Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science

00:00:03.680 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:05.880 | I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology

00:00:12.280 | and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.760 | My guest today is Bill Eddy.

00:00:18.060 | Bill Eddy is a practicing lawyer, a professional mediator,

00:00:21.480 | a licensed therapist, and on the faculty

00:00:23.660 | of the School of Law at Pepperdine University.

00:00:26.280 | He is a world expert in conflict resolution.

00:00:29.280 | In particular, how to resolve conflicts

00:00:31.600 | with what are called high-conflict personalities.

00:00:34.600 | I should be very clear

00:00:35.440 | that these high-conflict personalities,

00:00:37.040 | as you'll learn today,

00:00:38.360 | are not in a category of so-called personality disorders.

00:00:41.820 | Now, it is the case

00:00:42.660 | that people with high-conflict personalities

00:00:45.180 | often also have borderline personality disorder,

00:00:48.400 | narcissistic personality disorder,

00:00:50.480 | or suffer from bipolar depression.

00:00:52.480 | However, as you'll soon learn,

00:00:54.320 | people who have this high-conflict personality type

00:00:57.240 | could fall into any one of those three different categories,

00:00:59.680 | any combination of them, or none of them at all.

00:01:03.200 | These high-conflict personalities

00:01:04.640 | essentially come in two flavors.

00:01:06.160 | Some are very outwardly combative.

00:01:07.760 | They like to argue.

00:01:08.760 | They like to generate conflict

00:01:10.120 | in a way that's very overt, very obvious.

00:01:13.120 | The others, which comprise about 50%

00:01:15.440 | of high-conflict personality types, are very passive.

00:01:18.640 | They play the victim, or they leverage other people,

00:01:21.240 | so-called negative advocates,

00:01:23.360 | in order to achieve their goal

00:01:25.160 | of creating a lot of conflict

00:01:27.160 | where they always appear as the victim.

00:01:29.800 | During today's discussion,

00:01:30.840 | you'll learn how to identify

00:01:32.080 | these high-conflict personality types

00:01:34.120 | based on some very simple questions

00:01:35.960 | that you can ask yourself about them.

00:01:37.800 | He also explains how to deal with these people

00:01:39.960 | in the workplace setting, in relationships,

00:01:41.920 | and importantly, of course,

00:01:43.280 | how to disengage from these people,

00:01:45.360 | not just in the short term, but permanently.

00:01:48.480 | Now, across today's discussion,

00:01:50.120 | you'll realize that Bill Eddy is very sensitive

00:01:52.800 | both to the suffering

00:01:54.480 | that high-conflict personalities cause for other people,

00:01:57.400 | and therefore, how to identify them,

00:01:59.240 | avoid them, and disengage from them,

00:02:01.120 | but he also makes it a point

00:02:02.480 | not to demonize these high-conflict personality types.

00:02:05.520 | Instead, as a mediator, as a lawyer, and as a therapist,

00:02:09.240 | he is really most interested

00:02:10.680 | in helping people resolve their conflicts with these people

00:02:13.640 | and find the best, most peaceful path forward

00:02:16.880 | for conflict resolution.

00:02:18.480 | Dr. Bill Eddy is the author of several important books

00:02:21.240 | related to this topic and related topics,

00:02:23.680 | such as "Five Types of People that Can Ruin Your Life."

00:02:26.320 | It's an excellent book, I've read it,

00:02:27.800 | and I highly recommend it for everyone.

00:02:30.320 | He's also written books about adult bullies,

00:02:32.880 | which are becoming increasingly common online

00:02:35.120 | and in real life,

00:02:36.420 | and about mediating conflict resolution and separations

00:02:39.680 | and things like divorce,

00:02:40.920 | and in family court situations

00:02:42.620 | where he spent a lot of his professional career as a lawyer.

00:02:45.320 | By the end of today's episode,

00:02:46.560 | you will have a lot of new practical tools

00:02:49.200 | for being able to identify

00:02:50.520 | these high-conflict personality types

00:02:52.400 | and learning how to navigate forward

00:02:54.360 | and, frankly, away from them in the best way possible.

00:02:58.220 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:03:01.200 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:03:03.920 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:03:06.200 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:03:08.040 | about science and science-related tools

00:03:10.100 | to the general public.

00:03:11.560 | In keeping with that theme,

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00:06:11.260 | And now for my discussion with Bill Eddy.

00:06:14.160 | Bill Eddy, welcome.

00:06:16.060 | - Thanks so much for having me.

00:06:17.400 | I'm excited to discuss this with you.

00:06:20.040 | - I've read your books.

00:06:21.360 | I learned about them from perhaps

00:06:24.640 | one of the smartest people I know.

00:06:26.640 | She said, "You should check out this book

00:06:29.320 | called 'Five Types of People That Can Ruin Your Life'."

00:06:33.320 | And I said, "Well, that's an impressive title."

00:06:36.000 | And I tore through the book, learned a ton.

00:06:40.340 | You have a number of other books.

00:06:41.680 | I mentioned them in my introduction.

00:06:43.960 | And I suppose it's appropriate to say

00:06:47.280 | that you are an expert in conflict, conflict resolution,

00:06:52.280 | and in particular,

00:06:54.520 | how to deal with people that are high conflict.

00:06:57.200 | So maybe you could just tell us

00:07:00.080 | what a high conflict person is,

00:07:01.760 | how common are these people,

00:07:03.760 | and how does this overlap

00:07:05.280 | with some of the more traditional

00:07:06.920 | quote-unquote diagnoses of personality disorders?

00:07:10.500 | - Yeah, it's fascinating,

00:07:11.700 | because I started out as a clinical social worker,

00:07:15.460 | working with children and families

00:07:17.340 | in psychiatric hospitals, outpatient clinics,

00:07:20.640 | but I really like conflict resolution.

00:07:23.260 | So I went to law school to get a law degree

00:07:26.460 | so I could do mediation, other conflict resolution,

00:07:30.660 | and I practiced family law.

00:07:33.700 | And when I started in family court,

00:07:37.400 | I noticed right away that a lot of the conflicts

00:07:40.240 | seem to be driven by people's personalities

00:07:43.480 | rather than the legal issue,

00:07:45.880 | because I was also doing mediation in my office.

00:07:48.780 | I go to court in the morning,

00:07:50.200 | do mediation in the afternoon, same exact issues.

00:07:54.000 | In the morning, people were stuck

00:07:55.840 | for two or three years.

00:07:57.960 | In the afternoon, two or three mediation sessions,

00:08:02.160 | shook hands, went separate ways.

00:08:04.900 | So in family court, a lot of people

00:08:07.340 | aren't familiar with this,

00:08:08.580 | but since the 1980s, there's been the use

00:08:12.140 | of the term high-conflict families.

00:08:15.600 | And family court lawyers, judges, mediators, therapists,

00:08:20.140 | identified high-conflict families

00:08:22.780 | as repeatedly coming to court to make decisions,

00:08:26.620 | as having a lot of hostility,

00:08:29.320 | of just seeming driven in one direction,

00:08:33.220 | unable to be flexible, and in many ways,

00:08:36.260 | unable to truly have empathy for their kids,

00:08:39.020 | so they'd fight over their kids.

00:08:41.380 | And so high-conflict families was a term,

00:08:44.940 | when I became a lawyer in 1993,

00:08:48.100 | I was like, wait a minute,

00:08:49.260 | these aren't high-conflict families.

00:08:51.620 | These have maybe one, maybe two people

00:08:54.760 | with high-conflict personalities,

00:08:57.260 | or traits of personality disorders,

00:08:59.700 | which I knew about since 1980,

00:09:02.540 | and working in hospitals and outpatient clinics.

00:09:05.620 | - Because you're also a clinical psychologist.

00:09:08.540 | - Clinical social worker.

00:09:09.540 | - Clinical social worker.

00:09:10.420 | - So I got a master's in social work in 1981,

00:09:14.300 | then I became, I got licensed to do therapy on my own.

00:09:18.200 | So I'm a licensed clinical social worker in California.

00:09:21.700 | I can diagnose disorders,

00:09:23.580 | I can do treatment without supervision.

00:09:26.620 | I went through that, and that's how I became licensed.

00:09:29.740 | So when I came into Family Corps, I go,

00:09:32.180 | this is the same patterns when I was working,

00:09:35.500 | say, with people in the psychiatric hospital,

00:09:38.500 | who had addictions, depression, all these problems,

00:09:43.500 | and my job as the hospital social worker

00:09:46.640 | was to help them with their outside problems,

00:09:48.900 | their family problems,

00:09:50.260 | so I did family counseling for the patients.

00:09:54.180 | With their job, maybe their employer wanted to fire them

00:09:56.820 | 'cause of their behavior,

00:09:58.020 | and I tried to help keep their job.

00:09:59.940 | Maybe they were getting evicted,

00:10:02.380 | their landlord couldn't stand their behavior,

00:10:05.040 | and I'd solve one problem, and I'd go,

00:10:07.980 | I've got you into marriage counseling,

00:10:09.820 | and your husband or wife's committed

00:10:12.340 | to working on the relationship,

00:10:15.040 | and I'd go, yay, I accomplished something.

00:10:17.540 | Next day, Bill, my landlord wants to kick me out.

00:10:20.560 | Okay, I'd convince their landlord

00:10:22.860 | to give them one more chance.

00:10:24.420 | Yay, Bill, my job wants to fire me.

00:10:28.660 | Can you help?

00:10:30.340 | What they have is a pattern of conflict behavior

00:10:33.540 | that doesn't get resolved,

00:10:35.460 | and that's the high-conflict families

00:10:37.820 | that I saw in Family Corps.

00:10:39.620 | So that's where that connection came from,

00:10:43.140 | which I would not have arrived at

00:10:44.620 | if I hadn't been a therapist and also a lawyer.

00:10:48.540 | - My understanding from reading your book

00:10:51.100 | is that this high-conflict personality phenotype

00:10:55.940 | is equally distributed between men and women.

00:10:58.740 | What is the percentage of people

00:11:00.620 | that have this high-conflict phenotype?

00:11:03.500 | And then maybe we can drill into a little bit

00:11:05.860 | of how that shows up.

00:11:07.140 | It's different forms of expression.

00:11:09.420 | - Yeah, well, let me say a little bit

00:11:11.380 | about the difference between high-conflict personalities

00:11:15.460 | and personality disorders,

00:11:18.060 | because we have a lot of research on personality disorders,

00:11:21.660 | including statistics, which I'll give you.

00:11:24.580 | We don't have a lot of research

00:11:26.460 | on high-conflict personalities.

00:11:28.980 | People have talked about it, like I said,

00:11:31.260 | since the 1980s in Family Corps,

00:11:34.060 | and my own observations with thousands of cases

00:11:39.420 | of high-conflict personalities

00:11:42.060 | is it's pretty much men and women.

00:11:44.100 | My law practice, I've represented pretty much 50/50

00:11:48.340 | men and women, mostly custody disputes,

00:11:51.740 | mothers and fathers, so I got a good impression.

00:11:55.540 | Personality disorders, there's a lot of research on,

00:11:59.580 | and I mention in the book some statistics,

00:12:02.860 | and they came from the personality disorder research.

00:12:06.660 | So what they found,

00:12:09.940 | they studied the 10 personality disorders.

00:12:12.300 | In the early 2000s, a big study,

00:12:14.620 | National Institutes of Health,

00:12:17.060 | the alcoholism subdivision of NIH,

00:12:21.060 | they wanted to see how prevalent

00:12:22.820 | personality disorders were with substance abuse,

00:12:26.500 | with domestic conflicts, with criminal behavior,

00:12:30.020 | and workplace conflicts.

00:12:32.580 | And so this study, they looked at all 10 personalities,

00:12:36.140 | came up with numbers for each.

00:12:38.100 | Five of them seemed prone to high-conflict behavior.

00:12:43.100 | So these five, I can give you statistics on,

00:12:47.380 | and I can give you breakdown male and female,

00:12:49.900 | all from 20 years ago, big study,

00:12:52.020 | 'cause it hasn't been repeated since.

00:12:54.780 | So basically cluster B,

00:12:58.020 | that's narcissistic,

00:13:02.140 | borderline, antisocial, histrionic,

00:13:06.420 | but we see a lot of paranoid in legal disputes.

00:13:10.540 | And some research says paranoid personality disorder

00:13:14.420 | is the most likely to sue their employer

00:13:17.700 | of the personality disorders.

00:13:20.140 | So that's gotten attention too.

00:13:22.420 | So here's some numbers.

00:13:24.660 | First of all, narcissistic personality disorder,

00:13:28.700 | they found was about 6% of adults in the United States.

00:13:33.700 | They found the statistics on that was 38% female

00:13:38.700 | and 62% male.

00:13:43.500 | So that's more heavily male.

00:13:45.940 | 20 years ago, could be different now

00:13:48.460 | 'cause of environmental influences.

00:13:50.980 | Borderline, also about 6%.

00:13:54.700 | This was 53% female, 47% male.

00:13:59.700 | Almost 50/50.

00:14:02.060 | And that shocked the mental health world

00:14:04.300 | 'cause we've always thought of borderline

00:14:05.940 | as a female disorder.

00:14:08.460 | But Marsha Lanahan, the big name in treatment for borderline

00:14:13.460 | says she agrees, she thinks that's true.

00:14:16.220 | And I think that's true as a family lawyer

00:14:19.420 | because a lot of the men that we see

00:14:22.260 | engaged in domestic violence

00:14:24.380 | seem to have the borderline personality pattern.

00:14:28.380 | And the domestic violence is much more male than female.

00:14:31.580 | Then antisocial, it's around 4%.

00:14:37.580 | And that's about 75% male, 25% female.

00:14:42.740 | Histrionic, it's about 2%.

00:14:48.180 | And they found this is about 50/50,

00:14:50.580 | which again surprised people

00:14:52.260 | 'cause you think drama, center of attention, all of that.

00:14:57.700 | But, and this may be very much environmental influence.

00:15:00.780 | Our culture today teaches, especially young men,

00:15:05.380 | to try to get attention.

00:15:07.460 | Ride your skateboard behind a car or jump off a building,

00:15:11.660 | do all these dramatic things to get attention.

00:15:14.340 | - Or social media.

00:15:15.460 | - And social media's really encouraged that.

00:15:19.140 | Everyone wants attention

00:15:21.100 | and now you kind of have to fight for it in our culture.

00:15:24.460 | And so men as well as women are getting out there

00:15:29.460 | often in dramatic ways.

00:15:31.580 | So it came out about 50/50.

00:15:34.260 | Paranoid, it's about 4%.

00:15:37.260 | Came out, I think it was 57 to 43%,

00:15:42.260 | somewhere right around that.

00:15:44.700 | A little more heavily female, but not all that far apart.

00:15:49.620 | Altogether, it's really roughly 50/50.

00:15:53.660 | - Very interesting.

00:15:54.580 | And how does this high-conflict personality

00:15:58.340 | cut through all these personality disorder phenotypes?

00:16:02.580 | Because, oh, and I should also ask,

00:16:06.260 | I could imagine that some people who are borderline,

00:16:10.060 | perhaps, are also histrionic.

00:16:11.940 | Is that possible to fall into multiple categories?

00:16:14.640 | - And the study actually broke down some of that.

00:16:19.780 | So in the research, they particularly,

00:16:22.680 | one that I remember is borderline and narcissist.

00:16:25.700 | And it came out around 38% overlap.

00:16:29.060 | So, and I teach--

00:16:30.660 | - People who are borderline also can often be narcissistic.

00:16:33.380 | - Have narcissistic personality disorder.

00:16:35.300 | - I see.

00:16:36.140 | - And so this is personality disorder overlap.

00:16:39.860 | Now there's a whole continuum here.

00:16:42.100 | So many people have traits but don't have a disorder.

00:16:46.620 | The current DSM says the total personality disorder

00:16:49.940 | is around 10%.

00:16:52.260 | Now, that's taking an average of studies

00:16:55.400 | from around the world.

00:16:56.900 | The study I quoted earlier in the US said 15%

00:17:02.780 | have a personality disorder.

00:17:04.520 | So in the US, we're seeing that's significant.

00:17:10.580 | And that's the one that said 38% overlap,

00:17:13.300 | borderlines, and narcissists.

00:17:15.980 | I think that it fits for me.

00:17:18.380 | Because when I teach lawyers, from my own experience,

00:17:22.300 | I can say you have a client that comes on like a narcissist,

00:17:25.740 | they're very self-centered and putting you down,

00:17:28.980 | saying they're superior, here's some tips to deal with them.

00:17:32.500 | But they also may have wide mood swings,

00:17:34.600 | which is more associated with borderline.

00:17:37.260 | So you need to butter up their ego, honestly,

00:17:41.580 | not praise them for something that's real, that they did.

00:17:45.700 | But also they really need empathy.

00:17:48.000 | They have wide mood swings,

00:17:49.460 | that's someone that needs a lot of empathy.

00:17:51.380 | Say, wow, I can see how upset you are,

00:17:53.740 | this is so important, and they calm down.

00:17:56.660 | So you have to use both sets of responses

00:18:00.540 | to deal with someone that has that combination.

00:18:04.020 | You mentioned borderline and histrionic.

00:18:06.380 | There's a lot of similarities.

00:18:07.860 | So we see overlap with that.

00:18:10.820 | But I've seen every combination.

00:18:13.560 | But what I don't know in family court

00:18:15.700 | is, is it the disorder or just traits?

00:18:18.980 | And the disorder doesn't matter to me.

00:18:21.060 | It's the pattern that matters,

00:18:23.280 | 'cause if I see this pattern, I know I should do that.

00:18:26.580 | That's the key.

00:18:27.620 | - I can imagine that in family court,

00:18:30.340 | it's especially complicated,

00:18:32.220 | given that some of these things, not all,

00:18:33.860 | but some of these have a genetic component,

00:18:36.180 | certainly a situational component.

00:18:37.740 | So you could potentially be dealing with

00:18:40.700 | trying to work out a situation

00:18:42.500 | for the benefit of children

00:18:44.200 | that have some of the same personality disorders

00:18:46.880 | as their parents.

00:18:47.960 | Could be really tricky.

00:18:49.920 | - Well, what's interesting,

00:18:51.040 | and it's very rewarding work when things can go well,

00:18:55.500 | when the lawyers get it, the judge gets it,

00:18:58.400 | everyone gets it, what's happening,

00:19:01.400 | they can make orders that fit the situation

00:19:04.040 | and help protect children from bad behavior

00:19:07.280 | and help get parents some help.

00:19:09.800 | So substance abuse is a bigger issue in family court

00:19:14.800 | than personality disorders, but almost neck and neck.

00:19:21.160 | We talk about substance abuse all the time openly,

00:19:24.240 | there's treatment, everyone recognizes the signs.

00:19:28.160 | We don't talk about personality disorders in our culture,

00:19:31.960 | and that's like flying under the radar.

00:19:34.480 | - So Ari, I'm just gonna pause you for a second there.

00:19:36.440 | I think it's such a key point

00:19:37.960 | in a very interesting paper that you sent me,

00:19:41.720 | which by the way, I'll provide a link to

00:19:43.180 | in our show note captions.

00:19:44.760 | It essentially kicks off by saying that

00:19:46.760 | the movement toward explaining to people what alcohol,

00:19:54.040 | I think they now call it alcohol use disorder or alcoholism

00:19:58.240 | was and is in the 1970s and '80s,

00:20:00.520 | was a crucial move forward for the judicial system.

00:20:05.400 | And I think nowadays people generally understand

00:20:09.800 | that addiction is not just a lack of willpower,

00:20:12.800 | that there are brain circuits that become hijacked

00:20:15.000 | by substances or behaviors that these brain circuits

00:20:18.040 | were designed to promote our adaptive evolution,

00:20:20.320 | but they can be hijacked by behaviors and substances

00:20:23.240 | that render people really just unable

00:20:26.200 | to control their addictive behavior.

00:20:28.760 | I think nowadays that that box is checked,

00:20:31.280 | and it's wonderful that the judicial system

00:20:33.120 | understands that, right?

00:20:34.680 | Because then it can work with that.

00:20:36.440 | I don't think that the general public

00:20:40.480 | has yet come to the full appreciation

00:20:43.460 | of these personality disorders

00:20:45.280 | and these high conflict personalities

00:20:47.440 | and how pervasive they are,

00:20:49.880 | probably because of their prevalence.

00:20:51.520 | It's just sort of all around us

00:20:53.080 | and in all sorts of interactions.

00:20:55.120 | And here's the question,

00:20:56.460 | high conflict interactions

00:21:00.760 | tend to be quote unquote dramatic.

00:21:02.960 | And there tends to be almost a reward

00:21:05.840 | for dramatic behavior, as you said, online,

00:21:08.000 | in politics, in the media,

00:21:09.880 | the more dramatic, the more salience,

00:21:11.600 | the more salience, the more people click,

00:21:13.360 | the more people watch.

00:21:14.920 | And then the algorithms are designed

00:21:16.480 | to look at like dwell time,

00:21:18.280 | which is nerd speak for how long people look at stuff.

00:21:20.360 | And so you could see how this stuff could be fed

00:21:22.640 | in the same way that for nearly 75 years

00:21:27.440 | leading up to the 1970s,

00:21:29.320 | alcohol use disorder was sort of fed by the culture.

00:21:31.900 | The other 5 p.m. happy hour.

00:21:34.160 | Coming up in science, I would go to scientific meetings

00:21:36.600 | and it was like, okay, five o'clock hits, let's all drink.

00:21:39.120 | And I always thought this is kind of crazy,

00:21:40.600 | especially given that there was also a lot of concern

00:21:42.800 | about the kinds of interactions

00:21:44.200 | that drinking can create in the work environment.

00:21:46.440 | - It leads to high conflict behavior.

00:21:47.920 | - Exactly, so anyway, I don't wanna riff too long on this,

00:21:50.440 | but first of all, this is just lauding

00:21:53.040 | the important work that you're doing.

00:21:54.360 | Second, how should we think about

00:21:56.960 | this high conflict personality phenotype?

00:21:59.600 | Should we be calling people out?

00:22:02.100 | Like, hey, that's a narcissist.

00:22:04.220 | Hey, that's a borderline histrionic person.

00:22:08.000 | Or is there a more, I guess,

00:22:11.900 | something that embraces a little bit more of the humanity

00:22:14.060 | and the real issue at hand?

