Hi guys. Geoffrey here.
In this video I'm going to show you the true reasons of your partner's
narcissistic behavior and I really want you to stay until the end, this video,
because what I'm gonna talk about here will go against 99% of the articles or
the videos you watch about this topic. Um,
and I might risk offending some people here or making some people angry and
defensive. But so caveat is I want to tell you the truth.
I want to tell you based on my experience working with my students,
what is actually happening here. And once my students understand this,
they can actually stop being so frustrated and so insane about this whole
process and gain more understanding,
more clarity to actually take better actions to remedy it, to battle it.
Now before I begin this video,
I want to let you know there'll be hosting a free master class on the five
proven steps to rebuilding your relationships from the ground up.
So if you want internet masterclass, be sure to stay till the end.
This video for the announcement on how you can get in on that.
And if you want more content that equips you with the right skills and knowledge
to be able to thrive in your relationship,
then I want you to subscribe to this channel and also click the bell button as
well to be notified when I post new videos three times every single week.
Now if you look around the web and you look at, uh,
you know how to deal with their narcissistic wife, for example,
you'll see three kinds of videos.
The first kinds are the videos that allows you to diagnose whether you have a
narcissistic spouse or not.
And these are the videos that are titled like 10 signs of a narcissistic spouse.
The second type of video you have are the videos that show you how being with a
narcissistic person means that you have been emotionally abused.
And these are videos that are titled like five signs. You've suffered a Mo,
a narcissistic abuse from your spouse,
and a third kinds of videos are the ones that tell you that there's really
nothing you can do about dealing with a narcissistic spouse,
that the best thing you can do is simply run away, stay away, get a divorce,
get split up, or whatever it is,
because there's nothing really nothing you can do about it.
And the implication that these videos are making is that when you have a
narcissistic spouse, it's the problem with our character.
It's a problem with our personality.
It's a problem with the way their brains or hormones are wired,
so that that cannot help but be narcissistic. That's the implication.
And that's not really nothing you can do about that. But in my experience,
this is actually not the case at all.
So if you look at the research on NPD or narcissistic personality disorder,
you realize that less than 1% of the population has been diagnosed with this
disorder. But if you look at the number of views on these videos,
or if I look at,
let's say the number of people coming to me convinced that their partner is a
narcissist, there's way more people claiming that their partner is a narcissist,
then there are actual narcissist. The numbers just don't add up here. And to me,
I've come to understand that this is actually just a diagnosis problem.
So to give you an example here, you know,
we all know in the scientific community that correlation does not equal
causation.
And what most people do when they're determining if their partner is a
narcissist or not, as they're looking at the signs, they're looking at this,
my partner display the science, yes, tick the box and so on.
And if it takes enough boxes, they'll say, Oh, my partner is a narcissist.
But this kind of research lends you very susceptible to the correlation versus
causation error in that, you know, if you look at let's say, um,
you have a sickness for example,
and you go to Google and the research and Google,
whether you have that sickness or not,
what you often find is that you have a lot more sicknesses than you think.
And it's sort of the same effect or phenomenon here where people are
misdiagnosing whether their spouse is a narcissist or not based on this minimal
research that they're doing by looking at simply the signs, it doesn't work.
And so in this video, I want to open your mind to another possibility,
another explanation for those narcissistic behavior besides just it's a disorder
and suggest that what looks like narcissism is actually just self preservation.
And the self preservation is a defense mechanism and it's a defense mechanism.
Costs by the lack of safety. And if you've been following me for a while,
you'll know that safety should be the foundation of every relationship.
And when that's not built, it will cause a lot of problems,
like defense mechanisms that causes us those narcissistic behaviors.
So to show you an example of this,
let's look at the symptoms or the signs of an overt or a grandiose narcissistic
person. So typical signs here are, you know,
someone who whenever you suggest something, they will lash out at you.
They will lash out. Are you saying how you're wrong,
how they're right and so on. They get defensive,
they tend to justify their own actions.
They tend to blame you or shift the blame, so to speak.
But if you look at this, yes,
they could be diagnosed as a narcissistic personality disorder,
but they could also be diagnosed as a defense mechanism. Because to be honest,
if you look within and you say, if I was cornered,
if someone accused me of something, if I was going to lose my job, for example,
if someone was accusing me in the wrong ways and telling me I did this mistake
when I actually didn't was you also show the same signs.
Would you feel the need to justify herself?
Would you feel the need to be defensive?
Would you feel the need to be lashing out at them?
And I'm sure you've done the exact same things. So again,
you know there are two possible causes for those behaviors and often we're
making the wrong diagnosis and what the causes actually are.
And if you look at the signs of an covert or a vulnerable narcissist,
the same thing, you know, they tend to do things like stonewalling. They say,
Oh I don't know, I don't want to talk about it. And for example,
they avoid the problem,
they repressed stuff and they ended up doing a lot of stuff that are passive
aggressive. And the same thing here, right?
These signs can be assigned to a narcissist but they can also be assigned to the
case of self preservation as well. It's just a defense mechanism.
The same way when let's say your relationship has gotten so complex,
it's gotten so bad and your partner just always insults you,
accuses you and makes it difficult for you. You might shut down too.
Same thing here. And so again,
in this video I want to open your mind to another explanation and other
possibility for those behaviors. And this is not just simply labeling someone,
Oh, you're a narcissist.
