How to Get Over Narcissists, Cheating, and Heartbreak...the RIGHT Way

You can't go in taking minor transgressions from everybody and always extrapolating that out to the worst possible thing, or you'd never have a relationship with anyone. Welcome, everybody, to the Love Life podcast. Before I get started with the podcast, I wanted to make sure everyone knew we have the retreat coming up from the 9th to the 15th of September. This is the one and only retreat I am doing this year. I am joined by my wife Audrey, by Stephen, my brother, by my whole family and by my whole team. It is going to be an incredible six days of immersive coaching. We are down to the last few spots on the retreat, so jump on board now while they're available. MHretreat.com is the link. Come spend six days with me on the beach in Florida this September. All right, I am joined today by Stephen Hussey.

Hello everyone.

And Audrey Hussey. Hello. Three Husseys.

The gang.

The gang. I am excited to be back. We haven't had you for a minute, Stephen.

No, we haven't.

He's been all over the world.

Balkans, Italy, Zion with you. And now we're back in lovely England.

We're in mum's house, in fact.

We are in our mum's house.

Yeah. We wanted to do an episode kind of talking about self-compassion and the role it plays in the aftermath of a toxic relationship, an abusive relationship, a narcissistic relationship, and the role that accountability plays in taking ownership for that relationship and for the way we enter into relationships in the future. And are there any limits on self-compassion? Are there any limits on accountability? How do the two fit together? I recently did a podcast with our friend Lewis Howes, who I've known for many years now. Lewis recently conducted a conversation on his podcast, the School of Greatness, between myself and Saadia Khan, who there may be people who listen to this podcast who also listen to Saadia Khan, known for dating advice, relationship advice, perhaps more geared towards men. I think it's safe to say, but I know that there are women who listen to her, too. And we had a conversation some would call a debate.

It was definitely a debate.

It was definitely a debate. It wasn't pitched as a debate.

I had my popcorn.

You did.

Okay. I was watching in the dream room.

I know when Lewis had us on, it wasn't kind of, you know, Lewis had said to me, hey, this isn't a debate. We just want to hear from both of you on this subject. And the subject was ostensibly cheating for that episode.

And.

It turned out we did have quite different views on that subject and what the appropriate reaction should be from the person who had been cheated on. And I thought it was interesting. I initially, I hadn't intended to follow up on that podcast with anything because I kind of felt like, well, it's out there. If people want to know what I have to say, they can go and watch that podcast. And I would encourage anyone, if you want to kind of look at, you know, how that played out, go watch that podcast. But when I read the comments under the podcast, that made me feel like it was actually worth further discussion because it was interesting and in some cases quite surprising to see the division in the comments and how other people felt about things I was saying, things Saadia was saying, and there were, you know, people who agreed more with me. There were people who agreed more with Saadia. And there were, I think I would say there was a decent amount of misunderstanding in the comments about what was actually being expressed as well. So I know, Stephen, you've been through these comments and you've pulled out a few for us to talk about, but maybe we can start by trying to outline what may be a couple of the causes of the division were in that conversation. Stephen, tell me if you think this is accurate, but it felt like part of it was when Lewis talked about, you know, how we should respond to being cheated on. My first response was to go to a place of condemnation for someone having cheated and for that behavior. and a huge degree of compassion for ourselves in being in the situation on the receiving end of that behavior. And Saadia's response seemed to lean more towards a place of what could I have done differently? Why didn't I see this? And it very much put the focus on you know, how did I allow myself to get into this situation?

Yes.

Is that fair? I want to make sure I'm representing the two sides fairly.

Yes, I think that's fair. I think in that debate, I think Saadia was highlighting taking accountability for the choices we make in relationships. Maybe the kind of person you've chosen to begin with. I think she gave the example of someone who's hypersexualized. And maybe if you choose a person who's hypersexual and their needs are not fulfilled in a relationship, maybe that person is more liable. do go and cheat. I don't think she was saying that that makes it right, but I think she was saying we have to look inwards and maybe ask, why did I choose these kinds of people? Why do I permit these kind of behaviours? What signs did I ignore early on? Or red flags? And I think her point was there are always signs. So I think her point of taking responsibility was Well, there are always signs, therefore the onus is on us to be more aware of those things early on rather because someone doesn't, her point was someone doesn't just suddenly do that 15 years into a marriage.