00:22:15.540 | I think that's what you're trying to do.

00:22:17.020 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:22:18.580 | And you may have seen me shaking my head no

00:22:20.940 | and said, should we point this out to people?

00:22:23.240 | That's the last thing you wanna do.

00:22:25.180 | In fact, don't do that.

00:22:26.940 | And the reason why is personality disorders,

00:22:31.660 | oh, oh, let me just quickly distinguish

00:22:33.860 | between personality disorders, high conflict personalities.

00:22:37.060 | The difference, and there's a chart

00:22:38.940 | in the beginning of the book

00:22:40.100 | with two circles overlapping, a lot of overlap.

00:22:43.620 | But the main thing about personality disorders

00:22:46.060 | is they're stuck in a narrow range

00:22:48.300 | of interpersonal behavior.

00:22:50.320 | So some aren't high conflict people, some are.

00:22:53.140 | Thing about high conflict people

00:22:55.160 | is that they're preoccupied with blame,

00:22:57.880 | that blaming others is a big part of their life.

00:23:01.500 | So when you're dealing with a high conflict person

00:23:03.980 | who's blaming and has a personality disorder,

00:23:08.220 | you get a stuck pattern of behavior.

00:23:11.140 | You get high conflict personalities or high conflict people.

00:23:15.500 | So they're persistent in acting that way.

00:23:18.780 | That's the overlap with personality disorders

00:23:21.020 | is they don't reflect, they don't change,

00:23:23.360 | they just keep blame is everybody out there.

00:23:26.300 | So recognizing that difference and similarity.

00:23:31.300 | So about half of people I think with personality disorders,

00:23:35.300 | and this is just my estimate,

00:23:37.220 | have high conflict personalities and about half don't.

00:23:40.320 | I've worked with borderlines in the psych hospital,

00:23:42.860 | narcissists that don't blame other people,

00:23:47.000 | narcissists that are just self-centered,

00:23:49.820 | and borderlines who are more frustrated

00:23:52.060 | with themselves than anybody else.

00:23:54.940 | So that's an important distinction.

00:23:57.700 | - You beautifully distinguish

00:23:58.740 | between high conflict personalities

00:24:01.800 | and these personality disorders.

00:24:03.580 | And I just want to make sure everyone hears again

00:24:06.620 | that about half of people with personality disorders

00:24:09.580 | would fall into this high conflict personality.

00:24:11.380 | - In my estimation, I don't have research yet.

00:24:14.000 | - And the distinguishing feature seems to be

00:24:18.980 | that high conflict personalities are often

00:24:22.100 | or constantly casting blame on others

00:24:25.460 | for the difficulties of their life essentially.

00:24:27.780 | - And that's why they have conflicts.

00:24:29.380 | That's why, and they escalate

00:24:30.860 | instead of getting worked on and resolved.

00:24:33.580 | - So I can imagine that the high conflict person

00:24:36.660 | doesn't always appear as high conflict.

00:24:39.700 | In fact, this is something that you've alluded to many times

00:24:42.620 | already in this conversation and certainly in your book

00:24:45.260 | that sometimes these high conflict personalities

00:24:48.880 | come in kind of under the radar

00:24:50.860 | and that can be confusing to people

00:24:52.580 | or they can go undetected for a long time.

00:24:55.060 | - Yeah, so part of it goes with the specific personalities.

00:24:58.740 | So high conflict people with borderline personality traits

00:25:03.220 | or histrionic personality traits

00:25:05.660 | are often more openly dramatic.

00:25:08.240 | And so they might really shock you

00:25:11.580 | that suddenly they start yelling, screaming,

00:25:15.220 | throwing things just 'cause you're having

00:25:17.340 | an average conversation, very disproportionate.

00:25:20.780 | But some, and it tends to be more

00:25:23.020 | of the antisocial personalities,

00:25:25.140 | some narcissistic personalities

00:25:27.740 | can look really reasonable on the surface.

00:25:30.780 | And they've actually had a lifetime of experience

00:25:34.260 | at looking good, which kind of covers up

00:25:37.340 | all the stuff under the surface.

00:25:39.620 | And I think of a couple examples.

00:25:43.540 | So for example, and I deal sometimes

00:25:46.340 | with domestic violence cases.

00:25:47.980 | So let's say an abuser says, in court says,

00:25:52.260 | "Oh, well, I was helping her because she was so upset.

00:25:56.060 | "I took her keys away and I held her down on the bed

00:25:59.240 | "'cause I was afraid she would leave

00:26:00.820 | "and get into a car crash."

00:26:03.180 | Well, there may be rare occasions where that's true,

00:26:06.540 | but that's a common story

00:26:08.300 | that we get from domestic abusers.

00:26:12.260 | Or in court, I've seen this,

00:26:14.920 | where there'll be a very reasonable person

00:26:17.740 | kind of explaining the situation

00:26:20.740 | and their partner, more often a woman,

00:26:23.880 | is just emotional, is a mess, maybe even in tears.

00:26:28.380 | And people don't realize about 80% of divorces

00:26:32.140 | in court today, people represent themselves.

00:26:35.260 | And so there's these conversations

00:26:38.540 | and the judge is like, "Whoa, this guy's being

00:26:40.700 | "really reasonable and this woman's a mess.

00:26:43.380 | "I mean, I'm gonna go with what he's saying."

00:26:47.460 | And so a lot of stuff slips under the radar that way.

00:26:51.620 | But gender-wise, it could be the reverse.

00:26:53.940 | And a lot of relationships people get into,

00:26:56.940 | people make themselves look really good

00:26:59.860 | and then the negative stuff comes out

00:27:02.500 | weeks, months, maybe a year later.

00:27:05.620 | So that's why we say wait a year

00:27:07.700 | until you decide to commit.

00:27:10.440 | Because nowadays, who knows, you may have someone

00:27:13.060 | that really is good at covering their bad behavior.

00:27:16.980 | - Yeah, let's hover on that one particular point,

00:27:19.040 | because this is perhaps one of the most important

00:27:21.220 | takeaways from your work.

00:27:23.220 | Could you just spell out this first year principle?

00:27:26.740 | And perhaps it's useful for us to also acknowledge

00:27:31.740 | that yes, there are a great many truly great stories

00:27:36.260 | about people who met one weekend,

00:27:39.580 | two weeks later got married,

00:27:41.140 | and then we're hearing the story 50 years later

00:27:43.060 | when they've got grandkids and great-grandkids,

00:27:45.300 | they thrived.

00:27:46.420 | Or people met, got engaged three months later,

00:27:49.960 | or in some cases got pregnant three months later,

00:27:53.480 | and they have this wonderful marriage

00:27:55.580 | and family story to tell.

00:27:56.860 | We hear these stories

00:27:57.700 | and they're really wonderful stories, right?

00:27:59.500 | I mean, they sort of affirm your belief in humanity

00:28:03.420 | when you hear those stories.

00:28:05.200 | And they are powerful.

00:28:07.760 | But in discussing a little bit of this with you offline,

00:28:12.060 | you probably have witnessed more cases where people rushed

00:28:16.200 | and that rushing to commit or to create

00:28:21.200 | led to more problems than it did good.

00:28:24.240 | - Yes, and that's many, many of the high conflict divorces

00:28:28.720 | that I've worked on as a lawyer,

00:28:31.080 | and before that as a therapist,

00:28:32.920 | and sometimes as a mediator,

00:28:35.520 | are, in my mind, kind of the bad luck stories.

00:28:39.720 | Got a decent person, usually my client, of course,

00:28:43.360 | but something happened, they got together too fast,

00:28:47.600 | and then all this stuff came out.

00:28:50.240 | And I really believe in today's world

00:28:52.640 | that it is a matter of luck.

00:28:55.640 | And that's why you should take a year to find out,

00:28:58.680 | am I, did I draw the short straw in this relationship

00:29:02.360 | 'cause I got this perfect looking person?

00:29:04.880 | Great record, all these good things.

00:29:09.040 | But close relationships is where personality disorders

00:29:13.680 | come out, interpersonal difficulty,

00:29:16.360 | and the high conflict behaviors, mostly close relationships.

00:29:20.800 | So they might, everyone might like them at work,

00:29:23.740 | but when you're home alone with them,

00:29:25.700 | they could be really terrible, yelling, hitting,

00:29:29.160 | doing all of this stuff.

00:29:31.100 | So that's why we say wait a year.

00:29:33.880 | I've had a lot of cases where people tell me,

00:29:36.920 | we just fell in love, it was beautiful,

00:29:40.120 | and everything was wonderful for about six months.

00:29:43.360 | And then when I committed to get married,

00:29:46.320 | all this stuff started showing up.

00:29:48.600 | But I got married anyway 'cause I figured,

00:29:50.760 | well, time and love will heal everything, only it didn't.

00:29:55.080 | So in today's world, there's a higher risk

00:29:59.400 | of getting a high conflict relationship, I must say.

00:30:03.360 | And the description you gave is what people often tell me.

00:30:06.480 | They say, my grandparents got married a week after they met

00:30:10.620 | and they just celebrated their 60th anniversary,

00:30:13.580 | they're still in love, everything's wonderful.

00:30:16.380 | Your grandparents tended to know who they were marrying.

00:30:20.620 | In today's world, not only don't you know,

00:30:23.260 | you don't have a history, but high conflict people

00:30:26.120 | have learned to cover up the full range of who they are.

00:30:30.100 | And they're not bad people,

00:30:31.660 | and that's something I wanna emphasize.

00:30:33.780 | They just have a different personality,

00:30:36.060 | and they may have been born this way,

00:30:38.460 | but they don't come with markings.

00:30:41.940 | They don't come with the music like of Jaws, doo-doo-doo-doo.

00:30:45.940 | They look good, and anybody, I think,

00:30:48.740 | is at risk of falling into a relationship like this.

00:30:51.940 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:30:58.360 | that if I could take just one supplement,

00:31:00.120 | that supplement would be AG1.

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00:32:05.020 | - I definitely wanna come back to this point that you made

00:32:08.420 | that you're not demonizing these people.

00:32:11.900 | You're talking about how to behave with them

00:32:15.100 | or how to not behave with them in some cases

00:32:18.540 | in order to try and create

00:32:22.420 | the smoothest possible interactions.

00:32:24.140 | In some cases, no interaction.

00:32:26.220 | But if we could hover still a bit more

00:32:28.900 | on this first-year idea.

00:32:30.900 | My understanding is that no getting engaged,

00:32:35.700 | or for that matter, married,

00:32:37.060 | no conceiving children,

00:32:40.940 | and no moving in together in year one.

00:32:44.500 | Are those the critical?

00:32:45.980 | - Except for the last one,

00:32:47.580 | is it's really don't commit like getting married

00:32:51.500 | within the first year.

00:32:52.960 | Sometimes moving in together

00:32:55.260 | is a good way to find out

00:32:56.740 | what it's like up close with this person.

00:32:58.860 | - Yeah, you learn a lot by living with somebody.

00:33:00.740 | - That's right, that's right.

00:33:01.940 | And personality disorders,

00:33:03.740 | part of the definition is interpersonal dysfunction.

00:33:07.260 | And that's close, that's close relationships.

00:33:10.020 | So if you haven't had that close relationship,

00:33:12.820 | you don't see what happens when you leave your socks out

00:33:16.680 | or the caps off the toothpaste,

00:33:18.500 | and some little thing is some huge storm.

00:33:21.940 | - Or when somebody's sleep-deprived.

00:33:23.540 | I always say you learn a lot about somebody

00:33:25.420 | after a bad night's sleep.

00:33:27.220 | You end them, right?

00:33:28.820 | - Right.

00:33:29.700 | But the key is patterns of behavior.

00:33:32.020 | So one thing I wanna say is,

00:33:34.420 | everybody gets angry sometimes, that's fine.

00:33:37.540 | Everybody yells sometimes.

00:33:39.640 | Everybody criticizes sometimes.

00:33:43.060 | But if they have a pattern,

00:33:44.500 | like their life pattern of relationship

00:33:47.120 | is to yell and scream and criticize and all that,

00:33:50.840 | whoa, this pattern is probably gonna keep going.

00:33:55.120 | And as I mentioned earlier, I believe,

00:33:57.360 | with personality disorders,

00:33:58.780 | it's a narrower pattern of behavior.

00:34:01.640 | So it's more pattern-driven in several different settings,

00:34:06.640 | family, maybe at work when it's closed,

00:34:09.960 | maybe in the community when it's closed.

00:34:12.600 | So these are recognizable patterns,

00:34:15.620 | as recognizable as alcoholism and addiction

00:34:19.740 | once people learn.

00:34:21.620 | So that's the key.

00:34:22.620 | Give yourself some time,

00:34:23.780 | see if this stuff comes to the surface.

00:34:26.080 | - I think you're raising a really interesting point,

00:34:29.080 | which is that although nowadays we have more information

00:34:32.260 | about people available to us

00:34:34.300 | by way of the internet and social media,

00:34:37.220 | you made the comparison with our grandparents' era.

00:34:40.660 | I'm 49 years old, so my grandparents...

00:34:43.520 | Actually, my grandparents knew each other

00:34:45.200 | from the time they were like in the eighth grade.

00:34:48.120 | They eloped when they turned 18, boom,

00:34:51.800 | went and got married, I think to the dismay of one side

00:34:55.080 | or the other side of parents,

00:34:55.920 | but then were married more than 50 years.

00:34:58.620 | And grandkids, obviously, I'm one of them, et cetera.

00:35:01.440 | And so you have these stories

00:35:03.000 | and we love these kinds of stories.

00:35:05.920 | But as you point out, they knew each other very, very well

00:35:09.880 | and had for a long time.

00:35:11.440 | Nowadays, one can quote, unquote, do their research,

00:35:15.240 | go online and look for things.

00:35:16.880 | But would you argue that that's not complete information?

00:35:20.840 | - Right, I think it can be helpful.

00:35:22.720 | I tell people, Google your partner and find out

00:35:27.000 | if there's some history there that may impact you.

00:35:30.060 | But don't believe that's sufficient.

00:35:32.680 | What I say that you really wanna talk to

00:35:35.220 | is relatives and friends of this person.

00:35:37.760 | And what you really wanna do is see them in action

00:35:41.240 | with their relatives and friends.

00:35:43.040 | - Relatives and friends.

00:35:44.120 | - Yes, 'cause that's close relationships.

00:35:46.160 | That's the key.

00:35:47.040 | This is all about close relationships.

00:35:49.920 | And that's what catches people by surprise.

00:35:52.160 | They say, this person looks good at work.

00:35:54.480 | Some people have worked together for 10 years

00:35:58.340 | and maybe they were in other relationships

00:36:01.260 | and they both got divorced, commiserated with each other

00:36:04.600 | and they get together.

00:36:05.940 | And it's like, we've known each other for 10 years.

00:36:08.720 | We're gonna have a great relationship.

00:36:11.240 | And they find out this is like a stranger almost

00:36:14.480 | because it's a close relationship now.

00:36:17.240 | And that's the difference.

00:36:18.520 | How people behave in a close relationship

00:36:21.640 | often triggers like personality disorder stuff,

00:36:25.480 | fear of abandonment, fear of looking inferior,

00:36:29.600 | fear of being dominated, fear of not getting

00:36:33.240 | enough attention.

00:36:34.200 | The personality disorders seem to have excessive fears

00:36:37.600 | in these areas.

00:36:38.900 | - Is it fair to say that if somebody has a lot

00:36:42.000 | of stable friendships over long periods of time,

00:36:46.400 | that that's a good indication

00:36:48.620 | that they can maintain close relationships?

00:36:51.680 | But it seems to me you'd also wanna know like,

00:36:53.540 | what is a close friend to that person?

00:36:55.100 | Do they actually spend time with them?

00:36:57.000 | And likewise with coworkers.

00:37:00.480 | Because some work environments that I've been in

00:37:03.020 | are necessarily very non-personal.

00:37:06.620 | You don't share much, right?

00:37:08.140 | Whereas other environments,

00:37:10.420 | like I know the partners of everyone I work with now

00:37:13.820 | at the podcast, that wasn't true for my academic colleagues.

00:37:16.980 | I knew some of my academic colleagues' families,

00:37:19.180 | I would have dinner with them, et cetera,

00:37:21.220 | but some of them less so.

00:37:22.820 | So context matters a lot, right?

00:37:24.820 | - Yes, and I'd say, you mentioned the word stability,

00:37:28.420 | and that's really a key.

00:37:30.220 | So if they have close friends they've had for 10, 20,

00:37:33.620 | 30 years, that's a really good sign.

00:37:36.280 | Bad signs are, I don't want you talking to my family,

00:37:41.580 | they're evil people, they'll say terrible things about me,

00:37:45.020 | you can't trust them, they'll end up, they'll turn on you,

00:37:48.740 | they'll hate you, all this stuff.

00:37:50.380 | So you can't even ever talk to my,

00:37:52.300 | I can't even let you know who my family is

00:37:54.720 | and what their emails and phone numbers are.

00:37:57.980 | - Oh, goodness.

00:37:58.820 | - That's a warning sign.

00:37:59.700 | - Yeah, definite warning sign.

00:38:01.740 | Because everyone has conflict with family members

00:38:03.700 | at some level, but you would hope that one

00:38:06.260 | would feel comfortable allowing you

00:38:09.220 | to interact with their family.

00:38:10.740 | - Yeah, and if your family's really difficult,

00:38:14.040 | introduce your partner to your family,

00:38:15.980 | let them see, this is a difficult family

00:38:18.500 | and this is why I had to distance from them.

00:38:20.560 | 'Cause a lot of people, to be healthy,

00:38:22.580 | do have to get some more distance.

00:38:25.060 | But it's the secretiveness, it's the,

00:38:28.720 | just secrets in general are not a good thing

00:38:31.640 | for relationships, that's the biggest piece

00:38:36.180 | that's missing in a way compared to 50 years ago

00:38:39.780 | when people knew, it was hard to have family secrets.

00:38:44.100 | 50 years ago, now, even though people may be

00:38:46.780 | all over the internet, you might really know their secrets.

00:38:50.980 | And that's what you need to find out.

00:38:54.940 | - What about advocates?

00:38:57.580 | So, I'm familiar with some high-conflict individuals.

00:39:02.580 | Some are more of the combative type,

00:39:05.500 | others are more of the kind of, what did you call it,

00:39:08.540 | sort of a quiet, manipulative, victim-playing type.

00:39:11.780 | And both seem to be pretty good at generating advocates.

00:39:16.780 | I guess you call these negative advocates,

00:39:20.260 | people that will fight for them.

00:39:22.280 | By the way, this is all sounding a lot like modern politics.

00:39:25.220 | - Yes.

00:39:26.420 | - And maybe we'll get into that a little bit

00:39:29.340 | because it is an important reflection

00:39:31.060 | on what we're talking about.

00:39:32.420 | But what about these negative advocates?

00:39:34.660 | If somebody has a lot of friends or advocates

00:39:39.460 | that they are kind of like on their side against,

00:39:42.540 | that are also in a blame mode.

00:39:44.380 | - Yes.

00:39:45.300 | - Is that a red flag?

00:39:46.380 | - Yes.

00:39:47.220 | What's interesting, and I'd like to someday

00:39:51.060 | learn more of the neuroscience behind this,

00:39:53.980 | but high-conflict people have heightened emotions.

00:39:57.360 | The cluster B personality disorders

00:40:00.180 | are known as dramatic, emotional, and erratic.

00:40:04.880 | That's the DSM-5TR says that,

00:40:08.340 | the manual for mental health professionals.

00:40:11.200 | And so, their heightened emotions are contagious.

00:40:16.140 | And in general, what I've learned about this work a lot

00:40:20.180 | is emotions are contagious

00:40:21.820 | and high-conflict emotions are highly contagious.

00:40:25.620 | So what happens, and I see this so much as a lawyer

00:40:29.380 | and with other lawyers, and with therapists,

00:40:33.060 | is the high-conflict person comes into your office

00:40:37.060 | and says, "I've been terribly treated by,"

00:40:40.780 | let's say my ex, man or woman, 'cause it happens to both,

00:40:45.100 | "been terribly treated and you've got to save me.

00:40:48.260 | "You've got to protect me.

00:40:49.660 | "You've got to win.

00:40:51.020 | "You've got to," sometimes they say,

00:40:53.440 | "You have to destroy the other party."

00:40:56.140 | That's always a warning sign

00:40:57.540 | when their goal is to destroy the other party.

00:41:00.020 | It's not a good sign.

00:41:01.800 | But they're so emotional, you say,

00:41:04.620 | "My goodness, this person's been through so much.

00:41:07.900 | "Now I have the emotions."

00:41:10.420 | And what I teach in my seminars is,

00:41:13.100 | I understand it has a lot to do with the amygdala,

00:41:16.100 | that the amygdala catches the intense fear or tense anger,

00:41:21.060 | that those are heightened.

00:41:22.900 | And so now mine's going,

00:41:24.940 | "Oh, Billy, you've got to do something."

00:41:26.860 | I'm like, my body wants me to take action.

00:41:30.900 | And I want to save this person

00:41:32.980 | from their evil co-parent, for example.

00:41:37.340 | And so what we see with negative advocates

00:41:41.060 | is they're emotionally hooked, but uninformed.

00:41:45.460 | They don't really know what's going on.

00:41:48.260 | And I'll give you an example.

00:41:49.860 | A court case with a high conflict person

00:41:53.860 | brought their whole family.

00:41:56.940 | And I had a case with false allegations, terrible allegations.

00:42:01.020 | My client happened to be the father.

00:42:03.740 | The mother was making false allegations

00:42:06.560 | of child sexual abuse.

00:42:07.940 | And I've had all types of true cases, false cases.

00:42:11.820 | So this is a real problem, a real issue.

00:42:15.340 | But there also were false allegations.

00:42:17.300 | In this case, that's what was happening.

00:42:20.020 | So the mother brings her whole family.

00:42:24.060 | And the judge realizes what's going on in the case

00:42:28.740 | 'cause of the evidence presented

00:42:30.340 | and sanctions the mother for knowingly false allegations.

00:42:34.860 | - What does that equate to in the legal system?

00:42:37.260 | - So my client, the father,

00:42:38.860 | spent about $40,000 getting a psychological evaluation

00:42:44.860 | having a trial, doing all of this, attorney's fees.

