Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to intentionally disturbing with Dr. Leslie. Today I want to talk to you about how to spot a narcissist before they get their claws in you. I want you to stop seeing him as a fixer upper and more of a warning label. Look, I've spent over two decades in state hospitals, jails, prisons, courtrooms, and with psychopaths. And as we all know, or I'm hoping we're learning, that a psychopath is basically a narcissist plus someone with antisocial personality disorder, because we don't have a diagnosis of psychopathy, but we do have a test for psychopathy. So I'm going to take half of that psychopath, which is the narcissist, and I want to talk about what it's like to be in a relationship with them and how to get out and be free. You're gonna get out and be free by listening to the red flags. Okay? The biggest thing I learned working with severe narcissistic men was that they were not mysterious. They were not hidden, they were not complicated. They were predictable. And the problem. And the problem wasn't that women weren't seeing the red flags. It was like they didn't know what to do with them. They didn't know what they meant. They weren't understanding, like, what is going on in that guy's brain when he does stuff like that. They may be questioning it, but, you know, their gut drops when his behaviors are dangerous or he does these horrible things again that we all see in cycles of domestic violence. But then that's it. They just. They just move on. The relationship moves on. You just stay. You kind of feel the red flag. You acknowledge it. You think a little and you just ignore it, which is what society has taught us to do. Be the pretty, polite, nice girl. Don't use profanity. Just let the world happen to you. Well, I'm here to squash that. And my book coming out will definitely explain how to squash that. Hint, hint. Go against the grain, because predators do, so why can't we? So in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through how to identify a narcissist or a dangerous man, a predator, the mind of a monster. And no, it's not going to be the cute little checklist that you Google when you want an answer. I'm going to give you some real life examples because we need to understand what is really going on in the mind of a narcissist. How does he see you? How does he see the world? And then what do you actually do about it. Because telling someone just leave is the worst advice I've ever heard and I'm sick of hearing it. It's nonsensical, it's not stupid, safe, and it does not involve proper discernment and planning. So Once again, I'm Dr. Leslie, forensic psychologist with an extremely low tolerance for bullshit and an extremely high tolerance for the uncomfortable truth that people don't want said and people don't want to listen to. Let's go, guys. Okay, first, let's be clear on who we're talking about. Because the word narcissist or narcissism is so overused, we call everyone it these days. And also it's so, so misspelled. If you want to, like, come into someone's comments, if you want to use it, at least know how to spell it so it lands properly, right? So with narcissism, there's a spectrum, right? It's not all the same. It is light and it goes to very, very severe and dark. On one end, you've got narcissistic traits like selfish, entitled, need for validation. They really, really want you to tell them they're attractive or they've done well. That's kind of the end. That's annoying, but it's survivable. And that's probably not diagnosable either. But then you get to narcissistic personality disorder, which is a cluster B. Access to diagnosable, scary disorder, character, person innate to them. So this is a rigid pattern of grandiosity, grandiosity thinking your own shit don't stink, lack of empathy and an obsessive need for admiration. They really do look into the pond and just see their own reflection back at them. But then I, I want to introduce to you the overlap zone. That's when narcissism is combined with those antisocial traits. And that's when they would probably score high on the pclr, the psychopathy checklist. And it's psychopath, not sociopath. And we say psychopath now because we have a test for it. And we can actually objectively determine if you're a psychopath. And if we know how severe you are, if you are one, then we know your violence risk, recidivism, or your likeliness to be a shitbag in the future. So when we have the narcissist and the antisocial traits, that's where we get the abusive partner. That's where we get the dangerous man. That's where we get the guy who's going to be really charming and provocative and groom us and bring us into the relationship. Or the guy who's going to pressure us with lust so that we enter in and then trap us with abuse. But then, love bombing, that's the dangerous one, and that's the hardest one to leave. But here's what all of them share. A fundamental distortion of what they actually look like and who they are. A distorted view of themselves and a distorted view of others. To a narcissistic person, people are not people. They're objects. You're either a mirror reflecting back how amazing he is, or you're an obstacle he has to get over, get around, pummel through. There's really no in between. And if you think there's an in between, you're probably missing a red flag in that in between moment, which is the point of this podcast. And by the way, in the