3 KEYS to Healing Your Heart: Break Free from TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS & Find LOVE

Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's gonna be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in. If someone watching or listening is in a relationship with someone for a long time that they really love, they care about, and they have this pattern of distancing themselves emotionally, shutting down, or kicking and screaming. What can they do to support them in discovering tools, creating awareness around it, finding a therapist or a coach to support them in growing?

I think one of the most complicated things is you have two individuals trying to navigate a relationship where we both have our stuff from the past. Because what often happens in those moments when someone's kicking and screaming or detaching, chances are it could be activating my old lived experience. Right. So if someone removes themself distance, just like my mom once did to navigate whatever it is that they're feeling, a difficult conversation that we're having something not to do with me at all. Difficult experience they're having at work or with their family inherently in their distance, it's going to activate me.

Right.

It's going to be bring me right back to in childhood when my mom was emotionally distant or when she was giving me the silent treatment to express her, you know, disappointment at whatever I was doing in that. and it's gonna then activate the way I deal with it. So what happens is we have two people kind of ever kind of cycling through these threat-based responses, and neither of them are able to kind of return to that grounded state of presence. So the best thing I think that we can do is, and I have a lot of tools not only to begin to self-identify which state of nervous system activation you're in so that you can begin to regulate yourself. really helpful, and this is outside of even romantic partnerships for your friends, for your family members, can be really helpful to have the awareness of signs and signals that they're in a state of emotional system or nervous system activation. Because sometimes when we understand that, oh, this person is, you know, fleeing the room and can't have this conversation right now, not because it's not important to them, but because they're having their own threat-based reaction. that can give us a moment of compassion. It can maybe give us access to do something differently, not to allow it to activate our own threat response, which is going to perceive it probably differently. Oh, well, they're leaving because this isn't important for me. And then, of course, going back to this idea of co-regulation, the more ground that we're able to remain in those moments and the more open our partners or our loved ones are to co-regulating with us, I mean, we can actually help them calm down from those stressful reactive moments so that then they can shift their focus, they can actually shift the point of the brain that they're operating from and hear us and speak to us and negotiate what's happening in a much more common rational way. But I like to add that point in because sometimes we want to shake our partners and just get them to hear us in this moment where they're a million miles away or they're screaming and yelling. and unfortunately those aren't the moments where they're going to be able to hear us. Until they're in a calmer brain state, quite literally, they're not gonna be focused on what we're saying. They're gonna be locked and loaded in their perspective, and their nervous system's gonna be locked and loaded in their habitual.

Way that they need to do right then to find the safety. This is fascinating because people watching or listening typically are the type of people that want to improve their life. They wanna grow, they wanna find tools to have more awareness, more personal power, more, you know, progress, all these different things. So I'm assuming people watching and listening might resonate with this. Why is it so challenging for an individual who has been in a trauma bonded relationship and now they're aware of it, or they're in a family that has maybe had some stagnant behaviors and patterns that doesn't want to grow. Why is it so hard for one individual in a family or a relationship to try to improve and grow and develop new habits and transform themselves and think differently and talk differently and act differently? Why is it so challenging in a family dynamic or an intimate relationship to grow when others aren't willing to grow?

While we all are evolving creatures, I mean, I think it's kind of intrinsically what the experience of being human is. It's a process of evolving, becoming, process of movement, yet at the same time, our nervous system is wired to prefer the familiar. Simply, we don't like change. While we can change and we can create incredible change and transformation, our nervous system actually prefers to stay the same. It finds change and movement very stressful. So when faced with change, often in ourselves even, how to do the work was really around that concept of the resistance and the reason why we're so stuck in these habitual patterns, because anytime we set the intention to do different and then more so when we follow through with making new choices, we do meet that pull back to that familiar through the thoughts in our mind, the discomfort in our body, and before we know it, we're right back in those habitual patterns. So we struggle to change, even though we can change. our nervous system prefers us not to, and our relationships equally struggle. When we begin to experience someone anew, or when we're the person making new choices, especially in a family where dynamics and roles have been repeated and practiced and validated for so long, then really like dominoes, right? Here's someone new that's maybe putting a new perspective on the family experience. Might be really difficult to hear.

Right?

A different truth about how it was when we have our own rehearsed story of how the family is or isn't or whatever it is. More so when someone begins to act in a new way, then chances are there's going to be some impact on that dynamic.

Interesting.

There's going to be a challenge to the individual identity. Sometimes it's the challenge to the family identity, what we thought we were now maybe we're not as much.

Yeah.

And then there's going to be a reorganization of the different roles within the family. So again, it comes down to change. How equipped is each individual in whatever relationship, dyad or family unit, to deal with the stress of change. And as far as I see it, a lot of us who were raised with past generations were not yet equipped. We didn't have the tools, we didn't have the resources, we didn't have the attuned caretaking in our childhood to learn how to navigate the stress of change.

I know you've talked about this before on here, but how did you, for those that didn't hear this in a previous interview, how did you navigate this as you were evolving, changing, growing, developing? in your 20s, 30s, with your family dynamic, not in your intimate relationship, although that has evolved and changed as well. But let's start with the family dynamic before we talk about intimate dynamic.

Yeah, it was really challenging in my family coming from a family that was very boundary list, codependent. We had a very unified family identity. I was kind of taught growing up that family is everything with this idea of right putting family, family needs first, even going back to this concept of selfishness. So all of that was, you know, kind of ingrained in my belief system and very dynamically, like I was sharing when we began showed up in how I showed up or how little I showed up in my relationship. So as I started to become aware and see all of the moments where I wasn't giving myself space, and it was glaringly present in my relationship with my family, that I was living actually in quite close physical proximity. By this point, I had moved home to the Philadelphia area. They were living right outside of Philadelphia. So I endless opportunity to be at family dinner on Sunday or my mom's standard doctor's appointment with a lot of health issues that continued with my mom until her old age. So saying that to say there was a lot of the same dynamic happening at home and I was awakening to the possibility of and necessity for me of creating some more distance of not being endlessly available, of beginning to set new boundaries. And for the better part of several months, I would try I would try to decline invitations. I would try to decline phone calls and not be immediately available. And I say try because it was always met with a running theme in my family was when there was distance in especially contact immediately because there was so much health trauma that happened, health, you know, concerns and worry and anxiety. The immediate belief or worry would be when someone was out of contact for an unpredictable amount of time, it must be because Something terrible happened to them.

Interesting.

Are they in the hospital? Are they sick?

Is something wrong? So, there was a history of fear.

