Dhru Purohit Show
Energy Vampires and Narcissistic People Are A Tax On Your Health - Here's What To Do About Them
Mon, 18 Nov 2024
This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Fatty15, and Lifeforce. A long and healthy life isn’t just about physical well-being—our emotional health and social relationships are crucial in determining whether we truly thrive. Spotting toxic relationships and navigating them can be challenging, but today’s guests offer valuable insights on assessing the relationships in our lives and reclaiming our health. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we have a special compilation episode featuring Dhru's conversations with guests about the profound impact of toxic relationships on our physical and mental health. Dr. Ramani delves into why staying in toxic relationships is a major public health issue that often goes unspoken. She shares insights into the diseases she’s observed in patients linked to toxic relationships, the rapid healing that can occur after leaving them, and the damaging cycle of self-blame individuals face when dealing with a narcissist. Vanessa Van Edwards explores how to assess our inner circle, recognize the effects of ambivalent relationships, and identify key red flags of ambivalence. She also highlights the traits of a master communicator and offers tips on how to use those skills as an invitation to clarify intentions. Dr. Ramani Durvasula is a licensed clinical psychologist, Professor Emerita of Psychology at California State University Los Angeles, and the Founder and CEO of LUNA Education, Training & Consulting. She discusses narcissism on her popular YouTube channel and social media, her popular online program on healing from narcissistic abuse, and as the host of the podcast Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani. Vanessa Van Edwards is a multi-time bestselling author and renowned behavioral researcher on professional communication and leadership. Vanessa’s work has been featured in national and international media and to audiences in workshops worldwide. In this episode, Dhru and his guests dive into: The public health issue of our time (2:10) Disease and healing when toxic relationships are removed (4:40) Lack of courage, training, and awareness among professionals (9:07) What is a narcissist, and how to spot one (16:46) Studies on the quality of our relationships and happiness (22:35) How to assess your inner circle (24:21) Ambivalent relationships (27:21) Red flags and body language indicating ambivalence (31:11) Master communicators and how to change the agenda (40:41) How to practice discernment (44:31) Characteristics of a narcissist and self-blame (48:51) When leaving isn’t possible and support systems (53:21) This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Fatty15, and Lifeforce. Right now, BON CHARGE is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Fatty15 is offering an additional 15% off its 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Go to fatty15.com/dhru and use code DHRU to replenish your C15 levels for long-term health. Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress; go to mylifeforce.com/dhru! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the public health issue of our time?
But I am telling you now, and I would stake my reputation on this, for the people I've worked with, and there are thousands at this point, hundreds of thousands, who are navigating really toxic, difficult, invalidating, manipulative relationships. If you just lifted that thing out of their life, their health would improve almost instantaneously. I promise you that.
It would put years on their lives. Their health would improve. Their engagement in health behaviors would improve. Their sleep would improve. Their sense of meaning and purpose would improve. Every single predictor of health and wellness would skyrocket almost immediately. I know that the surgeon general, for example, made a lot of his focus on loneliness, the loneliness epidemic.
And while I agree with that, I think that that's a big issue. I still think it leaves this undiscussed area that I feel that the fields of medicine, psychiatry, and mental health won't take on, which is what is the toll of a toxic relationship? Nobody's talking about it, but I can tell you now that the change, and I can give you N of 1 research here, in that one case in particular, a woman was...
She was having to wear some kind of orthopedic device and was having a lot of trouble healing from an orthopedic surgery. And even the doctors were flummoxed. Why is this going so badly? Why is this going so badly? During the course of the recovery, it was taking years, a narcissistic relationship was removed from her life. Inside of a week, that brace came off of her.
She's like, it's so... And she said, I didn't put the two and two together. She said, it's so weird. I'm feeling better. And she's like, in five days, I think I could try this. And she said, it was like years of no movement. And then there was movement. And think about it. When we think about what happens to a person under chronic stress, we see cortisol. We see other neurohormones being released.
We see inflammatory issues. We see greater propensity for issues like depression. We see problems in the gut microbiome and deleterious effects on health there. We see dermatologic issues. We see cardiovascular issues. When people are under stress, And what we know is that interpersonal stress may be one of the most challenging kinds of stress, right? Because it's often inescapable.
When it comes to narcissistic relationships, it really is. It's narcissistic bosses. When it's a narcissistic marriage, narcissistic family members. And so I can't put too fine a point on this when I say I think this is the public health issue of our time.
that's pretty mind-blowing to hear it that way and even before we hit record we were chit-chatting a little bit you said that it's literally taking years years of people's lives i am seeing people i've seen multiple patients who didn't really have the genetics for the cancers they got and the course of the cancer was far more virulent than even their oncologists thought it would be
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Chapter 2: How do toxic relationships affect our health?
