Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Are They Really a Narcissist? Do They Really Have Borderline? Are They Truly Gaslighting You? How To Know. And What To Do When People Weaponize Therapy-Speak Against You. | Isabelle Morley About this episode How to handle people better.
Isabelle Morley https://drisabellemorley.com/ is a clinical psychologist and EFT-certified couples therapist (Emotionally Focused Therapy). She is a contributing author to Psychology Today, and has been featured in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Business Insider, Vox, and Very Well Mind, among others. Her latest book is They're Not Gaslighting You: Ditch the Therapy Speak and Stop Hunting for Red Flags in Every Relationship https://www.amazon.com/Theyre-Not-Gaslighting-You-Relationship/dp/1683738268.
In this episode we talk about:
The difference between abuse and bad behavior How to know if you're really in an abusive relationship How to correctly use the term 'gaslighting' What boundaries are, how to set them, and how to know if yours have actually been violated How to spot a narcissist The difference between having Narcissistic Personality Disorder and just having selfish qualities Red flags vs. garden-variety imperfections The definition and weaponization of terms like 'bipolar' and 'borderline' The overuse of the word 'triggered' Basic tips for navigating relationships beyond the therapy-speak And much more
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Additional Resources:
Navigating Intimacy: An Introductory Guide to Couples and Sex Therapy https://www.amazon.com/Navigating-Intimacy-Introductory-Couples-Therapy/dp/1683737997
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Transcript 12,599 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:31 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:46 Dan Harris? Hello, everybody. How we doing? In many ways, it is a great thing that we are now so open about our mental health. It's also great that therapy has gotten so popular. There are, however, some downsides to this otherwise positive trend. One of them is that therapy speak, the use of clinical, technical terms that therapists actually use, is now being widely misused in our culture, on social media and in common parlance, and most importantly, in relationships, where these terms are often being weaponized. Specifically, I'm talking about terms like gaslighting, narcissist, sociopath, bipolar, borderline, boundaries, red flags, et cetera.
1:29 Dan Harris? So today, we're going to talk about what these terms actually mean, how not to weaponize them against other people, what to do when other people weaponize them against you, and beyond all of the terminology, we're going to talk about how to navigate one of the trickiest parts of being alive, which is relating to other people. My guest is Isabel Morley. She's a clinical psychologist and a couples therapist, certified in something called Emotionally Focused Therapy, which she will explain. She's got a blog called Love Them or Leave Them. She's the co-host of a podcast called Romcom Rescue, and she's got a book called They're Not Gaslighting You: Ditch the Therapy Speak and Stop Hunting for Red Flags in Every Relationship.
2:10 Dan Harris? In this conversation, we talk about the difference between abuse and bad behavior, how to know if you are actually in an abusive relationship, how to correctly use the term "gaslighting," what boundaries are, how to set them, and how to know if yours have actually been violated, how to spot a narcissist, the difference between having narcissistic personality disorder and just having some selfish qualities, red flags versus garden variety imperfections, the definition and weaponization of terms like bipolar and borderline, the overuse of the word "triggered," basic tips for navigating relationships beyond all of the therapy speak, and much more.
2:52 Dan Harris? I just want to quickly pick up on one of the last things I said there, how to navigate all of your relationships, that really is a skill and an increasingly vital one in an era of artificial intelligence. Today's episode comes with a custom-guided meditation designed to help you handle the people who drive you crazy. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Christiana Wolf, and if you sign up at danharris.com, you can get access to it. Subscribers also get weekly live video meditation and Q&A sessions every Tuesday at 4:00. One other thing to say very quickly before we dive in here, if you want to meditate with me in real life, I've got a live taping of this podcast coming up on November 18th in New York City. My guest will be the hilarious and very thoughtful, soulful comedian Pete Holmes, is a dedicated
3:37 Dan Harris? meditator. This will be a benefit for the New York Insight Meditation Center, and there's a link in the show notes if you want to sign up. Okay, Isabel Morley and Therapy Speak, right after this.
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4:21 Speaker 03 How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking. And that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
4:55 Dan Harris? Dr. Isabel Morley, welcome to the show.
4:58 Speaker 04 Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
5:00 Dan Harris? I'm excited to have you here. So if I understand her correctly, your basic thesis and your kind of impetus for writing this book is that we are, and this is your phraseology, weaponizing therapy speak. Can you just unpack that a little bit?
5:15 Speaker 04 I think we have come into a day and age where there is so much access to mental health information, including things like disorders, that now we have taken a good thing too far and people are using these words, these terms, these diagnoses in a weaponized way, meaning that they are using them to control, to blame, to shift focus, to pathologize people in their lives, which is really not the intention of all of these words.
5:43 Dan Harris? We're going to talk a lot about the various terms that people are using and misusing and how we can properly understand them. But you just got me thinking about the fact that when I had my panic attack on TV back in 2004, like it was not a safe thing to admit that I had panic disorder, right? So the world has really changed and that's largely to the good, but there are some downsides. One of them, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about, which is the weaponization of these terms. The other thing is that I think sometimes on social media, people are not just weaponizing, but also kind of, but this is another de rigueur term, like trauma dumping in a way, or talking about anxiety and depression in a way that it's nice that it's normalized,
6:27 Dan Harris? but we're spending so much time dwelling in the suffering and not enough time, I think, talking about what you can do about it, giving normalization plus uplift. Agree or disagree?
6:38 Speaker 04 Absolutely agree. And I think part of it is there's this cultural shift where you want to be part of the in-group. Everybody has anxiety. Everybody is stressed about the state of the world. Everyone is depressed by the way our lives operate and how we have to function in modern society. But not everybody has depression. Not everybody has generalized anxiety. And so while the rates have gone up from, you know, the late 1900s, they are not 80% of the population, which is certainly how it feels. But I think you feel left out if you don't identify with the funny reel about how anxious you are all the time and you can't send it to 10 friends. You're sort of missing out on the cultural zeitgeist.
7:15 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I can see a little bit in some young people I know, I mean, very young people, like kids even, that there's a, um, people are kind of proud of their diagnosis a little bit.
7:27 Speaker 04 Proud and it becomes an identity.
7:30 Dan Harris? Yes.
7:31 Speaker 04 It becomes a whole personality of I have ADHD and that explains everything about me versus I'm a person who has a disorder that affects parts of my life sometimes.
7:41 Dan Harris? Yeah, like, uh, there's been a lot of linguistic murder happening in, um, I'm overstating it, but there's been some linguistic twister that's happening in, um, medical spaces because you're not supposed to say cancer patient, you're supposed to say a person with cancer.
7:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:59 Dan Harris? Which I get, I mean, the intention is good. I think it's not so mellifluous and it can be a little awkward at times. But a similar thing to what you're pointing at right there is, you know, I have panic disorder and have suffered from depression and I've got lots of diagnoses I could brag about if I wanted to, but I don't, that's not how I think about myself. It's just an aspect of the self.
8:19 Speaker 04 Yeah. And I've had patients come in and yes, especially young patients who are on TikTok and Instagram more so and more influenced by it, who have self-diagnosed or diagnosed other people. And it truly is defining for them. It is how they see themselves. It is how they see the other people, their relationships. And if and when you take away those terms because they don't actually apply, it's very disorienting for them because this is the lens through which they have been viewing their world. And I think it destabilizes people, which is why I really want people to not become so wed to these words in the first place.