History of fear. Which would create this hypervigilant monitoring of contact. When I didn't call, for instance, on the regular, you know, weekly phone call, it was, you know, is everything okay? Just tell me everything's okay. And I would call at a very particular time frame up until this period of time where I was like, well, wait a minute. you're only doing that to placate this kind of anxiety cycle. You don't actually want to be calling in those moments. Yes, I wanted contact with my family, but I didn't need to have regular contact every three days to tell them that I was alive. So saying that to say, I tried to put up boundaries to create separation, to create distance and space for me to begin to honor what I wanted and needed. By this point, I was building a practice. I was in a committed relationship. I had other things that I wanted to be putting my time and attention to. It was always met with this fear, this worry that would escalate into, I mean, I would get texts like, Jesus Christ, Nicole, just tell us you're okay. You know, we're getting worried. We're gonna call hospitals, like endless. So I came to the really difficult decision to make a break and to take, I always kind of start to say ask for space, but I didn't really ask for space. I more or less told my family that I was going to take space away from the family unit, that I would be unavailable for any sort of obligation or you know, anything that for the foreseeable future. And because I wasn't, I didn't trust myself to communicate to them in person, I was so afraid that when my mom started to cry or my dad became upset because my mom was upset or my sister was devastated because her and I were very trauma bonded in a codependent relationship, trying to navigate my mom's health, I didn't trust myself to stand in my boundary. So I took the opportunity to write I'm a very long email expressing things that I hadn't fully been able to share with them in terms of what I was coming to realize and how things in the past had impacted me and end it with that statement that I was taking time away. And I didn't know how much time I would want to take or need to take, nor did I know how they would react to my request. I mean, I was very much aware of the possibility that they would be so devastated and hurt that the door wouldn't be open. on the other side of it. But at that point, I knew, I'm probably from that deeper intuitive place, my heart was telling me that I did need more space than I was able to create. So it ended up being the better part of, I think, 18 months before I started to, you know, really get curious about what they were, where they were at. I had built a lot of self-trust in that 18 months, meaning I was getting more confident that I could engage with them again and if the dynamic was exactly as I left it, I was gaining more confident that I could continue to maintain my boundaries and to, you know, live into the relationship dynamic that I wanted, regardless of what they were unable or able to do. And very gratefully, not only did they email me back near immediately, they let me know that they had been in family therapy and individual therapy and all the different types of therapy since I had, you know, ended contact with them. While it was very devastating, they on some level were appreciative of the opportunity that it gave them and us to kind of look at things newly. We've re-engaged contact over several family therapy sessions, which felt very safe to me because I wanted to have a contained conversation, not knowing essentially what I was walking into. And I signed online for that first Zoom session, and I saw my mom, my dad, and my sister for the first time in eight months. And-- Wow. We had some difficult conversations and had some future based conversations where I was able to kind of acknowledge what I wanted and needed in the relationships moving forward and intended to create for us. And since then it's just been really a gift in a lot of ways. We've been able to not only reorganize as a family, we've been able to separate that has actually allowed us to deepen and build deeper actual real now authentic connections, which has been really beautiful.

That's pretty cool, but it's really scary too. get to that place, it sounds like, because what some of your family were thinking of like, okay, I'm going to create, I don't know, hypersafety was actually unsafe for you and didn't feel healthy, right? This idea of I want to make sure everything's safe and okay is actually an unhealthy or unsafe feeling. And so you had to kind of break the cycle, which you talk about in the book. But that's scary too. What if how are they going to react? What if they disowned me? What if they never want to speak to me again? How do they get to talk about me to my friends? Like this idea of being outcasted in a sense is also scary. But it sounds like for you, you guys were able to come back and create a more meaningful relationship. But I think it's so scary for us to think about whether it's family or friends or intimate partners, like having a boundary that might seem so extreme for a while because you need it to come back to loving yourself the way that you seek that love. and then reconnecting with that partner, family or friend, right? It can be extremely challenging.

Oh, it actually, because we're social creatures and we've evolved to connect in groups, to physically survive, to emotionally gain the support that we need, any thought of any actual experience of rejection, any imagined rejection or fear of it activates actually the pain center in our brain.

Really?

So we physically feel pain And your.

Heart feels this pain too, like clenching.

And then so for me complicating that with my mom increasing in age, having very real health concerns, I mean in the back of my mind I was like imagining the possibility that I might not have an opportunity. Depending on how long I decided to stay disconnected, I was entertaining the possibility that something could have happened to my mom. She could physically die in that period of time. And then how would that be? But my commitment at the same time, my commitment and that inner knowing that that is what we all needed was so strong that I was able to make that a really, really difficult choice.

In terms of relationships, I'm curious, what is the healthiest attachment style that we should be seeking to have? And what is the most common attachment style that most people have in relationships?

Yes. Most people do not have a safe and secure attachment. this feeling of inner safety and security, peace, the ability to be yourself and the curiosity to allow someone else to be curious of who someone else is, right? Not to be demanding, domineering, manipulative, so that they're the person that you need them to be to actually allow them to space to be themselves, express their wants, express their needs, and just be who they are. Very few of us have that, of course, because we didn't have that in childhood. We didn't learn. our body for a lot of us, a lot of this book is about unlearning, peeling back, all of the definitions of love and relationship we have been taught, all of the embodied ways that we have habitually related to other people so that we could actually teach ourselves, not just read a book and be like, oh, this is what a safe and secure attachment looks like, actually teaching our mind and body how to be safe and- Experiencing and feeling it.

-Experiencing and living it.

-And not just analyzing it. -For a lot of us, that living and that practice begins with our self first. Do I feel safe and secure in who I am? Can I explore my perspectives, whatever they might be? Do I know what they are? Can I explore my emotions? For decades, my answer was no. You would ask me what I wanted to do for dinner, I couldn't tell you. I didn't know what I even wanted to, how I wanted to spend my time on a Saturday, let alone how I'm feeling, right? So a lot of this reconnection begins with creating space or a practice in our world to introduce ourself. And that was a big reason why I even wrote the workbook, How to Meet Yourself, is because we don't have that connection to us yet.

Right.

We're not safely and securely connected. I'm a million miles away on my spaceship. Someone else is endlessly distracting through work or achievement, right? Or whatever it is. Or I'm always agitated and erupting at the world around me because the reality of it is I'm not safe in my body, first and foremost. And then when I'm able to be safe in my body, then the byproduct of that often is developing that safe and secure relationship with someone else where they feel calm and grounded. and like someone is interested in valuing them for who they are. And you're able to, like I always say with the clients I would work with in couples therapy, sit next to each other on a couch and write vision of future and negotiate kind of making sure that each of your needs and wants are factored into that. The large majority of us fall into a more dysfunctional attachment style, whether it's avoidant where you're emotionally shut down and like me for many years, there's no emotional connection. I'm a little bit more anxious avoidant, where there's anxiety around distance and a pursuing pattern. There could be a disorganized attachment. I'm just giving you some of the standard ones. But there's many ways. I focus a little less on what box category do I check and a little more on just individually exploring, right, how you show up in relationships and how does it feel for you when you do.

It sounds, I mean, I was probably, I don't know, all these attachment styles of the past at one point that, were anxious, avoiding, I probably had it all. And I attracted certain individuals who also had anxious or avoidant attachment styles too. I never attracted a safe, secure individual. And maybe because I was too insecure to attract that, or they would have not attracted me because they would have seen, oh, he's got issues. I don't want that in my life right now if they're safe and secure. But it's interesting, once I started to create that safety and security within me, and it's a constant process and a journey, it's not like it's perfect, but once I started to do that, I started to see others and be like, wow, this is a healthy person. I started to see them be like, okay, let me explore more about this person. So the person, I don't know, they just got something where their heart is out of coherence. I know what that is because I used to experience that constantly. I don't think I want that dysfunction anymore. Let me lean more into the safe, secure. And it was unfamiliar when I got into this current relationship with Martha that I'm now engaged to. And it was unfamiliar, but it felt safe. And I was just like, Man, this is different. This is weird. Like, it's just never experienced this. But do people... Have you ever seen people who have an anxious or an avoidant attachment style? get in a relationship with someone who's safe and secure, does that ever happen? Or is it typically you attract something you have a similarity to or something you're lacking in?

