Are you dealing with a flaming narcissist and at your wits' end?
By the end of this video, I'm going to share with you five shocking facts about narcissists
that will help you understand this heinous personality and actually grab the edge in
dealing with that.
I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% divorce attorney and the bestselling author of the books Negotiate
Like You Matter and Breaking Free: A Step-By-Step Divorce Guide, and I've helped thousands of
people go from lives of drama, trauma, and chaos to step into lives of freedom, possibility
and purpose, and I do the same thing right here with you in these videos.
So before we go any further, make sure you hit that subscribe button, hit that little
notification bell so that you can be notified when I upload my new videos every single week.
Now, if you're dealing with a narcissist, which I'm sure you probably are or you wouldn't
be watching this video, then you know what it's like and almost nothing you think could
possibly shock you about them because they're just heinous and awful to deal with, but there
are some things that will absolutely shock you about narcissists.
So hang on and let's get started.
So the famous author, Gore Vidal, actually once was quoted as saying, "You can always
spot the narcissist in the room, it's the person who's better looking than you."
He was joking of course, but the best jokes always have that grain of truth in it.
So the narcissist is the person that wants you to believe and wants to convince you that
they're better than you in every way and that you are somehow less worthy than they are,
have less value than they do, because that's what they really want you to believe.
But the first thing I want you to know is the first shocking fact about narcissists,
and that is how many of them that there are.
So I'm going to go through some facts with you that I think are pretty shocking.
One is that approximately 6% of the population has actually been diagnosed with narcissistic
personality disorder.
And so if there are 360 million people in this country, and 6% of them have been diagnosed
with narcissistic personality disorder, that's 19,500,000 people.
And if each one of those people just narcissistically abuses five people in their lifetimes, that's
close to 100 million people.
So just think about that.
And if you apply that same formula to the population of the world, which is 7.5 billion,
are you ready for this?
6% of 7.5 billion is 450 million people, okay?
That have this narcissistic personality disorder.
And if you actually overlay the number of people that lack a conscience or are actually
sociopathic as well, then you are up to 697 million people who lack empathy or without
a conscience or have narcissistic personality disorder.
And if each one of those people just emotionally abuses five people in their lifetime, which
is probably a low number, then you're actually talking about the potential damage of over
3.4 billion people.
Yes, this is the secret, the secret global pandemic.
And I just want to give a shout out to my friend Bree Bonchay, who is the licensed clinical
social worker and the designer, host of Narcissistic Abuse Support Day, which takes place on June
1st of each year or somewhere around there.
And I will actually drop a link below if you are interested in signing up for that free
webinar that she hosts every year.
I will be taking part in that this year.
So that's from Bree Bonchay.
So that's fact number one that I think is absolutely shocking.
The next thing that I find absolutely shocking about a narcissist is that it has nothing
to do with genetics, well, very little to do with genetics is what they think.
It has everything to do with childhood.
And the other shocking fact about their childhood is it doesn't necessarily come from trauma.
Yes, it can be from having a traumatic event or things happen in their childhood, but it
can also be from having parents who were actually overindulgent with them and gave into them
too much or told them how amazing they were in every way.
But here's the really key thing about that, is that they were praised constantly for the
things that they did externally and they weren't given any sense of feeling valuable on the
internal.
And that's the thing about narcissists, is they have no internal sense of value.
And so if they were raised in an environment where everything was about the external, how
did you look, what kind of grades did you get, then they might have ended up being raised
with this feeling of a lack of internal sense of value.
So that I think is actually pretty shocking as well.
The other little thing about their childhood is that all children are sort of narcissists
as well, especially teens.
And so, you know, it's part of the development of the human brain and the human emotion to
start to develop a sense of yourself by being kind of narcissistic and feeling that the
world revolves around you.
And it's very common for two year olds to think that, or even 15 year olds or 16 year
olds.
So the thing about narcissism is that while it starts in childhood like that, it actually
can't be diagnosed until one becomes an adult.
And number three, the shocking thing about narcissism, is that it's actually not necessarily
an unhealthy thing, just like a lot of other things with personality types, and narcissism
is a personality type, it's actually a trait unlike some other mental disorders.
The thing with narcissism is that we all kind of have an element of narcissism in us.
We actually all want to feel seen, heard and know that we matter.
And we actually all want to be validated by people.
And so, there a continuum of narcissism that's partially healthy.
It's when it gets into the illusions of grandeur and when you're actually feeling no sense
of empathy for another human being, and you devalue, degrade, and discard other human
beings to the point of emotional abuse that you're actually inflicting on these other
human beings, that's when that level of narcissism has risen to a level of being unhealthy.
It becomes unhealthy or pathological in the sense that they start to believe that their
own pain, their feelings are actually more important than others, and they give no credence
or credibility or validation to others for their feelings or for their contributions
or their achievements.