It could be that they're just simply self-preserving and they're self preserving
due to the lack of safety. Now I'm not saying that narcissists don't exist,
not saying that at all. They definitely exist,
but I think most of the time people are misdiagnosing the behaviors.
And in just a bit,
I'll show you why misdiagnosing this behavior does a lot more harm than good and
it can actually worsen the cycle to make your beliefs that is she's a narcissist
into a self perpetuating thing.
So why is believing in this old paradigm,
the old paradigm where you're simply looking at these behaviors and simply
assigning it to a narcissistic behaviors? Why is that unproductive? Well,
for one,
it doesn't give you anything productive to act on because if you're convinced
that the problem here is with her mind is with her personality,
with the character, there's really nothing much you can do about that.
And just like the other videos that we mentioned above,
the only thing you can do is assign it as abuse and say, Oh,
my partner is abusing me.
And simply walking away from it because there's really nothing you can do to
change someone's character, someone's makeup of their hormones or their brains.
So it doesn't give you any meaningful actions to take.
And if it does give you to take action,
the actions you take will not be productive.
Because if you believe that this is a sign of abuse,
this is a personality disorder, something wrong with our character. Guess what?
Whenever you see those behaviors, you're going to lash out to,
you're going to get defensive too.
You're going to try everything you can to shut down their behaviors instead of
gently approaching it.
And so when you perpetuate this blame and when you will lash back at those
behaviors, what you will often do is you actually remove safety even more,
which actually worsens those behaviors because you're,
you're giving her more reasons to self preserve,
to play out those defense mechanisms over and over again.
And when you do these two behaviors,
you'll see why this becomes a self perpetual cycle where where you have this
problem and there's no meaningful actions, no productive actions you can take.
So you just end up worsening the problem over and over and over again.
Before you know it, you'll say, I knew it my partner was a narcissist.
But if you shift your mind to adopting this new paradigm where you don't go
straight to narcissism,
but you instead go to self preservation first as a diagnosis,
then it gives you a lot more meaningful actions to take. Not only that,
it also gives you more compassion and more understanding what is actually
happening here. That she's not just being mean to you.
She's not just abusing you,
but she's actually just feeding like a victim herself because she feels the lack
of safety.
She feels threatened and she feels like she has to get her guard up and play all
this defense mechanism so that she can protect herself.
And he also gives you more hope,
more hope that this is actually a solvable problem, a problem that is fixable.
Because if we understand that this is just self preservation and the self
preservation is caused by a lack of safety, we cannot understand.
If I just build that safety and rebuild a safety changed the way I respond,
perhaps change the way I structure the culture in this relationship to create
more safety, then all those behaviors will away eventually.
So it becomes something that is much more easily fixable.
And if you're just like my students or like myself,
even what you find is that once you start to take the right action to build the
safety,
you'll find that what you thought was a narcissistic spouse or wife wasn't
actually narcissism. It was actually just self preservation all along.
And this happens the large majority of the time.
But if you take this old approach of simply straight away blading this to us,
to a case of narcissism,
what you'll do is you'll take the wrong actions and you will never get to find
out if this is just a self preservation problem,
a safety problem or a biological problem.
And to me this is a real shame because what I find is that you know,
a lot of people who are dealing with narcissistic behaviors per se are actually
just dealing with defense mechanisms, right?
And it should be a very solvable problem. But because they,
they assign it to narcissism straight away, they never get to solve it.
They never get to find out if this is even solvable or not.
So the purpose of this video was just to give you this key mindset shift on how
you perceive and how you see those behaviors,
how you interpret those behaviors so that it will lead you to have more hope.
It relieves you to have more understanding and it'll give you a lot more clarity
on what you need to do to actually start removing those narcissistic behaviors,
which I think is a much more helpful and much more productive train of thinking
than simply blaming it on character right away.
Now in the next two videos I'm going to make,
I'm going to give you five more key mindset shifts that you can use to not be so
crazy to interpret this in a much healthier way so that you can actually do
something about it and it changes your actions to be more productive.
And the future videos also show you the artful ways you can respond when she's
showing this narcissistic behaviors that actually creates more safety,
lowers our guard down and removes this, this need for self preservation.
But in the meantime, if you're looking for a resource,
if you're looking to learn more about how do I create the safety,
how do I lead the interactions with my spouse to create more of the safety,
to remove the need for self preservation and remove those behaviors.
Then you want to download the free guide in the description box below this video
on exactly that topic and if you want to join my free masterclass on the five
proven steps to rebuilding your relationships from the ground up,
then you also want to check out the link in the description box below this
video. And a big fundamental in that five step process will be the creation of
emotional and psychological safety,
which again is crucial if you want to remove those narcissistic behaviors here.
So,
so if you're interested in joining that masterclass and I would highly encourage
you to check out the link in the description box below this video.
Now of course, if you want to connect with me on a more personal level,
I do have a free Facebook group where you can join, ask her questions,
and actually get good answers to those questions by myself or other members of
the community here. So if you want to join that Facebook group,
the link is also down below. In the meantime,
I want you to leave a comment below on what did you find most insightful,
most eyeopening in this video? You know,
I love to hear from your love to hear your thoughts,
and if you liked this video and found it to be valuable,
then I want you to like it and subscribe to this channel for more content like
this one. In the meantime,
I do want you to watch this other videos to equip you with more skills and
knowledge to be able to thrive in your relationship. In the meantime though,
I will see you in the next video.