I think often you are attracting kind of particular dynamics, though if and when you meet a safe and secure individual, I think often what you'll feel, especially if you are more of the anxious type or the high emotions, you come from a chaotic, stressful childhood typically. you might start to see them as boring, right? There's no passion. Is there anything even here? Is it worth continuing? So I would not say it's that you don't attract them or you can't find your way into meeting a person. I don't think the relationship would be something that you would pursue or would be pursued for very long. Gotcha. And those are typically the languages and how it registers, oh, there's a passion here.

Interesting.

Maybe we're just friends, friend zone this person. this is boring or it's not what I'm looking for, and then on to the next.

So what are the different types of relationships? Interdependent, is that kind of like what might seem boring when there's interdependence? Would that categorize that?

I think maybe if you're in that more chaos cycle, the emotional addiction cycle, that likely could. Though I think the reality of it is maybe there is a little bit of a boring nature when you're living calm and grounded.

Peaceful and safe and secure. There's no stress and tension.

I think to some extent, in the absence of those highs and lows for a lot of us, I do think that even as I too am moving toward a much safe, secure partnership, I do think that we on some level, that expansive part of our mind is always seeking more or bigger or what's next. So it's interesting to consider if there is intrinsically a kind of boringness and stability for all of us.

For me, it's like, what I think about is when I am on my purpose and I have a vision that I'm excited about, there's going to be challenges and ups and downs when I'm on my vision in my life. And my relationship, I want us to have fun. I want it to be like a safe, fun environment where we can connect about our lives independently and share our lives together. For me, that's exciting. That is like the highs of it, I guess, not making the relationship the battlefield. Your life is like, okay, you got to go out and hunt or provide or create or make music or art. That's going to have its ups and downs. Let's make your relationship healthy. Let's make it fun. Let's make it enjoyable. It doesn't have to be so heavy and dark and high at the same time. It's like, out of now, that's where I find a lot of peace now. is creating and experiencing that.

Yeah, that's beautiful. And what you're kind of highlighting in there is the kind of aspect of interdependence that honors the unique individual that has passion, has purpose, you know, has those deeper things that I think we are absolutely driven. And I think, again, this is sometimes where we set up an expectation of relationships that it's somehow shared. I mean, a partner has all the same interest as me, or, you know, isn't interested in anything, or, I don't know what my interests are yet. I think the more we create space for individual exploration of unique passion and purpose and hobbies and all that comes along with that, and it might be outside of the relationship in some other realm or some other relationship entirely where you go and pursue whatever your hobby is with other people, I think if we can expand that that is still part of an absolutely healthy relationship, then I do think we create the space for that.

How much do others pick up our pain?

It's almost instantaneous. And especially the people that are closest to us, but especially children, because children are very, very keen on picking up on nonverbal cues. We actually, when we're like infants, that's the way that we understand whether or not the world is safe or not. We actually see the facial expression of an adult that's our caregiver. And if the facial expression is one that mirrors safety, calm, and ease, then what we interpret that as is the world is safe. I can be calm. If the adult feels preoccupied, angry, right? Like babies pick up on that and their nervous system is also picking up on that. And so it's important for us to actually be more attuned to the ways in which other people also pick up our energy and perhaps that can offer more motivation for people to actually do the nervous system practices that can actually be helpful for them and their families.

If a parent is watching or listening to this right now and they're thinking, wow, my kids are five or 12 or 16 and I'm just starting to realize that maybe I was too reactive based on my nervous system wounds for many years, or maybe we shouldn't have yelled at each other as parents in front of our kids. We shouldn't have been so reactive in situations that we were explosive, but we didn't need to be. And they're starting to realize, oh, okay, this could have some long-term effects on kids. And they've been living that way for a decade with their kids growing up. what can they instantly tell themselves right now about how they've shown up and what are some actions they can take to start breaking the cycle for themselves and their kids who still have developing minds who maybe aren't as comfortable talking about emotions yet because they're younger still? How can they start shifting that without thinking, I've ruined my kids lives?

You know, it It's important for parents, for anyone really, to understand if I didn't know better, I couldn't do better. So if you didn't know that what you were struggling with was intergenerational trauma because you were exhibiting toxic relationship behaviors that were reflected in your childhood home and you absorbed those as the norm, as a status quo, then you wouldn't know to actually disrupt those and not pass those on or not, you know, exhibit those in your home. However, it's important that if you now do know better that you take action, that you decide, okay, I know that there's a different way, and I understand that the way that I've been behaving is unhealthy. Let me shift. That is already a step in the right direction. When it comes to children, it's important to understand that children can also engage in the healing process.

They can.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of age-appropriate ways in which we can integrate the work with children. Children can meditate, children can do breath work, children can talk about their emotions, children can, you know, do dance parties with their parents that actually help them to release some of the stress and tension of the day. And all of that can be a large part of what families can do together to actually do some collective healing and engage in age-appropriate types of practices that can help their children not only absorb the healing in the moment, but also understand for the long term, for the entirety of their lives, that they can do something that can help them to heal.

That's cool. Yeah, dance party and drawing classes together, just different things, going for a walk out in nature. That's beautiful. You mentioned these nervous system restoration practices. What are a couple of other examples you have for that where we can start healing the nervous system?

The practice that I tend to integrate into my work the most is humming.

Humming.

Humming.

Yeah.

It's so calming.

It is very calming. And most people don't know you actually have this tool that you can use whenever and it can actually help you feel calmer.

Well, humming, I mean, there's so many, you know, there's now science that's backing all this, but this has been the, you know, Ancient spiritual leaders have been om-ing and humming for thousands of years. Yes. Because of the, you know, I think om is like God, right? It's like you're connecting yourself to God and you're speaking like source, creator, breathing it. And there's chemicals involved, there's dopamine involved, and it's calming, like this feeling in your heart is starting to like get into a better rhythm, right? So there's all these benefits to this.

Yes, and when we think about it from, you know, Just integrating the nervous system perspective into that as well. There is, you know, we have like different branches of the nervous system. And the branch that actually helps us to feel relaxed and calm is the ventral vagal nerve, which is what tends to be stimulated when we own.

When we own.

Yes. And so, and so, or when we hum, right? Like, typically, like, if I'm doing work with a family and or with a child, you know, sometimes I'll pick a song that they like and we'll hum the song instead of singing it. that already is an age-appropriate practice that we can do that integrates the practice that we understand is going to be restorative to their nervous system. But we're not necessarily like shoving mental.

Health, you know, if you're going to throw- Right, right.

Just therapy talk all day. Right, right. But we're doing something that can be very health promoting. Now eventually, you know, people catch on and they say, that made me feel relaxed. That made me feel more at ease. Especially when I had all these like floating thoughts that just wouldn't go away. And so when these children are then older, they have the tools. And that's what I want for us. I want for us to be able to be the generation of cycle breakers that can build the tools for ourselves and for the next generation. And even if we want to maybe like pass some of that back. My parents are 65 and 71, and I do this stuff with them. And they're open and willing and they're Dominican parents, which I would have never thought would do anything that was related to mental health, period. But they're so willing right now, after a couple years of talking it through. And it's beautiful to see how they have never really had any kind of foundational orientation around how they can feel more settled. And now they do, and that in their old age, they can actually feel more at ease in their own bodies. It's beautiful.

If someone's in a marriage, and they realize they want to break the cycle, and they're willing to do the work themselves, but maybe their partner isn't as open yet. And they're realizing like, oh, this person, you know, I want to do this work, I'm healing, but this person's still in a nervous system reactive state and unwilling to break their own cycle. What can they do if they're the only one trying to grow and their partner is not?

