How to Avoid Toxic Relationships | Bill Eddy & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | - What are some of the signs of a high conflict personality?

00:00:05.000 | Because in an ideal world, we avoid these people.

00:00:10.740 | And again, we're not trying to say that they're bad people.

00:00:12.740 | Some of them are bad people, some of them aren't.

00:00:14.860 | But since I'm not a clinical psychologist, you are,

00:00:18.180 | you can make the assessment certainly better than I can.

00:00:21.500 | What are some of the ways to avoid these circumstances

00:00:26.280 | besides the first year rule?

00:00:29.220 | And then let's talk about some ways to disentangle

00:00:32.820 | from these people based on their unique phenotypes.

00:00:37.420 | So is there a question or set of questions

00:00:41.140 | one should ask themselves when they are potentially

00:00:44.700 | dating someone, potentially becoming friends with somebody,

00:00:47.380 | potentially becoming coworkers with somebody, and so on?

00:00:50.860 | - Yeah, so what's interesting is often your gut feeling

00:00:53.820 | tells you something's up here.

00:00:55.620 | Like the person suddenly has a shocking opinion

00:00:58.360 | of somebody else, and they say, you know,

00:01:01.260 | that person's a total jerk, and yet you know that person,

00:01:05.060 | and they're not a total jerk.

00:01:06.300 | They suddenly, something's disproportionate.

00:01:09.220 | I think disproportionate emotions is often a trigger.

00:01:14.220 | I put in a lot of my books now what I call the web method,

00:01:20.160 | is pay attention to their words, your emotions,

00:01:25.220 | and their behavior.

00:01:27.060 | So starting with words, do they use a lot of blaming words?

00:01:31.320 | You know, it's all that person's fault.

00:01:33.740 | Do they use all or nothing words?

00:01:37.720 | They seem to see things through a narrow lens,

00:01:40.420 | that you know, there's all good, there's all bad.

00:01:43.140 | Unmanaged emotions, which they may or may not show,

00:01:47.360 | like I explained.

00:01:48.500 | Some people are good at hiding all that,

00:01:50.500 | even though it drives them inside.

00:01:53.120 | And the extreme behaviors, do they do things

00:01:55.540 | 90% of people would never do?

00:01:57.860 | And I'll give an example here.

00:02:02.420 | And this is, I won't say the city,

00:02:07.280 | but there was a mayor, there was someone who worked,

00:02:10.980 | who was a congressperson, and they decided to run for mayor

00:02:15.860 | in their city, instead of flying to go to Congress.

00:02:19.900 | But when they were flying to go to Congress back and forth,

00:02:23.940 | this is in California, I'll say that much.

00:02:26.260 | People can easily research this.

00:02:29.900 | So this person, flying back and forth,

00:02:32.860 | one day, one night, standing, you know,

00:02:35.700 | there was a line to get your bags at the airport

00:02:38.300 | after you got off the plane.

00:02:40.600 | And he was told to wait in line to get his bags.

00:02:44.700 | And he said, "Don't you know who I am?"

00:02:46.780 | And he pushed his way to the front of the line,

00:02:49.340 | and had an argument with the person behind the counter,

00:02:53.460 | said, "Don't you know who I am?

00:02:55.420 | "I want my bag right now."

00:02:57.780 | And she said, "You don't have it now,

00:03:00.340 | "you can't have it right now."

00:03:02.020 | And he pushed her and knocked her over.

00:03:04.780 | He shoved this airline worker behind the counter

00:03:07.940 | and knocked her over.

00:03:09.140 | - This was a mayor of a major--

00:03:10.540 | - Not yet, he wasn't mayor yet.

00:03:12.220 | He was a congressperson.

00:03:13.920 | Anyway, so that means he's--

00:03:16.300 | - Sorry, no knocking.

00:03:17.740 | I know some very decent congresspeople, but like, okay.

00:03:21.200 | Whoa in any case, right?

00:03:24.100 | This person could be any number of different professions.

00:03:27.140 | - Yes.

00:03:27.980 | - Yeah, this is antisocial behavior.

00:03:29.100 | - But this is a high profile person.

00:03:32.660 | So this is all over the news the next day.

00:03:36.020 | This is 20 years ago, maybe, 15 years ago,

00:03:40.780 | something like that.

00:03:42.060 | - Goodness.

00:03:43.000 | - Anyway, so it's in the newspaper the next day.

00:03:46.220 | And newspaper says, "Congressman so-and-so

00:03:49.860 | "gets into physical altercation with airline worker."

00:03:54.700 | Knocks her over.

00:03:55.700 | Half the people said, "That's terrible."