So I think even just to maybe use that as a jumping off point. Firstly, the idea of if we choose someone who's hypersexualized, I'm not entirely sure how we define hypersexualized, but if we just say, well, we choose someone with a high sex drive, well, we ourselves could have a high sex drive. You know, high sex drive doesn't have to go hand in hand with, you know, lapse in morals. No.

And you made that point. How do you not, how do you know you might just have a partner who's giving you a great sex life and you're having an amazing relationship. So that doesn't necessarily make you think, oh, well, they have a propensity to need to go and get that met elsewhere because they're getting it met with me. Right.

And there are also plenty of people who, and I know, Audrey, you've made this point in the past, or at least I've heard you make this point, that there are plenty of people who may be very sexual people, but their response to being in a relationship where they're not getting enough sex is to say, this is the wrong relationship for me. It's not to say, therefore, let me go cheat and, and lie and betray. And it's a, it's a very, it's actually a bit of a non-sequitur in many ways. I, I'm not saying that the kind of, you know, that it may not be more likely for someone with a very high sex drive or who's more promiscuous to cheat. But that's true in people who are more likely to have a lapse in morals. It's not just a connection that you can make for everyone, that someone really enjoys sex and therefore you better keep them entertained or they're going to cheat. That can't be the way we go into relationships.

No, and someone might have that sex drive and also have the morals to say, I'm not being fulfilled here. I think we don't have compatible sex drives and this is a real problem, right? There might be multiple conversations. That doesn't mean they're going to be dishonest, deceive you, lie, all the rest of it. So, yeah.

When you said that, you know, Saadia mentioned there's always signs.

Yes.

I don't agree with that. I don't agree that there's always signs. and I think that oftentimes the signs reveal themselves at a point where it's actually really difficult for somebody to leave. I think often, especially with antagonistic, narcissistic, kind of antisocial types of personalities, those things tend to reveal themselves quite a lot further into the relationship. So when we're looking at it through the lens of blame and accountability, which is what this whole conversation was about, which is, you know, if you've been cheated on, there is a level, which is not your point, Matt, it was the point that Sadiya was making. There's a level of accountability that you need to take for the fact that that happened because it is a reflection of the partner that you chose. I don't know that I agree with that. I think that is, you know, that is the case for some relationships and some situations where we do ignore things from the beginning because we're excited. And even then it's like, you know, people are human, you make mistakes and Sometimes you get carried away because you really like someone, but sometimes it's also just not that obvious because people don't show their sides themselves. Or people are not equipped. They don't have the tools to be able to see those things as red flags and those things as warning signs that they shouldn't get in a relationship with someone. So to me, I feel like it's, it's really, it lacks empathy and lacks compassion for the fact that you know, a lot of people find themselves in these situations and they don't feel like they, you know, they feel completely blindsided by it.

Yeah. I, one of the things that's interesting about narcissistic relationships is how people can be truly, and I would argue rightly, shocked at just what someone else is capable of when the chips are down. That it's very, it's quite a simplistic thing to suggest in hindsight, oh, I can draw a line between this thing they used to do that was bad at a three out of 10, and this thing they ended up doing, which was bad at a level 1000. yeah, but plenty of people do things that are bad at a three out of ten. It doesn't mean that they're capable of the devastation that some people are capable of on their worst day. And, you know, I've talked about this with Dr. Ramani before, that idea that a lot of people, when they're, when they find themselves in narcissistic relationships, one of the most disorienting, world-shifting mind-blowing moments is when they realize that on their worst day, someone didn't throw them a life raft or, you know, they. They think, oh, but if I was really in trouble, if I was really suffering, this person would show up for me. And then, you know, Dr. Romani, I know, has stories of people having, you know, cancer and finding that their partner. won't even drive them to the hospital, is completely uninterested. And them going, oh my God. Because you don't know how someone's gonna react to you having an illness until you have an illness.

