Prof. Chris French
speaker
118 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Prof. Chris French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So to go back to Lee, who we heard from at the start of the show, this was the guy that had this big fight with his wife after he yelled at the baby and he got diagnosed with this. Okay. He told me that this desire to feel really special and important is a major thing that has driven him for years.
That's a hard mark to hit. And so it turns out that this drive to feel special doesn't always feel good. So one thing that might surprise people is that a lot of narcissists are not happy people.
But that's not... That's not what we find? No. I mean, one study found that a third of people with NPD have major depressive disorder. A fifth have generalized anxiety disorder, which is much higher than the general population.
Yeah, but that's the case. And it's actually something that Lee can really relate to because he's also been diagnosed with depression and anxiety alongside NPD. And a thing that Lee told me that really helped me see why you'd be so miserable as a narcissist is that his ego really can't handle any criticism.
This is pretty common with this disorder, by the way, being very sensitive to any criticism. And so when this happens to Lee, it just eats and eats at him.
And so he's always on the lookout for his ego getting dinged and like preemptively getting ready to fight.
You're looking for weaknesses in case you need to exploit them later?
This is a pretty miserable way to live.
And that's not all. I mean, there's a review paper that found that they often suffer from feelings of meaninglessness. They're very critical of themselves and they struggle to express their emotions.
Yeah, I mean, so Lee, of course, had that question right after he had his moment of revelation because, like, the next thing he Googled was, like, cure for narcissistic personality disorder, right? And the results were disappointing. None.
So that's the treatment we have. Therapy. Talk therapy. Therapists might do things like try to help their patient be more aware of triggers that lead to narcissistic actions. One paper described what you can do as a therapist is move a patient from me mode to we mode. Okay. I mean, did Lee end up trying therapy? Yeah, he did start therapy. It was several months after the big fight with his wife.
And when he went to see this therapist...
Uh-huh. Was that unusual for you, crying?
Did she ask you why you were crying?
Yeah. I mean, there's no magical transformation. He says he's still a narcissist. But over the years, it has helped him learn to put some space between his thoughts and his actions.
We really tried to run this down, but it's very hard to put numbers around it because there are no trials exclusively on people with NPD. Annoying. Yeah. And, you know, psychologists have said that people with NPD tend to drop out of therapy. So maybe that's one reason, you know, we don't have these. But... We do have some evidence that is promising in people who do stick it out.
There are some case studies showing that people with NPD can improve after two and a half to five years of therapy. And a lot of therapists that I talked to told me the same thing, that they have helped people with this disorder.
Yeah. So this question of how do you deal with a narcissist in your life is something that Craig, our psychologist from earlier, he specializes in. He sees a lot of people who come to therapy regularly. Oftentimes they come in trying to figure out if someone in their life is a narcissist and then what should they be doing about it.
And his number one tip is to not focus so much on the other person's diagnosis, but to figure out whether or not the relationship is working for you.
Right. So if you do decide the relationship is worth working on, you want to stay or let's say it's like a relative or boss. Craig has a few strategies. Right. They're based on this observation that you can actually boost empathy in people with narcissism. There's a body of research on this. And Craig has come up with some ways to basically exploit that.
Showing 81–100 of 118 · page 5 of 6
← Previous
Next →