00:03:59.620 | And the other half the people said, "Wait, wait.

00:04:02.040 | "He was sleep deprived.

00:04:04.120 | "He was flying across country.

00:04:06.180 | "You have to understand that he was stressed."

00:04:10.460 | And here's where my web method comes in.

00:04:13.660 | 90% of people would not have done that

00:04:16.220 | even if they were sleep deprived.

00:04:18.380 | And I fly back and forth a lot.

00:04:20.660 | And I'm not, I don't do that.

00:04:23.380 | - I would like to think 99% of people wouldn't do that.

00:04:25.940 | - I think you're right, 99%.

00:04:27.580 | - To get physical with an airline person over a bag.

00:04:30.700 | The cutting to the front of the line is egregious.

00:04:33.420 | The shoving the airline person is like beyond the pale.

00:04:37.300 | - Yeah, exactly.

00:04:38.580 | So this is, so anyway, so he's running for mayor

00:04:42.300 | and I'm going, "This guy's a high conflict person.

00:04:45.380 | "If he gets elected, he's not gonna be a very good mayor.

00:04:50.500 | "He's gonna have a lot of trouble

00:04:52.020 | "with the people close to him."

00:04:54.860 | And so guess what happened?

00:04:56.740 | He gets elected.

00:04:58.020 | Within, I think it's eight months, he is,

00:05:03.660 | and this is before the Me Too movement got started,

00:05:06.900 | but people are reporting he's harassing women,

00:05:09.780 | sexually harassing women.

00:05:11.240 | Women come into his office to meet with him,

00:05:13.500 | professional, experienced, important,

00:05:16.180 | and he's like wanting to touch them a lot.

00:05:19.340 | Inappropriately, they don't wanna be touched.

00:05:22.060 | Anyway, so women start complaining about him.

00:05:28.760 | Word kinda gets out, yeah, this happened

00:05:30.700 | with a lot of different people,

00:05:32.080 | that he's not sexually assaulting them,

00:05:35.260 | but he's treating them badly.

00:05:37.900 | - So it cuts across domains.

00:05:39.900 | It's like in-- - Yes.

00:05:41.220 | - So it's not just in the office, it's there,

00:05:44.900 | but it's also at the airport.

00:05:47.020 | It's basically any time he's not getting what he wants,

00:05:49.860 | he throws a tantrum.

00:05:51.340 | - And that's the thing with personality disorders,

00:05:54.060 | is a narrower range of behavior

00:05:55.700 | that's repeated in a variety of settings.

00:05:58.220 | So he's fitting all of that.

00:06:00.960 | So which personality disorder, I'm not gonna diagnose him,

00:06:03.800 | but it narrows down to one or two.

00:06:06.620 | - So it's not context-dependent, it is--

00:06:09.740 | - Right.

00:06:10.700 | - It's pervasive.

00:06:12.180 | - Pervasive, and that word is in the diagnostic manual,

00:06:15.300 | that it's pervasive across, I think, several settings.

00:06:20.060 | I think that's the words, but let me just finish.

00:06:22.500 | - Yeah, please, please.

00:06:23.340 | - 'Cause the end of the story, (laughs)

00:06:25.820 | the end of the story is, he's also got committees

00:06:30.820 | and people that are supposed to accomplish things.

00:06:34.100 | He doesn't want them to think, he wants them to,

00:06:36.540 | he wants to do the thinking and tell them what to do.

00:06:38.980 | So he goes around alienating a lot of people.

00:06:42.540 | Within eight months, he's out of office,

00:06:45.540 | because enough people were upset.

00:06:48.500 | And the way he got out of office is,

00:06:50.860 | some of the heads of government told him,

00:06:55.460 | I think it was the city attorney or something,

00:06:57.900 | "If you quit now, we'll help you with your legal expenses,"

00:07:01.820 | 'cause he's starting to get sued for some of this stuff,

00:07:04.580 | suing the city, suing him,

00:07:06.520 | "We'll help you with your legal expenses if you quit now."

00:07:10.520 | And there was starting to be a petition movement for some,

00:07:15.280 | I don't know, the mechanics, like a special election

00:07:17.640 | or something to get rid of him.

00:07:19.480 | Anyway, within eight months, he was out of the office.

00:07:22.400 | And now you don't hear about him in that city.

00:07:24.760 | - It's a very interesting, literally high-profile,

00:07:28.600 | although still anonymous, based on this conversation, case.

00:07:32.760 | I wonder if on a more subtle or typical level,

00:07:37.760 | the following is informative or not.

