Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 284: How To Handle A Narcissist (Including, Maybe...Yourself) | Keith Campbell

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

“Narcissist” is a word that gets thrown quite a bit, including by me -- often, semi-facetiously, about myself. But until this conversation, I didn’t actually know what the word meant. My guest today is Keith Campbell, who’s been researching narcissism for more than 30 years. He’s got a new book called The New Science of Narcissism. In this episode, we talk about the difference between garden variety narcissism and the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the difference between grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism, what to do with if you’re married to a narcissist, how to identify your own narcissism, and what he calls the CPR method for narcissism control. Where to find Keith Campbell online:  Website: https://wkeithcampbell.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wkeithcampbell Book Mentioned: The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement by Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell: https://bookshop.org/books/the-narcissism-epidemic-living-in-the-age-of-entitlement/9781416575993  The New Science of Narcissism by W. Keith Campbell: https://bookshop.org/books/the-new-science-of-narcissism-understanding-one-of-the-greatest-psychological-challenges-of-our-time-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/9781683644026 Other Resources Mentioned: Chelsea Sleep: https://psychology.uga.edu/directory/people/chelsea-sleep Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche: https://shambhala.org/teachers/chogyam-trungpa/  Sigmund Freud: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sigmund-Freud Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/kieth-campbell-284 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, you may have heard me discuss this on the show before, but throughout the pandemic we've been giving free access to people who are working on the front lines that includes teachers,

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let me just take a moment to encourage you. Because when you're a paid subscriber, you not only support our work and our free access campaigns, but you're also getting access to our bevy of world-class teachers, meditation courses, and coaches. So if you're interested, please go to 10%.com slash subscribe. That is 10%, one word all spelled out.com slash subscribe. Go for it. One word, all spelled out, dot com slash subscribe. Go for it. Hey guys, narcissists is a word that gets thrown out quite a bit,

including by me often semi-facitiously about myself. But until this conversation, I didn't actually know what the word meant. My guest today is Keith Campbell. He's been researching narcissism for more than 30 years. He's got a new book out called The New Science of Narcissism. And in this episode, we talk about the difference between garden variety, narcissism,

and the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. We also talk about the difference between grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism, what to do if you're married to a narcissist, how to identify your own narcissism, and what he calls the CPR method for narcissism control. So there's a lot here, plus despite the heaviness of his chosen research area, Keith is a pretty funny guy, so here we go, Keith Campbell. Alright, Keith, nice to meet you.

Thanks for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me, Dan. Well, sure, I'm a little trepidaceous going to this because I feel like you're gonna diagnose me as a narcissist and within the first 30 seconds here, but we'll see. Oh, I don't diagnose anyone. I'm a researcher.

I believe that's the practitioners. That's good. Okay, cool. All right, I can breathe. Let me just first get a sense of who you are. Why did you become interested in narcissism? Well, it's been a long time. I'm a social personality psychologist.

I study that in graduate school and there's a big interest in self enhancement. Turns out that most people think they're better than they are. So if I go to a class and say, you know, on a 10 point scale, how attractive are you? The average person will say I'm about a six or seven. You know, if I say how humble are you, the average person, I'm about a six or seven on humility. I'm pretty humble.

I'm not the most humble, but I'm pretty humble. Most people think they're a little better driver than average. So our ego inflates, that's just what it does. It's an interesting question, but when I started looking at it back in grad school, I realized some people do this more than others. So some people are actually pretty nice. Some people are truly humble and some people are sort of arrogant and full of themselves. And narcissism is a tool that trade of narcissism is a way to look at this. It's a way to understand the ego a little better than without using it.

So that's partly why I got into it. I mean, for your interest, I was sort of interested in non-attachment and the non-self from a Buddhist perspective. And I couldn't figure out how to study that at all. And narcissism kind of gives the other way. So instead of studying lack of ego, let's just go the other way and study ego and sort of figure out how ego works.

And that's sort of some of the reasons I got into it. I guess I have suspected you to give me some horror story about being raised by a horrible narcissist, except father or something like that. Look, I struggle with ego just like everyone, but this isn't a full research, as me search kind of situation. I just found it really interesting.

So what is narcissism? Because the word gets thrown around a lot by me, but I'm keenly aware that I don't actually know what I'm talking about. Yeah, narcissism was word like said, people throw it around a lot and usually they mean somebody who's kind of a jerk and maybe a little bit full of themselves. And that's not bad for a definition, but when we talk about it and research, it's more complicated. And really there's sort of three definitions.

The primary one and the one most people are talking about when they talk about narcissism is a personality trait. That means there's people who are high on the trait and low on the trait. Most people are somewhere in the middle. And it's a personality trait that is a combination of maybe a lack of empathy, maybe a sense of entitlement or some callousness to people. But at the same time, some drive and ambition and maybe charisma and charm and extroversion.

