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Spotting Narcissistic Abusers (w/ Dr. Annie Kaszina) + The Bikini Thief image

Spotting Narcissistic Abusers (w/ Dr. Annie Kaszina) + The Bikini Thief

E28 · The Female Dating Strategy
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49 Plays4 years ago

We discuss the characteristics of Narcissistic Abusers with Dr. Annie Kaszina, Award-winning author of the Amazon best-seller Do You Choose Your Dog More Carefully Than Your Husband?  Roasting a Bikini Thief.  

 

Website: https://recoverfromemotionalabuse.com/

Books: https://www.amazon.com/Annie-Kaszina/e/B00JEUYNFU%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Workshop:  https://www.breakingoldpatterns.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_anniephd/?hl=en

 

Follow us!

Patreon: www.patreon.com/TheFemaleDatingStrategy

Website: www.thefemaledatingstrategy.com

Twitter: @femdatstrat

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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Female-Dating-Strategy-109118567480771

 

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Transcript

Patreon Support and Goals

00:00:00
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:00:01
Speaker
It's your host, Ro.
00:00:02
Speaker
Do you like female dating strategy?
00:00:04
Speaker
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00:00:07
Speaker
Then please sign up for our Patreon.
00:00:08
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We are currently targeting a $10,000 per month goal, which would allow us to work full time on female dating strategy content in order to expand on different platforms and upgrade our media presence.
00:00:20
Speaker
As a special thank you to our current Patreon subscribers, we will be increasing our upload rate for our bonus content to be weekly on Fridays, as well as offering a special discount for paid annual memberships.
00:00:33
Speaker
So please check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
00:00:37
Speaker
That's patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thank you.
00:00:41
Speaker
Let's start the show.

