Hey everybody.
Welcome to episode 147 of Waking Up to Narcissism.
I'm your host, Tony Overbay.
I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and a huge thank
you to RI Hope for her song.
It's not my job that led into today's episode.
And please go find ri wherever you listen to music, find me on Instagram at virtual
couch or on TikTok at virtual couch.
Substack is growing.
Substack is a very fun place to be.
Go to substack.com/the virtual couch.
There's a lot there.
Getting into some bigger question and answer episodes and some behind
the scenes stuff on Substack.
Okay.
But today we are gonna do one of my very favorite types of episodes.
We're gonna start with an email from a listener, and I am going to use that as
my muse, and I want to talk about that word muse because I just don't think
that we use the concept of muse enough in our emotional or our relational lives.
I am here on maybe a one man mission to make muse a part
of your everyday vocabulary.
Because I think about it a lot.
I think a lot of people when they hear the word muse, maybe think about
Greek mythology or some artistic genius that is staring out a window.
But here is how I define it.
A muse is anything that invites you into a little bit of self confrontation,
curiosity, discovery about yourself, about another person, about whatever
it is that you're interacting with.
Because a muse can be a conversation.
A podcast that you're listening to, a song lyric, a problematic coworker, a sunset, a
smell that takes you back to fifth grade.
Anything that pulls you inward and says, okay, what's happening for me right now?
What am I feeling?
What am I thinking?
What's my experience?
Your muse is simply a mirror that shows you what's already there what's coming
up for you, and then what you can work on if you want to, or what you can lean
more into or what you can learn from.
Today's email this one is a mirror that reflects so many of the stories that
I hear from listeners in my office.
I really think that you'll identify with something in this email.
. I'm going to read the email all the way through without commentary.
Then I'm gonna go back to the beginning, which is a very good place
to start, and I'm gonna pull out each sentence or section, and talk
through the concepts that show up along the way, and we're gonna hit.
Everything today, everything from emotional immaturity and attachment
dynamics and projection and trying to give the other person
the aha moment or the epiphany.
But what we're really going to nail down today is this idea
of a narcissistic collapse.
That term is something that has been getting a fair amount of airtime,
especially on TikTok, where one might call me a bit of a TikTok therapist, although
it is just purely advice that I'm giving.
I'm not your therapist, unless you're literally one of my
clients listening to this podcast, but here's the email as it is.
Hi Tony.
I've been listening to Waking up to Narcissism now for two years,
and I wanted to reach out because something has been bugging me and
I trust your perspective on it.
A little background, I'm 46, married for 18 years, two kids, 12
and 15 who are doing well despite everything that I'm going through.
I have a good career in sales and from the outside, I think most
people would say I have a pretty good life, and in a lot of ways I do.
But my marriage has been slowly unraveling for years, and your podcast has been
one of the only things that has helped me make sense of what's been happening.
When I first started listening, I actually thought that I was the narcissist.
My wife had told me that for years, she had said that I was too sensitive or
that I always had to be right, that I was impossible to talk to, and I believed her.
So I went to individual therapy, convinced that something was
fundamentally broken in me.
But the more I listened to your episodes, especially the ones about
emotional immaturity and how we're all starting from that place, the more
I started to see things differently.
And what really hit me was when you talk about how the emotionally immature
person will take almost anything that you share and use it as an attack surface.
That's exactly what happens.
If I tell her something that's bothering me, it becomes ammunition.
If I'm vulnerable about something from my past, it comes back during an argument.
I've learned to share almost nothing, which I know is not healthy either.
Here's my biggest problem, and I know you're gonna call me out on this.
I still think that I can give her the epiphany or the aha moment.
And I know that you've said a hundred times that you can't, that they have
to find it on their own, and that trying to get them to see it is just
another form of staying enmeshed.
I hear you.
I really do.
But part of me is convinced that if I just explain it in the right way
or find the right moment, or show her the right article or podcast
episode, that something will click.
'cause her behavior is just so hurtful sometimes that I feel like
she has to be able to see it if I can just get through to her.
Making matters worse.
We spent almost three years with a couple's therapist who I now
realize was making things worse.
At the time I thought therapy was supposed to be hard and that discomfort
meant that we were doing the work.
But looking back, I think her therapist just continually validated
my wife's perspective without ever really challenging her.
But every session, my wife would tell her side of things and the therapist
would nod and say things like, it sounds like you're really feeling unheard.
And then turn to me like I needed to fix that.
Meanwhile, I would try to share my experience and somehow it always came back
to what I could have done differently.
My wife would leave those sessions feeling vindicated and then use
whatever came up in therapy against me for the rest of the week.
So I finally put my foot down and I said I wouldn't go back.
Which of course became another example of me being unwilling
to work on the marriage.
Anyway, here's the real reason I'm writing.
Over the past several months, I've found a lot of comfort in online
content about narcissism, mostly Instagram reels and tiktoks.
I know that probably sounds pathetic for a 46-year-old man, but at 2:00 AM when
I can't sleep and I'm replaying another argument in my head, it helps me see
that other people get it that I'm not crazy, but there's this trend I keep
seeing and I can't tell if it's actually a thing or if it's just because the
algorithm has figured out What I watch.
People keep talking about the narcissistic collapse and how 2025 is going to be
the year of the narcissistic collapse.
There are all these videos about how narcissists eventually have a collapse
where their mask balls off, and everybody sees them for who they really are.
I'll be honest, part of me really wants this to be true.
I want there to be some moment where my wife finally sees what she's doing
or that people around us finally see what I've been dealing with for years.
I guess I want there to be some kind of cosmic justice, but the more I
look into the people making these videos, the more I notice that none
of them seem to be actual therapists or psychologists or psychiatrists.
They're coaches or survivors or empaths, but I haven't really seen the credentials
that cause me to fully believe them.
And some of the stuff they say almost seems too good to be true.
Like they're telling people exactly what they want to hear.
So my question is, is narcissistic collapse actually a real clinical concept?
Is there any truth, this idea that narcissists eventually have
some kind of breakdown where everything falls apart for them?
Or is this just content creators feeding desperate people like me what
we want to hear at two in the morning?
I'd love to hear your take on this, whether on the podcast
or even just a quick reply.