00:42:49.060 | And so the court made her pay $10,000

00:42:53.140 | of his attorney's fees and costs.

00:42:55.420 | So that's what the sanction is.

00:42:57.460 | And there's a code section

00:42:58.660 | that said knowingly false allegations of child abuse

00:43:02.860 | are a basis to make one party pay the other party's fees.

00:43:07.380 | So she's ordered, she never paid it, by the way.

00:43:10.360 | And she owned no property.

00:43:11.720 | We weren't able to get it 'cause she had property

00:43:13.900 | in other people's names.

00:43:15.980 | But the idea was that she brought her whole family there.

00:43:20.980 | She brought her mother, mother's boyfriend.

00:43:23.220 | She brought her roommate who was a psychology grad student

00:43:27.660 | who was like encouraging her,

00:43:29.300 | "Oh, your daughter's being abused.

00:43:31.420 | "You've gotta do something."

00:43:33.360 | These were all negative advocates.

00:43:35.620 | And when the judge made her ruling

00:43:37.700 | and spelled out the information, that was very clear.

00:43:41.300 | I mean, we caught the mother lying.

00:43:44.020 | She persuaded other people to lie for her.

00:43:46.580 | We caught them in lie.

00:43:47.780 | So it was a really surprisingly open case.

00:43:51.920 | And the family started yelling at the judge.

00:43:56.820 | They said, "This is a crime and this is a shame."

00:44:00.420 | And blah, blah, blah.

00:44:01.300 | The judge said, "You take yourselves

00:44:03.000 | "out of here immediately

00:44:04.260 | "or I will have the bailiffs take you out."

00:44:06.900 | And that they stood up and laughed and shouted,

00:44:09.100 | "This is an abomination," or something like that.

00:44:12.620 | These were the negative advocates.

00:44:14.740 | They didn't know what the full picture was.

00:44:17.420 | They believed their family member who was a skilled liar.

00:44:22.420 | I believe, and this is very interesting,

00:44:25.180 | I got to talk to her therapist, a therapist she had.

00:44:28.420 | I was released to talk to her.

00:44:31.020 | And the therapist, it was in the open,

00:44:33.220 | was she has borderline personality disorder.

00:44:36.200 | And that was an open thing.

00:44:38.940 | And the therapist said, "And there's something else."

00:44:43.940 | And I said, "Antisocial personality disorder?"

00:44:48.260 | And she said, "I can't say,

00:44:50.820 | "but I wouldn't disagree with you."

00:44:53.540 | - Which is effectively a yes.

00:44:54.700 | - Yeah, and with antisocial,

00:44:56.700 | that's where you get a lot of lying and stuff like that.

00:44:59.780 | It's a rare case,

00:45:01.020 | but since I have the social work background

00:45:03.220 | and I've had many true cases of child sexual abuse,

00:45:06.300 | especially as a therapist, I can see the difference,

00:45:10.140 | whereas a lot of lawyers don't know what to look for.

00:45:13.660 | But this was an exceptional case,

00:45:15.820 | antisocial and borderline personality disorder.

00:45:19.020 | She had a lot of traits.

00:45:21.100 | And at first, the judge was very critical

00:45:24.620 | of my client and us, and he had supervised contact.

00:45:29.340 | But the supervisor said, this is fascinating,

00:45:32.440 | "When the child would be exchanged,

00:45:35.700 | "the girl would walk tentatively towards the father."

00:45:40.700 | The mother dropped her and left.

00:45:42.540 | Supervisor brought her to the father.

00:45:45.260 | She was kind of tentative.

00:45:47.100 | She'd see the father, and she'd look.

00:45:49.480 | The mother's out of sight.

00:45:50.720 | She'd jump on him, laugh, and have a wonderful time.

00:45:54.540 | - I do have one question.

00:45:57.100 | It's not a litmus test question,

00:45:59.540 | but do you recall from the particular case

00:46:03.440 | you were just describing,

00:46:05.180 | whether the relationship had started very quickly?

00:46:08.900 | Had they moved in together quickly?

00:46:11.460 | Decide, excuse me, had they decided

00:46:13.060 | to have children together quickly, married quickly?

00:46:15.340 | In other words, was your client oblivious

00:46:20.340 | because of the rate at which he were moving?

00:46:23.280 | And the analogy that comes to mind is,

00:46:25.340 | if you're moving very fast, it's hard to read the road signs.

00:46:28.820 | - I think he did.

00:46:30.220 | And what's interesting is they got together

00:46:32.660 | when they were quite young.

00:46:34.120 | I think maybe she was 18, he was 20, something like that.

00:46:37.860 | - That's pretty young by today's standards.

00:46:39.820 | - And so excitement, new, all of that.

00:46:43.780 | I'm pretty sure they did.

00:46:45.540 | And what's interesting is they had gotten divorced.

00:46:50.540 | The issue I described was an after-divorce custody issue.

00:46:55.560 | But they had gotten divorced maybe four or five years

00:46:59.220 | into their marriage, and she assaulted him.

00:47:02.820 | And he had the scars and all of this.

00:47:05.380 | So he had actually custody of this girl

00:47:08.620 | who was eight years old when the story

00:47:11.020 | I just told you happened, which is also helpful

00:47:14.140 | 'cause she was verbal, she could describe.

00:47:16.020 | She actually described how her mother coerced her

00:47:19.160 | to say things that weren't true.

00:47:21.540 | But yeah, so they got together young, I think quick.

00:47:26.320 | Then they got divorced, but the patterns continued.

00:47:29.380 | And that's one thing we see, a lot of high-conflict divorces

00:47:32.460 | keep going even after the divorce.

00:47:35.140 | The actual divorce date is like a speed bump

00:47:38.260 | in the lifetime of high-conflict

00:47:40.780 | if they have children together.

00:47:42.720 | - Hence the wait to have children

00:47:45.860 | with somebody if possible.

00:47:48.780 | You asked about emotional contagion

00:47:53.020 | and you made reference to the science.

00:47:55.400 | If I may, I'll just share something

00:47:56.660 | that might be of interest to you and to the listeners.

00:47:59.600 | You're certainly right that the amygdala

00:48:02.340 | is a central hub for threat detection.

00:48:05.980 | What a lot of people don't know,

00:48:07.400 | because it's just not discussed enough

00:48:08.860 | in the popular coverage of neuroscience

00:48:10.820 | is that the amygdala can learn in the sense

00:48:13.500 | that it's highly prone to context-dependent plasticity.

00:48:17.900 | So this idea that getting emotionally charged

00:48:21.420 | is either negative valence, like fear,

00:48:23.660 | or positive valence, like, "Oh, I like that."

00:48:26.040 | That's true to an extent, but over time,

00:48:28.780 | the brain changes to, in some cases,

00:48:31.300 | like the feeling of adrenaline

00:48:32.780 | to get an associated dopamine release with that.

00:48:36.260 | But a really interesting set of brain structures

00:48:38.300 | that aren't discussed enough, I'll just mention,

00:48:40.540 | 'cause you asked about neuroscience.

00:48:42.740 | I had a postdoc in my laboratory

00:48:45.340 | by the name of Hee Kyung Jung, a fantastic postdoc,

00:48:48.820 | who was looking at emotional contagion.

00:48:52.620 | We were interested in human subjects,

00:48:54.260 | but these were animal studies.

00:48:55.500 | By one member of a species is observed

00:49:00.840 | and then mimicked by another member of the species,

00:49:03.740 | a very powerful aspect to human and non-human behavior.

00:49:07.500 | And there's a structure in the brain called the claustrum.

00:49:10.260 | Most people don't know about it,

00:49:11.180 | which seems to be critical for this.

00:49:13.480 | And she did a beautiful set of experiments

00:49:15.900 | of showing that when animals observed other animals,

00:49:19.620 | either in a positive or a fear state,

00:49:21.420 | but in this case, a fear state,

00:49:23.060 | they would, or a threatened state,

00:49:25.740 | their own claustrum to anterior cingulate cortex circuitry,

00:49:29.700 | and of course, amygdala, et cetera,

00:49:31.000 | those would light up as if they were in the experience,

00:49:33.380 | but not to the same degree.

00:49:34.980 | But over time, what one could see

00:49:37.160 | was a kind of a heightening, a plasticity of these circuits,

00:49:40.180 | so that smaller threats

00:49:43.700 | started to create larger internal responses.

00:49:46.180 | That's both combining Hee Kyung's work

00:49:47.780 | and other work that's come out since.

00:49:49.700 | So what it says is that our brains

00:49:52.660 | are very tuned to the emotional states of others.

00:49:54.720 | This is good, empathy, for instance,

00:49:57.860 | but that over time, we can,

00:50:00.700 | our brains change to actually require a lower stimulus

00:50:05.700 | to activate that kind of negative advocate part of ourselves.

00:50:10.300 | - Yes.

00:50:11.140 | - And so perhaps this is a good segue into a discussion

00:50:13.460 | about what we're observing societally now,

00:50:16.240 | not just in terms of politics,

00:50:17.620 | but it's one thing to be recruited to a camp,

00:50:20.880 | but then once you're in the camp,

00:50:22.180 | it turns out, if we think about

00:50:24.440 | through the lens of this work,

00:50:25.740 | it seems that it requires less negative stuff

00:50:29.640 | in order to stay in that camp,

00:50:30.980 | but want to fight more and more stridently

00:50:34.100 | in order to protect a cause.

00:50:35.940 | Does that make sense?

00:50:36.780 | - I think exactly.

00:50:38.020 | And as I mention in my book about bullies,

00:50:41.060 | I think polarization really demonstrates that.

00:50:44.300 | So once you're in your group

00:50:46.940 | and you see the other group

00:50:49.200 | as not only having a different point of view,

00:50:52.380 | but as the enemy,

00:50:54.420 | then your brain doesn't need to work on it anymore.

00:50:58.100 | That's case closed.

00:50:59.580 | They're the enemy.

00:51:00.820 | The only question is, what do we do now?

00:51:03.660 | And the research saying that

00:51:06.500 | when you talk to the people in your group,

00:51:10.700 | rather than coming together, you move farther apart.

00:51:15.260 | And to me, what's fascinating in terms of legal cases,

00:51:19.700 | and especially in family law,

00:51:21.980 | is you have, like the family I described,

00:51:25.120 | you have the family talking to each other.

00:51:27.340 | You pull a lawyer into that.

00:51:29.500 | The lawyer talks to them.

00:51:31.160 | The lawyer gets heightened anger, maybe,

00:51:34.780 | or commitment to save this person.

00:51:37.820 | And maybe you get a therapist into the picture,

00:51:40.580 | and they all just talk to themselves.

00:51:43.260 | They pull farther and farther apart.

00:51:45.660 | And that's often when we have our high-conflict court case.

00:51:48.300 | They come back to court every six to 12 months,

00:51:51.900 | sometimes for years.

00:51:53.100 | I have cases where people have been in court

00:51:55.100 | like every year for eight or nine years.

00:51:57.860 | And these are cases where the divorce was done long ago.

00:52:02.020 | What people don't realize is the worst custody disputes

00:52:05.420 | tend to happen after the divorce is over.

00:52:08.380 | And I think it's because people are spending

00:52:10.380 | more and more time talking to their own team,

00:52:13.100 | to their own group, and that pulls them farther apart.

00:52:16.340 | Their view of the other side is worse and worse and worse.

00:52:22.020 | And that's why I think the structure really matters.

00:52:26.460 | So I think politically, we have these two different

00:52:30.900 | universes that don't necessarily talk to each other,

00:52:34.220 | and they really create a sense of community.

00:52:36.540 | People are looking for community, and they find it.

00:52:39.940 | But it's fed by, I think, the media ecosystem.

00:52:43.860 | Everyone has their own media.

00:52:45.980 | And so we have these two universes talking to themselves,

00:52:50.460 | growing farther and farther apart.

00:52:53.380 | And that's why elections don't seem

00:52:55.540 | to have made a difference in any of this,

00:52:57.620 | 'cause elections kind of decides who does government,

00:53:01.420 | but they don't resolve the adversarial communities.

00:53:05.220 | And they get a lot of attention.

00:53:08.060 | And sad to say, I think our culture has shifted

00:53:11.140 | from government, that politics is about government,

00:53:15.660 | and the details and nitty gritty,

00:53:18.140 | and the values of government are what's good for our group,

00:53:22.100 | good for our country, unity, citizenship,

00:53:26.060 | we should be together in this,

00:53:28.900 | that politics have shifted to entertainment.

00:53:32.100 | The values of entertainment are be extreme, be emotional.

00:53:36.800 | And entertainment's driven by drama,

00:53:41.100 | for thousands of years.

00:53:44.060 | And drama is opposing us against them.

00:53:48.500 | And as I mentioned in the "Bullies" book,

00:53:51.380 | there's a terrible crisis, there's an evil villain,

00:53:54.300 | and there's a superhero.

00:53:56.140 | And if you have someone tell that story to their community,

00:54:00.060 | they will love that person.

00:54:01.940 | So now we have two communities in politics

00:54:05.300 | loving themselves and hating the other.

00:54:09.980 | And the elections don't resolve that.

00:54:13.160 | That's a speed bump on the road to high conflict.

00:54:16.580 | And that's not a good sign,

00:54:18.060 | and we have to find ways to bridge the gaps.

00:54:20.700 | And there are ways.

00:54:21.740 | You get people one-to-one talk to each other.

00:54:24.600 | There's a lot of groups trying to say,

00:54:26.500 | let's connect rather than separate.

00:54:30.140 | And if we get too far out of balance,

00:54:32.180 | we're gonna have bigger and bigger high conflict problems.

00:54:35.620 | So we have to, the more people's eyes

00:54:37.660 | are open to this pattern, the more they can say,

00:54:40.300 | hey, I seem to be part of this group,

00:54:42.740 | but I wanna, my neighbors think differently.

00:54:45.740 | I'm gonna listen to them.

00:54:47.580 | It's listening that's missing.

00:54:49.820 | - I'd like to take a quick break

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00:58:00.200 | On the suggestion of my friend

00:58:04.200 | and former guest on this podcast, two-time guest,

00:58:06.960 | Rick Rubin, I started watching a documentary

00:58:10.240 | about the history of professional wrestling,

00:58:12.040 | which everyone agrees is made up.

00:58:14.440 | So let's just acknowledge that, I recognize that.

00:58:17.260 | But it's a remarkable portal

00:58:19.840 | into some of the things that you're talking about

00:58:22.480 | because it all hinges on being able

00:58:25.560 | to create emotional responses in the crowd,

00:58:27.740 | and just a very brief history of it, as I understand,

00:58:30.360 | and I'm by no means an expert,

00:58:31.520 | but I took notes on this documentary as I do,

00:58:35.240 | take notes on most everything.

00:58:36.740 | They used to have good guys and bad guys,

00:58:40.000 | good gals and bad gals, you know,

00:58:42.880 | 'cause it's men and women's wrestling,

00:58:45.480 | typically not against each other, although sometimes.

00:58:48.200 | In any case, there was a transition that occurred

00:58:50.200 | at some point where they couldn't get more excitement

00:58:53.080 | and literally couldn't get more attention to the sport

00:58:57.040 | by having good guys and bad guys, good gals and bad gals.

00:59:01.240 | So what they ended up doing was making everybody bad.

00:59:04.840 | And the ratings just skyrocketed, everybody bad, right?

00:59:09.800 | The underlying premise being that both teams are cheating,

00:59:12.880 | and so therefore they had to behave poorly also.

00:59:15.760 | And it created this whole era of just bad people

00:59:20.000 | doing bad things,

00:59:21.280 | generating even greater emotional responses.

00:59:24.600 | And this fits very much with the neuroscience of emotion.

00:59:29.640 | Emotions like awe, happiness, joy, meaning, pleasure,

00:59:33.800 | these are powerful emotions.

00:59:35.840 | And I will not say,

00:59:37.320 | because there's no data to support the idea that fear,

00:59:39.840 | anger, being threatened, et cetera,

00:59:43.120 | are more powerful emotions,

00:59:44.620 | but they tend to drive more behavior to,

00:59:48.400 | in other words, people will do more,

00:59:49.720 | this is well-known in the field of behavioral economics too,

00:59:52.020 | people will do more to avoid losing something

00:59:55.000 | than they will to gain something, sadly,

00:59:56.920 | but this is how our species is wired for evolutionarily.

00:59:58.720 | - Evolutionarily, yeah.

01:00:00.240 | - Meaningful reasons.

01:00:01.880 | So the point being that I think societally

01:00:05.280 | and perhaps interpersonally,

01:00:06.400 | because the two things mimic each other at every level,

01:00:08.880 | individuals all the way up to culture,

01:00:11.980 | seem to be engaged in this

01:00:14.160 | like increasingly amplified emotional states.

01:00:17.200 | And now it just seems like combat is the rule of the day.

01:00:22.200 | And it's so sad,

01:00:23.780 | and you kind of have to wonder where it goes next.

01:00:26.200 | But it does seem like it rewards

01:00:27.640 | these high conflict personalities

01:00:29.280 | because they go undetected, right?

01:00:31.740 | So now the coworker who's super angry

01:00:34.600 | about something they saw on the news

01:00:36.060 | and is trying to engage people or something

01:00:37.800 | or create an issue around something that like,

01:00:39.920 | is this really an issue?

01:00:41.240 | I mean, there's some real issues in the workplace

01:00:42.960 | and at school, but like, is this really an issue?

01:00:45.560 | Like that person 10 years ago,

01:00:47.880 | everyone would have been like,

01:00:49.320 | this is a problem person and would have backed away.

01:00:51.480 | Now it just kind of, because the mean has shifted,

01:00:55.720 | I think it goes, it's no longer signal above the noise.

01:00:58.800 | It's as we say in science, within the noise.

01:01:01.360 | - Right.

01:01:02.280 | Well, what we're seeing is these kind of media systems,

01:01:07.280 | I call them, are attracted to high conflict personalities

01:01:13.000 | and high conflict personalities are attracted to attention.

01:01:16.660 | They want attention.

01:01:18.080 | So there's this almost marriage of media exposure

01:01:22.600 | and high conflict personalities.

01:01:25.080 | And so that's what pulls people together.

01:01:30.080 | I think everyone's looking for community these days.

01:01:33.720 | And it used to be around work, like a shared task,

01:01:37.680 | but now we do so much of our work alone or tiny groups.

01:01:42.000 | And so you get a real sense of community.

01:01:44.020 | People used to get it from church or synagogue

01:01:47.240 | or mosque, wherever, and that's weakened.

01:01:50.320 | And so we get that now a lot,

01:01:52.640 | the intense emotional community from politics.

01:01:56.680 | And so there's a community for you

01:01:59.200 | and there's a community for you.

01:02:01.240 | So they pull themselves together.

01:02:03.240 | They get that, I don't know, dopamine hit

01:02:06.440 | or whatever it is, and strengthens them.

01:02:10.520 | So what's happening is we're pulling apart.

01:02:13.360 | But to me, the answer is exposing the patterns

01:02:16.440 | and understanding our brains is recognize what's happening.

01:02:20.880 | This person's probably exaggerating

01:02:23.720 | when they say that those people are evil.

01:02:27.160 | This person's probably exaggerating

01:02:29.200 | when they say those people are stupid.

01:02:31.520 | Whatever it is that we have to realize,

01:02:34.880 | okay, don't buy that completely.

01:02:38.680 | And what's fascinating to me, I don't know how it happened,

01:02:42.040 | but I get text message solicitations

01:02:44.960 | to contribute to campaigns from conservatives and liberals.

01:02:50.920 | I get both, and guess what?

01:02:52.480 | They look like each other.

01:02:53.960 | And they're like, the end of the world is coming.

01:02:56.520 | You've gotta give $10 or $100 to save the world.

01:03:00.640 | And the end of the world's coming because of them.

01:03:02.920 | - It's all fear-based.

01:03:03.920 | - And it's fear-based, but it hooks your emotions.

01:03:07.240 | I know this stuff, so I can go,

01:03:09.000 | okay, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe away.

01:03:12.560 | But a lot of people don't know that this is happening.

01:03:15.160 | They don't understand how emotions are contagious

01:03:18.800 | and how I think high-conflict emotions are more contagious.

01:03:23.800 | So to me, it's educating people about these dynamics

01:03:27.960 | so you don't engage so much with them.

01:03:30.520 | Like, I won't watch more than a half an hour of TV news,

01:03:34.320 | but you can have 24/7 TV news.

01:03:37.080 | And since 1995, 1996, when they allowed,

01:03:47.400 | they gave you licenses for radio and television

01:03:50.600 | that didn't have to tell the other side of the story.

01:03:53.200 | Before that, you used the fairness doctrine.

01:03:56.160 | You have to say what the other side is.

01:03:58.200 | You're for a candidate,

01:03:59.280 | you have to hear it from the other side.

01:04:01.280 | You didn't have to after 1995, '96.

01:04:04.680 | So we had MSNBC and Fox News slightly off-center,

01:04:09.680 | slightly conservative, slightly liberal.

01:04:13.540 | Well, now we've had 30 years of that, much farther apart,

01:04:17.660 | and communities around each of these.

01:04:21.340 | And yet, if you go, okay,

01:04:24.120 | I'm probably hearing some exaggerations here.

01:04:28.020 | So I can check myself.

01:04:29.580 | And this person's trying to be a hero

01:04:31.940 | and demonize those people.

01:04:33.580 | I'm not gonna do that.

01:04:35.180 | So I'm not one for government regulation.

01:04:38.900 | What I want is for everyone to be able to say,

01:04:40.840 | okay, I see what's happening.

01:04:42.920 | I'm not gonna get my emotions hooked.

01:04:45.460 | And I think, to me, that's one of the goals,

01:04:47.820 | is for people to learn,

01:04:49.280 | I don't have to absorb the emotions,

01:04:51.860 | 'cause that's where the problem is.

01:04:53.320 | People are emotionally hooked and uninformed.

01:04:56.280 | - What are some of the signs of a high-conflict personality?

01:05:02.380 | Because in an ideal world, we avoid these people.

01:05:05.720 | And again, we're not trying to say that they're bad people.

01:05:07.740 | Some of them are bad people, some of them aren't.

01:05:09.820 | But since I'm not a clinical psychologist,

01:05:12.780 | you are, you can make the assessment,

01:05:15.420 | certainly better than I can.

