 Hello Upgraders and welcome to another edition of The Upgraded Ape Show. I'm your host Will Barron and today's show we have Sam Vaknin who is an expert on narcissistic psychopaths and has been diagnosed with both conditions. Absolutely fascinating talk. Sam's an absolute wealth of knowledge in this area and we're talking about how you can recognize narcissistic psychopaths in the workplace and then what you can then go on to do to one stop them bullying or manipulating you and two perhaps manage them better if you're a manager or how to survive working underneath them. What fascinated me about all this is that the literature suggests that one percent of people in the western world are either narcissists or psychopaths. However most psychopaths for example don't know that they're a psychopath because they think that they're fine they think that they're great so that one percent is actually a tiny amount so it's very likely that you have friends or family or colleagues that are narcissists or psychopaths and all this is on a sliding scale from you know Hannibal Lecter to the boss who likes attention and who is stealing credit for your work so that's something to bear in mind and Sam is the editor of mental health disorders in the open directory project he's got a book out malignant self-love and his work has been featured on mental health matters mental health century mental health today mental health review are loads of other websites and publications so just before we get into the show exciting news in that you can now download upgraded it magazine directly to your iOS device or your iPhone or your iPad if you just go into the app store type in upgraded it magazine you'll see it there download one bam and it's yours every week you'll get a little notification that tells you that the latest edition is available and then just click download and you view and you can just swipe through it and it's it's actually a way better experience reading the magazine on the iPhone or iPad versus in your browser how it is at the moment so yeah go check that out it's totally free and let's jump into today's show welcome to the upgraded it show your daily dose of brain upgrades to help you kick life's ass and here's your home will bear hi sam and welcome to the upgraded ape show thank you for having me you are more than welcome and today we're going to dive into the fascinating world of narcissism and psychopaths and just before we dive into that and we're going to talk about it in the context of the workplace can you tell us a definition of what a narcissist and a psychopath is just for listeners to clarify what we're going to talk about the distinction between narcissists and psychopaths has gradually become more and more blurred and today it is thought that a psychopath may be simply an extreme form of narcissists psychopaths are more prone to anti-social behavior including criminal conduct they are less empathic than narcissists if at all possible they are more centered on their benefits on tangible benefits that they may derive from people and from situations anything from sexual favors to money to the accumulation of power to the exercise of power etc etc psychopaths are also a bit more in a more the bits a bit more addicted to inflicting pain on other people they find it pleasurable and some of them even find it funny narcissists are a mellowed version of a psychopath they also lack empathy they are exploitative but they are addicted to input from other people input which we call narcissistic supply which essentially is attention whether positive or negative narcissists of course prefer admiration and adulation to not a rioting but if they cannot obtain the positive kind of attention then they would definitely go for the negative kind of attention so while psychopaths are stand alone units they are totally autonomous and they are not reliant nor are they dependent on anyone for anything narcissists are narcissists are addicted to narcissistic supply and therefore they are addicted to the input provided by people around them they go and solicit this input actively and sometimes forcefully so these are the distinction between the two types but both of them are callous ruthless de-sympathic emotionless and pretty terrifying okay well before we dive into how to spot these people and whether that whether it's good or bad and the sliding scale of how narcissistic and how psychopathic you can be can you just tell us some a little bit how you got involved in this world in the first place well i've been diagnosed with both i'm a narcissist and a psychopath and having confronted my own diagnosis multiply i've decided to delve into the uh into the issue and in 1997 when i started my 95 actually when i started my work on on these topics it was personality disorders in general and narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders in particular were an obscure and neglected sub sub sub filled of expertise among a very limited set of scholars narcissists and psychopaths are very hateful and difficult patients they do not yield to authority nor do they improve with treatment so they are very disappointing and resilient subjects both for study and for therapy and so psychiatrists ecologists and therapists tend to avoid narcissists and psychopaths in 1995 there has been nothing absolutely nothing written about this disorder with the exception of one or two books and so i had i had to do you know i have to start everything from scratch and i've spent the last 20 years studying both disorders coming up with a vocabulary that is widely used today actually and uh suggesting insights some of them accepted some of them rejected with regards to these two afflictions