relationship, there is no we. There is only what can you do for me? And this is not some kind of metaphor. This is clinically how they experience relationships. Empathy. They don't have it. I mean, they might have it at times when it's useful, but the real severe narcissistic people, they don't have empathy like a feeling that we have. They have transactions, they have strategy, and they'll do whatever they can not to get a narcissistic wound or to be hurt because they have no internal side. I like to think like it's an eggshell and if you crack it, you're going to just fall into hot lava. That's their biggest fear. That's the wound. The pain is so severe. If you break that admiration, if you break the validation, if you break the image that they have put forward that they want to be seen as. They fear pain as painful as falling into hot lava. But that's also what makes them so damn confusing. They really seem like they can deeply understand you. That's the thing, though, is they're mirroring you. They're giving you back to yourself. And what's more validating than someone who really, really likes you and is just like you? They can cry, they can apologize. It doesn't mean it feels the same way that it does to you and I. And granted, things don't feel the same way to you and I, because I am very cynical and burnt out after this career, but I am bringing you actual, like, science and facts. So I'm not. I'm not completely just so cynical. So I think once you look at it from that perspective, that everything is transactional, that you are an object and that their Emotions are shallow and limited. You can see the red flags easier and have a little more confidence to act on them and do something about them. Also, I'm drinking Vietnamese coffee right now and I love it. Go Costco, go. Because they have like the real actual brand there now. Okay, so let's talk about red flags and what they actually mean. And yes, I'm going to be using trending words because we're often misusing them. But then also we don't know. Know what to do with them. So let's start with red flag number one. Love bombing. Love bombing. He's texting you constantly within the first week. He's buying you gifts, he's calling you his soulmate. The pressure is on. You're feeling the lust. He's already talking about moving in together, getting married, having children, meeting his family. It feels like a fairy tale. But what's happening in his mind because it's not romance. I would call this the resource acquisition stage. Yes, it's that transactional. He has identified you as a high value target, high value supply. And you're going to give. If he can get you, you're going to give him his needs, whatever they may be. Admiration, sex, stability, money, or just simply an audience because that's what they really like. Love bombing is a techni. Whether it's conscious or not, it happens. It is a very fast trick into intimacy and young girls especially fall for it quickly. The point is that if we quickly rush into intimacy, he can then take control of you and your life in a variety of ways. He can take control before you've clearly had time to discern. Do I like this man? Is this man for me? You don't have any time to think. And that's why he's love bombing you and pushing so hard to get his claws in you so fast. So the real weapon here is speed. I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry if you're single and you, you want to date. But healthy relationships take time to learn about each other, to learn to get to know each other. Things that happen fast are often dangerous in relationships and badly what the narcissist is trying to do. He's skipping the vetting process. He doesn't want to apply, he doesn't want to interview. He doesn't want to take that time to be chosen as the right candidate. So here's your main red flag. Here's the. It feels like too much. It feels like it's too fast. And when you try to slow it down, he sulks. He guilt Trips you or he escalates it. So if you get that reaction, that's a giant red flag. Red flag number two, A grandiose backstory filled with inconsistencies. So like I said earlier, my shit don't stink. But you're like, wait a minute, here are all these moments in your life where your shit did stink. Okay, so what does it look like? He has an incredible, incredible story. He's always the hero, he's always the smartest one in the room. He's always wronged by everyone else. And you know, I say he because that's just the majority. But women can be narcissists too. So interchange that they, them, whatever you want to do. I'm just telling you about character and explaining red flags. He'll always describe his exes as crazy. It wasn't him. His bosses never recognized his geniusness. It was their fault. And his family, they just never understood him. It was their fault too. Right? So what's happening in his mind, really what is going on? What's going on is called a grandiose self narrative. He's telling himself my don't stink, but it's such a cognitive distortion that he's beginning to believe it. He believes it. It is integrated into him. And we can talk about the history of this and how it starts, but we're not quite there yet. We need to get them away from us first. So in their internal world, they really, truly feel like they exceptional. And anything that contradicts that has to be explained away or blamed on someone else. Accountability is genuinely threatening to their self concept. So they