And these things happen in increments. They don't happen all at once. It's funny you talk about Dr. Ramani. I told you this. I listened to a podcast with her on her podcast, which is called Surviving Narcissism. and she interviewed Evan Rachel Wood, who is Marilyn Manson's ex-girlfriend and who came out publicly and spoke out about the fact that he was abusive and, you know, all sorts of things. And first of all, she was, like, 18 years old. And secondly, she talks, you know, at depths and at length about the fact that they were friends for a long time, and he was really lovely to her and that, you know, in the beginning he very much just got to know her so well and studied everything about her so that he was the perfect partner. And it was only after a few months in when he felt like she was in love and, you know, it was solid that he started in small ways to change and the coercive control started and he started forcing her to distance herself from people and being this mean and anyway, you can, if you want the full story, you can listen to the podcast. They will do it justice far better than myself. It was such a perfect depiction to me of a situation where you cannot blame the victim. You cannot blame the person who was cheated on in that situation or who was abused in that situation because he cheated on her as well. You can't blame this 18-year-old child who got in a relationship with a man who was 16 years older than her and quite clearly, you know, allegedly did all these things and is Yeah, just-.

Well, this is the other thing, right? Especially if you're young, you haven't been given a reason to have a mistrust of what someone is saying and showing you. And many people, they may have been like, well, my last three relationships had complete trust. So the first time you meet someone who is very good at making you feel crazy, making you feel like you're doing things wrong or you're upsetting them, They're calling you labels you haven't had. You're like, that for you can be very disorienting and confusing, but you might initially just trust them because you're used to taking people at their word. So for then it to be like, well, you were naive or whatever, it's like, no, this person was skilled at manipulating a person who was trusting.

Which, by the way, isn't just true of someone who's young. It can be true of someone who just hasn't encountered that kind of animal before.

No, exactly.

You could be in your 30s, 40s or 50s and have had relatively healthy, you could have been blessed with relatively healthy people in your life, albeit people who weren't right for you or people you turned out not to be right for, but people who were fairly healthy and, and suddenly come across, I talk about it in the book. You know, there's a reason why in the chapter, my new book, love life, available at love life book.com. it, there's a chapter there called how to leave when you can't seem to leave, which is ostensibly about narcissistic relationships, but it can work for different kinds of relationships. And there's a reason why in the first few paragraphs I talk about narcissists as crocodiles who are not to be treated like dogs. You know, you kind of, there's an intuitive nature to how we think about dogs, right? There's a reason why, like, there's a Show called the Dog Whisperer from back in the day. Because there was a, like, what he came along and did was show that, Hey, there's a nature to dogs that we can actually understand. And what I found interesting is how much of what he said about dogs can apply to like children, right? Because it's the same thing, like the behavior you reward and the love you give at the right moments and so on, and how that trains a dog over time. What you show isn't acceptable. A crocodile doesn't give a fuck what's acceptable. You can't train a crocodile to go, no.

I have this image of you. It reminds me, you know when we saw that person walking down our street walking their giant pig?

Yeah.

I have this image of you trying to, like, walk a crocodile.

There was, there was a weird, just to give context to that story, me and Audrey were walking to our local coffee shop, and there was a couple unironically walking a giant pig down a LA neighborhood like a dog. Wasn't like a little, wasn't one of those little, like, tiny pigs. It was like a proper full-size, like, farm yard pig being walked down, like, this neighborhood in LA. It was so strange.

But you know the reason I brought up Evan Rachel Woods is because I think she's quite an extreme example of if you look at, like I say, her choice in man, you could, she's the epitome of, like, you kind of should have seen the warning signs and you should take accountability for it. But I think when you look at that situation, you're like, how can you possibly blame this person? Because her circumstances, she's just not to blame in that situation. And I think it's exactly the same thing with, with most people who get betrayed and cheated on and end up in abusive situations and whatnot. there is a certain amount of accountability that one should take and there is lessons that you can get from it. There are ways that you can say, you know, I will not make that mistake again. But to not only come out of that sort of trauma, because let's face it, it's a trauma when someone cheats on you or when somebody betrays you in that kind of a way, to leave that trauma and then on top of it be expected to berate yourself and blame yourself for what happened to you, to me just feels very cruel.

