who goes through it, but it's it's a fallout sequence that is often not absorbed by people because what was so tricky to me, and it's not you, is deliberately written to sort of hit that moderate part of the spectrum, narcissism being very much on the spectrum, maybe mild to moderate. When we get to the much more severe end, malignant narcissism, and even touching upon patterns like psychopathy and sociopathy, we are seeing something slightly different, right? And the film got at that. You know, you're seeing slightly some more severe depictions of what narcissism looks like. But we're in this moderate realm. The tricky part was to the world, sometimes, especially these marital relationships, but even these family relationships or long-term committed relationships, kind of look normal to the world. So the person is sort of stuck in this relationship where it kind of looks normal to the world. And even on some days, it feels normal adjacent. And so I felt that this was never properly documented. Number one. Number two, we really hadn't given people a sense of instead of installing the hope in the narcissist, maybe they could change. I really wanted the hope to be installed in the survivors. You can get to the other side of this, whatever this looked like. Number three, I got really sick and tired of the prevailing advice being, you gotta go. Because not everyone can go for a lot of reasons. There's practical tethers, there's emotional tether, there's existential tethers, whatever they are, not everyone can go. And I wanted the this book to be agnostic to that. You're gonna stay, you're gonna go, you're gonna heal. At least I hope you can find that path, you know, through this. And I so I wanted to lay that out sort of systematically, but there's another piece I wanted, which was we also make the mistake of viewing narcissistic people as caricatures, as one-dimensional, ridiculous, you know, sort of comic book villains, and they're not. That's the problem. We can come out of these relationships psychologically harmed and bruised, and still have some love, still have some positive feelings. And this idea that you had to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, that you had to turn them into an absolute villain, I saw that holding people's healing back. And this idea of sort of being able to hold multiple truths at the same time. You know, that you have a mother, and that mother may have gone through struggles in raising you, and that mother was psychologically cruel to you and deeply selfish and at times vulnerable, and she was funny and brave for her time. All of that stuff could be happening at the same time. And there is a world where you might even fully distance from that mother and still have love for her. Holding those things simultaneously is a real key to healing. And I think that the simplification of narcissism, and I also wanted to push back on this idea that it's a diagnosis. It's not. And I wish people would stop saying it. Because I hear diagnosis, Mark, as a psychologist, I hear treatment plan, I hear evidence-based treatment. That's what diagnosis means to me, that I have books I can go to. I have scholars, scholarly literature I could go to that would say, ah, I have a client with a major depressive episode. These are the things you do. We don't have that really in any way, I don't find in a convincing way around narcissism. I think there's some good work out there. You know, Wendy Bari's work, there's all kinds of work out there that I like, but I wanted to push back on this idea of diagnosis, diagnosis, diagnosis. Eh, let's just call it what it is. It's a personality pattern, and it's one that's rewarded by the world. So that's why I wanted to write the book. I thought healing was possible. I know healing is possible, but I wanted to write it in a way that was compassionate and didn't feel like people had to walk around thinking that their parent or their ex-spouse was Satan.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Yeah, yeah. I love the book, and I recommend everybody in the audience who has not read the book, please get the book, please read it. It's it's really amazing. I want to get to the holding multiple truths a little bit more, but first, before just before we get there, rumination, because you mentioned rumination. There's a stage where people can't stop replaying stuff and they're searching for the moment they should have known. Sometimes they're still checking on the person, they're hoping for an apology. What's this loop that keeps on going on for quite some time for people?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

So rumination in and of itself, like just going to the core of what rumination is, is mentally churning something in hopes of resolving it. That's all that rumination is, right? So there's good rumination and there's mad rumination. Good rumination is, and I'm sure you've done it, I'm sure everyone listening here has done it. You ruminate on something long enough and you're like, oh, wait a minute, I could fix it this way, and it works, right? That's good rumination, you know, and so we we get to the solution. Bad rumination is what we see in people going through these relationships because we're approaching a narcissistic relationship as though it's any relationship, right? If I communicate more clearly, if I try harder, what did I do wrong? So the churn is that you desperately want the solution. You want the relationship to work. So you keep getting lost in it. And a lot of that comes back to that self-blame. This is my fault, this is my fault. This not only distracts a person and almost pulls them out of life, there's no resolution. And when there's no resolution in a rumination sequence, it always comes back to self-blame. Because the challenging part, and even Mark frankly, once people understand this personality style narcissism or any of these antagonism styles are very, very, very resistant to change. Even when people get it, there's still a tendril of hope that often still dangles there, right? And that can be enough to keep a person thinking, like, okay, okay, I know they were terrible at birthdays, they were terrible at weddings, they were terrible about this, they were terrible about that. But when I get sick, I'm when I'm in the hospital, I got the IV, I got the thing, then of course. They're going to show up okay. And I'm like, they're not, they're not, they're not. And they don't. So people are in their most vulnerable moment. They're sick, they're in the hospital. And that little hope was that, okay, okay, all that little stuff, but here, when the rubber meets the road, so it's, and then more rumination. Like, I thought, I thought, I thought. And the the rumination can actually slide a person into depression. That's one of the big concerns about hyper-rumination, right? And also it really pulls a person out of life. It makes them a less effective caregiver. You're not able to be creative, you're not able to do other things in your life. So it it there's so much damage to it. But I'm gonna be frank with you, Mark, all my clients will say, so how do I stop it? And I'll say, there's no stopping it. Like it's there's no like anti-rumination button or pill. Sometimes it's distraction, meaning, purpose, um, healthy relationships. It never fully goes away. It comes in, and then we've got to find ways to sort of pull ourselves kind of out, even if it's through distraction, and hopefully kind of reroute it for a minute.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

