How Narcissists Hijack Your Brain - Dr Peter Salerno - #1068

How do you describe what you do?

Someone hasn't met you before.

They don't know much about you.

You're at a cocktail party.

How do you describe what you do?

I mean, my work focuses on,

I mean, I'm a psychotherapist.

That's kind of like my trade.

I'm licensed as a psychotherapist.

I have a doctorate in psychology.

So my background is in psychology and mental health.

I would say what I do specifically is,

I do extensive research on the etiology

or cause of personality disorders.

That's the type of diagnosis that I specialize

in assessing, understanding.

But one of the reasons I do it is actually

not necessarily to treat personality disorders.

I do it so that I help people understand

in relationships where there's a personality disorder.

There's often toxicity and conflict and strife

and abuse, right?

And so what I do is I help people restore

what I would call their reality confidence

following a toxic relationship.

Because in these relationships, what happens is

the individual who is the victim

of somebody who is intentionally manipulative,

deceptive, controlling.

What happens is the victim loses their sense

of what's actually true and real

and what's actually being manipulated.

And so I help people following these types of

hike conflict or problematic abusive relationships

kind of get their reality confidence back.

And one of the ways I do that is by resolving

what I call traumatic cognitive dissonance,

which is what happens to the brain

when you're forced to hold two contradictory realities

at the same time because someone is trying to convince you

that two things could be true at the same time

when they can't be.

And so when I'm consulting with people professionally,

I'm helping them regain their understanding

of what's actually real, what happened to them

and what was, what they were convinced to happen to them

because it was convenient for somebody else

if they believed that.

So it's almost like people that have spent

a good bit of time intimately close to these other people.

Reality gets warped around them to the point

where it's difficult for them to re-enter normal reality

without the old version creeping back in.

Correct. Yeah.

Yeah, and one of the reasons for that is because

the individual who is the manipulative person

has done such an exceptional job

of making a lot of the deception and the evidence invisible.

So it's not like there's somebody overtly trying

to manipulate you and you're aware of it.

Like it's not like there's somebody saying,

hey, I want you to buy this product for me.

Here's why I think it'll improve your life.

And then they pressure you.

It's actually more like, no, I'm not actually up to anything.

I mean, you're free to come and go as you please

in this arrangement.

All while underneath the surface covertly trying to gain

an advantage over this person for selfish reasons,

exploitative reasons.

And so even if the relationship has ended,

they still might perceive the relationship

even years or decades later in a way that's not accurate

because they were, the reality was distorted.

What are the personality type?

What are the sorts of people,

the kinds of psychological profiles?

What are we talking about here?

How does that show up in behavior?

Yeah, so I mean, I would say the personality disorders

and I'm just the messenger here, okay?

But the personality disorders that we most often associate

with interpersonal conflict abuse harm

are what we call the cluster B personality disorders.

And so the reason why we cluster them together

is because they have a lot of overlapping features.

So it's not really accurate to say that it's convenient

but it's not fully accurate to say that somebody

just fits into one concrete category of disorder

and we can just label them as such

and then there's nothing else going on.

Usually what's happening is there's quite a few traits

or features of multiple personality disorders

that are overlapping in one individual.

And so it makes it even harder to really pinpoint

what really is this person all about?

But I would say that the pathological traits,

the personality traits that we find common

in the cluster B classification of disorders

are the ones that you're going to find

causing the most interpersonal trouble

in conflict in relationships.

What would they, what are they named?

So we have one of the main ones that's sort of like

an umbrella term is what we refer to as antagonism.

And antagonism is a personality trait

where people are in oftentimes intentionally putting themselves

at odds with another person

or they're putting two other people at odds with one another

literally to create drama, to create conflict,

to escalate problems rather than solve them.

So an example of antagonism is something that we refer to

as like triangulation.

So one person is intentionally gonna tell another person

something about someone else to create a rift.

And then they're gonna deny that they did that.

And so now the two people that didn't even speak

could be having thoughts and perceptions about each other

based on this other person that could be completely

a fabrication, it could just be a lie.

And now those two people are at odds with one another

and they haven't even communicated necessarily.

It's just this other person is deciding

I'm gonna create a rift in here

because it might benefit them for those two people

to not get along.

And so they're gonna strategically create a problem

in that dynamic and then deny it ever have it.

I didn't even know antagonism was a personality trait

or a potential personality type.

I, I, I, yes, I don't know.

I mean, I've thought about somebody that is antagonistic.

You know that, but I didn't realize

that it would be something more definable,

something, there's something that had its own little bucket.

Yeah, and that's actually a big bucket

because what under, what's underneath antagonism is

things like grandiosity, which we see in narcissism,

I'm sure, familiar with that term.

It's a big popular term.

Most people who get accused of being narcissistic,

what's actually, what they're actually being accused of

is antagonism.

They're being accused of the problematic aspect

of narcissism in a relationship is somebody's grandiosity.

So they're entitlement, they're arrogance,

they're inability to see other people as an equal.

Well, the only way you can be in a relationship

as a narcissist and to maintain that position

is if you antagonize people.

Because you need to put people at odds with you,

they need to be beneath you, they need to be aware

that there's a hierarchy in the relationship

that you are whatever case may be smarter, better.

They need to be above.

There's no such thing as equality in a relationship

where one person is truly narcissistic.

So yeah, so antagonism is actually the big bowl

that a lot of the other traits that we often hear about.

They actually are falling under the category of antagonism.

What else is in the cluster?

We have hostility.

So people that have kind of tend to hold

like a contempt or a spike towards others

to where they're not actually collaborating

to make relationships better, they're resentful

of the person, they might envy the person,

they might be jealous of the person.

So they're hostile towards them.

And again, this isn't always being admitted to.

They could be smiling and winning favor and ingratiating

and being kind to the person all while sabotaging

something covertly through there

because as a result of their hostility,

so they might be deceptive.

That's another feature of antagonism is deceit.

Obviously manipulation, failure to fulfill obligations.

All of these things that we see

and if they're consistent chronic behaviors,

we're really dealing with an antagonistic person.

Like I suppose, all of us have done some of this,

some of the time.

So when we talk about personality disorders,

what we're really talking about is this trait,

so we'll just use antagonism

because we're talking about antagonism.

Is somebody antagonistic in like one or two specific contexts?

So do they tend to become antagonistic

when they're only talking to their mother?

And they're an adult, right?

But no matter how much time goes by,

if they go home to the house that they grew up in,

they start being antagonistic.

Are we talking about that?

Is that kind of a normal thing that we could see in humans?

Or is this person all day, every day,

plotting to put people at odds with one another

because it benefits them in some way

for people to not get along?

They seem to be the common denominator

of helping everybody pick up the pieces

that act together.

So there could be some motivating factor

why the person operates in an antagonistic fashion all day,

every day, we would say that that's more related

to abnormal or maladaptive personality.

But if you're antagonistic once in a while

with a particular person because you have a history,

that's just being human, right?

What we're looking for is how much is this pattern

interfering with the life of the individual

and the lives of other people?

So there's a junior.

Yeah.

What's the root of this?

What are the root of much of the close to be disillusioned?

This is an excellent question.

So one of the things that is gonna put my answer

or set my answer apart is most of the people

you've probably seen speak about this topic,

personality disorders or narcissism,

they're gonna give you a different answer

than I would give you based on what causes it.

Okay.

Most people have this idea or have adopted the idea

that what causes it is actually childhood adversity

or some sort of abuse or situation where the person learns

to be this way and hurt people, hurt people.

Precisely, yeah.

I mean, that's the most common answer you'll get.