Over and over we see this. I was talking with a team of rheumatologists in Egypt who said, you know, we have two groups of patients. One group of patients that really improves on medication, and the other group we just can't get. We can't get improvement. And you know what the difference was? They did sort of a straw poll survey. They did sort of a straw poll survey.
They found that the people who were not improving under best practices regimens were the ones in toxic relationships. all the stuff we know, medication, treatment, call it what you will. This is where Western medicine hits the wall because we don't ask about this. We don't address this. Or we think, ah, relationships are tough. No, actually relationships aren't tough.
These relationships are tough. And when you throw in there, Let's just put chronic health in there, chronic health issues that a person might be having. Having a narcissistic person in that relationship is more likely to invalidate their experience. I notice much higher rates of autoimmune processes, autoimmune illnesses, call them what you will, in people who are in narcissistic relationships.
over and over and over again. And not only are they invalidated by their partners and their families, often by the healthcare entire enterprise. So they're constantly being gaslighted by systems. They're often not helped. They're often still having to do the vast majority of stuff in a household or around child rearing. They're completely unsupported.
There's no one sort of supporting their adherence to healthcare regimens. These are people who are chronically, chronically, not only swimming upstream, So years, absolutely it's years because this amount of stress, the body never gets a chance to rest.
on one hand, it's taking years off of people's lives, especially, most likely, disproportionately affecting women.
It does disproportionately affect women. But I do want to put, I do want to say that not all narcissistic people are men. And I have worked with many, many men who are in narcissistic relationships, came from narcissistic families of origin. They're experiencing the same negative health effects. But there are more narcissistic men than women, and women have less power in society.
So if they're in one of these relationships, they may be on the wrong end of the stick in terms of having to manage caregiving duties, maybe not having the same kind of financial power. Stuff around family court can get really wonky.
And then when you have intersectional factors, ethnic minority status plus gender plus lower social class or lower access to resources, then these relationships can get all the more harmful.
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Chapter 3: What is a narcissist and how can you spot one?
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Chapter 4: How can you assess your inner circle?
You know, we have some sort of, it's interesting, I trained as a therapist in the 90s, right? So we don't have the same kind of, we didn't have the same kind of digital tools then as we do now. Many of my clients' patients will show me text messages, sequences of text messages, emails, voicemails, and things like that. It's unmistakable. It's very clear what they're up against.
And they're not making it up because they couldn't have made up an entire text sequence, right? So I'm seeing it right in front of me what these folks are up against. And repeatedly, repeatedly, couples therapy is a great example. The couples therapist seems so invested in making the point like, what are both of you bringing in? Well, let's see.
How about maybe one of them, one person is trying to play chess and one's trying to play checkers. One person's looking to fight. The other one's looking to affiliate. One person wants power, dominance, and control. The other one wants closeness. This is not a fair fight. And so that kind of resistance. And in fact, I've had many, many patients come in, literally almost need to be deprogrammed
from therapists who say oh don't talk about that narcissism stuff you have no right to call them that maybe it's your problem maybe you're the one who's to blame maybe i i mean as recently so it's always a boat that takes two to tango not really not really not when one person is using actually what i would really call psychologically dirty tricks and when you have two people in a relationship and one person's really invested in wanting to maintain attachment connection
closeness, that they're coming from a place of empathy and integrity and reciprocity, and the other person is coming from a place of power, domination, control, egocentricity, self-centeredness, and will do anything to make sure that whole relationship's about them. How is that person who's holding a stance that is more empathic, that is more connected, they're not having the same relationship?
And so short of people having paperwork that they put on a table when they enter a relationship and saying, hey, this is what I really want in a relationship, which narcissistic people walk around thinking they're empathic, warm, nice people.
So then you have that triple confusion that these are, it's not like the narcissistic person says, hey, you just met me and I'm a handful and I am not a nice person. They think they're good people. Yeah. And so do a lot of people in the world. So it gets very confusing very quickly for people in this relationship. And I will say this for all my days, what this is doing to people's health,
because I've seen what happens when we remove the narcissistic person. The person leaves the job, their health improves, and it's not because they're not working. It's because they're not, or they go to a new workplace. That's a better example. They go to a different department in the workplace. They go to a different, literally a different employer.