So there's there's a a wall that I perceive, certainly in myself and in people I talk to, of like this trying to keep the fantasy going. And if they take this big step into, let's call it reality, of like, oh, this is just the way it is, it's never gonna be what I imagine it to be or I hope it to be. It's a very big step for people.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:25

And it feels risky. And I'm wondering what your thoughts on that is. Why does it feel so risky to just to say it is what it is, it's not changing. Let me let the fantasy go.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Because, Mark, it's not as simple as a fantasy, right? If it was only a fantasy, I actually think that's almost like the very top of the cupcake. That's the frosting. But the depth of it is the loss of safety, right? Because if it was just the I wanted to believe that this super cool boss and my super cool job is a good guy, and it was they actually really weren't, that might that might hold. But this isn't just about fantasy. This is about this attachment keeps me safe. And what I mean safe is that it doesn't necessarily mean that if you leave, that this person is going to hit you or physically harm you, but it is going to affect your place in the world. It's going to affect your sense of belonging. It's a reenactment of an earlier abandonment. Uh, it feels as though, and and listen, there's also practical losses like lose custody of my child, I could, I could lose social status. These are all very real fears for people. So it is the a lot of people will talk about the fantasy part, but underneath that is the fear part, right? And so it's really about digging into what is the primal fear. And usually it comes down to things like abandonment, being alone, not having a place to belong, um, you know, that being stigmatized by the world, like the standard kind of big, big ticket fears. So that's often what's happening because it is a puncture, it is a puncturing of a fantasy, of an illusion, of a story we're telling ourselves. And in narcissistic relationships, it's not two people in a relationship, it's two people in relationships with stories they've told themselves about this relationship. The narcissist has told themselves a story, the other person in the relationship has told themselves a story, and they're both in relationships with these stories, right? So they're not really in a relationship with each other. Even we've had to tell ourselves a story about the narcissistic person to be able to get up each day and front up to the relationship, right? Whether it's they don't mean it or they had a tough backstory or we're just a quirky funny family, or we're just a different kind of marriage. We we tell ourselves stories to live, right? So that's the that that's what gets us through these, that's what gets us through these relationships. So yeah, part of it is the fantasy, but I actually think the fantasy mark is the protective part. The fantastical stories, we this is the most special love story. We're we're sort of a unique couple. This is different. Um, they they're a special person, you know, I'm lucky to be in this, whatever it is. Or it might be that I I feel like I've got my perfect home, I've got my perfect life, I finally got what I wanted. I've worked with many survivors who came from really, really dysfunctional, fractured early environments. They meet the narcissistic person, and ostensibly they've created up the home and the pictures going up the stairwell and the and the life and the activities, but it's all a stage set, right? To blow that up, to blow up the status quo. That is the ultimate fear. It's why most people never move that far away from home, right? We stay with what's familiar. So it's less fantasy, like, oh, I'm gonna live in Disneyland, and more the idea of what I hoped life could be, and not having to face this fear of the unknown, which is not being in this relationship, severing attachment.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

That makes a lot of sense. And also I'm thinking like this thing I called fantasy, quote unquote fantasy, is also keeping at bay. It sounds like what you're saying, this existential terror that most of us have at the core somewhere. That's very normal and natural. Yeah. Um, I want to talk a bit about grief. Um, you know, because I found for myself, you know, I had so much rage, so much rage. And then when the rage began to dissipate, I I encountered so much grief. And there's grief that people have, you know, when they get out of these things, not just for the relationship sometimes, but also for the person that they were before. Yeah. That they've lost that person. So, what advice do you have for people that have that struggle?

SPEAKER_01 27:28

So, as you said, there's there's many flavors of grief because this isn't as it's not this traditional conception of grief. Someone's died, you no longer are gonna ever be able to talk to them in sort of the mortal plane. And so, and that that's a and that's a loss that's sort of culturally validated. In this case, the loss of time, the loss of innocence, the loss of belief in structures like marriage, the loss of belief in family, there's a lot of those losses. But as you pointed out, Mark, there is this sense of I lost myself. It also pushes back on this, I think, very wrong stereotype that the whole story that we often tell about survivors of narcissistic relationships is that they were sort of a hot mess or like a, you know, a you know, sort of a uh fading violet when they get into this relationship. They were just a mess. And so the narcissistic person took advantage of that messiness. And it's not true. Narcissistic people want status. You know, they have probably chose you also because you were a great supply. You may very well have made them look better. You you knew something, you had something that they wanted. They ended up obviously like it's like a spider sucking the guts out of something else. They suck all that out, but they they chose you because there was something compelling about you. And that stereotype we have of that, you know, is not it's not it's not true. So people may come into these relationships at a in a good place, like in a happy place, and having good connections and friends and job and or career or just stuff they like to do in their lives. And all of that slowly has to be abandoned to maintain the relationship. And you will buy into the sort of the gaslighted narrative that, well, this is what love is. Love is, you know, love is compromise. You'll notice that compromise is a one-way street. But when people look back, they will say, What the hell happened to me? I was kind of on the top of my game. I had this dream. I was gonna do this, I was gonna finish school, I was gonna, and I am now a quivering nerve, waiting for this person. You know, I've turned my life upside down for them. Not only is there a lot of grief around that mark, there's a tremendous amount of shame that you sense like I quit myself for what? It was never a conscious process, right? It was a very sort of, again, sort of safety, attachment, healthy parts of yourself being harnessed for a bad kind of an outcome, if you will. So the that grief, that sort of I lost myself, can be very overwhelming. But Mark, I really do want to say this, and it's I don't want this to be sobering. I actually think it's quite hopeful. We don't go back to the cells we were before this relationship. These relationships transform us. Think of it, I mean, the world, the whole world's talking about the Odyssey right now. Think of it as a hero's journey. The hero comes back changed. They don't say, like, I'm back, you know, and I'm back and better than ever, or I'm back and I'm gonna pick up my routine. You're changed by this. And I don't necessarily think in bad ways. A lot of survivors feel like I was never so cynical. I used to be more optimistic. I prefer to think you're more realistic. You kind of get things. You're not walking around like a sort of a cheerful, toxically positive Pollyanna. There's a wisdom in survivors, and I think that the world tries to twist that. If we think of Judith Herman's work on trauma, and she states this out so beautifully, one of the issues we have is this problem with the just world hypothesis. The idea that good people have good things happen to them and bad people will get karma, not how karma works. So when people, survivors of narcissistic abuse roll up with their seemingly perfect-looking lives with a charming, charismatic partner, and it's all a farce, it challenges other people's conception of the just world. It ain't our problem to make other people feel good about their lives. That's not my damn responsibility. You go feel good about your life. But that burden is something we've all carried. And so we change as a result of these relationships. I think ultimately for the better, but I think many people want to seek safety into the self they were before the relationship. Some of that's there. Your values, the core of who you are, your personality, those things are still there, but a lot has changed. And I actually think there's a lot more depth to people after they've been through one of these relationships.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

