The Narcissist Expert: How To Spot Them, Survive Them & Why They're Everywhere - Dr. Ramani

Ramani Durvasula (0:00)

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a stable, persistent pattern of personality functioning that is characterized by selfishness and arrogance. And there's nine symptoms of which a person needs five. And I'm going to crunch these down.

Michael Gervais (0:16)

What are some of the key traits that drive high performance are also the ones at the very core of narcissism? If you were in a stadium, what percentage of people are narcissists?

Ramani Durvasula (0:25)

15, 16 percent.

Michael Gervais (0:26)

And if you were to walk into the halls of a world-class football team or world-class basketball, coaches slash athlete mix?

Ramani Durvasula (0:33)

20 to 25 percent.

Michael Gervais (0:35)

Wow. Welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. Now, the idea behind these conversations is simple, to sit with the extraordinaries, to really learn about how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is one that hits deep, and I am so pleased to welcome Dr. Ramani Durvasula, clinical psychologist, professor, and leading expert on narcissism.

Ramani Durvasula (1:03)

So when a person is in a relationship with someone who's narcissistic, the most common experiences we witness are self-blame, self-doubt, isolation, anxiety, depression. I hate to say it, but destroying a person's psyche is a pretty straightforward process.

Michael Gervais (1:20)

Dr. Ramani shares her model for navigating these relationships. She explains the different types of narcissism and how gender shapes their expression.

Ramani Durvasula (1:27)

The girls are allowed to be able to express emotion. What we still have not figured out is how to hold space for men and boys to be vulnerable without pathologizing them as weak. And without that vent, I do think that the grandiose and the malignant narcissism are more likely than to be expressed.

Michael Gervais (1:41)

Dr. Ramani's insights are powerful, practical. They're grounded in years of clinical research and personal experience too. Okay, so speak to the person that's in a relationship with somebody who's narcissistic. So how do you help guide them? Stay or go?

Ramani Durvasula (1:54)

So the stay or go conversation, I tend to be agnostic. I say...

Michael Gervais (1:59)

So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. Ramani Durvasula.

I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think I spend a lot of time with narcissists. And so...

Ramani Durvasula (2:16)

Given what you do, yeah, you do.

Michael Gervais (2:18)

Yeah, so... Yeah, you do. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here. But let's start at the beginning. Where does the story of narcissism begin for you?

Ramani Durvasula (2:26)

It begins, it's... I wish it was more sparkly, this story more interesting, you know? But it was, it's actually kind of, like many research stories, it becomes a sort of a dull necessity as a mother, or kind of a thing. I was a brand new professor at Cal State LA, and working on other people's research, and there were labs around the city, and the student research assistants would come back, and over a series of weeks, they would just come back like, you know, really with the sort of like, you know, rubbing the temples, a headache kind of thing. Like, what's going on? And they kept describing these patients who pretty much monopolized the run of the clinic. They were entitled. They were rude to the receptionist. They were rude to the nurses. They were rude to the research assistants. They were demanding. They were difficult, difficult people. Now, what's the word that came to mind was difficult. It was enough that these research assistants were feeling like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore, which made me wonder, would the other health professionals want to step back? And honestly, how much of a sort of health care toll these people were taking, was everyone getting poorer care because the health care professionals were so burned out at dealing with this small handful of difficult patients. That led me to start a program of research looking at personality and health, health behaviors, perceptions of health, self-protection and health, and with a real focus on these sort of rigid, maladaptive personality styles like narcissism to see what would come out of it. And I looked at personality, personality disorders, the whole nine yards. But simultaneous to that, I also about maybe five years later, my private practice was really coming up in earnest. I was doing all this research on narcissism, and I was talking to people who kind of kept telling me the same relationship story. They were being invalidated. They always wondered what they were doing wrong, saying wrong. They were they were being gaslighted, but, you know, wasn't we weren't even using the term as much then.