So you get these interesting people who are both a little bit callous, a little bit selfish, but they're also extroverted and outgoing and agenic. And they end up being your boss at work. They end up being the person you date because you met them and they seem so confident and charming. So you end up marrying them or getting relationships with them. You watch people like this who rise into celebrity status because this is a good temperament for being a celebrity.

Iron Man and those Marvel movies is a good temperament for being a celebrity. Iron Man and those Marvel movies is a good grandiose narcissist. And there's this other form of narcissism which we talk about in the literature, but you don't see it as much in the world except in clinical settings, which is vulnerable narcissism. And this has that sense of entitlement and selfishness just like grandiose narcissism,

the same sort of core of self-centeredness or self-importance, but you're also vulnerable and a little bit easily threatened. Your self-esteem's unstable, you're a little insecure. So these vulnerable narcissists, and we're insecure narcissists, and that becoming depressed and anxious, because they think people should appreciate how wonderful they are. People should acknowledge their genius, but they're not very outgoing. They're not very confident. So they end up depressed and they end up in therapy for depression because no one understands how great they are. So you get these two faces of narcissism that you see. One is more unstable and depressed and one's more grandiose and

likable and charismatic and charming. One runs the world, when it's going into therapy. And when these things become extreme, when you get narcissism that's extreme and inflexible, so you're kind of, you know, so somebody like you, you go on TV and you're confident and charismatic and it's great, and then you go home and you do the same thing to your kids, and your kids like that, I want to play and you're like, let me tell you about my day, kid. Then it becomes a disorder. It starts to mess up your life because your narcissism is so extreme

and it's so inflexible that it can become a disorder which we call narcissistic personality disorder, NPD. So that's another way people use narcissism in the clinical term, but that's a very rare disorder. So we're talking one or two percent and maybe people have NPD. When we talk about it in the research world, it's a little more complicated than the normal sort of use of the term. A complicated but fascinating. So, it sounds like everybody's somewhere on the spectrum.

Then you've got one or two percent that's the NPD territory. But in the spectrum, it's interesting because as I was listening to you talk about grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, I was thinking, well, there are times in my life that I can interpolate back to from now where I would fit both of those descriptions. Yeah, absolutely. And they can't go together. They don't correlate too much. So what that means is people with grandiose can also be vulnerable. People with vulnerable can be grandiose. Often you see, I'd say a condition, I don't know if that's the right word, but a state of affairs where people will vacillate between grandiose and invulnerability. I do this myself. So I'm going to be on this podcast, I'm going to be a legend. And then I'm like, I'm the most ugly person on earth. Look, I'll fat am. I hate myself.

Then like, I'm going to be rich. Oh my God, everyone hates me. So you kind of vacillate between deflation and inflation. And that's something you see with both forms of narcissism. I think vulnerability a little more, because it's associated with neuroticism and anxiety, which is why I do it more. But yeah, both of those polls are pretty active. So I once heard a critic of modern psychotherapy

describing it as providing understanding without relief. So that's far you've given me some understanding, but is there anything to be done about this? Is it useful or in any way a relief to be able to understand where I may fit on the narcissism spectrum at any given moment or where anybody in my orbit or anybody I'm watching on TV may fit on the spectrum. Yeah, that's a great phrase and that reminds me of Freud saying, you know, the goal is to turn

neurotic suffering into everyday unhappiness, you know, the goal of therapy. And it doesn't sound like that great a goal, you know, just to be sad. Look, I'm a researcher. I like to understand things even if it doesn't do any good, but I really do think it matters. So if I'm dealing with my own narcissism and I'm able to break down what's going on with me, I can maybe fix it better. So if my narcissism involves a sense of entitlement, if that's what really gets me into trouble, I can work on gratitude. And say, God, I'm so entitled all the time. Why don't I have a little bit of gratitude for my life? Maybe that would make me a little bit happier person. If my problem is I'm really insecure and I'm not willing to be confident,

maybe I got to be more confident and sort of treat the vulnerability that way. If I take too many risks because I'm too grandiose or I'm taking financial risks all the time because of my confidence and overconfidence, perhaps what I need to do is say, God, that risk takings a little problem. Maybe I need to hire somebody to double check my risk taking. Dial it in.

So by understanding that how narcissism works in the pieces, I think it allows you to address it in a little more sophisticated way than just saying, yeah, you're kind of fully yourself. Don't be fully yourself. So I think there's some good to it, but, you know, I'm in the business and I'm not, I don't know if I can convince anyone else. Well, you did write a whole book about that before this new book, the new science of narcissism, you did write a whole book about how to handle it if you're married to a narcissist.

I wrote a book called When You Love A Man Who Loves Himself. When I started doing this work. Keep that book away from my wife. No, that's why I wrote it because I kept going out with people and that's what every woman would say. The guy's didn't care. I was like, yeah, my wife's pretty hot.