8:53 Dan Harris? Okay, so let's go through some of the, well, actually, let me ask you first. Let me ask for consent to put it in therapy speak.
9:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:02 Dan Harris? Is there more you want to say on a big picture level? Before we dive into some of the terms that can be weaponized?
9:09 Speaker 04 I'll make the point that I think there's a difference between well-intentioned misuse of words and weaponization of words. I think a lot of us are trying to apply the words correctly and getting it wrong. And are not doing so in a way to control other people or absolve ourselves of all blame. And then there's people who intentionally use these words to avoid taking responsibility to make themselves innocent in all contexts. And I think that we have to be careful to differentiate between those different paths because most of us misuse them, but not all of us weaponize them.
9:42 Dan Harris? Right, so there's a couple of use cases here for this conversation, for the listener. I'm speaking mostly to the listener now. There are a couple of things you can get out of this. One is you can learn about how you may be weaponizing these terms or how they're being weaponized against you and what to deal, how to deal with that. You can also learn on the lesser sin level, what these terms actually mean so that you can use them correctly. And then finally, you can learn, once we learn what the terms mean, we can actually start to think about them in a more sophisticated way as they pertain to our lives and the lives of people we know.
10:16 Speaker 04 Yes, if you even need to use them at all, especially in conversation.
10:22 Dan Harris? Interesting, so we may want to think about just taking these things out of our lexicon.
10:27 Speaker 04 I think so. I mean, I'm an advocate for most of these therapy terms, we're not supposed to leave the therapy room. I have never had to tell someone, I'm upholding a boundary with you. You're supposed to uphold the boundary with the person. And I think we jump to these words and think that's the end of the story, but that's not how any of this works. You don't tell a narcissist, you're a narcissist and the problem is solved. If you think they're a narcissist and you change your behavior, your approach, the closeness of your relationship with them, you don't even have to tell them your perceived diagnosis of them.
11:04 Dan Harris? Right, right. People generally don't like to have you diagnose them, I've found.
11:08 Speaker 04 It's surprising, isn't it? People are so defensive.
11:13 Dan Harris? Okay, so that's what I was pointing at with the third use case for the listener, for this conversation and for your book, which is not only going to learn how to use these terms correctly, but also, once you understand them, whether you use the terms at all, and Isabel would argue, maybe you shouldn't, you can really learn how to navigate things like potential narcissism on somebody else's behalf. And we can learn how to set a boundary, even if we're not using the term, et cetera, et cetera. Am I stating that correctly?
11:41 Speaker 04 Yes.
11:42 Dan Harris? Okay. I'm going to go through them in the order in which you go through them in the book. So, chapter three is called "The Difference Between Abuse." Abuse is a word that gets thrown around a lot. The difference between abuse and bad behavior. Say more, please.
11:57 Speaker 04 I find this to be a really tricky one because everybody's afraid to say that something isn't abuse and to have somebody be trapped in a bad abusive relationship. But there is an important but murky line between abuse and bad behavior. Abuse is when somebody is trying to gain power and control in a relationship. An abusive partner has no remorse. They don't really feel bad or apologize. They feel justified in all the terrible things they do to you. They tend to be abusive in many different ways. They don't just gaslight you. They gaslight you, they manipulate you, maybe they physically intimidate you, they isolate you. It's usually a few things happening. And the abuse cycle, although it looks like a normal relationship cycle, is different.
12:39 Speaker 04 In an abuse cycle, there's building tension, the abuse incident, a reconciliation, and then a period of calm. That tends to happen over and over and tends to get worse over time. A healthy relationship, you have harmony, rupture, and repair. But repair is genuine. People feel bad, they reconnect, they feel close again, they feel safe again. Reconciliation in the abuse cycle is just sort of like pulling things back together without actual authentic remorse and apology. But people can behave very badly in good relationships. When you're in a terrible fight, you might scream, you might curse, you might slam a door. That's not necessarily what we want to call abuse.
13:22 Dan Harris? Could you call the incidents abusive or abuse without calling the person an abuser?
13:28 Speaker 04 Yes, and I like to say this behavior falls under the category of abuse. We call this an abusive behavior, but without the pattern, without the recurring cycle. And if the person especially takes responsibility, acknowledges the need to change, repairs, then we wouldn't call them an abuser.
13:45 Dan Harris? So let me give you an example. I think some of my biggest relationship sins in my marriage have been around shutting down or stonewalling when she gets emotional, which she doesn't often, but in those moments where she cries or something like that, which again, pretty rare, I in the past would like shut down. I once saw a T-shirt that says, "I don't get angry, I just get distant."
14:07 Speaker 04 [laughing]
14:10 Dan Harris? And so, and sometimes, but I actually, sometimes I do get, or I did get, straight up angry and just storm out of the room or whatever. And it was all just because of my own shame. But I could imagine that episode, or those episodes, falling into the category of a kind of emotional abuse, but that doesn't warrant labeling me as an abuser particularly.
14:30 Speaker 04 No, and this is where it becomes so difficult to talk about it because I want to argue, we shouldn't even really call that abuse, because that's just normal human behavior. All people during bad arguments with people that matter in our secure attachments can behave badly. So if we're looking at this in EFT terms, Emotionally Focused Therapy, that's how I practice as a couples therapist, we would call what you did a protective response. You felt shame, overwhelmed, whatever it was, and you shut down because those feelings were too much to manage and you didn't know what else to do. And maybe the shutting down was to help things from escalating and getting worse and for you to feel a little bit better.
15:09 Speaker 04 That's not the same as you shutting down to teach your wife, "You better not cry again, because I don't think that's acceptable and I am going to make sure I have power and control in this relationship and so don't get upset with me because I'm not going to put up with it."
15:22 Dan Harris? I don't know. I mean, I don't know if that what you're describing there would have been a conscious thought on my part, but I think that version of me would have thought, yeah, it'd be convenient if she never cries again. I don't want to incentivize it.
15:34 Speaker 04 Well, fair, but humans, I find, and maybe you'll disagree, but I find them to be a very difficult species. I find us to be very complicated. I think a lot of the time we mess up and make mistakes and don't behave in the best ways that we could, especially in hard moments. I like to say that I'm as much an expert in all of this as you possibly can be, and I still do the same thing and will shut down during a bad argument because I don't have another coping resource available to me at that time.
16:05 Dan Harris? No, it's because you're an abuser.
16:06 Speaker 04 That's what it is. I'm an abuser. Finally, the truth comes out on your podcast.
16:13 Dan Harris? You can tell I didn't get enough sleep last night because I'm being punchier than usual. I apologize if I'm being more of a dumbass than I normally am. No, I completely take your point. And just on your point about, first of all, I cut you off. Do you want to finish what you were saying?
16:25 Speaker 04 Oh, I just think it's this difficulty of, we're all on the spectrum of behaving well and behaving badly, and that you can find a way to label everything with something pathological, but should we?
16:37 Dan Harris? Hmm. I completely agree with that. I just wanted to pick up on what you said about humans being complex. One of my perhaps two glib lines is that the human curse is that we need each other, other humans, and other humans are a Titanic pain in the ass.