I trust that you'll gimme the truth even if it's not what I want to hear.
Thanks for everything you do.
Your podcast has been a lifeline assigned Matt, not my real name.
Thank you Matt.
Let's go back and break this thing down.
It probably won't be exactly line by line, , but we're gonna get pretty darn close.
So Matt starts out, I've been listening to Waking Up to Narcissism
for about two years, and right away I wanna validate something.
There are podcasts that people listen to purely for entertainment,
and there are others that people listen to to try and figure out their
relationships or understand difficult concepts of their relationships.
Sometimes that in and of itself can start to be overwhelming.
And it's kind of funny because I will often have people tell me that
they'll listen to some of my content for a while and then they tell me
that they really need to take a break as if I'm gonna be offended.
But I understand this is heavy stuff I do try to make things entertaining,
but the data that I'm gonna present is based off of now 20 plus years sitting
in the chair as a therapist and also dealing with emotionally immature and
narcissistic people in my own life.
People that I've interacted with.
There are times where honest to goodness, I need to take a break from
the things that I listen to as well.
I don't know if I can just thank my A DHD for this, but at any given
moment, I'm listening to a couple of entertainment podcasts, probably a fiction
book, as well as a nonfiction book, as well as other therapist podcasts.
There are times where that's gonna be more balanced toward just wanting to listen
to things for pleasure versus wanting to continually learn and grow and know
the things that will help me as a human, as well as help people in my practice.
So when you're listening to this podcast, it's okay to acknowledge I'm listening
because something in my relationship most likely doesn't make sense.
And I'm trying to make sense of myself and how I show up in this dynamic.
And that can be exhausting at times, and other times it can be liberating.
So Matt, reaching out means that he's starting to wake up.
Now it goes on to say, my marriage has been slowly unraveling for years.
When your relationship is chronically unpredictable, I'm gonna
go right to my commandment one.
If you listen to last week's episode on the 10 Commandments of dealing
with the narcissist or the emotionally immature, that you're probably still
breaking commandment number one is raise your emotional baseline.
When you are in a chronically emotionally volatile relationship,
your baseline is low.
It isn't calm.
Your nervous system lives right there on the border of fight or flight, or
it's in full fledged fight or flight.
And when you've been in that state for a long time, you don't even realize
how low your emotional baseline has fallen until you're out of the fog.
Because if you are living in survival mode, it's hyper vigilance.
It's this place where your cortisol is basically on a slow drip
constantly, but it is remaining high.
, The raising your emotional baseline concept is that self-care is not selfish.
And self-care doesn't have to be manicures and pedicures and running a marathon,
although those things can be amazing.
It can be listening to podcasts, it can be reading books, it can
be using an adult coloring book.
I just had somebody recently tell me that they've been doing, those paint by numbers
kits, and I wanna do that really bad.
I didn't even know that those were still a thing I darn near wanna bust out.
The yarn, macrame, crochet, cross stitch needle point.
Self-care can also be letting yourself think or dream.
Again, that is self-care.
'cause the alternative, and I think what most people end up doing when
they're in these emotionally immature or narcissistic relationships is obsessing
over things like, what did I do wrong?
How can I fix this?
How do I get through to them?
How do I prevent the next explosion?
And it can be so tempting to continually look at what I can
do, because if there's something that I can do, then I can fix it.
But sometimes the only thing that you can do is to stop putting
effort into a bad relationship and learn about what's happening.
And truly do your own self confrontation and be genuinely curious about the
dynamic and how you're showing up in it.
And that can be really, really hard because we want to make it
about something that we can do.
How do I prevent the next explosion?
. In the grand scheme of things that isn't self-care, that's more like
self abandonment or self betrayal.
And I get it because again, if I can make it about me, then I can fix it.
But if it's not about me, it might feel pretty unfixable.
And that can be lonely.
It can feel devastating.
It can feel hopeless.
You can feel stuck, and those things are scary.
So our brain constantly is trying to figure out a way to get out
of the discomfort, to predict, to make meaning to seek certainty.
But when your brain is constantly trying to predict and manage another person's,
emotional weather system, they end up taking up way too much time and way
too much square footage in your psyche.
You start spending all these emotional calories, managing things
that will most likely never produce safety or connection or even relief.
And investing those emotional calories and self-care and understanding even just
the dynamic that you're in, is a much better use of your own neural real estate.
Next.
Matt said, when I first started listening, I actually thought I was the narcissist.
And if you've listened for long, this is one of the most universal emails I get.
Why?
'cause emotionally, immature, narcissistic partners are masters
at projection and blame shifting.
So they often say things like, you're too sensitive.
Do you know how difficult it is to talk to you to be married to you?,
You think you always have to be right?
You are impossible to talk to.
And if you really look at the research on projection, it typically
means that's how I feel about myself and it's too painful to own.
So I'm going to project it out on you, and now I'm going to attack it.
So you're gonna be completely confused, which is gonna give me
even more ammo to say, see, you don't even understand what I'm saying.
You don't even hear me.
And this is where I really wanna drop , the go-to phrase, , the
thing that I want everybody to hear.
If you are genuinely vulnerably asking yourself, am I the narcissist?
You're probably not the people who write me these emails.
, They're the ones reading and reflecting and questioning their own impact.
They're the ones that are going to therapy.
They're the ones that are listening to the podcast and reading the
books and trying to figure it out.
Meanwhile, the emotionally immature partner, they're not going to
those links to figure things out.
They're not Googling, am I emotionally abusive?
They're Googling, if anything, how do I make my spouse stop overreacting?
They're not writing into a podcast.
They're not reading another book about the relationship.
They're not continually trying to figure out what they're
doing that's causing this.
They're may be chat GP ting.
What are human ways to apologize rather than embodying an apology?
The people who ask the question, am I the narcissist, are almost never
the ones that the question is about.
Next, Matt says, I went to individual therapy and I was convinced that
something was fundamentally broken in me, this is emotional immaturity,
most powerful weapon self-doubt.
The person who is emotionally mature enough to ask, am I the problem is,
again, almost never the, definitely not the entire problem and usually
not even the majority of the problem.
And I really wanna pause here and say this directly to my listener, Matt, and
then to anybody who relates to this.
I am genuinely proud of you.