i have written several books the most well known of which i believe is malignant self-love narcissism revisited but i've written other books as well about personality disorders and i have corresponded and observed thousands of narcissists people diagnosed officially with narcissistic personality disorder and with hundreds of thousands of family members neighbors colleagues bosses co-workers you name it but by now by now i probably have it would be safe to say that i have the largest database with regards to these uh aliens among us for sure for sure that's fascinating some and one question that comes from my mind listening back to you then was how and why did you go to get a formal diagnosis in the first place is this something that you'd notice the traits of narcissism and psychopathic yourself or someone else mentioned them to you i've been coerced twice into into evaluation once by my then fiancé who had the wits and the intelligence to bail out and uh second time in prison i did time for securities fraud and as a condition for parole i was i had to commit myself to psychiatric evaluation so on both occasions the verdict of narcissistic personality disorder was rendered in conjunction with one or two other personality disorders and then about four or five years ago i participated in a documentary titled i psychopath in which quite publicly i was diagnosed with psychopathy they used a test called the pcl a pcl r a test concocted by one robot fair and while there are there's a serious debate about the validity of the test for instance it is not accepted by the diagnostic and statistical manual committee which is the body the body of orthodoxy in psychiatry but still it's indicative and so it would be safe to say that i'm a psychopathic narcissist after all these luminaries have poured over my record and and myself multiply but i've been coerced into it and that's an important question actually which you've asked i've been coerced into into evaluation and coerced into treatment and therapy you see prior to prior to being confronted with my diagnosis i was completely unselfaware i i would have found it pretty funny had you suggested to me that something's wrong with me i would have thought that you are dim with it i would have ascribed pernicious and paranoid motives and motivations to you for having said it for having suggested that something's wrong with me i would have blamed everyone and anything for my misfortunes and defeats and and so on and recall this whole thing alloplastic defenses alloplastic defenses better known as external locus of control means simply that narcissists and psychopaths before they become self-aware and some of them do i'm i'm an example but before they become self-aware psychopaths and narcissists tend to blame everyone and everything for the mishaps and the misfortunes and the downfalls in their lives they can do nothing wrong nor will do nor do they ever do anything wrong everyone else is to blame the bosses envious of them their co-workers are jealous of them and undermine them no one appreciates them properly the universe is badly designed god is to blame society this to the increasing stupidity of the populace you name it the waiter the cabbie they i mean everyone was with one exception the narcissist himself and this is called alloplastic defense a defense mechanism which shifts the blame and the responsibility and the attendant guilt feeling to the outside in order to avoid an inner conflict i think we all know people who don't accept blame themselves and blame other people for things that are going on in their life and struggle to take responsibility but what percentage of the population are actually i guess clinically narcissists or psychopaths is this a big amount or is this a very small minority according to the latest edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual published in june 2013 last year i mean about a year and something ago about one percent of the population would qualify as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder but this is of this is obviously a massive underestimate and the reason that it is an underestimate is that narcissists rarely subject themselves either to psychological testing or to a therapeutic setting so it's very difficult to come across narcissists in a scholarly environment or in a therapeutic environment and so narcissism is heavily and massively underestimated not so psychopathy psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder i believe is pretty well measured the prevalence and the incidence of antisocial personality disorder i believe is is accurately reflected in the literature and the reason is very simple many psychopaths end up in jail end up in prison so there they are subjected to compulsory evaluations assessments and sometimes therapy indeed robot hair the father and mother of modern the modern study of psychopathy is actually a prison psychiatrist his bulk of his career he had spent in prisons where he studied this population but narcissists are a lot more insidious a lot more stealth a lot more they act by proxy they are great they have great cesspion skills they're great actors they are they know how to adopt themselves so that they appear to be socially acceptable pillars of the community indeed many of them climb up the corporate ladder or politics or show business or the judiciary or law enforcement or the clergy end up in positions of authority i'm not diving into that a little bit further then because that one percent that you said was an underestimate i thought that was quite high number no not knowing as much about it as you obviously and one percent would suggest that you most people would definitely