Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: How to Know If You're Being Gaslit by a Narcissist And What to Do About It: Dr Ramani Durvasula About this episode Dr. Ramani Durvasula explains the toxic and insidious nature of narcissistic abuse and gaslighting. In this powerful conversation, learn the psychological tactics narcissists use, from denying your reality to invalidating your experiences, and how to reclaim your sense of self in the face of manipulation.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Steven Bartlett? You spend time, even today, dealing with patients who are the victim of a narcissistic relationship, or the victim of a narcissist?
0:10 Speaker 01 Every week, every week. I mean, it's probably one of the, if not the most gratifying part of my week. I'm a big believer that if you're a mental health practitioner, you practice mental health. So that's a privilege, to be able to be in that room and to work with clients. But it would be so easy, when you're dealing at a macro level, large populations, going on YouTube, writing books, to get distanced from what is happening to individual people's lives. One of the tricky bits with research is we study populations, we study samples, right? We study hundreds of people. What happens in the room is something very different. And you start to recognize, A, how badly these relationships harm people, their schemas
0:51 Speaker 01 of the world, their schemas of themselves, and B, how much potential for intervention there is with these clients through very, very simple approaches around education about narcissism, validation of their experience, breaking through self-blame, and teaching them to trust themselves.
1:07 Steven Bartlett? So how many patients do you think you've seen that have been victims of narcissists?
1:13 Speaker 01 I mean, hundreds, hundreds, really. And I even use the word survivor. I hate to call them victims because I don't even think they're that passive. I mean, I think that they just weren't. No one ever taught anyone this, right? I'll give you the example. When people are in a relationship with somebody who's living with addiction, it's very clear what they're dealing with, right? You have a person, they're using a substance that's altering them, that's altering their behavior, that's taking them away from who they are in person. People in relationships with addicts will say, I'm in two relationships. I'm in a relationship with a sober person, and I'm in a relationship with somebody who's using or intoxicated, or denying, or defending their use, right? Two people. And it breaks the people in those relationships. And we're willing to call it that. The experience people
1:55 Speaker 01 have in narcissistic relationships, in a way, is no different with the added bit, though. At least with addiction, people can say, I see what the behavior is. I see what the issue is. Addiction's a disease, and we know it's treatable. Narcissism, not so much. And on top of that, the narcissistic person has this very well-developed, very successful behavioral repertoire. They can go out in the world, and they're able to be charming, and charismatic, and confident, and smart, and the center of attention, and running companies. And behind closed doors, they psychologically eviscerate the people they're with. Spouses, partners, family members, close friends, maybe people who are below them in an organization, people where they can kind of get away with it. So the people they're
2:39 Speaker 01 harming, the world thinks this person's fantastic. At least a person who's in a relationship with an addict, people say, okay, I get it. They're using, this is hard. But for the folks in narcissistic relationships, a lot of people say, aren't you lucky that you're married to that guy? And the person's like, oh, my gosh, are these people, their mind like, so what do they do? They blame themselves.
3:01 Steven Bartlett? Okay. What is narcissism? Because I've heard the word used so often, but I couldn't tell you the definition of it. And I feel like I'd butcher the definition of what it is.
3:15 Speaker 01 So I'm almost curious to ask you, what, just before I almost contaminate you with what my definition is, what's your working definition? What's your working model of what narcissism is?
3:27 Steven Bartlett? Delusions of grandeur, when they think they're like super important and that they are better than everybody else, arrogance, and they're cruel.
3:36 Speaker 01 Okay. All right. So I would give you probably like a C plus, B minus if you're a student in my class. I mean, I cut students a lot of slack back in the day. So I'll give you a C plus, B minus, because you're in the neighborhood, right? The grandiosity, the arrogance, the meanness. But that to me is even more sort of a manifestation of the traits, like the grandiosity, the arrogance. They have variable empathy and typically have low empathy. They're deeply entitled. They truly think they're more special than everyone else and that the rules should apply to them very differently. They have a excessive need for admiration and validation. They're very superficial. They don't really
4:19 Speaker 01 have the capacity for deep, sustained, intimate relationships. They're very much referential to the world out there, outside of them to set goals. They don't have a good internal sense of like, what matters to me? What do I want to do? They just want to do what they do, again, to get that admiration and validation. There's a shallowness, a real emotional shallowness to narcissism. Those are the patterns and traits. We sort of see they're very, very self-centered, very preoccupied with themselves, the good parts of themselves, the bad parts of themselves. It's very rare for them to sort of lift their heads up. And genuinely notice the experience of another person. That's what narcissism is. How does it show up? It shows up as devaluation, dismissiveness, manipulation, gaslighting.
5:03 Speaker 01 They get angry very quickly, especially when they're frustrated or disappointed. And that can show up as overt rage or overt anger, yelling, screaming, or even violence. That can show up as passive aggression, withholding and withdrawing. They are, they can be, they're prone to betrayal. They lie, they cheat, they make promises about the future. They never keep, but they do that to keep people around so they won't leave them. So it's, it's part of a larger sort of a manipulation. They will dominate people. They have to get the last word. They will shift blame onto other people. They will rarely take responsibility for their misdeeds, even when they're clearly caught in them. And if they do, they'll still blame the other person. They're very neglectful and careless in relationships. That is narcissism.