Roast a Scroat: Listener Stories

00:00:42
Speaker
Here's a segment we call Roast a Scroat.
00:00:45
Speaker
Our Patreon subscribers send in a story of a scrote in their life and re-roast them.
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:51
Speaker
So...
00:00:53
Speaker
This week's roast is grope is from anonymous.
00:00:57
Speaker
Uh, it starts in 2018 before FDS became a part of my life.
00:01:00
Speaker
I had been seeing a guy for around three months.
00:01:03
Speaker
We met through online dating and seemed to get along fairly well from the start.
00:01:07
Speaker
We were close in age.
00:01:08
Speaker
He had a good job, a nice apartment and overall appeared to be in a good place in life.
00:01:13
Speaker
I had recently been having terrible luck with dating.
00:01:16
Speaker
So meeting this guy seemed almost refresh, refreshing.
00:01:19
Speaker
He was good at texting, respectful, and we did fun activities together.
00:01:23
Speaker
Every summer in my city, there's a fireworks show on the beach that thousands of people attend.
00:01:28
Speaker
I enjoyed attending it every year.
00:01:30
Speaker
We made plans to go together.
00:01:32
Speaker
I suggested we go early and have a picnic on the beach and volunteered to bring the food.
00:01:37
Speaker
He thought this was a good idea and we agreed to meet up at his place after work and walk to the beach together as he lived close by.
00:01:43
Speaker
After work, I went home to change and bought sushi from a delicious sushi place near my house.
00:01:48
Speaker
When I met him at his apartment, he tried to initiate sex.
00:01:51
Speaker
I told him that I wanted to get going so he could get a good spot to watch the fireworks.
00:01:55
Speaker
He eventually agreed, but was sullen and grumpy.
00:01:58
Speaker
God, God, God, God.
00:01:59
Speaker
Okay.
00:02:00
Speaker
This is just the worst kind of guy.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:02
Speaker
Sleazy scrot.
00:02:04
Speaker
I mean...
00:02:04
Speaker
You watch the fireworks and then you have sex after, right?
00:02:07
Speaker
I don't even know what to say to this guy.
00:02:08
Speaker
It's like, no, have sex with me while the fireworks are going.
00:02:12
Speaker
Like, I don't know.
00:02:13
Speaker
That's a bait and switch.
00:02:14
Speaker
I don't really like...
00:02:17
Speaker
Like, when you know you have a deadline in the back of your mind, like, oh, I have to be somewhere at a certain time, and then, like, trying to relax and have sex at the same time, this is, like, a no-go.
00:02:25
Speaker
I mean, I guess if you're, like, looking for a quickie, but I feel like... I hate the concept of quickies.
00:02:30
Speaker
I'm not a huge fan of them either.
00:02:32
Speaker
It's because guys don't care, though.
00:02:34
Speaker
Like, they will get off regardless.
00:02:36
Speaker
It's women who need some extra, I don't know... Time and consideration.
00:02:41
Speaker
Attention and warm-up.
00:02:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:43
Speaker
But they'll literally, like, they don't care.
00:02:46
Speaker
You can kiss, you can make out, or do, like, foreplay, and it doesn't have to be penetration, right?
00:02:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:51
Speaker
I think that's the problem, is, like, every time men want to initiate any type of sexual contact, they want to always see it through completion.
00:02:58
Speaker
And, like, as a woman, it's... Don't blueball me.
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:02
Speaker
Yeah, don't blueball me.
00:03:03
Speaker
And then...
00:03:04
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of women that have a personal preference like myself where I'm like, if we have somewhere to be, it's much harder for me to get like completely revved up to go.
00:03:12
Speaker
Like I'd rather just get started and then really, really into it.
00:03:16
Speaker
And then by the end of the night, then you're ready to go.
00:03:19
Speaker
But a lot of men seem to not get this concept.
00:03:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:22
Speaker
Anyways, shall we continue?
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, let's go.
00:03:25
Speaker
We got to the beach and set up the picnic and he became angry.
00:03:29
Speaker
He said that he thought I had planned to cook him a nice meal when I said that I would bring food for a picnic and he was not happy with the sushi I brought.
00:03:36
Speaker
What?
00:03:37
Speaker
I should add that he was into cooking and had cooked several fancy meals for me while we had been seeing each other.
00:03:42
Speaker
I'm a terrible cook and had been open about that from the start.
00:03:46
Speaker
Before that evening, he had never made a comment about me cooking for him.
00:03:49
Speaker
He proceeded to remain angry and barely spoke to me for the remainder of the evening, ruining a summer event that I had been looking forward to.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, this is not about the sushi.
00:03:57
Speaker
This is emotionally punishing you for not, I don't know, providing sex on demand.
00:04:03
Speaker
For not complying, yeah.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:06
Speaker
What a dick.
00:04:07
Speaker
This is the compliance test.
00:04:08
Speaker
No, this reminds me of my ex because my ex would do this all the time where, you know, if I ever mildly displeased him or had a boundary, he would just like be sullen and grumpy and annoying for like days until, I don't know, just to like emotion.
00:04:23
Speaker
I call it emotional punishment.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, and like I said, it's not like she said no sex forever, right?
00:04:29
Speaker
It just seems like a really weird thing to suddenly throw a tantrum over.
00:04:33
Speaker
If there's an issue, he should have communicated what the issue was and not use these side issues as punishment.
00:04:39
Speaker
Because that's emotionally manipulative, right?
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:42
Speaker
So...
00:04:43
Speaker
Next paragraph.
00:04:44
Speaker
After this unpleasant evening, I realized that I did not want to see this guy anymore.
00:04:48
Speaker
He had shown his true colors and he was not someone I wanted in my life.
00:04:51
Speaker
I politely ended things with him over the phone a few days later.
00:04:54
Speaker
I wanted to avoid conflict, so I did not tell him that I was ending things because of his behavior on that evening.
00:04:59
Speaker
Instead, I gave him a vague explanation about how I thought we were looking for different things.
00:05:04
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:05:05
Speaker
I want to see if he freaks out.
00:05:07
Speaker
I feel like he's going to freak out.
00:05:08
Speaker
Several days after, I realized that I had left my bathing suit at his place when I had gone swimming at the pool in his building.
00:05:15
Speaker
Since things had ended peacefully, so I thought, I figured it would be no big deal to text him and ask him to return my bathing suit.
00:05:22
Speaker
His office was near mine, so it would be simple for him to bring it to work and I could pick it up from him at lunch.
00:05:27
Speaker
When I texted him, he said that he would not be returning my bathing suit.
00:05:31
Speaker
I was shocked.
00:05:32
Speaker
I asked if we could speak on the phone so he could explain what was going on.
00:05:35
Speaker
He agreed, and I called him that evening.
00:05:37
Speaker
He proceeded to yell and scream at me over the phone about how he would never return my bathing suit and how disgusting I was for asking him.
00:05:44
Speaker
What?
00:05:44
Speaker
What?
00:05:47
Speaker
I'm just imagining him getting like the vein popping in his forehead from screaming about a bathing suit that doesn't belong to him.
00:05:55
Speaker
Yeah, this guy lacks emotional maturity by a lot.
00:05:58
Speaker
Seriously.
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:00
Speaker
When I asked what use a man has for a bikini, he didn't have an answer, just made it clear that he would not return it.
00:06:06
Speaker
I was appalled to see this kind of behavior from a 31 year old man, but decided I would move on.
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:10
Speaker
His ego's bruised.
00:06:11
Speaker
So it just seems like when his ego feels a little bit bruised, he just flies off the handle.
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:16
Speaker
And he doesn't know how to manage that or like depersonalize it.
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:20
Speaker
Damn.
00:06:20
Speaker
This reminds me a lot of my ex.
00:06:22
Speaker
Like what if we dated the same person?
00:06:23
Speaker
What if this is the same guy?
00:06:27
Speaker
This behavior is common in many guys.
00:06:29
Speaker
So, you know, true.
00:06:31
Speaker
Um,
00:06:33
Speaker
A couple of weeks after this, I started thinking about how much I liked the bathing suit and how it was almost brand new.
00:06:38
Speaker
Girl, you should have cut your losses here, says.
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:41
Speaker
I decided to give it one last try and texted him requesting that he return my bathing suit.
00:06:45
Speaker
He again refused and it was extremely immature.
00:06:48
Speaker
The situation was ridiculous and I was beyond frustrated to see a full grown man acting like a child.
00:06:52
Speaker
I decided to cut my losses.
00:06:54
Speaker
I've learned the hard way with breakups, even if it's like, even non-romantic breakups, like friendship breakups or like, like, if,
00:07:01
Speaker
You have a roommate situation, even that like you're not on the best of terms, like you're going to have to cut your losses a little bit.
00:07:07
Speaker
You want emotionally manipulative people to be mature enough to like split up and like just you take your own.
00:07:13
Speaker
They take what's theirs and just move on with your life.
00:07:16
Speaker
But experience has taught me there's a lot of people that don't have emotional regulation skills like this.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:21
Speaker
So you have to prepare for the breakup by making sure you have everything you wanted and then like break up because you just never know.
00:07:30
Speaker
with people like that, how they're going to react.
00:07:32
Speaker
