You spend time, even today, dealing with patients who are the victim of a narcissistic relationship

or the victim of a narcissist.

Every week.

Every week.

I mean, it's probably one of the, if not the most gratifying part of my week.

I'm a big believer that if you're a mental health practitioner, you practice mental health.

So that's a privilege to be able to be in that room and to work with clients. But it would be so easy when you're dealing at a macro level, large populations going on

YouTube, writing books, to get distanced from what is happening to individual people's

lives. One of the tricky bits with research is we

study populations. We study samples, right? We study hundreds of people. What happens in the room

is something very different. And you start to recognize, A, how badly these relationships harm people,

their schemas of the world, their schemas of themselves, and B, how much potential

for intervention there is with these clients through very, very simple approaches around

education about narcissism, validation of their experience, breaking through self-blame

and teaching them to trust themselves.

So how many patients do you think you've seen that have been victims of narcissists?

I mean, hundreds, hundreds, really. And I even use the word survivor. I hate to call them victims

because I don't even think they're that passive. I mean, I think that they just weren't. No one ever taught

anyone this, right? I'll give you the example. When people are in a relationship with somebody who's

living with addiction, it's very clear what they're dealing with, right? You have a person, they're using a substance that's altering them, that's altering them behavior, that's taking them away from who they are in person. People in relationships with addicts will say, I'm in two relationships. I'm in a relationship with a sober person and I'm in a relationship with

somebody who's using or intoxicated or denying or defending their use, right? Two people. And it breaks

the people in those relationships. And we're willing to call it that. The experience people have

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