16:54 Speaker 04 I think that's exactly right. And the closer you get to people, which is what we need, we're social animals, we need that connection, the more we tend to make it difficult to be close, because the more we have to risk, the scarier it becomes to have somebody fully see you and know you, and the greater the loss if they were to get to know us fully and reject us. So that's when all of our protective responses tend to come out, which is why people tend to be meanest to those they're closest with.
17:23 Dan Harris? Hmm. I can't remember who I was talking to the other day, but... Being, I guess, a semi-professional practitioner of an interviewer around issues related to psychology and the Dharma, I just find the hardest place to apply these teachings is in my marriage.
17:40 Speaker 04 Absolutely. That is the person who becomes your primary attachment figure. Yeah, it's your parents when you're younger, you depend on them, they are your emotional connection to the world, and then it eventually becomes your spouse usually, which is a heavy weight to carry, that they become that important.
17:59 Dan Harris? Yes, yes. We're getting a little bit far afield here, I'm just following my interests. We've worked with this amazing couples counselor over the years, Michael Vincent Miller, and he has this great line in a book he wrote about how we used to live in an era, and he's not nostalgic for this era, but we used to live in an era where, you know, marriage was a kind of very functional thing, often arranged by the community or your parents for you, and now we have all this freedom, which is largely good, but we then bring these outsized expectations to the altar. We want our spouse to be our best friend, an Olympic-level lover, our consigliere, et cetera, et cetera. But it's too much weight to put on one relationship, which is why we need friends, why we need
18:44 Dan Harris? other sources of support.
18:46 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I know Esther Perel talks a lot about this too, of like, this was not supposed to be the way that humans operated, we're a community species, we do better with a village, our modern life is not really set up to have a village, so it does end up being your partner, your spouse, has to bear this weight, which they can't do because they need the same thing from you. It's kind of a failing setup.
19:09 Dan Harris? I do want to continue marching through the list of terms that we use and misuse, but before I go much further, you said something about EFT, Emotionally Focused Therapy. I don't think we've ever done an episode on that. Can you just give us a primer on it?
19:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, so E F T is one of the big couples therapy orientations developed by Sue Johnson. And it really looks at attachment and how we can create and heal from insecure attachments, create a secure attachment in your relationship. It looks at what we call the negative cycle, which is essentially, I have a bad feeling, so I act a certain way because it makes me feel a little bit better. But the way that I act makes you have a bad feeling, so you act a certain way. And because you act that way, it makes my bad feeling worse and I act more. And we typically see this, we call pursue withdraw, where I'm angry with you, so I tell you that I'm disappointed and you feel terrible, so you shut down.
20:04 Speaker 04 But because you say nothing, I think you don't care and I get even angrier and more hurt. And it is a self-sustaining, self-escalating cycle that you can help people identify and interrupt to create, again, more vulnerability, more connection and a secure attachment.
20:22 Dan Harris? So the way Miller talks about this, he calls it, and he invented this term before nine 11, but he calls it intimate terrorism. And the idea is that in every relationship, there's one partner who's generally really afraid of abandonment and another who's really afraid of engulfment. And this can switch throughout the relationship. Intimate terrorism happens when you're weaponizing each other's anxieties. And so that sounds pretty close to the push and pull you were describing.
20:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, and when you look at all the couples therapies together, you can see a lot of the same pieces that kind of span across the different modalities of, yes, like, we all have painful feelings that we hide and protect by acting a certain way, treating our partner a certain way, that ends up causing problems. At the end of the day, if you can figure out those feelings and share them in a more effective way and communicate in a safer, more effective way, you can avoid a lot of the conflict or a lot of the escalated conflict that you're falling into.
21:21 Dan Harris? I think Miller recently said to Bianca, you really lucked out because Dan's afraid of both engulfment and abandonment, so.
21:30 Speaker 04 Jackpot.
21:32 Dan Harris? She's such a lucky girl. Okay. Anything more to say about E F T. Before we move on?
21:37 Speaker 04 Nah.
21:38 Dan Harris? Okay. Chapter four. Gaslighting. Man, I heard somebody use this term today and I thought of you. Are they gaslighting you or do they just disagree? Please hold forth.
21:50 Speaker 04 Gaslighting has taken on a life of its own. Gaslighting is an abuse tactic. Where people try to make you feel like you're absolutely crazy and out of touch with reality. Because you think or feel the way that you do. That is very different from. Disagreeing with your memory of events. Thinking that you aren't justified to feel a certain way. That happens all the time. It's also not the same as lying. People lie all the time and that's not gaslighting. And this has become my pet peeve and this is the reason why I wrote this book is because everyone is saying. That's gaslighting. You're gaslighting me. I don't want to self gaslight.
22:31 Speaker 04 The word has lost almost all meaning at this point.
22:36 Dan Harris? What do you do if somebody's accusing you of gaslighting?
22:39 Speaker 04 I always encourage people to take a deep breath and to not. React because you're going to feed into whatever perception of you they have. I think that this is when you need to. Clarify what's going on, why they feel that way. Like what was your behavior? What's going on for them emotionally that they are accusing you of that? And repair that incident. And later on, address the term gaslighting, the use of that term. To see if it actually is a helpful, relevant word to use in your relationship. I will say. There are some people, especially abusive people who use these terms repeatedly. And they are not safe people to be with. Because they will say you're gaslighting me because you disagree with me.
23:22 Speaker 04 You're gaslighting me in this way as a way of controlling you. And making you feel bad and getting you to stop voicing your opinion or disagreeing with them. And that's something that you should be on the lookout for.
23:33 Dan Harris? Hmm. So abuse is a potentially weaponized term and abusive, truly abusive people tend to weaponize these terms.
23:41 Speaker 04 And I will tell you, I've had a few instances of couples who want to come work with me. And one part of the couple, one spouse will call ahead and say, I just want you to know that I'm pretty sure they're narcissist, they're abusive, I've diagnosed all of this with my therapist, you've got to be on the lookout for them because of this. And every single time when they walk into the room, it's the person who called me who is more narcissistic, it's the person who called me who is more abusive and who has weaponized all of these terms and feels very justified in doing so. And there's very little you can do to talk them out of it.
24:21 Dan Harris? Your job sounds really fun.
24:23 Speaker 04 It's a great time. It's a light day every single day.
24:28 Dan Harris? What's going on with those people who are abusive in this way? There's got to be some psychological explanation for that, which I don't want to like let abusers off the hook, but we can reduce our anger a little bit by understanding it through the lens of some sort of diagnosis for them. And again, I don't want to commit the crime in reverse, but there is some way of understanding this behavior.
24:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, for the most part, they are not intending to be manipulative and pathologize and correctly their partner. Abusers are perpetual victims. The world happens to them, people don't treat them fairly, they always get the short end of the stick, they deserve better, they can't believe people don't take care of their feelings more. And when you're in that kind of victim mindset, very easy to pathologize other people's behavior towards you because that's just how you're viewing everything around you.
25:21 Dan Harris? This is maybe a question that an abuser wouldn't ask? Maybe, I don't know. You just said that these abusers probably don't even know they're doing it. So that raises the scary question of maybe I'm doing that shit and I don't know it. How can we interrogate ourselves in this regard?
25:39 Speaker 04 If you can take personal responsibility for your part of the problem, and you don't always blame the other person, that's a good place to start. Abusers never take responsibility. They feel like whatever behavior they did was justified, right? They screamed and slammed the door. They broke the plate because how could you be so cruel to them as to come home late and not tell them? Right? They justify their abuse by your bad behavior, and they never take responsibility for their part in it.