don't do it ever. They're never accountable and they're never responsible for their own behavior. If they say they are, they're lying. And it's a part of the transactional act. They're on a mission. They want something. The pattern of everyone else being the problem, that's a diagnostic piece. And if you're listening to them really carefully, you're going to see that the stories don't always add up. The details shift, the timeline changes. And that's not actually an accident. It's because the story's being constructed around the emotional point that he's trying to make. Not a genuine emotional experience, not what actually happened. So here's the main tell. You need to ask follow up questions, interrogation style. Just kidding. Act like you genuinely are curious. I mean, maybe he's not a narcissist. Right? You genuinely need to know. And I want you to watch what happens when the story doesn't Play out how he said it did or when there's pushback. You know, when things don't hold up, does he clarify? What does he do? Does he get defensive? Because that's a red flag. That's the tell. Defensiveness, changing the subject. Or maybe he suddenly makes you feel like you're the difficult one for asking. Now it's your problem. You are the bad person. Let's jump to a true crime example, because this makes me think of Scott Peterson. So Scott Peterson lived. I don't know if I can say the whole word, but unalived his pregnant wife Lacy, on Christmas Eve in 2002. A long time ago, but really fresh in our minds. And if you go back and look at who Scott Peterson was before that, well, he was charming. He was handsome, he was confident. He told Lacy's family he was a golf pro when he was actually a fertilizer salesman. He was having an affair with Amber Frey and told her he'd lost his wife before Lacy was even missing. Do you remember that part? Guys, we have that on camera. He constructed an identity that served him in every room he was in. His facts were flexible. They changed all the time because they were not true. And they were based around the emotion, the fake emotion that he was trying to portray to the people listening. At times, his grandiose self narrative didn't look like clear arrogance. It wasn't clear. It was subtle. But that's also a tell. This is a man who always seemed to have a story, and he somehow always came out looking just fine. Until he didn't. Okay, let's jump to red flag number three, which is isolation and very common. It is. Is subtle. It happens early, and it's very strategic on the narcissist part. So what does it look like he might mention offhand? Your friend group is dramatic. They're below you. He pouts a little when you have plans without him. He just prefers when it's the two of you. And of course, this seems romantic at first. He just really wants to be with you. But what's happening in his mind. Isolation is a control tactic with a very specific purpose. He wants to eliminate competing perspectives, and he wants to alternate your support system to him. He would then be your only support system. Domination. If your friends and family are still in your life, they can validate your concerns. Sure. They can offer you a couch to sleep on. They could tell you what he's doing is not normal. Okay, yeah, well, he's going to remove those options as fast as he can, and it's going to start with subtle commentary. He's going to plant seeds of doubt about the people in your life, just like he's going to do to you. He's not going to say, stop seeing your friends. Well, I don't know. Maybe he will if he's really, really bad. But most would start subtle. He's going to do things that will make you want to see your friends less. So then it's you choosing, and then you question it less. You question him less. So what's the tell? You gotta check yourself. Are you spending less time with people who care about you or people that you care? Are you defending him to people who have expressed concern about him? Well, that's not love making you choose him. That's kind of like a smear campaign. That is something he has planned out and orchestrated, and it works. So when I say check yourself, I say check yourself early on. Once you match online dating with a profile, it begins right there and right then. Watch the patterns. Watch the speed. Watch. Watch for the red flags. Okay, let's talk about red flag number four. Control disguised as care. I see this very often with my clients. They want you to think they're caring, but they're not. They're controlling. So what does it look like? It looks like he wants to know where you are all the time. What are you doing? What money are you spending? How do you make your money? Who are you talking to? And it's because he worries about you. He doesn't like your outfit, wants people to respect you. And he definitely checks your phone because he's always going to assume you're cheating on him. And it's reassuring to him. And of course you're going to show him because you're not cheating, but he's taking control of your phone. He's just working through trust issues because of last. Because of the past relationships. No, that's manipulation. He doesn't need to look at your phone to work through trust issues. He needs to work on himself. But that's the thing, is every controlling behavior will have a loving explanation, and it messes with your mind. So what's really happening in his mind? Because that's key. He's dangerous. It sounds like he has narcissistic