100% agree. Yes. Beautifully said. I'm gonna ask you one more question, then open it up to the audience. Um If someone in this room is still in that fog and they're still blaming themselves, which is not something you can just turn off like a like a spigot. Like what's what what would you like them to know?

SPEAKER_01 32:04

I want you to ask yourself the question what's the what's the function and what's the benefit of blaming yourself? Because you're getting some juice from this. It's something's happening. What this is serving uh sort of a a function, it could be a protective function, it could be a status quo function. Mark, I had the most interesting experience, someone I'm I'm close to and adore. She's a sweetheart. She bought like 10 copies of my book. She's like, I want to support you. I was like, great, thank you. And she picked one of them up and she said, I got to page 10, and I love you so much, and I'm never gonna read this book. And I said, Why? And she said, No, I I I ain't question. I I like I want my life to keep going as it is, and if I keep reading this, I'm gonna question it and no, thank you. I and listen, there's parts of this person's life that are a misery, but it's a misery that there's things, there's also these these value adds. And I said, that's fine, but I'm only gonna let you off the hook on one, you know, on one promise that you stop blaming yourself. I did the whole point of me writing this is these people's bad behavior, their tendency to keep saying, you're the problem, you're the issue, you're foolish. I said, You're a brilliant woman. And in my presence, if you blame yourself, I'm gonna shut, can I curse? I'm gonna shut that shit down. Okay. I because so, but it was fascinating for her right in front of me in real time saying, I don't want you blowing a hole in this rather fragile fabric of my life because I like a lot of it. I like our Sunday dinners, I like our get-togethers. This matters to me. And I don't want she almost felt it would be soiled by this. Make sense? So to me, what was more important was the function. So I said, You, I said, and this is where I was able to have the higher order conversation. You can be in this mess. Thanks, I'm not coming over, but you can be in your mess. And you can recognize that the what the way they're behaving is not acceptable. Can you work with me on that? And this is a friend, it's not a patient, right? Can you work with me on that? And we've made some progress. Like she's able to say, that was not okay. Thank you. Because when you can say that was not okay, and I get I'm in this because there's something about this I enjoy. I enjoy 50 people at a potluck. I, you know, that there's something about this person, and there's something really beautiful that there's this really affiliative part. And no, and she knows that if I really see this, I'm afraid I'm gonna get too jaded to do it. She'd done some examination around that. So to me, it's the what what function is this? But for the longest time, it's like, maybe I'm a bad this, maybe I'm a bad that, maybe I'm dumb, maybe I'm incompetent. We lifted some of that in our conversation. So to me, it's what function does this self-blame serve? Right? How is it protecting you? What is it allowing you to do? Understand that part of it. That's that's where I think you can get the self-blame can be its own teacher.

SPEAKER_00 35:01

That is so interesting. I don't think you and I had this conversation, but a couple of years ago, I started to look at the um self-blame and self-hatred that I was feeling. And I began to have the understanding, like, what am I getting out of it? And I had an amazing therapist, and I realized like I was avoiding a whole bunch of pain. That's exactly what I think by doing that, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:20

And yet you didn't avoid the pain because you were walking around thinking you were a terrible person that did a bunch of bad stuff. Right? I again I I'm gonna take a page out of Gabor Mate's playbook because this guidance he had given on our one on our our Dr. Romney Network platform, he had said to me, and I think he's absolutely right. In this issue, especially in relational abuses, we keep looking for the path of no pain. We keep thinking there's a solution. If I go down that pathway, it's all gonna be right. That's it, it's all gonna be fine. There's none, there's none. You are choosing between, like, do I want to go into a pit of vipers? Do I want to go into a volcanic, you know, lava? Do I want to jump into a shark pit? That's what you're choosing between, right? You're like, yeah, okay, I'm gonna hang with the snakes, I'm gonna go there. But all of it's bad. All the choices are icky. And but knowing that, because I think people get frozen because they're like, I don't know which way to turn. I'm like, of course you don't, because no matter which way you go, it's gonna hurt. You're either gonna feel like you're a bad person, or you're gonna feel like you're abandoning your family, or you're gonna feel like a pariah. Pick your poison, right? And that's really what this becomes. But I think when you can make some sort of you can resonate with that, you recognize that, okay, this is going to hurt no matter what. To me, Mark, though, there is a winning path. And the winning path often means vipers and sharks along the way, but the winning path is the path where you are self-abandoning less, right? That you're living in line with your authentic self, with you, with your values, but recognizing that the pain and the agony of these relationships is whatever path you choose. You're either gonna feel guilt or you're gonna feel like a bad person, or you're gonna feel the constant invalidating misery of the relationship. In my healing program, like I know a lot of people are looking for community. We have a monthly healing program that has a phenomenal community. We just covered this concept of guilt ad nauseum this month in July. And it was remarkable because the insights people were having about it were amazing. And I'm gonna try to drum up a discount code that I'm gonna give at the end. So if people want to try out our healing program, they can try it at half off. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:33

Cool. I love that. So let's do this. Let's get into the audience questions. Scott's been going through them and he's passing them on to us. Um so these are some of the questions that are coming in. Oh, this is a good one.

unknown 37:45

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 37:45

Romney, can you talk about low-range narcissists that are very charming and charismatic at the workplace and the impact when they kidnap the social dynamics of an office?