5:49 Steven Bartlett? How can you tell the difference between someone having a bad day, an asshole and a narcissist? Because some of those things there, I thought, Joe, on a bad day, I might do that.
5:58 Speaker 01 Yep.
5:59 Steven Bartlett? You know, um, the whole collection together, no? But on a bad day, when I haven't slept, okay, do you know what? I might blame someone or whatever else. What's the distinction?
6:09 Speaker 01 When a person has a bad day, and we all have bad days, and on those bad days, we might look if all the, if the only tape someone had of us was of that day, right? But here's the piece. When people are not narcissistic and they have bad days, they will take accountability. They will make amends and they will change their behavior and say, I'm not doing this again. This is, this is not okay. Why wasn't it okay? Because it was none of those people's fault. You didn't get enough sleep. And whether that means we reach deeper to be as kind as we can to the people in some cases, especially if it's people we know or we see again, you may not know the random person at the gym. But if we, someone we know or work with, we step, we step out of ourselves to say,
6:51 Speaker 01 the way I conducted myself yesterday wasn't okay, and I'm really sorry about that. And so that they're having that experience of you taking accountability. That's where I know we're not dealing with a narcissistic person. We're dealing with a bad day and a bad day is just that, a day. It's not every day with a narcissistic person. Many days, I'm not going to say all, but many days are characterized by these machinations, these manipulations and these invalidations. The person in a relationship with a narcissistic person feels like they're constantly on their back foot, that they can't be themselves, they can't express a need, they can't express a want, they can't even express a feeling for fear of it being shut down. So there's your, so there's your not narcissistic person. What about an asshole?
7:37 Speaker 01 Okay. I do think assholery and narcissism are pretty, we use the terms interchangeably. I think though that here's my asshole belief, since this is something, I think the construct validation asshole is probably still needing to be done. I think assholes tend to be pretty consistently assholes. So whereas narcissistic people can really, they have a much wider behavioral repertoire to be absolutely charming. This is a person who can be absolutely charming on the golf course with the CEO of their company, like charming, nice, warm, remembering the ages of their kids and asking about the wife and remembering that their grandmother is sick and all this stuff.
8:21 Speaker 01 And get home, forget it was his anniversary, scream at their partner, why is the house like, look like this? Why do I have to put up with this? Make those damn kids shut up. But they were Mr. I remember that your little girl's birthday is February 6th when they were on the golf course. That is not assholery. That's narcissism.
8:42 Steven Bartlett? Can you cure narcissism? In your opinion?
8:45 Speaker 01 No, I don't, because I think that would imply changing a personality, which I don't think we can do.
8:52 Steven Bartlett? Is there any evidence? Have you ever seen in your 20 years of working with narcissists and their survivors, any sign of a narcissist becoming a not narcissist or a non narcissist?
9:04 Speaker 01 I've not seen them become a not narcissist. I've seen them make micro changes, because I measure and monitor and make my notes in therapy. So I'll see, interesting, they're no longer trying to mess with coming in 10 minutes later and asking me to keep them for the whole hour. They are honoring the therapeutic frame. They're paying the bill when they decide not to show up at the last minute. I'll see tiny tweaks. I'll see people who'll come in and say, I screamed at my girlfriend again last night and that wasn't cool. So I was like, whoa, whoa, that's insight. Like, I'll run with it. But here's the rub, okay? These micro changes, and they are micro changes, but they are changes and they're in the right direction. That much water under the bridge for the family members and partners and other people
9:49 Speaker 01 that have been harmed, they're saying, you want me to stay in this relationship because this dude remembered to say thank you once this week? I think not. To me, the thank you is progress. To the people in their lives who've been harmed, that one thank you is not going to be enough.
10:02 Steven Bartlett? I heard this word gaslighting again. It's a word I've heard a lot, but I'm not necessarily really clear on what the definition of gaslighting is. But from reading your work, I hear that narcissists gaslight people a lot.
10:12 Speaker 01 A lot, right.
10:13 Steven Bartlett? What is gaslighting?
10:13 Speaker 01 So gaslighting, at its simplest, it's a power play. It's a form of emotional abuse and it's a tactic. Gaslighting is predicated on a relationship that's ostensibly characterized by trust. So that's why strangers can't gaslight you in the same way as an intimate partner, a trusted colleague, a family member, even a person with expertise, like an attorney or a physician, could gaslight you, right? Because there's a presumption of trust. So you're going to listen to the gaslighter. Initially, what the gaslighter will do is they will doubt the gaslighted person's perceptions, experiences, memories, even reality. That never happened. I never said that. You're making that up. We never went there.