know someone who's narcissistic but if it's higher than that then it's likely that you know either family members or definitely people that you work with if you work in a big not big organization are going to be afflicted with this so if we look at a stereotypical organization now so they can relate this to their workplace are we talking about management that are more likely to be narcissistic or is it likely to be the CEOs of company or is it sales people is there a specific part of the company that tends to have more narcissistic people than others with your with your kind permission before i answer your question i would like to to make two comments why not narcissism is only partly a mental health diagnosis mental mental health construct it is equally influenced by culture and society it is what we call a culture-bound syndrome it tends to increase in societies which are narcissistic or which reward narcissism so societies which would place emphasis on individualism on ambition on trampling on other people you know Darwinistic societies societies which would emphasize competition and ruthlessness and so on so forth would tend to reward narcissists and in these societies people would become narcissistic indeed there is a suggested diagnosis by professor millman of harvard university situational narcissism narcissism which is provoked and and engendered by circumstances so this is comment number one in societies such as the united states for instance countries such as the united states it would tend to reason that narcissism is more prevalent more visible and more widespread than in let us say japan which is a collective society that's one thing second second comment i would like to i'd like to make narcissism or pathological narcissism is rarely diagnosed alone it is usually comorbid in other words it's diagnosed with other mental health disorders mood disorders other personality disorders and so on so one might one comes across narcissists whose main complaint or whose main syndrome or symptom is not narcissism prime example will be borderline personality disorder which is extremely accentuated narcissistic dimensions so narcissism is not an isolated phenomenon it it i think a good case can be made that pathological narcissism is the foundation of myriad other mental health problems so these are the two comments as to your question narcissists tend tend to gravitate towards positions of authority because there they can exercise power and extract not to say extort narcissistic supply attention adulation admiration from their surroundings human surroundings they need this input of narcissistic supply it is both a drug a drug and a fuel to their machinery in the absence of narcissistic supply they crumble crumble and crumble and go to dust so they would tend to gravitate to these positions of authority but if they fail to gravitate if they fail to reach these positions i'm sorry if they fail to reach these positions they would opt for second best and second best is to become minions and psychophants and fans and admirers and followers and subscribers to those in power so you can find them actually most represented in these two positions either as the figures of authority imposing authority on others and thereby enhancing their own feelings of omnipotence and grandiosity or by serving as satellites as extensions of people hello as satellites or extensions of people in positions of authority and thereby deriving the narcissistic supply by proxy if you wish indeed the second type of narcissists that i've just described the satellite or the extension is known as covert narcissists or inverted narcissists narcissists who is very much like the moon he shines but with reflected light and it is the reflected light of the fun the main narcissists the one who is in power so these are the two it's very rare to find narcissists in you know low level long-term low level occupations and so on if they are completely unable to reach the top they would tend tend to be itinerant they would tend to be desultory they would tend to hop from one job to another from one position to another they would change 40 careers in the span of 20 years attempting to reach the top somewhere somehow from then a business and workplace perspective then what traits do narcissists have that are actually positive for the business if it seems like some things like if you if you're willing to trample on others to get to the top that might not be necessarily positive but if you're willing if you know that the reward in attention is there at the end you might be willing to put in way more work than someone who isn't potentially narcissistic is that about right intuitively it sounds right but the correct response is counter-intuitive pathological narcissism is never ever good for business now what I've just said is not accepted by some scholars such as Kevin Dutton and others Makobi these scholars claim that narcissism can be harnessed and can be put to good use within the corporate structure and that the drive of the narcissist is in irradicable energy his neediness and addiction to narcissistic supply and so on so forth are actually energies that could be channeled and leveraged for the benefit of the organization and that is a serious serious mistake in thinking and a serious misrepresentation of case studies narcissists are very good as entrepreneurs they are charismatic usually they are intelligent they are driven they have clear goals and they motivate people around them either in the form of a cult cult-like setting or in preferring a vision a common vision and we call this shared psychosis kind of a hypnotic psychotic state into which everyone else buys and so they are good