00:07:40.680 | I'm not looking for a validation of the example

00:07:43.160 | I'm about to give, but I've been very surprised at times

00:07:48.160 | how a person who I'm with for the first time out on a meal

00:07:54.360 | will behave towards the wait staff.

00:07:58.920 | - Yes.

00:08:00.080 | - Not explicitly disparaging of them,

00:08:02.800 | but sometimes mildly disparaging of them.

00:08:05.280 | Or feeling as if the amount of liquid

00:08:10.160 | poured into their glass was somehow an indication

00:08:12.500 | of how the waiter felt about them or didn't feel about them.

00:08:15.720 | Like reading into these things

00:08:18.200 | where you're just thinking to yourself like,

00:08:19.300 | "Whoa, life must be really tough for you.

00:08:21.640 | Like who's paying attention to this stuff?"

00:08:23.800 | And so that's one that I've noticed in people.

00:08:29.120 | And it's proved informative.

00:08:31.440 | - It's really a useful thing to see.

00:08:33.320 | That's part of what you see, their behavior,

00:08:36.360 | and their behavior towards other people.

00:08:39.520 | This was a brilliant thing.

00:08:41.160 | I don't remember the name of the program,

00:08:43.440 | but there was a guy who was head of a company,

00:08:46.940 | and he used to, when he was interviewing people

00:08:50.960 | for high-level jobs, he pretended he was a taxi driver

00:08:54.920 | or something, would pick them up at the airport

00:08:57.760 | as the taxi driver and see how they treated him

00:09:01.680 | as the taxi driver.

00:09:02.960 | And then he gets in the interview room,

00:09:04.620 | and he's the guy interviewing them.

00:09:06.820 | And in some cases, people treated him really disrespectfully.

00:09:10.860 | And it's like, now I know this is not someone I want.

00:09:14.080 | - Clever.

00:09:14.920 | I made the decision to not work for somebody years ago

00:09:19.800 | when I was on a very different stage in my career

00:09:23.480 | based on how that person treated a janitor.

00:09:28.480 | And it was amazing because it was one

00:09:30.880 | very brief interaction.

00:09:32.920 | And it wasn't like this person yelled at the janitor.

00:09:35.980 | It was the dismissiveness.

00:09:37.840 | - Yeah.

00:09:38.720 | - And I remember it was this, your web approach.

00:09:40.840 | It was his, I guess I just revealed,

00:09:43.760 | it was his words towards the janitor.

00:09:45.980 | It was my emotional response was sort of like,

00:09:47.760 | I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.

00:09:49.800 | I was like, hey, that was...

00:09:52.000 | It just felt like a very,

00:09:53.960 | what I would call like the football play,

00:09:55.280 | unnecessary roughness.

00:09:56.660 | - Yes.

00:09:57.500 | - It was mild from the perspective of like,

00:09:59.920 | no one got physical or called anyone names,

00:10:02.120 | but I remember thinking like, oh, like that sucked.

00:10:05.240 | - Right.

00:10:06.080 | - And then their behavior was just to just go right back

00:10:08.460 | to what they were talking about.

00:10:10.200 | And I knew in that moment, I was really crestfallen

00:10:13.360 | because in that moment I knew, oh my goodness,

00:10:16.900 | I can't work for this person.

00:10:18.760 | - Yeah.

00:10:19.600 | - Like I just can't.

00:10:20.420 | And I made the decision not to.

00:10:21.320 | And actually their response to my deciding not to

00:10:24.420 | for a variety of other reasons too,

00:10:26.320 | confirmed everything that I suspected

00:10:28.600 | in that one little interaction.

00:10:30.240 | - Yes.

00:10:31.080 | - But it's interesting because we're trained

00:10:32.460 | to collect data rather carefully.

00:10:37.460 | You know, and we don't wanna make snap judgment.

00:10:41.040 | Somebody could truly be having a bad day,

00:10:42.880 | but in this case it was the right decision

00:10:45.080 | to not work for them.

00:10:45.920 | Thank goodness.

00:10:46.740 | I thank my lucky stars.

00:10:47.840 | Made some really bad decisions about people in my life.

00:10:50.060 | That was a really good decision.

00:10:51.540 | I never spent a day regretting it.

00:10:53.300 | And I went to work for someone else

00:10:54.300 | who was terrific instead.

00:10:55.640 | - Right.

00:10:56.480 | - So, but as you said, these things sometimes hit

00:10:59.080 | at a somatic level, as opposed to some sort of,

00:11:02.980 | wait, did, you know, some like very cerebral analytic thing.

00:11:08.380 | It kind of hits at a, what must be a very primitive circuit.