And a lot of times people, yeah, people just hold onto things just to be, just to be a dick.
00:07:36
Speaker
Jerks.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker
For emotional blackmail, to keep trying to coerce you to talk to them.
00:07:42
Speaker
Like there's so many reasons why people might do stuff like this.
00:07:45
Speaker
That's why whenever I'm breaking up with someone, I always make sure I bring everything right down to my toothbrush because I don't want to give someone an excuse to, like, one of my exes, like, he texts me every few months to be like, like, one of the times he texted me, he's like, oh, you left some stuff at my place.
00:08:02
Speaker
And I'm like, oh, what did I leave?
00:08:04
Speaker
And he's like, oh, just like some hair ties and like junk mail.
00:08:07
Speaker
Stuff I wouldn't want anyways, right?
00:08:09
Speaker
But it's clearly just an excuse to try to meet up with me.
00:08:12
Speaker
It's like, I can put it in a box and bring it to you if you like.
00:08:16
Speaker
Just tell me your address.
00:08:17
Speaker
No, bitch.
00:08:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:20
Speaker
A few weeks after that, he contacted me stating that he would give me back my bathing suit if I paid him $45.
00:08:26
Speaker
What?
00:08:27
Speaker
What?
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, she says I hadn't blocked him because he knew where I lived and I have a policy of not blocking men who know my address for safety reasons.
00:08:37
Speaker
I was floored.
00:08:38
Speaker
This guy had a good job and did not need to extort $45 out of me.
00:08:41
Speaker
He was clearly being manipulative.
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:08:44
Speaker
I texted back that I would not be paying him any money and requested that he would not contact me again.
00:08:50
Speaker
He then texted me claiming that my message had been harassment and that he could sue me for that.
00:08:55
Speaker
What?
00:08:57
Speaker
This guy's crazy.
00:08:58
Speaker
He's actually crazy.
00:08:59
Speaker
This guy's crazy, yeah.
00:09:00
Speaker
Yeah, this guy's insane.
00:09:02
Speaker
He's crazy.
00:09:02
Speaker
This guy sounds like a guy on Reddit, to be honest.
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, he sounds like a Redditor.
00:09:06
Speaker
These guys who have these grandiose visions of their own power.
00:09:11
Speaker
First of all, as an FDS mod...
00:09:13
Speaker
who gets a ton of harassment online and, you know, mostly just keeps that to myself, um, for the most part, when guys are like, oh my God, you know, you said something I don't like that's targeted harassment.
00:09:25
Speaker
Like I have very little patience for people who complain about being harassed over minor shit like that.
00:09:30
Speaker
Like, don't be a fucking drama king.
00:09:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:33
Speaker
This is, um, this is nutso behavior from a grown man.
00:09:36
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:09:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:38
Speaker
Seeing this man act like a child and try to manipulate me was such a discouraging experience that I was turned off from dating for quite some time.
00:09:45
Speaker
Looking back, I could see a few red flags that I missed at the time.
00:09:49
Speaker
These included him commenting that men were falsely accused of sexual assault all the time.
00:09:54
Speaker
Waving massive.
00:09:56
Speaker
Whoa.
00:09:57
Speaker
Red flag, yeah.
00:09:58
Speaker
He's a rapist.
00:09:59
Speaker
When a guy says that, he's actually accidentally admitting that he is a rapist.
00:10:04
Speaker
Straight up.
00:10:05
Speaker
Only rapists say shit.
00:10:06
Speaker
Or only people who are rapists or want to be rapists say shit like that.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's very strange to me.
00:10:14
Speaker
Bringing up ex-girlfriends early on and asking me to rent a vehicle to help him move a table to his house after only a few dates...
00:10:22
Speaker
quote, I didn't do it.
00:10:23
Speaker
However, I was not able to see how truly of a disgusting person he was until he completely took his mask off.
00:10:30
Speaker
Please roast the shit out of this groat.
00:10:31
Speaker
He deserves it.
00:10:33
Speaker
Also, following the break I took from dating after my experience with this groat, I ended up meeting a great guy who knows how to appreciate a sushi picnic on the beach.
00:10:41
Speaker
Hooray!
00:10:42
Speaker
Yay!
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:44
Speaker
Good for you, sis.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, we're happy.
00:10:47
Speaker
I mean, I don't know what to say.
00:10:48
Speaker
This guy kind of roasts himself, like, just by existing.
00:10:51
Speaker
Like, his whole existence is a self-roast.
00:10:53
Speaker
He just seems crazy.
00:10:55
Speaker
He's crazy, but also, I would not be surprised if, um, you know what this sounds like to me, honestly?
00:11:00
Speaker
It sounds like one of those, uh, he gave her one of those red pill shit tests, and
00:11:05
Speaker
Uh, she didn't respond the way he thought she would, or he wanted her to.
00:11:09
Speaker
And then he threw a tantrum because now he, he feels like rather than express like his emotional needs are expressed to her.
00:11:17
Speaker
what he wants, he's like emotionally punishing her, right?
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:23
Speaker
Sometimes when like guys get in these sulky moods, it's like they have, it's usually like mismatched expectations or they, or some kind of like manosphere thing.
00:11:30
Speaker
Oh, test if she likes you by doing this, you know?
00:11:32
Speaker
As a general rule, I actually find it's very liberating when a guy is being sulky is to just be like, okay, you're not being funny anymore.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:40
Speaker
You guys do that because they want you to try to be like, it's like a part of Dread Game where, um, they want you to jump through heaps.
00:11:49
Speaker
What should I do?
00:11:50
Speaker
You know, they want you to, you know, or like apologize.
00:11:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:58
Speaker
To jump through hoops, to try to make him feel better.
00:12:01
Speaker
It's a way of trying to emotionally punish you into doing what he wants.
00:12:04
Speaker
And I love like ever since my last, I like one of my exes who used to do the emotional punishment routine.
00:12:10
Speaker
I just have zero patience for that from guys.
00:12:12
Speaker
And so as soon as they start to get all sulky and mean and like shitty, I'm just like, okay, bye.
00:12:19
Speaker
It's so fucking funny seeing their reaction because they're like, wait, what?
00:12:21
Speaker
Like, they weren't expecting that.
00:12:23
Speaker
They were expecting you to grovel and, you know, kowtow to him.
00:12:27
Speaker
And I...
00:12:30
Speaker
it's sad because the reason why they do that is because I'm sure a lot of women do fall into that trap of trying to, you know, of like self-doubt, self-blame.
00:12:38
Speaker
Oh, I should try to make him feel better.
00:12:39
Speaker
That kind of shit.
00:12:41
Speaker
Um, don't like any ladies listening in on this.
00:12:44
Speaker
Trust me.
00:12:44
Speaker
Like there's nothing more beautiful and empowering than when a guy is being a piece of shit like that and just being like, okay, bye.
00:12:50
Speaker
You're not being fun anymore.
00:12:51
Speaker
Have a nice day, man.
00:12:52
Speaker
That sucks for you.
00:12:53
Speaker
Right.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:54
Speaker
Although
00:12:54
Speaker
It must be really hard for you.
00:12:56
Speaker
Of course, they're probably going to go on Reddit and complain about like, women are so heartless.
00:12:59
Speaker
They don't want you to show emotion, like that kind of shit.
00:13:03
Speaker
But who cares?
00:13:04
Speaker
It's not, yeah, it's not even the emotion.
00:13:06
Speaker
It's just like when a person is clearly punishing you.
00:13:09
Speaker
He started picking at things that were clearly not the problem, like the sushi dinner, right?
00:13:14
Speaker
I feel like when you take the step from not owning your shit or owning your own problems or communicating your own problems and just antagonizing another person, then that's a huge, huge red flag.
00:13:26
Speaker
This person just lacks emotional maturity of any kind.
00:13:28
Speaker
Emotionally immature and also just...
00:13:32
Speaker
toxic, like just actively antagonistic.
00:13:35
Speaker
Right.
00:13:36
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:13:37
Speaker
The other, the other thing about guys who emotionally punish you like that is like, they don't want you to leave.
00:13:43
Speaker
Like I find when guys start to do that emotional punishing shit and I want to like make my way to the exit.
00:13:50
Speaker
That's what, like, I remember very vividly one time my ex was doing this and it's when I had enough of the emotional punishment and he like physically would not let me leave.
00:13:58
Speaker
Like he was blocking the door, like grabbing my arm and
00:14:01
Speaker
wouldn't let me leave and you know like I was like if you're not gonna drive me home then I'm just gonna get a taxi or something and so um and I like left and then he like showed up at my place later it was very creepy anyways so yeah guys will like do this but they want you to stick around and suffer with them they want you to suffer from their misery they want you to engage and
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah, they want you to engage.
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah, they want you to engage.
00:14:27
Speaker
And so when you try to leave or when you drop out or when you've had enough or whatever, they're like, they get pissed off that that's not the reaction that they wanted.
00:14:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:36
Speaker
100%.
00:14:36
Speaker
True.
00:14:37
Speaker
Okay, so that's our roast to scrote.
00:14:39
Speaker
If you would like to submit your own roast to scrote or a queen, chit, or a nasus, please visit our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy and sign up for one of our tiers and you can listen to our bonus content and submit a story to be read out loud on the podcast.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yay.
00:14:59
Speaker
Let's start the show.