They're not working with someone like that, and they're thriving. Same person, The narcissistic people were removed. They'll say, after about a month living in my own apartment without the narcissist around, my health improved. When I stopped talking with my family, my health improved significantly. And I think of all my clients, and I have to be frank with you, We muddle through week over week.
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Chapter 5: What are the red flags of ambivalent relationships?
Wow. You know, you mentioned an important word and it's the reason that we brought you here. You mentioned the word confusion. There's a lot of confusion around this topic. And I really see you as a voice of bringing people clarity. Also a sense of like letting people know you're not crazy. You know, literally the topic of the title of your book is it's not you, right?
Letting people know it's not you. So part of that confusion is that at the very basics and at the foundation, many people actually don't even know what is a narcissist. Correct.
Yes. No, they don't. And so let's start there. Let's start with basics. A narcissistic person is a person with a narcissistic personality disorder. They do not necessarily have a disorder. They do not necessarily have a personality disorder. Everyone's got a personality. You've got one. I've got one. Everyone listening has got one. That doesn't mean we have disorders.
It means we have personalities. All human beings have got them. And a narcissistic personality is characterized by variable, low, shallow, transactional empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, arrogance, self-centeredness, sort of a selfishness and egocentricity, very poor frustration tolerance. If things don't go their way, they will react very, very angrily. There is...
There's a really thin-skinned sensitivity. They cannot bear up against any form of criticism, any form of feedback. They tend to envy other people or think other people envy them. Narcissistic people often view themselves as a victim. If things don't go their way, it feels like the world's, you know, unjustifiably coming after them.
But if the same thing happened to someone else, they would not frame it that way. But I'd have to say, if we had to pick one strand that defines narcissism, it's that entitlement. Now, all of the stuff I'm talking about, the entitlement, the grandiosity, the arrogance, all of it, These are defenses, they're grandiose defenses against a very core sense of insecurity and shame.
That's what's percolating, it's bubbling, it's like it's what's under the earth's crust. We don't see that all the time, but it's there. So anything that activates that shame, like they don't get the promotion, they don't get the sports car they want, their girlfriend breaks up with them, then we see that comes out as anger.
Whereas other people, when they experience shame, might experience sadness, they might experience guilt. The narcissistic person turns that into anger. So these are very antagonistic relationships. And the narcissistic person needs lots of supply. They have an excessive need for praise and admiration. So they're going out there all the time, getting it any way they can.
Now that means different things to different people. For some people, narcissistic supplies money. For some people, it's power. For some people, it's likes on social media. For some people, it's status. Depends on the person. And so they're going to go out and get that. And they'll often get that from other people. So that's what a narcissist is. Narcissism is on a continuum. At the low end, it's
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Chapter 6: How can you practice discernment in relationships?
Now when you get to the far end of that continuum, to the severe end of narcissism, you're talking about malignant, exploitative, severely manipulative, isolating, coercive narcissism. Now we're talking about something dangerous. Obviously at that low and high end, the people in those relationships are having very different experiences. There are also multiple subtypes of narcissism.
And all this heterogeneity means that different people in different narcissistic relationships are sometimes having different experiences, but the core experience of a person in a narcissistic relationship is oftentimes confusion, self-blame and rumination.
So how do you know what impact your relationships are having on you? My next guest, Vanessa Van Edwards, shares actionable tips to evaluate and improve the quality of your relationships. Let's listen in.
One of the things that you've highlighted is this one of the longest running studies that's happened. I believe it's out of Harvard. Yeah. And a lot of press about it that kind of came out early this year. And it's been going on for like 75 plus years. And it's looking at
happiness and sort of social relationships and how the quality of our relationships, being around really incredible people that feed us, lift us up and are there and are looking after us, which goes back to dopamine, oxytocin that you shared earlier, is deeply correlated with longevity. And so I would have to think that
the opposite of that would be, or as part of that, is avoiding people that have a toxic influence in your life.
And I'd love you to chime in on this because you've shared very openly that a big reason that you are interested and have gotten down the rabbit hole of the work that you are into and sharing with other people is not only to improve your own charisma, but it was also to sort of break free of these toxic environments that you were in. Can you chat about that?
Yeah. So I think that what we don't realize is that And in our life, there are 10 to 20 relationships that are affecting us in many ways. They affect our productivity, right? Do you have people in your life who are contributing to your motivation? They're encouraging you with your goals. They are supporting you. They are changing your health. Are they encouraging your health choices?