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Mmm, that's very, very interesting. It's interesting this person thinks they're low range. I I often don't know that we often see the full depth of someone's sort of narcissistic behavior at work because it's such a curated space. Um, it is interesting, though, this idea of the the hijack is they really, again, the narcissistic person is really always able to set the thermostat to where they want, right? Couple of things. I would say one thing you could really you could strive for, it really depends on how you're sort of wired. Many times we can keep a narcissistic person in a system at bay if there's someone else who is the kind of the person who's willing to sort of speak out in that group, saying, Hey, you know what? I noticed that for Mary has been trying to say something here. Like, can we just give Mary a minute? That ability to do that, Mark, sometimes comes from privilege, right? Like I say, if you have privilege in a group, you're the white guy, you're the, you know, you're the person who's got more money, you might have the title, whatever it may be, you might be in a position to open up the conversation so that you can sort of un hijack a little bit, like pay attention to the room, see if you can bring someone else into the conversation, get a different point of view. Another way is to try to be the what I call the anti-gaslighter, right? Anti-gaslighting is an incredibly powerful technique at work because it's when you see someone being gaslighted in real time, like, oh, that's not true or this, that, and the other. You can either, if it's safe enough, say, no, I think that is true because I was there, or you can take it aside the person who was silenced if that's safer and say, I want you to know what that just happened. That's not true. And another piece is to build independent allyships, right? To have subgroups where it's not like it's a gossip fest, but where, I mean, anyone here who's ever been to a family gathering where the toxic family member doesn't come one year, right? They get sick or they're on another trip, you're like, this is a totally different experience. It's literally like one person out of 20. You take that one person out and you have an entirely different party. Okay. This is this is similar. So trying to create simulations where hijacker isn't there can also lend some, actually, it can also confirm your hypothesis about like, okay, this person really is sucking the oxygen out of the room. I don't know that there's ever a full-on fix fix, but I think these are some of the things that can sort of nudge it. And the the again, the most empowered person who's not narcissistic does need to kind of take the lead in in sort of bringing other people into the mix and keeping this person at bay. But you can't expect someone who's junior and doesn't have that kind of power to take on that role.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Awesome. I love that. I have a question that's coming from our team backstage, a number of them. How do you grieve the death of a narcissistic parent? Well, narcissist parent, they said.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

It's it's a big one, okay? The problem, the issue maybe is that when a person has a narcissistic parent die, they are flooded with a lot of conflicting emotions, ranging from regret to relief to anger. And all of that is it's a much more complicated grief experience, right? Rather than it's almost a more traditional, I'm sad, I miss this person, I wish I'd had more time, right? But there's not as much of the the relief piece, right? And that relief can ping those old senses of I'm a bad person, I'm disloyal, I'm a, I'm a um, the moral injury piece, like I'm bad. How can I be relieved that someone's dead? What's wrong with me? So that can that can sort of churn up those feelings, even if they've been kept at bay. If someone's gone no contact for a long time, there may be a lot of regret around, was there a chance for one more conversation? And did I miss that chance? That hope, that one last tendril of hope could be teasing someone, right? No, the answer to that is no. And in fact, we know as narcissistic people age. I don't know that they become any easier. They they remain resistant and they're all their old ways, it's just their voice isn't as loud because they're tired. It's but it is a unique form of grief. And I think a lot of the working through is releasing that hope, that sense of uh if they could see me now, what what would they have said? Would they have noticed? Would they have been proud? Would we have closed the circle? I think the hardest part, and the the death of a narcissistic parent, frankly, Mark brings up a larger theme in these relationships. We never get closure. In many other relationships, we get closure when it ends. A person's like, we grew apart. I still have love for you, but we grew apart. Or the parent, the parent takes the person aside as they're in their last months of life and says, I screwed up a lot, and I am really, really sorry. And you're a great kid, and I'm so proud of you. You get something. In a narcissistic relationship, you are never, ever going to get closure. And without that closure, you're trying to close that space yourself for yourself. It's hard again to sit in that middle space, but that's what these relationships are. There is never accountability. And in the absence of accountability, there's no repair. So when a person is navigating this, it is the bouncing between that sense of relief that this stressor is no longer there. I do suggest that people, you know, again, whether it's in therapy, whether it's journaling, to really lay out the conflicting, the conflicting feelings and then reflect on, especially for folks where there was a hope. There was a hope of the deathbed conversation, there was a hope that the parent would be proud of them to really treat that as the loss rather than the parent themselves. Like, what exactly are you grieving? What's the loss? And pin it to that thing. Because what you may be grieving is the hope that I could have been a part of a normal family and had a parent who saw me. Well, that was never something that was going to be a Available to you anyhow. So it's grieving that strand rather than getting confused and grieving this whole person where a lot of you is like, I am so glad I don't even need to think about this anymore.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

So complex. And also I think I was thinking about like it's also requires honesty because sometimes you have to be honest about maybe I hated them sometimes, maybe I was angry sometimes. You have to be honest about all those feelings. So complex.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

I do think though, Mark, that piece of if you can come out and say, I don't, I didn't like them. In fact, I downright hated them. They, you know, really, it's understanding how did this parent affect you in terms of how you go through the world? It's not about blaming, right? Because of this parent, I this, this, and this, right? It's more of how did this parent shape me? You know, you might say my tentativeness to this day is because of this parent. My holding back on a new idea is because of this parent. We can sort of understand, but and why was that the case? Because to hold back on that stuff kept you safe. When you can understand that, it becomes less of I'm a tentative person. And it becomes more of tentativeness is how I stay safe. Now the threat has gone. They've died. It may also open you up to pushing on some of those limits.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

I love that. Thank you. Let's um let's stick with family for a second. I have another one here from the audience. How do parents and loved ones move forward when an adult child appears to be under the influence of a controlling or narcissistic partner and wants nothing to do with the people who love them?