and antisocial traits. And like I said, he has a core terror of losing control of himself and of you and of his environment. We're talking about your autonomy, your independence, your outside relationships. They are all threats to him. So control is how he's going to manage that terror. And he's probably gotten pretty good at packaging that control as devotion for you in the relationship. We're socialized to receive it that way. That's how we interpret it and we rarely question it. But the psychology here is really important. And this really. I really want you to hear this. From a psychological perspective, a narcissist may not actually experience themselves as controlling. In his perspective, he may be a devoted partner in a chaotic world. He's managing you and life and caring for you. So. So it doesn't make it less dangerous, but it makes it harder for you to identify and name and do something about. So what's the big tell? Healthy care doesn't require your compliance to work. You shouldn't have to comply to everything to be in a functioning relationship. Real concern is more like, hey, I was really worried about you, I care about you. What can I do? It feels like an emotional connection, back and forth, long term, slow communication, not this fast paced. Give me everything and I've got your back. The control really pivots quickly. It pivots from he's controlling you and caring for you to you're always wrong. And he has to be in this role so that you don't mess up your life. It's so twisted and manipulative. Okay, red flag number five. It's a little bigger because we're talking about the cycle as a whole. The tension, the explosion, the honeymoon, and then the repeat. People package this cycle with a lot of different words. They explain it in a million different ways, but I think this is kind of the most simple way to explain it. And you can expand on it because every experience is going to be slightly different. So what does the cycle look like? Things are good. But then there's an edge. Someone explodes, a fight, an incident. Maybe it starts verbal, maybe it becomes physical, maybe not. And then all of a sudden, he's the man you fel love with again. He's remorseful, he's loving. He swears it'll never happen again. But what's actually happening in his mind? The cycle is not incidental. It's functional. It's working. It's working because the honeymoon phase resets your baseline and we get to start all over again. Almost like you're not going to remember it happened. He doesn't have the capacity to be that cruel. Let's erase your memory. It reminds you of why you stayed. It gives you just enough hope to stay through the next tension phase. But here's the problem. Over time, the periods get shorter and the bad periods get worse. But by Then you've been through the cycle so many damn times that your nervous system is done, it's depleted and it's adapted to the cycle. So it's also not triggering you as much. You start to see his good behavior as relief, which is. Is. Which is so messed up because his good behavior is a manipulation after horrifying behavior. And then you're minimizing the horrifying behavior. And that is what we call trauma bonding. It is a genuine neurological process. It has been studied up the wazoo. So it's not a weakness, it's not stupidity. It is a real neurological bonding. Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do in an unpredictable environment. So what's the tell? The tell is when you feel more relief when he's being kind, but you don't feel actual joy. There's a big difference. And I want you to pay attention. Here's a celebrity example for you. Let's talk about Rihanna and Chris Brown. And I'm not bringing this up to drag anyone down, but it's a really good example because Rihanna was brave enough to be public about it. And what she described with him was textbooked to this tension cycle. After. After Chris Brown assaulted her brutally in 2009, she went back to him and she explained why, in her own words, I was so in love. It was unconditional. She felt she had to stay with him. She also felt bad. She also went back because she felt protective of him and she thought he needed help and she was going to be the one to give it. That is trauma bonding in real time. And that's one of the most powerful women in the world right now. Granted, that was almost 20 years ago ago, but it still is such a perfect example of this tension cycle. And we know more about it, but it's still happening to women every single day. But you gotta think, if it can happen to her, yeah, it can happen to you. It can happen to anyone. But she was able to name it and she walked away and she built her own empire. So that's the part of the story that's worth amplifying. And boy, does it piss me off when people play his music as though he wasn't that predator and monster and beat her face so badly. It was so swollen and black and blue. I will never forget the images. Yet people still play his music on the radio on Sirius xm. He should not be allowed to have a platform. Okay, I want to pause and take a moment to talk about something that most content creators aren't going to be talking about because a lot of the time they're just guessing what they're talking about. And I'm not guessing because I'm a licensed psychologist and I've worked with severely narcissistic people, people and criminals for many years. Here is how a man with significant narcissism and antisocial traits sees