10 Signs Someone in Your Life is a Narcissist & 4 Ways to Navigate the Relationship with Them

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And because we don't have a deep understanding of our own strengths. That's where a lack of self esteem and self confidence comes from. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. If you're listening, you're investing in your physical, mental, emotional, financial and spiritual health. On Purpose is the space, the safe space where we create conversations, dialogue, insights, research on how you can simply, practically and in a focused way create change in your life. If you want to change habits, you're in the right place. If you want to change and transform patterns of thought, you're in exactly the right place. And if you want to create change in the world, effect change in the world, you're in the right place. Thank you so much for joining me. My name is Jay Shetty. If you've been here before, I am so grateful to you. You mean the world to me. If you've never been here before and this is your first episode, I want to thank you for being here. I am so deeply committed to this community that we have. And it has been astounding to me at how many of you are listening to episodes on the Daily Now. And the feedback I hear from you all is that the more you listen, the more you grow, the more you change, the more you're able to effect change in your lives and the people that you love. And that fills me with so much joy. It fills me with so much excitement and happiness. So thank you so much for doing that. Now, today's topic is something I've been thinking about for a while, and it's because it's something that's come up with my clients. Now, as some of you know, I'm a. I'm a life coach, a relationship coach, and I work with different people. All of my clients also have a therapist. I really believe in co serving with a therapist because I believe that therapists fantastically help people entangle their past and really make sense of the thoughts and patterns that they've developed. And as a coach, it's really about building forward. But this was a theme that kept recurring in some of my sessions. And I would talk to a lot of my therapist friends about this a lot as well. And it's all about narcissism. And I started to find out that a lot of people that I was working with may have been dating a narcissist at one point in time, may have come up with someone or been with someone at some point in their life who had narcissistic personality disorder. And so I became more interested in this space. And so I've been researching, learning about this space and I wanted to share it with you today because I think it's important. Today you will discover that approximately 0.5% of the United States population, or 1 in 200 people, has narcissistic personality disorder. And this is study from the Recovery village. And so when you hear that number, you think, well, that's not a lot of people. I'm not likely to bump into someone. But we realize that there are a lot of people that are on that spectrum. And so some of us may have dealt with someone who's in an extreme case and some people less so. But we start to recognize that there are also significant gender differences when it comes to the prevalence of the disorder. Says Recovery Village, that 75% of people with narcissistic personality disorder are men. And the demographics go on to give a bit more detail. 2 to 6% of those seeking help from mental health clinics, 6% of forensic analysts, 20% of people in the military, and 17% of first year medical students. Now a lot of what I'm going to share with you today are more signs that you can notice in people. And even if that person doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder or npd, they may have certain traits. And it's important for us to be mindful of these traits in people we meet and even in ourselves, because a lot of these traits can create a lot of challenges moving forward for us and for our relationships. So sometimes when I reflect on this list, I actually find that there are elements of this in a lot of people. Right. And it's just valuable for us to be aware so we can actually navigate our relationships better. So here are the ways to know if you're with a narcissist, dating a narcissist, maybe married to one, maybe you have elements of this in yourself and, and I want to do this in a safe space of acceptance and non judgment and encouraging us to find help and support, whether it's through therapy in the beginning and of course through coaching long term to just encourage you to move towards that, whether you're with someone that way, you know a friend who's in that scenario as well. Because sometimes we find out too late and act too late. So one of the first simplest ways that we start to notice that someone has narcissistic tendencies and is that they struggle to talk about others for too long. The conversation has to constantly shift back to talking about them. So if they start a conversation, it will often be about them. If they start a conversation, it will often reflect on everyone talking about them. They enjoy the idea of, of planting the seed of a problem in a group of people and hearing what everyone has to say about them. And so we start to notice that if the conversation veers off, if the conversation goes in another direction, they will want to drag the conversation back to them. Now often when we're around these people, we'll say things like, oh well, they're so selfish or they're so self centered or, or we don't enjoy being around that kind of person because we always feel unheard or we feel like that person's unaware of us. And this can stay in relationships for years. Before someone asks for help or someone even knows that they have this trait. And it takes a lot of courage as a friend to