SPEAKER_01 45:32

So, I mean, we could take a page out of cult recovery there, because it sounds like exactly the same thing, except the difference is this could be, for example, you have an adult child, and that adult child marries a partner, and the partner turns out to be quite antagonistic and narcissistic, right? That would be a great example. And that's a pretty classical example. We can also take a page out of substance use treatment, right? The one thing I can tell you doesn't work in substance use treatment is going up to a person living with addiction and saying, you need to stop using drugs. That doesn't work. You have to build in, you have to, you have to push back on the ambivalence and get some buy-in, right? So even with the cult survivor, how much can we help the cult survivor reflect on things that they used to love doing? Right. So your conversation, if you get to even see this person, is ask them about how much they loved. Are they still doing all that quilting? Like I remember you used to love quilting. You still doing that? Because I still have one of those quilts you gave me. It's as though you're kind of turning on this light in them that's probably turned off by being in the subjugated relationship. So you're you're reaching out into the self from the past, if that makes sense. Instead of saying, why are you with this person? They're controlling you. Because what a person will do when they're in one of these relationships and they're in the fog, they're going to double down and defend the narcissist, right? It's like the person doubles down and defends a cult. Don't call this a cult. Oh, I should have known. They told me you would say that because, you know, we're actually learning things and I'm finally able to see you clearly. I've seen this conversation go down like that so many times, Mark, right? The cult people know exactly what they're doing. Narcissistic people kind of know exactly what they're doing. So we've got to find the back door, what the relationship used to be, the interests of that person, the, you know, the little quirks of that person prior to this person coming into their life. That person is still alive in that person, but has been shut down because they're not safe in the new relationship. That's the play. Okay. And it moves very, very slowly because it's this, you know, there's sort of this dramatic sense of we're going to do an intervention, we're going to pull them out. Good luck with that. Like that's not going to work. And so you don't want to turn the narcissistic person in the, let's use the example of the adult's child's life into the enemy. There'll be time enough for that if they can get out of the relationship. But for now, you want them to know you're a safe place. You're not, because if they think every time they talk to you, you're going to talk smack about their partner, they're going to stop showing up. And their partner is aware, so they're going to isolate them from you. So you're losing all your roads in. You almost have to play this other ground game to keep contact and then make the conversation about kind of who they were before, so you can keep that part of them alive.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

Yeah. 100% makes sense. 100%. I have another one from the audience. My mother has been married to a narcissist for 25 plus years and has started using his tactics on me. Silent treatment, Darva, not holding him accountable. Is this a trauma response from living under him so long, or has she become a narcissist herself?

SPEAKER_01 48:46

I'm assuming the person asking this question, mom wasn't a narcissistic person before the marriage. Is that a safe question?

SPEAKER_00 48:53

I'm assuming that as well.

SPEAKER_01 48:54

No, it did not. So personality is a funny, funny thing, right? Personality really is a social developmental phenomenon. There is certainly an infusion of temperament, the biological part of personality. We can take a page out of Marsha Linahan's playbook. She talks as a biosocial model, temperament, biological part of personality, shaped by an environment, and that yields an adult personality. Adult personality would only make a major shift if either A, the person had a head injury or some other form of central nervous system process, like a neoplasm or some kind of tumor in their brain. That could cause personality change or stroke or something like that. So brain injury. I guess is controlling them and, you know, and invalidating them and all of that. Mom doesn't know what she's in. Mom likely is trying to stay safe in the relationship. So keeping at bay any naysayers is going to result in tactics that are very similar to the narcissistic person. Mark, many people leave narcissistic relationships with a tremendous sense of shame when they say, I behaved in ways that they did. I'm like, well, of course you did. We absorbed the behavioral repertoires that we are around. But there's so much shame and this fear of I'm narcissistic now. Like, no, you did that to be safe. And you're aware it was the wrong thing. It's not your go-to. So I don't think her mom became narcissistic. But people who have been through trauma can behave in manners that look like and that look antagonistic, especially if it's a fight response. It's like the fight response looks antagonistic. It's fighty and yelly and screamy. And so it's more unusual for women to use a fight response, but it's there. And her mom, or this person's mom, may be using the fight response because they feel safe with their child. We tend the fight response tends to only come out when we're safe enough to fight. That often gets shut down, especially if you don't have power. But um, I don't think mom became narcissistic. I think mom's in a in a relational trauma situation and doesn't quite understand what she's up against.

