121 — Dr. Jaime Zuckerman-Love-Bombing, Trauma-Bonding, Toxic Positivity and Narcissistic Trauma.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

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Welcome Dr. Jamie Zuckerman to the Ruthless Compassion podcast.

Thank you for having me.

It's great to have you on, and there's so many interesting topics that I want to discuss with you. But before we start, I thought it would be great for you to just tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and most importantly, how you got started doing it.

Sure. So my name is Dr. Jamie Duckerman. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, which is right outside Philadelphia, and I have a private practice. I see adults specialize in anxiety, depression, relationship issues, and have a specific specialty in working with people who are either in a narcissistic relationship, trying to get out of one, or who are on the other side experiencing post separation abuse.

Oh, that's a very interesting topic. And so the most important question, again, is, like, how did you get into doing this particular kind of work?

It didn't start out that way. I started seeing a lot of mostly women, but also men, but mostly women, who were coming in with severe anxiety, clinical depression. And I started noticing kind of this subset of relationship issues that followed a very specific course, very specific blueprint. And from a clinical standpoint, it became obvious that a lot of these women were experiencing narcissistic abuse and hadn't ever put (A) a label on it, and (B), never really started addressing what was kind of the underlying issue of their depression and their anxiety. So that's kind of how I started getting into that more and more and then started doing a lot more kind of education about it, because I realized there wasn't that much out there at the time on this in kind of a social media format. There was a lot of people sharing stories that were similar, but there wasn't kind of one place or a couple of places you could go to get this information. And so I started doing that. And then when COVID hit, that's really, I think when people who were stuck at home, who couldn't leave, who didn't have that out, were really turning to social media for an outlet and for help. And that's kind of really where it took off from kind of an educational standpoint.

Is there something for you in this topic that resonates?

Yeah, so I get that question a lot because it really is. Everyone always says, you take this stuff home with you, and as therapists, we really were not supposed to, obviously, but some of these stories that I would hear were just so heartbreaking and so gut wrenching. And I think for me, one of the biggest things that I found rewarding, and that would resonate with me is when you're working with people who finally see that it's a pattern, that it's a predictable blueprint and they get to that point where they're able to be objective to it. They have this moment of it's almost like this Aha lightbulb moment where they realize that, wait, this isn't me. This actually has nothing to do with me personally. And when they have that realization, the empowerment that they feel is I don't even have words for it, but you see it, you hear it. And when they realize again that they have a way to figure this out, this chaos out, it's just such an empowering feeling for them. And I love seeing women, in particular men too, but who feel empowered and have them that ability to move forward and live the life that they want to.

I guess as a normal human being and as a woman, it's probably very rewarding personally, because for many occasions in our lives we are misunderstood or we are blamed for things that are not our fault. And so in these specific cases where narcissists always do the projection, always do the blaming, never take responsibility, never are held accountable. And so as a human being, as a woman, we can look back at all the times in our life where we were blamed for something that wasn't our fault and was like, yes, you know?

And also it's so embedded in our society that a lot of times we don't even realize that we're explaining ourselves too much or that we're being blamed for something. It's almost as if we're not objective to it. Exactly. Like you said, once people gain that objectivity, it's very empowering. And as a female, unfortunately, that's kind of something we're familiar with.

Yeah, for sure. So being in relationships with narcissists, you're talking about a couple of things. I was looking in through some of my research notes and one of the things you're talking about is love bombing. And I wanted to talk about that because I heard the term, but it's not a term that I'm really familiar with until you came along. So I thought it would be fun for you to discuss it and give some examples of it in your practice.

Yeah, sure. So love bombing is fairly prefaced by saying just because somebody is using love bombing tactics doesn't mean they are a clinical narcissist. Right. But love bombing is very much a consistent technique that people with narcissistic personality disorder do. And what it is, is it's the beginning stages of the narcissistic abuse cycle. And it's repetitive over and over again in the cycle. So it is in a relationship, let's say in an intimate relationship, dating. You'll hear things like on date number one, right? Where have you been all my life? You are perfect for me. I've been waiting for you. This is too good to be true. You are my soulmate. And I tell people, if you hear language like that in the beginning of a relationship, run. Now I'll get pushback from this because, you know, people say, well, I didn't meet my soulmate. That's the tiniest percentage of people. And it really logically doesn't make sense. And I blame Disney for this. It really doesn't logically make sense. You would think somebody is your soulmate and love them to that extent when you don't even know their birthday, their middle name, right? You don't even know maybe what their upbringing is like.