Truly.
I love clients like you.
'cause it takes courage to go to therapy when you believe that you are the problem.
It takes courage to read the books and listen to the podcast
and try to go back in and fix the relationship over and over again.
As a therapist, it often takes a session or two or 10 to help people
see that they aren't solely responsible for the pain in the relationship.
So showing up for therapy, especially when you believe that you're
the broken one, that is bravery.
My good friend Matt and anybody else who's listening next, he says that he identified
with when I've said that the emotionally immature person will take anything that
you share and use it as an attack surface.
I will say yes.
Yes.
Capital YES.
Yes.
In last week's episode, this is one of the newly minted
commandments, emotional commandment.
Number six, thou shalt limit thine attack surface.
When you share a vulnerable story with an emotionally immature partner,
or any story for that matter, you're not deepening intimacy.
You unfortunately are handing them a tool for the next argument or an
argument right then or something they cannot even respond to.
It doesn't mean that you're wrong for sharing.
It means that they don't have the capacity or the ability or the genuine
curiosity to hold that conversation gently and look at it as what it is.
It's an emotional bid for connection and for intimacy.
Matt said, I've learned to share almost nothing.
And, here begins the tragedy of living with emotionally
immature and narcissistic people.
Silencing yourself, becomes a safety strategy.
This is a survival adaptation and I've had many people reach this point and
say, okay, now that I know this, I think I can stay in the relationship.
I'll just stop sharing anything vulnerable and I think I'll be okay.
I will outsource the vulnerable or the intimate conversations to other people
at work , or groups or my parents.
And that is where I gently bring some awareness and ask , how does your central
nervous system feel about that plan?
'cause here's the truth, we are biologically wired for connection.
It goes back to exiting the womb and not knowing we exist unless
we interact with another human, especially with somebody that we
chose to be in a relationship with.
So convincing yourself that your connection is unsafe , is protective,
but convincing yourself that connection is unsafe and now that you understand
that it's unsafe, you can jump back in and assure yourself that you won't offer
up anything vulnerable and still try to have meaningful connection with that
partner, that person that might feel like progress, but I worry that your nervous
system isn't gonna necessarily buy it.
'cause living with emotional silence or self-protection starts to drive
this chronic cortisol spikes.
You constantly walk around the house worrying that you are gonna
say the wrong thing or feeling like you're walking on eggshells.
And I cannot state this enough.
In a healthy relationship, there isn't a wrong thing.
You are two completely separate human beings in a relationship,
going through life for the very first time as an individual and together.
And so you're going to say things and you're gonna react
to things in a certain way.
If you are worried that you are being you in the wrong way, then you are going to
start to walk on eggshells and worry that I don't want to say this thing that will
make this other person feel a certain way.
I hope that they don't feel a certain way and I wanna understand why they may have
felt hurt by the things that I'm saying.
I want you to be able to be you in the relationship, both people , and then have
the tools to be curious about why you feel a certain way about what your partner
says, or even why they say what they do.
Like I really wanna understand where does that come from.
I can say a thing and my partner might have a reaction to it.
, And this is not meant to sound negative, but that would be a them thing.
Then I can be very curious about why they reacted the way they did.
Tell me how you're feeling.
I do wanna understand.
Or tell me what you mean by this thing that you said fascinating.
Because I wanna know you because here's what that means to me, or
here's what that brought up for me.
Eventually, with practice It feels safe intimate and connected because if you
don't have that over time, you move into a semi-permanent fight or flight state.
And that's how people start to develop symptoms of things like complex
post-traumatic stress disorder, C-P-T-S-D, some of the symptoms of C-P-T-S-D are
things like difficulty concentrating or overall emotional numbing, higher
startle response, digestive issues, sleep problems, memory lapses.
C-P-T-S-D affects short-term memory because as I understand it, your brain's
prioritizing survival over recall.
It literally becomes a blood flow issue in the brain.
We don't need our short-term memory when we're in fight or flight mode.
Hippocampus, the little sea horse shaped part of the brain that stores short-term
memory, will maybe get back to you later.
And if things aren't making it into your short-term memory, they're not going to
eventually make it into long-term memory.
Either.
We need all hands on deck, all blood flow, getting to the amygdala, the fight
or flight response because it's go time.
Your brain over time is saying, Hey, remembering things like a grocery list.
Not that big of a deal.
So that becomes optional.
Staying safe, not so much.
Matt goes on to say, I still think I can give her the epiphany.
And there it is, emotional commandment.
Number five, thou shalt never give thy spouse an epiphany or an aha moment
trying to give somebody else An epiphany is like trying to breathe for that
other person, epiphanies, aha moments.
They're born from introspection of accountability, self confrontation,
of growth from their own discomfort.
Those are things that emotionally for people work very hard to avoid.
Matt then says, if I just explain it the right way, and Matt, honest to
goodness, bless your heart, , this is your anxious attachment talking.
I know this one all too well myself.
Your anxious attachment says, my safety comes from fixing the
relationship if the relationship is not going well, it's a me thing.
I need to repair it.
I must have done something wrong.
So then your emotional management says.
My safety comes from managing other people's emotional experience.
So instead of saying, I wanna be understood, your brain says, I must
prevent them from getting dysregulated.
But you're not communicating, you're regulating them.
And that's a lot of emotional labor.
That's exhausting.
It's not real intimacy.
And then Matt said, our couple's therapists made things worse.
And this part serves a spotlight as a legitimate couple's therapist.
When somebody's in a relationship with a narcissistic or an emotionally
immature partner and they're working with a therapist who may not
understand that dynamic, something called reactive abuse often shows up.
And reactive abuse isn't physical abuse, but it can be just as damaging
or worse, and even more crazy making.
And it's when the victim is now reacting to being pushed,
not just their limit, but.
Past the limit, and it comes out in a lot of different ways.
Crying, yelling, shutting down.
Finally, snapping big emotional outbursts because sometimes after months or years of
being poked and prodded and minimized, and being the one who has felt like they're
trying to do more and more and not having their needs met or being made to feel
crazy about the things that they're asking for and feeling gaslit and dismissed and
criticized and invalidated, the person who has finally gotten their partner to
come to therapy, it's like their central nervous system can't take it anymore.