I would fundamentally disagree with that

because there's a lot of new research

that has come out within the last 20 years even

that suggests that a lot of the traits that we use

to describe the central features of something

like narcissism are actually just as much,

if not more related to the way somebody

is just intrinsically built rather than the things

that happen to them.

So we're gonna go into like the,

there's no such thing as a nature, nurture debate

because it's always nature and nurture.

So there's no such thing as talking about one without the other.

But what I've noticed in clinical research

and clinical practice and just in my field in general is

there is a lack of awareness among professionals

of how much DNA and biology contribute

to narcissistic traits and features across the lifespan

in an individual regardless of what has happened to them

in early life and childhood.

So what I mean by that is there is evidence to demonstrate

that people can be highly narcissistic

or have a personality disorder that's more severe

than we'll say mild or moderate

and they could actually develop that disorder

without any adversity or trauma or incidents

of being hurt in their personal life.

So we can no longer attribute this type of behavior

solely to what happened to somebody

in their early formative years.

I had Catherine Paige Harden on the show yesterday

familiar with her.

Yeah, wrote the genetic lottery

and her new book is Original Sin

and it's all about how people's behavior is influenced

by the genes, especially maladaptive,

anti-social behavior, robbing, stealing, lying, abuse.

And so yeah, you're in good company.

So this week apparently it's just all about bad personality

traits and how much genes.

So an interesting question there is if you're saying

trauma doesn't necessarily cause people to become abusers

that you can have a child who goes through a horrendous

childhood and doesn't grow up to become a narcissist

or an antagonist or whatever.

And you can also have a childhood which doesn't have abuse

and the child does grow up to become an adult

or even in childhood is generally you get

narcissistic children as well.

How often do you see somebody that becomes,

let's just say a narcissist or antagonist

that doesn't have it in their family history

where you have been able to separate out

some of the heritability component of this.

How many people can environment themselves

into a cluster B disorder?

Yeah, that's such a great question.

I would say historically in the mental health field

the answer to that question would be as many people

as possible because they're operating

from the theoretical lens, right?

That these are created, these are designed disorders.

They're not built into anybody.

They're strictly environmental.

So that presents a problem if they're strictly

environmental to my perspective.

Cause what it's saying is that under the right circumstances

you can make a narcissist, right?

So to answer your question,

maybe I'm correct me if I'm not answering your question.

I would say, I'm not gonna say something's not possible.

So do I think it's possible that somebody

based on experience alone could develop

what we would typically refer to as like

narcissistic personality disorder?

Cause they meet that criteria at some point in their life.

Yeah, sure.

I would caution to say though

that what we're really seeing now though is they need the,

they need enough of the startup material of narcissism

in order for it to really manifest

into like a pervasive disorder.

Meaning there has to be some biological

and genetic underpinnings to set up the trade profile

for that type.

They need the raw materials.

Yeah, I'd say so.

I don't think you could just create it

on the ground up in anybody.

So do you often see it in mom or dad or grandparents?

Have you ever looked at this as anyone doing this study?

Yeah, so they're actually what gives us the most information

on how genetic something is versus how environmental

is twin studies.

Twins, it's a natural experiment.

You take two identical twins that have been raised apart.

So they don't even know the other exists

and they know nothing about their environment.

You study them later in life or at intervals of life.

How similar are they if they come

from completely different upbringings,

completely different socioeconomic status,

completely different countries?

How similar are they in personality

if they didn't know the other exists

but they share 100% of their DNA, right?

So those are the kind of cool natural experiments

we can do on identical twins to see

how much of the environmental influence

is there versus how concordant are their traits

even if they live the part which is share similarly DNA.

What we found in some pretty landmark meta-analyses

and landmark studies is across the board

when it comes to psychological traits,

50 plus years of twin research covering millions

and millions of different twins

and covering, I don't know how many traits there are

but maybe 20,000 psychological traits that are possible.

We're finding that all psychological traits,

including personality traits,

show measurable average heritability of like about 50%.

So that's just with startup material alone,

all psychological traits show about 50% average heritability

and what we've seen with personality disorders

is that those percentages actually increase

when we're talking about pathological personality traits

so it exceeds 50%.

That's pretty significant.

Well, it's on average pretty much everything is 50%.

But when you're talking about such an extreme outlier,

what sounds like very antisocial kind of maladaptive

at least at the group level,

although it may be slightly adaptive

at the individual level,

I would have, you would have hoped

that our genes might have been able to regress back to the mean

a little bit more effectively to try and push this thing out.

So have you thought about this through an evolutionary lens?

Have you thought about how close to be personality traits

might be adaptive?

What sort of benefits they would afford ancestors

and what sort of benefits the people who have them receive now?

Because if they have stayed in the gene pool

for a couple of hundred thousand years,

we have to assume that that's for a reason.

So what sort of benefits do these people see?

Yeah, so essentially why did these mechanisms evolve

and why are they still around?

Like Bingo.

Okay.

So the first question that we just talked about

heritability, we were asking essentially,

why do individuals differ?

Why would some person have more narcissism than the other, right?

Now you're asking maybe not an even better question,

but just as important as a question.

Why are the mechanisms in the first place?

Like did they serve some useful purpose

or even non-useful evolutionary psychologists?

I don't wanna speak for all of them,

but some of them would say this is just due to random variation.

Like these traits exist in the human DNA

and they're gonna re-emerge in future generations,

even if we try to wipe them out.

Just like cooperation would re-emerge

if we try to wipe out all the cooperative people.

So part of it is random variation.

I think it's just the nature of human DNA,

we have these traits that exist.

I think that these traits do serve certain purposes

and certain contexts that are useful

for immediate reward or immediate gratification

or even solving a very particular problem that requires

could potentially require even impulse, right?

I mean, you'd like a spontaneous

and pulsive quick decision here.

So we wanna look at the utility in these traits too.

They're not all bad and I wouldn't even go so far

as to say this is an issue about related to good or evil.

I think these traits even in smaller doses

could be extremely useful.

And so they exist for that purpose.

When they get to the point where they're on the extreme end

of the quantitative dimension,

somebody is existing in life and in relationships

hostile to the point where it's problematic.

That's when we would say, well, whatever purpose it served,

this isn't the purpose.

But we could even say that for positive traits,

like agreeableness, for example.

If you could be too agreeable,

then if you're pathologically agreeable,

then it might be useful to be a bit more disagreeable

in day-to-day life, right?

So to answer your question, they exist because they exist.

They evolve for randomness and also some useful purposes

in extreme levels.

They're just harmful in other news.

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What about the neurobiology of this stuff?

What parts of the brain are involved in empathy

and self-control and have we looked at the brains

of what's going, is it dopamine overload?

Is it the, the, the, the,

a make-diller is firing too much?

What's going on?

This is something that I think is extremely important

to bring to this conversation because I think oftentimes

psychology stops at social and, you know,

caregiving contributions, right?

Like the original environment and things like that,

but there are so many other systems involved

in creating a personality or creating a trait

and you mentioned some of them.

So we're talking about hormonal systems,

the endocrine system, you know, the nervous system

and then all of the brain networks that are communicating.

I don't, I don't really like to say that this is like,

there's such a thing as like a narcissistic brain

where there's certain regions that look a certain way

and so that's a narcissistic brain.

That's a little too naive, I would say,

but are there regions or areas in the brain

that are indicative of things like a lack of empathy?

Sure, like absolutely.

We see that in certain brains.

You see that in brain imaging.

We also see structural and functional differences

in brain preimposed therapy and individuals

with personality disorders.

They've done studies on child brains.