You know nothing about them to be able to determine whether you love them or not. So that's one of the things that happens to love. I mean the other is it feels like a tidal wave of just rush of emotions as the other person. You're feeling this in the beginning. It's a tidal wave. It's connecting every single day and talking every day and seeing each other all the time and again, too good to be true. And everything is just so amazing and it doesn't follow the norm, whatever normal is. But let's say a standard dating protocol, right? Like you slowly get to know somebody. I know social media makes it a little bit different, but there's still a format to it. This bypasses that format. It's very quick, very fast, very sudden. What also happens is it's like elaborate gifts and vacations but then you'll start to pick up on things like they will describe themselves very much as a victim of previous relationships. All their exes were bad and crazy and horrible, terrible people. Let's say their ex spouse, their parents were horrible to them, everything you can imagine. But they were never the one that was wrong.

And it's to an abnormal extent, right? So there is that there's also this feeling of extreme vulnerability that you have with them. You feel really comfortable really quickly telling them your deepest, darkest secrets, your upbringing, stories that maybe you don't share with anybody. And they will pretend to relate to you on a very deep level. But what they are really doing is they are baiting you. They are tricking you into this comfort level where you think you're getting into this wonderful, amazing relationship and they'll store these vulnerabilities and these secrets that you tell them way back so that later on down the road they can use them against you to make you feel like you're wrong or you're bad or whatever the case may be. So love bombing is just a very deliberate, yes, they know what they're doing. Attempt to manipulate somebody into really falling into the relationship and not being able to get out.

Right? Because you feel like this is the greatest love. Because they've told you that this is the greatest love.

That's right. That's right. And listen, I mean I always say that nobody is immune from love bombing. Who wouldn't want what I just described? I mean, everybody wants that fairytale romance. So we're all at risk for that. And that's why I like to do a lot of education. That's why I love to ask that question. Because the only way you won't fall into it is if you know what the signs of love bombing are. And you say, wait, this is weird. Okay, I heard about this. Right. Otherwise, who would turn that down?

Especially since, as you were saying, all of our romantic comedies portray these very manipulative, devious tactics as the signs of true love and real love, real romance. So our media primes us for narcissistic entrapment.

Yes, exactly. I have three kids. Two of them are girls. And when Frozen came out, they were obsessed with Elsa and Anna. And I watched this over and over again, and it was so I had this is the downside, I guess, of having a psychologist for a mom, but I had something. Anna meeting her prince and deciding to get married that day because they're in love, that's not healthy. And I really think it's a very dangerous slope, because you see what it sets you up for. You're looking for that.

If you look at real traditional fairy tales, they're much more reality checks. They're much darker. They're much more warnings. They're not showing, like, true love. The Prince. Yeah, exactly. They're much more cautionary tales. Whereas Disney and the Romcoms are much more like, you know, love is a many splendid thing, and if somebody love bombs you, it's a good thing. I wrote an article called Romantic Comedies are Ruining Our Relationships, and it's totally true. And I was talking in the article about how when people stalk you afterwards, in Romcoms, it's a sign of true love. In real life, it's a sign of psychopathy. Right.

It's sociopathic. Right. In Romcoms, it's all he misses her. All she misses him. No, it's dateline. I love what you said. I never looked it like that. You're 100% right. That fairy tales, kind of not Disney related, are these very cautionary tales.You're absolutely right.

Beware, beware. We need more of the old-fashioned fairy tales of many.

Threw them in my head.

They're all dark and they're all warnings. Be careful, don't do that. Watch about this. Whereas Disney is everything is perfect. And even if you make a big mistake, there are no consequences.

There's no consequences.

Whereas in the old ones, there are like hardcore people die. The little mouth girl die.

Exactly.