Their emotionally immature partner puts on an Oscar worthy performance
right in front of the therapist.
I've seen this happen, and all of a sudden the partner who has been doing
the majority, if not all of the heavy emotional lifting in the relationship,
it is like their own subconscious things.
I finally have my partner in a room with a professional.
They're taking notes.
They look the part.
Hopefully now this therapist will see what's going on.
And maybe tell me I'm not crazy, maybe even help, maybe even rescue.
And then it doesn't happen.
And so they lose it.
And then the emotionally immature partner points at the reaction and says, see this?
What am I supposed to do when he's doing this?
Seriously, I am so glad that you're seeing this doc because maybe
now you can get through to him.
And unfortunately, far too often the therapist does now
think that you're the problem.
And I'm so sorry to say that because therapists who are unfamiliar with this
dynamic often validate the wrong person simply because one partner appears
calm, but the other appears reactive.
But calm does not always mean healthy and reactive does not always
mean unstable in that scenario.
The context really matters.
And unfortunately, this is common.
Emotionally immature people often perform well in therapy because
they lack a solid sense of self.
It's whatever mask they can put on and wear.
, I think the words of, , Ursula the Sea Witch.
It's what they live for.
It's what they do.
So they may present confidently, they can be emotionally convincing.
They can use this linear logic where they know the next logical step.
And meanwhile, the pathologically kind partner presents with doubt
and self blame and tentativeness and fear of conflict and worry.
A lot of worry about retribution when they leave the office.
Unfortunately, if that happens after you leave the therapist's
office, that's not okay.
If you hear, I can't believe you threw me under the bus like
that after I finally went in.
So therapists who don't understand emotional maturity can unintentionally
reinforce the wrong narrative.
And maybe even more unfortunate, even a decent therapist who understands
the dynamic can push the narcissist too hard, too quickly, and then
they leave and use that against the pathologically kind partner.
Oh yeah.
Found somebody now who's just gonna agree with you and gang up
on me, and it costs a lot of money.
I'm not doing that and you certainly can't use my money to see them.
And I also wanna acknowledge, as a couple's therapist, it is not helpful to
go to couple's therapy with a narcissistic or any kind of abusive partner.
But while that's the right thing to say and it is true, I also know, and
I wanna acknowledge that people don't even really recognize what's going on
in their relationships more often than not because that's the relationship
they know and they got into it because it might have been the familiar,
what they saw modeled in childhood.
I think it's fair to acknowledge that going into couples therapy, they
still maybe don't know that they're in a relationship with a narcissistic
or an emotionally immature partner.
It can almost feel like something that they're ruling out or something that
they never would've understood how challenging or bad their relationship is
until they saw that happen in therapy.
'cause you just don't know what you don't know.
And it often takes going to therapy to really see what's going on.
Matt said she used whatever came up in therapy against me, this is the
attack surface because the emotionally immature person interprets any kind of
vulnerability as leverage or ammunition or access into your inner world.
It becomes this future argument that's just waiting to happen, and I don't want
to go all or nothing, but depending on the severity of emotional immaturity
or if we're moving into narcissistic traits or tendencies or full blown
narcissistic personality disorder.
It can go on this spectrum from, it often feels like an attack surface to
literally anything you reveal becomes a file that they store in this internal
cabinet labeled used during conflict or to make person feel bad at any moment.
, That is not a partnership.
What can be difficult is it can feel like the other person doesn't understand.
I watch people in my office say, no, I really wanna understand
where you're coming from.
And then the person will share something and even with nice mouth noises and
kind eyes and facial gestures, and the person will then say, okay, but that's
not even true, or, that's ridiculous.
Or, you know that that isn't the way that I really am
showing up in this relationship.
I can't believe you even said that, even though they just asked.
I wanna understand what you are experiencing and how you're thinking.
He then goes on to say that at 2:00 AM he scrolls, TikTok, and he says, scrolling
makes me feel like I'm not crazy.
There's a lot happening in that sentence.
'cause what he's describing isn't just a bad habit.
It's not just mindless phone use.
It's actually what I think a lot of people do, or at least it's a story.
Their brains are telling them that they're trying to use the phone in that situation
to co-regulate to calm yourself down.
Now, that doesn't mean it's the ideal way.
One could work more toward meditation, reading a book, having
some sort of a nighttime routine.
'cause in this version of co-regulation that Matt's talking about, our nervous
system's looking for some certainty, it really wants to alleviate the discomfort
and it's trying to use your phone.
And other people's stories and other things as a way to do so, because
normally our nervous systems settle when we feel understood or seen or
connected or safe with another person.
And ideally that's gonna happen in a relationship with a partner
who can sit with you and hear you and help your nervous system
relax and hold your hand and get oxytocin to cuddle hormone flowing.
Or you can learn to self-soothe.
You can learn to be a meditative zen guru and calm your own nervous system down.
And I'm not being facetious with that.
That is self-soothing.
That is your self validation.
But when the person who's supposed to be your safe place is actually also
the source of your anxiety and trauma,
your body still goes looking for regulation, it's just trying
to find it somewhere else.
So at 2:00 AM he ends up co-regulating with strangers on the internet.
And that's absolutely not pathetic, Matt.
It's adaptive.
That's his brain saying, I need to feel less alone.
And this is about all I have.
Here's where the story turns.
'cause your phone, your apps, the algorithm, none of it , is neutral.
And yes, I'm about to sound like an old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
But your phone, the slot machines, narcissists, they all deliver something
called intermittent reinforcement.
It's the same reward pattern that creates some of the strongest behavioral
bonds we know, including trauma bonds.
You don't get validation every time you swipe.
You get to hear you get it there, a video that nails your experience
, and then a whole lot that don't.
And then another one that feels like it was made just for you, , that sometimes
it hits and sometimes it doesn't.
Rhythm.
That's exactly what makes your brain chase it even harder.
The same device or the same human that can provide you with
punishment can also deliver you a reward that is a trauma bond.
And James clear's book Atomic Habits.
He has a fascinating take on the dopamine system.
He says.
Dopamine isn't just about getting the reward, it floods
in anticipation of the reward.
So if you're laying in bed scrolling, looking for certainty, hoping to
co-regulate, wanting to find that one video that will finally make
sense of it all your brain's kind of whispering to you, maybe the next video
will finally make you feel better.