SPEAKER_00 51:11

Yeah, it makes sense. It's very hopeful, too. Very hopeful. Um, here's a big one. Um it's a very big one. What advice would you give for someone divorcing a covert, malignant narcissist, if possible, specifically about getting more custody with their children? Just a small one.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

Be realistic. Okay. Every state has slightly different laws, every province, every country, okay? Family court is one of the most corrupt spaces in the judicial systems, at least in the United States. They're not trauma-informed systems, they are not antagonism-informed systems. And trying to get more custody can sometimes be it simply not may not be within easy reach. And so it's also about fight, that's that might be winning the war, but you have to continue fighting the smaller battles. Here's what's unfortunate. If a narcissistic person knows that custody is the hill you're gonna die on, they are going to make that the war every single day. It's it's is it's we're literally trying to coach people to be kind of indifferent to their kids with the legal teams. Like, you know, whatever you come up with is great. And I remember working with one woman who literally was with a covert, malignant narcissist. And the coaching we did really involved, she, I mean, she would have, she would have fought to the death for these kids too. Is that when this whole custody thing was being fought out, she really had to kind of play act it, like, you know, that that with this 50% time, you know, I'm gonna actually use it. I've been wanting to, you know, join this adult soccer league. And now this is gonna give me the time because it's a bit of a drive. So, you know, it's good to know that I'm gonna have this time, right? He immediately said, Oh, hell no. It's sort of like, what do you mean you're gonna do this thing you want? And there was a lot of bandying back and forth. She ended up, she never, she now never was gonna get full custody, but I think she got closer to like 60, 70 percent. She never joined the soccer league. Let's just leave it at that. But my it was all it was all a tactic. But see, the problem is it is tactics. And people say, Well, I'm a better parent, and can't the judge see that this is a bad guy? No, the judge can't. And being a bad guy is not what's going to drive the custody decision. So a lot of this, and this is where Christine Cociola, who's one of the therapists, and Dr. Barrett, Catherine Barrett, are both really, really incredible experts at sort of working, how do we work out the tactics on this? How do you show up? And it is a lot of it is to the narcissistic person at loves court, they love court. They love court, they love vexatious litigation, they love it. It is, it's a it's a what is a court? It's a place, it's built, it's purpose built for antagonism. It's like their arena. So they flourish there. They love depositions, they love it all. You've got to be as regulated and as calm as them, whatever that takes, however, you work it through in therapy, whatever you need to do. That's one step. Number two, you've got to document the hell out of everything. And what you've got to do is when you're going through these conversations, whether it's with these custody evaluators, many of whom are actually corrupt, and you know, all these other players in this sort of larger divorce industrial complex, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, by the way, a lot of people making a lot of money. Um, that you have to um, you can't make it about he bad, he bad, he does this, he does that, but about the safety, stability, routine, and consistency for your children. So the when you bring up the all the terrible things that person does, it has to be in the context of I have a concern around the instability and dropout in drop-off times. It's really, it affects them going into the school week. It's no, it's not, he brings them over anytime he wants, right? And I'm not saying this person does this, but you're trying to stay as child-centered as you possibly can. Child center, child safety, child school, child mental health, child, child, child, child, child. Everything has to be about that and not he's a bad guy. Because the minute those words come out, he's a narcissist, he's a gaslighter, he's doing this, he's doing that, the judge shuts down, and now you're the bad one. And the bias in the court can often be, believe it or not, against the mother who's being viewed as the one who's creating problems. And we can sometimes, the bias is like, whoa, they're a good dad, they're fighting for their kids. That's a paternalistic bias that's sort of built into the family court system. You have to be prepared for all of that. You need a lawyer who gets it. And if your lawyer is poo-pooing it, like, oh, blah, blah, blah, everyone thinks their ex is a narcissist, you might need different counsel. You need a lawyer who is not gonna get lost in the weeds of responding to every email and sending you a big bill. They need to know how to play this ground game with this antagonistic client, but you got to keep your expectations realistic. You're never gonna get full custody. I mean, unless there's something really egregious happening, and Christine Cociola will tell you, even then, the courts may still not, you know, rule in favor. It's to keep those expectations realistic, that the documentation remains child-centered, that the documentation is about observable behavior, and then in the midst of this, as much as possible, build allyships with your kids' teachers, with your kids' coaches. You want to be able to know how your kid is doing, how how they're showing up. Because you're not going to be in all those space spaces all the time. But this is a this is almost like a multi-pronged assault. And the helplessness is you can do all of these things right. And if you get the wrong judge or the wrong other players, guardians ad lightum and the custody evaluators and all these other sort of people hanging on the fringes, it still may not go the way you want, which can result in tremendous, tremendous grief. So it's it's really, really about being prepared. And and again, I'm I'm here, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna shill for Christine Cociola's group. She has an amazing protective parents group. So if that's something you're going through, I highly recommend looking into her resources.

SPEAKER_00 57:13

Absolutely. Thank you for that answer as well. Um, I'm interested in in how we're gonna answer this next one here. How are narcissists so successful at convincing others that the victim is actually the problem?