01:05:16.500 | What are some of the ways to avoid these circumstances

01:05:21.260 | besides the first-year rule?

01:05:23.020 | And then let's talk about some ways

01:05:26.340 | to disentangle from these people

01:05:28.740 | based on their unique phenotypes.

01:05:32.400 | So is there a question or set of questions

01:05:36.120 | one should ask themselves

01:05:37.300 | when they are potentially dating someone,

01:05:40.820 | potentially becoming friends with somebody,

01:05:42.340 | potentially becoming coworkers with somebody, and so on?

01:05:45.860 | - Yeah, so what's interesting

01:05:47.300 | is often your gut feeling tells you something's up here.

01:05:50.620 | Like the person suddenly has a shocking opinion

01:05:53.340 | of somebody else.

01:05:54.920 | They say, you know, that person's a total jerk,

01:05:58.520 | and yet you know that person,

01:06:00.060 | and they're not a total jerk.

01:06:01.300 | They suddenly, something's disproportionate.

01:06:04.220 | I think disproportionate emotions is often a trigger.

01:06:10.180 | I put in a lot of my books now

01:06:14.020 | what I call the web method,

01:06:16.060 | is pay attention to their words,

01:06:18.780 | your emotions, and their behavior.

01:06:22.060 | So starting with words,

01:06:23.860 | do they use a lot of blaming words?

01:06:26.300 | You know, it's all that person's fault.

01:06:28.720 | Do they use all or nothing words?

01:06:32.700 | They seem to see things through a narrow lens,

01:06:35.420 | that, you know, there's all good, there's all bad.

01:06:39.320 | Unmanaged emotions, which they may or may not show,

01:06:42.360 | like I explained.

01:06:43.500 | Some people are good at hiding all that,

01:06:45.480 | even though it drives them inside.

01:06:48.120 | And the extreme behaviors.

01:06:49.640 | Do they do things 90% of people would never do?

01:06:52.840 | And I'll give an example here.

01:06:57.420 | And this is, I won't say the city,

01:07:02.280 | but there was a mayor,

01:07:03.660 | there was someone who was a congressperson,

01:07:08.320 | and they decided to run for mayor in their city,

01:07:11.680 | instead of flying to go to Congress.

01:07:14.880 | But when they were flying to go to Congress

01:07:17.720 | back and forth, this is in California,

01:07:20.200 | I'll say that much. (laughs)

01:07:22.460 | People can easily research this.

01:07:24.880 | So this person, flying back and forth,

01:07:27.840 | one day, one night, standing,

01:07:30.360 | you know, there was a line to get your bags

01:07:32.520 | at the airport after you got off the plane.

01:07:35.600 | And he was told to wait in line to get his bags.

01:07:39.680 | And he said, "Don't you know who I am?"

01:07:41.760 | And he pushed his way to the front of the line,

01:07:44.320 | and had an argument with the person behind the counter,

01:07:48.440 | said, "Don't you know who I am?

01:07:50.360 | "I want my bag right now."

01:07:52.760 | And she said, "We don't have it now,

01:07:55.280 | "you can't have it right now."

01:07:56.960 | And he pushed her and knocked her over.

01:07:59.760 | He shoved this airline worker behind the counter

01:08:02.920 | and knocked her over.

01:08:04.080 | - This was a mayor of a major--

01:08:05.640 | - Not yet, he wasn't mayor yet.

01:08:07.200 | He was a congressperson.

01:08:09.760 | Anyway, so that means he's-- - Sorry, sorry.

01:08:11.840 | No, knock it, I know some very decent congresspeople,

01:08:15.320 | but like, okay.

01:08:16.260 | - Yeah, but so he's a-- - Well, in any case, right?

01:08:19.060 | This person could be any number of different professions.

01:08:21.360 | - Could be, yes.

01:08:22.520 | - Yeah, this is antisocial behavior.

01:08:24.040 | - But this is a high-profile person.

01:08:27.640 | So this is all over the news the next day.

01:08:30.960 | This is 20 years ago, maybe, 15 years ago,

01:08:35.720 | something like that.

01:08:37.000 | - Goodness.

01:08:37.960 | - Anyway, so it's in the newspaper the next day.

01:08:41.160 | A newspaper says, "Congressman so-and-so

01:08:44.800 | "gets into physical altercation with airline worker."

01:08:49.640 | Knocks her over.

01:08:50.640 | Half the people said, "That's terrible."

01:08:54.560 | And the other half the people said, "Wait, wait.

01:08:57.000 | "He was sleep-deprived.

01:08:59.040 | "He was flying across country.

01:09:01.120 | "You have to understand that he was stressed."

01:09:05.440 | And here's where my web mythic comes in.

01:09:08.640 | 90% of people would not have done that

01:09:11.200 | even if they were sleep-deprived,

01:09:13.360 | and I fly back and forth a lot, and I'm not,

01:09:16.960 | I don't do that.

01:09:18.320 | - I would like to think 99% of people

01:09:20.760 | wouldn't do that. - I think you're right.

01:09:21.800 | - Right. - 99%.

01:09:22.640 | - To get physical with an airline person over a bag?

01:09:25.680 | - The cutting to the front of the line is egregious.

01:09:28.720 | The shoving the airline person is like beyond the pale.

01:09:32.240 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:09:33.560 | So this is, so anyway, so he's running for mayor,

01:09:37.280 | and I'm going, "This guy's a high-conflict person.

01:09:40.340 | "If he gets elected, he's not gonna be a very good mayor.

01:09:45.480 | "He's gonna have a lot of trouble

01:09:47.000 | "with the people close to him."

01:09:49.840 | And so guess what happened?

01:09:51.720 | He gets elected.

01:09:52.980 | Within, I think it's eight months,

01:09:57.240 | he is, and this is before the Me Too movement got started,

01:10:01.880 | but people are reporting he's harassing women,

01:10:04.740 | sexually harassing women.

01:10:06.200 | Women come into his office to meet with him,

01:10:08.440 | professional, experienced, important,

01:10:11.160 | and he's wanting to touch them a lot.

01:10:14.280 | Inappropriately, they don't wanna be touched.

01:10:17.000 | Anyway, so women start complaining about him.

01:10:23.720 | Word kinda gets out, yeah, this happened

01:10:25.680 | with a lot of different people,

01:10:27.060 | that he's not sexually assaulting them,

01:10:30.260 | but he's treating them badly.

01:10:32.900 | - So it cuts across domains.

01:10:34.880 | It's like in-- - Yeah, so--

01:10:36.220 | - So it's not just in the office.

01:10:38.440 | It's there, but it's also at the airport.

01:10:41.840 | It's basically any time he's not getting what he wants,

01:10:44.840 | he throws a tantrum.

01:10:46.360 | - And that's the thing with personality disorders

01:10:49.060 | is a narrower range of behavior

01:10:50.680 | that's repeated in a variety of settings.

01:10:54.080 | - So he's fitting all of that.

01:10:55.960 | So which personality disorder, I'm not gonna diagnose him,

01:10:58.800 | but it narrows down to one or two.

01:11:01.640 | - So it's not context-dependent.

01:11:04.040 | It is-- - Right.

01:11:05.720 | - It's pervasive.

01:11:07.200 | - Pervasive, and that word is in the diagnostic manual,

01:11:10.320 | that it's pervasive across, I think, several settings.

01:11:15.080 | I think that's the words.

01:11:16.240 | But let me just finish. - Yeah, please, please.

01:11:18.300 | - 'Cause the end of the story, (laughs)

01:11:20.840 | the end of the story is he's also got committees

01:11:25.840 | and people that are supposed to accomplish things.

01:11:29.120 | He doesn't want them to think.

01:11:30.640 | He wants them to, he wants to do the thinking

01:11:32.720 | and tell them what to do.

01:11:34.000 | So he goes around alienating a lot of people.

01:11:37.560 | Within eight months, he's out of office

01:11:40.560 | because enough people were upset,

01:11:43.520 | and the way he got out of office

01:11:45.560 | is some of the heads of government told him,

01:11:50.480 | I think it was the city attorney or something,

01:11:52.920 | "If you quit now, we'll help you with your legal expenses,"

01:11:56.880 | 'cause he's starting to get sued for some of this stuff,

01:11:59.640 | suing the city, suing him.

01:12:01.560 | "We'll help you with your legal expenses if you quit now."

01:12:05.560 | And there was starting to be a petition movement

01:12:08.280 | for some, I don't know, the mechanics,

01:12:11.400 | like a special election or something to get rid of him.

01:12:14.520 | Anyway, within eight months, he was out of the office,

01:12:17.440 | and now you don't hear about him in that city.

01:12:19.800 | - It's a very interesting, literally high-profile,

01:12:23.600 | although still anonymous based on this conversation, case.

01:12:26.840 | I wonder if on a more subtle or typical level,

01:12:32.760 | the following is informative or not.

01:12:35.640 | I'm not looking for a validation

01:12:37.640 | of the example I'm about to give,

01:12:38.920 | but I've been very surprised at times

01:12:43.920 | how if a person who I'm with, for example,

01:12:49.680 | for the first time out on a meal

01:12:52.000 | will behave towards the wait staff.

01:12:53.920 | - Yes.

01:12:55.080 | - Not explicitly disparaging of them,

01:12:57.800 | but sometimes mildly disparaging of them,

01:13:00.280 | or feeling as if the amount of liquid

01:13:05.160 | poured into their glass was somehow an indication

01:13:07.480 | of how the waiter felt about them

01:13:09.120 | or didn't feel about them.

01:13:10.720 | Like reading into these things

01:13:13.200 | where you're just thinking to yourself like,

01:13:14.280 | "Whoa, life must be really tough for you.

01:13:16.880 | Who's paying attention to this stuff?"

01:13:18.800 | And so that's one that I've noticed in people,

01:13:23.120 | and it's proved informative.

01:13:26.400 | - It's really a useful thing to see.

01:13:28.280 | That's part of what you see, their behavior,

01:13:31.320 | and their behavior towards other people.

01:13:34.480 | This was a brilliant thing.

01:13:36.120 | I don't remember the name of the program,

01:13:38.400 | but there was a guy who was head of a company,

01:13:41.900 | and he used to, when he was interviewing people

01:13:45.920 | for high-level jobs,

01:13:48.000 | he pretended he was a taxi driver or something,

01:13:50.200 | would pick them up at the airport as the taxi driver

01:13:54.560 | and see how they treated him as the taxi driver,

01:13:57.920 | and then he gets in the interview room,

01:13:59.560 | and he's the guy interviewing them.

01:14:01.760 | And in some cases, people treated him really disrespectfully

01:14:05.800 | and it's like, "Now I know this is not someone I want."

01:14:09.040 | - Clever.

01:14:09.880 | I made the decision to not work for somebody years ago

01:14:14.760 | when I was on a very different stage in my career

01:14:18.440 | based on how that person treated a janitor.

01:14:23.160 | - Yeah.

01:14:24.000 | - And it was amazing

01:14:24.840 | because it was one very brief interaction.

01:14:27.880 | And it wasn't like this person yelled at the janitor.

01:14:30.920 | It was the dismissiveness.

01:14:32.760 | - Yeah.

01:14:33.680 | - And I remember it was just your web approach.

01:14:35.800 | It was his, I guess I just revealed,

01:14:38.720 | it was his words towards the janitor.

01:14:40.920 | It was my emotional response was sort of like,

01:14:42.680 | I felt like I had been kind of kicked in the stomach.

01:14:44.560 | - Right.

01:14:45.400 | - I was like, "Hey," like that was,

01:14:46.720 | like, it just felt like a very,

01:14:48.960 | what I would call like the football play,

01:14:50.240 | unnecessary roughness.

01:14:51.640 | - Yes.

01:14:52.480 | - It was mild from the perspective of like,

01:14:54.900 | no one got physical or called anyone names,

01:14:57.120 | but I remember thinking like, "Oh, like that sucked."

01:15:00.240 | - Right.

01:15:01.080 | - And then their behavior was just to just go right back

01:15:03.440 | to what they were talking about.

01:15:05.200 | And I knew in that moment, I was really crestfallen

01:15:08.360 | because in that moment I knew,

01:15:10.280 | "Oh my goodness, I can't work for this person."

01:15:13.780 | - Yeah.

01:15:14.620 | - Like I just can't, and I made the decision not to,

01:15:16.320 | and actually their response to my deciding not to

01:15:19.440 | for a variety of other reasons too,

01:15:21.320 | confirmed everything that I suspected

01:15:23.640 | in that one little interaction.

01:15:25.280 | - Yes.

01:15:26.120 | - But it's interesting because we're trained

01:15:27.480 | to collect data rather, you know, carefully,

01:15:32.480 | you know, and we don't wanna make snap judgment.

01:15:36.080 | Somebody could truly be having a bad day,

01:15:37.920 | but in this case it was the right decision

01:15:40.120 | to not work for them.

01:15:40.960 | Thank goodness, I thank my lucky stars.

01:15:42.840 | I made some really bad decisions about people in my life.

01:15:45.080 | That was a really good decision.

01:15:46.560 | I never spent a day regretting it.

01:15:48.280 | And I went to work for someone else

01:15:49.280 | who was terrific instead.

01:15:50.640 | - Great.

01:15:51.480 | - So, but as you said,

01:15:53.000 | these things sometimes hit at a somatic level,

01:15:56.540 | as opposed to some sort of, wait, you know,

01:16:00.200 | some like very cerebral analytic thing.

01:16:03.360 | It kind of hits at a, what must be a very primitive circuit.

01:16:07.040 | I can't help the neuroscientist in me wants to say,

01:16:08.800 | like, it's gotta be something at the level of the body

01:16:12.020 | where we go, wait, that was messed up.

01:16:16.520 | - Yeah.

01:16:17.360 | - And you can't really point to a specific word.

01:16:19.560 | And then you start to question yourself.

01:16:20.960 | That's the problem you wonder was,

01:16:22.800 | well, maybe their tone wasn't,

01:16:24.040 | maybe it's my own perception, but I don't know.

01:16:26.760 | Maybe the body doesn't lie.

01:16:28.960 | Maybe it knows.

01:16:30.320 | - I think the body is like a first responder

01:16:33.480 | and that we should pay attention to that.

01:16:35.800 | And especially with high conflict personalities,

01:16:39.240 | especially the con artists,

01:16:42.320 | which is part of the antisocial personality,

01:16:45.240 | and the ones I've dealt with are very good at this,

01:16:48.480 | is their words are just right.

01:16:51.040 | And your brain is like soothed by them.

01:16:53.760 | You go, this person gets it and I'm totally comfortable.

01:16:57.200 | They're charming, all of that.

01:17:00.040 | And your gut goes, wait, they're out of sync.

01:17:02.880 | I have this cold feeling.

01:17:04.280 | Why do I have this cold feeling?

01:17:06.720 | And I think that they're aimed at your cerebral thinking

01:17:11.720 | and that your guts kind of gets it

01:17:17.320 | because they're in a way predatory,

01:17:19.440 | like antisocial tend to be predatory.

01:17:22.000 | - Those people have dead eyes.

01:17:23.560 | I've known a few.

01:17:24.400 | - Yeah.

01:17:25.240 | - I've known a few men and women

01:17:26.320 | and their eyes are, I can only describe,

01:17:29.160 | and I'm a vision neuroscientist.

01:17:30.800 | That's like what my career has been.

01:17:32.600 | And those are two little pieces of brain right there.

01:17:34.760 | And there's something about the deadness.

01:17:37.120 | And I don't have a science to support what I'm about to say.

01:17:40.000 | There's something about the deadness in their eyes.

01:17:42.160 | Maybe their pupils don't change shape

01:17:44.200 | with levels of arousal the same way other people's do.

01:17:46.400 | 'Cause we know that happens in healthy,

01:17:48.880 | people with an unhealthy autonomic nervous system,

01:17:50.840 | but there's something lacking.

01:17:52.840 | - Yeah.

01:17:53.680 | - And people make up all sorts of theories online.

01:17:56.600 | Like I'm not a big blinker.

01:17:58.560 | I don't blink.

01:17:59.400 | When I'm concentrating, blinks break up my flow.

01:18:01.800 | And this is actually a way I can remember things.

01:18:04.280 | People have these theories about blinking, non-blink.

01:18:06.320 | The research doesn't support any relationship

01:18:08.240 | between blink frequency and personality.

01:18:10.380 | They had this whole theory about Zuck too.

01:18:12.040 | Like he doesn't blink, therefore he's whatever, he's a robot.

01:18:15.320 | None of that holds up.

01:18:16.700 | What does hold up, however, is this mismatch between words

01:18:21.400 | and the affect that it creates in us.

01:18:24.220 | - Yeah.

01:18:25.060 | - It's sort of like it sounds right,

01:18:26.160 | but it doesn't feel right.

01:18:28.480 | I wish we understood more about this

01:18:29.860 | at the level of science.

01:18:31.020 | - There are a lot of theories, not a lot of tools.

01:18:33.640 | - Someday, I think, yeah.

01:18:35.280 | - Yeah, the tools for measuring the stuff

01:18:37.360 | are getting better.

01:18:38.400 | I wanted to ask you about other ways of just knowing

01:18:44.320 | if you're interacting with a high conflict person

01:18:47.160 | when the cues are more subtle.

01:18:50.580 | Are there other things or examples of the web method

01:18:54.000 | that come to mind?

01:18:55.760 | - Well, for me, of course, dealing like with court,

01:18:59.200 | especially, there's a lot of stuff in writing.

01:19:02.140 | And so being able to look at what's written

01:19:05.220 | and a lot of blame words, the all or nothing words.

01:19:09.540 | She did this and she did that.

01:19:11.860 | And disparaging words, she's stupid or whatever.

01:19:15.060 | Or he's a bully, he's this and that.

01:19:18.380 | Which triggers for me, maybe he is,

01:19:21.060 | or maybe the person saying it is,

01:19:23.100 | but it heightens my attention.

01:19:25.820 | - Yeah, how do you disambiguate between projection

01:19:28.420 | and a real thing?

01:19:29.260 | Like online now, I mean, one of the fastest ways

01:19:33.100 | to get a popular social media account

01:19:36.100 | is for somebody to give advice

01:19:39.100 | about how to avoid bad people.

01:19:41.700 | You know, name calling, gaslighting, narcissist,

01:19:44.380 | sociopath, psychopath, history on it.

01:19:47.300 | Like these are clinical terms

01:19:49.980 | that now the general public can leverages

01:19:53.300 | to like, you know, sort of amplify community.

01:19:56.900 | And then in part, I understand

01:19:58.780 | from talking to people on the tech side

01:20:00.020 | is that social media is social.

01:20:02.460 | - Right.

01:20:03.300 | - The accounts that grow fastest

01:20:04.120 | are the ones where you don't need much language

01:20:05.980 | to convey what you're trying to convey,

01:20:07.680 | like a sport or dance or an animal.

01:20:11.260 | And among the others that grow very quickly

01:20:15.320 | and therefore rewarding to people

01:20:17.000 | are ones where you're recruiting these negative advocates.

01:20:22.000 | - First of all, I wanna make sure

01:20:25.300 | that I get this point across,

01:20:26.700 | and that is there's a lot of temptation

01:20:28.760 | to label people with like the mental disorders,

01:20:32.340 | the personality disorders.

01:20:34.440 | And it's absolutely essential that people don't do that.

01:20:38.040 | If you think somebody might be a narcissist

01:20:41.180 | or might have borderline personality or be antisocial,

01:20:44.260 | keep that to yourself and adapt how you work with them

01:20:48.500 | to be more effective or be more cautious, whatever.

01:20:51.880 | But the worst thing I think is people say,

01:20:54.020 | oh, and everyone agrees that person's a narcissist,

01:20:56.900 | so we kind of gang up on that person.

01:20:59.500 | That's not helpful.

01:21:00.540 | The goal is not rejecting people.

01:21:03.660 | The goal is adapting what you do

01:21:06.340 | to either manage the relationship,

01:21:08.580 | decide, okay, that's not someone I'm gonna get close to,

01:21:12.440 | but I can still work with them

01:21:15.380 | or have them as neighbors or whatever.

01:21:18.000 | So I wanna emphasize that, 'cause I think you're right.

01:21:21.540 | There's a lot of that today.

01:21:23.820 | And people come to me with that concern and say,

01:21:26.060 | Bill, you teach about personality disorders.

01:21:28.500 | Yes, so people understand patterns of behavior

01:21:31.580 | and how to adapt your own behavior.

01:21:33.940 | I'm not teaching people to label other people.

01:21:37.020 | So that's real important.

01:21:38.740 | - Yeah, people go to school for many years

01:21:41.500 | and do 3,000 plus clinical hours

01:21:43.480 | to learn how to do that, to do that properly.

01:21:46.340 | It's like saying, it's like diagnosing anything, right?

01:21:49.700 | I mean, a dermatologist might be able to help diagnose

01:21:52.700 | a skin patch for potential cancer,

01:21:56.560 | but we're taught that we're not supposed

01:21:59.740 | to do that ourselves.

01:22:01.540 | - So we have to be cautious, but on the other hand, aware.

01:22:05.480 | And the more you're aware of patterns,

01:22:07.300 | like being aware of someone with an alcohol abuse issue,

01:22:12.020 | is to go, okay, I'm not gonna be serving him alcohol

01:22:15.220 | with dinner, he's a great person,

01:22:17.060 | but I'm just gonna leave that out of the evening meal.

01:22:20.700 | Adapt to what we do rather than judging them.

01:22:23.860 | And I don't see people with personality disorders

01:22:26.220 | as lesser beings.

01:22:27.760 | I see them as having a different set of behaviors

01:22:31.760 | that they acquired pretty much in childhood.

01:22:33.980 | So I don't hold it against them.

01:22:36.260 | I may dislike their patterns of behavior,

01:22:39.040 | but I really don't hate people like that.

01:22:41.300 | I've been a therapist with clients like that.

01:22:44.780 | So I think our awareness needs to be there

01:22:48.340 | so we adapt how we work with people.

01:22:51.220 | But I think the gut feeling is so important.

01:22:56.220 | And as a therapist, I was trained,

01:23:00.220 | pay attention to your gut 'cause that's gonna help you

01:23:02.740 | with your clients.

01:23:03.860 | And that's why the web method, their words, their behavior,

01:23:07.600 | but how I feel often gives me tips.