26:13 Dan Harris? But aren't they just protecting themselves? Some sort of deep shame that would arise if they were to look at their responsibility?
26:20 Speaker 04 Sure, yes, they're always full of shame. But the problem is that they don't ever see that. They don't have insight typically. And if they gain insight, which I have seen, it's short-lived. Maybe they see, oh, well, yeah, I'm definitely behaving the way that my father did towards me, and it's not okay. It's scary. It's harming my relationship. I've got to change. But an hour later, they're back to their old narrative. By the time I see them next week, that insight is gone.
26:46 Dan Harris? So are these folks incurable?
26:48 Speaker 04 Some are, yeah.
26:50 Dan Harris? Yeah. So I guess maybe we should talk about boundaries now, even though that's not the order of the.
26:57 Speaker 04 Some people, yeah, are not going to change. Unfortunately, they just don't have the capacity. They don't have the willingness. Some people have different brain structures, right? Like sociopaths do not have the ability nor the desire to change their behavior and the way they operate in the world. They truly lack empathy. You can't make somebody who lacks empathy want to be kind towards people. Doesn't make sense to them.
27:20 Dan Harris? But how common is a sociopathology?
27:22 Speaker 04 Very rare. I mean, yeah, incredibly rare. And there's a spectrum of severity. So like, the really extreme sociopaths, very few. And most are in jail because they break all the laws and they hurt people and they get caught and they are in prison.
27:36 Dan Harris? Okay, so that's sociopaths. But there are people who could be abusive, or I don't know if you like this word, but like toxic or malignant or something that you should avoid and set a boundary with, but they don't rise to the level of sociopaths. And I imagine those people are more common.
27:53 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely, yes.
27:59 Dan Harris? Coming up, Isabel talks about what boundaries are, how to set them, and how to know if yours have actually been violated. How to spot a narcissist, the difference between being a narcissist clinically and just being a little bit selfish, and much more.
28:49 Dan Harris? Okay, so let's talk about boundaries because I'm skipping ahead here, Chapter 11. Did they violate your boundaries, or did they just not know how you felt? That's probably not the question I mean to ask you. I'll get to that question in a second. But what is a boundary? How do we set one with a person who, as you described before, is unlikely to change?
29:09 Speaker 04 A boundary is a way to keep yourself safe and autonomous in a relationship. It is a thing that you need, that you express, and that you enforce. So it might be your boundary that if we're arguing and you start screaming, "I cannot keep talking to you because it's too upsetting. I get overwhelmed. I can't stay in that conversation. I don't feel safe with you." That doesn't mean that you will never scream at me again. That means the next time you scream at me, I'm leaving the room until you're calm, and then we can keep talking. There are some boundaries that I call universal boundaries. You cross those boundaries, it's abuse. You steal from someone. You physically assault them. Like, these are not okay things to do.
29:54 Speaker 04 We can all agree if that happens to you, that is a boundary violation. That's a red flag. Watch out for that. But a lot of things are individual, personal boundaries that I might feel okay with, but you might not. And those are the things that you have to communicate. And if you don't, the other person will only know they've crossed it when it's been crossed.
30:15 Dan Harris? I want to pick up on that part in a second, but let me just stick with the problematic, toxic person, whatever terminology we want to use. I can have some compassion for these folks because I think there are reasons why they've become this way. And we do need to set boundaries with them. If you're married to somebody like that, I think the answer is it's not easy, but it's somewhat clear, which is divorced. It's obviously very hard if you have a kid with them, et cetera, et cetera. But there is a remedy. Harder to do if it's your mom or if it's your boss. So what recommendations do you have for boundary setting in those contexts?
30:53 Speaker 04 You have to consider if it's a relationship that you're willing to leave because that is the ultimate boundary is leaving that relationship. If it's someone who's too important or you're dependent on, unfortunately, you're going to have to try to reinforce your boundaries repeatedly. You're going to have to pick your battles with your boundaries, which nobody likes to hear, but you may not get all of your boundaries respected with that certain relationship. And you will have to maybe shift the dynamics of that relationship. Maybe you see your mom less frequently because she cannot respect what you need. Maybe you get a new job at some point because your boss is disrespecting you.
31:30 Dan Harris? Okay, so just to reflect that back to you, if you've got a problematic person in your life who can be abusive and in the real sense, not in the weaponization of the word sense. Obviously, cutting them off is one hard, hard boundary, but it's sometimes that's really, really hard to do. So what I'm hearing you say is the modalities or the strategies that are available are see them less. And also just get into the habit of kindly, but clearly and firmly restating your boundary whenever you need to do it.
32:03 Speaker 04 Yes, and people hate this. Boundary violations do happen. Even when somebody knows it's a violation, they will continue to do it. And humans can survive that. You may not want your boss to email you at all hours. You may not want them to call you at 5:00 AM. They may do it anyway, and you can survive that. And if you can't, then you can leave. But we can't control other people.
32:33 Dan Harris? Right, so you're not saying accept the unacceptable. What you're saying is if you're unwilling to accept it, you can leave.
32:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:39 Dan Harris? And short of that, you can set and reset and set and reset the boundary. But like you can survive when people, as Charlie Murphy says, when people are habitual line steppers.
32:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, the issue with boundary setting is that you can't control the other person. You can control your reaction to it and you can try to sort of recondition them to behave the ways in which you would like that make you feel safe and autonomous in that relationship. But you cannot control what they will do. If you're using the word boundary to control what they do in that way, that's ironically weaponization of the word boundary.
33:15 Dan Harris? Okay, so let's go back to weaponization of the word boundary. You tried to answer this question before and I redirected you. But the question that is the chapter title is, did they violate your boundaries? Or did they just not know how you felt? Can you say a little bit more about that specific question?
33:29 Speaker 04 People aren't mind readers. If they don't know what you need or what makes you feel safe or happy in a relationship, they can't give it to you. And so I think a lot of us feel offended when a boundary has been crossed. But if the person didn't know it was our boundary, then maybe that's why it was crossed. People also cross boundaries repeatedly because maybe it takes a few times of hearing. That's not okay for me. I can't handle when you do that until it actually sinks in. People are just so imperfect. I feel like that's the message of this book is like,
34:02 Dan Harris? Yes.
34:02 Speaker 04 even when they're trying their best, even when they know all the right things to do and they have gone to therapy for 10 years and they have all the coping strategies at their disposal, they will still let you down, disappoint you, make mistakes sometimes, cross your boundaries, do toxic things, not because they're a terrible person, but because humans are just messy.
34:23 Dan Harris? Right, I think it's a question of degree. The way I would gauge that, and this is unscientific, is are they, quote unquote, here's a cliche, doing the work? Are they going to a therapist? Are they meditating? Whatever it is, is the trend line good with an exception and a mistake at a regular interval?
34:42 Speaker 04 Yes, but I think especially younger generations do not have that generosity. They feel like people should not be misstepping so much. If people know better, they should be doing better. If somebody's in therapy, they shouldn't be ever crossing a boundary.
34:58 Dan Harris? What's going on there? Why is that happening?