Like, you know, they scan them prior to treatment

and then scan them following treatment

for tasks related to cognitive restructuring,

mentalization based treatment

and seeing that the function and structure of the brain

does in fact change with certain interventions.

Okay, so this is not a complete lock-in,

we can't intervene.

In some cases, yeah, well, I would say in a lot of cases,

it's not, none of this is deterministic,

it's probabilistic and it's more influential than it is

like just set in stone.

But there are cases, I just wanna be totally transparent.

There are cases of individuals where there's not much hope

for changing the operating system.

And what does that look like from a brain chemistry perspective?

Like, what differences in brain chemistry

could make someone more prone to dominance or aggression

or whatever?

Yeah, great question.

So what we see, we see pro-active

or intentional forms of aggression in individuals

who have like less activation

when it comes to fear, learning or consequences.

So what I mean by that is some brains operate in a way

where they don't learn from mistakes through fear.

The fear doesn't register when they do something

pretty horrific.

So there's no motivation to stop doing the behavior

when the fear doesn't kick in.

There's also no arousal in the body or in systems

that would normally say, okay, we need to be a hypervisual

here, we just did something, we don't like the way it feels.

And some individuals, those things don't happen.

So they don't learn from the mistakes,

so therefore there's nothing in them registering

to say we should stop doing this.

What actually might be happening is

it's making them feel better to do it, right?

And it could be an anti-social behavior.

So some people are wired in such a way

where they're motivated to continue participating

in what most people would consider a negative behavior,

but their body, their operating system is telling them

to keep doing it because it produces a reward

or it's just, there's nothing negative about it for them.

Page yesterday said, basically the exact same thing.

And the funny thing about somebody

who doesn't learn through punishment

is that much of the time when you're a kid,

if you are acting out, what happens is parents begin

and teachers begin to ratchet a punishment more and more

and more and more.

We can don't realize is that that is simply the wrong pathway.

It would be like somebody having a vitamin B methylation

with a pathway deficiency

and you're just pushing more vitamin B into them,

hoping that this simply does not get absorbed.

And her angle was, they will learn through reinforcement

of praise, but not through reinforcement of punishment,

which means that in your example here,

it's almost like people are kind of blind

to the slings and arrows of distaste from people

and they will just continue to work through

until they find something that, oh well, that worked.

That seemed to get me closer to whatever my goal was for today.

I'll keep doing that.

No, you can't do that, you shouldn't do that.

You've got time out, I'm taking a ripad,

you're gonna sit on the note, you step,

made no difference, try it again,

maybe it went in a different way,

ratchet it up a little bit more.

The punishment comes back in, again, no difference,

doesn't, I'm not learning from this,

not learning from this.

I'm just, he's seeking missile for effectiveness

without the sort of overlying social mores

and the discomfort for the people who've got

the spirit to scally a staircase wit in French.

That sense of, oh, I really wish that I'd said that thing

as opposed to, I just don't reflect on my behavior

in that kind of a matter.

That's exactly right.

So what we see in the operating systems of the more severe

to extreme personality disorders

is we see a lack of capacity, but also interest in collaboration.

So imagine, imagine if you're starting point

is I'm not interested in collaborating with people.

That's how they, so there's a problem right there.

There's a lack of collaborative capacity or interest.

There's a lack of problem solving capacity or interest

in these individuals.

There's a lack of self-reflective capacity and interest

and there's a lack of self-corrective capacity and interest.

So we have to stop making the mistake

of thinking that there is no variation

between individuals and what motivates them.

And interestingly enough too,

with the severe personality disorders

that create the interpersonal strife,

more nurture and empathy for them,

actually makes them more exploitative.

Oh, hang on.

So no, wait a second.

So you're telling me that a lot of these people

are immune to punishment and encouraged by empathy.

Yes.

Now we see this in, we actually see this in clinical practice,

which is interesting because when you work with individuals

who have severe personality disorders,

they actively put wrenches in the therapy process.

They derail the process.

In what ways?

Well, they exploit your empathy and your unconditional positive

regard for them and you believing their narrative.

They exploit all that.

So treating them and dealing with them in a clinical setting

is one very telling it how they operate in their personal lives

where they're derailing and manipulating the narrative

so that you guys don't reach a common ground.

Seems like completely counterintuitive to most people,

but that's what they're in fact doing.

They're making it so that you can't reach a common ground with them.

So there's that.

Oh, sorry, just on that, they're trying to maintain,

maintain control and distance.

I'll give you what I know,

what I think that you want.

For me, it's some sort of performative revelation

or revealing a degree of titrated information

that I've given you, but that's probably fake as well.

Because I understand the dynamic.

I understand what your reward function is.

Oh, I've really got them to open up during this session.

And that allows the therapeutic relationship to keep going

in a manner that it's supposed to,

within the rules of the game,

without actually having to play it again.

Correct.

Well, yes.

Well, seemingly, and most therapists

just goes over their head.

So they're thinking that you're making great strides

and you're progressing because you're feigning collaboration.

So I understand that you work with the victims of these people.

Have you ever worked directly with the people themselves?

Yeah, I should clarify.

I used to, I don't anymore,

but I used to for a very long time.

Okay, you're a little bit like an ex undercover cop

that's now turned into a proper detective or whatever.

So tell me what it's like.

Tell me what it's like to sit down,

opposite somebody who has 99th percentile

close to be personality disorder,

just describe that experience.

When we're talking about in a therapeutic context,

something that's really important to mention

is transference and counter transference.

So do you want me to go into that for your audience?

Yeah, give us a brief overview.

I learned that interestingly,

and I'm grinning because it's one of the few things

that I've learned from reading chick novels.

The silent patient by Alex Michael ladies

or Andrew Michael ladies,

and in it, one of the main protagonists

is a therapist who's trying to get this patient to speak.

And he goes to his coat head, head therapist

who's trying to help him get through

this very difficult patient.

And there's this line,

tell me about the transference and counter transference.

And this was as I was starting to do therapy

about two years ago, I went in all impressed with myself

to tell my therapist that I learned

what transference and counter transference was.

But I didn't learn about it from proper research.

I learned about it from reading like an absolute USA Today

best selling chick thriller.

But transference counter transfer,

you're sitting down with somebody with close to be, et cetera.

Yeah, well, I mean, just in general,

we all transfer and counter transfer in life

and human relationships.

It's not just exclusive to therapy,

but it's important to notice that it's happening in therapy

because it gives you a lot of information

as far as what's happening in the interaction.

So, I mean, transference in the simplest terms

is the feelings that are transferred

onto the therapist by the patient.

Counter transference are some of the feelings

or emotional reactions that take place inside of the therapist

while they are interacting with the patient.

So the reason why that's relevant is

because we get to ask cool questions like,

would I have been feeling this

by reciting with anyone else right now?

Or is this feeling that just got activated in me?

Is it directly related to the dynamic of this person

that I'm interacting with?

Because it starts to tell you information

about how maybe other people are experiencing

them outside of therapy in their personal life.

That maybe they're not super aware of.

And they might actually, even a narcissist

could genuinely come into a therapy office

and not have a clue why everybody thinks

they're so insensitive, right?

All the while, the therapist is picking up on their insensitivity

and having a counter transference reaction

to the insensitivity.

Like, gosh, it feels hard to sit in a room with this person.

I feel incompetent.

I feel scared.

I feel like different than I did before they showed up, right?

So it's really important.

But the typical counter transference that results

when you're sitting with somebody

who meets the criteria for cluster B,

I should say, yeah, typical or common counter transference.

So what the therapist feels in the room with them

is you feel, I said it a couple of them just now,

you oftentimes you just start to overwhelmingly feel

incompetent, like you don't know how to do your job

or you're not qualified to do your job.