share this with them. And often we're not the right person. We may not be close enough, we may not have the trust of that individual. And I think we have to be aware of that. And that if you're going to say to someone that you know that they are self centered or selfish or the conversation is always about them, it's important that you also do this in a compassionate, loving way. It's very easy to assume that they should know and they should realize, but making them aware is extremely healthy if you're the right person. And of course, doing it through the right person is even more important. Someone that that person trusts, respects, maybe even looks up to is, is what's truly needed. Now, an extended part of this number two is that this person craves attention, right? They crave attention. They want everything at the party to be about them. They want everything at the event to be about them. They're not great at celebrating others. They struggle when someone else is the center of attention. Think about proposing at someone else's wedding. Think about announcing something at someone else's birthday. These are all methods to crave attention. And the Mayo Clinic says that although the cause of narcissistic personality disorder isn't known, some researchers think that in biologically vulnerable children, parenting styles that are overprotective or neglectful may have an impact. Genetics and neurobiology also may play a role in the development of narcissistic personality disorder. So we start to recognize it's not that that person doesn't have a choice and you're feeling sorry for them, but it is understanding the context of how they got there. The Mayo Clinic also says that as with personality development and with other mental health disorders, even though the cause is complex, there's three areas that it can be linked to. The first is environment mismatches in parent child relationships with either excessive adoration or or excessive criticism that is poorly attuned to the child's experience. I found this fascinating, right? So this idea that someone craves attention is because they received so much attention growing up for every tiny thing they did, that they're now looking for everyone to give them the same thing. Or it was the opposite. They were given no attention for anything they did. And so there's this natural movement towards it. Now, I'm sure as you're listening to this, you may be thinking, jay, I feel like that a bit. There's times when I want attention because I didn't get any. Or there's times when I want attention because my parents always gave me some. So you can start to notice how we all have different aspects of this within ourself, within the development of our own personality. Now, whether we notice it is one thing, whether someone else notices it is another, and whether it's a recurring pattern is another. So we start to see how the prevalence of this in our life is dependent on how obvious it is and how repetitive it is to the people around us. We often find that we can be self aware about something, but most people around us don't notice it. Or we're self aware and someone notices it. And not only are we self, aware, not only does someone notice it, but it is a repetitive cycle. Us being aware of it ourselves is really powerful because self awareness is where all change begins. But at the same time, there are lots of people in our lives, including us, who we sometimes miss this. We miss the understanding because from our perspective, we think we're right. We're like, of course I crave attention, Everyone craves attention. And we assume that because we crave attention, everyone must be craving the same thing. So now it makes it a competition. So we can find that in npd. And in terms of being a narcissist, that becomes this craving of competition. The other cause that comes up by the Mayo Clinic is genetics. Inherited characteristics. Of course, if family members had aspects of this, we start to mirror it, we start to replicate it. And then the third is neurobiology, the connection between the brain and behavior and thinking. And of course, the biggest area of negative impact this creates is in relationship difficulties. Because we start to recognize that people really struggle to connect deeply with someone who has narcissistic tendencies. Or we connect for a certain period of time, but then often people feel exhausted and drained. The third way to know that you're with a narcissist is that they don't accept responsibility if they make a mistake. They're not vulnerable enough, they're not open enough to accept that they are part of the problem. And I think in relationships this often becomes a big, big, big issue. Because when someone doesn't take responsibility, sometimes we can take it all on ourselves. And we think it's all our fault. We think it's all because of us. And when that person doesn't take responsibility, we can often start to feel like we're the only ones responsible. Or the opposite happens. We know we're not the only ones responsible, but we keep waiting, maybe even forcing for them to take responsibility. But the penny hasn't dropped for them yet. They haven't had it click yet. That they are a part of the challenge that exists. The fourth way of knowing is that they make you feel like you're wrong. That comes from the last one. When someone doesn't accept responsibility, a big part of that is they make you feel like you're wrong. Now, I've had clients who've been in this space of being made to feel like they're the ones that are wrong, they're the ones that are responsible. And whenever they've been in this position, the thing that I found is that they internalize it. If you're sincere, if you're genuine, you start to internalize this. And this starts to play on your own self worth and your own self esteem. And this is why I'm doing