I guess she's narcissistic, I don't care. But the women would talk about it all the time. And so I wrote a book really for women, but it's a little bit out data, but that's the reason. Yeah. So what are the tools that we can use? You know, if, again, we don't have to go around, unless we've got a true NPD on our hands, it might be useful to think about where our partner is on the spectrum at any given

moment and what are the tools we can use to sort of provide ourselves and them with some relief. Yeah, I think that's useful to think about. I don't think going around and analyzing your partner's personality all the time is really what you're in it for a long time. Maybe you just make it work. But I think what you're saying is, you're in a marriage with somebody, you've got a relationship with somebody, it's not a clinical disorder, but narcissism's a problem.

So my wife's married to me, and maybe I go, look, I've got to put the kid's second because my career is first. And I do this over and over and over, and it starts causing problems. Or maybe I have issues with conflicts. And my wife says hey Keith

you know maybe you could be a little nicer and I'm like why you tell me what to do I'm doing all this work you're always blaming me maybe you can be nicer so maybe the narcissism's leading to conflict in my relationship because I'm not willing to kind of soften up and take criticism and so I think understanding those kind of rough spots in the relationship and where the ego is getting in there and messing it up Can be really important and being able to just talk about it. You know, it's just ego and Understanding and breaking it down is is useful. I can imagine if you're dating somebody who's or married to somebody who's Pretty advanced on the spectrum of narcissism that bringing this up would be

tough on the spectrum of narcissism that bringing this up would be tough. Yeah, it's very challenging. And I think one of the mistakes people make potentially is sort of globalizing it and focusing on it. So I'm going to say it's me because I don't want to know what's to feel bad. But imagine I'm the narcissist in this relationship. And my wife comes home and says, you are so narcissistic, stopping so full of yourself.

What I'm gonna do is get angry and defensive. Cause I'm gonna say, you called me a narcissist, that's mean and you said I'm full of myself or how am I gonna be less full of myself? What I'm gonna be filled with, that's useless. But if you said, Keith, you're a great husband. I really appreciate how hard you work and how serious you are, but I think it would be great and would make even more admired is to spend more time with your family.

You know, that's something really great husband's do and, you know, I'd really appreciate that and I know the kids would appreciate that and I think it would make you a stronger person, a better person. I bet it would even feedback and make you better at work. I go, you know, maybe my wife's right, I could be even better. I mean, pretty good, but I could be better. And maybe that would make me better work, because I could talk about my great family. When I do podcasts or I could talk about it when I'm trying to get clients, this would be great. And that's going to be a little better. It's going to be a little more effective, because I won't get as defensive. Low manipulative, but it's a way of getting at the

issues of narcissism without hitting the person directly, kind of come into it at the side. It's interesting. So if you're dealing with a narcissist, the one way potentially to reduce the narcissism is to use a narcissistic appeal toward altruism. Yeah, I mean, it's manipulation. I apologize, but we have different terms for it. Sometimes I've used the term communal activation, trying to bring up more communal feelings

in your partner, trying to open up compassion, trying to open up warmth. So when I look at narcissism, I see it as having these two sides. One is about dominance or leadership or drive or ambition. And those are things in our society we kind of like, you know, we don't mind people being leaders, we encourage people to be leaders. And this other side is being selfish and self centered and entitled and expecting more from people.

And that's the side in our system that we see is more socially toxic. I can deal with people who think they're great if they're nice to me. But if somebody thinks they're not great as a jerk to me, I don't like them. So when you deal with narcissism, I think it's especially in relationships, it's really useful to focus on that more interpersonal piece, to try to bring about compassion, try to being about some more affection, perspective taking all those sort of interpersonal skills from your partner.

Speaking of somebody who's, again, been on the pretty far end of the spectrum at times of my life, maybe even literally right now, one appeal that's worked for me is that if you're paying attention And if you're paying attention when you're just filled with self-regard, be it grandiose or vulnerable, it doesn't feel good. Thinking about yourself, being self-centered hurts. It feels much better to be other focused. I've just seen over and over through my meditation practice and through my life and the world and through relationships with other human beings. And so that has provided a way that also works through the pleasure centers of my brain, but it doesn't feel manipulative.

Part of the challenge is the science is we spend so long trying to figure out what narcissism is and how it works that these sort of treatment things or if we've got another decade to figure all these things out. But this idea of self-consciousness or self-awareness being unpleasant is really interesting because there is research on this, where just self-awareness can be unpleasant. You're just sitting there thinking about yourself,

it's boring, even if you love yourself and think you're awesome, I think it can be rewarding. The oldest definitions of narcissism were self-love in a physical way. I mean, it was, you know, back to just real, I mean, this is 1890s kind of stuff. So I think that self-consciousness could be a turn-off eventually. If you made, I'm sorry, I'm just thinking it through Dan. This would be an interesting manipulation of people come in. Just reflect on yourself. Think about yourself. How do you feel? And now think about somebody else. Now think about doing something for somebody else. Think about helping somebody else. How do you feel? Most of the work people feel better interpersonal than they do at home.