And remember, this is just coming

as you're sitting with someone.

You weren't thinking about it earlier today

on the drive to work.

You were thinking, oh, I can't wait to go to work.

I do a pretty good job.

I have a full practice.

Then this person comes in and all of a sudden,

you feel like you can't do your job, right?

So that's, what is it, what is it, what are they doing?

What is it, they're devaluing you

and not telling you that they're devaluing you.

But you're starting to feel incompetent.

So this is something that somebody

with pretty severe personality pathology

can sort of just put into the environment.

They can export this out into the environment

without saying a word.

Do you think that mean to is this an outcome

that they want or is this a spandrol

that's come along for the ride?

So earlier, you were asking about

purpose evolutionary perspective.

I would say this is an evolutionary perspective

that would be important to look into.

Can they put this spell into the environment

and to the air for some sort of an advantage for themselves?

That they might not even fully be aware of in a moment,

but it's happening and it's starting to work for them.

It makes people want to compete.

Allow me to show you just how competent I am.

No, no, no, no, no, I will do,

I will over deliver, I will over

because there is this odd sense

of interpersonal competition of one.

Oh, it's actually of non, right?

It's just you, right?

It's not a competition between you.

It's that I need to prove myself

because you don't seem impressed by me.

You impressed by me.

Okay, I'll do a bit more.

I'll do a bit more.

I'll do a bit more.

Be finally, please just recognize that I'm here.

Or if I can get the professional to tell me

to feel incompetent,

then I get to direct the treatment,

which means maybe if they feel incompetent,

they'll agree with me more.

So see, I take them off their high horse of expertise.

Now I get to kind of get what I want from them a little bit.

Maybe I could pull the wool over their eyes.

So they're a bit more vulnerable.

This isn't exactly 100% conscious,

but to me, I would still,

I would still refer to that tactic

as intentional abuse

because you're not showing up

with the intention of playing fair

even in the conversation, you know?

So what else do you feel?

Fear and dread.

Okay.

And it's not always like 100% conscious of what you fear

or what the dread is,

but you can all of a sudden come up with this feeling.

We also have a detection,

or a deception detection network in our brain,

which gets hijacked by these types of tactics.

You feel it and you stop thinking,

if you get somebody who's good enough at manipulation,

you could stop thinking,

hmm, I'm feeling incompetent.

I wasn't before.

Now I am.

What's that about?

You might just think,

maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was.

And that would be a really important thing

for a victim of a narcissist to say to themselves.

Maybe I'm not as good with court

because that's dissolved their defenses

around I'm not in the wrong, they're in the wrong.

Right.

Yeah.

And this happens in milliseconds, by the way.

This is all happening unconsciously

when you're interacting with someone.

So someone like me, you know, I'm a few steps ahead,

but not by any means immune.

And I would never tell anybody,

because even the foremost experts of this

would never claim that they could never be suffer-pumpched.

Gaze-ed, finessed.

Yeah.

But it's not really about becoming a human lie detector

and knowing what everyone else is all about.

That's not what you're trying to do,

but you're trying to notice,

when I'm with this particular person,

I feel incompetent, I feel dread, I feel fear,

I feel insecurity.

And in most other relationships in my life,

I don't operate that way.

What's happening in this particular dynamic

that's making me feel that way?

That's kind of some things that a therapist

would want to certainly be aware of

if they're interacting with someone

who potentially has a socially maladaptive personality.

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How you mentioned there about these people

don't even mean to do it.

It's happening in some forms unconsciously

and in others of the population of close to be personality,

the anti-social personality disorder, people, patients.

How many of them know what they're doing and mean to do it

and how many of them are at the mercy of their programming?

And I suppose this is a difficult question

because what we're talking about here is

agency over empathy and ability to recognize

and wish to do different.

But unfortunately, the very personality trait

that we're talking about

catales your ability to do the empathy thing.

So it might be hard for someone to empathize

with the damage of their lack of empathy

and wish that they could do differently.

Would you understand the question here,

how many people revel in what they're doing

and how many people are fighting against it?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So these are what we call egocentonic disorders.

What that means is they're comfortable in their own skin.

So they're not experiencing the aftermath

of these interactions as symptoms or side effects

and wondering, what am I going to do about this?

Every time I'm in a room with somebody,

they start to feel fearful.

What's wrong with me?

They don't think that way.

If a person who would think that way

would be experiencing something that's egocentonic,

egocentonia, this is interfering in my life

in a way that I can't tolerate it.

It's making me uncomfortable.

I want to rid myself of it.

I'm going to do whatever it takes to stop doing this thing,

saying this thing, having this dream, whatever.

That's ego-distonic.

That means the person's aware that it's a problem.

They don't like that it's originating in themselves.

They want to get rid of it.

Personality disorders don't have that process

because these are egocentonic.

So what that means is they're in harmony

with the way they are.

They just experience conflict

when other people confront them about the way they are.

So nothing in them is internally motivated to change

because they don't think that the problem

is originating with that.

Okay, so that's one part of this.

How intentional as a result of that?

I would say it's as intentional as an introvert

cultivating environments to cater to their introversion.

That's how intentional it is.

Right.

So what I mean by that is if you're an introvert,

you're going to select environments

that cater to your introversion,

your natural inclination to be introverted.

And what does introversion entail, right?

So you're going to start creating environments

that cater to that trait.

And that's exactly what individuals

with personality disorders do.

They cultivate, select, modify their environments

intentionally based on the traits

that they bring to the environment.

What sort of ways?

What are the things that they do?

Well, like a narcissist who wants to

be the center of attention is going to find a way

to make an environment they're in.

They're going to cultivate the environment

and select things to say and do

and operate in the environment to get what they want from it,

which is attention.

So they're going to intentionally behave in ways

that are attention-seeking,

whereas an introvert is going to intentionally behave

in ways that draw attention to others

and then they're going to regroup privately

rather than go get stimulated socially,

because that's not, it doesn't do it for them.

So whatever the trait is, those behaviors

are going to, the behaviors that you engage in

are going to be motivated to cultivate

how you feel with that trait.

Why is it called close to be?

Is there a close to right?

Yeah, there's a good question.

I mean, they're called cluster disorders

because the features, not symptoms,

the features and characteristics cluster together

and overlap in the different disorders.

There's cluster A.

The cluster A's are considered the auto-next-centric munch.

So odd kind of bizarre behaviors, eccentric behaviors.

The cluster B's are the more interpersonally

manipulative, exploitative, dramatic, erratic.

So those are the cluster B's.

And then the cluster C's are the anxious and fearful cluster.

So disorders that operate around fear and anxiety

being like the central feature,

rather than drama or erratic or dangerous,

which is how we typically describe the cluster B's.

What would a commonly understood term be

for people who are cluster A?

What would a commonly understood term be?

Yeah, you know, you're talking about narcissists and...

Okay.

Like paranoid or...

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or schizoid or schizoid is interchangeably pronounced that way.

The other cluster A is schizotiple.

So we have schizotiple, schizoid or schizoid

and paranoid are the cluster A's.

And then the cluster C's are the avoidant, the dependent,

and the...

I'm drawing a blank here as I'm on the spot.

What's the third...

What's the third cluster C?

Obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

There's avoidant, obsessive compulsive personality,

which is completely different than OCD.

Those aren't the same.

Okay.

So when we look at cluster A, cluster B and cluster C,

do these fit on the spectrum?

If you were to make a 3D or a 2D graph of how the clusters

sit together, does that exist?

Or are these completely different universes?

So they're not completely different universes

because the problems that they create in the individual

and in the individual's relationships

are directly related to

who the person characteristically is.