the world, sees the relationship. You are a resource, you are an object. And not in a consciously predatory way every single time. Although sometimes, yes, it's very deliberate. But fundamentally, think about what you provide him. Sex, admiration, money, attention, status, domestic stability in audience, and that's what makes you valuable to him. The moment you stop providing it, the moment you threaten to leave, that's when it becomes a threat against you and your livelihood. These people do not have a stable sense of self. And this is crucial to understand. Beneath the grandiosity, beneath the arrogance and the bravado, there is an ego that requires constant external validation to stay intact. And no one can keep that up. That's why the reaction to the criticism that you may give is so freaking extreme. That's why he can't apologize without making it about himself. That's why you're the supply, meaning you are not optional. These guys operate in a threat and reward framework. When you're compliant, you're rewarded. Affection, charm, good behavior. When you challenge his authority or threaten ego, you're going to get punished with coldness, anger, manipulation, and sometimes violence that will escalate over time. You may start to unconsciously manage your behavior around his framework, which is his goal after all. That's how control becomes internal. He doesn't have to tell you what to do. You start thinking you need to do it because you've learned what triggers him and you want to avoid that. That self preservation baby. And remember, he believes that he's entitled not just to your time, not just to your body, but to your submission. When you assert yourself, you are not being independent in his eyes. You're violating his natural order. And that entitlement is the engine under every single one of these red flags. So once you can see that framework, it stops being as confusing in your mind and in your body. And you start to recognize it and name it. It becomes predictable. And when things are predictable, you can plan, you can plan to leave. Let's do a little true crime example, shall we? Let's talk about Chris Watts. Yeah, makes everyone want to just puke in their mouth. Chris. Chris murdered his pregnant wife and his two gorgeous baby daughters. This happened in 2018. He was having an Affair. And he claimed he wanted to have a fresh start. He didn't know where his family. I mean, he went on the freaking news crying, so upset that he could not find them. He was distraught. And people believed him. Well, not a lot of people. The true crime community was like, he's fucking lying. Some people thought he was devastated. Some people just didn't want to say anything because they couldn't tell the difference. But what people started to notice was that his ego was so fucking inflated. He was so certain of his own ability to control the narrative around everything that was happening, happening. His missing wife and two daughters. He really thought he could pull it off. He really saw himself as the protagonist in the story. Loser. But what I'm describing is the mindset of a narcissistic man who is so disconnected from the reality of other people's inner lives that he could take the lives of his entire family and then stand in front of a camera and perform. And the wife was distant from her friends and family for a while before this happened. He had isolated her, but mostly because he had isolated himself, because he was planning and preparing for this. He was cold. He wasn't sleeping with her. He was with somebody else. This was premeditated. So what I'm telling you, and not about the gruesome way that he ended their lives. And I. We don't need to go into that in this episode. But he was so cold and so callous, and so there were warning signs. It wasn't nothing. There were red flags. I don't know if people around didn't see them. People minimized them. People ignored them. But I do not believe that anything just happens randomly when it comes to a narcissistic person. Okay, so now we've gone through the checklist of the most common red flags, the mind of these narcissistic, potentially antisocial, dangerous men. And here's the question. Question. When you recognize the red flags, what do you do? And I'm going to be honest with you. There's no script for every individual situation. So don't take this like it is the truth or your direction. But again, use discernment and think and plan before you do anything. I'm going to give you a framework that I would give somebody I care about, that I would give somebody who I love, and I know that they need to get out of the relationship. Relationship number one. I want you to trust your body before your brain, your nervous system knows before you can articulate it. It's in a million books out there, guys you know that low grade anxiety that follows you around, the way you rehearse conversations before you have them with him, the relief when he's in a good mood? Those are data points and you need to start there. I tell friends, I tell clients. Clients. Keep a record, keep notes, keep your phone locked, keep a journal. Put a lock on that journal, hide the journal. You can make police reports, just informational ones. You can tell family and friends, document, log it, times, dates, behaviors, exactly what happened, what he did, how you felt. Because one of the biggest things that happens in these relationships is that your sense of reality will start to