Which is much better. But we've neutralized all our media, and it's well, even I used to watch on TV car chases, and I would think, at the best, nobody is having to pay for all the cars they destroy on the way. At the worst, why aren't they going to jail for this kind of criminal behavior? There's never any consequences. You see people destroying, they're going down the streets, they're crashing at everything. They're destroying property, they're running people off the road. Not a consequence. Nothing happens. Right.

So our modern media is teaching us that, you can do anything criminal, crazy, self destructive, destructive to others. There's no consequences, including with love. Right?

Right. That's right. Absolutely. People don't even think past that point. Very true.

It's just kind of funny when you're talking about Disney, it's like, wait a minute, I have another question apropos of this narcissism thing. So you were saying how narcissistic relationships are really hard to extricate yourself from and I was wondering why that is in your mind. What have you seen in your practice and in your life that makes it so hard for the people on the receiving end of the abuse to leave? You would think if they're being abused, they'd want to go, right? So what is it that makes them stay?

So it's a couple of things. First is going back to the love bombing. One of the other reasons why a narcissist will love bomb you is it becomes this intermittent reinforcement. If you think about it, drug addiction, right? You're constantly chasing after this high and you need more of it and more of it, and you don't feel right unless you have it. And so it's the same kind of concept where they will give you the world, suddenly take it away from you. And your left is kind of wondering, what did I do? Because in a healthy relationship, if somebody all of a sudden stops their normal behavior in that relationship, it's odd, right? And normally something would have caused it. The differences in these relationships. There's literally nothing that caused it. It's purposeful gives you this gift, takes it away, you're trying to figure out why and then they'll slowly here and there, give it back to you, but never in the same amount that they did. And when you try to leave, they will go full force back with the love bombing. But as soon as you come back, it's gone again. So it's used as a strategy to keep you stuck.

It's really an addiction model. So there's that aspect where it becomes really difficult to leave. The other thing that happens is that one of the things that narcissists do is through things like gaslighting, where they will make you basically feel like you are incapable of perceiving reality accurately. And so for a lot of people, they doubt their own perception of things. They doubt the reality. They feel crazy. They don't know what end is up. And so they become so dependent on this other person to define their reality, they don't even realize what they're in. It's not like they're able to say, I see they're doing this, this and this. They've lost all sense of objectivity. They have been disconnected from their families on purpose. They've been isolated from anybody who could say to them, you're being abused, or help them to get out. So they have no really outside social support. They are confused. They have no self-concept anymore. They don't know who they are, what their interests are. I will have people out of these relationships. They don't even know what their favorite foods are. They were told what to eat. They don't know their taste in music, their taste in art, because they were never allowed to have their own narrative.

So they don't have a sense of identity. They don't have a sense of self. Or they do, but it's very, very buried and broken down. And so it's very scary to leave because they genuinely believe they can't exist without this person. People say, I would never get that point. The problem is that it's not a sudden switch to it's very calculated and slow building. And so eventually you get to the point where you don't even realize how you got there. And I caution people to think, I won't ever get into this. It's very easy to fall into it. So that's why it's helpful to know the signs. The other thing, too, is that there's a lot of other types of abuse that go on. So there's physical abuse. So a lot of times, a lot of people are scared to leave for their own safety and the safety of their children if there's children involved. They threaten everything from, I will keep your kids. I will tell them you're crazy, because chances are they are probably in therapy for depression and anxiety and on medication, and they will use that against them. There's financial abuse.

So you'll hear things like, oh, you don't need to work. I'll take care of you. Okay, cool. Okay. And before you know it, you have no access to your checking account. You have no access to credit cards. Nothing is accessible to you financially. You haven't worked. I have patients who were attorneys, doctor, teachers, who stopped working 20 years later. They have no income except from their spouse, and it's not like a healthy sharing of finances or assets. And so they also can't leave because they have no money, they have nowhere to go, and they're petrified, and they're scared. And a lot of times there's threats to, if you leave, I'll kill you, I'll kill our children. I mean, it gets that ugly. So there are so many variables at play. It's not a typical breakup. It's not even a typical toxic breakup. There's so much more to this that it's not simple at all. And I think the average was seven times somebody leaves before they finally leave for good. And all those individual times they leave are necessary to gain that confidence, to be able to leave for the final time. So I always tell people, don't beat yourself up if you leave and you come back. It's almost kind of necessary sometimes to do that.