Maybe the next one is going to explain your marriage or give you
the tools to not feel as bad anymore.
Maybe the next one's gonna prove that you're not crazy.
So that anticipation is what keeps your thumb moving.
And it's also why it can start to feel so compulsive because your nervous system is
distressed and it thinks, man, if I just keep going, I'll eventually land on this
thing that's gonna make that feeling stop.
What do you do if you recognize yourself in this pattern?
One simple shift is to put some structure around it.
You can try to set a timer before you open the app so there's a built-in
stopping point instead of endless.
Just one more, just one more.
I remember one of the first times I heard of Mel Robbins, the author of the
Let Them book, which I really enjoyed.
It was something she had about a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown.
When you're scrolling on social media, and I have to use that on
occasion, even still, you start counting 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then quit.
Or there's another way you can look at this going in, decide what you're
going to do in the first place.
Are you looking for connection, education?
Just a laugh.
You're scrolling with at least a little bit of purpose instead
of trying to just fill some void that you're not even aware of.
And then when your timer goes off, you can't just drop the phone
and hope for the best transition into something more grounded.
Stand up, stretch, grab water, take some deep breaths, turn on a light.
Step outside for a second.
Give your body a clear signal.
I am now back into the real world zero part of this is meant to shame
you for being on your phone because we're pretty much all on our phones.
That is where we are now as humans.
You're not weak.
You're being a human and you're a human whose brain and nervous system are doing
exactly what they're designed to do while using a device that it did not anticipate
would be here at this point, a device that's been designed by thousands of very
smart people whose job is actually to keep you engaged for as long as possible.
When you understand that, you can start meeting yourself
with a little more compassion.
From that place, you can start making a little bit better choices.
I think we are ready to get to the good stuff when Matt brings up the
narcissistic collapse, because this is one of those terms that is a lot of
places online, and I think you might experience a little confirmation bias
because if you haven't heard the concept.
Of narcissistic collapse, buckle up because your phone's probably
listening to you right now and you will find content that talks about
it or it's been there and you haven't necessarily been sure what it means.
Now, my professional opinion, I don't think it's ever quite explained.
, And I wanna say accurately, but really in a way that I would
like for it to be explained.
Yet I am also claiming to not be the narcissist, but I'm saying it needs
to be explained the way that I think it should because , the internet
loves a dramatic version of anything.
The mask falls off the villain is exposed, the fans go wild, and suddenly
the emotionally immature partner has a moment of cosmic clarity.
But if we strip away the TikTok mythology and look at what the research
and the clinical literature actually says, what we're really talking
about isn't justice or an awakening.
It's the moment when an emotionally immature person's
coping system gets overwhelmed.
What researchers have been trying to describe are decades under
terms like narcissistic injury or decompensation is basically this.
What happens when an emotionally immature person's coping system gets
overwhelmed, their defenses crack, not because they've grown, because the system
stopped working the way it used to.
The concept was originated by these researchers named Kohut and
Kornberg, which sounds like a great comedy team back in the forties.
, But it's this concept of a narcissistic injury.
It's essentially an ego wound.
It's what happens when admiration or control or validation
is all of a sudden removed.
So maybe you say, Hey, I'm setting a boundary.
If you are going to yell, then I'm gonna leave.
You are sounding calm and firm and grounded, and you've been
doing a lot of work to get there.
You actually follow through on the boundary.
So to that emotionally immature person, that boundary feels like humiliation
or definitely a loss of control.
And in response, they're gonna rage or collapse into despair.
And if that no longer works, if that button is gone from you, that's when you
can start to see this narcissistic injury.
And it's not because you did anything wrong, it's actually because
their fragile sense of superiority just took a real hard poke.
So for people who depend so heavily on denial and blame shifting and
grandiosity to keep their whole internal world from feeling too shaky.
When a stressor pushes past their threshold, like if they're criticized by
a boss or somebody's genuinely calling them out, or even just having a bad
day, or they don't feel like they have the control that they're used to, they
don't just get irritated or frustrated.
Their entire defensive structure can , start to collapse.
Maybe they spiral and rage for hours or shut down completely for days at a time.
And it's not about the event itself, it's about how fragile their
whole internal scaffolding was.
So for the emotionally immature shame isn't just uncomfortable, it's
intolerable, it feels annihilating.
When you say something as simple as that really hurt my feelings, you're
not just giving feedback to them.
You're potentially threatening the entire story.
They tell themselves about who they are, and this is some of the genesis,
stories of confabulation creating a new narrative, a new memory.
'cause they cannot be the person that has done what you're accusing them of.
That's why gaslighting comes so easily.
They will flip instantly to one extreme or the other.
Either they may withdraw so completely that you can't even
reach them or they explode.
Oh, so now I'm the monster.
Everything's my fault.
That's their shame talking.
It's definitely not insight.
So to get really, really clear, a narcissistic collab isn't
justice all of a sudden happening.
It's not revelation.
It's not an aha moment of accountability.
It's not even insight and it's really not the mask falling off forever.
That's the fantasy version that feels great at 2:00 AM
and gets a whole lot of clicks.
'cause people want that kind of certainty, but it doesn't really match.
Human psychology.
Change takes a tremendous amount of time.
And people who are in the position they're in, who lack that ability to
self confront, whose ego is so fragile, it has taken their entire life to build
up to the point where it is right now.
So a narcissistic collapse is a type of overload.
It's a defensive system that has been overloaded.
It's temporary dysregulation.
It's a moment where their fantasy of their self image flickers.
It doesn't evaporate though.
And most importantly, it's not the beginning of a transformation.
It's more of a, a beginning of a cycle that's gonna reset in some situations.
It can lead to the narcissistic discard, where now you are dead to them and
real life relationships collapse looks a lot less than a grand reckoning
and a lot more like them erupting into rage over something small.
And then they go silent for days and they threaten to leave and they accuse
you of abandoning them and they fall into maybe even a depression like state.
But refuse help going into that victim mentality.
Maybe they rewrite the last argument, so it's all your fault.
Or they try to pull you back in with guilt or fear or pity, or they
play the victim so convincingly that you start questioning your reality.