at inducing these pretty pathological states and they are therefore good at building up businesses at gobbling up businesses through mergers and acquisitions they are very good at creating teams putting teams together on condition that they had they are you know at the helm and they are the chiefs of these teams they are very bad team players but they are very good team builders and so on and so forth however narcissists invariably implode ultimately all narcissists without a single exception are self-destructive they would put 20 years into a business they would build it up into a global conglomerate but then their self-destructiveness will come into play and they will and it will all tumbling down why narcissists are self-destructive is perhaps outside the remit of this program but it it is a given narcissists are self-destructive in a variety of ways they are very inventive they're very inventive in the way that they extract narcissistic supply from people and they are equally inventive in the ways in which they self-destruct implode and ruin everything and everyone around them but they invariably do perhaps an excellent example would be Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler who was remote diagnosis and narcissists by Eric from a prominent psychoanalyst Adolf Hitler has succeeded to build out of the ashes and the ruins of the first world war having come having appeared on the scene having burst on the scene literally from nowhere and with zero credentials and achievements to his name this nobody succeeded to put up together a formidable a formidable war machine involving an empire the likes of which the world has not seen since Alexander the Great now and he has done all that in less than a decade yet we all know how it ended so they are great in the phase of construction unfortunately they are also unequaled in the phase of destruction so I've mused about Adolf Hitler before and this is a slightly going off topic I guess from the business world but I've thought and contemplated that perhaps if he hadn't done and gone into the role that he did because he was an artist beforehand and he could from sound things he could have been an entrepreneur he could have been anything are you suggesting that whatever he'd done even if it had been for the good of mankind rather than you know what he did end up doing that it would have imploded eventually now first of all for a very long time everyone thought that he was acting for the good of mankind I can show you adulating and forming articles in the British press about Adolf Hitler not to mention the American press well into the late 1930s so his post-mortem assessment posthumous assessment as a monster is Victor's history throughout most of his life he has not he was not considered a monster at all he was considered a fresh political talent with innovative courageous ideas a rebuilder of his own nation a reconstructor of the space of Europe and so on and so forth it is only when in 1940 that the images you know changed but yes the answer is yes whatever he whichever field he would have entered whichever endeavor he would have embarked upon he would have ended up the same all narcissists do all of them do from Enron to the further right they all do okay so let's put this into context for the listener then listeners listening they work in the corporate environment and their boss fits perfectly to the role and the aspects of a narcissist or psychopath which we just talked about they are constantly claiming that the subordinates work as theirs they're taking potentially advantage of them in different ways what is the best way to deal with this situation if you know your boss is a narcissist is there a best way to deal with it or is the best way to move to a different place within the company and have different management well best using the word best is a bit misleading best to whom in which circumstances depending on one's character as well the best way is to adulate admire adore visibly volubly and repeatedly your boss brown nose if you wish to use a less savory experience phrase so that's the best that this this is the winning tactic never fails because by doing that you're you're stroking their ego so they're more likely to work with you and you'll be in there good books by doing that you're stroking their ego you're distorting their reality because you are providing them with fallacious feedback and by doing so you are in control of the reality you have information which they're not privy to and this gives you the the leverage and the power to manipulate them and indeed narcissists are very gullible and easily manipulable they are junkies think junkie you know you provide them with the fix provide them with a dose they're yours for the taking so this is the the winning and only viable long-term strategy of survival around a narcissist and in the work environment however very few people are either willing or able to countenance let alone implement such a strategy because it requires you to some extent to possess psychopathic and narcissistic traits of your own or that is what I was just about to ask in the it's a fascinating twist in the speaking to yourself as a narcissist you're telling me how to manipulate other narcissists which leave me to the question then of do you then get to a point within the corporate structure where you get a higher and higher percentage of narcissists because they're the only people that are willing to manipulate and play the game with each other yes that's precisely what i've said i've said that narcissists tend to gravitate and and conglomerate and accumulate in the upper strata that means in positions of authority and in the satellites and