35:01 Speaker 04 Partly because there's just such a focus on all of these words. And I feel like people think that, again, if you know better, you should do better. We have very high expectations for other humans and how they should behave. And partly because we don't want to suffer in our relationships. We would like to skip the part where somebody rejects us or makes us feel terrible. And focusing on these words is a way to get out of that suffering.
35:27 Dan Harris? One of the critiques, I'm always so wary of critiquing younger generations because my generation, Gen X, has made plenty of mistakes and we do dumb shit all the time too. So I, I'm not saying this from a position of being overly judgmental. And often, like when I think about some of the quirks or unhealthy or unadaptive behaviors of younger generations, I actually feel like the older generations should take responsibility for it because we created the world in which they grew up. So that caveat issued, one of the critiques of younger people these days is that they're addicted to comfort, they're intolerant of discomfort. And so maybe that's part of what you're describing here?
36:08 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yes. You can skip the hard part. Nobody wants to feel the pain of, you arrived late, once again, I'm not important to you. I was embarrassed, I was waiting at the party, everybody was looking at me, where were you? Once again, why do that part and express how you feel and feel that pain? If you can just say, what a narcissist, once again, only thinking about yourself, right?
36:33 Dan Harris? Okay, well, so let's go to that chapter. That's chapter seven. Are they a narcissist or did they just hurt your feelings? Could you say more about that?
36:43 Speaker 04 Only at most 6% of the population qualifies for narcissistic personality disorder, at most, and that's probably the clinical population, right? The general population is maybe like 0.5%. There are not that many clinical level narcissists in the world. And if you go online or you're in my practice, every spouse, every ex, every in-law, every boss is a narcissist. When we say that, we're really saying they have narcissistic personality disorder, which has a whole set of criteria. It's lengthy. What they mean is you acted in a way that hurt me, or seems selfish or unempathic,
37:27 Speaker 04 or you have a narcissistic trait, that you're acting grandiose. You think that you deserve better treatment, or you're better than other people. But that does not a narcissist make.
37:37 Dan Harris? Hmm. I've probably told this story before on the show, so I apologize. But I once asked a shrink, do you think I'm a narcissist? And he was like, well, it's a spectrum. And you're like, maybe on the...
37:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, somewhere. But we all are, or we go through narcissistic phases. Like, I'm just getting at the other side of one, of like, a very self-focused...
37:59 Dan Harris? Writing a book, you mean?
38:00 Speaker 04 ...phase of what? Yes. Yeah, and talking a lot about yourself, and you want everyone else to be as excited, and you feel like, oh, like, the world should love this thing. Every teenager, and I had a professor in grad school say, we don't diagnose teenagers with any personality disorders, because they would all have one. Because it's just an emotionally and relationally fraught time.
38:20 Dan Harris? I'm almost done with my second memoir. I sometimes joke about how I put the me in memoirs. So, I get it. Okay, so how do you, you said there's a lengthy set of criteria for a narcissist. How does one spot a narcissist?
38:35 Speaker 04 To be honest, it can be quite hard, because at first, they don't present as pathological. But there's nine criteria. They have to be present since early adulthood. And a narcissist is narcissistic across time in a pervasive way.
38:51 Speaker 04 In many different contexts of their life. So I always like to say, there's no way that your spouse is a narcissist just with you. They would be that way also at work and in their close friendships and in their family dynamic. People who have these traits present that way and all their relationships across contexts. It's pervasive, it's stable, it's inflexible way of being in the world.
39:12 Dan Harris? Can you say just a little bit more about, use the term inflexible, but what are the other things that?
39:18 Speaker 04 The criteria?
39:19 Dan Harris? Yeah.
39:20 Speaker 04 Grandiose, they think very highly of themselves. They want a lot of admiration. They think everybody else should think very highly of them.
39:27 Dan Harris? Okay, check.
39:28 Speaker 04 They want special treatment.
39:29 Dan Harris? I got that one, I got that one too. Good.
39:31 Speaker 04 But don't we all? They feel like entitled to better treatment, to praise. They lack empathy for other people. And as a result, they will exploit people if it suits them. And they tend to go through a pattern of idolizing people, especially in new relationships of like, this is the most amazing person, you're wonderful, I want to do everything for you. And then when they feel hurt by you, which they inevitably will, they devalue you and treat you terribly.
40:00 Dan Harris? Okay, so I can imagine that I probably misuse this word. And I can see your case for it being a technical term that we should avoid because it does come with these nine criteria, some of which you just listed. I think when I use it, I mean, like, chronically, if not terminally self-centered and selfish.
40:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, which is colloquially how we use it. And I think that if we could separate out a clinical word and our casual use of the word, great, fine. But narcissism is so much more than selfishness because it's actually somebody with very low self-esteem, trying to compensate for that by thinking that they are better than everybody else. And that's different than selfishness and being self-focused. Putting yourself above others, exploiting and manipulating others, not feeling badly if you hurt other people, is a step beyond, or maybe many steps beyond, being selfish.
40:56 Dan Harris? I mean, that abusive part, the exploitation, subjugation, that seems like...
41:04 Dan Harris? Very specific, beyond the way most of us are using the word.
41:09 Speaker 04 Yes, absolutely, yes. Although, when people say narcissist, I think what they're saying is, yeah, they're self-focused, they don't feel bad enough for me, or what they did to me, and they hurt my feelings.
41:23 Dan Harris? So then, how should we think and talk about folks who do stuff like that?
41:29 Speaker 04 Who hurt our feelings?
41:30 Dan Harris? Who seem, like, irreparably self-involved.
41:34 Speaker 04 Again, this is back to, if you come into my office and tell me, the person you're seeing is so self-involved, they don't care about you, they only talk about themselves, what do you want me to do about this? If this is the way that they are, and you've tried to get through to them, and they're not listening to you because they don't care, your options are to see if you can find a way to have a relationship with them, given who they are, that works for you, or to change your relationship, or to leave it.
42:00 Dan Harris? Okay, so it just sounds like you're really practical. The point is not to diagnose a narcissist, because you're not qualified to do that anyway. The point is to identify the behaviors that are problematic, see if you can find a modus vivendi, a way to live with each other, and if you can't, get the fuck out of there.
42:18 Speaker 04 Basically, yes. And like, the point of diagnosis is to know what you're dealing with, but at the end of the day, you want that just so you can decide what to do. It doesn't help you to know whether they officially are a narcissist or not. If they're treating you in a way that does not feel good for you, does not work for you, your options are the same whether or not we can give them this disorder.
42:38 Dan Harris? Okay, so, but just to push back for a second, sometimes it can be like, if somebody has, I don't know if narcissism technically qualifies as a personality disorder, does it? Yes, okay. So if somebody does have a personality disorder, I'll throw out some terms that I also don't understand, like borderline personality, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, would, um, can't it be a source of both clarity and compassion to have a diagnosis for them?
43:02 Speaker 04 It can, yes. And I think it can also be freeing. If you see this person in the context of, oh, this is because they have borderline, that they're acting this way, it's not because of me, I didn't do the things they're accusing me of, this is their trauma, their stuff. I think that can set you free, and it gives you the options again of what you want to do about it. I'm totally for an accurate diagnosis, if it helps you understand the person that you're dealing with, and to sort of see through the crazy-making situation you've been with them. But too many people get stuck at that stage and don't go to the next part, which is, okay, so this is what I'm dealing with. What am I going to do about it?