I don't know if it affect narcissists more than anyone else, but I bet it would make a difference. And in fact, one of our grad students, Chelsea Sleep, just did this amazing study looking at And in fact, one of our grad students, Chelsea, sleep just did this amazing study looking at, you know, asking people in narcissistic what they thought. And what I used to think and what people thought in the literature where people in narcissistic were really kind of unaware of these interpersonal consequences of their life.

But when we did these studies, it turns out that people in narcissistic are aware of it. They say, yeah, I'm kind of antagonistic. I'm a little bit of a jerk that causes problems. I wish I was a little less this way. So we do seem to see more self-awareness than I thought existed five years ago. Because the old model narcissism where people are just kind of oblivious. But what it seems to be, at least in the normal range, is that people like, yeah, my narcissism, it helps me at times, but it causes me problems.

I wish I could have some better relationships. Yeah, I mean, I suspect a lot of people who have pronounced narcissistic tendencies are on the sort of wrong side of the spectrum here or maybe thinking, how do I keep the good parts of narcissism, the ambition, but Jettison, the more painful to myself in other's aspects? Yes, in that challenge of being driven without being a jerk or being a leader without being entitled, or sometimes in the leadership world, if you go into the business side of it, they'll talk about it as servant leadership or level five leadership, the idea that you can be a driven leader

without being an egomaniac. And this is very possible. I mean, people are like this. You look at the Dalai Lama. I mean, he's one of the greatest political leaders we've ever had. He's not an egomaniac. He works at it.

I think he spends hours and hours a day to force himself or to train himself not to be an ego maniac, but he isn't. We have people who do that and we respect people like that a lot, but it's that how do you peel away the ego from the drive. How can you be fearless without being mean how can you be fearless without an envy I this is a line from. be fearless without an envy. There's a line from one of the Clancy, but Liam Clancy, I got the sim my head from an old Bob Dylan interview where he says, no fear, no envy, no meanness, but I thought that was an interesting formula for creative success. How you can do things without being mean to people. It's a challenge. No, I think Buddhism has a lot to say on this, you know, on how to be ambitious.

And the devil, I'm a good example, and he meditates every morning for three hours, at least I believe. You know, there are ways to train the mind so that you can be ambitious in that you have lofty goals, but your motivation is not self-aggrandizement, but is benefit of other beings, and that you're not attached to the outcome so that you're more resilient. Both of these things actually boost resilience, because if your motivation is less self-regard and more benefiting other people, then it's easier to dust yourself off and not take things personally.

And then if you're not attached to the results, you recognize, okay, in particular in the Dalai Lama's position, he can have the view of like, I can set a lofty goal and hope to achieve it over many lifetimes. Yes, you have a very bodhisattva vow, right? Or bodhisattva pledge. Yes. God, that would be a really interesting manipulation in narcissism work because it is very selfless. It's very giving and it also takes away the element of time because you have lifetime

to do it. So you don't have to nail it this week. You know, I'm going to save the world. I don't have a deadline. So I can be a little less pressured. I love talking about the Dalai Lama. But there are other spiritual leaders who are incredibly narcissistic and they start cults and they take advantage of people You know spiritual materialism is a term they use for this. I've seen in some of the Buddhist literature and the Hindu literature

So it's a this practices. I think can be really good for relieving that stuff, but there's also it's also a vector for narcissism Much more of my conversation with Keith Campbell right after this our system. Much more of my conversation with Keith Campbell right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke and we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our new series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course.

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into the future about, if not myself? Yeah, and that's the, there's this, I'm just like Dostoevsky, you know, I'm the worst man in the world and I made it all, every make caused all this suffering. I mean, you have to be an ego maniac to think you're that bad. You know, if I, if in my depressive thoughts, for me to be as bad a person as I imagine when I'm depressed, I'd have to be pretty arrogant because I really couldn't be that

horrible. You know, I'm just kind of a normal dude. I can't be that much of a loser. So there is that ego in depression. And you get an inflation of self, people who get depressed get really self-focus because you're in such suffering. It's hard for you to reach out and help somebody else, you know, because you're dealing with your own anxiety, your own fear, your own suffering. So reaching out can be really hard.

Sorry, I just, I get too weird. I started thinking about the acid test now. I don't know why. Remember the acid test from the 60s? Ken Keezy. Ken Keezy in those guys. I saw a wavy gravy, the clown who was at the acid test. I saw him do a talk and he said,

when you were in the acid test and you thought you were the lowest, you could be the most scared and depressed and you could reach out and transcend yourself to help somebody else out, that's when you pass the acid test. The thing with narcissism is ego is a big topic. And ego can do a lot of things. And sometimes ego can just be distracting like monkey mind.