So collapse is not a turning point.
It is more of a destabilization, it's a flare up in a long term
pattern of emotional immaturity.
Unless the person chooses real work, remorse, accountability,
insight, self confrontation, learning about their discomfort, tolerance,
collapse doesn't lead anywhere new.
It just clears the stage for the next round of the same play.
It's like the huge big blowup, the brush fire that clears all
the ground so that they can grow this false sense of self again.
It's not a moment of awakening.
It's more like they hit a moment of being overwhelmed, and that's a
very different story than the one the internet tells you at 2:00 AM.
Here's the part that rarely gets talked about when people talk
about a narcissistic collapse.
A collapse does not happen because the narcissistic or extremely
emotionally immature person suddenly wakes up one day and decides to
self-reflect or self confront.
The collapse happens because you've changed.
Their narcissistic collapse happens after you've been doing your own
work long enough that the system can't run the way it used to.
And often that takes months or even sometimes years of learning how your
nervous system works, figuring out what's a you thing versus what's a them thing.
Pulling your sense of self out of their hands and taking it back into your own,
noticing the attack surfaces that you unknowingly offered time and time again.
And understanding things like projection and truly understanding and embracing
and trusting that I cannot give them that aha moment or the epiphany
that I have to stop doing that.
And it's the beginning point of differentiation.
And the truth is, most people don't reach this point, not because they're weak,
but they may not find the right tools.
They have no vocabulary to talk about what we're talking about right now.
And also because it's exhausting work to slowly pull yourself out of a one
down dynamic that you've been stuck in for years over and over again.
So that's why paradoxically, a narcissistic collapse is actually a
sign of your progress, not theirs.
They aren't collapsing because they've changed.
They're collapsing because you have.
You are no longer providing the same emotional fuel, the same emotional labor,
the same caretaking, the same reassurance, the same falling on the sword, the same
self-sacrifice over and over again.
The same reflexive repair, the same endless efforts to create
the relationship for both of you.
You've stopped feeding their supply or the system, and the system is starting
to struggle and it's starting to glitch and it's starting to break down.
Yeah.
This is where things like the concept of differentiation
and my go-to is David Arch's.
Four points of Balance becomes so critical.
'cause differentiation is the process of constructing a self that is strong
enough to stand there, steady, even when the other person is spiraling.
I haven't talked about this in a while.
It seemed like every podcast I did for, I swear, over a year or so, I brought up the
four points of balance of differentiation.
So let's go through this, because when somebody begins this work, it usually
starts with a quiet realization over time.
Almost like, wait, I cannot keep explaining myself and
understanding it's not working.
I can't keep earning safety by trying to make myself small and
trying to convince them to see me is actually not working at all.
I feel like I'm abandoning myself, betraying myself.
Those are the seeds of differentiation.
And differentiation is not about confrontation.
It's not about withdrawing love.
It's not about giving ultimatums or toughening up.
Differentiation is holding onto yourself, having a solid but flexible sense of self.
You start to become somebody who can have a different opinion, a different feeling,
a different desire without needing someone else to tell you that that's okay.
And without melting down, without apologizing for your own thoughts
and feelings, but not saying them in a defensive way, offering them up as
something, again, amuse that we can interact with and talk about without
trying to convince the other person that they have to understand it.
It would be so great if they did, but that's gonna take genuine curiosity.
And for them to get out of their own ego and to not think that they're right
and you're wrong, that there's even a right and wrong way about everything.
You stop performing emotional caretaking, and you stop editing yourself to
avoid their reaction, and you stop rushing in to fix their discomfort.
And that alone removes a huge amount of supply from the dynamic.
Now's.
Second point of balance is about quieting the, I need you to validate my
reality reflex that we all seem to have.
It's about learning how to have a quiet mind, a strong heart.
Learning how to self-soothe.
Learning how to regulate your own nervous system, and realizing I don't need their
approval to feel okay or to feel steady
. It would be great if they did, if they really wanted to understand and
know me, but I need to quit trying to make them see me and understand me.
I need to start seeing myself and what I'm doing.
I need to be able to understand my own self and behaviors.
You don't need their agreement to feel like what you're doing is okay.
This is where the collapse starts to rumble underneath the surface.
'cause the emotionally immature partner senses a shift that they can't articulate.
It's as if they're thinking almost out loud.
You're not as easy to control.
You're starting to do and think about things all on your own.
And I don't like it.
It makes me feel bad.
And I'll hear people say things like, Hey, something's different about you.
I don't like the way that you're doing this now.
They'll even weaponize the concept of differentiation.
It feels like you're being pretty selfish.
I don't like the way that feels.
But you're not as easily controlled.
You're not as emotionally pliable.
You're not giving them the reaction that they need to feel stable.
The third point of balance is about learning how to stay calm, how to calm
your reactions, and learning how to stay grounded in close relationships.
You don't have to go big or overboard and you don't play small.
You stop defending.
You stop taking the bait.
You pause your stillness feels to them like abandonment or defiance because
for so many years, most likely, your reactivity propped up their stability.
You would go too big and didn't like the way that you felt after you
got loud or angry, or you'd go the opposite direction and play small
and not feel good about that either.
And then Shana's fourth point of balance is this integrity of self, this meaningful
endurance, this understanding that growth is going to come from discomfort.
And you can sit through it, you can survive and the world still spins
when they collapse, you no longer hand your identity over to them.
You can hold your boundaries without being performative, and you can
take ownership for the things that you are doing in the relationship.
And you can do that and it's okay, and you're not gonna
project them onto your partner.
It's, I did the thing I did because I did it.
That's a me thing.
And you can even start taking effort to change
after you take ownership, not for agreeing to do the work that they need to do
themselves, this is the piece that makes the narcissistic collapse even possible.
'cause you're no longer reinforcing their fantasy self-image.
You stop participating in the illusion.
And when you stop participating, they may start to unravel, not because
they want to explore themselves, but because their system is destabilizing.
The attack surface concept describes how your vulnerability and your honesty
and your emotional openness become weapons in the hands of the emotionally
immature, narcissistic partner.
And here's again, another paradox.
Before you start doing this work, you'll hand out your attack surfaces like candy.
You'll explain.
You justify, you reveal your fears.