That's a really tough situation. And, you know, we have to empathize anyone that is in any kind of environment, particularly a home environment, in which they have to go back to the source of their pain, right? Or back to a place where their safety is compromised in any way, their sense of psychological safety, I mean. And so, you know, what I tend to help people reorganize in terms of like their own thinking around this is like, show up, as your more healed self. Let people see how you walk and move as a more healed version of yourself. Model for them, whether it's your kids, it's your parents, it's your partner, it's friends, right? Like anyone, let them see how you're modeling how you show up differently and how you no longer feed the cycles, but you break them. And then see who is willing to join you in that process.

Right. and there may be, you know, months of resistance and challenge where you've got to keep showing up as a healed person or in the process while someone's reactive or crossing your boundaries, you've got to keep creating those boundaries, which is a challenging thing to do.

It's one of the biggest barriers to people being able to continue their cycle breaking process, which is going into the spaces that where people have not actually done the work. and them feeling like, what am I even doing this for?

Right.

Like, I may as well just like.

You know, Let it go and just-- Let it go, just-- play their game. It's so challenging.

It is very challenging. And it's, you know, process that also is going to require that they, in essence, like just tolerate the distress, which is why distress tolerance skills are so important when it comes to trauma-based work, because we have to train the mind and body to tolerate the guilt. tolerate the guilt of being the one that's doing the work and leaving others behind. Like that sometimes tends to be like how people feel about their healing. And so when we're able to reorganize the body and how it's actually internalizing that emotion, it helps them to sit with whatever guilt may still be lingering in a more settled way and not just throwing the towel.

What do you think of all the different traumas that you've worked on in your clinic and worked on with individuals, all the different types of traumas, abandonment, abuse, neglect, all these different things, bullying, being cheated on, all these different things. What one is the hardest trauma to overcome that you've seen or takes the longest for people to psychologically wrap their heads around? the wounds that they've received, you know, grieve, forgive, own, move on, process. Which one is typically the hardest to over come?

What I have seen has been the hardest and what I have seen, like people struggle with the most and has taken the most time has been abuse, childhood abuse specifically.

Them experiencing childhood abuse.

Them experiencing it, yeah, from A trusted adult, someone who either cared for them or someone who was proximal to them. And the experience of feeling almost kind of like their entire life formation was around that experience also being a part of it. And then having to extract that from all the layers of how it became a part of them is something that can be really, really hard. But also there's people that can live really abundant lives once they start doing the work in that direction.

Yes.

Usually wherever we feel the biggest triggers, that's where the work is. So when we can centralize the work there in that triggered space, right, it makes it so that we can experience probably the better part of our healing.

I guess in storytelling mythology, there's There's heroes and there's villains. And they have a similar backstory. They've both been abused or abandoned or something happened to them, right? And the villain uses that pain to hurt others. And the hero works with that pain, transforms it into making sure that others don't have that pain ever again, right? And I probably had both of those in my life of like, I've used the pain to try to be angry at others and dominate and win in sports. and then I've found transformation and being like, I don't want anyone to feel this pain ever again. And so I think we have a decision at different times of life of like, how are we going to use this trauma or this memory or this experience for us? Are we going to live it to harm others or to help others and be in service? And I think it's really tricky, speaking from experience, as an adult mind trying to understand your 5, 7, 12, 15 year old self who is sexually abused, childhood mind that's still stored inside of you. It's hard to reflect back and recall all those moments and then think about how you carried that trauma until the adult mind is reflecting on it, process however many years that is and all the decisions you've made your entire life, why you've been reactive, relationships you've gotten in, challenges you might have, good that might come from it too, and then learn how to heal that time. It's like, it's kind of a mind, you know, it's a mind mess, you know, it's tricky. And so I think you're, you know, you're probably right in that that's probably a painful one to overcome. I know there's lots of different traumas, but that one's definitely painful. But I know from experience that there is incredible peace and love on the other side. if you're willing to do the work. Took me a couple of years to really kind of feel like I could speak about it without having a nervous system response anymore. Yeah. But I think also when you realize you can overcome something like that, it gives you a lot of confidence, a lot of poise, a lot of power, a lot of peace and knowing, okay, if I can take on this as a five, seven, ten year old, what can I take on as an adult with these tools that you're providing? so I think it's a great, you know, it's a great thing that you're sharing these tools because a lot of adults don't have them still, and I'm still learning as many tools as possible. But why is that so challenging for adult minds to understand sexual abuse or some type of abuse as a child? Why is it hard for adult minds to understand that and overcome it?

Well, because there's been a really pervasive intrusion, you know, like a person feels like they are accessible to people. Like, people can hurt them, right? You know, they're vulnerable, and they've remained stuck in that vulnerability.

Yes.

And so the challenge in our adult lives is in the fact that that vulnerability just got carried on. And we still feel raw and open and vulnerable and, like, tender to the touch, and people can actually hurt us easily. And so that's why very often, like people also develop the coping mechanisms to try and protect themselves because they don't want to land in a similar situation where they're, you know, then there's yet another intrusion and how will they then survive that?

Right.

And so, you know, it makes it-- I always say, you know, when it's doubly hard to actually get through something, the reward would be double.

Right. Even more. It'll be even exponential. Right? I think so.

And I think your story, you know, which I know you've spent many years now sharing, and I think that it offers a beautiful moment for all of us to also reflect upon the fact that there is hope about abundance on the other side of healing. Because most of us think, like, when will this ever end? Will I ever heal? And we kind of get stuck in that narrative rather than in the narrative of, just do the work.

Yes.

And trust that there will be abundance on the other side. There will be a steady version of you that is meeting you on the other side.

Yeah. I started the healing Journey 10 years ago with this, with the sexual abuse that I experienced as a kid. And I thought that I had a healed a lot of it, but I still kept, and I did in certain areas, but I still kept entering relationships that proved otherwise and allowing myself to be kind of cross certain boundaries that I didn't want to, right? Because I didn't have the skills or the courage to be able to stand for the inner child inside of me and what he really needed during certain relationships. So it wasn't until about three years ago when I kind of revisited it again through intimacy. Like I was able to heal in some areas, but not every area. and that's when it took even more work. It was like an extra couple of years. So, you know, I feel like healing is a journey. It doesn't like mean, okay, I've done six months of intensive work, now I'm good. Like new things might come up in a couple of years that you have to readdress. And at least that's what's happened for me. But it, but not thinking you've got it all figured out, I think is something we need to have in mind. Be like, okay, I don't know all the answers. Even if I feel better, I'm going to keep working and processing. If we don't learn to heal our inner child as adults, what will happen to us?

Well, we can actually develop the same type of inner child wound in our children.

Ooh. Yeah. So they don't have to experience the wound. We're just passing it on, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, that comes up. Of course, you know, we're talking about intergenerational trauma having Some biological, you know, connections, right? Like, so there's already a family that perhaps is already from a nervous system perspective, from perhaps an epigenetic perspective, already having tenderness and vulnerabilities that are emotional. And then you have, you know, the possibility of there being like misattunement between a caregiver and their child. The caregiver may be so preoccupied with their own stress and trauma that they miss the social cues that their child is telling them, I need you. And that sense of emotional abandonment, you know, can surface or an inability to really relate to and connect with others, which is kind of like the general foundation of like attachment and attachment styles, right? A lot of those things can start to surface as a result of those initial imprints of the relationships that are primary to us, which are with our caregivers or individuals that are, in essence, taking care of us in the school system, any of the individuals that have proximity. And then, you know, it's going to be really important for us to also understand that whenever we're talking about, like, not wanting that to carry on to the next generation, not wanting that tender little soul in front of us to then experience the pain that we have carried for so long, we have to talk about how we can also heal our own wounds. We need to reparent ourselves while we're also parenting others. So it's an intergenerational reparenting.