And sometimes it can be really self-focused and fear-based and hiding in a room. And sometimes it can be this more narcissistic. Look at me, I'm awesome. And so ego can take all these different forms. I meant to ask this early on, are we seeing societal shifts toward narcissism? And if so, what's driving it? Gene Twang and I wrote a book, I think we owe eight or nine, right before the crash called the narcissism epidemic. And we spent a lot of time looking at narcissism, looking at young people.

And we spent a lot of time looking at narcissism, looking at young people. And it looked like narcissism, and this is college student data, because this is what we have data on. It looked like narcissism is trended up, at least until the great recession, where this the average narcissism school in the country went up and up and up. And then in the recession, it looks like it sort of stabilized or started going back down. And now, I think, I mean, obviously, there's tons of narcissism in the US just turn on the TV. It's not hard to find. But it seems like we're getting huge waves of depression now. We're just destabilization from the coronavirus. But the data are, I mean, I'm sort of looking to data right as they come out and it looks like this is kind

of making people more depressed. I don't think the narcissism is going up with this. I'm not sure though. I've been under the armchair analyst impression that narcissism must be going up because of social media. Yes, and it looked to me like it was until maybe 2012 or something like that. And I'm talking beyond the data right now, Dan, but I'm just going to talk. So this is me doing armchair stuff because our data, you know, in the last year or two,

it's hard, the science is always fuzzy. It always takes a few years for stuff to clean out. It looks like what happened on social media is when it started, it was a vector for narcissism in part. What happened on social media is when it started, it was a vector for narcissism in part. What we know right now are people who are narcissistic use social media more. They're more accomplished at it. They have more followers or friends or whatever. Social media and narcissism go together pretty well. But then there's the question, does social media make people narcissistic? And originally I thought it would, I thought it made sense, but when we started looking at the data,

it didn't really seem to. It seemed like people in narcissistic, social media would help them maintain their narcissism. But what seemed to be going on with other kids and young people, old people, whatever, me too, is social media became very stressful for them. So if it became on Instagram, I had to do a perfect selfie. I'm doing selfies all the time. It's hard. If I don't love myself, if I'm a little insecure,

my selfie doesn't look good. So I feel stressed when I send my selfies at. I get stressed when I get my feedback. And so what you saw happen was all the kids were on Instagram. Then a lot of the young kids got sort of fake Instagram accounts so people couldn't see them. And then they got Snapchat accounts so that it wasn't as permanent. So there was less pressure on them. And now they're sort of a TikTok where it's silly. I sometimes think about it this way. Our kids are more exposed than 1930s movie stars. So my daughters have probably more celebrity exposure than a movie star would in the 30s or 40s. Just have their picture taken more, they're out there more. And so they get a lot of celebrity problems. Narcissism might be a

celebrity problem, but there's also depression, low self-esteem, body image, or body dysmorphia. So you have this big move for... Like if you go into a plastic surgeon's office, there's a reasonable chance. You can say, here's a image or body dysmorphia. So you have this big move for like if you go into a plastic surgeon's office, there's a reasonable chance you could say, here's a perfect selfie. I want to look like this. They'll even be a sign in there. Want to make your selfie better? You know, get this procedure. So people are getting plastic surgery to take better selfies. So it's, I think there's a cost to a lot of this that people are suffering from now. When social media first came off, the to a lot of this that people are suffering from now.

When social media first came off, the cost wasn't apparent, and now people are seeing more of the cost. It's a guess. I just don't have the data. You were modest earlier when I asked you, you know, what can we do to deal with narcissism in our own mind and in the minds of people around us. But in your new book, you do have a section about an acronym called CPR,

which you do build as set of tools we can use in these circumstances. I'd love to hear more about that. You know, we're talking about narcissism again. I don't like just attacking people's ego because you don't know what you're going to get. CPR is a way of thinking about narcissism, especially people are like, what do I do with my kids? What do I do with others?