So in cluster A's, these individuals

are characteristically odd and eccentric.

Okay.

In cluster B's, they're characteristically

dramatic, erratic, dangerous and severe interpersonally.

And then in the cluster C's,

they're characteristically fearful and anxious.

So all their relationships operate

based on those types of motivations

or intrinsic perceptions.

Okay. That's interesting.

All right.

Going back to the sort of nature and nurture debate,

why is the idea that hurt people, hurt people so attractive?

What makes that such a seductive explanation?

If behavioral genetics and Robert Ploman

and a couple of fucking million people

from the bio bank can explain otherwise?

Yeah.

Well, I think one is because the work of Robert Ploman,

this isn't a conspiracy theory.

I mean, it's admitted.

It's been admittedly swept under the rug

and academic circles and clinical circles

because it seems to really intimidate people

that there might be like strategy and pattern

to what we have decided as a negative behavior

at this point in our evolution, right?

That the negative behavior could potentially come naturally

or be ingrained is terrifying for people to accept.

So what they've done instead is created this idea

that everything is environmentally determined.

So the reason why there's preference for that

is if the environment created it,

maybe the environment can stop it, prevent it or modify it.

Well, look, I suppose this is a debate around

behavioral genetics overall,

but Ploman is the fifth most cited psychologist

in the 20th century.

That was a century that had fucking Freud,

that was a century that had young,

that was a century that had some of the biggest turning points

and invented the field of psychology as we know it today.

And he's the fifth most cited.

And the fact that the industry, he's been on the show,

I think he was episode 320, something

it was a long time ago now.

The fact that behavioral genetics is so

heretical to talk about, just fucking blows my mind.

Did you know Corey Clark, if you're familiar with her?

So evolutionary psychologists, she did a great study,

she sent a study out to a survey out

to every psychology professor in the United States

at a higher education institution,

got them to fill in some anonymous questions.

Asking about a variety of things,

getting a cultural temperature,

the topography of what the psychology,

psychology professor world is like,

the two most unspeakable, this should be banned,

people should not learn about it.

The two spiciest subject areas that most professors

were most likely to say they shouldn't be taught,

evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics.

And I think it speaks exactly to what you were saying there,

that in a egalitarian world that's a meritocracy

and also a capitalist competition,

if the victors get to own their successes

and the losers have to own their failures,

anything that doesn't feel like your future is entirely

in your hands is unbelievably disempowering

because it makes it feel like the outcomes in your life

are predestined before you're even born.

And as you said, this isn't deterministic,

it's probabilistic, as Plum and says,

it does not predetermine, it predisposes.

But it is disempowering, it is disempowering to find,

Chris Hemsworth did that documentary

about his health and he found out that he's got

a couple of relatively rare mutations

that predispose him to Alzheimer's.

I mean, this is just raw biology

and he's now taking supplements and adjust his lifestyle

on this diet and all the rest of it

to try and compensate for this.

But to find out that as a, you know, you've got your kid,

and if you were to have a child that had diabetes

or autism, you're not looking necessarily

for some sort of intervention to cure their autism,

you're looking to manage it.

Because we don't pathologize,

the pathologization occurs more differently

when we get into psychology than it does

when we get into what feels a bit more like biology,

even though biology is psychology for the most part.

Yeah, I could talk about this all day.

I think it's so, I think it's so fucking interesting,

the pushback against evolutionary explanations

that basically say you are being shunted forward

by forces that came about long before you

and a kind of outside of your agency

or at the very least you're gonna have to permanently fight

against, that feels disempowering and behavioral genetics

is that on steroids, right?

It's that time's a thousand.

You can't change your genes.

You can maybe turn them up and turn them down

with some happy genetic stuff,

but gene therapy as far as we know is pretty nascent.

So yeah, it's an interesting area.

Something that I love about what Ploman does though

is he talks about how everything is just,

well, we look at it from that perspective,

everything is then just differences, right?

Which I appreciate.

I like to use the word disorder

because I think once you cross a particular threshold

of arm and dysfunction,

we have to call it something different.

I mean, we can say it's like a huge difference,

but clinically it makes more sense to say,

okay, this is where we're operating outside

of the balance of what we can accept.

And so we have to call it something other than just,

oh, this person's very unique and different.

We have to say, this is problematic behavior.

Based on the type of society we're trying

to collectively create, right?

I don't find it surprising

that those are the two subjects that are considered

to be the problematic ones.

I'm not sure why people are so intimidated by that.

I do know that the problem is too is

Royd kind of commanded the ship of having this

impenetrable, untestable theory.

Like, no one can ever really prove it wrong

because it just might be that much more unconscious,

never find it.

And I think that's unconsciousness all the way down.

Yeah, but that's not, I mean, that's not,

that's not science.

You have to be able to test it.

All right, let's get into some of the different ways

that people can present.

So narcissism, I see an endless number of videos online

about how to know if you're in a relationship

with a narcissist, how to escape a narcissist.

When it comes to narcissism as a,

the motivating force behind it

is narcissism about, is it really about low self-esteem?

Oh, no.

Is it about something else?

What's it about?

No, narcissism is excessive investment in one's image,

the image that they prefer.

It's excessive investment in that preferred image

at the expense of any authentic cell.

So it's not that they have low self-esteem

in this void of shame, which is the most common idea.

I can direct you to behavioral geneticists

and evolutionary psychologists

that can blow that theory out of the water if you want,

but it's not a shame-based disorder.

It's excessive investment in one's preferred image

at the expense of cultivating a true cell.

So yeah, they get hurt and wounded and offended

and defensive and they get triggered

and they get injured

because they haven't cultivated anything

to receive a disagreement underneath that thin layer

of reflection that's on the pond

that Narcissus is gazing at.

There's nothing under there

because nothing has been examined or cultivated.

So it's like they're emotionally thin-skinned

but it's not because of shame.

It's because they didn't put any emotional muscle

underneath any of that.

But they prefer to be the way they are.

I think this really bothers people.

Why would anybody prefer to be someone

who doesn't get along with anybody?

They're entitled, they don't believe in equality.

So in a way, they expect not to get along with anybody

because everybody has to accept

that they are better than them

in order for them to get along with everybody.

Somehow, this got morphed into this idea

that it's all compensatory,

that it's all compensation for low self-esteem.

Those are just theories based by the way

on the reports of the Narcissus telling professionals that.

And perhaps an unreliable self-witness.

Perhaps.

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A difference between vulnerable and grandiose narcissism.

Does this show up?

Because I know these terms.

I can pretend that I know what I'm talking about with narcissism,

but is that bullshit?

Or is that clinically validated?

I'm sure you know exactly what they are.

A grandiose narcissist is somebody who,

you see their grandiosity overtly,

meaning they're not concealing it.

Vulnerable narcissism, depending on who you ask,

one definition of vulnerable is,

they're concealing their vulnerability.

So that a covert narcissist is someone

who conceals their vulnerability.

To me, a covert narcissist is somebody

who covertly is grandiose.

They act like they're not, but they actually are.

So you're using the term covert rather than vulnerable.

Is that the more clinically accurate term?

Covert and vulnerable narcissists are used interchangeably

for a lot of people because of the concealing of the vulnerability.

An overt narcissist is somebody who doesn't hide the fact

that they believe that they are entitled to special treatment.

So you're going to see them a mile away.

Do you look at them as having different origin stories

coming from different places, different motivations?

I personally don't.

I think that grandiosity is just being expressed

in those two individuals.

But the central feature of both of those individuals

is still their inherent grandiosity.

But the self-belief in that is different, right?

No, I would disagree with that too.