Something just came up for me as you were saying this, because I think a lot of, I'm not a parent yet, but I get the sense and the feeling that a lot of parents in America today are very protective of their kids. You know, I see this. Maybe it's not everywhere, but I see a lot of that happening. They're more worried about you know, who they're hanging out with. I hear a lot of parents say, I'm never gonna let my kid do sleepovers anymore. You know, I'm taking them out of public school because it doesn't feel safe or whatever it is, right? They're just more protective as opposed to allowing their children to kind of fumble and learn along the way. And I'm curious in your perspective from what you've experienced and what you've seen with your clients, your patients, is it worse? to allow our children to be, you know, free in the world and be vulnerable to potential harm, or is it worse to overprotect them and pass on our own traumas and wounds because we keep them so close to our wounded self?

You know, I would say that it is important for us to actually allow them to have some connection to the world that isn't necessarily overprotected by us. However, it is going to be really critical for us to, as parents or parents to be, to also vet the environments that they're a part of. We need to vet the people that are their babysitters and ask them questions that are taboo, that are uncomfortable, that are likely to actually protect our children.

Right.

Be uncomfortable with your questioning.

Be uncomfortable with your questioning so that you don't have to live a life of discomfort because you didn't ask the question or regret the person. And then something would have happened that could have been avoidable. Not always, right? We can't say that, you know, it's the onus is on parents. The onus is really on people who, you know, just aren't protective of the children that they're connected to. But beyond that vetting process, right, which is a vetting process that is permissive because you're also allowing the child to be in the world and explore and understand and enjoy the world and fumble and pick themselves back up. And what we know about that process is that that also builds resiliency, right? And so we need that process in our lives in order to actually be resilient adults. But it's also going to be critical as I see it, specifically as cycle breaking parents, for us to then transition into also being advocates on behalf of our children. We need to also, in whatever way is possible, advocate for the systems that they're a part of for them to keep them safe, right? Advocate for better safety in schools, which, as we see in today's world, especially in the US, is really compromised. And also advocate for the laws that hold people accountable when they hurt children. And it's like all of these things that are also systemic are also going to be a part of the process of how we parent forward in a way that's different.

Chemistry and connection are really dangerous words to me. When somebody says to me, I feel the sense of connection. My question is, Shrink's gonna be, what does that mean to you? Right? Because what you call connection, what I call connection, what a random person on the street calls connection, may be very different things, right? There's healthy feelings of connection, feeling attuned to, feeling seen, feeling heard, a conversation that seems to just flow effortlessly. You don't feel judged. You feel safe. I'll buy that as connection. But connection when it's sort of like, you kind of feel like you're on your back foot, that now you're sort of game on, and how do I win this person over? And it's a little bit of like, you're almost like, it's almost like a match. Like how do I sort of, mm-mm-mm. Like it's a little bit gamey. That concerns me.

Wow.

Because that, to me, could actually be a throwback to somebody feeling as though I have to win this person over. What are the tricks? And you'll see this in people who have sort of a sympathetic nervous fawn response, like, how do I have to modify myself to win them? That familiarity, especially if that's how somebody had to go through childhood, can actually feel like connection. Wow. Because it's work, it's exciting. Oh my gosh, there's something I need to do. But if one doesn't feel worthy of being loved as who they are, and somebody comes and just likes you for who you are, well, that's not very fun, 'cause I don't have a template for that. You're almost like, what? Why are you like, mm? But when you're feeling you have to win someone over, that becomes exciting. So I think that that idea of chemistry can make people irrational. Listen, if you have chemistry with somebody who is empathic, compassionate, kind, and respectful, you won the lottery. We call it what it is. You're just a lucky person.

Wow.

Okay. And that's great. And there's people out there who have connection and all those goodies. and they are as blessed by the heavens as a human being can be, right? The majority of people who have connection, sadly, will say, we had this kind of connection, and that's why I excused the this and excused the that, and the this and the that. And, you know, it's funny because when I have worked with people who are in more trauma bonded relationships, this idea where it's days hot and cold and back and forth, and you keep having the same arguments and you're always justifying the hack I have for figuring out whether or not someone's in a trauma bonded relationship. I'll have a client who's in a chaotic dating relationship or like a really unhealthy relationship and will sometimes hit the wall as like, I know this is unhealthy, I love them. And I'll say, okay, right now, take a minute, tell me why you love them. And you know the answer I get when people are trauma bonded? The answer I get, or with chemistry, the answer I get is, okay Doc, give me a second. Well, you know what? It's, I don't, it's this, I don't know how to describe it. It's like this, I don't know, it's just sort of this, you can connect, that's not an answer. They can't clearly define why they love me.

Because it's, see, and whereas I asked.

That to healthy people, 'cause I have friends whose marriages are just, they're for the book, they're beautiful. And I'll say to my friend, Tell me why you love him. She's like, oh, please, my best friend. I love him. We've got each other's backs. I feel like we kind of almost read each other's minds. We do stuff together. He's the first person I want to see in the morning. I look forward to landing on my flights 'cause he's the first person I text. I miss him when I'm not. Those are answers. Nothing trauma bonded. But the whole, I don't know. That's not good.

How do you know if you're entering in a relationship through trauma bonding?

So I don't think anyone enters in that way, Louis. I think that we are, attraction's a pretty universal phenomenon, right? Although we might find different things attractive, right? Not different people find different people attractive. Attractiveness, you know, there's something that sort of, we're attracted to what we're attracted to. We're attracted to whatever is aesthetically pleasing to us, what might feel so much familiar to us, what is sort of normative for our culture, attractions, attraction. Now remember, narcissistic folks are charming, charismatic, and confident and successful, right? So that is attractive to everybody, which is why everyone's attractive to narciss, why everyone, narcissistic people are attractive to everyone. But trauma bonding is not what gets people into relationships. It's what gets them stuck. So a person might be drawn, for example, in a narcissistic relationship, to the charm, the charisma, the confidence, the attractiveness, the smoothness, the whole thing, the whole package, and say, whoa, wow, you know, I want to meet them, and you meet them, and they're every bit as charming as they were across the room. That's attraction. When you're three months in and this person's gaslighting you and manipulating you and doing shady stuff and invalidating you, and you're making excuses for that, that's trauma bonding. So someplace between attraction and trauma bonding is a process. And that's the process we'd love to be able to short circuit. But the problem is most of that process is something we call love bombing.

No, and it just like brings you into the relationship and makes you feel like you're thinking about them all the time.

Yeah. How do you pull someone out of a fairy tale? It's not easy.

How do you?

And this is why I'm the last person anyone wants to spend Valentine's Day with. Interesting. It's my clinical day. I'm like, it's best that I just stay locked in with my clients on Valentine's Day and be kept away from everyone else because I, it's not easy. So when people are in the fairy tale, I say to people like, listen, if any of you have the discipline to just eat the top off the cupcake, do it. But then don't get involved in the stumpy bottom part. Like we don't need that. You want to ride it out? Ride it out. Have some fun. Do some fun things.

But it's pretty rare.