It's a way of thinking about it that's not directly an ego attack, and it's easy to remember. So, see compassion. Compassion or interpersonal relationships or love or affection or whatever you want caring concern and all those those interpersonal warmth That is a buffer against narcissism the more love you have in your life the less narcissistic You're gonna be the more compassionate you are the less narcissistic you're gonna be so building that Compassion and is really an important way to sort of stop from becoming an unhinged narcissist because you care about people way to sort of stop from becoming an unhinged narcissist because you care about people. The second one is when people don't think about very much, but I think it's important, especially when you're in a performance field, creative field, sports, any of these, any

of the fields. It's passion. So when people do things out of passion, out of love or what they're doing. So I mean, surfing or yoga or meditation or doing podcasting or being a professor when they're passionate about their subject, they can be energized and they can draw people in charismatically, but they're not ego involved because they just love what they're doing. It's not about them. So in the psychology literature, we have this term called flow or flow states that people

get into sometimes in sports. They talk about it like being in the psychology literature, we have this term called flow or flow states that people get into sometimes and sports They talk about it like being in the zone When you're so engaged in what you're doing and you're performing at such a high level that you literally lose consciousness of yourself You sort of lose awareness of yourself. You're so immersed in what you're doing And so I think that if you focus your life on passion your ego isn't going to be as strong It's going to be buffered because you just love what you're doing. And the third thing is that R and CPR is responsibility taking. One of the biggest challenges with narcissism is taking responsibility for failure,

or taking responsibility for mistakes or bad outcomes. People who are narcissistic are very good at taking credit for success. They're not so good at taking credit for failure. And so I think it's a real practice just to say, yeah, I'm responsible for this screw up. Even if you're not responsible, even if your employees responsible for the screw up, it's better to say, yeah, I'm responsible for that screw up. So if you practice this over time, what you find is, first of all, you get better because you take responsibility for mistakes. You don't make them as much. Secondly, people don't hate you for taking responsibility for failure. They kind of respect you.

They go, yeah, Keith's not perfect, but he's not a jerk. At least he takes responsibility. I don't have to. So that responsibility piece, I think, is a pretty good buffer for narcissism. have to. So that responsibility piece I think is a pretty good buffer for narcissism. Would you describe CPR as primarily a set of tools that one can use to shave down one's own narcissism or is there an aspect to it that you can use with a difficult boss or spouse, etc? I came up with that idea because I had so many parents going I don't want my kid to be narcissistic and so I try to come up with an acronym really, you know, how to deal with kids. But I use it for myself,

just like run that through my head sometimes, with a boss, it's much harder. Because with yourself or your kids, you have some control when you're dealing with a boss. A lot of it is how do you protect yourself, how do you make sure that my boss can't take advantage of me? And then it becomes a balance of protection, but also some manipulation. So if I have an arrogant boss, I figure, well, the guy wants to have an ego, the woman wants

to have an ego, how do I help her? Ego needs to be met in a way that benefits my career and then cost me my job. Right. So back to the manipulation. Yeah. I'm sorry. I don't use manipulation in the pejorative. I mean, if you don't have as much power, manipulation is the jujitsu move, right? But if you have power, agency when it comes to your own personality, and hopefully, especially when they're younger, you're your own children. And so what I hear you talking about CPR as it pertains to children,

I've got a five year old died very much, do not want him to be a narcissist, even though he has my genes. So I would be encouraging under your schema for him to have things in his life that develop skills like compassion, passion, and responsibility. Yeah, absolutely.

And the other thing I think is really good with kids is natural consequences, meaning the classic example is you burn your hand on the stove, you don't grab stovets anymore, but a lot of nature does that. So you're out, you know, brought climbing or surfing or doing anything out in nature and you get hurt and you can't blame anyone but yourself. You know, you're out kayaking on a river and you get hurt and you can't blame anyone but yourself. You know, you're out kayaking on a river and you get knocked underwater. You can't blame anyone. You just have to accept responsibility for what happens. So I think those natural consequences over and over.

It just helps you establish a self that's not interpersonal in a way. It allows you to know what you're good at, what you're not good at. If you meet people who do high-risk sports, you know, big wave surfers, fighters, or what, they're pretty, usually pretty chill people. They've gotten beat down so many times. Their ego isn't what it was when they were 15, you know? Let me ask you about passion, because I have a lot of things that I'm passionate about, but you use the phrase, you can get so passionate about it, but you can get it to a flow state where your ego isn't involved. But, you know, I'm really passionate about my writing books

and doing podcasts. And yet, like, do I check my Amazon rank pretty regularly? Yes. Do I check how this podcast is ranking in the Apple store all the time? That's pretty prominent ego involvement. Well, it's ego involvement, but it depends how you frame in your task. So if your task is you say, look, I just love to write. I don't care when it leaves my desk. I don't care. I just love to put words on paper. And then you said, and I'm checking my stuff all the time. I'd say, Dan, maybe there's

something going on. But if you said, I'm really passionate about being a successful writer, how do you score points as a successful writer? You get sales ranks, so you get comments or whatever. So you're basically looking at the points on the board. So looking at the points of the board is going to give you feedback for good or bad. And if your numbers are bad, you're getting bad data from it. And you go, I better readjust or maybe you just blame your publicist and go off the handle, fire your publicist.