Interview with Dr. Annie Kassina

00:15:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:15:10
Speaker
I'm your host, Ro.
00:15:11
Speaker
And this is Savannah.
00:15:13
Speaker
And I'm Lilith.
00:15:14
Speaker
Today's guest is Dr. Annie Kassina.
00:15:17
Speaker
She is the author of three books, one such called Do You Choose Your Dog More Carefully Than Your Husband?
00:15:23
Speaker
And she specializes in helping women heal from emotional and narcissistic abuse.
00:15:30
Speaker
Dr. Annie, welcome to the pod.
00:15:31
Speaker
Thank you.
00:15:31
Speaker
It's really lovely to be with you today.
00:15:34
Speaker
So my first question to you, Annie, is, you know, what is narcissistic abuse?
00:15:43
Speaker
Well, narcissistic abuse is a...
00:15:48
Speaker
I suppose you call it a form of relationship, which people get into unsuspectingly because they meet someone and that person sort of says the right kind of things.
00:16:01
Speaker
You get into a relationship and you have assumptions that it's all going to go really quite well, that the person's like you, and especially if you're following all the advice about how to date, what could possibly go wrong?
00:16:19
Speaker
And the fact is people aren't aware of what a narcissist looks like.
00:16:27
Speaker
We're not looking for them.
00:16:29
Speaker
We don't think we know any of them, although most of us do.
00:16:33
Speaker
But narcissists are people who have a very, very good opinion of themselves.
00:16:41
Speaker
They can come across to those of us who weren't born with piles of confidence as being
00:16:48
Speaker
and therefore in some way aspirational.
00:16:51
Speaker
Their confidence is over the top.
00:16:55
Speaker
They think they're something really special.
00:17:00
Speaker
And they tend to have ideas of themselves as being somewhat better than they are.
00:17:07
Speaker
My ex-husband, yes, who was a narcissist, he was a doctor in a hospital when I met him.
00:17:15
Speaker
He was laboring under the illusion that he was the guy who was actually running the hospital.
00:17:20
Speaker
Without him, it would have fallen down.
00:17:23
Speaker
So you often have that kind of belief.
00:17:26
Speaker
They believe that they're special and unique.
00:17:31
Speaker
Now, they would be horrified to think that everybody is actually special.
00:17:37
Speaker
But we're all special and we're all ordinary at the same time in reality.
00:17:44
Speaker
Narcissists think they're special and above other people and when they select a partner they tell that partner that he or she is special.
00:17:54
Speaker
You know, they're the kind of people who say to you, I've never met a woman like you.
00:18:00
Speaker
Which actually means I've never met a woman that I actually like and at the moment you're just about passing the test.
00:18:10
Speaker
They do require excessive admiration and excessive attention all the time.
00:18:19
Speaker
They tend to talk a lot about themselves.
00:18:22
Speaker
Sometimes they can talk quite interestingly about themselves, but they do love to be the centre of attention.
00:18:32
Speaker
They lack empathy.
00:18:34
Speaker
They lack interest in you.
00:18:37
Speaker
They will be terribly interested at the beginning because they're on a frailty finding mission.
00:18:43
Speaker
They're looking for your vulnerabilities.
00:18:45
Speaker
So tell me about your last relationships.
00:18:49
Speaker
How do you get on with your parents?
00:18:52
Speaker
Have you been having a tough time at work?
00:18:55
Speaker
Whatever kind of vulnerabilities they can find, they're really looking for.
00:19:00
Speaker
So they're interested in that respect, but they're not interested in you as a person, and they're not really interested in an equal relationship.
00:19:10
Speaker
What they want to know is where they can slot you into their life, not how they can open their life up.
00:19:20
Speaker
to share with you and to experience new horizons and different ways of doing things.
00:19:27
Speaker
They can be very envious or resentful of others if they feel that others have more than they have and they will often feel it's undeserved and they often have the belief that others are envious of them.
00:19:44
Speaker
And yeah, and
00:19:48
Speaker
That is rarely the case, and they do tend to be somewhat arrogant and haughty.
00:19:57
Speaker
They, you know, if you say that they act like the sun shines out of their bottom as often as not, you wouldn't be far wrong.
00:20:06
Speaker
So that's the fairly standard idea.
00:20:11
Speaker
description of a narcissist, and they do feel very entitled.
00:20:16
Speaker
They really do believe that everything that they want, they should have.
00:20:22
Speaker
They're the main character of their own story, and everybody else is just a player in it.
00:20:27
Speaker
Bit player.
00:20:27
Speaker
Yes.
00:20:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:30
Speaker
A side extra side piece.
00:20:33
Speaker
Background noise.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:20:36
Speaker
Not even a cameo role.
00:20:38
Speaker
I'm sorry, but listening to that description, I'm like, that just sounds like an average man to me.
00:20:44
Speaker
This is where it gets complicated.
00:20:49
Speaker
I think so many things have conspired to allow men to show up as more narcissistic than they might have done once upon a time.