01:23:11.100 | - You mentioned before, and I think it's really important

01:23:14.340 | to highlight that people's patterns of interactions

01:23:18.060 | across a lot of different domains,

01:23:19.640 | with the teachers in the school, with close family members,

01:23:23.420 | with the people that know them best at work,

01:23:26.100 | that these different types of relationships

01:23:28.700 | reveal a pattern.

01:23:30.380 | And one of the things, just speaking from my own experience,

01:23:34.300 | is that I've tended to, where I've gone wrong,

01:23:38.180 | I've tended to overemphasize the importance

01:23:41.140 | of like a credential.

01:23:44.420 | For instance, some of my past romantic relationships

01:23:49.280 | have been with people who are highly educated,

01:23:52.580 | some less higher education, all extremely smart people,

01:23:56.860 | some more formal, some less formal education.

01:23:59.780 | But I think that I and other people sometimes

01:24:01.780 | will look at the CV of somebody.

01:24:04.980 | And of course, that's not the only indication

01:24:08.260 | of their values, et cetera.

01:24:12.380 | But, and to overemphasize, like, oh, well,

01:24:15.380 | they did difficult things in a difficult setting,

01:24:18.740 | and therefore must be a good person.

01:24:22.500 | So would you say that these high-conflict personalities

01:24:25.080 | exist more or less in high-competition venues

01:24:29.180 | versus low-competition venues?

01:24:31.320 | I don't wanna make this about socioeconomic status.

01:24:33.460 | Those things correlate, but all too often,

01:24:37.300 | we tend to do the kind of good-on-paper analysis

01:24:41.380 | and forget the, like, how do they actually

01:24:44.140 | measure up in real life.

01:24:46.260 | - Yeah, I would say, first of all,

01:24:48.900 | that we see high-conflict people in every occupation,

01:24:52.420 | in every culture, in every community,

01:24:54.900 | every economic status.

01:24:56.740 | I think that, and I don't think there's research on this,

01:25:01.780 | but I think that healthcare and higher education

01:25:06.740 | are two fields where there's a slightly higher incidence--

01:25:10.620 | - Higher. - Of high-conflict people

01:25:12.740 | because there's a higher, oh, also, I would say churches,

01:25:17.100 | and we get consultations with churches sometimes,

01:25:19.500 | there's a high tolerance for behavior

01:25:24.300 | that's outside the norm.

01:25:26.460 | - So you said higher education

01:25:28.500 | and healthcare in particular.

01:25:30.220 | - And I would say churches-- - Are you talking about

01:25:31.700 | physicians and universities?

01:25:34.720 | - Yes, yes, so--

01:25:37.300 | - Students and faculty and staff?

01:25:39.980 | - Yes, both, administrators sometimes,

01:25:42.780 | and I believe it's because of the higher tolerance.

01:25:45.860 | - Administrators, just kidding.

01:25:47.700 | I'm blessed with good administrators.

01:25:50.380 | I've been blessed with great administrators.

01:25:52.340 | - Yeah, let me mention, I do a lot of consultation,

01:25:55.460 | and one of the things that people come to me about

01:25:59.180 | is people with little power bases,

01:26:02.500 | like department heads in universities.

01:26:06.860 | I remember one university I did a consultation with

01:26:10.740 | about a department head, and they were a medical school,

01:26:15.260 | and they had a high-conflict person

01:26:18.620 | high up in the structure who was really,

01:26:21.540 | I was told, damaging some of the students' careers

01:26:26.260 | because they looked at them cross-eyed

01:26:28.780 | or something like that, so they wouldn't write

01:26:30.560 | the kind of recommendation that they needed,

01:26:33.460 | and how can we deal with this person

01:26:35.740 | 'cause they're embedded in their position,

01:26:39.900 | so gave them a variety of tips,

01:26:42.140 | but that's why I think people do need

01:26:45.500 | to have their eyes open in these fields,

01:26:48.260 | and I wanna add, since I'm talking about occupations,

01:26:53.260 | we see this a little bit more in non-profits

01:26:56.980 | and non-profit administrators because, again,

01:27:00.380 | non-profits are good people doing good things,

01:27:04.080 | but they have this higher tolerance

01:27:06.020 | for administrators with bad behavior

01:27:09.940 | because they're good people, and that blinds people to--

01:27:14.940 | - Because of the assumption they're good people

01:27:16.540 | or because the mission is good?

01:27:18.780 | - The mission is good, and they're invested in this mission,

01:27:21.640 | so they must be good.

01:27:23.100 | - Do you think that's part of what got them there?

01:27:25.540 | - Yes, and the thing that's so tricky

01:27:28.940 | is everybody's somewhat unique,

01:27:31.980 | but also these are some recognizable patterns of behavior

01:27:35.640 | once you know to look for them,

01:27:38.240 | and this is something, we're doing much more

01:27:40.180 | in the workplace now, and employers wanna know,

01:27:42.940 | we wanna promote this person, is that a good or bad idea?

01:27:46.320 | Well, let's look at the patterns of behavior

01:27:48.460 | 'cause once you put them in an embedded position,

01:27:51.960 | things are gonna be harder.

01:27:53.680 | I've been approached by city councils.

01:27:56.000 | They say, we've got somebody on our city council

01:27:58.680 | that's a high-conflict person, what do we do?

01:28:01.560 | Do we confront them?

01:28:02.920 | Do we publicly talk about them?

01:28:04.800 | All that stuff.

01:28:05.840 | I say, neither of those is good.

01:28:07.640 | Learn how to manage them until they move on,

01:28:12.580 | and they often do because people slowly go,

01:28:15.760 | we don't like working with this person.

01:28:17.780 | - It's really interesting.

01:28:20.160 | You know, when I was a graduate student,

01:28:22.040 | there was a department chair in the department,

01:28:24.240 | big personality, like big personality,

01:28:28.560 | and I very quickly came to realize,

01:28:33.040 | also because I listened to the faculty

01:28:36.200 | that were under this person,

01:28:38.080 | that despite having this like big,

01:28:40.240 | like larger-than-life personality

01:28:42.000 | that you might initially like place into a category

01:28:46.040 | of, you know, like diagnosis or something,

01:28:48.960 | that this person was an incredibly strong advocate

01:28:52.160 | for the faculty, and they loved that,

01:28:55.080 | and he was really beloved, and I think rightfully so,

01:28:59.280 | you know, and, you know, at a surface level,

01:29:03.980 | might've rubbed a few people the wrong way.

01:29:06.120 | I think as students, we were like, oh, whoa,

01:29:08.240 | like, you know, it was almost like,

01:29:10.560 | didn't quite know how to like respond to it,

01:29:13.880 | but you very quickly got the sense of like

01:29:16.200 | a real kind of paternal nature in this person.

01:29:19.720 | So I point this out because sometimes

01:29:21.400 | these big personalities are really, truly benevolent.

01:29:26.400 | Now, I'm not saying he was a perfect human being.

01:29:28.080 | How could I know that?

01:29:28.960 | I don't know that. - Right.

01:29:29.800 | - I didn't know him in all domains of his life,

01:29:31.220 | although I did know his family,

01:29:32.440 | and he seemed to have a great, strong family too.

01:29:35.360 | But then by contrast, I'm thinking of the person

01:29:38.960 | I alluded to earlier, different department,

01:29:40.800 | different university, who was kind of like more meek,

01:29:43.920 | like certainly is more of the stereotypical lab scientist,

01:29:47.640 | but then, you know, there was this like interaction

01:29:51.560 | that I observed and I thought like, whoa,

01:29:53.600 | like that's really dreadful.

01:29:55.740 | At least that's not an environment I wanna be in.

01:29:58.040 | So sometimes these things don't match

01:29:59.800 | our initial impressions.

01:30:00.920 | I raise this because sometimes we think big personality,

01:30:04.560 | AKA high conflict personality.

01:30:07.600 | Sometimes we think, hey, kind of, you know, quieter,

01:30:11.240 | nerdy type, and they're actually quite dreadful.

01:30:15.040 | So it doesn't always fit.

01:30:17.140 | It's, and I think the problem with the internet,

01:30:20.240 | social media version of this, the typical version,

01:30:22.880 | 'cause there's some great social media internet stuff,

01:30:24.880 | podcasts, et cetera, is that we default to what we see

01:30:29.880 | and what we hear, but we don't really have the data.

01:30:34.400 | - And we can get manipulated that way.

01:30:36.600 | That's what's tricky,

01:30:38.040 | but you raised several important points.

01:30:40.280 | I wanna respond to them all if I can remember them.

01:30:43.800 | The first is that this is in many ways quite nuanced.

01:30:48.800 | The key thing to look out for with high conflict people,

01:30:52.140 | a preoccupation with blaming others

01:30:54.560 | and not taking responsibility.

01:30:56.900 | So you might have a big personality

01:30:59.580 | that's not a high conflict person.

01:31:02.500 | You might have a me, quiet person

01:31:04.860 | who is a high conflict person.

01:31:06.740 | So you can't go by what your eyes see and your ears hear.

01:31:11.900 | It's really a question of evidence.

01:31:13.840 | And that's why I think maybe I got into this

01:31:16.520 | after I became a lawyer, that there's no way

01:31:19.840 | to quickly know, although you may quickly suspect

01:31:24.560 | and then wanna look deeper.

01:31:26.600 | But I wanna give an example 'cause now that I seem

01:31:29.720 | to have criticized department heads and--

01:31:32.960 | - Well, I cited at least one that is really wonderful.

01:31:35.800 | I've known some other great department heads.

01:31:37.560 | I mean, there's some chairs that are just like,

01:31:39.840 | these are, first of all, as a department head,

01:31:41.900 | sometimes there's a slight salary increase.

01:31:43.900 | Usually it's trivial.

01:31:45.580 | These people don't do it for the money.

01:31:47.140 | I have a good friend who's also been on this podcast

01:31:49.140 | who's a chair of neurosurgery at a major.

01:31:51.020 | I mean, these are people who they work their butts off

01:31:55.520 | to try and make conditions better for patients,

01:31:57.860 | for professors, for clinicians, for staff.

01:32:01.060 | I mean, I'm not just saying this.

01:32:02.580 | I have no incentive for saying it.

01:32:04.180 | These people don't control my life anymore.

01:32:05.760 | Well, I suppose my chair of ophthalmology

01:32:07.420 | who's a wonderful person, it does, et cetera.

01:32:11.560 | But the point is that there are some people

01:32:13.840 | that step up to the plate to lead

01:32:15.640 | that are really great leaders.

01:32:18.040 | And these are just not the people

01:32:19.440 | that we're focusing on today.

01:32:20.640 | - Right, right.

01:32:21.800 | And so the thing I wanna emphasize

01:32:23.840 | that my favorite example is Steve Jobs.

01:32:27.520 | Steve Jobs, I would say, hands down,

01:32:29.880 | was a high-conflict person.

01:32:31.840 | - Famous for it.

01:32:32.660 | - There was a guy in Silicon Valley

01:32:34.120 | who wrote a book, "The No A-Hole Rule."

01:32:36.720 | And he talked about Steve Jobs in there

01:32:38.700 | 'cause he knew Steve Jobs.

01:32:40.140 | He was in Silicon Valley.

01:32:42.300 | So I remember reading his biography,

01:32:44.980 | like 1,000 pages or whatever.

01:32:47.820 | And what stood out to me was that he blamed people,

01:32:52.820 | sometimes all or nothing thinking.

01:32:56.640 | They talked about his distortion--

01:33:00.020 | - Reality distortion field.

01:33:01.540 | - Reality distortion field.

01:33:03.660 | And that's exactly what high-conflict people do.

01:33:06.540 | They all or nothing thinking,

01:33:08.580 | "You gotta do this, you can do this."

01:33:10.400 | People say, "That's not possible.

01:33:11.780 | "It's physically impossible, Steve, you can't do this."

01:33:14.900 | And then he would push them.

01:33:17.300 | And one example that stood out to me was touchscreen,

01:33:20.780 | glass that you touch and it knows where you are.

01:33:25.160 | I think, and I may have it wrong,

01:33:27.120 | but from reading his autobiography,

01:33:29.520 | that he harangued Corningware Glass Company,

01:33:34.520 | Corning Company, something like that, to create that.

01:33:38.160 | And they said, "You can't do it.

01:33:39.200 | "It's not physically possible."

01:33:40.520 | He says, "Do it and do it in the next 90 days."

01:33:43.480 | And they did, they invented this thing

01:33:45.480 | that they probably would not have done

01:33:46.800 | unless he pushed them.

01:33:48.800 | So high-conflict person,

01:33:51.180 | but I don't think he had a personality disorder.

01:33:53.640 | People say, "Oh, he's an incredible narcissist."

01:33:56.440 | But personality disorder is characterized

01:33:59.440 | by lack of change, lack of self-awareness,

01:34:03.160 | lack of flexibility, and they shoot themselves in the foot

01:34:07.600 | and it interferes with their success.

01:34:10.040 | He, I think, was close to that,

01:34:12.440 | but he had enough flexibility.

01:34:14.840 | And he picked a team that pushed back on him

01:34:17.620 | and he liked that.

01:34:19.660 | So he's an example to me of high-conflict person,

01:34:23.920 | probably not personality disorder,

01:34:26.420 | and successful because he probably had some traits

01:34:29.720 | of these personalities.

01:34:31.040 | So what I see is you totally have to look for the evidence

01:34:35.480 | that you can't make an assumption.

01:34:37.840 | But if your gut says, "Maybe something's off here,"

01:34:41.080 | pay attention to that, but look for the facts,

01:34:44.320 | talk to other people that know this person,

01:34:47.180 | see them in other situations,

01:34:49.840 | because there's incredible people like him

01:34:53.440 | that accomplish a lot of really good stuff

01:34:58.360 | that you don't wanna say, "Oh, we can't have him."

01:35:01.120 | Apple fired him in the 1990s

01:35:03.800 | and he seemed to learn from that.

01:35:05.760 | He seemed to grow from that.

01:35:07.740 | People with personality disorders

01:35:10.040 | don't seem to grow and change,

01:35:11.960 | and that's their problem, they're stuck.

01:35:15.480 | High-conflict people, they blame others.

01:35:18.160 | If they have some traits, maybe you can do a workaround.

01:35:21.240 | So there's many people in position.

01:35:24.800 | Surgeons are one group I wanna mention briefly,

01:35:27.940 | because as a clinical social worker,

01:35:30.400 | I worked in hospitals and dealt with doctors a lot.

01:35:35.080 | As a lawyer, I've represented doctors in their divorces.

01:35:40.080 | Several, I think, are high-conflict people,

01:35:43.720 | but most aren't, and that's what I wanna say.

01:35:46.320 | Most department heads aren't high-conflict people.

01:35:49.600 | Most surgeons aren't high-conflict people,

01:35:52.040 | even though they get a reputation for that.

01:35:55.640 | Police is another area, military's another area,

01:35:59.360 | probably slightly higher incidence,

01:36:01.920 | because they're in a position

01:36:03.500 | where they can dominate and control people.

01:36:06.340 | But most police aren't like that.

01:36:08.620 | Most people in the military aren't high-conflict people.

01:36:12.260 | They're professional people, they like their job,

01:36:14.820 | they know their job, they have empathy,

01:36:16.820 | they work with people.

01:36:18.220 | So even though some of these occupations,

01:36:20.460 | there's a higher incidence,

01:36:22.580 | and that's certainly true for lawyers, I think.

01:36:25.420 | But most people, most lawyers aren't like that.

01:36:28.740 | Most lawyers I know are really committed to their work,

01:36:31.860 | really wanna help their clients.

01:36:34.300 | So I wanna kinda be clear that this is nuanced stuff,

01:36:39.300 | but when you're hiring people,

01:36:42.720 | when you're getting into a dating relationship,

01:36:45.660 | you wanna watch more closely,

01:36:47.480 | because it's the close relationships

01:36:49.780 | where high-conflict behavior comes out more.

01:36:53.100 | - So the web method seems like a very good method,

01:36:56.120 | as well as paying attention to,

01:36:58.260 | and maybe getting some information from other people

01:37:01.120 | close to that person in different domains of their life.

01:37:04.740 | That seems like a very sage way to approach this.

01:37:09.180 | - Exactly, and because when you hear from different people

01:37:12.980 | the same problem, then that should raise your antenna.

01:37:16.540 | Okay, a lot of people say,

01:37:18.900 | "Yeah, but this person can be really irritable."

01:37:22.100 | And you go, "Okay, oh, they're irritable

01:37:23.900 | "in different settings.

01:37:25.620 | "I'm gonna think about that."

01:37:27.140 | - What about when somebody is already involved

01:37:32.500 | with a high-conflict person, and they want to disentangle?

01:37:36.680 | I could imagine a couple different scenarios.

01:37:40.140 | Let's say disentangle from a professional relationship,

01:37:45.140 | disentangle from a personal relationship.

01:37:48.220 | Probably some overlap there, but slightly different.

01:37:50.900 | Let's assume the high-conflict person

01:37:52.760 | is a high-conflict victim type.

01:37:57.220 | Then let's compare that to if the high-conflict person

01:38:01.180 | is more of a combative type.

01:38:03.620 | Maybe we'll start with the combative type.

01:38:05.660 | So if you're dealing with a combative,

01:38:07.220 | maybe even, dare we say, narcissistic type,

01:38:10.080 | I don't know that we should diagnose,

01:38:12.540 | but the stereotype that comes to mind,

01:38:15.000 | somebody that gets angry

01:38:16.620 | when you don't fulfill their expectations,

01:38:19.980 | and blames others, does not take responsibility,

01:38:24.860 | and it's time you decide to,

01:38:27.660 | like the Homer Simpson meme,

01:38:29.060 | kind of drift back into the hedge.

01:38:31.060 | Is that the way to do it?

01:38:32.100 | Or do you lay a clear line and say,

01:38:33.700 | "Listen, I'm not gonna tolerate this anymore.

01:38:37.640 | "I'm out."

01:38:38.980 | - It's really somewhat dependent

01:38:40.540 | on the nature of relationship.

01:38:43.440 | I do a lot of consultation.

01:38:45.020 | We do a lot of training with high-conflict institute.

01:38:48.080 | So we get married people getting divorced.

01:38:52.380 | We get business partnerships

01:38:54.540 | where there's one partner that they're going,

01:38:56.660 | "We gotta deal with this."

01:38:58.700 | We have employees trying to get away

01:39:01.580 | from a high-conflict supervisor,

01:39:05.200 | and we have supervisors trying to deal

01:39:07.140 | with a high-conflict employee.

01:39:08.660 | So there's slightly different settings.

01:39:12.940 | - You know, the most common situation

01:39:14.640 | is gonna be where somebody has a friend

01:39:16.720 | or a romantic partner

01:39:18.380 | or a business professional partner they wanna get out of.

01:39:23.780 | So I suppose any of those.

01:39:24.940 | - A close, so a partner kind of relationship.

01:39:27.580 | - Something where the person expects to hear from you

01:39:30.380 | on a fairly regular basis, expects things from you.

01:39:33.460 | Could be professional things, could be personal things,

01:39:35.520 | but where there's an ongoing expectation

01:39:38.060 | that you show up emotionally, physically,

01:39:41.820 | financially, whatever.

01:39:44.100 | - Yeah, so first of all, we strongly recommend

01:39:48.600 | against the direct hit, is don't tell the person,

01:39:51.960 | "Look, you do this, this, this, and this,

01:39:54.540 | "and that's terrible, and I don't wanna be,

01:39:57.000 | "I don't wanna work with you,

01:39:58.360 | "I don't wanna be in a relationship with you,

01:40:00.480 | "I don't wanna be close to you because of your behavior."

01:40:04.700 | That high-conflict people puts them through the roof.

01:40:09.000 | They will defend themselves,

01:40:11.400 | and for the next months or years,

01:40:14.380 | they may put you in litigation,

01:40:17.680 | they may stalk you depending on your relationship.

01:40:22.680 | They will hate you for that.

01:40:26.040 | - They'll blame you.

01:40:27.040 | - They will blame you, and that fulfills their picture

01:40:30.840 | that it's all your fault.

01:40:32.880 | And now, look, you have violated the most basic thing,

01:40:36.580 | is that you will never blame me.

01:40:39.760 | So don't blame them.

01:40:42.160 | Second thing is, don't blame yourself,

01:40:46.920 | because that reinforces to them.

01:40:49.000 | Like if you say, "You know, I just can't,

01:40:51.880 | "you know, I'm a sensitive person,

01:40:53.880 | "and I just can't keep up with you.

01:40:58.760 | "I know I'm defective,

01:41:00.460 | "and I know I'm no good at this, this, and this,

01:41:03.460 | "and so I just have to end this relationship,

01:41:07.460 | "and I so much apologize.

01:41:09.720 | "It's all my fault, you know, I do everything wrong,

01:41:13.100 | "and I'm gonna go really look at myself

01:41:16.020 | "and get some therapy, and I'm so sorry,

01:41:18.300 | "but I just can't, you know, keep up with you.

01:41:22.020 | "You're such a really good this, this, and this,

01:41:25.740 | "and I just can't keep up with that."

01:41:28.720 | Well, they're gonna blame you for that,

01:41:31.100 | and you're, depending on their personality,

01:41:33.860 | if they tend to have borderline traits,

01:41:35.780 | they're gonna feel abandoned by you.

01:41:37.860 | They have narcissistic traits,

01:41:39.460 | they're gonna feel put down by you.

01:41:42.960 | They're gonna, 'cause you're supposed

01:41:44.300 | to see them as superior.

01:41:46.260 | If they have antisocial traits,

01:41:48.420 | they're gonna feel like, "Wait a minute, you know,

01:41:51.380 | "you're supposed to be submissive to me,

01:41:53.680 | "and yet you're walking away."

01:41:55.860 | So you don't wanna blame yourself.

01:41:58.880 | So you're gonna go, "Well, what's left?"

01:42:00.780 | What's left is we aren't a good fit,

01:42:05.660 | our goals have gone in different directions,

01:42:08.400 | I'm really ready for a career change,

01:42:13.520 | I wanna go back to school, or, you know,

01:42:17.180 | I just realized I'm not ready for a committed relationship.

01:42:22.100 | So it's not about you, and it's not about them,

01:42:24.980 | it's not about blame.

01:42:26.580 | You wanna try to keep it away from blame.

01:42:28.660 | Now, some people say it's dishonest

01:42:33.420 | to not tell them everything.