Are they a good influence with the food choices or the workout choices? And then also you have the emotional supporters in your life. You have the people who are your partner, your parents, your kids, your best friends who are there on a bad day and they're there on a good day. An exercise that you could do if you like to visualize this, I like to visualize things, is take out a piece of paper.
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Chapter 7: What tips can help improve communication?
You have the same kind of boring conversations over and over again. Are you in level two? So in that middle ring where you know their goals and their motivations, but You don't know their self-narrative, they don't know yours. And then who's in that very inner circle? Who really deeply knows your self-narrative?
That snapshot is a really important snapshot because it's gonna tell you how supported are you? Are all of your relationships with people on the very, very outside? Do you have any depth? Do you have any emotional supporters? Are all of your relationships on that second ring? So you have a lot of connections, but they're not necessarily the deepest quality connections.
And then do you have anyone in that inner, that tiny inner circle who knows your true self narrative? Then the second exercise I want you to do, so do that with 10 to 30 people. I want you to draw arrows if you want them to move in or out. Right? So if you look at that person and you see where they are, do you want them closer? Like coming in, draw an in arrow.
Or you're like, no, no, I don't want them closer. I want them further away. Draw an out arrow. Okay. That's a really helpful exercise to see where you want to move people. Because the people who have an in arrow, those are people who I want you to ask the deeper questions. Right? You want to get to know their self-narrative. You can ask them, what do you think your self-narrative is?
Send them this podcast and be like, what is yours? Are you lucky? What are you learning? What's your goal? What are you worrying about? Ask them all these questions, use it as a jumping point to deepen connection. People who without arrows, those are people who you wanna actually stick to level one questions with. You don't want to add depth to that relationship.
You might want to maintain some distance is what you're saying. Like healthy distance. They could be in your life for various reasons, but you may not be leaning on them to a further degree than you need to.
And conversational distance. For those people, you don't want to ask the deep questions because you don't want them to rely on you if they're a victim mindset, right? So you can create conversational distance where you see them in the office or maybe they're a neighbor or a family friend or a family member, hopefully not. And you're like, you know, everything going good? Anything new?
You can actually stick to some of those questions that are more autopilot because you don't want to go deeper with them.
Even if that person, for the people that are listening, is their mom?
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Chapter 8: What should you do if leaving a toxic relationship isn't possible?
Those are the people that you have to watch out for. What research finds is that ambivalent relationships are more draining and more toxic than toxic relationships. What they found was is that when we are unsure if someone likes us or we are unsure if we like them, we're unsure, do they support me? This is how you know if someone's ambivalent. Do I have fun with them?
You see their name pop up on your phone and you're like, ugh, right? Like not sure. You see their name on the calendar and you're like, Do I kind of want to cancel?" Or you wonder, was that a supportive comment? Was that passive aggressive? Wait, was that kind of mean? Or you leave and you're like, why do I feel bad? Right? Like those are actually ambivalent people.
So a study looked at police officers and they had them rank all the relationships in their precincts. And they found that officers who had toxic coworkers
had officers who had toxic coworkers, and they had officers who had not a lot of toxic coworkers, but a lot of ambivalent coworkers, coworkers where they weren't quite sure where they sit with them, they weren't sure if they were toxic, they weren't sure if they enjoyed spending time with them.
They found the officers with the most ambivalent relationships had lower happiness, had higher workplace stress, had worse immune function than the officers who had toxic coworkers. Wow. Here's why. If you go into your office and you know you don't like someone, it's quite easy. You don't ask them to lunch. You say, morning, hope you're good.
You don't ask them about their weekend or maybe you say, what's new? Great, good job, right? You don't invest in that relationship. You keep it surface, you keep it cash, you try to work together and you don't spend time with them. Ambivalent relationships are much harder. That's when you're in the break room or you're like on a video call and you're like, should I ask about their kids?
Like, are we due for a happy hour? Oh, but the happy hour last time was so not fun. That is so draining. So for those people on your list, like in that circle exercise, for the people who are like, I don't know, your mission in the next month, in the next 30 days is to decide, are they coming in or are they going out?
Like put something on the calendar and then when you see it on the calendar, are you dreading it? Then go out to lunch with them or out to happy hour or hop on a video call and then be like, am I enjoying this? Is my social battery being charged or am I drained? Do I not feel supported?
It's so important. It's so important. You know, I bet if you were... almost like a fly on the wall when these individuals... Oh, I could tell you. You could tell. Not only could you tell, but you could point to, hey, you know that thing that sounded like a compliment? It actually was a backhanded neg. Neg. Oh, neg. And that's why you don't know how to answer, because you're not sure.
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