Two to four weeks and then stop. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty rare for a person to say, okay, I'm, or, you know, or to leave after the the third invalidation or the third shady thing, right? I'm a big fan of threes. You know, first time happens, it happens. Second time it happens, it's a coincidence. Third time it happens, it's a pattern. And that's when you're like, what's happening here? But that overlap, that overlap period where love bombing turns into devaluation is this demilitarized zone that's a really dangerous place because it's where the good stuff is still happening at a pretty good frequency. But the devaluing is starting to kick in. And you're now trying to- you- just want the good stuff. And you want the good stuff. Go back to the good stuff. But it's happening enough. You're still getting enough good stuff. So it's almost like you're with this, again, it's all intermittent reinforcement, all trauma bonding. It's not consistent.

It's not consistent. It's a slot machine. I think the last time you were on here, or maybe it was the first time you were on, I didn't really know what narcissism was fully. I was kind of like, and I remember just having all these gasping moments where I was just like, starting to realize more and more about the pain of experiencing a narcissistic, either person or narcissistic tendencies from a person where I had once in a relationship felt so much love for many, many months, and then this intermittent make wrong or you need to change or whatever it was, like this less accepting of me, more shaming of me, diminishing me, trying to change me, but still bringing some of the love. But then it just faded all the way into, you know, 5% of the love and all blame, make wrong, gaslighting type of experiences. And when you first started telling me about this, I was just like, man, this is a, it's a pain. It was, because it's so painful to experience.

It's painful.

And so many people have experienced this in some way, whether it's intimate relationship or a friendship or other parents. and it's painful to be in, it's painful to try to get out of, it's painful to heal from. The whole thing is painful.

It is painful. And I'm so glad you brought up that painful part because the simplistic view is this person's mistreating you step away. But for some people, they'll say it feels like cutting off my own arm. And many people, when they're a trauma bonded, they'll say, I'm feeling like a panic attack. at the idea of even considering leaving this relationship, you know, not even having the conversation or considering doing it. And so that, so we can't live in tension all the time. That's not how the human nervous system's set up and the human psyche is not set up that way. So how do we dissipate that tension? Cognitive dissonance, we call it. We undisonance it, right? And we make the justifications. So the justifications make us feel less tense. And now we've bought another month, six months, 10 years, you know? And when life gets busy, right? Which is where when people might get married to a narcissistic person, and then there's wedding, wedding, and busy, busy, instead of a honeymoon. Distraction, distraction. Then you have kids. I've worked with so many people. That's why 20 to 25 years is not an unusual time for a marriage with a narcissistic person to break up. 'Cause around that time, everything, like there's no more, there's not so much activity to pay attention to. You're like, I hate this person. I hate them. I don't wanna be in this house with them anymore. but there was so much activity, distractions or things before work, whatever it was.

You just dealt with it enough, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, this is, you know, I have a lot of compassion for people that have experienced this because I just remember thinking, like, I would think, how do I get out of this relationship? But it's also, but I didn't have the courage. Now, I had the courage to do everything else in my life and achieve and go after my goals and have challenging conversations and succeed or whatever it might be, but I lacked the courage to have tough conversations in a previous relationship that kept me in it. And when I would think about ending the relationship, I would have heart palpitations.

-So what were you afraid of?

-Oh man, let me go back to this state now, because I feel like I'm in a healthy place now.

Sorry.

But I think I felt like I was a failure if I couldn't make the relationship work. I think I was thinking something's wrong with me if they're not accepting of me or loving me, or if they're mad or angry with me, or if they're, I was thinking, how come we can't just go back to the first few months when it was just like everything was amazing. There was never any stress. There was never any like make wrong or blame or you need to change or you can't do that or you have to do this. None of that. I was like, why can't we just go back to that experience again and have that more continuously? So Mm-. But I just also didn't know what a healthy relationship looked like ever. So I never experienced that from the model of my parents.

That's right. That's right.

I never experienced that from all the relationships I had. So I was unable to know somatically, this is healthy, this is the way it's supposed to look. Whether we work out or not, you know, based on our values or our vision or whatever, but this feels healthy.

Yeah.

I'd never felt healthy in any relationship. And so I just didn't know.

No, you don't know. And in some ways, ending-- so being honest with yourself about that moment in a relationship where, like, this is not good for me. I'm afraid, like you said, I felt a lack of courage, as it were.

And I was also afraid, like, if I end this, this person's gonna go out and try to, like, ruin my life.

Okay, well then, see, but see, the thing is that that's a real-- so those fears, some of those fears are, fears based on history. Some of those fears are fears based on identity. I'm a failure. Some of them fears based on potential reality. Because if there's one thing anyone, because this is what's challenging about narcissistic relationships, it's actually great when they break up with you. And all my clients will say, what are you talking about?

My heart's broken.

I'm like, you,'re gonna be so glad.

About this at some point. That didn't happen though.

I had to end it.

You had to end it. So when I kept saying, please end this, but they wouldn't.

They wouldn't do it. Okay.

And then they were like, you,'re breaking everything up, it's your fault.

And I'm like, oh my gosh. But when you end it, then something that often happens is a period we call post separation abuse. Oh, that's a thing. Post separation abuse can be everything from stalking to incessant text and email messages to talking badly to you by your friends. Tell your friends reaching out to your phone. Putting on passive aggressive posts on social media when they clearly everyone reads it, knows it's about you. Yeah, of course. All of that stuff, larger small, I mean, some of the stuff can be, I mean, obviously the most horrific cases, it's physical violence afterwards, but in, you know, what we're talking about is that not as dangerous, but still psychologically dangerous, people kind of know that's gonna happen and they don't want that to happen. And so they say, well, there's one way to avoid this from happening, stay in it. Stay in it. Right? But to see one of these relationships, so that partly that courage piece is to see a toxic relationship clearly. intimate relationship clearly, especially when we've had no template of healthy relationships or a history of relationships where we've made the accommodations in ourselves to make them work. Is that to see, to come into that place of courage, to see clearly that it's not okay and something needs to be done, can give people this tidal wave of terror of, that means all this other stuff in my life was a mess too. It's terrifying. It opens up this sort of door on our narratives that we sometimes don't wanna look at and examine how these other things have shaped us.

Or examines our parents. Exactly.

Our parents, exactly. That's my point, is that it feels like too much. But I have to say that, and the other fear that I hear a lot of people have is regret. What if I'm wrong? What if I'm reading this wrong? Those first three months were good, and maybe this is just a bump in the road. And if I walk away from this, and in fact, and I'm out there in the desolation of dating profiles and people's puppy pictures, what am I gonna do? And now, and they never find someone.

As good as you.

And the next person's gonna get the better version of them. And so then people go down that rabbit hole and it's almost like that, you know, it's almost you, it's like a kid with a toy. They're like, I don't really want this toy, but I don't want you to have this toy. If you've ever had a sibling, you know, the sibling doesn't give up the ball, but like, you don't want the ball, but I don't want her to have it.

That'S right.

It's that. So they, so people that fear of regret, what if I'm wrong? What if they change? What if they change for the next person? What if they move on quickly? They're gonna move on quickly. That's what they do. And all of that. And then I've got a bird in hand and it's so hard to date and all that stuff.

I've invested a year or two years or four years, whatever it is, right? Okay, gosh. How do you know? when you know.

That someone's narcissistic?

That someone's the right person.

The right person.

You know, they say you know when you know, but how do you fully know mentally, spiritually, somatically, this is healthy, this is, or could be the right person for me?

So you're neither indifferent nor ruminating. Does that make sense? And the reason I'm making that distinction-.

What does that mean?

Okay, so, You're ruminating when it's unhealthy. Like you're ruminating the whole drive to.