00:11:12.060 | I can't help the neuroscientist in me wants to say,

00:11:13.820 | like, it's gotta be something at the level of the body

00:11:17.020 | where we go, wait, that was messed up.

00:11:21.520 | - Yeah.

00:11:22.360 | - And you can't really point to a specific word.

00:11:24.460 | And then you start to question yourself.

00:11:25.980 | That's the problem.

00:11:26.820 | You wonder was, well, maybe their tone wasn't,

00:11:29.060 | maybe it's my own perception, but I don't know.

00:11:31.780 | Maybe the body doesn't lie.

00:11:33.960 | Maybe it knows.

00:11:35.340 | - I think the body is like a first responder

00:11:38.460 | and that we should pay attention to that.

00:11:40.820 | And especially with high conflict personalities,

00:11:44.220 | especially the con artists,

00:11:47.300 | which is part of antisocial personality,

00:11:50.220 | and the ones I've dealt with are very good at this,

00:11:53.480 | is their words are just right.

00:11:56.060 | And your brain is like soothed by them.

00:11:58.740 | You go, this person gets it and I'm totally comfortable.

00:12:02.180 | They're charming, all of that.

00:12:05.060 | And your gut goes, wait, they're out of sync.

00:12:07.900 | I have this cold feeling.

00:12:09.300 | Why do I have this cold feeling?

00:12:11.740 | And I think that they're aimed at your cerebral thinking

00:12:16.740 | and that your guts kind of gets it

00:12:22.300 | because they're in a way predatory,

00:12:24.420 | like antisocial tend to be predatory.

00:12:27.020 | - Those people have dead eyes.

00:12:28.560 | I've known a few.

00:12:29.860 | I've known a few men and women and their eyes are,

00:12:33.420 | I can only describe, and I'm a vision neuroscientist.

00:12:35.800 | That's like what my career has been.

00:12:38.060 | And those are two little pieces of brain right there.

00:12:39.780 | And there's something about the deadness.

00:12:42.180 | And I don't have a science to support what I'm about to say.

00:12:45.060 | There's something about the deadness in their eyes.

00:12:47.180 | Maybe their pupils don't change shape

00:12:49.220 | with levels of arousal the same way other people's do,

00:12:51.460 | 'cause we know that happens in healthy,

00:12:53.900 | people with an unhealthy autonomic nervous system,

00:12:55.900 | but there's something lacking.

00:12:57.900 | - Yeah.

00:12:58.740 | - And people make up all sorts of theories online.

00:13:01.660 | Like I'm not a big blinker.

00:13:03.580 | I don't blink.

00:13:04.420 | When I'm concentrating, blinks break up my flow.

00:13:06.840 | And this is actually a way I can remember things.

00:13:09.340 | People have these theories about blinking, non-blink.

00:13:11.340 | The research doesn't support any relationship

00:13:13.220 | between blink frequency and personality.

00:13:15.380 | They had this whole theory about Zuck too.

00:13:17.020 | Like he doesn't blink, therefore he's whatever, he's a robot.

00:13:20.320 | None of that holds up.

00:13:21.700 | What does hold up, however, is this mismatch between words

00:13:26.400 | and the affect that it creates in us.

00:13:29.220 | - Yeah.

00:13:30.060 | - It's sort of like it sounds right,

00:13:31.140 | but it doesn't feel right.

00:13:33.500 | I wish we understood more about this at the level of science.

00:13:36.020 | There are a lot of theories, not a lot of tools.

00:13:38.640 | - Someday, I think, yeah.

00:13:40.300 | - Yeah, the tools for measuring this stuff

00:13:42.380 | are getting better.

00:13:43.420 | I wanted to ask you about other ways of just knowing

00:13:49.340 | if you're interacting with a high conflict person

00:13:52.180 | when the cues are more subtle.

00:13:55.580 | Are there other things or examples of the web method

00:13:59.020 | that come to mind?

00:14:00.760 | - Well, for me, of course, dealing with court especially,

00:14:04.940 | there's a lot of stuff in writing.

00:14:07.140 | And so being able to look at what's written

00:14:10.260 | and a lot of blame words, the all or nothing words.

00:14:14.580 | She did this and she did that.

00:14:16.900 | And disparaging words, she's stupid or whatever.

00:14:20.120 | Or he's a bully, he's this and that.

00:14:23.420 | Which triggers for me, maybe he is,

00:14:26.100 | or maybe the person saying it is,

00:14:28.140 | but it heightens my attention.

00:14:30.880 | - Yeah, how do you disambiguate between projection

00:14:33.460 | and a real thing?

00:14:34.300 | Like online now?