01:42:36.020 | And let's talk about brutal honesty.

01:42:39.420 | High-conflict people really love brutal honesty,

01:42:42.300 | and they'll tell you, "I'm just being honest,

01:42:44.340 | "you're stupid, or a jerk, or whatever."

01:42:47.460 | That's high-conflict people.

01:42:49.380 | Reasonable people don't tell everybody

01:42:52.420 | every negative thing they think.

01:42:54.200 | That's just not healthy for relationships.

01:42:57.340 | So it's okay to say, you know,

01:43:02.020 | "We seem to be going in different directions,"

01:43:04.300 | or, "I have different plans,

01:43:05.540 | "I've realized I wanna change."

01:43:07.640 | So those are basic principles.

01:43:11.140 | The worst thing in ending a relationship

01:43:15.600 | or reducing contact is to go back and forth.

01:43:20.020 | The worst thing is to pour out your feelings to the person.

01:43:24.820 | I had this, people getting divorced,

01:43:27.140 | and they tell them, "I'm so sorry,

01:43:29.060 | "and I love you so much," and it was that.

01:43:31.660 | Pouring out your feelings to someone

01:43:34.220 | brings them closer to you.

01:43:36.500 | So you wanna start holding back some,

01:43:40.060 | and the other person say, "Well, let's work,

01:43:42.380 | "let's go to counseling, let's do this."

01:43:45.120 | And if you're not sure, go to counseling, I recommend that.

01:43:48.220 | But if you're sure, just say,

01:43:50.520 | "You know, I'm kind of not there anymore.

01:43:53.740 | "I really need to be more on my own."

01:43:57.480 | So don't go back and forth,

01:43:58.940 | 'cause that really makes it raw,

01:44:01.140 | and sometimes presages violence in divorces.

01:44:06.100 | A high-conflict person,

01:44:09.780 | especially with some of the personality disorder traits,

01:44:13.780 | can't handle the opening and closing, opening and closing.

01:44:17.400 | But the other thing, as I say, do it in steps

01:44:21.700 | so the person can adjust.

01:44:24.400 | You might say, "I'm thinking about making a career change,"

01:44:29.820 | or, "I'm thinking that maybe this relationship

01:44:33.300 | "isn't the right one for me anymore."

01:44:37.120 | So the person gets used to the idea

01:44:40.300 | this may be coming to an end.

01:44:42.340 | And then, "I'd like to move out,

01:44:45.840 | "and have more time alone to think."

01:44:50.660 | And then, you're at a safe distance,

01:44:53.060 | and you say, "I've thought about it,

01:44:56.080 | "and we really need to get divorced.

01:44:58.640 | "And let's go to a divorce mediator.

01:45:00.800 | "I wanna be amicable.

01:45:03.200 | "I don't hate you.

01:45:04.120 | "In many ways, I still love you,

01:45:05.880 | "but we're just not meant to be a couple anymore.

01:45:09.240 | "If there's kids involved,

01:45:11.480 | "then I really want us to have

01:45:13.840 | "a supportive relationship for them.

01:45:15.820 | "If there aren't, then maybe this really is the end."

01:45:19.700 | But it's step-by-step so this person can adjust

01:45:24.500 | to the fact that you really are leaving,

01:45:28.060 | but not too long and not too many steps,

01:45:31.140 | 'cause then their expectations are raised,

01:45:32.960 | "Oh, maybe you're not really leaving."

01:45:34.860 | So these are general principles.

01:45:38.740 | Depends a lot on the specifics.

01:45:41.600 | - Yeah, that was very helpful

01:45:44.040 | in reference to the high-conflict person,

01:45:45.780 | especially not placing blame on them.

01:45:47.640 | I mean, I suppose in your own mind,

01:45:48.780 | you can hold all the litany of reasons

01:45:51.060 | why they are a terrible choice,

01:45:52.900 | or I guess more typically, if we're realistic,

01:45:57.400 | it's not going to be all black and white, right?

01:46:00.020 | I mean, one would hope that at the first sight

01:46:03.060 | of really egregious behavior, people are like, "I'm done."

01:46:05.620 | But typically it's a mix, right?

01:46:06.980 | I mean, this is, professionally and personally,

01:46:09.900 | it's often a mix.

01:46:11.580 | And I've certainly observed this professionally

01:46:15.540 | where people wanted to collect the degree,

01:46:18.160 | or they were three years into a degree,

01:46:20.660 | and leaving, it's always an option,

01:46:24.580 | and yet sometimes it's not an option.

01:46:26.580 | They have plans and financial obligations,

01:46:29.380 | and sunk cost is a real thing.

01:46:32.120 | People always talk about sunk cost,

01:46:33.420 | like, "Oh, that's just sunk cost."

01:46:35.020 | Sunk cost is a real thing.

01:46:36.780 | So I think, okay, so with the high-conflict person,

01:46:40.180 | I think you beautifully illustrated

01:46:41.900 | how to not blame them, not blame yourself.

01:46:45.280 | Internally, you can hold any reasonable understanding

01:46:49.940 | that you come to, but you don't have to share all that.

01:46:52.100 | And that you don't want to oscillate in indecision,

01:46:54.780 | but that perhaps things, some staging of the exit,

01:46:59.780 | not staging theatrically, rather staging meaning in stages,

01:47:04.300 | increments would be a better word.

01:47:07.580 | What about with the high-conflict victim-playing person?

01:47:12.580 | That seems like it's a little trickier.

01:47:15.460 | Yeah, please. - Let me back up a minute,

01:47:17.060 | 'cause I want to say there's some times

01:47:18.660 | where you just need to get out and do it all at once,

01:47:22.140 | and don't ease yourself out.

01:47:25.100 | - Serious physical or emotional risks.

01:47:26.660 | - Yes, so you may need to get away before you hint

01:47:30.020 | that I no longer want to be married to you.

01:47:32.780 | And I've worked with people, consulted with them

01:47:37.300 | on established, moving out when the other person

01:47:41.540 | isn't there, they and the kids go to a safe place,

01:47:45.140 | they've got their lawyer, and then they tell this person

01:47:48.320 | that I'm getting divorced from you.

01:47:50.380 | Because people get killed when they separate

01:47:53.380 | with certain high-conflict domestic violence people.

01:47:57.180 | So, also in the workplace, sometimes they're going

01:48:01.260 | to destroy, they're gonna send emails,

01:48:03.300 | they're gonna be really destructive, they may,

01:48:05.900 | you might say I'm gonna leave in a month,

01:48:08.140 | and they're so angry that they're gonna really

01:48:11.860 | destroy your business.

01:48:13.260 | - Well, this is why in the professional setting,

01:48:14.940 | they're, forgive the word, 'cause it's associated

01:48:18.180 | with this podcast often, but there are protocols

01:48:21.580 | for this in the workplace where if you have

01:48:23.780 | to let somebody go, there's a sequence of steps.

01:48:28.700 | And sometimes it involves telling people,

01:48:31.180 | you'll go home, we'll ship you your things,

01:48:32.900 | that's one extreme, go home now and there's somebody

01:48:35.540 | waiting to escort you out type of thing.

01:48:37.580 | Other times it's, listen, you're gonna finish out the month,

01:48:41.980 | but you're gonna finish that month out at home.

01:48:44.300 | Other times it's, hey, you're welcome to stay

01:48:46.460 | and continue to participate, but by X date,

01:48:50.460 | that's your final day.

01:48:51.580 | So there's any number of different variations

01:48:53.540 | on these themes in the professional setting.

01:48:55.900 | It sounds like there's any number of different variations

01:48:57.820 | in the personal setting too.

01:48:58.660 | - Right, it's nuanced.

01:49:00.340 | And that's where getting consultation,

01:49:02.860 | having a therapist, a lawyer, a high conflict consultant,

01:49:06.900 | someone that you kind of walk it through with,

01:49:09.420 | maybe even practice what you're going to say with.

01:49:12.300 | - A third party observer seems really key, right?

01:49:15.100 | - Often.

01:49:16.020 | - Just for peace of mind.

01:49:18.260 | - Yes.

01:49:19.100 | Yeah, so mostly gradual, but sometimes fast, really depends.

01:49:25.740 | Now you asked about the person who plays the victim.

01:49:31.180 | And I would suggest that that's very common

01:49:34.540 | with high conflict people,

01:49:36.380 | that when aggressive behavior doesn't work,

01:49:38.780 | they switch to, oh, how can you do this to me?

01:49:42.140 | I'm so sad.

01:49:44.020 | And what's interesting, the word that,

01:49:46.060 | I didn't come up with this,

01:49:47.180 | other people came up with in divorce settings,

01:49:50.660 | where let's say you're divorcing someone

01:49:53.620 | with high conflict personality,

01:49:56.860 | and they're like, I hate you,

01:50:00.460 | I hate you, don't leave me kind of personality.

01:50:04.140 | And so, I'm divorcing you,

01:50:07.060 | and they're like in a rage at you,

01:50:09.940 | and then no, I'm really leaving.

01:50:12.300 | Then they switch and beg and plead.

01:50:15.620 | And I've got cases where people say,

01:50:18.020 | and my ex-to-be just seduced me,

01:50:22.140 | and somehow I went along with it,

01:50:23.780 | 'cause it felt real good.

01:50:25.140 | And it's back and forth from the high conflict person,

01:50:29.860 | and they call it hoovering.

01:50:32.020 | You go, hoovering, where did that word come from?

01:50:34.740 | The hoover vacuum.

01:50:36.420 | - Oh, I see how it sounds like hoover vacuum.

01:50:37.260 | - What happens is they vacuum,

01:50:38.580 | they suck you back into the relationship.

01:50:41.420 | And it's very common

01:50:43.180 | with some of the high conflict personalities.

01:50:45.380 | They can't stand to lose you,

01:50:46.940 | and when rage doesn't work,

01:50:48.780 | then they try to seduce you back in.

01:50:51.660 | And some people have allowed themselves to get back in.

01:50:55.180 | And that's not good.

01:50:56.860 | You've gotta be ready for that,

01:50:58.620 | don't be surprised by that,

01:50:59.980 | and don't give in to that if you're sure it's over.

01:51:02.940 | If you're not sure it's over,

01:51:04.020 | get couples counseling and see where it might go.

01:51:07.420 | - I know a number of people who,

01:51:10.580 | let's just say, conceived children

01:51:13.540 | very in close proximity to the ending of the relationship,

01:51:20.260 | and therefore there was no end to the relationship

01:51:22.380 | until several years later.

01:51:24.300 | I don't know of a single case

01:51:25.540 | where that led to a persistence of the relationship,

01:51:28.300 | for better or worse.

01:51:30.700 | So this sounds like it falls

01:51:32.580 | under the rubric of hoovering, right?

01:51:34.900 | People are leaving, and then they end up,

01:51:37.300 | you know, one more time,

01:51:39.380 | or just to try and make the pain go away type thing.

01:51:43.100 | And then they're bringing more of an attachment.

01:51:47.380 | I mean, obviously, a child is a forever tie, as they say.

01:51:50.980 | So, yeah.

01:51:55.380 | - I wouldn't say it's the majority of cases for sure,

01:51:58.180 | but it's a common symptom with high conflict people.

01:52:02.620 | And you hit on it, it's like they can't handle the pain.

01:52:05.860 | And so they really bring the person back in.

01:52:09.540 | But if this is the direction you're going,

01:52:11.420 | you need to let them start coping with the pain,

01:52:15.300 | either step by step, or if it's dangerous, all at once.

01:52:19.240 | But don't go back if you can help it.

01:52:21.500 | - These are very helpful.

01:52:25.520 | They're not even tips.

01:52:27.460 | This is very useful information for everyone listening.

01:52:30.460 | I'm sure they agree.

01:52:32.340 | We had a guest on this podcast, Jonathan Haidt,

01:52:34.980 | who's written the book "Anxious Generation,"

01:52:36.620 | "The Coddling of the American Mind."

01:52:39.100 | And he mentioned some statistics that younger folks,

01:52:43.700 | so high school and younger, have seemed to lost

01:52:47.500 | or are losing the capacity to arbitrate among themselves.

01:52:53.800 | That now, more typically, if there's a conflict,

01:52:57.440 | and here we're assuming not extreme conflict

01:53:00.460 | or anything criminal, but where there's a conflict

01:53:02.980 | between two kids at school,

01:53:05.340 | and they bring it to the authorities.

01:53:07.600 | When I was growing up, that was called tattling.

01:53:10.100 | You were called a rat,

01:53:11.660 | and it got you semi-ostracized if you did it.

01:53:15.380 | You learn quickly, don't do it.

01:53:16.820 | Either you learn directly or you learn by observation.

01:53:20.160 | You don't be a tattletale.

01:53:21.700 | He claims that nowadays,

01:53:23.900 | there's more of this lack of ability to arbitrate

01:53:26.860 | and kids calling out other kids publicly or publicly.

01:53:32.820 | And that parents are doing it now too.

01:53:35.820 | And this seems worrisome in that it seems like

01:53:40.180 | it would foster this group segregation

01:53:44.020 | and cultivating through emotional contagion,

01:53:47.420 | blaming of others and negative advocates.

01:53:51.060 | I mean, I don't wanna blame social media for everything

01:53:53.980 | 'cause I love social media for certain things.

01:53:55.820 | I exist on social media for a number of things

01:53:57.880 | that I believe are truly benevolent.

01:53:59.500 | So I'd be hypocritical if I said I didn't like social media,

01:54:01.500 | I love social media for certain things.

01:54:03.760 | But are you concerned about this?

01:54:06.220 | I mean, this seems like a real issue.

01:54:08.100 | I mean, the profession of law exists

01:54:10.700 | because of a lack of ability

01:54:11.940 | for people to arbitrate among themselves,

01:54:13.420 | but that's not what we're talking about here.

01:54:15.280 | We're not talking about people bringing therapists

01:54:17.540 | or lawyers to really help mediators.

01:54:19.980 | We're talking about just people

01:54:21.620 | going to the authorities or online

01:54:23.700 | and trying to create some drama for what, to what end?

01:54:28.260 | - Yeah, I think in some ways, to some extent,

01:54:31.420 | that's high conflict parents

01:54:33.580 | who see everything in all or nothing terms,

01:54:36.380 | see their kids as offended by other kids

01:54:41.380 | or they're protecting their children.

01:54:44.280 | And I am concerned about it.

01:54:46.900 | And I also agree it isn't just social media.

01:54:49.860 | In many ways, I've been watching this

01:54:53.340 | since families got smaller.

01:54:56.220 | So I remember growing up, most families had several kids.

01:55:01.100 | The divorces I do now often have one or two kids.

01:55:05.480 | And that's been true in many ways since the 1970s.

01:55:10.420 | And a lot of it has to do with birth control.

01:55:12.980 | So don't just blame social media, also blame birth control,

01:55:16.740 | that when people could decide how large a family they have,

01:55:20.900 | they decided to have smaller families.

01:55:22.500 | So birth control pills came out in the '60s.

01:55:25.980 | And the '70s, suddenly we started noticing

01:55:28.420 | people are having two kids.

01:55:30.500 | And by the '80s, '90s, 2000s, a lot of people have one kid.

01:55:35.500 | My most high conflict divorce cases have one kid

01:55:39.840 | because it's hard to share one kid.

01:55:42.840 | It's a little bit easier to share two kids.

01:55:45.420 | It's a lot easier to share four kids.

01:55:48.140 | It's like, you can have them for the weekend.

01:55:50.660 | I'm not gonna fight with you about that.

01:55:52.660 | Please, take them.

01:55:54.160 | And the small family, and this is, I think,

01:55:58.220 | structurally a lot, the small family structure

01:56:01.980 | is feeding parents becoming enmeshed with their kids,

01:56:06.200 | some parents.

01:56:07.660 | And so their kids become their partners,

01:56:10.220 | especially in these high conflict divorces.

01:56:13.020 | Now dad's a bad guy, mom's a bad woman,

01:56:16.300 | and the child, especially often the oldest child,

01:56:19.560 | now is my best friend,

01:56:20.940 | my kind of junior partner in the world.

01:56:25.140 | And that's where you see a lot of,

01:56:26.700 | you start getting alienated kids.

01:56:28.420 | Now they hate dad and mom's perfect,

01:56:30.700 | or they hate mom and dad's perfect.

01:56:32.420 | - Parental estrangement is growing like crazy

01:56:37.420 | as a phenomenon.

01:56:39.380 | We're heading towards the holidays

01:56:40.580 | in a few weeks and months, and this is gonna come up.

01:56:43.500 | I actually did an Instagram Live

01:56:46.240 | with a really skilled therapist named Mathias Barker,

01:56:51.020 | who specializes in, among other things,

01:56:54.260 | parental estrangement.

01:56:55.980 | It's so common now, kids just deciding,

01:56:58.940 | I'm done with my parents.

01:57:00.140 | - Right, and it's partly the culture is fulfilling that,

01:57:04.200 | that we're now seeing everything in opposing terms,

01:57:07.880 | all or nothing terms, et cetera.

01:57:10.420 | And the big message I wanna get across with this,

01:57:12.780 | with all parents and kids, is it's a question of skills,

01:57:17.600 | that the kids aren't growing up with the skills

01:57:20.140 | to manage the nuances.

01:57:22.620 | And so we teach a lot of our skills,

01:57:26.340 | and we teach parents, teach these to your kids in divorce.

01:57:30.460 | Flexible thinking, teach them flexible thinking.

01:57:33.460 | Teach them manage emotions.

01:57:35.380 | Teach them to moderate their behavior.

01:57:40.380 | Teach them to check themselves.

01:57:42.540 | Wait a minute, am I doing something here,

01:57:44.860 | rather than always you, you, you.

01:57:47.340 | And we developed a method, we call it New Ways for Families,

01:57:51.060 | which was designed for high-conflict divorce cases,

01:57:54.620 | for both parents to kind of learn these skills,

01:57:58.720 | and practice, either with a therapist, or a coach,

01:58:02.600 | or just watching online and typing in answers,

01:58:06.860 | to practice these four.

01:58:08.220 | We call these the four big skills for life.

01:58:11.400 | And this is, I think, what parents need to teach their kids,

01:58:14.620 | is you can solve that problem.

01:58:17.020 | Tell me what happened, okay.

01:58:18.940 | Let's talk about what you could say to Johnny.

01:58:22.180 | And we teach skills we call ear statements.

01:58:26.180 | Empathy, attention, and respect.

01:58:28.140 | A statement that shows that.

01:58:30.040 | And so we teach parents, teach your child,

01:58:32.940 | you know, your best friend who just broke up with you,

01:58:36.340 | might be feeling hurt about something.

01:58:38.660 | Maybe something they said.

01:58:40.300 | What can you do?

01:58:41.700 | So we encourage kids to help their kids

01:58:44.860 | manage the situation.

01:58:46.940 | And we encourage them to manage their relationship

01:58:49.460 | with the other parent.

01:58:50.780 | They come back from a visitation, or access,

01:58:55.340 | from a weekend, let's say with dad,

01:58:58.340 | and child says, you know, dad didn't look at my drawing.

01:59:02.500 | I drew a picture, and dad didn't look at my drawing.

01:59:05.640 | High-conflict parents says, oh, your dad's a jerk.

01:59:08.820 | You know, I always hated that about him.

01:59:11.940 | A reasonable parent says, oh, that's sad.

01:59:14.700 | Well, you know what, next time, if he

01:59:18.860 | doesn't look at the picture right away, maybe wait an hour,

01:59:22.420 | and then show him the picture again.

01:59:24.220 | Maybe he got busy, maybe this or that.

01:59:26.940 | Teach your child to manage the relationship,

01:59:31.540 | even with the other parent.

01:59:33.460 | And those parents don't have high-conflict divorces.

01:59:37.020 | High-conflict divorces have the other.

01:59:39.060 | Your dad's a jerk, you know, forget about him.

01:59:41.820 | He'll never pay attention to you.

01:59:43.980 | And that's when you see parents estranged or alienated,

01:59:49.660 | the kids alienated from the parents.

01:59:52.100 | So you think that with increasing number of siblings,

01:59:54.660 | kids learn how to work things out among themselves.

01:59:57.180 | That's another big part of it, is you

01:59:58.780 | have to find out how to share.

02:00:01.220 | So I had three siblings.

02:00:03.060 | And we grew up, and it's fascinating--

02:00:04.860 | You're one of three, or you had three others?

02:00:07.300 | I'm one of four, so I have three others.

02:00:09.140 | That's a good-sized kit.

02:00:10.380 | A brother, two sisters, so four.

02:00:13.020 | And what's fascinating for me, and I

02:00:15.760 | think it helped shape my personality and approach

02:00:18.580 | to life, is we grew up without television.

02:00:20.860 | We didn't have something to watch after school.

02:00:23.580 | We had to deal with each other.

02:00:25.500 | So we might play kickball in the backyard,

02:00:28.460 | or we might read, or something or other.

02:00:31.820 | But we had to learn conflict resolution with each other.

02:00:35.900 | And our parents were like, you go talk to your brother, Bill.

02:00:38.980 | I don't have time to hear your complaint.

02:00:42.300 | And so structurally, it's shocking,

02:00:46.100 | going from that to doing people's divorces

02:00:48.460 | with one or two children.

02:00:50.140 | And even two is better than just one,

02:00:52.420 | because they do learn to share.

02:00:54.900 | But parents feel so guilty today,

02:00:58.220 | and that's our culture is really not fair to parents, I think,

02:01:04.500 | to know that teach your child ways

02:01:07.460 | to deal with it themselves.

02:01:09.700 | I'll say, I have one sibling.

02:01:11.300 | We get along terrifically well.

02:01:12.980 | We're exceedingly close.

02:01:14.420 | But I can recall when we were kids,

02:01:16.220 | if we were getting into the scrap,

02:01:18.180 | my mom or dad would say, just sort it out among yourselves.

02:01:22.300 | Just don't get any blood on the carpet.

02:01:24.660 | It was like that.

02:01:25.940 | It was like that.

02:01:26.660 | But then again, my mom's from New Jersey,

02:01:28.360 | and so it's like a different style, right?

02:01:31.020 | Anyone from New Jersey will understand that was a joke.

02:01:34.020 | But the point being that we learned pretty quickly

02:01:36.460 | how to sort things out.

02:01:37.420 | My sister and I have had a few conflicts over the years,

02:01:39.740 | but we get along terrifically well.