43:38 Dan Harris? What do you do if somebody accuses you of being a narcissist? I'm sure that never happened to you.
43:43 Speaker 04 Never.
43:43 Dan Harris? It has happened to me. So what do you do in those circumstances?
43:47 Speaker 04 This is hard, but I ask people to, once again, take a breath, don't react. I ask people to think about, has somebody else said this to you? For all the disorders, has somebody else mentioned that maybe you have OCD? Does somebody else think maybe you have borderline? This is the first time you're hearing it, or is evidence mounting? That you should take a closer look at this part of your personality? You can go get an assessment if you want from a therapist, and if this is inaccurate, again, go back to, why did the person feel so hurt that they would use this term? What happened? How selfish were you that they would call you a narcissist? Heal that wound and then talk about the use of the term.
44:28 Dan Harris? All right, let's talk about another overused term. And this is a term that people weaponize on themselves, I think. But here's the way you phrase it in the chapter title. Do they have obsessive compulsive disorder? Or are they just particular?
44:42 Speaker 04 OCD is, yeah, weaponized in both directions. I have, I have found other terms that fall into that category too, but for this book, this is the only one. OCD is a complex and can be a very distressing disorder where you have obsessions and accompanying compulsions that cause distress. They are time consuming and they are out of your control. Everybody thinks they have OCD because they like the dishwasher arranged a certain way. Or they want to line up their shoes in a certain order, or they hate when you put a glass down and there's a ring of water on the bottom. But that's a preference. That's a need for organization and cleanliness. That's normal. That's fine. We all have our things that we care about.
45:27 Speaker 04 That's not the same thing as OCD.
45:30 Dan Harris? Okay, so what to do about that? What's the advice here? I guess the advice is don't pathologize somebody who might be particularly particular?
45:39 Speaker 04 Yes.
45:40 Dan Harris? But then some of those people might have OCD.
45:43 Speaker 04 They might, but they probably don't. If they do, they know it before you do, probably. Because not only are they asking you to do very specific things, but typically, they know they have obsessive thoughts that are causing them great distress that they are trying to alleviate through their compulsive behaviors or through controlling your behavior because it's linked to their obsessive thoughts.
46:04 Dan Harris? So you said before that this is like a term that can cut both ways. People can weaponize it against you, not by accusing you of having OCD, but by saying, "Well, I have OCD", even though they don't have a diagnosis, and therefore, you've got to do whatever crazy thing it is I'm asking you to do.
46:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, and a lot of these terms are about asserting autonomy in your relationship. Right, you have OCD. I'm not doing that. That's crazy, right? I'm not going to comply with your request. I control my own behavior. No. Or in the reverse, I have OCD. You have to do what I'm saying. I'm so clinically unwell about this, right? Do what I ask is another way of control.
46:43 Dan Harris? And so if somebody does that, what do you do?
46:47 Speaker 04 I always go back to, and eventually, you've got to talk about the use of the term, but there's something else underneath those moments of demand and disconnect. Like, why is this so important to you? Can you say it in a nicer way? Can we not frame it as your OCD? But like, it is helpful for you if I do this thing. And I'm not going to always do everything you ask because I'm my own person and I may not agree with what you're asking of me. So we have to find compromise and middle ground.
47:17 Dan Harris? Coming up, Isabel talks about the difference between red flags and garden variety imperfections, the overuse of the word "triggered", how to know if you are in an abusive relationship, how to focus on your own personal growth, and much more.
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48:07 Dan Harris? Okay, let's go through a few more of these terms. Is it a red flag or are they just imperfect?
48:14 Speaker 04 I'll tell you. And I thought this book was going to have a more critical feedback of people disagreeing and being upset with it. So far, people have been totally on board, except for this chapter. People do not like this chapter.
48:28 Dan Harris? Why?
48:29 Speaker 04 I'm taking away a term that people really want to have be broad, I think. I make a case that red flag is supposed to mean danger, serious warning, right? Fire, flood, run, very serious, very big deal. Red flags are indicators somebody's going to be abusive, that they are not going to be a safe person to be in a relationship with, that you should very cautiously proceed with, if you proceed at all. But nowadays, red flag means any imperfection, any bad behavior, any sign somebody might have a personality trait that's not your favorite thing, right? The ick can be a red flag. And it makes it so hard to be dating, to be in any kind of relationship, to be an
49:13 Speaker 04 employee, to be a boss, because everybody has, people now call red flags.
49:20 Dan Harris? Right. So it's like, maybe we just need a different term, because what red flags really means in a clinical setting is something that's, as you said before, dangerous. And so we need a term for just shit we don't like.
49:34 Speaker 04 Yes. And I think there's an overzealous approach to finding red flags as soon as possible and to spot them, the earliest warning sign. But the problem with red flags is even like the pretty acute ones are best seen in hindsight, or if there are many red flags pointing in the same direction. So it's not as if... Your boss sends you a really rude email and you know for sure that they are going to be a terrible boss. Maybe after seven pretty terrible emails, you have a good idea that they're going to be a terrible boss.
50:09 Dan Harris? So the problem here isn't just the imprecision of the language. It's that if these are the goggles through which you're viewing all of your relationships, it just leads to a kind of hypervigilance that reduces the likelihood of success.
50:22 Speaker 04 Yes, and I think we are living in a very hypervigilant relational world where people know so much about what to look out for and what they want to avoid, that they spot it right away and are quick to make conclusions, even if they're not going to be accurate conclusions about that person, and are making it very hard to have relationships because people need a fair amount of leeway to make mistakes and to annoy you and to repair. And there's just less and less room for that now.
50:52 Dan Harris? What's going on that we have this intolerance? Does it go back to the intolerance of discomfort? Is it that we live in a world that's increasingly divided and disconnected because of social media and therefore, you know, we just don't have the reps of the hard work of being a social animal? What do you think's going on here?
51:10 Speaker 04 I think it's both of those things. I think that we do not want to feel suffering and we have an easy way out, which is we can exit relationships. And then sometimes we're encouraged to, right? Do like hard endings on family relationships. That has been a thing that's sort of being pulled back now. But, you know, you don't like someone you go on a first date with. There's 100,000 people on an app waiting to talk to you. So why go through one more red flag? Why put up with one more thing if you can just hop to the next person and find somebody better? But I do blame social media for a lot of it because it's easy to have little snippets of information that make it feel
51:49 Speaker 04 like we can anticipate, avoid, or quickly address all the human suffering we have in relationships. And I partly blame therapists for this. And I say that with some caution because I think it was all well-intentioned. But therapists have helped people be too vigilant in their relationships and too quick to pathologize. And therapy has exploded in a way I don't think people would have predicted. But now it's made everyone feel like they are an expert, even though they're not.
52:21 Dan Harris? So what, in what ways should the therapy profession perhaps reform?
52:28 Speaker 04 I think we have to be much more careful when introducing a term to a client. It sounds like your partner might have these traits or tendencies. I have had many cases of therapists recommending to people that their partner is a clinical narcissist, is a sociopath, really heavy diagnoses that they shouldn't be recommending. So I think we have to be careful when introducing a term. And I think we have to also steer people away from just the words and helping them figure out more about patterns, the feelings, what their agency in that relationship, in that context. Whereas some therapists will really stick with, well, this explains it. This person is this way. They keep doing this thing. It's not your fault.