Empowerment of Male Narcissism

00:20:59
Speaker
And what are some of these, because I've gotten that perception too, it just feels like nowadays so many people are narcissistic.
00:21:07
Speaker
I mean, women can be narcissistic too, but I feel like male narcissism presents a little bit differently and is a lot more...
00:21:14
Speaker
like actively harmful.
00:21:15
Speaker
I don't know.
00:21:16
Speaker
That's a curious question.
00:21:17
Speaker
Are there substantial sex differences between how narcissism presents in women versus men?
00:21:24
Speaker
I think there are subtle differences.
00:21:26
Speaker
I think that men will swan into your life, narcissistic men, and it is a great deal of, look at me, I'm wonderful.
00:21:36
Speaker
And we're trained to go, oh, yes, you're wonderful.
00:21:39
Speaker
I will look at you.
00:21:40
Speaker
And I think women will swan and narcissistic women and they're more likely to say, oh, look at you.
00:21:49
Speaker
You're wonderful, initially, and offer loads of sex and hook a man that way.
00:21:58
Speaker
And then they start to reveal themselves more.
00:22:03
Speaker
So it seems like women are more likely to present it in a more covert way.
00:22:07
Speaker
Because I've heard of covert narcissism where often their intentions are concealed.
00:22:13
Speaker
Whereas for men, because I would say the social punishment isn't as high for men who express their own narcissistic tendencies that they are probably more likely to be upfront about their intentions.
00:22:25
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:22:27
Speaker
There are covert male narcissists too, of course.
00:22:31
Speaker
And they come in...
00:22:33
Speaker
And that sort of look at me, I've had such a hard time.
00:22:36
Speaker
People are horrible to me, but I'm a genius, really.
00:22:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:22:42
Speaker
Oh, I was raised by narcissists.
00:22:45
Speaker
I've dated narcissists.
00:22:46
Speaker
So all of this is like, really conferring.
00:22:49
Speaker
Oh, my gosh.
00:22:50
Speaker
So relatable.
00:22:51
Speaker
Thank you, though.
00:22:53
Speaker
You and I both.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:55
Speaker
So I think there's so many things going on.
00:22:58
Speaker
There are so many narratives.
00:23:01
Speaker
You know, the shift with feminism and men got frightened.
00:23:05
Speaker
So now we have to accommodate to frightened men.
00:23:09
Speaker
We have to worry about them.
00:23:12
Speaker
So we've got to we've got to compensate.
00:23:16
Speaker
I think a whole lot of our sexual freedom somehow has been twisted to benefit men.
00:23:23
Speaker
for sure.
00:23:24
Speaker
Oh, let us tell you about that.
00:23:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:23:29
Speaker
We talk about that all the time.
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:31
Speaker
I mean, but that, that is part of why I think FDS really blew up the way that it did.
00:23:37
Speaker
I mean, we obviously we started on Reddit, but we got a ton of media coverage and a lot of it is because we took aim at some of the narratives that were being propagated in sex positive culture and pointing out the fact that, you know, this really kind of leads you very vulnerable to a lot of abuse and narcissism.
00:23:54
Speaker
Right.
00:23:54
Speaker
Because like a lot of the,
00:23:57
Speaker
the idea is that you're trying to emulate behaviors that are common in men, or you're just not doing the proper self-protection that a person would do with a stranger, right?
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:08
Speaker
Or you're just doing things that benefit men and not yourself.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yes.
00:24:14
Speaker
Yes.
00:24:15
Speaker
I mean, you just have to look at sexual trends and think, really?
00:24:19
Speaker
You know, do women really want to go out and have men choking them?
00:24:24
Speaker
In a friendly way, of course.
00:24:27
Speaker
Oh, it's consensual strangulation.
00:24:29
Speaker
Totally.
00:24:30
Speaker
I just resent the idea that it's, well, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I resent the idea that that's become normalized.
00:24:39
Speaker
I think when it was kink and it was like deliberately a fringe sexual activity, then people knew it was taboo and then...
00:24:48
Speaker
You know, you'd have to discuss that with your partner when it was more expected.
00:24:51
Speaker
But now I think because it's become so normalized via porn or cultural influences or sex posi-feminism that it's really, really pushed a lot of sexual violence to the forefront and made it a normalized sexual practice when it really shouldn't have ever been.
00:25:06
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:25:08
Speaker
Well, now it's like expected of women.
00:25:10
Speaker
And if you don't do it, you're, you know, frigid or closed-minded or, you know,
00:25:15
Speaker
No pressure.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:17
Speaker
No pressure.
00:25:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:19
Speaker
Um, I'm just on the topic of, you know, sex and pornography, Annie.
00:25:24
Speaker
Um, is there any, you know, link or any, I guess, um, you know, behaviors that, or sexual behaviors that a narcissistic person would exhibit that's different to normal sexual behavior?
00:25:41
Speaker
Oh, just a small question then.
00:25:44
Speaker
Um,
00:25:45
Speaker
So I think this is a really difficult one.
00:25:50
Speaker
The crazy thing at bottom is that narcissists don't really like women.
00:25:59
Speaker
Some of them are hypersexual and then they pride themselves on being super stud.
00:26:07
Speaker
And I had a client who's
00:26:10
Speaker
husband was hypersexual and at one point he was having an affairs with people all the time and telling her about them and he kind of reached the stage where provided he wasn't driving her mad it was not that she wasn't that bothered but he would boast about how he would give them the best sex of their life kind of thing but the interesting thing was they didn't want to see him again
00:26:40
Speaker
Mr. Superstud did such a good, naughty job.
00:26:44
Speaker
No repeat customers.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:50
Speaker
Because there was a sort of, oh, it was kind of screwing by numbers thing, I guess.
00:26:58
Speaker
So some of them are hypersexual, some of them are not, and...
00:27:06
Speaker
The one thing that sex is not for narcissists is an act of intimacy.
00:27:13
Speaker
They will use sex as a weapon and they will withhold sex as a weapon a lot.
00:27:20
Speaker
And people who withhold sex from a partner
00:27:25
Speaker
You can't say that they really like that partner.
00:27:27
Speaker
It is about the narcissistic supply, right?
00:27:29
Speaker
Like it's about the conquest, the idea that they could get one over on the next person.
00:27:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:39
Speaker
And control, of course.
00:27:42
Speaker
I'm always very fascinated.
00:27:43
Speaker
I have a small dog who had to be castrated because he's a little bit sexy.
00:27:49
Speaker
When he plays with his toys and he gets excited...
00:27:54
Speaker
He still tries to hump them.
00:27:56
Speaker
And that always reminds me that narcissists do use sex for control, power and control.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:07
Speaker
But it's about the domination.
00:28:09
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:28:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:11
Speaker
Also, I find narcissists love porn.
00:28:13
Speaker
Is that just me or is there any research behind that?
00:28:17
Speaker
In my experience, they don't all love porn, but it stands to reason that a lot of them would.
00:28:23
Speaker
I mean, you know, there are always differences between people.
00:28:28
Speaker
Narcissism, I know they say it covers a broad spectrum and so on, but there are actually differences in the way some narcissists show up to others.

