How Narcissists Hijack Your Brain - Dr Peter Salerno

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?

I mean, my work focuses on, um... I mean, I'm a psychotherapist. That's kind of like my trade. I'm licensed as a psychotherapist. I have a, a doctorate in psychology, so my background is in psychology and, and mental health. I would say what I do specifically is, um, I do extensive research on the etiology or cause of personality disorders. Like, that's the, 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, um, in relationships where there's, uh, a personality disorder, there's often toxicity and conflict and strife and, um, abuse, right? And so what I do is I help people, uh, restore their, 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, um, controlling, what happens is the, the victim loses their sense of what's actually true and real and what's actually, um, being manipulated. Okay? And so I, 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, uh, 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. Um, and so when I'm consulting with people, uh, professionally, I'm helping them regain their understanding of what's actually real, what happened to them, and what was-- what they were convinced happened to them because it was convenient for somebody else if they believed that.

So it's almost like people that have spent a good bit of time intimately close to these other people-

Mm-hmm

... their reality gets warped around them to the point where it's difficult for them to reenter normal reality without the old, uh, version creeping back in.

Correct. Yeah. 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, 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 from 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 they were, um, their reality was distorted.