02:01:41.200 | We go on vacation together for our birthdays every year.

02:01:44.980 | But both of us had a lot of friends in the neighborhood.

02:01:49.300 | I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of boys my age.

02:01:51.860 | She grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of girls her age.

02:01:55.060 | And so I quickly learned in that big pack of boys,

02:01:59.100 | and then I entered sports and got involved in things

02:02:01.180 | where it was like big packs of boys.

02:02:03.700 | That's just kind of how it worked out, eventually

02:02:06.100 | young men and then men, that you couldn't say

02:02:11.180 | certain things or it was going to mean trouble.

02:02:14.720 | - Yeah, you'd get punched in the face if you say that.

02:02:16.760 | - Right, but nowadays that would be considered like,

02:02:18.580 | oh, goodness, and you know, like, wait,

02:02:20.120 | obviously not a proponent for violence,

02:02:21.780 | but there were certain, I probably learned at 14

02:02:24.160 | that there were certain things you didn't say to friends

02:02:26.160 | or you'd get into the scrap with them,

02:02:28.080 | and then you'd remain friends.

02:02:29.720 | And so we arbitrated among each other,

02:02:31.600 | but also just how to share how to, you know,

02:02:35.560 | we would, I don't recommend this because I'll,

02:02:38.720 | well, whatever, we used to do these like dirt clod wars

02:02:41.040 | where you'd throw dirt at each other's heads,

02:02:42.900 | like, you know, and occasionally someone would throw a rock

02:02:47.500 | and cut some kid, and then, but that kid who threw the rock

02:02:50.740 | would get in trouble with us.

02:02:53.100 | It's not like we'd turn them into his parents.

02:02:55.140 | You just kind of knew like he plays dirty

02:02:56.940 | and then he wouldn't play dirty again.

02:02:58.500 | Or if he did, then he kind of knew it.

02:03:00.020 | Like you got, there was just sort of an understanding

02:03:02.260 | of how people sorted out in groups.

02:03:05.340 | And this stuff hearkens back to primitive circuitry

02:03:08.120 | that's present in all old world primates, right?

02:03:10.380 | Chimpanzees in particular.

02:03:11.940 | I always tell people, if you want a really good watch

02:03:14.520 | and you want to learn about human behavior,

02:03:16.420 | watch Chimp Empire, the Netflix series,

02:03:19.640 | because it's basically the, it's the core circuitry

02:03:23.580 | of the primate brain in action, how people team up,

02:03:26.440 | how they cooperate, how they then,

02:03:28.660 | all the human behaviors pretty much are there

02:03:31.180 | except the technology development.

02:03:33.020 | Those chimps aren't building rockets and electric cars,

02:03:35.720 | but they're engaging in all the sorts of behaviors,

02:03:38.960 | both hierarchical and non-hierarchical,

02:03:40.700 | romantic and professional, so to speak.

02:03:43.100 | Chimps have professions too.

02:03:44.500 | To bring about cooperative and non-cooperative behavior

02:03:50.260 | and sort it out, it's fascinating.

02:03:52.620 | - Then the chimps are our closest relative, I think.

02:03:54.980 | - Yeah, as far as I know.

02:03:55.920 | I mean, I have friends who are like really into the genomics

02:03:58.480 | of all this stuff, so I want to be careful.

02:04:00.700 | But I believe so.

02:04:01.900 | They are old world primates.

02:04:03.540 | We are old world primates.

02:04:05.380 | So there's a common lineage there for sure.

02:04:08.220 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

02:04:09.440 | But I want to really reinforce what you're saying

02:04:12.320 | is about the community of learning

02:04:14.500 | and kids growing up in the community of learning.

02:04:17.940 | And I think it plays a role with bullies.

02:04:22.320 | Because what happens is the community of kids

02:04:25.280 | figures out who's bullies

02:04:27.400 | and confronts them with their behavior.

02:04:30.360 | And people ask me, well, are adult bullies,

02:04:33.400 | 'cause my book is about adult bullies,

02:04:35.680 | were they bullies as kids?

02:04:37.280 | And I'll say it seems to be pretty universally

02:04:39.840 | they were as kids.

02:04:41.520 | But most kids try bullying at least once

02:04:45.120 | and they grow out of it because they get feedback.

02:04:47.960 | They learn that's not gonna work,

02:04:50.080 | you're not gonna have friends, I'm not gonna be around.

02:04:54.160 | So bullies learn to either change their behavior

02:04:58.520 | or to live on the fringe of the group

02:05:00.760 | if they don't change their behavior.

02:05:03.360 | And so part of why we're seeing more adult bullies today,

02:05:07.760 | I think, is because they used to be on the fringe

02:05:11.520 | because, or they learned how to get along.

02:05:15.160 | But if they're on the fringe because nobody liked them

02:05:18.480 | and they didn't change their behavior.

02:05:20.600 | What we're seeing today is bullies are finding each other.

02:05:25.480 | And this is one of the negatives of social media, I think.

02:05:29.320 | And I agree, there's a lot of good things.

02:05:31.280 | But this is one of the surprising things

02:05:33.320 | when I researched my book.

02:05:35.280 | Bullies are finding a group for themselves.

02:05:38.560 | And instead of the group teaching them not to be a bully,

02:05:42.760 | the group reinforces being a bully,

02:05:45.320 | says you were justified in doing that.

02:05:48.360 | And one of the shocking things

02:05:50.520 | is to find that school shooters

02:05:53.120 | have a support system online.

02:05:55.600 | - Really?

02:05:56.440 | - That they seem to, some of the research says

02:05:59.120 | they always have a social media group.

02:06:01.220 | They have peers that they're trying to somewhat impress

02:06:04.960 | and that may actually edge them on.

02:06:08.100 | And that if they track down, they find these folks have,

02:06:11.960 | and I think they should look for that,

02:06:13.520 | find out who they've been talking to,

02:06:16.240 | who they communicate with.

02:06:18.880 | And so what I think we're seeing is bullies

02:06:21.840 | are reinforcing their bad behavior

02:06:24.560 | rather than social pressure for them to learn good behavior,

02:06:29.200 | which is for me, I've done a lot of group therapy.

02:06:33.180 | I've treated people that go to Alcoholics Anonymous,

02:06:36.500 | Narcotics Anonymous, and the group reinforces

02:06:40.120 | and teaches them good behavior.

02:06:42.860 | But bullies are finding other bullies

02:06:46.060 | and reinforcing their bad behavior.

02:06:47.880 | And that's an issue we have to address,

02:06:49.680 | especially with young men,

02:06:52.060 | is we have to get on top of that

02:06:54.580 | and redirect them into socially pro-social activities.

02:06:59.580 | And most people don't realize that.

02:07:02.020 | I didn't realize that.

02:07:03.500 | - Now that comes as a real surprise to me as well.

02:07:07.260 | Are there female bullies and male bullies online?

02:07:10.900 | Or is it more typical that there are groups

02:07:13.060 | of male bullies online?

02:07:14.540 | - I haven't heard about female bullies finding each other.

02:07:18.400 | Well, actually I should take that back.

02:07:22.460 | And this gets into a sensitive area

02:07:25.460 | about personality disorders.

02:07:28.100 | But borderline personality disorder

02:07:31.500 | is one of the more treatable personality disorders.

02:07:35.700 | And people become aware that they have this disorder

02:07:39.140 | a lot from internet information.

02:07:42.080 | But what seems to happen,

02:07:43.920 | there's a couple stages for them.

02:07:45.700 | They become aware before they change their behavior.

02:07:49.820 | And like DBT, dialectical behavior therapy,

02:07:54.260 | is a really good treatment for that.

02:07:56.620 | But therapists, and my wife is a DBT therapist,

02:08:01.620 | said that they become aware of it

02:08:03.900 | before they change their behavior.

02:08:05.540 | So they do self-sabotaging things,

02:08:09.200 | even though they shouldn't.

02:08:10.500 | I know I shouldn't do this, but.

02:08:12.340 | And then finally they learn to change their behavior.

02:08:15.540 | Well, some people are discovering their borderline

02:08:17.900 | and finding other people online

02:08:20.420 | and reinforcing their borderline view of the world.

02:08:24.020 | There's evil people and good people.

02:08:26.900 | And occasionally they write reviews of my books

02:08:30.660 | and say how awful a person I am

02:08:32.900 | because I talk about personality disorders,

02:08:35.380 | even though I say don't identify anybody.

02:08:38.380 | And I believe personality disorders in most cases

02:08:41.580 | could be helped if they're open to that.

02:08:44.520 | So I think there's some degree of, say, female people

02:08:48.620 | with that personality finding each other

02:08:51.420 | and reinforcing that behavior.

02:08:54.100 | But what I read was, and I cite it in my book in the,

02:08:58.940 | I'm trying to remember, I don't remember which chapter,

02:09:02.780 | but that some researcher at a university said,

02:09:07.140 | look for their social media connections.

02:09:10.220 | And you'll find that there was a reinforcement

02:09:13.260 | of this behavior rather than people saying,

02:09:15.940 | hey, you can't do that, you've got to cut it out.

02:09:18.420 | - One of the best pieces of advice

02:09:20.820 | a colleague ever gave me was when I started teaching

02:09:24.100 | in the university to undergraduates,

02:09:25.800 | this was prior to my arriving at Stanford where I am now,

02:09:28.660 | I had this big class.

02:09:32.020 | And this colleague who's a neuroscientist,

02:09:34.260 | very esteemed neuroscientist,

02:09:35.380 | but also trained as a psychiatrist, he's an MD,

02:09:38.380 | he said, just remember the statistics

02:09:40.480 | on various psychiatric and personality disorders.

02:09:44.740 | You've got 1% of the population is schizophrenic,

02:09:47.260 | you've got 10% at any time

02:09:49.360 | that's probably experiencing major depression,

02:09:51.220 | you've got borderline, you've got that.

02:09:52.540 | And he said, so when you look out on your classroom,

02:09:55.660 | just understand that it's a not necessarily

02:09:59.280 | representative population, but that those challenges,

02:10:03.180 | he posed in the right way, he was patient-oriented,

02:10:05.340 | those challenges are present in that population.

02:10:09.180 | I mention this now because it's something to keep in mind

02:10:11.920 | anytime one goes onto social media and reads comments,

02:10:14.900 | you have to run those comments through the filter

02:10:19.580 | of what we know about the frequency

02:10:21.320 | of those challenges for people.

02:10:23.980 | Which is not to say that every negative comment

02:10:27.080 | is coming from somebody that's borderline or sociopathic,

02:10:30.020 | but there's a high probability that if somebody

02:10:34.240 | is continuously doing that,

02:10:37.360 | especially in the blame game type scenario,

02:10:40.340 | that that's what's going on there.

02:10:43.300 | - There's something I wanna fit in here,

02:10:45.320 | and that is that we need to understand

02:10:49.800 | that people with personality disorders

02:10:51.600 | didn't choose to have them.

02:10:53.560 | And so I have a lot of compassion for people like that.

02:10:57.920 | And so I have a lot of students over the years,

02:11:02.920 | and they write reflective journals.

02:11:05.800 | And occasionally they put in their journal,

02:11:07.720 | "I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder."

02:11:11.360 | And I remember this one woman said,

02:11:13.200 | "So when you talked about borderline personality disorder,

02:11:16.600 | "it was a little uncomfortable for me,

02:11:19.080 | "but I found it helpful."

02:11:21.680 | And she was actually one of the better students in the class.

02:11:24.980 | And so she had that level of awareness,

02:11:27.820 | but she was still working on herself

02:11:31.480 | to manage the emotional rollercoaster and such.

02:11:36.480 | And so what's important to me is some people

02:11:39.840 | with borderline personality disorder

02:11:41.760 | may be angry with me 'cause I talk about it,

02:11:44.160 | 'cause they're early stage with this.

02:11:47.040 | But other people say, "Thank you, Bill, that was helpful."

02:11:50.900 | And so there's kind of a range there.

02:11:53.640 | But I also wanna say three basic reasons

02:11:57.440 | I think people develop personality disorders.

02:12:00.380 | The first is genetic tendencies.

02:12:03.080 | And various researchers say like 20 to 80%

02:12:07.120 | may be the genetic tendency, depending on the person.

02:12:11.340 | That early childhood, first five years of life,

02:12:14.640 | maybe attachment difficulties may be a driving factor,

02:12:19.400 | but also cultural environment.

02:12:21.560 | Some people say, the researcher in San Diego

02:12:27.480 | wrote "The Narcissism Epidemic,"

02:12:30.040 | and she says from her research

02:12:32.480 | that the decade you're born in

02:12:37.040 | influences your personality development

02:12:40.040 | as much as your family.

02:12:41.720 | - Fascinating.

02:12:42.560 | - I don't agree with that 'cause she's not a therapist

02:12:45.920 | and looked at the mental health.

02:12:47.040 | She looked at big surveys, college students especially.

02:12:51.000 | But I think that's more significant than we realize

02:12:55.000 | and more significant than I used to think.

02:12:57.780 | And so part of what you're saying

02:12:59.320 | is today's culture is reinforcing

02:13:02.000 | not taking responsibility.

02:13:04.480 | Whereas in the past, you had to solve problems yourself.

02:13:08.280 | - On the positive side, I'll just get to it.

02:13:12.360 | It seems that even though family structures

02:13:16.280 | have changed quite a lot,

02:13:18.880 | even though culture is changing quite a lot,

02:13:21.320 | there's this wonderful feature

02:13:23.880 | of social media and the internet now,

02:13:26.720 | which is what we're doing right now,

02:13:30.040 | which is the opportunity for experts like yourself

02:13:32.320 | to come on and educate.

02:13:34.160 | And I think that as we started off talking about,

02:13:37.400 | it's probably about 90% of people

02:13:40.200 | do not fall into this high-conflict personality category.

02:13:45.040 | And what we're talking about, what you're educating us on,

02:13:47.340 | is how to interact with this 10% in a way

02:13:49.660 | that brings about more functionality for everybody,

02:13:53.300 | more effective, professional, personal,

02:13:56.260 | familial interactions for everyone.

02:13:58.820 | It's not about just ostracizing those with challenges.

02:14:03.080 | So keeping with that,

02:14:05.160 | what should most people do

02:14:11.900 | if they are feeling frustrated with someone that they feel,

02:14:16.900 | for instance, 80% of your problems come from 20% of people.

02:14:20.960 | In this case, I guess we're saying

02:14:22.300 | like 90% of problems come from these 10% of people,

02:14:25.380 | but really it behooves us all to try and figure out

02:14:29.240 | how best to interact with others.

02:14:31.840 | And so you've spelled out a number of ways

02:14:33.540 | that we can do that today.

02:14:35.160 | If you were to kind of highlight, I never want to pressure,

02:14:39.740 | but highlight one or two things to just keep in mind

02:14:43.640 | as one moves through the world,

02:14:45.180 | the web tool seems especially effective.

02:14:49.280 | Is there anything else that you recommend

02:14:51.940 | that we just hold in mind as we navigate forward?

02:14:54.380 | 'Cause it's quite a landscape out there.

02:14:57.300 | - Yeah.

02:14:58.540 | Several things, and I can be brief with each of them.

02:15:01.700 | First, there's what I call the four forget about it's.

02:15:04.940 | Is forget about trying to give the person insight

02:15:07.940 | into how they're behaving.

02:15:10.400 | That blows up the person.

02:15:12.340 | Just like I said, don't blame them

02:15:14.300 | for you ending the relationship.

02:15:17.140 | So just forget about giving them insight.

02:15:20.220 | Instead, talk about what we can do now.

02:15:23.140 | Talk about options.

02:15:25.300 | Talk about, don't go inward with them,

02:15:28.140 | go outward with them.

02:15:29.780 | So when you go inward, you escalate their defensiveness.

02:15:33.200 | So don't try to give them insight into themselves.

02:15:35.780 | And a lot of people say, how can I make him see

02:15:38.940 | that what he's doing is so wrong?

02:15:40.740 | Or how can I make her understand

02:15:42.540 | that she's creating the problem we're trying to solve?

02:15:46.740 | Just forget about that.

02:15:47.940 | Talk about, okay, here's what our options are.

02:15:50.260 | Let's talk about what to do.

02:15:52.820 | Second is, don't emphasize the past.

02:15:56.540 | And people argue forever with high conflict people

02:15:59.220 | about the past, and you never resolve the past

02:16:01.740 | with a high conflict person.

02:16:03.840 | And I'll tell you in a minute why that may be.

02:16:07.260 | Focus on what to do now and the future.

02:16:10.060 | Future focus, not past focus.

02:16:12.840 | Maybe you need some information to understand a problem,

02:16:16.100 | but then emphasize the future.

02:16:18.960 | The third is, don't focus on emotions.

02:16:22.700 | And especially don't yell at them, don't burst into tears,

02:16:26.820 | don't tell them how frustrating they are, all of that.

02:16:30.840 | And this is what I'm gonna tell you now is a theory

02:16:33.660 | that I hope someone figures out.

02:16:35.860 | And that is, people with personality disorders

02:16:39.380 | and high conflict personalities don't seem to go through

02:16:42.940 | the five stages of the grieving and healing process.

02:16:46.400 | Denial, anger, bargaining, depression,

02:16:51.180 | sadness, and acceptance.

02:16:53.380 | They seem to get stuck at denial and anger.

02:16:57.500 | So what happens is, they don't resolve things.

02:17:00.660 | They don't, quotes, get over things.

02:17:03.080 | They don't get over the divorce.

02:17:04.620 | They don't get over the job loss.

02:17:06.460 | They don't get over having to sell their house

02:17:09.180 | 'cause they couldn't pay the mortgage.

02:17:11.460 | They don't experience the normal human

02:17:14.860 | healing and grieving process.

02:17:17.540 | So they're stuck.

02:17:19.060 | And so a lot of situations with them turn to anger.

02:17:23.060 | They're angry, but they're not resolved.

02:17:26.660 | So high conflict people are constantly talking

02:17:29.740 | about the past and how aggrieved they are.

02:17:33.260 | They shouldn't have done that to me.

02:17:35.100 | I was right to have done this.

02:17:37.660 | And people start, when I say that,

02:17:39.860 | like students in my class, oh yeah,

02:17:42.380 | that's what I see, they keep repeating themselves.

02:17:45.940 | And they go to as many people as they can

02:17:48.140 | and tell the story.

02:17:49.620 | I believe they're trying to grieve and heal,

02:17:52.740 | but they don't have the mechanism.

02:17:54.880 | And I don't know exactly why.

02:17:56.660 | So I'm hoping someday neuroscience will figure out

02:17:59.940 | what connection is missing and can we give people that

02:18:04.220 | so that they can grieve and heal.

02:18:05.940 | Well, what that means is, if you focus on emotions,

02:18:09.320 | you're focusing on an area that's unresolved

02:18:12.580 | and has a lot of hurt.

02:18:14.900 | And so if you say, well, how do you feel about that?

02:18:18.500 | They almost always say, I feel terrible.

02:18:20.860 | I suggest not saying, how you doing today?

02:18:23.880 | Because the answer I get is terrible.

02:18:27.180 | You know what she did yesterday.

02:18:28.780 | You know what he did last week.

02:18:31.140 | So instead, do small talk, do it about anything

02:18:34.940 | except about how are you feeling today.

02:18:39.140 | So don't ask how you're feeling.

02:18:41.540 | Focus on thinking and doing.

02:18:45.060 | And an example I teach lawyers and mediators

02:18:48.540 | is don't say, how do you feel about that proposal?

02:18:52.060 | Say, what do you think about that?

02:18:53.900 | Could you picture doing that?

02:18:55.300 | How could you do that?

02:18:56.540 | How could that work for you?

02:18:58.740 | Because if you focus, how do you feel?

02:19:01.300 | I feel insulted.

02:19:03.160 | I feel abandoned.

02:19:04.140 | And then they drown in that.

02:19:06.500 | And next thing you know, you've lost them.

02:19:09.180 | So avoid emotions.

02:19:12.300 | Don't focus on emotions, but acknowledge emotions.

02:19:15.820 | Say, I can see your frustration.

02:19:18.740 | Now here's how I can help you today.

02:19:21.820 | The fourth is don't use names.

02:19:24.420 | Don't label people.

02:19:26.020 | Don't say you're a high-conflict person.

02:19:28.580 | And lawyers do that to motivate their clients.

02:19:30.900 | That doesn't work.

02:19:33.140 | Don't say you have a personality disorder.

02:19:35.580 | You may be wrong, and that never motivates anybody.

02:19:39.540 | So that's the fourth.

02:19:40.380 | Forget about it.

02:19:41.300 | So that's key stuff for people to avoid.

02:19:45.140 | So that was a long answer, but when you're ready,

02:19:47.540 | I have four simple tips for things to do.

02:19:50.620 | That was a great answer.

02:19:53.020 | Would love to hear the four simple tips for people

02:19:55.460 | to pay attention to.

02:19:56.940 | OK, I'm so glad you asked that question.

02:19:59.980 | So we have what I call the CARS method.

02:20:03.260 | And we've actually trademarked this CARS method.

02:20:06.860 | Connecting, analyzing, responding, and setting

02:20:10.700 | limits.

02:20:12.420 | First is connect with the person.

02:20:14.380 | So someone's angry with you, or you're

02:20:16.540 | trying to help somebody with their problem.

02:20:19.820 | Is connect with them by giving them

02:20:22.700 | a statement that shows empathy, attention, and/or respect.

02:20:27.140 | You know, I can see how hard this is.

02:20:31.340 | I see your disappointment.

02:20:33.020 | I hear your frustration.

02:20:35.180 | I can understand.

02:20:37.260 | By saying I can, I'm showing I see them as an equal,

02:20:41.500 | rather than looking down on them.

02:20:43.500 | So that's the empathy rather than sympathy.

02:20:48.380 | Pay attention.

02:20:49.140 | Say, I'll pay attention.

02:20:50.420 | Tell me more.

02:20:51.140 | I want to understand your situation.

02:20:54.100 | And listen some.

02:20:56.420 | And so what I see all the time is people say,

02:21:00.620 | it's like, oh, good, because I'm going to listen to them.

02:21:04.420 | They don't have to prove-- they don't have to fight

02:21:06.620 | to get my attention.

02:21:08.300 | And high conflict people often are

02:21:10.220 | fighting to get attention, because they've

02:21:12.460 | turned everybody off.