erode. Having an anchor, having a recognition record is your anchor number two. Step two, do not telegraph your exit. I am thinking JLo in the movie. Enough now. We don't need to go that far. But she kind of let him know she wanted to leave. Things got horrible and then she had to come back. And do you know her really, like, she was like a major MMA fighter in it. But this is the part where people say, just leave. And I hate when people say that because it could end your life and your family's life. It can be that severe if you just leave. The most dangerous moment in a relationship with a controlling or a violent partner is when you leave. That's key. And I don't think people always understand that or remember it. It's clinically documented, it's scientifically researched. The risk of escalation, including lethal violence. Silence spikes at the point of separation. And if he has strangled you in the past, it will spike higher to the end of your life or someone else's. So don't announce that you're evaluating your relationship. Don't threaten to leave. You don't have to really say, I've been thinking about this, or we need to have a conversation. You don't need to tell him your plan or your safety net. If you've gotten to this point, you keep it to yourself. You keep it away from him. You tell people you can trust that will not not tell him. Step three, I want you to quietly rebuild your support system. Start reconnecting with the people you've distanced yourself from, even if it's icky friends and family. You don't have to explain everything to them. You don't always know who you can trust if there's been distance. But I want you to show up. I want you to show up to lunches, I want you to go to events, I want you to text old friends. I want you to slowly rebuild the scaffolding around you before you need to use it. Step four, contact the domestic violence hotline. Even if you don't think it's bad enough, memorize the number. The national domestic hotline number is 1-800-799-7233. I'm gonna repeat that. 1-800-799-72233. They do safety planning. They help you think through the steps that are specific to your situation. You don't have to, you don't have to have a black eye to call the number. You also don't have to be certain because they can talk you through it. That's why they're there. Step five, I want you to get into therapy. Specifically four. Not because something is wrong with you, but because these relationships do something very specific to your nervous system and your self concept. And unwinding on your own is genuinely hard. A therapist who understands coercive control and trauma bonding will help you understand what happened in a way that releases the self blame. And the self blame is usually the last thing to go. You also need somebody who is going to be objective, who's going to be honest, and who's, who's going to tell you like it is, but who's going to protect you, protect your mental, mental state and also protect you when it comes to police if needed. For cases like this that are severe, I highly recommend that you go to somebody who's trained in trauma, in the treatment of trauma. Oftentimes that will be somebody who has been trained at our Veterans affairs hospitals with veterans who went to war with severe trauma, combat veterans. And that'll be somebody who also has a private practice, like on the weekends that is an ideal psychologist to see. They get the violence, they get the power, they get the personality of the partner and then they get the fallout that is within you and the potential. So here's the thing. Nobody wants to say, guys, being with someone like this does not mean that you're a problem or you're stupid. It does not mean that you are weak. It means you encountered somebody who was very good at what they do and you were operating without the information that you needed. But you have it now. The red flags make sense and there are so many more I can talk about. The behavior makes sense and what to do about it makes actual sense. Now you have a bit of a plan to think about. And if you've watched this, delete it. Delete the history. Delete your watch history on YouTube. You also don't want him seeing that podcast history. He doesn't need to see that. You've listened to this, and if this video helped you or you think it's going to help somebody else, share it with them. If you're listening on a podcast, share it with somebody. You could be saving someone's life and just giving them permission to use discernment to build their confidence and to get out. And no, it's not because the algorithm needs it. So don't worry there. I actually have a day job, which is why I can barely do these videos. It's because I have seen lives literally end, and I have talked to the predators after they've done it, and I know how they think and perceive the women who they've killed. I've talked to survivors who got through it, and I've seen all the red flags that were minimized or not identified or not acted on. And I've seen how their lives have fallen apart and helped build them back up. You're not alone. I promise you, if this episode hit home, you're not alone. Dr. Leslie, thank you for listening or watching. Next week, what I want to talk about is what to do, how to after you leave. So I will catch you next Wednesday with that episode. Be well and be safe, and listen to your intuition, which might be telling you to not return your shopping cart. Oh, hey, you're here.