Narcissistic Behavior and Environment

00:28:39
Speaker
Right, because I know a lot of religious narcissists and they're not into the porn thing, right?
00:28:44
Speaker
So the other side of that coin where they just see everyone who's into anything that could be construed as lascivious as inherently beneath them.
00:28:52
Speaker
It's just what I'm guessing anyways, it seems to manifest on my experience, just whatever their social pecking order is or their social environment is, it'll shape what their particular...
00:29:03
Speaker
What their particular brand of narcissism, how it manifests.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah, their particular brand of narcissism will be shaped by their environment.
00:29:11
Speaker
Dare I be really naughty and just throw into the mix that I have knowledge of one narcissist, a religious narcissist, who being a good soul decided to leave his wife and go off and save an escort and marry her.
00:29:29
Speaker
What?
00:29:29
Speaker
Why?
00:29:30
Speaker
Right.
00:29:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:34
Speaker
Geez.
00:29:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:36
Speaker
You know, they'll, they'll do what they want.
00:29:38
Speaker
And then at least my experience with such people, they'll do what they'll, they want and then like create a narrative, a backwards narrative, right?
00:29:46
Speaker
To try to spin it, to say, to make themselves look like they're in the know there, uh, or they're just not a bad person because they want to look like they're doing things for altruistic reasons.
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:57
Speaker
Which is now obviously highly manipulative because it's a way to obscure their true intentions for you or the other person.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah, they always do that.
00:30:07
Speaker
And in marriages, the number of women I've heard from who said, my husband told me it's my fault he had affairs.
00:30:18
Speaker
How does that one work?
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah, narcissists are spin masters.
00:30:23
Speaker
Spin doctors.
00:30:24
Speaker
Yeah, spin doctors.
00:30:26
Speaker
And to be fair, as a person who grew up in more religious communities, a lot of times there is community pressure on these women, so they feel that way, right?
00:30:35
Speaker
It's not like it's just the narcissist.
00:30:37
Speaker
Sometimes that is very much reinforced by the rest of the environment.
00:30:41
Speaker
So I don't know...
00:30:43
Speaker
I know part of FDS's work, and I think we discovered this as we started talking about relationships and figuring out where we were getting these kinds of narratives, or these kind of women-blaming narratives and these victim-blaming narratives.
00:30:56
Speaker
And a lot of it comes from the media.
00:30:58
Speaker
Obviously, some of it comes from traditional, religious, conservative-type communities.
00:31:02
Speaker
But...
00:31:04
Speaker
What do you think about that?
00:31:05
Speaker
I almost can see that male narcissism, or in particular, can be kind of potent because it can shape entire cultures or shape entire environments to antagonize women.
00:31:21
Speaker
Sadly, it does.
00:31:22
Speaker
And religious environments of whatever flavor are great places for narcissists to thrive in.
00:31:33
Speaker
We are always meant to, you know, support and be loyal to them and defer.
00:31:39
Speaker
And forgive.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah, forgive, defer, tolerate.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, they are very unfortunate environments and they make it much harder for women to leave.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:53
Speaker
And when you leave a narcissist, you may well have to leave your place of worship too.
00:31:59
Speaker
you lose the community along with the narcissist who were shown in that community.
00:32:04
Speaker
So moving on to, you know, dating, Annie, what's in the dating stage?
00:32:10
Speaker
What are there any signs that women can look out for of, of narcissistic behavior or red flags that they can look out for when they're in the dating stage?
00:32:21
Speaker
Well, there are so many.
00:32:25
Speaker
The first one is,
00:32:27
Speaker
The instant soulmate.
00:32:29
Speaker
You know, he's the guy who pops up in your life and you're his soulmate or his twin flame or whatever nonsense language he uses.
00:32:41
Speaker
And he's going to be with you forever.
00:32:43
Speaker
He loves you forever.
00:32:44
Speaker
And you've been with him for five minutes.
00:32:46
Speaker
Whoa.
00:32:46
Speaker
Whoa.
00:32:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's really worrying.
00:32:51
Speaker
So with that, that's actually interesting, because I always thought that was indicative of a guy with low self-esteem, like the love bomber, the ones that try to.
00:32:58
Speaker
I mean, I find narcissists at their heart do have low self-esteem, but the whole reason why they exist the way that they do is to try to not feel bad about that.
00:33:08
Speaker
But there's also the more practical thing, which is a narcissist is looking for something.
00:33:14
Speaker
He's got a vacancy in his life that he needs to fit, to fill.
00:33:20
Speaker
And since he's not terribly interested in another person, and they're very quick to register the right kind of person for them, why hang about?
00:33:30
Speaker
Why not just go for it?
00:33:32
Speaker
And I think this is a really important thing that people often don't get, that narcissists can clock you very quickly.
00:33:43
Speaker
I did an interview with a narcissist recently and he was saying you can just tell.
00:33:51
Speaker
They literally can because they have this kind of sixth sense for a woman who's a little bit shy, a little bit lacking in confidence, a little bit vulnerable.
00:34:03
Speaker
And they can sense it and they go for it quickly.
00:34:08
Speaker
It's kind of like you're hungry.
00:34:10
Speaker
You want a meal now.
00:34:11
Speaker
You're not going to wait for a three-course meal.
00:34:13
Speaker
They're not.
00:34:14
Speaker
They'll just shove junk food down their neck.
00:34:18
Speaker
They're not bothered about...
00:34:21
Speaker
really getting to know you.
00:34:23
Speaker
So they're very fast wooers.
00:34:27
Speaker
If you listen to them, they will talk rather a lot in cliches.
00:34:34
Speaker
Their romantic game is stolen more often than not from this sort of kind of chiclet stuff and movies,
00:34:47
Speaker
Yeah, I was just about to say a lot of like the media narratives that we get about like love at first sight and, you know, you'll know your soulmate the moment you, you know, I laid eyes on them and fell in love kind of thing, right?
00:34:59
Speaker
And I, you know, growing up as a kid, you almost think, oh, that's just like what true love is.
00:35:04
Speaker
And then you grow up and realize that that's actually not how it is.
00:35:09
Speaker
It's actually a red flag.
00:35:10
Speaker
It's the reddest of red flags, yes.
00:35:14
Speaker
First, they love you, you know, and they're going to sweep you off their feet, your feet.
00:35:18
Speaker
They love you like nobody else has loved you before and nobody else ever will again, if you're lucky.
00:35:24
Speaker
And then they start to isolate you.
00:35:28
Speaker
They love you so much they want to spend every minute with you.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:33
Speaker
A friend of mine told me about...
00:35:35
Speaker
her narcissist, and she married him and she said, darling, darling, I've always wanted a cat.
00:35:42
Speaker
Can we have a cat?
00:35:43
Speaker
And he said, no, we can't have a cat.
00:35:45
Speaker
I don't want you to, I don't want a cat to come between us.
00:35:51
Speaker
Wow.
00:35:52
Speaker
That reminds me of my ex who didn't like my dog.
00:35:55
Speaker
He was jealous of my dog.
00:35:57
Speaker
Yep.
00:35:59
Speaker
That's normal.
00:36:01
Speaker
My book came about because my then husband told me I had to choose between him and the dog.
00:36:07
Speaker
Dog.
00:36:08
Speaker
I choose dog 100% of the time.
00:36:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:36:12
Speaker
Yes.
00:36:12
Speaker
My mouth answered before I had time to think.
00:36:16
Speaker
I said, it's got to be the dog.
00:36:20
Speaker
So yeah, they do that.
00:36:25
Speaker
As I said, they do slot you into their life.
00:36:30
Speaker
And then they start playing games with you.
00:36:33
Speaker
Everything that you tend to be doing is what they want to do.
00:36:38
Speaker
And they start maybe not telling the truth or maybe...
00:36:45
Speaker
getting annoyed with you about something to see how you react.
00:36:51
Speaker
They have an unreasonable moment to see what you do.
00:36:56
Speaker
Is this like a sort of compliance testing?
00:36:58
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah.
00:37:01
Speaker
It's something or other.
00:37:03
Speaker
My ex, just to give you an example, we were going somewhere and we drove somewhere and it was a hot day.
00:37:11
Speaker
And he turned the engine off, sat in the car,
00:37:14
Speaker
didn't move.
00:37:15
Speaker
I said, are we not going into the coffee shop that we're going to?
00:37:20
Speaker
He said, I'm tired.
00:37:24
Speaker
Close his eyes and said, I need some sleep.
00:37:27
Speaker
And just did that for half an hour.
00:37:30
Speaker
And idiot face sat there.
00:37:33
Speaker
I knew something was terribly wrong, but I sat there because I thought he was a wonderful man and he was having a blip.
00:37:38
Speaker
That was no blip.
00:37:39
Speaker
That was the compliance test.
00:37:42
Speaker
And I passed with flying colours and
00:37:44
Speaker
I did nothing.
00:37:46
Speaker
And then when they've done that, they know that they can up the ante and up the ante and you'll probably take an awful lot from them.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, we talked about this in another podcast about the boiling frog theory about how it's so insidious with people like this because they never throw you in a hot pot of water when they're doing their compliance test.
00:38:12
Speaker
It is a slow... Yeah, abusers don't punch you in the face on the first date.
00:38:16
Speaker
No, they don't.
00:38:17
Speaker
It's a slow escalation.
00:38:18
Speaker
And sometimes...
00:38:21
Speaker
Most of them don't, but there's a few really nutty dudes out there.
00:38:27
Speaker
I guess with understanding that, how long do you think it typically takes for a narcissist to start to...
00:38:37
Speaker
I start the slow escalation or is it like an immediate thing?
00:38:40
Speaker
And then as a person who might, who may not necessarily recognize the first compliance test, how long should you kind of, is there like a timeline you should monitor to kind of start to see, okay, if this person escalates from this, this time to this time, it's probably a red flag that they're a narcissist.
00:39:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:39:04
Speaker
I think that's a rather misleading way of looking at it.
00:39:11
Speaker
So you probably will see stuff within little hints and they may be able to keep up a facade for three or six months.
00:39:21
Speaker
But I think there are other ways of looking at it which are more
00:39:27
Speaker
constructive.
00:39:29
Speaker
One is definitely three strikes and you're out.
00:39:35
Speaker
So instead of watching that person all the time and in a sense letting go of some of your power, you start from the premise that if I see three behaviors that I don't like, even if they're not huge, I'm out.
00:39:53
Speaker
Because in the early
00:39:55
Speaker
part of your dating experience, someone is likely to be on their best behavior.
00:40:02
Speaker
And if their best behavior isn't that good, you've got serious worries about what's coming further down the line.
00:40:09
Speaker
So that's one thing.
00:40:13
Speaker
Another thing that I feel strongly about is running your own temper tantrum test.
00:40:19
Speaker
And that is doing something
00:40:24
Speaker
Not wildly provocative, but something that a narcissist or someone could find annoying and seeing how they respond.
00:40:37
Speaker
So, for example, when I met my lovely partner, we were going out to the cinema one night and by mistake, in fact, I let things run late so we didn't get to the cinema for the beginning of the film.
00:40:53
Speaker
Now I knew exactly how my ex-husband would have behaved.
00:40:58
Speaker
You know, nuclear explosions.
00:41:00
Speaker
So it was interesting to see how this person I didn't know very well would respond.
00:41:08
Speaker
And he was remarkably placid.
00:41:11
Speaker
So that was a really useful test, you know.
00:41:15
Speaker
How do they respond?
00:41:16
Speaker
And when they get angry, how angry do they get?
00:41:21
Speaker
So that's part of it.
00:41:23
Speaker
I think also when there is no time to stop monitoring behaviour, not three months down the line, not six months down the line, not a year down the line, at any time when the behaviour is unacceptable, that's a good time to leave, to cut your losses.