SPEAKER_01 57:29

Again, narcissistic people, listen, there there is a personality. Okay, let's start with personality, okay? One of the elements of the agreeable personality, which are the people who most often get stuck in these relationships, is straightforwardness. We say it straight. We say what's on our mind. We don't we don't manipulate, right? We just say this is what I need, this is what I want, this is what I feel. And it's true. And the narcissistic person completely lacks that straightforwardness. Manipulation is basically getting someone to do something that they don't want to do, but convincing them it's in their interest because actually it's in your interest. That's that's manipulation, right? So there's a lot of steps there, it's a bit a relatively high-level sort of um social tactic when you think about it. And it helps when you don't have empathy and you're entitled. Those two qualities make manipulation frictionless, right? For a person who's agreeable to manipulate, you're like, oh, this does not feel good, you know, and you can actually feel pretty sick, and that in and of itself could be enough to stop you from manipulating someone. So there they're there because there's an almost there's this entitlement. Entitlement really is sort of the trunk of the narcissistic tree. And because of that entitlement, the narcissistic person genuinely feels that they should, number one, get their way. Okay. And so your question though, Mark, is about how are they able to basically pathologize the victim, is what you're saying for going through it, right? It is a it's a narcissistic delus delusion or delusional, yeah, the delusional aspects of narcissism, if you want to call it that, is different than psychotic delusion. Psychotic delusion is the FBI's monitoring my thoughts, it's tinfoil hat shit, right? It's that. Narcissistic delusion is narcissistic people, the research has shown, they actually believe, and they think, absolutely believe it, that they're very empathic. They're very empathic, they're very they believe it. It's not like a weird life coachy new age, like I'm good, like an intention on your mirror. Like, I'm good, I'm special. No, they believe they're empathic. Like, I'm such a good guy, like I'm such a great guy, and they believe it. So this is you're dealing with someone who is at some level delusional. Because there's no, there's very little self-reflective capacity. And narcissistic people, because of the way there's sort of this sort of switch in the salience network in their brain, they they only focus externally when it's to their benefit. So they ain't paying attention to you unless they need you, right? And when they need you, they're hyper-focused on you. That's why we create a trauma bond. Like, but no, last week they were really listening to me. They were really listening to you because they needed something from you. So all of these capacities and things that are sort of built into them, I don't think they're good things, but they basically they don't care about anyone. Everything is all ships lead into their harbor. Okay, so they then are able to, without almost really guilelessly, be able to sell this story of can you believe this? Can you believe this greedy grubbing bitch? She takes all my money, she spends it all. You know, I'm such a great guy. I'm I'm such a good, and you're like, wow, and they believe it. And I think that that piece that we're like, nah, they don't really believe it. No, no, no, folks, they really believe it. And understanding that delusional aspect might mean you interact with it less. I would not try to tell a person saying the tinfoil hat is helping them talk to the FBI. I'm not going to say that's not true. It doesn't work with the narcissistic folks either. And that's why they're able to do it. They construct narratives that center themselves, and their entitlement is such that they feel that they absolutely have the right to this in an unyielding way. There's a there's a maladaptive, rigid, rigid, rigid quality to these antagonistic personality styles. You ain't bunching them.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

I think what you said is so important as well, because in my experience talking to people like this, I think people think that they're oh they're pretending, but like they really, really believe their fantasy wholeheartedly.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:51

They do.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:52

They do. No, no, no. There's no um, and I think when you see it as a delusion, because when the research has shown this, they really do. They are they believe their hype, they, they, they believe they're good, they believe they're generous, they believe they're helping other people. Can you see how amazing I am? Like you see everything I do for other people. And they're not, again, it's not that it's not with a wink. It's it's it's very, very serious. And they believe that when someone else is pushing back, what you've done is you sort of pinged that unconscious part of them that they're not special. When you tell them, like, well, that's not true, or you shouldn't say that. Now you've hit their shame. But that's not consciously processed, but it is uncomfortable. And that discomfort comes out as rage. And they rage at that other person, but then they're also able to position it because they believe their own hype. That's the gaslight, right? It's the constant dismantling of the other. That's how the that's how the relationship completely erodes the other person. And in order for the relationship to last, you almost have to buy into this delusional hype.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:58

Yeah. There's a question that just came in. I thought it was interesting. Why is there such a stigma that only men can be narcissistic? Does narcissism present differently in men and women? I'm assuming there might be some research.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:14

You know, it's interesting. It is um the you know, ever every every myth has some truth to it, right? Well, there's a little bit of truth here. Narcissism in the research is definitely overrepresented in men, but in vulnerable narcissism, it's equal across genders, and that's been supported by the literature. So when we think about what's societally permitted in girls and in women, the kind of more grandiose, braggy, though social media is changing that, I gotta say, like this sort of like women are being grandiose and braggy too, but it's still not normative, right? And it's also not safe. Okay, we go when we think about gender, we've got to think about safety. Inherently, being in a woman's body and being in a female body isn't safe. You know, there's there's greater risk to a woman in the world. So that grandiose piece isn't always going to be selected for, right? Not at a population level. Same thing with the malignant piece, also. Now that's not to say that there are not women who are sociopathic. It's just more rare. And I think it's why we're often quite fascinated by it when it shows up. But there's truth to it. Men are more likely to be represented in sort of the grandiose um narcissism spectrum, in the malignant narcissism spectrum, the psychopathy spectrum, but not in the vulnerable narcissistic spectrum. This is why you can see women who are, they'll be the ones who are more sullen, victimized, um, woe is me, passive aggressive. Those kinds of gambits are what we might see in a woman who's narcissistic. The challenge becomes, and this is a real diagnostic challenge, frankly, is the term borderline personality disorder is often used to describe people who are vulnerably narcissistic. And it discredits people who are going through the very, very real experience of borderline personality, which has a lot of features that are akin to complex trauma. And people with borderline personality disorder are often quite despairing. There's a real risk of self-harm. There's a difficulty with regulating emotion, including anger. But I think that anger can sometimes feel overwhelming to others, but there's often very, very intact empathy in per people with borderline personality that only goes haywire at the moments they're dysregulated. But what you the manipulation is not in the diagnostic formulation of borderline personality, passive aggression is not, but in vulnerable, even being a victim is not part of that diagnostic formulation. But we do see it in vulnerable narcissism. It has those manipulative top notes, and this is just a mistake in how people were trained and they're not taught in this. But I think a lot of the women out there who are vulnerably narcissistic have been inaccurately labeled as had having a borderline personality style, which is wrong. So if you shoved all those, a lot of those women where they belong, which is in the vulnerable narcissism lane, you'd see that that similarity between the two groups. A lot of folks who have narcissistic mothers would say, Yeah, my mom often played victim, that I owed her something, that I should feel guilty for not doing more, that her life was hard. Harder than mine, and she had very little empathy. She was competitive with me. So it had that feel. That would be the feel of a vulnerable narcissistic mom. And enough people have narcissistic mothers to know that this is obviously not only men.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:14