this episode, because I believe that where we want to get to is this perfect balance of assessment and examination of ourself. But acceptance of ourselves, right? You've got assessment of yourself, but you've got acceptance of yourself. That's where we want to live between those two words, when often what we live between is perfection and completely pulverizing ourselves. Or we live between criticizing ourself or falsely cheering ourselves on, or we live in between judging ourselves or trying to boost ourselves up. And what I find is that acceptance and assessment are healthier words. For example, should we assess whether we're improving and growing? Of course we should. Should we examine whether we've grown since last year and developed? Of course we should. But when we do that in a critical way. So the question is, how do you assess yourself without being critical? How do you examine yourself without being judgmental? Here's a way to do it. The way to do it is be more regular and consistent with assessing yourself and having clear criteria. For example, let's say I'm really committed to. To become more organized, right? Let's say that's a personal commitment for me. And so today I'll say, on a scale of 1 to 10, how organized do I think I am? And let's say I give myself a 5. This is hypothetical, by the way. I consider myself to be very organized. And now I come up with a plan to be organized. And in a month's time I ask myself the same question, how organized do I think I am? And I may say, well, I'm at a six and a half now. I'm measuring progress. And because I've done that month on month and now in 12 months, I could say, oh, I'm at a seven and a half. That's amazing. I've gone up two and a half points than when I started and now I feel really confident about this area. The mistake we make is when we kind of just think about it in our head, but we don't have a scale. We make it subjective. We ask ourselves randomly on any given day when something goes wrong, how we feel about ourselves. And of course we don't rate ourselves highly We've been getting so many amazing reviews for the Daily J, my new daily guided meditation series on the Calm app. You might have heard a couple of snippets on the podcast for a few weeks, so in case you haven't had the chance to check it out, I just wanted to share this review from Caitlin, an elementary school teacher from New Jersey. Here's what she had to say I have over nine years of experience in the American public school education system, including teaching throughout the pandemic. Over the past two years, I have seen extreme cases of anxiety in my students like never before. Many of these children have never experienced these feelings before and most are not even sure of what they are feeling. My school district has spent a great deal of time focusing on social emotional learning sel through this school year, we try to teach coping skills and focus on teaching kids how to deal with their feelings and become the best version of themselves. As someone who has also been experiencing the many anxieties of the world today, I have recently downloaded the Calm app thanks to my mum. My mom and I are big fans of yours and once she heard that you will have seven minutes of Daily J each day, she encouraged me in doing this. Your meaningful ideas and meditation have quickly become part of my daily routine so much that I have begun incorporating some of them into my SEL morning meetings with my third graders. 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When you have to go pick up meds, it can really dig into your downtime because you have to wait in traffic, wait to find parking, and then stand there waiting in the pharmacy line. Amazon Pharmacy delivers meds right to your door fast without ever having to get up and do anything. Your patience and your feet will thank you. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy, healthcare just got less painful. When you hear wellness, you probably think of healthy living, making better choices and quality organic food, right? Or maybe you just think of Whole Foods Market. Because wellness and Whole Foods really go hand in hand. You walk in the store and it's like wellness everywhere. This time of year, a lot of people set goals for themselves, wellness goals. And it can be tough to stay on top of them. But Whole Foods is built to help you succeed trying to eat healthier. Lean protein is the foundation of a healthy diet, but you can't live on protein alone. So Whole Foods makes meal prep easy with ready to eat salad kits and ready to heat rice and bean blends from their 365 brand. Just pair with your favorite protein and. And you're done. And when it's easy to eat healthy, you're more likely to do it right. And we haven't even touched on all the vitamins and supplements at Whole Foods. So for all things wellness, shop for them at Whole Foods Market. The next thing to do is to be as clear with yourself about your strengths as you are about your weaknesses. I find that a lot of us are unable to name our strengths, but we find it very easy to reel off a list of weaknesses. What are your strengths? What are the parts of your life that you feel really confident about? And if you struggle with this, I want you to ask a colleague, I want you to ask a friend, I want you to ask a family member, and I want you to ask a parent, where do you excel? Where do you truly shine? I want you to be so aware of that. And I want you to know that. Because when you know you have strengths and then you know your weaknesses, you can live between acceptance and assessment. But often we don't live in acceptance. We live in criticism. Because we only know our flaws. We know our flaws deeply and we know our strengths weakly. Let me repeat that. We know our flaws deeply and we know our strengths weakly or