A psychologist’s guide to understanding and spotting narcissism

A psychologist’s guide to understanding and spotting narcissism View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed A psychologist’s guide to understanding and spotting narcissism Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula explains what narcissism really is, how to spot it, and why most of what circulates online gets it wrong. A psychologist’s guide to understanding and spotting narcissism Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula explains what narcissism really is, how to spot it, and why most of what circulates online gets it wrong. How can we take control of our lives when so much is out of our hands?

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Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and the author of It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. In the early 2000s, I started becoming interested in narcissism and actually in narcissism itself while I was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and was specifically looking at how narcissistic people made decisions and showed up in relationships. But where it got really interesting for me was when I was in private practice and more and more and more clients were coming in and describing relationship dynamics and partners and family members who had personalities very consistent with what I was looking at in the lab and studying narcissism.

And I thought what would happen if you taught folks who are going through these relationships that this is indeed a pattern. It's just not a difficult relationship. And as I started to do that, for a lot of people it was a light bulb moment.

And what really struck me is that the world of mental health, there was very little literature looking at the impact of personality styles like narcissism on relationships. And I found that with a few tweaks, we really could make leaps and bounds with people who are going through these relationships and really identify it as a real phenomenon that when a person is in any kind of close relationship with a narcissistic person, whether it's an intimate relationship, a familial relationship, particularly a parent, or even a workplace relationship, very similar things happen to a person in one of those relationships. So, ever since, you know, for the past few decades, I've been really focused on documenting this and figure out ways that we can work with people who are going through these relationships clinically and help them feel sane and ultimately grow after they've left these relationships or even if they stay in them.

I think there's many good books out there about narcissism and a lot of them are more in the research realm. Once we jump it into the self-help, personal development space, one of the big errors I see is that the assumption is if somebody is in any kind of relationship with a narcissistic person, the only solution is to get out. And that is simply not accessible to the vast majority of people.