Challenges in Leaving a Narcissist

00:41:46
Speaker
And the other thing is that
00:41:49
Speaker
narcissistic behavior deteriorates the more confident they are that they have got you.
00:41:58
Speaker
So in the first few months of dating when you're a free individual and they've got to make the sale they will be relatively well behaved.
00:42:10
Speaker
Once you either move in together or get engaged
00:42:15
Speaker
they're more confident.
00:42:17
Speaker
Their behaviour can start to deteriorate.
00:42:21
Speaker
If you marry, that's a good opportunity for them to get much worse.
00:42:28
Speaker
If you have a child together, then as they see it, that's another bond and their behaviour will deteriorate even more.
00:42:37
Speaker
If you're financially dependent on them, that's another thing that's tying you to them.
00:42:42
Speaker
So their behaviour will
00:42:43
Speaker
will deteriorate still more.
00:42:46
Speaker
So there will be a progressive deterioration over time and it's really important never to say, yeah, but we've been together for a while and relationships get worse, so I guess I can just put up with it.
00:43:04
Speaker
You've always got to be noticing and protecting your own best interest.
00:43:12
Speaker
Definitely.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, with the three strikes and you're out, I almost feel like that's too generous.
00:43:17
Speaker
Like, I'm of a one strike and you're out.
00:43:20
Speaker
Two strikes, maybe, tops, if the first one was not that bad.
00:43:25
Speaker
It feels like to me whenever I've seen...
00:43:27
Speaker
Whenever I've experienced people like this, the first strike is always something that could be chalked up to a misunderstanding, right?
00:43:34
Speaker
Oh, I forgot my wallet, right?
00:43:36
Speaker
Or something that's like, maybe that's actually maybe a little bit more obvious.
00:43:39
Speaker
But there's times where, in hindsight, it makes sense in aggregate of their behavior.
00:43:47
Speaker
The first time just never registers as more than perhaps a slight miscommunication, right?
00:43:55
Speaker
Or at least they'll try to paint it that way to you, right?
00:43:57
Speaker
And I think that's always the hardest part because once I've been around someone long enough to establish like, okay, this is a pattern with this person.
00:44:06
Speaker
But like you said, it could take maybe...
00:44:09
Speaker
a month or two at least to reveal themselves, but it's never like the first or second time where I'm thinking like immediately this person's a narcissist until I start to realize that this is a habit.
00:44:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's why I said three strikes.
00:44:24
Speaker
Sometimes the first strike really could be good enough, but by three strikes, pardon me, you should be staring in the face the fact that this person is off in some way.
00:44:38
Speaker
way that will only get worse with time.
00:44:43
Speaker
So once a woman is in the, you know, web of a narcissist, it can be really hard to leave.
00:44:52
Speaker
And so, you know, we hear a lot, you know, oh, if he was abusive, why didn't you just leave him?
00:44:58
Speaker
So can you tell us a bit about, you know, why is it so challenging to
00:45:02
Speaker
to, you know, once you're in it, why is it so challenging to recognize what's happening and what are the barriers that keep women from leaving?
00:45:08
Speaker
Or why do some women, you know, keep coming back to these sorts of men?
00:45:12
Speaker
It's incredibly hard to leave these people.
00:45:15
Speaker
They have promised you the best dream of your life.
00:45:19
Speaker
That's the first thing.
00:45:22
Speaker
And it's really hard to give up on that dream.
00:45:26
Speaker
We women kind of work this thing that, well, if he's been
00:45:31
Speaker
behavior could get worse, it could get better as well.
00:45:36
Speaker
And I know he's got so much potential and it's kind of my responsibility to make that potential the reality.
00:45:47
Speaker
So that's a part of it, the dream that you do not want to give up on.
00:45:51
Speaker
You've also got a narrative going on in your head that you're in the last chance saloon and
00:45:58
Speaker
the narcissist will have done their bit to put it there as well.
00:46:03
Speaker
So you've got that going on.
00:46:05
Speaker
If the narcissist has done his job right, he will have started to isolate you from other people.
00:46:14
Speaker
There will be a perceived loss of status if you have to admit that this
00:46:21
Speaker
dream which was so fantastic you know you're the happiest woman alive and everything and it's gone sour that if you have to do that that's really hard there might be financial issues as well if they're good at what they do you will find that your money is tied up with them and hard to get out of their clutches you know you might have bought a
00:46:46
Speaker
a property together which, strangely enough, is just in their name.
00:46:51
Speaker
That happens.
00:46:54
Speaker
And then there's this thing that when you're with a narcissist, there is this constant denial going on.
00:47:02
Speaker
You know, you let the first bad behavior go and the second one and the third one happen.
00:47:09
Speaker
And then you start to tell yourself, well, it's probably not so bad.
00:47:14
Speaker
Every relationship has its problems.
00:47:17
Speaker
It's probably my fault, like he says it is.
00:47:22
Speaker
And emotionally, you go into deep denial.
00:47:29
Speaker
And then there's another aspect that the person has been chipping away at your self-worth big time.
00:47:38
Speaker
So it's quite a cocktail that makes it very, very hard to leave.
00:47:44
Speaker
And they always tell you that you couldn't survive without them.
00:47:50
Speaker
So it's really, really hard.
00:47:52
Speaker
And if you have children, then there's the narrative about you want your children to have a two-parent home.
00:47:58
Speaker
There are many, many reasons why it's incredibly hard to leave.
00:48:03
Speaker
So with that in mind, then, what do you, you know, given all these challenges, what do you recommend for women who are in the middle of that?
00:48:11
Speaker
You know, how do you overcome those?
00:48:14
Speaker
Well, I think we're incredibly blessed now with platforms like Instagram, where you can, first of all, Google and read about stuff and absorb information until it reaches the point when you go,
00:48:33
Speaker
This isn't just him having a bad day or being stressed.
00:48:37
Speaker
This is a syndrome that I'm stuck in.
00:48:39
Speaker
So you can get a lot of information and education there.
00:48:44
Speaker
And then you really want to plan your exit.
00:48:52
Speaker
And you want support.
00:48:53
Speaker
It helps if you have someone who you can turn to.
00:48:58
Speaker
It helps if you still have friends that you can speak to who will run reality checks with you because it's not easy to get out.
00:49:09
Speaker
It helps to go to have any kind of group or one-on-one support that you can have, but ideally from people who really understand narcissistic abuse because otherwise you can get some crazy information.
00:49:26
Speaker
It doesn't help to go to things like couples counseling because a narcissist can usually lie so convincingly that the therapist will tell you that you're the crazy one.
00:49:41
Speaker
and you're trying oh boy that's one of us i mean that's one of i mean that's one of our biggest gripes of the platform reddit is that when a woman is saying that her partner has done something egregious the common refrain is oh just communicate or just tell him that you don't like him or just or just like tell him that you don't like him you know raping you in your sleep just tell him that communicate and it's like no no
00:50:07
Speaker
No, I think like a lot of couples counseling.
00:50:11
Speaker
I mean, it only really works if you've got if both parties are, you know, wanting to improve and like are invested and are not.
00:50:18
Speaker
And if they're not abusive as well.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:21
Speaker
But like once you're talking about like one person having a narcissist, yeah, couples counseling is just a scam.
00:50:27
Speaker
It's a disaster.
00:50:28
Speaker
It's so difficult, too, because psychology and, you know, mental health fields have a long history of having, like, certain ideological captures, right?
00:50:38
Speaker
I know in a lot of religious communities, there's a lot of, like, you know, Christian or Catholic or…
00:50:44
Speaker
Muslim type counselors.
00:50:47
Speaker
And so a lot of times they'll recommend that you go to counselors like these, but they may already have like a predisposed outcome in mind because of their religious or ideological restrictions.
00:50:59
Speaker
Right.
00:50:59
Speaker
So, you know, I know for Christian counseling, you know, the end game is always like keeping marriages together.
00:51:05
Speaker
So there's a lot of times where, you know,
00:51:08
Speaker
I think women in particular are vulnerable to being coaxed into staying in situations that are really, really horrible for them because the outcome that is always pushed on them is that the preservation of the marriage is, um, more important than your individual wellbeing or even happiness.
00:51:24
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:51:26
Speaker
It drives me crazy.
00:51:28
Speaker
Um, I have worked with quite a few people in that situation.
00:51:33
Speaker
Um,
00:51:34
Speaker
to winkle them out of those hopeless marriages.
00:51:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:40
Speaker
It's always like, you're not a godly enough woman, you should pray more, then your husband will stop beating you, that kind of stuff.
00:51:46
Speaker
And to not beat up on the right wing or the conservatives too much, there's also that, I think, in more liberal institutions as well, because we've talked about how there's been a lot of these quote-unquote sex therapists and psychologists that push a lot of like
00:52:01
Speaker
abusive kink onto people as like some kind of cure-all, right?
00:52:05
Speaker
And it can be kind of dangerous because if you're dealing with a guy who already likes power and control and then you introduce the idea of kink, well now you're just giving over the reins for him to freely abuse you in public or like freely abuse you openly.
00:52:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a secular religion in a way.
00:52:21
Speaker
I think with all of these things,
00:52:25
Speaker
I've done it and I know plenty of other people have done that we've gone to see psychologists, therapists and we have trusted that they were fit for purpose and we have to make that decision whether we believe they're fit for purpose.
00:52:40
Speaker
We cannot rely on them having the appropriate expertise and sensitivity.
00:52:47
Speaker
We have to ensure that for ourselves.
00:52:50
Speaker
And I think
00:52:51
Speaker
This whole conversation really is about nothing gets in the way of you needing to do your own due diligence about partners and therapists and everything related to relationships.
00:53:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:53:10
Speaker
I'd also like to ask about the impact on people who may have had narcissistic parents.
00:53:20
Speaker
I guess before they start dating, you know, what would you suggest that these people do to ensure that they don't
00:53:30
Speaker
also pick out a narcissistic partner because if that's what you're used to growing up it's very easy to fall into that pattern again yeah um if you've been brought up by narcissists as i was two um that's exactly what you're trained to um and you will probably go on to marry
00:53:56
Speaker
You're a narcissistic parent.
00:53:58
Speaker
The problem, of course, is that when you leave a narcissistic home, you may not realize, first of all, how bad they were, and second, how unlikely you are to be able to make safe choices for yourself.
00:54:20
Speaker
So I've known so many women who've looked at their fathers and said, God, anything but that, I will not marry that.
00:54:29
Speaker
And then they have gone on to marry a different iteration of precisely that.
00:54:35
Speaker
Because we assume that we're savvier at relationships than we actually are.
00:54:41
Speaker
So...
00:54:42
Speaker
What's required is a whole lot of diligence and instead of rushing headlong into relationships which is so romantic and the way we do things nowadays, it's all about stepping back and learning who you are and how you want your relationship to look.
00:55:04
Speaker
It's a really big one.
00:55:06
Speaker
I work with women often in middle age
00:55:10
Speaker
And I say to them, describe to me your ideal partner.
00:55:18
Speaker
And they go, well, he has to be solvent.
00:55:23
Speaker
And he has to be kind.
00:55:27
Speaker
And he has to share my interests.
00:55:33
Speaker
And I say yes.
00:55:34
Speaker
And they say, well, we don't want any addictions.
00:55:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:55:38
Speaker
and what else, and they really don't know.
00:55:43
Speaker
They agree that he has to eat without spraying food everywhere, that he has to change his underwear daily, but they know so little about how they want to be treated in a relationship, and that is absolutely key.
00:56:01
Speaker
If you know how you want to be treated, how you want to feel in that relationship, then you've got some kind of yardstick against which you can measure the people that you date.
00:56:16
Speaker
So women don't even think, I want to feel safe with this person.
00:56:23
Speaker
I want to feel that they love me all the time.
00:56:30
Speaker
I had a wake-up moment one time when I was sitting on a boat with my horrible husband, and there was a couple opposite us.
00:56:37
Speaker
They had young children, so they'd been married a while.
00:56:40
Speaker
And what struck me was that every time the husband looked at the wife, he had a smile in his eyes.
00:56:48
Speaker
And I looked at my husband and thought, you never had a smile that reaches your eyes, you miserable bastard.
00:56:57
Speaker
I was right, he hadn't.
00:57:00
Speaker
So, and this is an important kind of thing to be thinking about.
00:57:06
Speaker
You know, what would you like your ideal, what would you like a Tuesday to feel like two years into the relationship with your husband?
00:57:15
Speaker
What would you be doing together?
00:57:17
Speaker
How would it feel?
00:57:18
Speaker
You know, what would a trip to the supermarket together feel like?
00:57:24
Speaker
I think that's really powerful and important, Annie, because, you know, when we read about, I guess, disastrous relationships, it's easy to think, like, how can you...
00:57:38
Speaker
he's making you feel like shit most of the time how can you be happy with that but they're obviously not happy but it's a really really good way to put any relationship into perspective and it's ultimately what any good relationship whether it's either romantic or platonic should come down to is or does this person make me feel good majority if not all of the time and that's what it should come down to
00:58:07
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:58:07
Speaker
It's not their job to make you happy, like to lift your depressed mood, if you have one.
00:58:15
Speaker
But it is their job to not bring you down.
00:58:21
Speaker
And the problem is, particularly if you've grown up with narcissistic parents, you have grown up as miserable as hell.
00:58:29
Speaker
And misery feels like a normal state.
00:58:33
Speaker
So that it's very easy to settle for a narcissist who makes you feel as miserable as hell because that is the way that you know the world works.
00:58:45
Speaker
That's why you have to do work on yourself to unlearn those beliefs and find out how happiness works.
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:56
Speaker
I find when you're raised by narcissists, there's also so many ways that they just sort of psychologically break you, you know, and groom you to be more vulnerable to abuse later in life.
00:59:08
Speaker
Like, you know, you're, you feel ashamed about having boundaries or you're groomed out of the concept of having boundaries at all, or that, um, you know, you feel a lot of anxiety about, you know, your partner being mad at you or people being mad at you and you feel, you know, like you have to,
00:59:26
Speaker
be in this sort of people pleasing state all the time, just like for survival, you know, you tend to be more like self-sacrificial and, you know, because, you know, growing as a child of a narcissist, you're groomed to serve the parent or to, you know, be their supply.
00:59:43
Speaker
And so they almost sort of like pre-groom you for, you know, future abusive partners.
00:59:48
Speaker
And it makes it so much harder to, you know,
00:59:51
Speaker
to identify what you want or to say no to things that don't bring you happiness.
00:59:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:59:59
Speaker
And since when was your happiness ever meant to be important if you're brought up by narcissists?
01:00:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:07
Speaker
So it's really important to learn how to do you, what makes you happy, how you want to live and how
01:00:17
Speaker
what you're looking for in a partner that will bring joy to your life.
01:00:24
Speaker
And also getting this idea, which you will not have had from a narcissistic parent, that you bring real value to relationships.
01:00:34
Speaker
And if you're bringing real value to relationships, it's not unreasonable to find someone who,
01:00:41
Speaker
who will appreciate that and who bring something valuable as well.
01:00:47
Speaker
The projection from narcissists is what makes it so much harder to like, they'll tell you that you're the selfish one or that you're the, you know, demand, you're the one being demanding and so on.
01:00:56
Speaker
And so you think that by having any expectations at all, like it makes you the narcissist or something.
01:01:01
Speaker
Right.
01:01:01
Speaker
So, um, it's so hard to even know what reality is almost.
01:01:07
Speaker
But let's talk about recovery because that's, I think, the hardest part of all of this is, you know, it's one thing to spot red flags, it's one thing to leave.
01:01:15
Speaker
And I find the recovery is something that can be, you know, years in the making.