There's also something interesting to say about that idea of, you know, Stephen, you said there are, you may not have learned yet that there are people you can never take at their word. That not, you know, we've, we will have lived, lived a very naive life if we've never learned that people can lie. But if we find someone who is capable of lying at a level we've never experienced before. That can be a shocking realization, right? And the reason I bring that up is because in the same way that there are people who don't, until they experience it, they don't realize that someone can be pathological in their lying. There are people who come out of like on the other side of that kind of abuse who when they go out into the world again, they have the opposite problem, which is that now they feel they can't trust anything anyone says.

Yes.

And I think that's important to look at as a spectrum because when you realize there are people who can't trust anything anymore, because they realize that someone can be literally swearing blind that they're telling the truth, do all the right things to indicate they're telling the truth, and still they were betraying them the whole time and continuing to. When they can no longer trust anything, part of the healing is to come back to the center to be able to start to trust people again. in a world that, and this is the hard part for people in that situation, is that the world can't always be trusted. So you're trying to help people to get to a point where they can understand that people can tell you the truth in a world where it's also possible that someone can still be lying to you. And if you may are making the point that you missed something. and therefore you need to now look at what you missed. You're also potentially creating a really dangerous Dynamic for your future relationships, because the message you can receive there is it's going to be my fault if I miss something. So I need to go into every relationship from now on in this ultra hypervigilant state, looking for every little thing that someone is doing wrong and making accurate extrapolations from that about the worst possible thing they could do, that this could be signaling. And that also doesn't make for a pleasant person to have a relationship with.

Right.

The person who can never Overlook minor. I God, how lucky am I that you did Overlook things that I did and that you were able to give me grace, Audrey, because that allowed us to be together today. I'm not suggesting that there aren't. Of course, there are things we can't Overlook, and there are things that you didn't Overlook because we had a conversation about them. But my point is it. You couldn't predict whether that meant that I became more of what you wanted or that I ended up doing the worst possible thing. you couldn't know that.

You could have been a crocodile.

Could have been a crocodile. But you can't go in taking minor transgressions from everybody and always extrapolating that out to the worst possible thing, or you'd never have a relationship with anyone.

Well, this leads to a really good point that guy winch talks about in his book, emotional first aid. And he talks about in the context of rejection, but it easily applies here as well. But what he says when your self-esteem takes a battering in those situations, what you tend to do is over personalize and over generalize. So he says, basically you might think you over generalize, you think this always happens to me, or I'm never going to find someone, or in this case, I am always going to attract people who betray me. Like I'm in danger of always naively attracting those kind of toxic people. And he says, then what we do is we engage in a needless kind of self criticism. which he says, basically, you spend hours and hours looking for the critical wrong move. What did I do wrong? Maybe I'd sent the text at the wrong time. Maybe I said the wrong things. Maybe this is why I provoked in that person. And he says, you have to counter that in that moment because, you know, rejection, betrayal, these things are already really damaging. But you can. He basically says you can really, like, infect the wound by piling on yourself and kicking yourself when you're down now. and I think this is the point you got into it a bit with Saadia is in your response to these things psychologically, where you were arguing for a kind of self-compassion and she was taking issue with that of too much self-compassion means you kind of, to paraphrase her, I think she felt it leads you to be complacent, overly accepting of your own behaviors. And she thought by extrapolation, you become overly accepting of others. Like, you're, you're, if you're so compassionate, you just end up going, well, I have compassion for people, so I'm gonna allow this person to be who they are, or I'm gonna get in this situation again. So she saw self-compassion as this kind of dangerous thing that can happen when you respond. And you took some umbrage with that because you felt that, you know, self-blame now is only gonna hurt your self-esteem more, whereas you need to be building yourself. back up.