You try to repair their feelings.
You try to preemptively soothe them to them, that's free supply.
But when you begin to differentiate, you stop oversharing to prove your intentions.
You stop narrating your emotions for their comfort.
You stop managing their reactions.
You stop giving them the information they use now to control the
dynamic, either now or later.
So you actually start to shrink that attack surface without becoming
cold or withdrawn or defensive.
'cause now they have less to work with, what used to give them power.
Your vulnerability now starts to give them anxiety For somebody
emotionally immature or narcissistic.
Your growth equals their loss of control.
Your boundaries feel to them like abandon.
Your defining of yourself leads to their destabilization, and eventually
your calm equates to their panic.
And this doesn't cause change.
It causes that collapse.
And here's the painful part that I think a lot of people
don't realize until much later.
You weren't just trying to repair the dynamic.
You were unintentionally feeding it through projection by providing them
with the attack service, by handing them your buttons, you kept projecting
your emotional maturity onto them.
You kept projecting your growth mindset onto them.
You assumed that they wanted mutual understanding.
You kept assuming that they cared about your emotional experience
like you care about theirs.
You kept assuming that they would repair if they only understood the pain.
Like you've done the work to repair.
As soon as you've understood the pain in the relationship, you kept assuming
that they valued connection over control, and you kept assuming that they had
the same emotional range and ability to self confront that you learned.
So what did that lead you to do?
You explained harder or you tried softer, or you revealed more, or
you repaired faster, or you offered empathy that they couldn't reciprocate.
You fell on the sword.
You made it all about you.
Not in the narcissistic way, but in the way that says, I'll take
the responsibility for something even though I didn't do it.
You started making the emotional deposits for both of you,
and every time you did this, bless your heart.
Little did you know, you provided them with more of an attack surface.
You actually stabilized their nervous system at the cost of yours,
and that kept the system intact.
You prevented the collapse that would only come once you began to figure out
who you were once you began the change.
So that's why a narcissistic collapse isn't a sign of progress inside of them.
It's definitely a sign of progress inside of you, because projection
stops when differentiation begins.
Now, while all of this can finally lead to the collapse, it's because you're holding
the boundary without being defensive.
You've stopped over explaining, you've stopped emotionally babysitting them.
You've stopped trying to be understood before you were safe.
You stopped doing the emotional labor for both people and you stayed
calm rather than going reactive, you stopped giving them the mirror
that they need to feel superior.
You looked at your own behavior.
You stopped rescuing them from the consequences of their own behavior because
unfortunately, in so many relationships with the narcissist or the emotionally
immature people just learned to go along to get along, and they don't realize that
it's only feeding the supply or that ego.
And now the narcissist loses access to the control mechanisms
that kept them emotionally afloat.
And that's what the collapse actually is.
It's a temporary internal implosion caused by the loss of external regulation.
Not growth, not insight, not transformation.
It's a little crack in the mask.
It's a moment when the scaffolding that held them up falls down.
It's not the beginning of change.
It's the beginning of another cycle.
And I think this is one of the most important parts.
It's the beginning of your clarity.
Now, that could be a great place to wrap things up, and I hate to take away that
kind of momentum, but I wanna address one other thing that Matt said, and
I'm gonna stay up here on my soapbox.
Matt asked, is this just content creators feeding desperate
people what they want to hear?
That question hits on something I've been pondering and wrestling with for a very
long time now, not just as a therapist, but as a person who operates in a space
surrounded by coaches and influencers and motivational speakers, and people I
believe genuinely want to help, but don't necessarily always have the tools to
back up the promises that they're making.
And I'm not one who says I know everything, but I'm definitely not
going to try and step into a lane where I don't have the evidence-based
tools, or the knowledge or the time in the chair to know that I can genuinely
help somebody with the problems that I'm claiming I can help them with.
I think the best way I can explain my answer.
Is, uh, through Limerick and Song.
I really wish it was, but it's not.
But it's through.
Something I learned years ago when I was building my magnetic marriage
course with my good friend, Preston.
He's good at putting courses together, and we kept having the
same conversation and it was a me thing that I wasn't understanding.
He would ask me, okay, what do people actually feel though?
What makes them reach out to you?
Where are they hurting?
What's happening in their bodies long before they ever learn about
the tools that you're offering?
And I would just skip straight into the therapy, the psychology.
I would start describing my beloved four pillars of a connected
conversation or emotionally focused therapy or differentiation or
attachment dynamics or emotional maturity and communication science.
All the things that I, to this day do believe generally work.
And Preston would push back.
He would say, you're still trying to sell the vehicle.
We need to talk about the destination.
And I did not understand.
Over and over again.
But he wanted me to describe the lived reality that couples
experience, that moment.
Your chest tightens when you hear your partner's car pull in the
driveway or sitting in a restaurant with nothing to say or feeling like.
Like business partners who occasionally high five each other or inmates
in a facility, running a daycare together replaying the same argument
that you've had for 20 years.
The ache of being unheard, the heaviness of feeling like you're
walking on emotional eggshells.
I still didn't understand exactly what he was asking me for, but then
he showed me a commercial and it was a family on the beach laughing.
There was a luau, there was dancing and hula dancers and a sunset and
connection and warmth and belonging.
And then at the very end, in the corner, the name of the airline just pops up.
Not a single shot of the airplane.
No engines, no seats, no safety record, no mechanics, just the destination.
And he looked at me and he said, that is the destination you, Tony,
keep trying to sell an airplane.
But people buy the destination.
And in that moment, something clicked, not from a marketing perspective,
although I think I understood that better now, but from a human behavior
perspective, it made sense why people gravitate towards certain messages,
certain content creators at two in the morning, certain reels, certain promises.
It made sense why somebody online saying 2025 is the year
of the narcissistic collapse.
Why?
That's gonna get millions of views.
When I'm out here trying to, and I'm, I'm just saying this, lightheartedly save the
world and not always getting millions of views with good old evidence-based data.
It's because they're selling the destination.
It's hang on, justice is coming.
They will finally see what they've done.
They will ru the day.
One day everybody will know the truth.
And that is coming soon.
That's the emotional beach scene.
That's the sunset.
That's the relief people crave.