Recovery from Narcissistic Abuse

01:01:21
Speaker
So what do you, like, what does that look like?
01:01:25
Speaker
How does one recover from emotional abuse or especially narcissistic emotional abuse?
01:01:31
Speaker
This is something I have been working on for a really long time.
01:01:35
Speaker
for myself and clients as well.
01:01:38
Speaker
I think the first thing is to understand the difference between what you're feeling and what reality is.
01:01:48
Speaker
So we all stagger out of a narcissistic relationship and we feel broken and we're damaged goods and it's all over for us and then there'll be anyone so wonderful again.
01:01:59
Speaker
And we have all of these beliefs
01:02:03
Speaker
And we're worthless and useless and whatever else as well.
01:02:07
Speaker
And we have all of these beliefs which we believe to be true.
01:02:13
Speaker
And they are just beliefs.
01:02:17
Speaker
We are not broken.
01:02:20
Speaker
It is not all over for us.
01:02:23
Speaker
And certainly there's far better to come once you get away from narcissists.
01:02:29
Speaker
But it's very difficult to
01:02:32
Speaker
thing to understand sorry it's a very difficult thing to get your head around and I love what Robert Holden says which is that if you think about babies they come into the world happy essentially you know they have their moments but they come into the world happy happiness is hardwired into us
01:03:01
Speaker
You know, you don't teach a baby to be happy.
01:03:04
Speaker
Babies can learn over time not to be happy, but that happiness was hardwired into them, into all of us.
01:03:16
Speaker
And we can always go back, get rid of all the programming that we've learned and get back to being happy.
01:03:27
Speaker
I love that.
01:03:28
Speaker
And we are
01:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, for me that was the first huge mind shift.
01:03:35
Speaker
What I find is that clients I've worked with are all so much more resilient than you would think they are.
01:03:46
Speaker
And we are all so much more resilient than we think we are.
01:03:53
Speaker
I've worked with women who've been through absolute nightmares.
01:03:59
Speaker
real nightmares, war-torn countries and God knows what, and come back from there and started to feel happy very much faster than they would have thought they could.
01:04:13
Speaker
So I think it's really important to hold on to this fact that you're not broken, you have this capacity to be happy and whole, and it's a question of tapping into it.
01:04:29
Speaker
So that for me is huge.
01:04:32
Speaker
What I do with pretty much anyone I speak to is I annoy them by urging them to write out their 20 celebrations a day.
01:04:45
Speaker
And I started doing this when I was working with women in refuges, women's shelters, which was really the worst place because they'd just come up with these nightmare relationships.
01:04:58
Speaker
And...
01:04:59
Speaker
They had limited resources, limited finances.
01:05:03
Speaker
And I said, you're going to have to write down 20 things you have to celebrate every day.
01:05:10
Speaker
I don't like the word grateful because a lot of us have been forced to feel grateful for things we never wanted anything.
01:05:17
Speaker
totally agree I hate the word gratitude I remember all of my worst bosses would be like tell me what you're grateful like they had they all have like speeches about what we should feel grateful for and it's like oh thank you so much for not giving me a raise this year and you know giving me some bullshit speech instead
01:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, like, for sure, you're grateful for things that you, like, should be allowed to be mad about.
01:05:39
Speaker
But anyways, yeah, 20 celebrations.
01:05:42
Speaker
Yes.
01:05:42
Speaker
So, gratitude can be really quite abused, used abusively in that respect.
01:05:48
Speaker
So, 20 celebrations every day before you go to bed at night.
01:05:53
Speaker
And this is really hard when you're depressed.
01:05:55
Speaker
you know, it's really hard to find too.
01:05:58
Speaker
So what am I grateful for?
01:05:59
Speaker
My day's been ghastly.
01:06:01
Speaker
Ah, I have a bed to sleep in.
01:06:03
Speaker
I have a roof over my head.
01:06:04
Speaker
I have running water and so on and so on.
01:06:07
Speaker
Oh, and someone smiled at me today.
01:06:10
Speaker
And once you start to program your mind, before I can get to sleep tonight, I've got to write out my 20 celebrations.
01:06:18
Speaker
You actually have to train your mind to look for positive things.
01:06:24
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:06:26
Speaker
which is what you don't do when you're feeling God awful.
01:06:30
Speaker
So you start looking for positive things and it actually starts to shift your mood over time.
01:06:38
Speaker
It starts to make you feel better, even when times are really tough.
01:06:43
Speaker
So that's another really powerful thing you can start to do for yourself.
01:06:49
Speaker
All it costs is the price of a notebook.
01:06:54
Speaker
Um...
01:06:55
Speaker
And then obviously you want to get some education and you want to get whatever help you can.
01:07:05
Speaker
Ideally, you want expert professional help.
01:07:08
Speaker
If money gets in the way, then honestly these days there are so many resources on YouTube and Instagram and everywhere else that you can start to consume money.
01:07:24
Speaker
and take from them what you can.
01:07:27
Speaker
I think that healing is some kind of weird cocktail that in the end you mix for yourself.
01:07:37
Speaker
You mix it with everything that helps to lift you.
01:07:43
Speaker
So a friend of mine was in a ghastly abusive relationship
01:07:50
Speaker
And she couldn't leave.
01:07:51
Speaker
She had a small child.
01:07:52
Speaker
She had no money.
01:07:53
Speaker
She was desperate.
01:07:54
Speaker
She's in a country, pardon me, a long way from home.
01:07:59
Speaker
And she couldn't do anything.
01:08:02
Speaker
And I said, yes, you can.
01:08:03
Speaker
You have to be able to do something.
01:08:05
Speaker
And the only thing she would concede that she could do was take a hot bath every day.
01:08:12
Speaker
She was so busy looking after her child that she often didn't even wash.
01:08:16
Speaker
So she did this small act of self-care every day.
01:08:21
Speaker
She had a hot bath, she had a bubble bath, then being British she decided she had to have a cup of tea while she was in the bath and then she decided that if she was having a cup of tea while she was in the bath she'd have to have a biscuit as well.
01:08:37
Speaker
This is British stuff.
01:08:39
Speaker
And then if she was having a cup of tea and a biscuit, she had to read in the bath for a while, and she did that too.
01:08:46
Speaker
And then she left her husband.
01:08:49
Speaker
That little bit of self-care really lifted her.
01:08:54
Speaker
It took her into a different headspace.
01:08:56
Speaker
So that's another important thing you can do for yourself.
01:09:02
Speaker
And then obviously there are the conventional things like finding out what your hobbies are, what you like to do, what lifts your heart, what brings you joy, how you can change your mood when you're feeling down.
01:09:21
Speaker
And being very, very patient with yourself.
01:09:27
Speaker
Taking should out of your vocabulary.
01:09:32
Speaker
What does that mean by taking should out of your vocabulary?
01:09:37
Speaker
Well, if you listen to anybody who's come out of a toxic relationship, should comes in every sentence.
01:09:43
Speaker
I should have done this.
01:09:45
Speaker
I should have known better.
01:09:46
Speaker
I should be feeling better by now.
01:09:48
Speaker
I shouldn't be feeling like this all this time.
01:09:51
Speaker
I should, I shouldn't.
01:09:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:09:53
Speaker
That's taking should out of your vocabulary.
01:10:00
Speaker
And if you...
01:10:02
Speaker
must carry on, replacing it with I could.
01:10:06
Speaker
So I could be feeling better by now.
01:10:10
Speaker
That doesn't make sense at all.
01:10:12
Speaker
And then you start to notice that you're punishing yourself with all these shoulds.
01:10:19
Speaker
Does that make sense?
01:10:22
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:23
Speaker
So starting to tune in to yourself and being kind to yourself
01:10:32
Speaker
If you've got the stomach for it, you can do some mirror work.
01:10:38
Speaker
That's where you stand and you look at yourself in the mirror and you don't go, God, I didn't know I had this second chin or I didn't know I had this new wrinkle or whatever or my bum looks big in this.
01:10:50
Speaker
It's where you look at yourself and say, I really feel for you.
01:10:56
Speaker
You're going through this and you're doing the best you can
01:11:01
Speaker
Or find something calm and kind to say to each other, to yourself.
01:11:08
Speaker
But again, mirroring can be a bit hard if you're having a real issue with yourself.
01:11:14
Speaker
Mirror work.
01:11:19
Speaker
So these are some of the things that you can do.
01:11:24
Speaker
Affirmations can work.
01:11:28
Speaker
if you find affirmations that fit with where you are.
01:11:34
Speaker
So every day in every way I'm getting better is not going to land well with you if you're feeling awful.
01:11:47
Speaker
I know this is really hard and I'm doing the best I can and for today that's good enough.
01:11:54
Speaker
is a different kind of affirmation that might work for you.
01:12:01
Speaker
Yes, so there is this element of being mindful, being present to yourself, treating yourself the way you would a friend who is desperately upset or a child who is hurting.
01:12:20
Speaker
instead of treating yourself like your narcissistic partner or parent treated you.
01:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, that helps a lot.
01:12:28
Speaker
Thank you.
01:12:29
Speaker
Do you have anything coming up, Annie, that you would like to let our listeners know about?
01:12:35
Speaker
Well, I've got a couple of things that could be useful to your listeners.
01:12:40
Speaker
I have my free healing affirmations for dark times on my website.
01:12:49
Speaker
which is HTTPS, recoverfromemotionalabuse.com.
01:12:56
Speaker
So that's a free download, Healing Affirmations for Dark Times.
01:13:02
Speaker
And also one thing which we haven't really talked about is boundaries, which is a big problem for survivors of narcissistic abuse.
01:13:13
Speaker
I know, was it you, Ro, who said that
01:13:17
Speaker
You come out of a narcissistic family without boundaries.
01:13:21
Speaker
You're basically trained not to have any boundaries when you're raised by narcissists.
01:13:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:26
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:27
Speaker
And then when you get out into the outside world, all these helpful people give you a load of advice that is...
01:13:35
Speaker
either not sensitive or not helpful because you're not where the advice is and they say to you, you should get boundaries, you should have boundaries and you end up going, yeah, yeah, I need boundaries.
01:13:46
Speaker
I'm going to get some boundaries and then you go home and think, what the hell even is a boundary?
01:13:51
Speaker
How do I do this thing?
01:13:53
Speaker
So having been in that situation and worked with a load of women who
01:14:00
Speaker
knew they needed boundaries and punished themselves because they didn't have them and didn't know how to get them, I created this little program which just teaches you to break the old patterns of people-pleasing and sacrificing yourself and working for crumbs of affection that you're never going to get and being frightened of saying no to people.
01:14:29
Speaker
and instead create the kind of boundaries that will help you in all areas of your life, that will help you have healthy friendships, healthier workplace relationships, have a healthier relationship with your work, and also have a better relationship with narcissistic parents,
01:14:54
Speaker
and folk generally, I was going to say narcissistic partners, but you'll never have a healthy relationship with them.
01:15:01
Speaker
But if you do have to have a relationship with a narcissistic ex, it really helps if you do have boundaries so that you can limit your interactions in such a way that you don't get wounded by them again.
01:15:19
Speaker
So I have this program which is called the Breaking Old Patterns Toolkit.
01:15:27
Speaker
And that's available from, full address is www.breakingoldpatterns.com.
01:15:36
Speaker
So it's https colon slash slash www.breakingoldpatterns.com.
01:15:45
Speaker
And that's a paying program, but it's $39.
01:15:51
Speaker
And it will give you an awful lot of insights and new ways of seeing the world and dealing with difficult people so that you don't feel that you are suddenly stripped of your personal power.
01:16:11
Speaker
Thank you so much.
01:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for your insights.
01:16:15
Speaker
It's a pleasure.
01:16:16
Speaker
I love what you're doing and it's been absolutely wonderful to speak with you today.
01:16:22
Speaker
Well, we're honored to be able to have you on the show.
01:16:25
Speaker
And that's our show.
01:16:26
Speaker
Please check out our website at thefemaledatingstrategy.com as well as our Twitter at fem.strat.
01:16:32
Speaker
And if you'd like to hear additional bonus content as well as submit your own roast to scrote and our brand new discord that we have for our level up and queen tier members, please check out our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the female dating strategy.
01:16:48
Speaker
Thanks for listening, queens.
01:16:49
Speaker
And for all you practitioners of the clownological arts, die mad.
01:16:53
Speaker
See you next week.