Work, like, how could he- you- asking people, all your friends, like, why is this happening? And what do you think about this?

And asking for advice.

All that. So that's bad.

Ruminating, yep. Indifference is bad, because I was gonna say, 'cause you're not thinking about it all the time. But I don't mean not thinking about it all the time, 'cause you're literally indifferent to someone and you're like, if they never call me back, I don't care.

Right?

I would say that in a in a good relationship, you are looking forward to seeing them. They're the first person you want to tell good news to because you feel validated that they see something in you that you don't see, that they're genuinely proud of you, that they are. But it's more of the looking forward to them. Like at even at the end of the day, I think I'm always amazed when I was, I have a friend of mine, she's been married for about 30 years, 25-30 years.

And.

She was visiting me over the summer and I was listening to her talk to her husband on the phone. And they, I mean, they're an old married couple, sorry to friend if you're listening. You know I'm talking about you. But I was overhearing their conversation and it was so beautiful. It was, he was so solicitous. He works very hard in the summer. She works very hard during the school year. And she wanted to go do all this stuff and he's like, sweetie, sweetie, you just need some time to yourself. Don't put so much on the day. Go out there, go with the kids, enjoy the beach. So it wasn't like, oh, you're having a vacation and I'm not. And he's like, I miss you so much, but I'm so glad you're having a good time and can't wait to see you. And she was the tone of their voices. But I'm like, oh my God, after over 25 years, she is as looking forward to talking to him as she probably was when they were first dating. There is a, I have several friends in these situations and there is a, you feel like you sort of, you don't feel like you're looking at a friendship. You feel like you still feel like you're looking at something like special. Sweet. And I have to say that there's a fantasy of like, imagine if you grew up with parents who had that kind of a marriage, what that does for you, what that does for your heart. But you know what, Louis, there's people out there whose parents were happily married and they end up with narcissistic folks and that's its own whole kind of mess of a situation whose parents were super happy. Like, parents were like love story. But the what the kids are narcissistic. No, the kid marries a narcissist. Why? That's a great question and I'll tell you why because I've seen it happen many times.

So they're just so compassionate and loving.

And accepting or how does it work? So go back to the charm, charisma, confidence, success, all that stuff, right? So the person's shiny and cool and neat and not and sometimes that narcissistic person not only love bombs person, they.

Love bomb their family.

Oh yeah.

Right?

And so, especially a close-knit family where everyone's doing stuff together. And so they ingratiate themselves into that system sometimes, right? Especially the happy family that's clearly a united front, but they're not a difficult front. And since they love each other and they love their kids, they believe in love, right? So that kind of cynicism that you'd see in most of the dysfunctional families, I know that they're like, who is this guy? Is more of like, come on in, like, welcome in.

Yeah, come on in.

They're getting so much validation, right? So then when things start going wonky, talk about the lack of a template. At least those of us from dysfunctional families were like, I know from messy, okay? Something messy is happening. I don't have a name for this, but they literally have not been to this planet before. They're like, what is this place? They're speaking the language I don't understand. And I'll tell you, this actually can be quite tragic. I consulted once. There was a couple of times, actually, not even once, a few times. With families where, one I remember so well, the parents had been married like 48 years, 45 years, really healthy, did all kinds of wonderful stuff together. And daughter married a narcissist, right? And the parents were almost coming to me like, we don't get this. And they said, we're devastated because these parents literally believe that like, well, he's not a very nice guy. So family court is just gonna give the parents to the nicer person. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not how this works. Your daughter needs an attorney like yesterday. And they said, well, no, we're already learning this because this process has already begun and we're watching our daughter fade in front of our eyes. And so they said, we did, and they felt very guilty because they felt like they'd given her terrible advice because they kept saying, Just trust me. Love him more. Love him more. That's what we do in our family. We love more. And sometimes that would come in the way of giving him more money. That would just be like, you guys go, go away to the Bahamas for the weekend. We'll watch the kids. Like, so it was just like they were basically giving him supply and he was getting worse and cheating on her more and it was just getting worse and worse and worse. But the family really, they said they were so, and they felt almost a sense of moral injury that they had done something wrong to their child by not seeing this, but Louis, they had no template. And there are people out there who are like, I, they don't know this. They really have this joyful, happy, happy life.

And you wanna trust the people. You wanna trust the world. You wanna be open, you wanna be.

You know, vulnerable, all that stuff. But the good thing is, but there's a good thing is that the woman did have this happy family who was this tremendous source of support. That's good. So as the whole thing fell apart, whereas most people who go through this don't have that. So they're not only do they, are they going through this nightmarish, divorce or something like that, they don't have a family of origin they can turn to, or the family of origin blames them, or the family of origin was half their problem. So they really, it can sort of double down on their grief.

Man. Now, there's four things you said about a narcissist. They're charming, charismatic, confident and successful, is that right?

Charming, charismatic, confident, successful, curious, attractive. I mean, we can keep going.

Shiny.

Shiny.

Now, is it possible to be charming, charismatic, confident, successful, attractive, and not be a narcissist?

Yes, and please- How do you know.

The difference between the two?

Well, you know, here's how you know the difference. It's, here's the thing. Charm and charisma get supply, right? They're like the fancy pollen-y thing that sticks out of a flower, right? They attract the bees and the birds, right? So there is a, there's an interpersonal skill that's cultivated in the charming and charming and charismatic person. It can happen, right? So how do you know? Because the charming, charismatic, successful, attractive person who's not narcissistic is empathic. They listen, they're warm. They're not, you know, there's always that sort of that vision of the person who's at the cocktail party that is talking to you, but they seem to almost be looking through your head at the door behind you to see if something better is coming in. They don't, you don't get that vibe from them. There is a genuineness. They don't monopolize the conversation. They are, they're, there's a genuine warmth to them. You feel it. I mean, you definitely feel it. And, and it takes a few hits at, you know, sort of a few times up at bat to be sure that that's what you're dealing with. It's a, I mean, listen, I've met charming, charismatic people who are nice, but I've met more that are narcissistic.

It's a pretty rare combo.

Right.

Yeah. Oh man, it's probably rare depending on where you are located in the country as well too, where there might be more. LA is... LA, right?

Yeah.

What is the percentage of narcissists in the country right now, do you think? This is a number, I mean, I'm.

Going to spitball a number because we have never gotten good prevalence statistics. Here's the problem. There's this thing called narcissistic personality disorder that I don't even concern myself with. It is a clinical diagnosis that can only be issued by a mental health practitioner who spent enough time with a client to actually unfurl these patterns. And no narcissists are going to a therapist.

They're often not.

And when they do, they're going in for a backdoor reason, like addiction, depression, optics, court order, court order, being forced, ultimatum by a spouse, that kind of thing. And a lot of therapists don't issue it because it's stigmatizing diagnosis and insurance, you know what I'm saying? It's the whole world of diagnosis Messey. And usually the way we figure out the prevalence of a disorder is what we call epidemiological studies, where people are brought in and like they're actually just put through the interviews and they're anonymous and it's not going on any record.

Right.

Those studies of NPD show 1 to 6% prevalence. Right.

But again, in the country. In the country. Which is like the strong on the spectrum of narcissism.

They're at the, like the highest. They're at the most, they're in the research studies. I can't even say they're at the highest.

Right.

And it's one thing I do want to correct is that just because someone has NPD doesn't mean they're more severe. It merely means they were diagnosed. That's it.

Does that make sense?