Here's why I have to hold my professional line, because for 20 years I've sat
in the actual therapist chair across from people that are really going
through it on a day-to-day basis, and they've been doing it for years.
I've watched real people in real pain with real histories and real trauma,
and I've watched marriages fall apart and some grow back together again, and
evolve into something even healthier and more beautiful and better.
And I've watched people heal slowly and painfully, and I've watched
people pretend to heal quickly and then fall back into the same pattern
because they bought this hope.
And with that experience, I can't bring myself to sell a destination
without telling you all about the vehicle that actually gets you there.
I want you to know that my airplane has amazing rivets
that hold the seats together.
'cause while I think coaches mean so well, and I truly, I believe most of
them do, and I've worked with coaches, I have a coaching certification myself.
I have worked with far too many clients who are promised transformation through
a feeling, through a three step formula, through a manifestation technique or a
mindset hack or a script that's supposed to change your partner's behavior.
And it can be so expensive because you're willing to spend anything on hope.
And sometimes those things help.
And sometimes they do offer hope and they offer language and
sometimes they offer community and they definitely offer feelings.
And hope is therapeutic.
I get why people want it.
But hope without tools can be maddening.
It can be frustrating.
Hope without grounding isn't necessarily healing.
Hope without a process, it can start to look a little bit
manipulative, even unintentionally.
I think that's where my frustration with the concepts around the narcissistic
collapse trend come in, not because people shouldn't have hope, not that
they shouldn't know the data, but I worry that the version people are
often selling is the emotional luau.
It's the fantasy of the mask falling off and justice arriving
neatly wrapped in a beautiful bow.
And I understand why the videos get traction when you're in pain and you
want relief when you're confused and you want clarity when you feel alone.
You want somebody to say, this is what's gonna happen next.
But that's really not how life works.
It's not how emotional immaturity plays out.
It's not how it looks when you are becoming more emotionally mature.
That's not how personality structures work.
And that's not even how change works.
And I understand why people sell the destination, because people buy feelings.
But I'm gonna sell the vehicle and it's gonna take us, a pretty long
time to get across country or wherever you're going because it's based on the
actual evidence-based processes that help you heal, regardless of whether
the other person changes or not.
And you're gonna go from a, I have no idea what I'm even doing to now.
I kind of know, but I'm really not sure what to do.
Or I'm starting to do it a little bit more than I did before.
And that can be a lengthy process, but eventually you're gonna get to a point
where you understand it and you're embodying it, and you're doing it more
than you used to, and then someday all of a sudden, it's just what you do.
I want to help people get to that point where this is just who they
are without trying to get them there on a plane that doesn't fly.
Transformation isn't something that you wait for in someone else.
It's something that you build inside yourself slowly.
Deliberately with tools, with support, with differentiation, with boundaries,
understanding your nervous system, figuring out your identity, your clarity,
your confidence coming back online.
You don't need a collapse in someone else's life to build your own.
And you don't need a trending concept to validate your reality.
And you don't need the illusion of a destination that you can't control.
You have a vehicle.
It's what you're using to listen to me right now.
And that's the only one that will take you truly where you want to go.
Before I wrap up, I'm gonna say something that probably is gonna make me sound
like the world's biggest hypocrite.
And honestly, I'll own it.
'cause that whole section I just shared, the part about selling
destination versus building the actual plane that will get you there.
It does make me think, it reminds me that, that explains more of why my.
Men's Emotional Architects Group has been to say it very delicately
and gently, incredibly delayed as in delayed for a very, very long time.
People have been reaching out for months, maybe even a year, asking,
when's the group starting again?
And I would respond if I even did respond with, it's getting close any minute now,
which looking back is exactly the kind of thing I would tell somebody to be
cautious of if they were in a relationship with me and the words I'm saying.
But here's the good news, and this time it's real.
The plane is basically completed and ready for takeoff.
It's built, the wings are on, the engines are attached, and I'm
finishing the final check so it doesn't fall apart over the Pacific.
If you've emailed me about joining my Men's Emotional Architects group, you'll
hear from me soon, and it wouldn't hurt if you haven't heard from me to reach out.
Maybe just one more time, but the group's gonna be incredible.
It's gonna be, weekly.
It's gonna be led by yours truly online.
You don't have to attend all the time.
There will be archives, there'll be a lot of information and a lot
of opportunities for you to ask questions and share experiences.
And it will be for the price per month, less than a session of therapy with me.
It has taken some time to put something together that I'm really excited
to share and that I know will help.
I didn't want to sell you the luau.
I wanted to build something that actually is gonna get you somewhere.
So it's coming and I'm excited and you can absolutely email me
to remind me that you want in.
Lemme bring this in for the landing and maybe my last airplane, pun today.
We covered a lot and I appreciate Matt sending me the email and that is
encouraging any of you to email me as well with your questions, your thoughts,
your experiences, because this really has helped open up the door to what
is behind the narcissistic collapse the hard work of differentiation,
projection, being aware of attack services, nervous system regulation, and
what actual transformation looks like.
And I think if there's one thread running through all this today, it's
this, you aren't actually powerless even if the relationship you're
in has left you feeling that way.
'cause your clarity, your growth, your boundaries, your nervous system settling,
those things matter and they're not small and you're not being selfish.
And these things aren't wasted just because somebody else
refuses to do their part.
In fact, your growth is what changes the entire dynamic, whether or
not they rise to meet you there.
And if you're sitting here thinking, I don't even know where
to begin, then begin where Matt began with curiosity and honesty,
with your own internal experience.
Begin with the smallest acts of self-care.
Begin with the tiniest steps of holding onto yourself.
Begin by asking your body, what have you been trying to tell me for so long?
You don't have to wait for somebody else's collapse to build your own awakening.
You don't need your partner's epiphany to have your own, and you're allowed
to outgrow the version of yourself who thought that love meant self-sacrifice.
And you're allowed today, right now, to take a step toward the life, the
stability, the grounded self that , hopefully started imagining and have
started feeling quietly right there in your chest and you're not behind.
And it's gonna take as long as it's gonna take.
And you are admittedly right where you need to be.
You're not broken, you're human.
You're waking up.
And waking up is the beginning of all the amazing things that come next.
I appreciate you joining me, and I will see you next time.
I'm waking up to narcissism.