extensions around them so yes level c and a bit down that these would be narcissists narcissists are rarely found in the lower echelons or in the lower levels of the of the corporation they gravitate up they they're likely to come you know they go to the top well sam i've got two questions for you one question that i ask everyone who comes on the show which i'll ask you in a second but before that just to wrap things up here you mentioned the pclr tests that may or may not be the best test to look at this but if i remember the audience now and me included if you feel like you have some of these traits it was talked about what's the best way to go about like an initial kind of test before you'd speak to a doctor or a psychiatrist whoever who would give you a clinical diagnosis is there a test that you can do perhaps online or from a book that would give you a heads up as to how narcissistic or psychopathic you are no not really because all these tests both online and offline regrettably require self-reporting honest self-reporting and no matter how honest you think you are especially if you're a narcissist you're not honest it's a self-defeating proposition it's like the famous abdera paradox you know all all abderans are liars and who says that an abderan so is he lying or is he telling the truth so self-reporting is a problem and this is the main obstacle in diagnosing narcissism psychopaths because ultimately we have to rely on their honest self-reporting and the self-reporting of people around and the reporting of people around them who are usually scared of them or like to avoid them or would say anything just to obtain certain outcomes so it's very difficult to diagnose them but they are tests designed in order to circumvent self-reporting so we have a test such as the MMPI 2 which is a dimensional very complex test and very difficult to beat even if you know the test intimately so that would be my recommendation my the first line MMPI 2 and perhaps MCMI 3 these are the two tests that I would the other the most common test used to diagnose narcissists the narcissistic personality inventory is idiotic sorry for being blunt because it requires the narcissist to self-report honestly unflinchingly and to be self-aware since this borders on on anonymity so and the second the second way is with a trained observer diagnostician who is a trained observer who has been exposed to hundreds of cases and is able through a structured interview and through direct observations of body language demeanor reaction reactivity and so on so forth in a therapeutic setting after several sessions reached a conclusion that perhaps we are dealing with a narcissist and perhaps not so it's a process diagnosing a narcissist is a process especially taking into account that narcissists have developed over the years have developed numerous strategies to hide and disguise the less savory aspects of their personality they have been exposed to a lot of censor a lot of social rejection and criticism as they were growing up so they have learned to disguise these guys who they are and they apply that in a therapeutic setting but after several sessions a trained diagnostician with or without structured interviews and an end with or without applying psychological tests such as the MMPI would still be able to say if someone is a narcissist or not okay okay well Sam just before we come on to you tell us a little bit about your book and where the audience can learn more about you and your work I've got one final question for you and that's something I've asked everyone who's come on the show so far and that is if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self what would be one piece of advice you'd give him to help him upgrade his brain in my case I benefit mightily from my dysfunction we are talking to each other because I'm dysfunctional and disordered so I have I have leveraged and and applied and used my disorder my dysfunction and my ruination in order to obtain the very narcissistic supply that I require narcissists would be unable constitutionally to respond to the question that you've asked because they are emotionally invested in their disorder they're very happy with it they are what we call in psychology ego-syntonic means they're comfortable with their disorder they aid and abet the disorder and the disorder aids and abets them it's a partnership symbiosis so nothing's wrong with it nothing could ever be wrong with it retroactively or prospectively amazing well Sam your your insights are absolutely fascinating to me and thank you do you want to just tell us a little bit more about your book malignant self love where we can find where we can find it where we can bind it yeah sorry malignant self love narcissism revisited is available of course via amazon and balsa novel I think your first stop if you want to get acquainted with my work and more generally narcissism and psychopathy and so on the first stop might well be in in my youtube channel that's Sam back in my name s a m v a k and i am so youtube.com backslash some back name there are well over 300 videos there and I believe you'll find your match and then my book malignant self love narcissism revisited amazon balsa novel and my website which is narcissistic-abuse.com just type my name into google I'm sure you'll come up with some results well Sam I really appreciate your time today it's been absolutely fascinating talking to you and we'll link to all them in the show notes at radio.upgradedape.com for anyone who is in the car or at the gym at the moment and Sam I just want to thank you again for your time today really appreciate it and thank you for coming on the upgradedape show thank you for having me