Ceri Wheeldon of Fab after Fifty talks to therapist  Wendy Gregory about how to recognise a narcissist. A topic which has proven to be of enormous interest when we have discussed dating over 50 on the Fab after Fifty website. This is the first of a series of 3 interviews on recognising and dealing with narcissists.

In this episode Wendy will share:

How to recognise the signs of narcissistic behaviour.

The three phases of a relationship with a narcissist - love bombing, devalue, discard.

What is involved in each stage

What is gaslighting ?

Wendy's contact details: [email protected] or TheWendyHouse facebook page

The patterns of narcissistic behaviour

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Full episode transcript:

[00:00:06] I'm Ceri Wheeldon. Welcome to the Fab after Fifty podcast. Leading the pro age conversation, talking about all things life after 50.

 

[00:00:19] Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Fab after Fifty podcast. I'm very pleased to have with me today Wendy Gregory. Now Wendy is a counsellor, psychologist and writer. Hello and welcome to Fab after 50.

 

[00:00:32] Hi, Ceri.

 

[00:00:34]  What are we going to be talking about today?

 

[00:00:37] Today we're talking about narcissistic personality disorder and initially on how, you know, if you're actually involved or in a relationship with a narcissist.

 

[00:00:49] There is an awful lot of media coverage about narcissism today is that because there are more of them out there with it, because we're just more aware of what a narcissistic personality is.

 

[00:00:59] Yeah, that's a difficult one really to pinpoint. And I personally think that there probably are more narcissistic people simply because parenting styles have changed over the years and become much more child centered as a lot more children are growing up believing that they're special. And this that doesn't help. But we don't actually have any numbers. I mean, the thing with narcissistic personality disorder is that very few narcissists will ever present for therapy. So they're largely undiagnosed.

 

[00:01:33] Right. And what exactly is a narcissistic personality disorder?

 

[00:01:38] Okay. Narcissistic personality disorder is a developmental disorder. There's often confusion. People think it's a mental illness and it isn't. If it were a mental illness, we could treat it with drugs or whatever and cure it. And it isn't actually the case. So it's about ways of behaving that are not what we'd call normal. I hate to use the word normal really as a psychologist, but. But they're not normal. They affect their relationships and more importantly they affect everyone that they're involved with. So there is narcissism is on a continuum. So this very low level, what we call a covert narcissists, there's that really quite hard to spot and generally they go through life without being spotted and then going upwards to the extreme and the overt, malignant, sadistic narcissist type, much more obvious. And it's really a collection of behaviours. So I'll just give you a few examples and a grandiose sense of self-importance. They're always very grandiose. So they pick themselves up. They're boasting, they claim to have done things well, make up qualifications and clams that just don't exist. And they believe that they are special and unique and they have an absolute need for excessive admiration. So that ties in with boasting a lot and a lack of empathy. So they really, really don't empathize with other people. And and that makes them obviously very difficult to have any sort of satisfactory relationship with them, very manipulative.

 

[00:03:15] So their whole aim really in life is to get what they want and at the expense of everybody else. All right. I mean, I know recently there've been a few examples in terms of films, one I watched on, I think on either Netflix or Prime was Dirty John, which is a true life story which gets quite horrific in fact in terms of how this poor woman was abused without giving away t