I think their belief is that they truly

have a sincere conviction that they're superior to others

and entitled to special treatment.

That's when we're going to get into heterogeneity

or the expression of that belief.

It looks a lot different.

Interesting.

So my understanding of vulnerable

or covert narcissism was that the grandiose narcissist

genuinely believes I'm the best in the world

and I believe that I'm the best in the world.

The vulnerable narcissist would present

time the best in the world to try and cover up the fact

that I don't think I'm worth anything.

They're the compensatory one who's secretly suffering

from all this hidden shame, right?

I disagree.

I think the problem is they're not shameful enough.

They don't have enough shame to put on the brakes

to stop mistreating people.

There's no motivating factor in their operating system

that puts on the brakes, because they're lacking

and empathy and lacking in conscience.

They've done recent studies too to show that

what we've historically referred to as

the vulnerable expression for the vulnerable presentation

of narcissism is 90% identical to borderline personality disorder

in criterion variables, traits.

Borderline personality disorder is another cluster B disorder

that is often associated with.

Most people, when they hear the term borderline personality,

they think of fear of abandonment,

lots of suicidal gestures or suicidal attempts.

There's this chronic feeling of emptiness

and these attempts panic and frantic attempts

to avoid abandonment.

But what actually is underneath a lot of that

are if you look at the traits underneath the borderline

personality are what we see,

how we see vulnerable narcissists operating

in relationships and in general.

There's a lot of neurotic traits, negative affectivity.

And so there's this impulsivity, there's a lashing out.

There's pathological levels of anxiety, right?

Is that the same in the grandiose?

Well, no, it's not the same in the sense

that they're not experiencing themselves that way.

But you know, just like we have people who look

narcissistic very externally,

we have, there are also people who are

narcissistic internal.

How come, okay, so one of the common patterns

that I see people talk about online is narcissists pulling

somebody in close and then suddenly pushing them away.

Why does that seem to be a pattern?

Well, because narcissists live in a dichotomous world

where something is either everything they want

or nothing they don't have the gray area,

break pedal, pause, limitation mechanism

in their operating system.

They don't have the function to use that properly.

So somebody's either idealized,

which means they're everything that they could have ever

wanted or they're devalued and then discarded,

which means they're not ideal, so they're useless.

Narcissist see human beings and relationships

as far as utility, not about, not worth.

They don't look at people how much they're worth,

they look at how useful they are.

What about psychopaths?

What makes, so I'm trying to find what the acceptable level

of something is and then turn it up to what the dysfunction is.

So what makes a psychopaths harm different

to somebody who's just losing their temper?

Everybody's lost their temper.

Right.

And that's a reaction and that's a defense

and that's part of being human.

I would say to differentiate between these two

that we're talking about,

with narcissism we see grandiosity

at the expense of equality.

And that's the engine, grandiosity

at the expense of equality.

With psychopaths what we see is exploitation of others

at the expense of any sort of honor.

They don't honor humans.

They don't have any value for human life whatsoever.

They don't see another person and think,

this person should be alive or has the right to be occupied.

What they think is I will exploit this person.

It's a doggy dog world.

If something bad befalls them,

they should have known better.

That's kind of a psychopath's mentality.

Psychopaths for the most part have more of a active grandiosity.

So if they, if you do cross them,

they're going to show you, like they're going to make you pay.

Some narcissists have what's called a passive grandiosity

where they don't care enough about you to make you pay.

You should have just known they were better than you.

And so they're not going to bother themselves with you.

Well, that's interesting.

So I imagine this means that in some situations,

psychopaths are more dangerous,

retributively, but there must be some situations

when certain types of narcissists might be more dangerous.

So you venture into the malignant narcissist

is when you're starting to move more into the exploitation

and conning that you see common in psychopathy

or anti-socials.

So there is like a sort of a bridge to that

where the malignant narcissist is kind of the bridge

between NPT and psychopathy,

again, not across the board,

but just to give a visual that, yes,

there is a severe degree of narcissism that,

and then that's what we would refer to more as like the dark

triad narcissism, where you have psychopathy,

Machiavellianism and narcissism.

The dark triad thing's kind of fascinating.

It's between Peterson and a bunch of other people

that do podcasts.

It's become like the hot new girl in school

that everybody wants to talk about.

And the dark tetrad, right?

What's that one?

That's what's that one, what's that one?

Sadism?

Is that one?

Yeah.

Is that that's the fourth one when you go for the,

when you add another?

Anyway, how common is it for somebody

who has got narcissism to also have psychopathy,

to also have Machiavellianism,

to also have sadism?

I should.

Not all narcissists and psychopaths are Machiavellian, OK?

All psychopaths are narcissists.

All psychopaths are pathologically narcissistic.

Not all narcissists are psychopaths.

OK, necessary, but not sufficient.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then Machiavellian, I would say

they're psychopathic, narcissistic, so they're both.

So I mean, as far as not all narcissists

are Machiavellian, not all narcissists are psychopathic.

All Machiavellian and psychopaths are narcissistic.

Are all Machiavellian psychopaths?

Oh, good question.

I guess if they're practicing, I guess

you could be Machiavellian in theory,

but you wouldn't ever do the things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about sadism?

I imagine it must be difficult to be a sadist

and not be a psychopath.

Yeah.

I mean, sadism is all about deriving pleasure

from the harm you inflict on others,

or the harm others are experiencing

that you just witness.

You could experience the pain they're deriving.

So, but again, you know, not all narcissists are sadistic.

You could have a narcissist.

OK, so it seems to me like, narcissism

is kind of, it's the, it's the front end of the funnel.

It's the front door to the house.

It's the, the, um, the white belt.

It's the white belt of Machiavellian.

What we're talking about here, that,

well, to a degree, yes, because in order for you

to graduate to these other, you know,

whatever you want to call it, just anti-social, not pro-social.

If you want to graduate to, you know, a way of being

where you're not interested in pro-social emotions

or behaviors at all, you could start with narcissism.

Because narcissism is something that primarily

we're supposed to outgrow when we realize

other people exist, not relationships aren't symbiotic.

You know, there are others who have a subjectivity to them.

Once you discover that in life,

and that usually happens very early,

someone says no to you.

Once you discover that someone else has autonomy

and subjectivity, your narcissism

is supposed to be challenged,

and you're supposed to start trying to find ways

to outgrow it in favor of equality, right?

Right. So you're saying that all,

all two-year-olds are narcissists and,

and I think all three-year-olds are so centered

because they don't have the brainwiring to be like altruistic

because no one, no one can explain it to them

in a two-year-old language that they don't understand.

I, I'm hungry.

I don't care the people attired.

I'm hungry.

And after a while, you realize I'm hungry,

but mom and dad are busy at the moment,

so maybe I'll delay this,

but with the narcissism,

that lesson kind of never really gets to the learned.

But even that hunger is not pathologically narcissistic,

because you don't,

because does that baby have the capacity

to learn the lesson that you just described?

That, okay, well, it's not gonna happen every time

on command or on demand.

You're gonna have to wait a little bit,

cry a little bit,

you're gonna have to be a little uncomfortable in that diaper

until human mom can come over and be human with you.

Now, a pathological narcissist or somebody

that I would say has trait inherent trait narcissism,

they'll never learn that lesson from mom.

Oh, mom's too tired, she's got stuff to do

before she comes here.

They can't, for the life of them,

figure out why the diaper isn't changed like that,

and then they hold resentment

and then they punish mom for it,

and they feel entitled to do that.

And then they can't, for the life of them,

figure out why somebody would ever have a problem

with them touching mom for that.