53:12 Speaker 04 You know, they're a bad person. They're toxic. But that's disempowering at the end of the day because the person sitting in the therapy room is the one who has to make the change.
53:23 Dan Harris? Are you now like not welcomed at the APA conferences? Did your colleagues find you, are they intolerant of you? Are you a red, walking red flag?
53:31 Speaker 04 So far, no, people are really open to it. I'm actually doing three conferences this year all about helping clinicians address therapy speak in their practice because so many therapists don't know what to do with it, don't know how to take these terms away from people in a way that doesn't break the therapeutic rapport.
53:52 Dan Harris? All right, here's another frequently used term bipolar. Chapter 10 is, are they bipolar or did their mood just change?
54:00 Speaker 04 I think bipolar can be weaponized in both directions too, to sort of explain, I'm having a really big feeling and it doesn't really make sense, but I'm allowed to have it. But most often I hear people say, that person is so bipolar, they acted in such an irrational way that I cannot comprehend. It must be this underlying mood episode explaining why they left me, why they're angry with me, why they're doing something that I don't understand.
54:28 Dan Harris? So what's a better lens to understand these kinds of mood swings?
54:33 Speaker 04 First of all, there might be a reason. They may have left you because they've been unhappy with you and they didn't tell you until it was too late for you to fix it. And sometimes people do just have big feelings that for you come out of nowhere, but for them have been building. But second of all, sometimes people just have moods or emotion states with no known triggers. They don't know why, you don't know why, and you don't have to pathologize it. And bipolar is composed of mood episodes where it's not like one day of somebody being high energy, right? Like for bipolar one, you need to have a manic episode. Mania stands out. People get hospitalized when they're manic.
55:17 Speaker 04 So that one's pretty easy to diagnose. But again, I think people miss that an episode is different than a change in mood.
55:24 Dan Harris? Yes. Although, so a change in mood is super common and often benign. And bipolar is much more, much more intense than most people understand. And yet there's something in the middle that, you know, there can be people who are arguably, and I probably fall into this category occasionally, like too moody, emotionally unintelligent, you know, just yanked around by their emotions. So obviously, we don't want to label those people bipolar, but we might want to understand what's going on and how to deal with that.
55:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think it's a great point because again, links back to the person's awareness of how they are, their own emotional internal world, and how they interact and affect the world around them. And some people just have low insight. They don't know how they feel, they don't know what they need, they barely know who they are, they don't see how they affect the people around them, they don't see their patterns, and whether or not they meet criteria for a diagnosis, they're just going to be a hard person to be in any kind of relationship with.
56:25 Dan Harris? You might have to set a boundary.
56:27 Speaker 04 You might have to set many boundaries.
56:30 Dan Harris? Okay, we're not gonna hit all of these in our lot of time here, but let me go to borderline, because I actually know what that term means. I'll read to you the name of the chapter, just so the listener knows what it is. The chapter is, are they borderline? Or do they just have strong feelings? Maybe just start by defining what borderline personality disorder is?
56:50 Speaker 04 This is so interesting, because borderline is hot right now. It's up there with narcissist. People call men they don't like narcissists. People call women they don't like borderlines. So borderline personality disorder, it's typically born from serious trauma, where a person develops a very unstable sense of self, and has significant difficulty maintaining stable, healthy relationships, because there's a constant push and pull between wanting intense closeness, almost enmeshment, and then rejecting that person and pushing them away, because they're terrified of that closeness. So there is a real fluctuation in that relationship. It's often accompanied by self-harm,
57:35 Speaker 04 by suicidal ideation or attempts, by recklessness, by risk-taking behaviors, and it can be very difficult to treat, because it's not usually helped by medication alone, but it takes years of therapy to address the habits and patterns and symptoms.
57:54 Dan Harris? And so, people who simply have strong feelings can be misdiagnosed by a layperson as borderline?
58:03 Speaker 04 I will tell you, I have been dating recently, and I have had no less than seven men tell me, or have on their profiles, my recent ex slash, for one of them, all the women I've ever been with, have had borderline. So I'm really wanting to make sure that anyone I date next doesn't have it.
58:24 Dan Harris? I'm sure that date goes well.
58:28 Speaker 04 They learn a lot from me.
58:32 Dan Harris? Is it a red flag when they say that?
58:34 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yes. For me, especially. It's against my whole brand, Dan. But they say that because the women have had strong feelings. They have felt very hurt by them. They have broken up in a dramatic way that didn't make sense, right? They wanted a close relationship, but then did something to indicate they didn't want to be with them. And there's no way they can understand it besides saying that they're borderline.
59:00 Dan Harris? Right, so I guess in the past, they would have just said a bitch?
59:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
59:04 Dan Harris? Right. The real underlying thing here is just our reflexive need to label people.
59:11 Speaker 04 Yes.
59:12 Dan Harris? And put them in a bucket.
59:13 Speaker 04 To make ourselves feel better.
59:15 Dan Harris? Yeah. And to reduce the complexity of this animal.
59:20 Speaker 04 Yes. Our brains do that, right? As you know, like, we seek simple answers. We want schema to explain what's happening in our world. We cannot give nuance to everything, or we would have no capacity to function because there's too much data to take in. It's too much work. But I argue that in our close relationships, ones that matter, or ones where we could gain self-reflection, we should give those nuance.
59:46 Dan Harris? All right, let's talk about a few more terms. There's a chapter on the words toxic, triggered, and trauma bonded. These get used a lot, and I actually am realizing that I used toxic earlier. So what do these terms actually mean? And how are we misusing them?
1:00:02 Speaker 04 Toxic, I'm not even mad about at this point. Toxic is a life of its own. My only case for toxic is that it means something bad, a dynamic that is unhealthy for you, or a person that is not a good person for you. You can't say toxic and think that people know what it means. Toxic, to me, doesn't mean abusive, doesn't mean narcissistic. It could mean somebody who's just the wrong person for you because they annoy you. So instead of using it as this catch-all, I encourage people to define it a little bit before they then use it. But I don't have a huge problem with toxic, in part because it has no clinical roots, really.
1:00:42 Dan Harris? Got it. Okay. What about triggered?
1:00:44 Speaker 04 I have a hard time with this chapter because language does evolve, right? Like words take on new meanings. So I know I can't control that. My whole book is about letting go of control of other people. Triggered was intended to mean for somebody who has PTSD. A trigger is a cue that brings up their PTSD symptoms. So, right, it's somebody who has been at war, who comes home and eight months later, a car backfires on their street and it brings up flashbacks. They have a panic attack in response. That was supposed to be what a trigger meant. People have generalized it to mean you did a thing that made me feel a bad feeling, which is fine. That word can change and mean that, but people will trigger you. You don't get to control how people act.
1:01:29 Speaker 04 Being a human means being triggered, going through the world and managing your emotional reaction to that.
1:01:36 Dan Harris? My beef with the term is, I mean, and I probably if somebody put all of the transcripts of this show in an AI would see that I probably used it. But I my beef with the term, notwithstanding my hypocrisy, is it just speaks to our fragility. Life is filled with triggers. You're gonna die. I mean, that can be pretty triggering.