02:21:14.500 | And that's why I teach lawyers and therapists that.

02:21:17.380 | So they're going to come to you as much as anything

02:21:19.580 | else to get your attention.

02:21:21.540 | So let them tell their story.

02:21:23.780 | Listen to them.

02:21:24.740 | Acknowledge the emotion.

02:21:27.180 | So empathy, attention, and respect.

02:21:29.820 | Find something you respect about them.

02:21:32.260 | They respect the kind of work they do.

02:21:34.860 | You respect their relationship with their son or daughter.

02:21:39.060 | Or you respect their commitment to resolving this dispute.

02:21:44.100 | So use those words.

02:21:46.220 | And what's fascinating is I teach this to people

02:21:49.580 | who I consult with.

02:21:50.740 | And then they come back and say, I did that.

02:21:53.340 | And it really worked.

02:21:54.300 | The person calmed down.

02:21:56.500 | I had one woman who said my boss was giving me a hard time.

02:22:01.820 | And so I'd run into my office to try not to interact with her.

02:22:06.020 | And I said, next time, especially like Monday morning

02:22:08.700 | or something, is go up to her and say, how was your weekend?

02:22:14.180 | Or say, I appreciated the presentation you gave last

02:22:17.940 | week.

02:22:18.440 | Give her some empathy, attention, and/or respect.

02:22:21.740 | You don't have to do all three of these.

02:22:23.660 | Just any one of these often calms the relationship.

02:22:28.740 | And I remember checking back with this woman a month later

02:22:31.580 | and says, guess what, Bill?

02:22:33.100 | Now I'm her favorite employee.

02:22:35.340 | But she's picking on somebody else,

02:22:37.020 | so I gave somebody else your book.

02:22:40.660 | But the idea is connect with people.

02:22:44.660 | So empathy, attention, and respect.

02:22:47.820 | And ear statements, we call it.

02:22:50.340 | And people say they really remember that,

02:22:52.940 | because you can use that with anybody, anywhere,

02:22:55.100 | even with your kids.

02:22:56.660 | Genuine respect, right?

02:22:58.500 | You're not puffing them up.

02:22:59.620 | This all has to be honest.

02:23:00.180 | Yeah, you're not puffing them up.

02:23:01.620 | Yes.

02:23:02.380 | Think about that.

02:23:04.020 | Now, if you don't respect them and you

02:23:07.180 | don't have empathy for them, tell them

02:23:09.300 | you'll pay attention and listen.

02:23:12.300 | And often, you'll start developing some empathy

02:23:14.940 | or respect for them.

02:23:17.140 | But you can always pay attention and listen.

02:23:20.780 | So that's connecting.

02:23:22.740 | The second area-- and these aren't exactly steps,

02:23:26.220 | but these are four areas high conflict

02:23:28.260 | people have difficulty.

02:23:30.460 | The second is emotions kind of cloud their thinking.

02:23:33.940 | So we want to help them think.

02:23:35.460 | So you want to move to analyzing.

02:23:38.700 | Give them a way to think.

02:23:41.220 | So you're kind of calming the emotions,

02:23:43.340 | and now you're saying, let's think about this.

02:23:46.340 | So present problems as a choice.

02:23:50.340 | You could do this now or do this tomorrow.

02:23:54.300 | Or here's the options I see.

02:23:56.020 | There's three ways you could approach this problem.

02:23:59.100 | So you're getting people thinking about the problem

02:24:01.700 | rather than reacting.

02:24:03.380 | And when you give a choice, it kind of

02:24:05.180 | forces them into logical problem solving.

02:24:09.820 | So one way you can do this is, especially

02:24:13.580 | if you have a professional relationship like employer,

02:24:16.780 | employee, therapist, client, stuff like that,

02:24:20.220 | is have them write a list.

02:24:21.780 | They're talking, they're saying, this is wrong,

02:24:23.740 | and that's wrong, and that's wrong.

02:24:25.260 | You say, whoa, whoa, whoa.

02:24:26.980 | Write a list of these problems so I can get a clearer picture.

02:24:32.260 | When you write a list, you calm down.

02:24:35.180 | And I've had this over and over again.

02:24:37.320 | Angry people, when they're writing a list, calm down.

02:24:41.220 | They start thinking about--

02:24:42.340 | I've done this with a doctor once.

02:24:45.780 | He was having trouble with the nurses.

02:24:47.780 | And it was like they're doing everything wrong.

02:24:49.780 | Write a list of all the things they're doing wrong.

02:24:52.820 | And pretty soon, you start thinking,

02:24:54.320 | you know, there's this other thing they do,

02:24:56.060 | but it's not so bad, actually.

02:24:59.180 | And I want them to do this on the left-hand side of the page.

02:25:02.620 | Because on the right-hand side, we're

02:25:04.860 | going to start looking at what are possible solutions.

02:25:08.700 | And you really calm people down.

02:25:10.500 | I've done this as a media.

02:25:11.860 | I've had both people, OK, I want you

02:25:13.980 | to write two lists, like business partners.

02:25:17.780 | Now, say you're trying to decide whether to split up or keep

02:25:20.580 | the business partnership.

02:25:22.620 | So I want you both to write a list, what

02:25:25.620 | you would do if you split up, wind down the partnership,

02:25:28.940 | the steps you'd have to take.

02:25:31.020 | And another list, what the steps would be if you could

02:25:34.780 | make it work between you.

02:25:37.540 | So let's meet in a week, and we'll look at your list.

02:25:40.460 | Come back a week later, they say, you know what?

02:25:43.020 | We both wrote our lists.

02:25:44.180 | We immediately called each other and realized

02:25:47.740 | that we should terminate the partnership,

02:25:50.740 | but we have one last big project we want to do together.

02:25:54.820 | And we realize now we can go our separate ways in peace.

02:25:58.740 | We really have different goals.

02:26:00.260 | It's not her fault. It's not her fault.

02:26:02.940 | This was two women who worked together.

02:26:05.940 | And so writing a list helps.

02:26:08.420 | This is all under analyzing, the A of the Kaur's method.

02:26:12.940 | Having the person make a proposal.

02:26:15.620 | Say, make me a proposal.

02:26:17.820 | I tell managers, as soon as you can,

02:26:20.860 | tell your employees that now that I'm your manager,

02:26:26.180 | whenever you bring me a problem--

02:26:27.940 | and I want you to bring me problems when they're small,

02:26:31.100 | because conflicts that are small are much easier to resolve.

02:26:34.980 | Always bring a solution to the problem.

02:26:37.340 | I want to hear your proposed solution,

02:26:39.380 | because you know the problem better than I do.

02:26:42.820 | You're getting them to think.

02:26:44.700 | So high conflict people, I believe,

02:26:47.260 | have a bandwidth for problem solving.

02:26:49.660 | And some are brilliant heads of companies, inventors,

02:26:54.060 | all that stuff.

02:26:55.380 | They got a big bandwidth for conflict,

02:26:57.860 | but they also have a bandwidth for problem solving.

02:27:00.340 | You want to aim at that and bring that out.

02:27:03.780 | So that's analyzing.

02:27:05.780 | R is for responding.

02:27:08.540 | High conflict people, because they blame so much,

02:27:11.940 | are always saying, you should have done this.

02:27:13.820 | You didn't do that.

02:27:16.260 | Our tendency is to argue with high conflict people.

02:27:19.420 | And that's a forget about it.

02:27:20.980 | You're trying to give them insight.

02:27:22.460 | It's not going to work.

02:27:23.820 | So instead, give them what we call a BIF response.

02:27:28.260 | That's brief, informative, just straight information.

02:27:32.220 | Don't tell them you're wrong.

02:27:33.900 | Just tell them what the information is.

02:27:37.260 | And do it in a friendly manner.

02:27:39.620 | And have it be firm.

02:27:40.820 | Have it end the discussion.

02:27:43.780 | Most commonly, BIF responses are in writing.

02:27:46.860 | And we teach this as an email method.

02:27:50.180 | And we estimate there's about a million people doing BIF now,

02:27:53.740 | because we taught it to about half a million people--

02:27:56.700 | professionals and individuals.

02:27:59.500 | We've got four little BIF books.

02:28:01.660 | We've got--

02:28:02.180 | So it's brief, informative, friendly.

02:28:04.300 | And firm.

02:28:05.340 | Firm.

02:28:05.820 | And those four things.

02:28:06.980 | Friendly is immaterial.

02:28:09.540 | Well, a touch of friendliness.

02:28:11.780 | So what I say, like someone writes to you and say,

02:28:15.060 | you know, you're doing everything wrong.

02:28:18.100 | And you write back, and you say, thank you

02:28:19.940 | for telling me your concerns.

02:28:22.060 | Here's some information you may not--

02:28:23.700 | like say someone tells me, Bill, your methods

02:28:25.740 | are never going to work.

02:28:27.540 | And I get instantly defensive.

02:28:29.940 | And so thank you for telling me your concerns.

02:28:33.780 | You may not be aware, but about a million people

02:28:36.820 | are using this method now.

02:28:39.060 | And I wish you well.

02:28:42.380 | Something like that.

02:28:43.660 | So a touch of friendliness.

02:28:45.100 | Doesn't have to be a lot.

02:28:46.460 | And firm doesn't mean harsh.

02:28:49.040 | It just means try to end the hostile conversation.

02:28:53.900 | So don't respond to their distortions,

02:28:58.460 | maybe, even, when they say you've

02:29:00.340 | done this, or misinformation, or hostility.

02:29:04.820 | It's just give them a BIF response.

02:29:07.660 | And I tell that sometimes to business owners, sometimes

02:29:14.700 | public figures, is they might say, like politicians

02:29:18.900 | sometimes, terrible things are said about them, and they go,

02:29:22.140 | but they're not true.

02:29:23.620 | And they're going to go, well, I'm

02:29:25.100 | going to ignore that because no one will believe that.

02:29:28.460 | But then people believe it.

02:29:30.420 | A great example, Domino's Pizza about 10 years ago.

02:29:36.340 | This is a great story.

02:29:37.380 | I love it, and I also eat Domino's Pizza.

02:29:41.340 | I won't get into the details, but somebody

02:29:43.480 | said something that grossed people out,

02:29:46.980 | and their stock just dropped.

02:29:49.100 | Two employees did something to the pizza.

02:29:51.380 | So first, they were going to ignore that.

02:29:56.620 | Everyone's going to realize that was a dumb thing

02:29:58.840 | two employees did.

02:30:01.420 | Well, their stock dropped like 10% or something like that.

02:30:04.500 | But two days later, the head of Domino's Pizza

02:30:07.420 | puts out a 90-second video, and it gets spread around.

02:30:13.300 | And what he says is, two former employees

02:30:16.380 | did this gross thing, and that doesn't represent us.

02:30:20.060 | And most important to us is our customers.

02:30:22.820 | We're totally dedicated to you.

02:30:24.900 | This is never going to happen again.

02:30:26.660 | We've done everything to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:30:29.540 | So they bounced right back.

02:30:30.980 | And in my mind, 90-second video didn't

02:30:33.980 | do a 20-minute explanation of how we do this.

02:30:36.820 | That's just 90-second video.

02:30:39.020 | Head of the company put it out there, bounced right back.

02:30:43.780 | And to me, that was a BIF response,

02:30:45.780 | even though we never heard of it.

02:30:47.820 | Brief, informative, friendly, and firm.

02:30:51.340 | So that's CARS, C-A-R--

02:30:54.540 | That's R.

02:30:55.320 | Yep.

02:30:55.820 | That's the responding.

02:30:56.820 | What's S?

02:30:58.060 | The S is setting limits.

02:31:00.380 | And this may be the most important

02:31:02.580 | with high-conflict people, because one

02:31:05.780 | of their biggest problems is they don't stop themselves.

02:31:08.220 | They keep going in areas where most people stop themselves.

02:31:12.880 | They keep talking.

02:31:13.760 | They talk a lot.

02:31:15.220 | They create a problem and keep creating the problem.

02:31:18.860 | They don't stop.

02:31:20.660 | And so people around them have to stop them.

02:31:25.380 | And we're not used to stopping other people's behavior.

02:31:28.460 | Most people manage themselves.

02:31:31.220 | And part of writing my books is I believe today

02:31:34.980 | that we have more high-conflict behavior,

02:31:37.660 | and everyone needs to learn skills

02:31:40.020 | to set limits on bullies, on high-conflict people's

02:31:44.660 | behavior.

02:31:45.460 | It's all about behavior.

02:31:46.700 | They're not bad people, but they don't have the self-restraint.

02:31:50.620 | So setting limits and key things here--

02:31:54.740 | don't blame them.

02:31:56.180 | Don't blame yourself.

02:31:58.060 | Say there's a policy, there's a rule, there's a law.

02:32:02.060 | How it looks to people is do this instead of doing that.

02:32:07.380 | So that behavior-- and if you keep doing that behavior,

02:32:11.320 | here's what the consequence is.

02:32:14.460 | So I have a method I call SLCC.

02:32:18.020 | So everything I've got initials.

02:32:19.380 | You've got a lot of acronyms.

02:32:20.460 | That's all right.

02:32:20.980 | Scientists have acronyms.

02:32:22.140 | Military science and apparently Bill Eddy.

02:32:24.900 | High-conflict methods.

02:32:27.500 | So SLCC is setting limits and imposing consequences.

02:32:32.860 | So with high-conflict people, you might set the limit.

02:32:36.300 | Like you say-- I'll give an example.

02:32:39.540 | As a lawyer, I represented a woman

02:32:41.860 | victim of domestic violence.

02:32:44.100 | Her ex-husband-to-be didn't have a lawyer.

02:32:47.340 | So that means he's allowed to talk to me.

02:32:49.300 | I have to talk to him, negotiate, solve problems.

02:32:52.980 | So he calls me up, and he says, we've

02:32:55.980 | got to solve this problem.

02:32:57.220 | You tell that blankety-blank-blank wife of mine.

02:33:00.900 | I said, hold on.

02:33:01.860 | You can't talk about my client that way.

02:33:04.500 | He said, I'll talk about her any way I want to.

02:33:07.060 | She's a blankety-blank-blank or whatever.

02:33:09.940 | So he didn't respect my limit at all.

02:33:12.640 | So then I said, if you keep talking like that,

02:33:15.820 | I'm going to hang up.

02:33:17.540 | And so it's up to you.

02:33:19.620 | He says, I'll talk about her any way I want.

02:33:21.820 | Keeps talking like that.

02:33:22.860 | I said, OK, you've chosen for me to hang up.

02:33:25.420 | I'm hanging up now.

02:33:26.820 | Call me when you're ready to be civil.

02:33:29.540 | So end of call.

02:33:32.580 | Next morning, he calls me back.

02:33:34.180 | He says, Mr. Eddy, we have to solve this problem.

02:33:38.620 | My blankety-blank-blank wife-- and I say, hang on.

02:33:41.700 | Remember, I'm going to hang up if you talk like that.

02:33:44.580 | He says, oh, no, no, no, don't hang up.

02:33:46.220 | We have to solve this problem.

02:33:48.140 | I'll try not to say those words.

02:33:51.620 | And he doesn't say those words.

02:33:54.220 | We get to address the problem.

02:33:56.940 | So the consequence is what stopped him, not the limit.

02:34:02.660 | And I think it's a brain thing that they're

02:34:05.460 | so absorbed in the emotions of the moment

02:34:07.820 | that they can't picture that their behavior has

02:34:09.960 | a consequence.

02:34:11.300 | So if the people around them point out

02:34:13.740 | there's a consequence if you do that, it's kind of a jolt

02:34:16.380 | to them, oh, I don't want that consequence.

02:34:19.580 | And so with high conflict people,

02:34:22.180 | you often have to tell them the consequence when

02:34:25.140 | you set the limit, and be ready to impose the consequence.

02:34:30.140 | So that's setting limits, imposing consequences.

02:34:33.040 | They have to go together with high conflict people.

02:34:37.020 | Love it.

02:34:37.940 | And I know that those listening and watching

02:34:40.100 | really appreciate this.

02:34:41.420 | I mean, these are incredibly valuable tools.

02:34:44.260 | I mean, I can say from my own life,

02:34:45.820 | and I know observing the experiences of others

02:34:49.460 | and what people have shared with me that here,

02:34:53.620 | I have to be careful because I don't want to place blame.

02:34:56.020 | Let me phrase this correctly, that the ability

02:35:00.140 | to navigate interactions with high conflict personalities

02:35:04.180 | well can lead to a dramatic improvement in people's lives,

02:35:08.420 | both for the non-high conflict personalities

02:35:10.900 | and the high conflict personalities.

02:35:12.820 | And that a failure to do that does exactly the opposite.

02:35:15.380 | So look, I really want to thank you for doing the work

02:35:20.380 | that you do as a lawyer, as a therapist,

02:35:24.460 | the research that you've done.

02:35:26.100 | You're incredibly well researched and thorough.

02:35:29.540 | Send me papers in advance of this,

02:35:31.180 | in addition to having written all these books

02:35:32.840 | that we'll provide links to in the show note captions.

02:35:35.180 | I've read several of them,

02:35:36.060 | but I plan to read the others as well.

02:35:37.620 | You have a book specifically on relationships.

02:35:42.820 | You have books on bullies.

02:35:45.340 | You have a book about five types of people

02:35:48.180 | that can ruin your life and several others as well.

02:35:51.460 | So we'll put links to those as well

02:35:53.180 | as some other resources related to your work.

02:35:55.780 | And also just want to thank you

02:35:56.860 | for being a contributor to public education.

02:36:00.260 | I mean, that's what this podcast is.

02:36:02.500 | People listen to this podcast

02:36:03.900 | in hopes of gleaning information that they can really apply

02:36:06.620 | and that they can pass on to others.

02:36:08.420 | And you're doing incredible work.

02:36:10.100 | You're also teaching in the university system

02:36:12.380 | later today, so you're quite, quite busy

02:36:15.340 | and we're deeply appreciative

02:36:17.200 | that you took the time to come educate us.

02:36:18.940 | So on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching,

02:36:22.300 | I just want to extend a deep gratitude.

02:36:24.620 | Thank you.

02:36:25.460 | You're trying to make the world a better place

02:36:26.300 | and you are making the world a better place.

02:36:28.620 | - Thank you so much.

02:36:29.540 | I appreciate the chance to speak with you and get this out.

02:36:32.940 | - Great, we'll come back again

02:36:34.100 | and tell us more about bullies and the rest.

02:36:37.140 | There's a lot more to cover.

02:36:38.200 | We'd love to have you back.

02:36:39.940 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:36:41.880 | with Bill Eddy.

02:36:43.020 | I hope you found it to be as interesting

02:36:45.020 | and practically informative as I did.

02:36:47.580 | To learn more about Bill Eddy's work

02:36:49.080 | and to find links to his various books,

02:36:51.100 | please see the show note captions.

02:36:53.220 | If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast,

02:36:55.580 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

02:36:57.500 | That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

02:36:59.860 | In addition, please subscribe to the podcast

02:37:02.020 | on both Spotify and Apple.

02:37:03.660 | And on both Spotify and Apple,

02:37:05.100 | you can leave us up to a five-star review.

02:37:07.460 | Please check out the sponsors mentioned

02:37:08.980 | at the beginning and throughout today's episode.

02:37:11.160 | That's the best way to support this podcast.

02:37:13.800 | If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast

02:37:16.420 | or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider

02:37:18.300 | for the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:37:19.800 | please put those in the comment section on YouTube.

02:37:22.100 | I do read all the comments.

02:37:23.820 | For those of you that haven't heard,

02:37:24.940 | I have a new book coming out.

02:37:26.140 | It's my very first book.

02:37:27.780 | It's entitled "Protocols,

02:37:29.180 | an Operating Manual for the Human Body."

02:37:31.320 | This is a book that I've been working on

02:37:32.500 | for more than five years,

02:37:33.640 | and that's based on more than 30 years

02:37:35.980 | of research and experience.

02:37:37.540 | And it covers protocols for everything

02:37:39.340 | from sleep to exercise to stress control,

02:37:43.080 | protocols related to focus and motivation.

02:37:45.500 | And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation

02:37:48.900 | for the protocols that are included.

02:37:50.980 | The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com.

02:37:54.860 | There you can find links to various vendors.

02:37:57.220 | You can pick the one that you like best.

02:37:59.020 | Again, the book is called "Protocols,

02:38:00.780 | an Operating Manual for the Human Body."

02:38:03.360 | If you're not already following me on social media,

02:38:05.340 | I am @hubermanlab on all social media platforms.

02:38:08.300 | So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter,

02:38:10.900 | Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

02:38:12.780 | And on all those platforms,

02:38:14.340 | I discuss science and science-related tools,

02:38:16.460 | some of which overlaps with the content

02:38:17.940 | of the "Huberman Lab" podcast,

02:38:19.420 | but much of which is distinct from the content

02:38:21.300 | on the "Huberman Lab" podcast.

02:38:22.500 | Again, that's "Huberman Lab" on all social media channels.

02:38:25.560 | If you haven't already subscribed

02:38:26.700 | to our Neural Network newsletter,

02:38:28.500 | our Neural Network newsletter

02:38:29.900 | is a zero-cost monthly newsletter

02:38:31.940 | that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols

02:38:34.580 | in the form of brief one-to-three-page PDFs.

02:38:37.420 | Those protocol PDFs are on things

02:38:39.700 | like neuroplasticity and learning,

02:38:41.580 | optimizing dopamine, improving your sleep,

02:38:44.160 | deliberate cold exposure, deliberate heat exposure.

02:38:46.340 | We have a foundational fitness protocol

02:38:48.420 | that describes a template routine

02:38:50.580 | that includes cardiovascular training

02:38:52.100 | and resistance training with sets and reps,

02:38:54.060 | all backed by science,

02:38:55.380 | and all of which, again, is completely zero cost.

02:38:57.900 | To subscribe, simply go to hubermanlab.com,

02:39:00.500 | go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner,

02:39:03.100 | scroll down a newsletter, and provide your email.

02:39:05.220 | And I should emphasize that we do not share your email

02:39:07.660 | with anybody.

02:39:08.500 | Thank you once again for joining me

02:39:09.860 | for today's discussion with Bill Eddy.

02:39:12.340 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:39:14.460 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:39:16.360 | [upbeat music]

02:39:18.940 | (upbeat music)

Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People

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