That's the problematic narcissism

that is a complete, to me,

it's a completely different trajectory

than the primary narcissism that we all outgrow

when we see that other people exist.

There's something to start.

Of all of the different traits here,

which is the hardest to treat or change,

which is the hardest to have an intervention on.

Is it psychopathy?

Is that the hardest to try and adjust?

Well, there is no known cure

or successful treatment for psychopathy.

They can, you contain and manage psychopathy,

you don't treat it.

There's no treatment for it.

They haven't figured something else out yet

that can actually cultivate change

in the personality of a psychopath,

even an incarcerated psychopath.

They don't think differently.

They just behave differently because they're confined.

So at this point in history,

anti-social personality psychopathy,

there isn't an effective treatment

other than some behavioral,

containment and management.

So that would be the hardest one to treat or to, you know.

But I would say that just in general,

not clinically, but in general life,

somebody who really doesn't understand

the concept of equality,

I'd say that's the hardest thing to overcome.

So grandiosity to me,

practically speaking, would be the most difficult

trait to deal with because this person seriously

is convinced that you should be treating them differently

than they should be treating you

because they are worth more

and you need to find a way to come in terms with that.

That to me is the most challenging one.

Because the sort of presence of it

precludes the fixing of it.

By nature, you would have to accept that you're less than

in order to improve.

I'm perfect as I am.

Yeah.

It's kind of like being immune

and somewhat to what the treatment would be.

Like a therapy resistant bacteria or something.

Right.

Which does exist.

So I think they exist in human personality too.

There's a there's a resistant personality.

There's a personality that's resistant

because they don't see any benefit from changing.

They like the way they are.

They're just waiting for everyone to accept them.

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All right, talking about how this shows up

on the other side of the fence,

on the side of the recipient,

the interlocutor with the person with the particular disorder.

What are the main tools of control?

What are the big levers that these people push and pull

and the dials that they turn in order to enact change

any other person?

The first thing that they typically do

is they either naturally

or they become highly skilled at mimicking

the prosocial emotions that most human beings

think everybody possesses and operates under naturally.

So what that means is like when you meet someone

and they are friendly to you, you don't think to yourself.

I wonder if they're being friendly to manipulate me.

What you think is that person's friendly.

And so they mimic that.

They mimic the typical

cues that would indicate that they're a human.

They mimic them and they do it very well

so that you let your guard down

and they do it long enough for you to completely

give up on the possibility that it's insincere.

They do that long enough.

And we call that the seduction phase

or the love bombing phase.

They are an ideal partner.

They have the same trauma you have,

the same interests you have, the same lifestyle

and life goals as you have.

They're practically getting,

they're reflecting you back to yourself

so that you'll give them this time of day.

That's the first thing to look out for.

You know, because the moment you see that slip

or there's an inconsistency or contradiction

is when you can't just take it as,

all the way they're having a bad day,

you have to start doing sadly.

You have to start doing this skeptical, scientific investigation

you know, on that behavior.

To see if there's any convergence.

To see if this is something that could potentially result

in a pattern or a strategy, you know.

Okay, so that's first step.

They lop as a normal human.

Yeah.

Promotions are, that's almost always the first,

because presumably if you steamed in

with psychopathic, manipulative, BPD, behavior

before somebody is invested in you,

the bad first date, nobody sticks about just because,

okay, that was a bit much on a first date.

Whereas a bad seven month anniversary,

you're like, I can give them a little bit more tolerance here.

So that kind of, we need to invest in people

before we can accommodate them.

That is kind of the...

Very well said.

You need to invest, yeah, you need to invest in them

before you just accept them at face value.

Cool, okay, what next?

Okay, so when there's a slip that we typically

in hindsight call a red flag,

but as it's happening, we have confirmation bias,

and we go, no, it's not that, it's just, they're just human.

You need, when there's a slip, so when the mask slips,

when there's something that's blatantly in contrast

to their prosocial presentation that they gave you

on the first or second or third day,

where it was flawless and they're the person of your dreams.

At the moment, there's something that's a contradiction

or an inconsistency, no matter how benign

or incidental it seems.

You have to take it very seriously,

and you need to start developing this idea in your head

that you're gonna see, you're gonna repeat this investigation

to see if a pattern converges, right?

It's a one off, if it's an isolated incident,

then you know, stay reasonably alert,

but not hyper vigilant, just, okay, I know it,

but this is where people go wrong.

We naturally are not neutral information processes

or not, so we're biased to information is my point.

So if you want a relationship to work,

because you really like that person on the first date,

and you really thought they were cute,

and you really like that they live close to you.

If they slip up, you're gonna use the prior information

that you know about them to justify

why you should still be with them.

Your humans don't justify

why they should not be with someone, typically.

That's part of kinship, that's part of evolution,

that's part of loss of avoidance, right?

So the first time there's a red flag,

you have to be counterintuitively like attuned to it,

because it's not gonna come naturally for you

to investigate it, what's gonna come naturally

is for you to erase it and forget about it.

That's the first, that's the second thing you do,

is the moment there's an issue

that you could potentially test for a pattern,

you need to investigate it, don't resolve the dissonance

by saying, oh, well, there's more good than bad.

That would be the second step.

It seems like attention, where attention is being drawn

and where it's being put is a really important tool

of control here, is that right?

Absolutely.

Well, just think about how you've done

your past relationships, you don't think

you should have to add this step of analysis,

you just think that felt good, that's cool.

Oh, they showed up again a second time,

that felt good, that was cool.

I might be falling in love here,

or this person's a really good friend,

they're really generous twice now.

We have to accept the sad reality

that people know and bank on you thinking that way,

and they're gonna exploit that from the beginning.

You just have to introduce that into your worldview,

or you run the risk of getting duped or manipulated

by one of these people, and it could be financially

devastating, emotionally devastating,

devastating with your time, your resources.

Is there a particular profile of victim

that these sorts of people tend to go for?

Good question.

I would say no, and here's why.

Oh, they're an equal opportunity attacker.

I think they vet everyone, and the analogy I use

is often like the used car sales person.

Anyone who shows up on the lot,

they're gonna try to sell a used car to.

They're not gonna try to figure out how vulnerable you are.

They're gonna just start doing their things,

their pitches first.

They will stick around the people

who take the second, third, fourth, and fifth pitch.

I mean, the one that just walks away outright,

they're not gonna necessarily follow home.

Oh, they just split testing

for who's got sufficient resilience to put up with them.

There will eventually be somebody who is resilient and not,

not because they're flawed,

but because they just have a lot of resilience.

Who will take the fifth and sixth and seventh piece of BS

and not like fact checker do anything?

And then those are the ones they'll latch onto.

Actually, it's not necessarily that the,

well, it is a kind of selection,

but it's closer to natural selection and conscious selection.

Yes.

They're gonna put out a particular type of behavior,

and there is gonna be a drop off

and a survival bias is gonna kick in,

and whoever is left.

So this is a different way for me to ask the same question.

Yeah.

Who are the people that end up in these situations?

Because it seems to me it would be countering

to you to think about somebody who is mentally resilient

because a lot of the time when I think about people

who are in relationships with BPD,

nurses and personnel,

it's that they were almost a kind of vulnerability,

there was a vulnerability that was manipulated by them.

So how do you square?

Is it resilience?

Is there something else?

Who are the people that end up going deep?

I would say it's an emotional resilience.

They can take a beating long, long enough

to where by the time they even start entertaining

the possibility that they should exit the relationship,

they're already kind of biochemically hijacked,

hypodynamic.

And so, but I'm cautious to have this conversation

to say that I think that you should be less agreeable

or less conscientious or less kind

because those aren't the things

that got you into the bad situation.