Sorry. Sure, Joe, my publicist's Beth is the nicest person in the world, not a stay-bath. But you can see that, right? Your numbers are down, you go off the handle, you fire everyone and you go, okay, Dan's awesome or Keith's awesome, but everyone around Keith is an idiot. Let's get a new team around Keith so Keith can be awesome again. But if you're looking at the numbers going, you know, I got to work on this or, you know, it's really working over here, but it's not working over here.

I'm going to change my direction a little bit. That's feedback for performance. So it's not really ego, it's more performance-based. Well, what it gets me thinking, and maybe this is totally off-base, is that is it possible there's a kind of healthy or useful narcissism in that, yes, I do look at the metrics, and yes, I do feel there's at least some ego involvement there, but I am using it as a way I hoped to get better at my job

so that I serve people better. I mean, I'm trying to be honest here, is that my only motivation? I'll say it's at least one outcome that I do serve people better. And so maybe I'm putting lipstick on a pig here, but is that maybe useful ego? Well, yes, I think it's useful ego.

I mean, you got to have a ego. You got to get out of bed in the morning, you know? And if you're gonna be successful, and you're gonna say, I'm gonna put stuff out there that I want people to pay attention to. You gotta have some of an ego to start with. I mean, to make it work, the problem is you just don't wanna take in the over.

So if you have an ego and you can use your ego, but it's not taking you over, it's not destroying your relationships. I don't think it's a bad thing at all. I mean, it's a tool. Think about ego as a tool in your toolbox, but you can pull it out of your toolbox and use it, but then you can put it away and go home to your wife and kid or whatever. You can go to the park and look at the birds and feel joy. not have to be living in your head all the time. So that tool in the toolbox metaphor is what I've used and it makes sense to me. Also, I mean, no one's perfect.

I'm not the Dolly Lama. Oh my God. That guy meditates. He was reincarnated with 13 times and needed meditates for hours a day. I mean, I get out of bed, have a cup of coffee, get yelled at by my kids, and my dog bark at me. I'm just glad to be awake, you know?

But when you're pointing at, to me at least, seems really deep. That, again, I think thinking about it as a spectrum is really useful and we're going to be at various points on the spectrum, given our conditioning and given the current conditions in our lives. But what I hear you're doing is kind of decriminalizing the ego here. We need to have ego.

We need to, as you said, get up in the morning, put our pants on, make appointments. And it's not wrong to want to be successful, but you might want to have ways to be able to turn the volume up or down on the ego or to put it back in the toolkit and pull out a different tool, whatever. Pick your metaphor. I think motivation is a key part here. What is your motivation for your success, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems like we're getting into really complex, but deeply useful terrain here. I agree. I'm not anti-ego by any means. I just think it can be overwhelming. I like competition. I think competition is a great way to learn about yourself. It's a great way to kind of lose your ego

because you get your butt kicked. It's a great way to gain confidence in what you do. It's a very egotistical thing. But if it's balanced fair competition, it's great. That's where we have sportsmanship, though. So, you know, you don't go sabotage your competitor after the competition. We learn how to have you go and then put it away and we learn how to deal with it reasonably well. Being selfless all the time. I mean, if you just woke up and started giving away all your stuff, I mean your family's gonna starve. It's not perfect. I mean we're human. We're not gods. I very much look at this as a balance and trying to make things better or worse rather than getting rid of ego

somehow. I mean, you can do it for moments and intense experiences, but done last long. I have a few more questions. This is fascinating. The book is called The New Science of Narcissism. That's the new book. What do you mean by new science? What's new here? Well, the research in Therian Narcissism has been a mess for a long time. And the term has been around for about 100 years. And it got real messy because just historically, you had psychoanalysts looking at people and saying, well, these people are really arrogant, but deep downside, they hate themselves.

So, you know, Donald Trump is underneath Woody Allen and Woody Allen underneath must be Donald Trump and it gets all confusing. And we have these very strange models and different people calling different things narcissism. The definitions were really messed up. And in the last 10 years or so, there's been a wide agreement of sort of how we can structure narcissism, talk about as a personality trait, as in a disorder. And really what it meant is the personality psychologist, the social psychologist, the industrial organizational business psychologist, and the psychiatrist and clinical people all got together and sort of agreed on what we're talking about. And the field was able to move forward very quickly in about 10 years. So that's really what, I mean, a lot of the reason I write the book is I just

want to get this stuff out there. So if somebody wants to come along in five years and pick it up, they can just start where I am and not have to start from scratch. The epilogue in your book is, well, the title of the chapter is epilogue, but the subtitle is facing the future with hope. What is hopeful here? I just try to be hopeful now. I used to be so cynical, but it just wasn't working for me. No, I'm hopeful in a lot of things.

