How to cope with narcissistic people

This story is part of our mental health series. Find out more here.

In the social media age, it can sometimes feel like everyone is a little bit full of themselves.

But what’s the difference between being self-confident and being a narcissist?

The term narcissist was thrown around quite a bit during the presidential election to describe President-elect Donald Trump, although he hasn’t had an official medical diagnosis.

The origin of the term dates back to the Greek myth of Narcissus, who died after falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. It’s a “metaphor of pathological self-love,” says Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a licensed clinical psychologist based in Los Angeles and author of the book, “It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People.”

Durvasula says there’s a difference between narcissistic personality disorder — which is a classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — and the way people use the word colloquially.

“If you simply use the word narcissistic, you're merely describing someone's personality, and it really isn't a diagnostic term," she says. “And I think that's very important for people to know because I think people get a little churlish about, well, you really shouldn't be diagnosing someone you don't know. I'm like, ‘I'm not. I'm describing their personality just like I might call someone stubborn.’”

What are the personality traits and behaviors associated with narcissism? 

“There is entitlement. There is grandiosity. There's arrogance. There's an excessive need for praise and admiration. There is a lack of empathy. So, this isn't just someone who's selfish. This is someone who simply can't be there with other people.

“Now, when we talk about this sort of offshoot of malignant narcissism here, we're talking about someone who's all those things: lacks empathy, entitled, grandiose and all the rest of it. But they're also exploitative. They are deeply manipulative. They're coercive. It starts to get very dangerous. This is somebody who will literally take someone and put them into psychological servitude, like, make them exist solely to serve their needs and often keep them there through fear and again, through manipulation. So malignant narcissism takes all these patterns, throws in some coercion and exploitation and really levels it up.”

What’s it like to be in a relationship with a narcissist? 

“People in these relationships are deeply confused because there are some really good days they feel like ‘Well, I'm married to someone or I'm in a relationship with someone and things are good and they're really charming or everyone at the dinner party really liked them, and then we got into the car and they started screaming at me’ and that dichotomy and that difference.

“The people in the relationship are always going back and forth between moments that feel very loving, very affectionate, very fun or simply days that don't feel abusive and days that are very abusive. So, folks in these relationships actually experience tremendous harm, but the harm is often not recognized by the world because [narcissists] are so socially successful because they are often wearing two very different faces: a social face and then the face they'll wear behind closed doors.

What techniques can you use to deal with a narcissist? 

“People navigating these relationships are like, ‘I don't know how to talk to this person without it always becoming a mess,’ and at some point, they feel like, ‘I don't want to talk to them at all,’ but you really can't do that. So gray rocking is a technique that in essence involves becoming as dull as a gray rock. So, you're not getting into it with the narcissistic person, you're not giving them what we call narcissistic supply, which is all that praise and admiration they want. But you're also not giving them something that they can jump on, criticize, you for. It's kind of like just the facts, you answer the questions very one word. ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ Today it's raining and it's often that you're very flat and detached.

“Now listen, here's the thing: Not everyone can get out of these relationships. This isn't as simple as like, “Oh, you're in a relationship with a narcissistic person? Let it go. Break it up. Get a divorce.’ Keep in mind for a lot of people, the narcissistic relationship they're struggling with is a parent or a sibling. Sometimes it's an adult child. So, what ends up happening is coming up with these techniques to really clearly see these dynamics.

“There is very little evidence of major change even through therapy unless you've got one heck of a therapist and a lot of money to stay in therapy for a very long time, we don't see a lot of change. There's never been a randomized clinical trial that has shown treatment to be effective with this personality style, and there's often not much motivation or will for the narcissistic person to want to change. Why would there be? They think it's everybody else's fault.

“So if a person is in a relationship with someone narcissistic, one of the places I start with them is say, ‘Listen, our baseline assumption is this is not going to change,’ and armed with that — because that's often one heck of a wakeup call for people — so armed with that knowledge that this is not going to change how are you going to proceed? But above all else is seeing it clearly, so the person in the relationship no longer blames themselves for the other person's manipulation. That's a key step to folks in these relationships starting to heal.”

Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Raphelson also adapted it for the web.