What got you into the bad situation

is someone exploiting those things.

Well, that's exactly what I was thinking

as you were talking, you know, you're saying,

well, you must be careful about this thing

in the first stage and this thing at the second stage,

I go, wow, you know, what a difficult house skeptical

and cynical and highly scrutinous,

I must be of all of the different people

that I encounter in case they're gonna,

and what you're suggesting is that

the issue is not your positive traits,

it was that there was a vector of weakness,

perhaps a strength turned up too much,

your psychological resilience,

your preparedness to turn the other cheek and forgive,

your perhaps leaky boundaries, inability to assert,

I have to assume that a lack of assertiveness

is maybe one of the things that would be quite common here.

Well, yeah, I mean,

fear that if you assert yourself

that you're gonna like offend the person

or that if standing up for yourself

means that the other person is gonna be disappointed,

I mean, I think that there's always gonna be room

for all of us to investigate our own character

and our own vulnerabilities.

I just personally, I've seen people who have come

from very well to do and emotionally stable upbringing

get duped by this, following the death of their spouse,

let's say, they're vulnerable in that sense,

but they were never somebody who was like a pushover

or somebody who gave everything,

everyone, everyone, everything they ever wanted.

They just so happened to be in a vulnerable spot at 60

when they're widowed, and now they wanna fall in love again,

and somebody swooped, goes into their orbit

and exploits them.

You don't need a history of being a doormat

or a history of being abused as a child

to fall prey to these individuals.

They will vet anyone, you know?

That's just important to realize.

So, I'm cautious to, I don't want people to think

that they have to do a personality makeover to avoid this,

either.

I think that's what a lot of, unfortunately,

a lot of people that I've worked with and that I've consulted with,

they tell me that they've gone to three or four therapists

who have told them this only happened

because you're co-dependent or because you have a need

to do your attachment or because you didn't work out

your childhood issues with your mom

and you were vulnerable to this.

That's not necessarily true.

No, it might be that we have to come to terms with the fact

that they're people who don't play by the social rules

we've decided are beneficial.

And so, they're gonna pretend to play by them

and then they're gonna exploit you.

And it's not that you had a bad childhood

or your relationship with your dad wasn't strong enough,

it's just that person found an opportunity.

They're preferential and opportunistic.

With the bits of behavior,

what about flirting or creating drama to manipulate people?

When does flirting and drama turn into manipulation?

In the cluster B personalities,

seduction is kind of like,

like a central feature of that.

It's charm and seduction and charisma.

So I would say, I mean, that's kind of a hard question

to answer because they use that as a-

Of that flirtation is manipulation.

They use it to begin with.

Wow, yeah, that's-

Even if they're sincerely attracted to you,

they're still using flirtation as a way.

A people with close to be personality disorders,

are they more attractive on average, physically?

Why do you ask?

That's an interesting question.

I was wondering whether there is a physical manifestation

that goes along with the behavioral trait.

Yeah, that's a good question.

That'd be a good question for an evolutionary psychologist too.

But I'll answer it kind of generically, if you will.

I think, yeah, there's an interesting correlation

between, you know, it's common for them to be attractive.

There's not a particular physical type though.

I don't want to give off that idea.

Short, tall, big.

I think what it adds more to do with is someone's,

not their actual physical appearance,

but their self-concept, they have a very high self-concept.

So it's almost like they have this way of convincing you

to believe about them, what they believe about themselves,

even if it's not objectively true.

So that's why I'm kind of hesitant is

because somebody who is objectively unattractive

could be a cluster B and actually be very attractive.

Like people would find them very attractive,

even if they're not traditionally what we would constitute it.

Or, you know, that's the presentation.

It's the giling, endearing, charming.

And it's also their authentic belief

that they're that great.

I mean, it's a sincere belief.

That's why I say it's not a compensation

because they truly are, they're feeling great.

Well, we use confidence as a proxy for competence, right?

Like it's typically confidence is a lagging measure

of somebody's level of development in whatever they are confident

about.

Our confidence is in some way supposed to be associated

with whatever the fuck we're confident about.

And therefore, if somebody turns up

and they've full of bravado and they're very seductive,

that can give the effect of being attractive

without the challenge of having to be attractive.

Correct.

And it's, I guess, messy or at least complex

the way that humans become attracted.

And it's not role, physicality.

That's an important aspect.

I think a lot of times what we mistake,

what we mistake arrogance for confidence in these individuals.

So they are very relaxed and they're calm.

And we can think, oh, they're comfortable in their own skin.

Maybe they're really confident.

They could actually just be arrogance, right?

So the difference between confidence and arrogance,

confidence is an earned self-esteem or self-regard.

Like, you're confident because if someone asks you a question

or asks you to put this to the test,

you're confident because you could perform it and demonstrate

your ability or capacity.

Irrigants is just saying shit.

Like, it's saying I'm good at something,

but not actually backing it up.

But the problem with a narcissist is,

they believe they're great at things that they can't back up.

So it's very convincing.

Is there not actually second guessing themselves

when they're trying to sell you something?

They're sincerely believing they're good

at something that they could be terrible.

But the sales pitch is authentic, you know?

I'm wondering how many, oh, actually, that's a good question.

Of the people that we're talking about,

of these cluster B people.

What are the things that they would almost never do?

Because you've mentioned, these personalities

will behave in a manner that kind of breaks down defenses

that laps as a normal functioning human.

And then after they've got investment

and you're prepared to accommodate more,

that's when the veil tends to get revealed.

Or I guess in the version of narcissism,

it's that they want you.

They are trying to get you because you are everything to them,

but once they've got you, perhaps you're disposed of.

I'm wondering if there are any behaviors,

you mentioned calm, sort of in control.

I'm wondering if there are any behaviors

that are very rare to see manifest in these people,

would ever see them be very, very loud and out of control?

And is that a rare thing?

Are they rarely funny?

Are they rarely, what are the potential behaviors

that if somebody does do it?

That would be a suggestion that they're not,

or that is much rarer to see?

That they're not what?

In this cluster B.

Oh, like ways to determine if somebody wouldn't fit the criteria,

like by a particular, based on something that they do do.

I'm aware that this is difficult

because the lapping as a human thing

means that all of that can be performed.

But I just wondered if there was something

that these people typically don't have access to even in performance.

Yeah, that's really, that's a great question.

And that, I mean, that's certainly a relevant question

across the board because personal relationships,

but even clinical practice, I was thinking,

it's important to know these things.

I'll tell you this.

There's something called,

and I'm not gonna go into detail in this,

I'll just kind of introduce the topic,

and then people can research it,

but neurological soft signs,

are these psychomotor sort of,

like behaviors, tendencies that are operating in the body?

Some people who have a disorder like this,

you can actually tell by that,

some mannerisms and ways in which their system is operating

from just a neurological perspective,

where there's signs that you can see in their psychomotor behavior.

How they would respond and make eye contact

after a particular type of question,

their body, their face, their eyes,

I mean, it sounds kind of crazy, almost woo-woo,

but there's certain things that can show you

how they're processing or perceiving information.

This would require a lot of study and skill,

but it is a thing that there are these sort of signs,

if you will, not across the board,

but there's that.

Something they wouldn't do often is collaborate

or take accountability.

Even performatively, rather.

Yeah, I mean, they don't really have the capacity

to do it all the time, even in a famed way,

where they're constantly in character.

I mean, it'll slip eventually,

there'll be a contradiction or an inconsistency,

because they lack the function to use a thought properly,

long term to say, oh, this is probably a time

where I should be agreeable, they lack that function.

They can do it temporarily, but they can't maintain it.

Permit.