Well, I think what gets us, I actually think what gets us into trouble is that we don't ration out compassion equally between other people and ourselves. That's the problem, is that we have endless compassion for someone else in a relationship like that. And, well, you know, maybe they, you know, they've cheated on me lots of times because they've had a bad upbringing or, you know, they're so sorry every time. And then I feel sorry for them because they cry and I forgive them, and I'm just. you know, I can see they're hurting or I, you know, I can see how I sort of make them do it because I get, you know, like, I'm a difficult person to be with. We, that's an excess of compassion towards someone else that ends up going beyond compassion and just being an enabling Behavior. So. And I I, by the way, I would say that's often fear disguised as compassion. I think often that's a kind of. you know, we call it empathy, but what we really are is terrified of leaving. And so we say, I'm being empathetic towards someone, but it does become a kind of convenient mask for our own fear.

Like you always say, it's a fear of lighting up the fuse that blows up your whole life.

Yeah, no one wants to light the fuse to blow up their own life. You know, and for a lot of people, especially who are deep into relationships and marriages, especially where finances are concerned and they know that they're going to be in a really bad situation financially, especially when emotionally they have a core abandonment wound that there's nothing worse than the idea of being alone or losing this person because they perhaps, you know, it was certainly irrationally, but emotionally they feel like they won't survive without this person. It leads them to make excuses for just about any behavior, which, by the way, to be fair to Saadia, I think is a big part of the point that she was making. is that we at some point have to take responsibility for. I, I don't agree that we have to, we should take responsibility for someone cheating in the first place. But if they continue to cheat and we continue to live with this person and believe they're going to do something different, of course we have to take responsibility for our part in that. And what lesson are we not learning? and why aren't we learning it? So I actually, what may not have come across in that conversation is that Saadia and I share an awful lot of ground in believing that people need to take responsibility for that.

Yeah, and I think you both share more ground than you disagree on. I think she was not as enthusiastic about self-compassion, which are things where you disagree.

And to come back to that point, I believe that we have a massive deficit in self-compassion. and that's why we stay with people like this. What we need to do is like a Jack Cornfield said, you know, your compassion is your, your compassion for people is incomplete if it doesn't include yourself. I would argue compassion doesn't lead us to forgive everyone else all the time and hurt ourselves. That only happens if we lack self-compassion self-compassion is what makes us say enough is enough. the person that I am here to take care of and protect ultimately is me. And I am not protecting the one person in the world I'm supposed to be protecting. Self-compassion isn't self-indulgence self-compassion isn't being soft on ourselves. Self-compassion says, what is the most loving thing I could do for myself today? and in abusive relationships, it will be two things, by the way. It will be forgive myself for having stayed and understanding the intricate, complex reasons why I stayed and that it was never simple for me to leave. You know, from the outside, it may have looked crazy for me to stay. but if you actually look back at my upbringing, if you look back at where I've come from, if you look back at what I've been through, if you look back at the wounds that I have, if you look at the challenges I've had internally, actually, there was nothing simple about me leaving. And I'm. I'm gonna recognize how hard it was for me to leave. And if it was easy for me to leave, I would have done it a long time ago. That's one element of self-compassion the other element of self-compassion is if I'm finally loving myself on that level, where I'm finally making space for myself and why I am the way I am and why these things have been so hard for me, I actually can start to develop an affection for myself. And I can start from that affectionate place. I can start to say, what would loving myself look like today? What would being compassionate to myself look like today? It wouldn't just look like understanding why I've done this and forgiving myself for that. It would also look like doing something about it. And so in that sense, the accountability that I believe Saadia is talking about doesn't most productively come from shaming ourselves. It comes from loving ourselves. It comes from self-compassion. Self-compassion makes us want to do better for ourselves. It makes us want to take care of ourselves. in the same way that love for one's child makes you want the best for them. Right? It doesn't love for one's child doesn't make a parent say, give them all the bad things in the world because that's what they're asking for. True love for one's child makes a parent say, what's the best thing for them? Even if the best thing for them makes them cry in the next 10 minutes.

Yeah.

Right. So, so that kind of love leads to accountability, leads to a sense of ownership.

And by the way, I think, and I think this is where I, I disagree with one of the commenters. One of the commenters kind of said, like, Sardia was realism and you were idealism trying to make it like, I guess it's more hard-nosed and real to take responsibility for your folks.