I think, you know, if you'd asked me five years ago, I'd say there's not really a treatment for MPD, people might change too much. And it seems like people can change. It seems like people are flexible in their personalities more than we thought before. It seems like we can understand personality so we can see that some things are strengths

and weaknesses and we kind of balance those out. So I think there's hope that challenge clinically is that there's no real good research on narcissistic personalities as order. It's just not a priority of the government to fund research on this. So we don't really have... I mean, I wish I could say, you know what? We've got five therapies. They've been tested in these, you know, these clinical trials. Easy. Call this guy. We can fix your narcissism. We just don't have that because there's no research on it. I mean, there's some, but there's no big money push for it. There's just not a federal interest in narcissism. So many jokes to be made there. I mean, it just really isn't. I hate to say a bit.

I mean, that's literally the case. There's not a federal interest in narcissism. That's very interesting sense. I could get fired for playing with it too much. But let me put it in terms that this is actually a little spookier, but this is kind of what happens is our National Institute of Health thinks about mental disorders as being things that are first found in cells and then found in neurons and then things you can find in rat models or rodent models, and then things you find in the brain. So it's a very materialistic view of the psyche. And so things like narcissism that don't really clearly fit into a rat model or a mouse model, they just don't know what to do with it. Because it's a problem of ego, and we don't really have good models with animals, we don't have good medicines for it, and our whole system is designed to make every mental problem of pill. And so there's not a lot

of funding for things that don't follow along those lines. How do you clinically, and I know you're not a clinician, but how does one clinically delineate between somebody who is pretty far to the extreme on the narcissism spectrum and somebody who's full on NPD and narcissistic personality disorder. The distinction is impairment. So we'd say is there clinically significant impairment in your life from your narcissism? To be a disorder, it has to be messing you up. And so what they have to do is localize a couple areas where this disorder is making your life harder. So it could be interpersonal problems. That's a big one for narcissism. So yeah, you've got this narcissism and it's wrecking your marriage or your work. That's a problem. It could be a

cognitive distortion. Oh, you know, you're making terrible decisions because your confidence is way too high. So it's distorting your decision making. It could be emotional disruption. So your narcissism makes you have these aggressive outbursts whenever you feel threatened. And we need to work on that clinically because you lost your job and you can't, you ran up on stage when someone got an award

and stole the award from them and that's terrible. You know, you know, whatever it is, you kind of have to have this impairment to be a disorder. If you're just the most arrogant person on the earth, but you're a nice person, you're not getting a disorder. I mean, a Dalai Lama comes in and says, yeah, I'm a reincarnated Lama. And yeah, that's kind of how I roll God King. He's not going to be diagnosed as NPD because he it's not imparant. So it's that impairment piece that makes a clinical disorder and not just a trait.

Yeah, I guess the impairment though, there's some elasticity in that phrase in that. There is so much elasticity and that the truth is if you walked into a psychiatrist and said my life's messed up because my wife says I'm kind of a narcissist, guys probably gonna diagnose you as narcissistic. Right. Because you walked in there. Right. This has been a great chat.

Having written numerous books on the subject are there areas where I should have steered the conversation but failed to or the things you want to get off your chest that I haven't given you a chance to No, this is really interesting The thing with ego is that it affects every single avenue of life So you could say Keith what about narcissism and sports what about narcissism and geeks what about narcissism and the military What about narcissism and religion? I mean you can go anywhere with it. It's the nature of the ego. It goes in everything. So, no, this is fun. So, final, final question here. We do, on some episodes, we do this thing called the Plug Zone, where we we force our off- and modest guests to shamelessly plug. So, can you just plug your new book, your old books, where you are in the interwebs, etc., etc.

Oh, thank you. We have a new book coming out to September 28th called The New Science of Narcissism, available from all your local bookstores. Internet, we put up a site called Narcissism Lab that has some narcissism tests on there that should be working if you're curious and wkeithgamble.com. A pleasure to meet you and a chat with you Keith.

Thank you so much. Oh, likewise, thank you a chat with you Keith. Thank you so much. Oh likewise. Thank you. Big thanks to Keith before we go heads up on Thursday, October 1st from 7 to 9 Eastern PM Joseph Goldstein Sharon Salisberg and 7 a.c. Lasting I will be doing a live event It's a live stream event. It's a benefit to support two great meditation centers, the New York Insight Meditation Center. That's obviously in New York and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge Mass. For more information and to register, you can go to nymc.org and search under events to

make it easy for you. We'll also put a link in the show notes. And finally, big thanks to the folks who work so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns is our senior producer, Marissa Schneidermann is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boynton and Ania Sheshik of Ultraviolet Audio. Maria Wertel is our production coordinator. We derive a lot of wisdom from our TPH colleagues, such as Jen Poient, Ben Rubin, Nate Toby, and Liz Levin, and as always, big thanks to Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohen

from ABC News. We'll see you all on Wednesday for an episode about joy. Is that even a relevant emotion these days? An episode about joy with the great meditation teacher, James Ferris on Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts.

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