1:01:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:01:55 Dan Harris? So it really, it's kind of like the term safe space. I don't love. I'm sure its original intent was very positive and but the way people are demanding safety in a world that it's just definitionally unsafe. And so we need to be preparing people to handle life's inevitable ups and downs or triggers.
1:02:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, it's right. You know, if a teacher asks you for something, calls on you in class when you weren't paying attention, that could be triggering. That could make you feel anxious and embarrassed. It could make you feel all sorts of things, but you don't get to skip that experience.
1:02:29 Dan Harris? And finally, trauma bonded?
1:02:31 Speaker 04 This is my personal most important one because I am so frustrated by how this word has been taken over. Trauma bond is Stockholm syndrome. It's when you and an abuser or a captor develop this very counterintuitive relationship where you, the survivor, want to like protect and defend the abuser and captor because you feel the sense of closeness and connection with them.
1:02:58 Speaker 04 Trauma bonded, as people use it now, is like, we went through a really hard thing together. So now we're bonded because of the trauma, which is just a totally different thing.
1:03:07 Dan Harris? I see your balance here because you don't want to be like the get off my lawn lady, you know, just like policing everybody's language. And so some of these, the ones we've just gone through, may like inch up toward that. Whereas the other ones are like, are actually causing harm to you and others when you use them.
1:03:26 Speaker 04 Yeah, so there's definitely a spectrum too of like severity and how much I think using these words correctly matters. I will say, it hasn't stopped people from using these words with me, whether in personal relationships or professionally. What I'll get now is like, they were gaslighting. I know, I know, probably not real gaslighting, but you know what I mean, gaslighting. Like, yeah, that's fine.
1:03:47 Dan Harris? Look, I can't tell you how many fucking 10% jokes I get, so just get used to it. So you finish with some really practical stuff, and I do want to spend a few minutes on this. Chapter 14 is called, "Being a Human in Relationship is Hard." So here's some advice. Let's just walk through a few of these until we run out of time. One is about how to figure out if you're actually in an abusive relationship as opposed to like, just using the term willy nilly. So what do we look for?
1:04:13 Speaker 04 You look for patterns. You look to see if this behavior, this abuse cycle is happening repeatedly. You look to see if you feel isolated, if you feel scared, if you're losing sense of your own reality. And I encourage people to talk to therapists, to talk to friends and family, to read about abuse and how it presents, and to see if it resonates.
1:04:33 Dan Harris? And in relationships that are not abusive, but, you know, difficult, which is all relationships, if you're actually participating, there's a section here and about doing the work. It's also a therapy term, I think.
1:04:46 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
1:04:47 Dan Harris? Some of the things you recommend are specificity, vulnerability, and commitment. Can you talk a little bit about each of those?
1:04:55 Speaker 04 Yeah, instead of jumping to a label of sort of being more clear on this is the thing that you did, this is how it felt to me, and I want to work through this with you, as opposed to, oh, you're so bipolar, here it is again, right, go fix that. But in a bigger picture, I would tell people, listen, decide if this relationship is important to you, if it's worth doing the work, because if you're with somebody who does have a disorder, it can be a lot of work, and it can be a steep hill, and it can be a long time. So I think you need to decide how much you want to invest in this relationship, and if it is that important, then to then go forth and do that work of trying to change and improve things.
1:05:35 Dan Harris? And that's the commitment?
1:05:37 Speaker 04 Yes, if you feel the commitment.
1:05:39 Dan Harris? You mentioned this just now, and it also comes up in the book. You know, there may be cases where you are correctly suspecting that your partner qualifies for borderline or OCD or whatever, and while you don't want to be in the business of doing armchair diagnosis or weaponizing the term, you may want to encourage people to get help. What do you recommend if that's the case?
1:06:04 Speaker 04 I think that there is always room to offer observations and to recommend people take a look at something. It really matters how and when you do it. If it's in the middle of a fight, it's going to be harsh, and it's going to be poorly received. If it is in a quiet moment where you're able to say, I'm worried about this, I have noticed this pattern, it seems to be getting in your way, it seems to be affecting us, can you go talk to somebody about it? Can you go get assessed for it? Can we look at this together? It's going to go better. And it might not. You might have somebody who is offended, who is unwilling to consider it, somebody who has no insight and won't be able to understand even what you're saying to them, in which case that decision bounces back to you of like, what do you want to do with
1:06:48 Speaker 04 that relationship with that person?
1:06:51 Dan Harris? One of the things you emphasize toward the end of the book here is focusing on your own growth as like a good citizen of a relationship.
1:06:58 Speaker 04 Uh huh. Because that's all that we have control over, you know, and you always have the opportunity to gain your own insight and to focus on your agency and your own growth, no matter what the other person does. And I think if you become so focused on the other person's problems and how they need to change, you really miss out on your chance to look in the mirror and figure out how you can change in the context of that relationship.
1:07:22 Dan Harris? And I've found that to the extent that I've done my work, one of the benefits is something that you call for in a robust way in the book and have done so throughout this conversation, that the more I, metaphorically speaking here, look in the mirror through meditation, therapy, or whatever, and see how fucked up I am, the more grace I'm willing to give other people.
1:07:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think it helps you see that we are all doing our best, and some people are doing their best, and it's not enough for you. And that's okay. Then you can make a choice to leave. But yeah, people are imperfect. They're messy. They're struggling. But we can all support each other in that process instead of pathologize each other.
1:08:06 Dan Harris? Two final questions. One, is there something that you were hoping to get to that we didn't?
1:08:11 Speaker 04 I don't think so.
1:08:13 Dan Harris? Awesome. Great. And then finally, can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and anything else you've made that we should know about?
1:08:19 Speaker 04 So the book is called They're Not Gaslighting You: Ditch the Therapy Speak and Stop Looking for Red Flags Everywhere in Every Relationship. Up next is a book called You Don't Have ADHD: Stop Self-Diagnosing and Reclaim Your Mental Health. That'll come out sometime next year. So that'll be a similar topic, but for self-diagnosis. And then for any therapist, they can check out my Navigating Intimacy book, all about couples and sex therapy.
1:08:44 Dan Harris? And website that we should know about, social media?
1:08:47 Speaker 04 You can find me at drisabellemorley.com or on Instagram at DrIsabelMorley.
1:08:52 Dan Harris? Amazing. Great job. Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it.
1:08:55 Speaker 04 Thank you. No, thank you for having me on. I was telling everybody before that I read 10% Happier, like, the week it came out. My whole practice talked about it. I've made, like, every patient read it. So it's a personal honor to get to meet you.
1:09:08 Dan Harris? Thank you. I appreciate that. I think one of the biggest growth engines for my work has been therapists.
1:09:15 Speaker 04 That's so interesting. We are promoters. We're a good community for that kind of thing.
1:09:19 Dan Harris? Yeah, I appreciate you guys. All right. Well, thanks again.
1:09:23 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thank you, thank you.
1:09:29 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Isabel. Great to talk to her. Don't forget, there's a guided meditation that comes with this episode. It's all about how to handle difficult people. It comes from our Teacher of the Month, Christiana Wolf. You can get it if you sign up at DanHarris.com. You can also, once you sign up, access our weekly live meditation and Q and A sessions. We do those every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. Also, just a quick reminder that I've got that event on the 18th of November with Pete Holmes, the comedian and meditator, that you should sign up for that. There's a link in the show notes. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.
1:10:14 Dan Harris? DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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