Narcissism: Spotting Red Flags and Protecting Your Peace | Dr. Ramani Durvasula

Narcissistic people know empathy gets you things. Hey, everyone, it's Rosie. (upbeat music) Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." If you spend any time online, you know that narcissism gets thrown around a lot. But what exactly is narcissism, and how do we deal with the narcissist? To help us answer these questions, I'm joined by the brilliant Dr. Ramani Durvasula. She's a clinical psychologist, author, and one of the leading experts on narcissistic abuse and recovery. Today, we're going to talk about what narcissism looks like in real life. Whether you're navigating a difficult boss, family member, or just looking to protect your peace, this one's going to leave you with some real tools. Let's get into it. Dr. Ramani, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. I've been wanting to have this conversation with you for so long. You're in my feed constantly. You were in my feed so much that at one point I was like, am I a narcissist? (laughs) Yeah, I know. That's the other problem I got. You know, there's two sides of this to be on. Though, increasingly we are finding that there are a fair number of people who are narcissistic who are accusing the other person that they're in a narcissistic relationship. That's the whole snake swallowing their tail thing that I'm now working. Yeah, I'd love to get into that. First things first. What got you into narcissism? Yeah, I wish it was a sassier story, to be honest with you. It's actually kind of boring and researchy and sciencey. I was a professor here at Cal State LA. We were talking about commonality there. So I was a university professor and focused on some specific things on how people take care of their health, basically. And I specifically worked with people at HIV and all that stuff. That was my focus. And what we noticed, though, was one of our research assistants, and several of our research assistants, would come back from the field like rubbing their head and saying, "Oh, my gosh, this person's so difficult." And then it dawned on me. I said, "Oh, this is interesting." These people, these difficult people, that's the word we were using at the time, were creating havoc for the nurses, for the receptionists, for the physicians. And I thought just these people were almost like they were kind of hurting everyone's healthcare. So that led me on this sort of journey of trying to understand how personality affected health. And specifically these more kind of difficult personality styles like narcissism. And after I'd done this research for a while, more and more people were coming in and they were talking about their relationships. And it was a lot of the same things. They were being invalidated, they were being gaslighted, they were being manipulated, they were second guessing themselves, and they were reading all the books out there on relationships and...