10:57 Speaker 01 So now this person's a little confused because their reality is saying, yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. So initially, a person will fight back against the gaslighter. They'll say, we absolutely went there. Do you want me to show you the pictures on my phone? Then we go to the next step of gaslighting. The gaslighter doesn't want to see the pictures on your phone. They just want to overpower you. This isn't about evidence. This is about them overpowering you. So they'll say, look, here's the pictures on my phone. And then the gaslighter won't say, well, you're right, we did go there. Instead, they'll say, oh, my gosh, you are the most petty human being I've ever met. Is this what it is? You're just going to go through your phone to find the pictures to prove something to me? Is that what this relationship is?
11:40 Speaker 01 I don't know that I want to even be in a relationship like this. Now, this poor person who's being gaslighted is thinking, I just show them the pictures to prove a point and now I'm the bad one. And so they're, and they trust this person. So they think, well, maybe I am doing something bad. Maybe I am being petty. But gaslighting doesn't happen once. It happens over and over and over again. It's an indoctrination process that leaves the gaslighted person utterly confused, completely out of their minds, doubting themselves. And they start to believe the critiques. The gaslighter will tell them things like, you're crazy, you're stupid, you don't remember things right, maybe you have dementia. Do you think you should be in therapy? You might need to be on medication.
12:22 Speaker 01 Like by the time the gaslighter's done with someone, they've lost all sense of, they don't, they don't trust themselves at all. And so if they don't leave the relationship, and some people don't, they are then sort of in this, again, this form of servitude with the narcissistic person, the gaslighting person, almost relying on them to lead them through reality. So it's almost like utter submission at that point, that they get, the gaslighter gets to dictate reality. And then, over time, there's, there's this, there's this tactic that narcissistic and other abusive people use called DARVO. DARVO stands for deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender. It's a construct that was developed by Dr. Jennifer Fried.
13:03 Speaker 01 Deny, attack, reverse, victim, and offender. So what the narcissistic person will in a very skilled, I mean, in a cruelly skillful way do is if the person, the gaslighted person, ever attempts to push back on something that the narcissist has done, like you came, you said you were going to be home by nine o'clock last night, you didn't get home till one in the morning. The narcissistic person will deny, said, that's not true. I came, yeah, I didn't get home at nine, but I didn't come home at any one in the morning. But again, like, what is your problem? Like, what do you do? Like, you read the ADT guide all day to see what time I come in the door? And you know what? Like, I can't believe that this is my life.
13:48 Speaker 01 I worked so hard to keep us in this fabulous house. I worked so hard so you can stay home and I am the bad guy? Like, I can't even believe that this is the issue. Like, you put me through so much. Reverse, victim, and offender. He was out till one in the morning and he knows it. But now he's shut down the conversation. It is an insidious dynamic because done enough, you literally strip another person of their reality. And that is unacceptable to me. That's absolute abuse.
14:19 Steven Bartlett? Do you see this a lot?
14:19 Speaker 01 All the time, all the time. It is the dynamic that once it had name to it. When the word is used right, most people use this word wrong. That whole process I described is gaslighting. When the word is used correctly, it's powerful. It captures a unique interpersonal dynamic that really eats people from the inside out. I hear it, I see it all the time by family members, by partners in the workplace, you name it. And it really messes people up because they they feel like they've lost their minds and they feel like they can't trust themselves. And I think that's a terrible thing to do to someone.
14:56 Steven Bartlett? What should you do if you're being gaslit?
14:59 Speaker 01 When you know what it is and someone starts to gaslight you, they literally deny your reality, right? You have to take a step back and say, that's not what happened. But you don't say it to them. The importance with gaslighting is you don't engage with the gaslighter. You now know you're being gaslighted, which means the other person in that interaction has the capacity to gaslight you. So what that means is from your side, you need to shut it down. And that means no longer engaging. Does that make so that you cannot keep engaging with them? Because they're going to pull you down.
15:33 Steven Bartlett? Further and further.
15:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're gonna, it's almost like they're gonna pull you down into into being drowned or pull you into the quicksand. So when they start gaslighting, I never said that. One playback could be, we're having a different experience then. And leave it at that.
15:49 Steven Bartlett? Don't go down that slippery slope.
15:50 Speaker 01 Don't go down the slope. Don't say, don't show them the text message. Don't pull out the email. Don't try to prove them wrong. Don't engage with them. It's funny you're asking me this because I was recently gaslighted. I was relatively recently in a professional situation.
16:06 Speaker 01 And I'm thinking, not me. Like, I don't know much, but I know this. So don't, but they did. I was. And I got very upset. And in this particular situation, it was actually, I understand why I got, it was like, think of it as a corporate structure that was gaslighting me. So sometimes, very nice people who work in corporate systems, gaslight, because they're trying to prop up the narcissism of the corporation, but they're decent human beings. It was very clear to me. I've seen that happen. But in this particular case, I was being gaslighted. I got upset, though, knowing all I know, knowing all the tactics. It's very dehumanizing to have your reality completely doubted. And so I did feel a sense of upset, but I confronted
16:49 Speaker 01 the person. I said, this is gaslighting, and it's not okay. And I know you're better than this. And they happened to be, this was a lucky case with the gaslighter was not narcissistic. So we came to a conclusion. But when I've been gaslighted by narcissistic people, I just disengage. And I file it away and say, this person is capable of this. There's really not much juice here. I don't, this can only go so deep.
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