shallowly. And because we don't have a deep understanding of our own strengths. That's where a lack of self esteem and self confidence comes from. Number five is superiority complex. Apart from making you feel like you're the one that's wrong, there's a way of making you feel inferior. You don't work as hard as them, you don't work as fast as them, you don't work as smart as them. Right. If your partner always compares themselves to you or you to them, you start to notice that this isn't a healthy trait. Now, what do you do in that case? What do you do when your partner does this? The first thing is to make them aware that you don't think it's fair, that you don't think it's clear that you don't think it's the right way to feel encouraged. We have to give the person the opportunity to become aware. Now, if they still don't change, chances are they will need therapy, that they will need support. And as I go through this podcast, I'll also add that you have to set boundaries because a lot of the times this person is using you as a punching bag in their journey to perfection, right? And they're never going to get to perfection, so they're going to keep punching, trying to release that pressure. And so you have to be really careful that you don't allow yourself to become a punching bag, to be made to feel inferior consistently, which it takes people years to recover and rebound from things like this. To this group, number six is everything feels like a threat to them. Everyone you mention, any person, any idea, it starts to feel like a threat. And the reason why I'm making you aware of that is because I don't want any of you to get caught in the act of feeling like what you're doing is wrong. I think a lot of people live in this fear in their relationships and that I'm doing something wrong and my partner is upset. Now, it's different if you cheat on someone, is different if you lie, it's different if you steal. But often we think we're doing something wrong because they make everything feel like a threat. You're meeting up with a friend you care about, you're meeting up with an old friend, you're starting a new job, you're applying for something new. You're getting advice from someone and you might start to say, well, you know, everyone has these traits. Of course we do. We all have this because of how we were raised. And it's good to be aware of these things in people because we are then not surprised. I think so much of the time we get surprised. We think, oh, but they loved me. But then we unpack it and we go, oh, wait a minute. I saw all those things. I just ignored them. Right? I just ignored them. The next one is they switch the combo to themselves. Whenever you say something, they switch it back to themselves. And this was something I had to train myself out of. I found that I always thought it was a way of building rapport, and. And I started to realize how it wasn't effective listening. So if someone says to me, oh, my gosh, I just went skydiving this year, rather than me saying, how was that experience for you? My reaction was like, oh, yeah, I went last year as well. It was amazing. And so I found that actually being a better listener, actually asking better questions has allowed me to reduce some of these tendencies by me saying, how was that experience for you? Like, what was your favorite part about it? What was the worst part about it? And then me sharing my experience actually builds up a much healthier bond. So even if you're listening to this, and I hope you are noticing some of these traits within yourself that you start to recognize that you don't want to treat yourself this way either. Sometimes we take out our narcissism on ourself. Now, number eight is taking credit. Often the narcissist wants to take credit for everything, whether they did it or not. And. And they will find a way to scoop up the credit whether they did it or not. Something to be very wary of. And as you can notice, some of these are very normal. And when you're first starting a relationship, it's so easy to be blinded by love. It's so easy to think, oh, yeah, no, that's fine. And then as time goes on, we start to go, oh, I knew this. I noticed this. So I wanted to flag that one to you. And number nine and ten. Number nine is a really subtle one. And I found that, you know, there were elements of this that I did as well in my relationship that I had to really work on. This was reclaiming difficult moments as yours. So if your partner says, I had a really long day today, you'd say, well, tell me about it. I had a longer day. Right? Or, oh, my gosh, I'm really stressed about this week. And you're like, well, tell me about it. I've got so much. I'm stressed about this week. Someone says, I've got a lot of planning to do for this meeting. And you say, well, I've got 10 of those meetings this week. So you're reducing the other person. This is all almost a accumulation of all the other areas where you reduce the other person's efforts because you're reclaiming difficulty as your badge of honor. And I have spent a lot of time noticing this in myself. And when I've done that, because, again, I want a little bit of attention and, you know, all of us do. And so being able to accept that and say, yeah, okay. There were times in my relationship with Radhi where she would tell me she's stressed about something, and I'd be like, well, I'm more stressed than you are. Imagine what I've got on. And then you start to realize, well, why am I minimizing? She wasn't comparing her stress to me. She wasn't trying to say that her stress was bigger than mine or greater than mine. But because I'm not feeling heard myself, and because I'm not vocalizing how I feel myself, I want to use her vocalization as my opportunity. If you use someone else's opportunity for vulnerability as a chance to vocalize your own