There might be others who have been diagnosed. We never diagnosed, but they're way worse, right? But if we were to look at across from mild to severe narcissism, because it is on the spectrum, so mild to severe across the population, the spitballed number that I think most of us in the trenches would probably agree with, enough narcissism. that it's causing other people problems, 15%. That's my guess. Somewhere between 15 and 20. I say certain parts of LA, 20. Certain industries.

Right, right, right.

But I would say on average somewhere around 15, and that's all types of narcissism too, which mean 85% of people aren't, which is good.

That's good, yeah. And there's what, four different types of narcissism?

I'd say probably closer to six, but.

We can go to four, yeah.

What are the- so for, I would say grandiose, which is a traditional, arrogant, pretentious, charming, charismatic, you know, kind of shiny narcissist. That's your kind of prototype of the narcissist. There's the vulnerable narcissist. This is probably, to me, the most compelling form of narcissism because this is where you see the sullenness, the petulance, the passive aggression, the chronic victimhood, the social anxiety, the failure to launch. These are people who live in fantasies of the great things they're gonna do. But they never do them. Wow. The grandiose people actually often do get them done. They will talk the big game and they'll kind of do the big game.

So the vulnerable doesn't mean they're actually intimate and vulnerable with you. No, no, no. It means that they- They themselves are vulnerable.

But they don't actually take action.

Correct. And they tell- And- And- To tell.

Everyone, I'm gonna do this project or this thing. And you know why I couldn't do it? Because that guy didn't give me the money and that guy was scammed me and that, you know, everyone takes advantage of me and that person stole my idea. that's that.

The vulnerable.

Okay. Then there's the malignant. Now, to me, the malignant narcissist is the most severe form of narcissism. And that's when we talk about stuff like the dark tetrad. And the dark tetrad is composed of narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, the willingness to take advantage of other people, and sadism. And I also believe paranoia sits in there, too. Right? So in malignant narcissism, we're talking about people who are more coercive. who are more menacing, who are more isolating. This feels a little bit more like psychopathy, but it's still narcissism. That's much more severe. Okay, then we have the communal narcissists. Communal. Communal. And these are the folks who get, so all narcissistic folks need validation. The communal narcissistic folks are interesting because they get their validation by being perceived as saviors, rescuers, and do-gooders. Like cult leaders or more- that's a severe- So a cult leader would be a communal malignant narcissist. That would be, so these are like cocktails, right? These are like you move every, you put it all together. At the extreme, a communal malignant narcissist cult leader. But some communal narcissist could be, could be a mother who does all the activities and the PTA and is the, is the, helps the little league and raises the money and goes to the galas and goes home and screams at her kids and is horrible and abuses her partner.

But on the surface, it looks like.

She'S- They think she's a saint amongst us. It's the person who walks around and everyone thinks they're humanitarian and people are like, no, no, no, I worked for their nonprofit. And like, they were with the hellscape, right?

When you look behind the curtain, you see- Bingo.

So that's the communal narcissist. So they get validation by being, by the sense of, look what a good person they are. They're rescuing puppies and they're doing this thing. They're raising all this money and they're so good. But behind the scenes they're not. Not. So it's not saying if people do nice things are communal narcissists. It's that they continue to have the.

Lack of empathy, entitlement, all that other stuff. So it's like you can, you know, 'cause I'm like, okay, well, you know, I wanna build a community and serve people. So how do you build a community? You've got a big audience. Like, how do we build communities without that becoming a thing? Is it just because if you're not.

Consistent with service all around you and your relationships Then you're more- so, I mean, are you being mean to other people?

So, if I was- Public facing, you look like the best thing ever, but.

Behind the scenes- Exactly. So you're mean to your partner, you're mean to your family, you're mean to your- Got it. People who work with you. You're inconsistent. You're, well, you're consistent. You're consistently mean to the people who.

Are behind the curtain.

You're consistently sort of putting on a show in front of the curtain. Yeah, yeah, but you're not consistent on both ways. No, no, and that's- of like service mindset. Okay, communal. No, communal. And then there's the self-righteous narcissist. And the self-righteous narcissist is judgmental, moralistic, rigid. They're often funky with money. They will, like they will, this would be a kind of person who has so much money and someone in their family has a hardship. They had a job loss and then their kid needs medical care and they'll say, well, I didn't create this situation, so I guess you'll have to figure it out. They have no heart. Like this is, it feels like no heart, but there's also this really rigid judgmental, and they judge people from the sense of, well, look at all I built. I guess I must have worked hard. They'll never account for their luck, right? Or sometimes their absence of bad luck, that kind of thing. They will say, if they say dinner's at six and you show up at 6:30 because your kid got sick, they'll say, I'm sorry we already ate. So it's very, it feels very rigid, cold, moralistic, miserly, obsessive. These are people who are often workaholics and with little care for how it would affect anyone. It's like there's workaholics out there who check in on other people, like, I'm gonna make time for you. Sure. Or once, and we're gonna do, we're taking a vacation when this is done, whatever, and they're communicating and people are.

Aware, okay, they're doing this so we could buy the house or whatever.

So is it possible to be self-righteous and not be a narcissist in them? I don't think you can ever be self-righteous and healthy. Because I think if you're self-righteous, you're like, I'm better than you. Ah, gotcha. Right, so you'll even see self-righteous narcissism in some of these kinds of exercise zealots who are like, I wake up at 4:00 a.m. and then I milk my goat and I make a smoothie and then I do raw, thousand crunches and run 10 million miles and then I worked and then I journal and then I this and I sleep at eight o'clock and I'm like, what are you talking about? Is there no other human being in your life? How do you deal with a crying sister? I told her go to hell and I drink more goat milk. You know, I mean it's that, that can be sub, and the reason I'm in shape and I'm gonna live to be 179 years old is because I do all this and you don't, you lazy, awful person.

That's self-righteous.

Lacking compassion, lacking understanding. It's lack of awareness of others. So that self-righteousness is sort of where the lack of empathy sits, right? So I don't think you can be self-righteous, I don't think there's good self-righteousness. I don't think all self-righteous people are, narcissistic, but many people said to me that self-righteous narcissism is really what happened in their family of origin. It was apparent. So there would almost be this unrealistic expectation that the child would adhere to rigid, obsessive rules like, Don't touch this, don't do this, don't sit there, eat like this. And so the kid never got to be a kid.

Okay, number six.

And number six would be more of a neglectful narcissist. So these are the people who They will not, they view everyone as object, so coffee cup, whatever. And they just neglect them until they need them.

They just discard them. Or they just don't give them attention or energy.

They don't attune, they don't have to give them attention. They don't attune to them. They don't, they, when a person around them is struggling, they won't care.

It's a lack of empathy.

It's a lack of empathy, but it's a lack of, like, for example, a malignant or a grandiose narcissist might actually get mad at someone. Like, oh my gosh, why do you keep talking to me? And people in relationships with neglectful narcissists will say, I'll take it, because at least that person was listening. But people in these relationships will literally feel like they're losing their minds because the person with them is literally not noticing. Unless they need something from them.

Wow. So they're giving the cold shoulder. They don't speak to them for days. Yeah, whatever.

Yeah, whatever. They just don't notice. They don't care. They won't know. Like you might say, like, I have the biggest presentation of the year next week. They won't even ask. Wow.

It's all about them.

It's all about them, but in this weird way. And they don't even take notice of other people. So it is a people, I've known clients in this experience and they'll say, It's as though I didn't exist. But then when I had the piece of information or something they needed, I existed. So you feel like a really neglected personal assistant.

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