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I have one that's this is interesting. How do you leave a narcissist when they threaten to kill themselves if you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:24

This is one of the most challenging manipulations that people run into in these relationships. And again, it's much more in the realm we see of vulnerable narcissism, right? Here's what I would tell people. If that's the threat you're getting, then you'll say, I whatever you feel, say, you know, this is no longer working. I also want you to be safe. So I am going to call emergency services, right? You got you, and and I don't consider that calling a bluff. I consider that doing what anyone should do if somebody is saying they're going to harm themselves, right? You can, and here, and I want to tell people a tricky thing you don't want to fall into. You may, if you're in a close relationship with someone, know the name of their therapist. But if that their therapist, so let's say you and I are in a relationship, Mark, and you're threatening to kill yourself, and I knew your therapist's name is Dr. X. If I call Dr. X and say, hey, Mark's about to kill himself, Dr. X can't confirm or deny that you're their patient. Dr. X could, though, reach out to Mark and say, Mark, what's going on? I just got a call. I couldn't confirm or deny, but can you, and maybe you'd get that, you might get that. So there's back doors you can try. But ultimately, you're not their therapist. And it is, and if the if basically now the formula is if you stay, I won't do this. That's a manipulation. Okay. And so bringing and saying, like, I, I, I, you're gonna, I'm gonna have to call someone to support you and help you through this. Um, I would cons I would consider calling the suicide hop line in your area. They can also give you guidance saying, I am I'm in ending a relationship. This person's threat person's threatening to harm me. I mean, harm themselves. Now, here's the other piece. If there are firearms or other weapons in the house and folks, a cutting knife for the kitchen is a weapon, their ending their life could also put you at risk. That suicidal risk is also a homicidal risk. Okay. So you have to take this seriously, right? I mean, all of this is risk assessment. People saying, oh no, that it's not gonna go there. Don't be so sure. Many of these cases when we see an intimate relationship with these kinds of personality dynamics hits this head of steam, is that you you you've got to remain steadfast. You need your own support. You want to say, okay, if this is what's happening, I want to call someone. They will get mad that you want to do that. You're still leaving and saying, but I'm gonna call someone to take you to safety. They're gonna get even angrier. You need your own safety plan. You need a safe place to go to. You know, you need to ensure you have all that in place, that you're documenting everything. It may be down the line, you need a protective order. This stuff's no joke. Because when the vulnerable narcissistic person is having this big of an abandonment wound, it doesn't just come out as rage itself. It could turn out to be rage at other. So later on, where they'll say, Can't you just come and talk to me? I'm through this. You make sure someone comes with you. And you might say, no, no, this is an intimate thing. We should be talking alone. Absolutely not. There are too many of these tragic cases every damn day in the news. I can't, I can't stress that enough. It is a manipulation, it doesn't feel good. And are there cases where you leave, they threaten suicide, you do everything, and they still end their life? Yes, they do.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:36

That's something they did. Otherwise, you are gonna remain a prisoner in this relationship for the rest of your days.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:43

100%. Dr. Romani, could you just to finish off, tell us about your community and all the work you're doing and any offers you might have for our audience?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:52

So, you know, I have the books and those are available, and you can listen to them, you can read them. You know, for people are saying money's an issue, we have YouTube and that's free, and we have thousands of videos at this point, and you probably will find something on every anything you want. We have a people who want to hear more conversations with experts. We have sort of a podcast format called the Dr. Romini Network. And we have sort of our kind of our our flagship program, the healing program, which is an intensive healing program that has a very carefully monitored monitored community. We have monthly workshops on a specific topic. July was guilt. Next month is, I'm losing track of my months. I think next month we're getting into individuation. So we give different topics every month. We have QA sessions, just like you and I are doing, but we do those twice a month to get specific questions answered. And you'll see all these people going through what you're going through. I'm actually gonna check to see here if if I've gotten that discount code because I I um okay, so here it is. Ready? The discount code is HP-free month. So you put that in at checkout. HP-free month at checkout. If you want to check it out next month, you can have the first month free and see if you like it and and kind of come and join our community because it's a lot of what we're talking about here. So that's HP-free month. And so we have all of those things. And then if you're a therapist working in this space, we have a therapist program every month. I'm sorry, several, multiple times a month, where you can get questions answered and present cases and hear cases. That's called therapists only. All of this you can find on my website, dromini.com. And then you can also, if you want to get continuing education units and get more comprehensive training, you can go to the pessy.com website and you will see my 36-hour training for therapists who want to work with clients who are experiencing these relationships. So lots of different ways you can kind of get more support and hear from different people and hear about this more and hear about different topics. So we're always going, going.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:54

You've made an amazing ecosystem. And just want to check one thing that coupon code is good. What's the website they go to for that?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:00

So they go to my website, and then you just hit heal, you go to go to dromini.com, you'll see the healing program there. Click that, and then it'll ask you to enroll, and you can just use that code at checkout. So dromini.com is the website, and then you can go to check at checkout, just put that code. You can try the first month for free.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:17

Well, thank you so much for that offer, and thank you so much for spending your time with us. I mean, as always, every conversation I have with you is amazing. Whether you're in the hot seat or I'm in the hot seat, it's just amazing, amazing conversations and your wealth of knowledge and your wisdom. You are doing remarkable things in the world. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:33

Well, I'm I'm I'm I hope this was helpful to people. You can feel very alone when you're going through it, and it can feel just because it's hard as you're going trying to heal, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It's just really hard. And then one day you can come out to a different place. And I don't know that the wounds ever fully go away, but you've internalized them into yourself and you feel like now you're back to being yourself. They feel more manageable.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:57

Thank you again so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:58

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:59

Thank you all for listening. Dr. Romani is a rock star.