00:14:35.780 | - I mean, one of the fastest ways

00:14:38.120 | to get a popular social media account

00:14:41.140 | is for somebody to give advice

00:14:44.140 | about how to avoid bad people.

00:14:46.740 | You know, name calling, gaslighting, narcissist,

00:14:49.460 | sociopath, psychopath, history on it.

00:14:52.340 | Like these are clinical terms

00:14:55.020 | that now the general public can leverages

00:14:58.340 | to like, you know, sort of amplify community.

00:15:01.940 | And then in part, I understand

00:15:03.820 | from talking to people on the tech side

00:15:05.060 | is that social media is social.

00:15:07.500 | - Right.

00:15:08.340 | - The accounts that grow fastest

00:15:09.160 | are the ones where you don't need much language

00:15:11.020 | to convey what you're trying to convey,

00:15:12.700 | like a sport or dance or an animal.

00:15:16.300 | And among the others that grow very quickly

00:15:20.340 | and therefore rewarding to people

00:15:22.020 | are ones where you're recruiting these negative advocates.

00:15:27.020 | - First of all, I wanna make sure

00:15:30.340 | that I get this point across.

00:15:31.740 | And that is, there's a lot of temptation

00:15:33.780 | to label people with like the mental disorders,

00:15:37.340 | the personality disorders.

00:15:39.460 | And it's absolutely essential that people don't do that.

00:15:43.060 | If you think somebody might be a narcissist

00:15:46.180 | or might have borderline personality or be antisocial,

00:15:49.260 | keep that to yourself and adapt how you work with them

00:15:53.500 | to be more effective or be more cautious, whatever.

00:15:56.900 | But the worst thing I think is people say,

00:15:59.020 | oh, and everyone agrees that person's a narcissist.

00:16:01.900 | So we kind of gang up on that person.

00:16:04.500 | That's not helpful.

00:16:05.540 | The goal is not rejecting people.

00:16:08.660 | The goal is adapting what you do

00:16:11.340 | to either manage the relationship,

00:16:13.580 | decide, okay, that's not someone I'm gonna get close to,

00:16:17.440 | but I can still work with them

00:16:20.380 | or have them as neighbors or whatever.

00:16:23.020 | So I wanna emphasize that 'cause I think you're right.

00:16:26.540 | There's a lot of that today.

00:16:28.820 | And people come to me with that concern.

00:16:30.860 | They say, Bill, you teach about personality disorders.

00:16:33.520 | Yeah, so people understand patterns of behavior

00:16:36.580 | and how to adapt your own behavior.

00:16:38.940 | I'm not teaching people to label other people.

00:16:42.020 | So that's real important.

00:16:43.760 | - Yeah, people go to school for many years

00:16:46.500 | and do 3,000 plus clinical hours

00:16:48.500 | to learn how to do that, to do that properly.

00:16:51.340 | It's like saying, it's like diagnosing anything, right?

00:16:54.740 | I mean, a dermatologist might be able to help diagnose

00:16:57.700 | a skin patch for potential cancer,

00:17:01.580 | but we're taught that we're not supposed

00:17:04.740 | to do that ourselves.

00:17:06.580 | - So we have to be cautious.

00:17:08.420 | But on the other hand, aware.

00:17:10.500 | And the more you're aware of patterns,

00:17:12.300 | like being aware of someone with an alcohol abuse issue

00:17:17.040 | is to go, okay, I'm not gonna be serving him alcohol

00:17:20.240 | with dinner, he's a great person,

00:17:22.060 | but I'm just gonna leave that out of the evening meal.

00:17:25.720 | Adapt to what we do rather than judging them.

00:17:28.860 | And I don't see people with personality disorders

00:17:31.220 | as lesser beings.

00:17:32.780 | I see them as having a different set of behaviors

00:17:36.780 | that they acquired pretty much in childhood.

00:17:38.980 | So I don't hold it against them.

00:17:41.260 | I may dislike their patterns of behavior,

00:17:44.060 | but I really don't hate people like that.

00:17:46.300 | I've been a therapist with clients like that.

00:17:49.780 | So I think our awareness needs to be there

00:17:53.340 | so we adapt how we work with people.

00:17:56.240 | But I think the gut feeling is so important.

00:18:01.240 | And as a therapist, I was trained,

00:18:05.240 | pay attention to your gut 'cause that's gonna help you

00:18:07.760 | with your clients.

00:18:08.860 | And that's why the web method.

00:18:11.040 | Their words, their behavior,

00:18:12.600 | but how I feel often gives me tips.

00:18:16.520 | (upbeat music)

00:18:19.100 | (upbeat music)

00:18:21.680 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

How to Avoid Toxic Relationships | Bill Eddy & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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