That's when it's pathological and that's when it becomes unhealthy.
And that's where you start to look at the scale of what a narcissist actually is.
And I have a video on, am I married to a narcissist?
And I actually go through the seven different personality traits that psychiatrists look
at when they are actually trying to determine whether or not somebody is a narcissist or
not, and I will drop a link to that video below.
You're going to want to check that out.
And if you are a victim of a narcissist and you are so ready for change in your life,
give me an, "I'm ready," in the comments right now.
The fourth most shocking thing about narcissists is one of the things that I actually found
the most shocking when I really started to learn about narcissists because I had to deal
with them so much in my law practice, and that is that they're actually the most scared,
most insecure, most fragile personality on earth.
You are actually so much stronger than they are.
You're the stronger one.
You are the more secure one.
They know that, and that's why they were attracted to you in the first place.
Because remember, there's this symbiotic relationship between narcissists and empath, and I talk
more about that in my video on the covert passive aggressive narcissist.
So you're going to want to check that out and I will drop a link to that below as well.
But just remember that you are probably an empath because that's what narcissists are
mostly attracted to.
They want the person who has the qualities that they don't necessarily have, and they
glom onto you and they just kind of drain the life out of you, but that's what's happening
in these relationships.
Underneath it all, there's this fragile little personality, an empty shell that feels no
sense of value, so they attach themselves to people, and people that they think are
going to help them feel more valuable.
So they need an endless amount of supply and they try to get that from that person.
They're tremendously insecure.
They're tremendously afraid of being rejected or abandoned, and so they act in this heinous
way, all to protect they're fragile little egos.
I recently had a conversation with Dr. Ramini, and as many of my regular viewers know, that
I did a lot of series with her, and one of the things that she said that really struck
me is that she said that the narcissist is actually a very simple personality to understand.
They're not like normal people, like you and I, where we are actually pretty complicated
and there are a lot of different things that motivate us and a lot of different things
that cause us to do the things that we do or want the things that we want.
Narcissists are actually pretty simple.
They're just wanting to try to get as much value from everything out in the world as
they possibly can because they feel so empty inside.
It's all about survival for them.
So that's the shocking fact that I think is actually the most shocking, and that is that
they are the most fragile, scared little creatures on the planet.
And number five, this is the best one and this is where I come in, and that is that
they can be motivated.
They can be motivated to behave in certain ways.
And in my world, I call that motivation leverage or strategy.
And if you create enough leverage and you created a strong enough strategy and you're
anticipating what the narcissist is going to do and focusing on you and your case, which
is my SLAY strategy, strategy, leverage, anticipate, and focused on you, then you will be able
to get them to behave the way you want them to.
They're basically two year olds and adult bodies and you're motivating the two year
old to stop having a tantrum.
So when two years olds have tantrums, they fall on the floor, they scream, they yell,
and they're really just testing.
They're testing the parents to see how much they need to scream and yell in order to get
what they want.
And narcissists do the same thing.
They're testing you, they're testing your boundaries, they're testing you constantly.
And so, when the two year old screams and yells and the parents give in and give the
kid the lollipop, then the two year old goes, "Aha, so all I need to do is scream and yell,
and fall on the floor and cause a big scene, and they will give in.
So next time I just need to scream louder, scream longer, and cause more of a scene and
they will eventually give in.
So I'll just keep on doing this until they eventually give it."
And that's what narcissists are doing.
And so, you have to kind of implement what we call a behavior modification system for
narcissists and go, "I'm not going to do that anymore.
I'm going to do something else.
I'm going to actually motivate you into behaving the way I want you to behave."
Here's the little kind of thing about narcissists that I also think is sort of maybe shocking
fact number six, and that is that they do know what normal behavior looks like because
they play the part.
You know, they may not be able to feel any empathy for you and they may not be able to
give you emotionally what you want, and they maybe act absolutely awful and emotionally
abusive, but they do know what good behavior looks like.
That's how they were able to love bomb you in the first place, in the first phase of
the narcissistic relationship.
Remember, the narcissistic relationship is love bomb, devalue, discard, and they do sort
of vacillate back and forth between all of those different stages of the relationship.
But just remember that they do know what they are supposed to do, so you can actually create
enough leverage and enough motivation to squeeze them into behaving the way you want them to.
And that, to me, is a positive, shocking fact about a narcissist.
So those are my five shocking facts about a narcissist.
If you are getting ready to negotiate with a narcissist, then you must grab my free Crush
My Negotiation prep worksheet.
It is below, it is chockfull of information, pages and pages of information for you, and
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All you have to do is grab it, so make sure you do that.
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so that you can go ahead and join it.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
I'm so glad that you're here and I will see you in the next video.
Remember, today is a great day to start negotiating your best life.