Like the tough love perspective.

Yeah. But my issue with that is, I think the self-compassion actually gets you closer to the truth. It's not only pragmatic in that it helps you more. Like in your situation, when you're heartbroken in bed, feel like terrible, it's only pragmatic to start doing loving things. It's not gonna help in that situation to punch yourself harder and harder. That's not gonna make you wanna get out of bed and start enjoying your life again. So it's pragmatic to start loving yourself in that moment and go, I've got all these amazing qualities as well. These are all the reasons I'd be excellent in a relationship and I'm compassionate. I'm warm, I'm smart, I have great friends, I have a great life, you know, but that's also more true. It's not true if you're cheated on and someone lived a double life and you didn't know about it to then just go to here's all the things I messed up on. That's such an incomplete picture of the truth. The truth might be I have unbelievable amazing qualities and this person took advantage of them. and yes, in your own reflection later on, you can assess the reasons you might choose certain people or ignore if there are red flags, if you ignore them. But, but that's only such a tiny part of the real picture. The real picture is you have all these wonderful things. And that's what guy winch said as well, which is like, if you took every rejection as a real proper rejection of you, well, you just wouldn't date again because you'd assume all these people are rejecting you for these deep inner reasons about you. But he said, that's so rarely ever, ever true. It's about you not quite being the right fit. It's about someone else having their own thing going on. They just got back with their ex. Something just happened in their life. All these reasons. So for you to take on this whole weight of, like, what do I need to change is just kind of also living in a kind of false reality. Do you know what I mean?

100. And, and I think There's a, as you were speaking just then, I thought there's an interesting way to illustrate, I think, both sides of the argument, which is let's say that part of your pattern in dating is to over give and to over empathize. Well, that can play out lots of different ways, depending on who you come across. If you come across a secure person and you over give and you attach too quickly, the result of that might be that you never get past week three because that person might see, oh, this is too much for me. This is too intense and they might back away. Right. If you do that to someone who's toxic, they might infiltrate your life and love bomb you and devastate you by what they're capable of over the next six months. You're not responsible for the love bombers behaviour. You may be responsible or you are responsible for the pattern that is making your love life challenging. But in the case of the secure person, it just meant that you pushed someone away. In the case of the toxic person, it meant that they were able to come in and in a very sinister way, take hold of you and manipulate you and betray you. You're responsible for the pattern. You're not responsible for the sinister things that someone did.

Yes. that's right.

That's so true.

And that's a, that's a big distinction. And, and to conflate the two is really, it actually, it creates a level of Shame and self-loathing that I think is really, really, really counterproductive to someone healing.

Yeah.

We have to acknowledge the pain someone's been through, right? acknowledge what they've just suffered and then look at what are the patterns that are making it more likely that you get into these situations? And how from a place of self-compassion do we make sure this never happens again?

And self-compassion gets you to the initial thought, I deserve I deserve the right behavior.

That comes from self-compassion.

It does.

I deserve better. I deserve better. Let us know in your emails podcast@matthewhussy.com, which you can either write or send us a little, I'm calling it an answer phone message, but you can send us a little voice note on an email.

I'll call it an answer It feels.

More fun, doesn't it?

90S radio.

But leave us, do leave us either a voice note or leave us an email and let us know what you hear when you hear all of this. What helps you through this conversation? Do you disagree with us? You know, do you have a different opinion? Did you agree more with Saadia's case that she was making? And if so, why? Like, let's talk about it. If you haven't already, make sure to go and subscribe to my private email. The3Relationships.com is the link for that and I will see you in your inbox this coming Friday with a brand new letter from me. If you've been enjoying the book Love Life and my writing style, if you enjoy the free content that you get from us on the podcast and YouTube, this is another way that you should be taking advantage of all of this information because it's delivered for free to your email every single Friday. And other than that, I mean, we just look forward to speaking to you in the next episode. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Audrey.

Thank you, guys. Thank you.

The great conversation. Thank you all out there. We'll see you next time. Be well and love life.