How Narcissists Hijack Your Brain - Dr Peter Salerno - #1068

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
How do you describe what you do? Someone hasn't met you before, they don't know much about you, you're at a cocktail party. How do you describe what you do?

**Peter Salerno** (0:07)
I mean, my work focuses on, I mean, I'm a psychotherapist, that's kind of like my trade. I'm licensed as a psychotherapist. I have a doctorate in psychology, so my background is in psychology and mental health. I would say what I do specifically is I do extensive research on the etiology or cause of personality disorders. Like that's the type of diagnosis that I specialize in assessing, understanding. But one of the reasons I do it is actually not necessarily to treat personality disorders. I do it so that I help people understand in relationships where there's a personality disorder, there's often toxicity and conflict and strife and abuse.
And so, what I do is I help people restore what I would call their reality confidence following a toxic relationship. Because in these relationships, what happens is the individual who is the victim of somebody who is intentionally manipulative, deceptive, controlling, what happens is the victim loses their sense of what's actually true and real and what's actually being manipulated, okay? And so, I help people following these types of high conflict or problematic abusive relationships kind of get their reality confidence back. And one of the ways I do that is by resolving what I call traumatic cognitive dissonance, which is what happens to the brain when you're forced to hold two contradictory realities at the same time, because someone is trying to convince you that two things could be true at the same time when they can't be. And so, when I'm consulting with people professionally, I'm helping them regain their understanding of what's actually real, what happened to them, and what they were convinced happened to them because it was convenient for somebody else if they believed that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:15)
So it's almost like people that have spent a good bit of time intimately close to these other people, their reality gets warped around them to the point where it's difficult for them to re-enter normal reality without the old version creeping back in.

**Peter Salerno** (2:35)
Correct.

**Chris Williamson** (2:35)
Yeah.

**Peter Salerno** (2:36)
Yeah. And one of the reasons for that is because the individual who is the manipulative person has done such an exceptional job of making a lot of the deception and the evidence invisible. So it's not like there's somebody overtly trying to manipulate you and you're aware of it. Right? Like it's not like there's somebody saying, hey, I want you to buy this product for me. Here's why I think it'll improve your life. And then they pressure you. It's actually more like, no, I'm not actually up to anything. I mean, you're free to come and go as you please in this arrangement, all while underneath the surface covertly trying to gain an advantage over this person for selfish reasons, exploitative reasons. And so even if the relationship has ended, they still might perceive the relationship even years or decades later in a way that's not accurate because the reality was distorted.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
What are the personality types? What are the sorts of people, the kinds of psychological profiles? What are we talking about here?
How does that show up in behavior?

**Peter Salerno** (3:43)
Yeah, so I mean, I would say the personality disorders, and I'm just the messenger here, okay, but the personality disorders that we most often associate with interpersonal conflict, abuse, harm, are what we call the cluster B personality disorders. And so the reason why we cluster them together is because they have a lot of overlapping features. So it's not really accurate to say that it's convenient, but it's not fully accurate to say that somebody just fits into one concrete category of disorder and we can just label them as such, and then there's nothing else going on. Usually what's happening is there's quite a few traits or features of multiple personality disorders that are overlapping in one individual. And so it makes it even harder to really pinpoint what really is this person all about. But I would say that the pathological traits, the personality traits that we find common in the Cluster B classification of disorders are the ones that you're going to find causing the most interpersonal trouble and conflict in relationships.

**Chris Williamson** (4:56)
What are they named?

**Peter Salerno** (4:58)
So we have one of the main ones that's like an umbrella term is what we refer to as antagonism. Antagonism is a personality trait where people are in oftentimes intentionally putting themselves at odds with another person or they're putting two other people at odds with one another literally to create drama, to create conflict, to escalate problems rather than solve them. So an example of antagonism is something that we refer to as triangulation. So one person is intentionally going to tell another person something about someone else to create a rift. And then they're going to deny that they did that. And so now the two people that didn't even speak could be having thoughts and perceptions about each other based on this other person. That could be completely a fabrication, it could just be a lie. And now those two people are at odds with one another and they haven't even communicated necessarily. It's just this other person is deciding I'm going to create a rift in here because it might benefit them for those two people to not get along. And so, they're going to strategically create a problem in that dynamic and then deny it ever happened.