feelings, you are reducing their voice. You're reducing their vulnerability. Take a moment to reflect on yourself. It's so easy for us to listen to these and think about other people, but it is important to see some of this in ourself and again, to safely assess and accept ourselves for how we are. We're not bad people. We've adopted some poor habits and patterns, right? If you have a bad diet, it doesn't make you a bad person. It just means you picked up some unhealthy habits along the way that have become your normality. If a car is driving through the mud and it gets muddy, it doesn't make the car mud. It just means that it rolled in some mud, it picked up some mud along the way, but it can be washed, it can be cleansed, it can be detoxed if you like. It can be purified. And that is the same with us. And number 10 is a term called love bombing. This is probably the hardest one. It's when people are overly loving in the beginning. They're treating you, they're complimenting you, they're going all out telling you how special you are, how important you are, how amazing you are. They're excessively intense. They put you on a pedestal, they give you extra gifts and positive compliments, and it just gives you so much energy. And if you're one of these people, I hope you hear this, because it makes other people Feel like they are going crazy. Right? When you exaggeratedly fall in love with someone and the reason you're doing it is because you want them to think you're amazing. You over love in the beginning because you want someone else to think you're amazing. You want them to say, you are the best thing that ever happened to me. You want them to say, you're the most incredible thing that ever happened to me. And then all of a sudden when you run out of that, you drop them and you say, hey, I don't think we had anything real. I don't think there was anything between us. I didn't really feel the spark, I didn't really feel the chemistry. I tried my best. I overloved you. You didn't love me back enough. And that's another thing. We love in order to be loved back, but the other person can't keep up with that exaggerated, inflated flattery. And so then we go, oh, well, you never loved me the same as I loved you. And so how many of you have ever experienced that in your life where someone is so excessively, exaggeratedly in love with you, you feel like this is going somewhere promising and then they lean away. If you've been through that, I just want you to understand that that is a challenge for someone. That is something they're dealing with. And I know everything about you makes you want to think you did something wrong or you messed up. And chances are it was a trait that made them do that. Especially if you were just happy and going along. And I just want you to take a moment again to assess what happened. But accept yourself the way you are. If you've experienced any of this, what have you got to learn? What do you do? One of the biggest things is developing this understanding of your strengths, your self esteem, not based on what someone sees in you, but what you see in yourself. That is self esteem. Self esteem is not based on what others see in you. It's based on what you see in yourself. Self confidence is not what other people notice, it's what you wear. And naturally, whether people notice or not, it's always there. I want you to thank you for listening to this episode. I really hope that it helped. I want you to share it with a friend because I want people to be aware that sometimes the people that they're with, the conversations that they're having, that often it's really, really important that people find help and support and therapy that we don't just allow them to be this way and just keep dealing with it and think, oh yeah, we're trying to help them and we can help them out of this. We need talented, skilled experts and professionals to support people out of these. Do not put that pressure on yourself. I think so many people in relationships are trying to be their partner's therapist. It's really tough to do that and it isn't your role. It's not your job. But helping them to find help is an amazing thing you can do. And I want to end by reading some amazing reviews. And I thank you so much. We're growing every week in reviews. We're nearly at the 20,000 goal for the end of this year. So please, please, please. It would mean the world to me if you left a review. This is a review from Sarah. She says, I've resisted podcasts for some reason, but realize now that it can be just like a breath of fresh air in a world with such high demand. Listening to your guidance is a wonderful way to slow down and and make the most of moments we have. Thank you so much. This is from Krista Jay. Your podcast has changed my life for the better. I was going through a tough time with anxiety, depression, and panic attacks when I came across your book, Think Like a Monk. The book helped me so much and I tell everyone I know to read it. I started listening to your podcast while I was reading the book and I haven't stopped listening since. You always have had such good wisdom and helpful advice. I take something away from every single one that makes my life better. Thank you so much for everything you do. And I'm going to read one more because there's so many beautiful one. This one is from Courtney. I've started my workday with you for the past couple of months. Something about your voice and unbiased advice brings me such peace and energy to greet the day ahead of me. I love learning something new with your guests and I just want to thank you for bringing me calm wisdom and happiness each day. Thank you all who've left a review. Thank you to everyone who's listening. I hope you're enjoying this week's episode. I'll see you soon.

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