It so reminds me of the stories you hear about drug dealers who will give the first hit for free, and then the person gets hooked. And then when the person doesn't have money and they come around and they say, I'm desperate. I'm desperate. Just give me something to tide me over. I'll pay you later. And the drug dealers like, sure, I'll give you a little something. Not because they're being generous, but because they want to keep that person hooked. And so, you know, the person thinks, oh, they're so generous. They're my best dealer because they give me something for free when I need it. No, it's totally the same thing, right. So these narcissistic abusers are acting just like drug dealers just doling out a little bit just to keep the person hooked.

Yeah, it's breadcrumbing, right? They just give a little bit just enough to have you hang on to hope that they'll change. People say all the time, everyone can change. That is true. But in order for someone with true narcissistic personality disorder to change, they have to completely. It won't happen. So I tell people that if you're staying with the hopes of things being different, it won't ever be different. If anything, it gets progressively worse. And that's a hard thing. That's a hard thing for people to take, especially when people have been with their significant others for 10,20, 30 years to come out of it and realize, wait, they never loved me. Women say, I've wasted so many. I put everything ahead of this, and they don't even love our children, and we can't wrap our brains around that. And it's very traumatizing for people to come to that realization.

Yeah, they'd rather keep trying in the hopes of than have to face this waste of a life. That's very, very sad. So you were talking also about trauma bonding, which I'm sure is connected to this topic. What is trauma bonding?

So trauma bonding is where, you know, sometimes people think it's because two people have trauma. That is not what it is. It's kind of what we were talking about, that relationship. That the dependency of one based off of the abuse in a way that the other one is giving. It's kind of this co-dependency, but it's based more on kind of in this abuse context. So, like I said, they can't define their own reality because they doubt themselves so much. So they depend on their narcissistic toxic partner to define their narrative for them. So they need the narcissist to give them this sense of identity. And simultaneously, the narcissist needs this other person because they get what we call supply. Narcissistic supply. It keeps their narcissism going. It's what feeds them. So it's both parties are getting something from the other within this abuse context. So it becomes really difficult to break, especially with a narcissist, because if you withdraw that supply from them, they will either go into a narcissistic rage they will try to love bomb you, and or they'll get supply from other people. There's always other people in the wings. Always.

Now that we've talked about narcissism, I feel like I want to brush my teeth. I wanted to kind of switch gears and talk about something that you call toxic positivity because I think that's kind of toxic, but it's like a different kind of toxic. So where did it arise from?

Yes, the term has been around for a while and again, a lot of this stuff started coming out ironically during COVID and pandemic because of social media and people kind of constantly gravitating towards it just to have some sort of connection. Toxic positivity is this rule that the society has kind of put upon us that we should be happy, we should be grateful for what we have because so many other people have it worse than all of which is true. Right. However, what it does is it really invalidates the person's emotions and it invalidates their experiences. It makes them feel guilty for feeling sad or depressed or anxious. So during COVID one of the things that was happening was people were almost feeling guilty and bad for doing things for themselves, for fun when people were sick. And so there was this feeling of, wait, I shouldn't be having fun. Everybody has it so much worse than me right now. And so then there was this shame and guilt and it became this vicious cycle and it doesn't allow people to have their emotions freely. And, you know, truth be told, is if I'm upset about something and somebody says to me, like, cheer up, it's not that bad, or it could be worse, or there are other fish in the sea.

Or this happens. A lot with women that have miscarriages. And this is when it's well, it was meant to be, or your body did what it was supposed to do, or you already have a healthy kid at home. It's like and so it's invalidating. And I think people do it with good intentions and people do it because they don't know what the hell to say. But it ends up making the other person feel a lot worse things. Like, again, we hear it okay, it's not that bad. It could be worse. So pandemic hits and one of the things that I personally started noticing was I would see a lot of influencers who have these large followings or even just people I know that are friends with. We're posting pictures of them, like cooking these gourmet dinners, right, or doing like 9 million workouts in one day. And I'm sitting on the couch watching TV. It gave up this impression that something was wrong with you, right, and that you need to kind of like, let's go, it could be worse, and use this time to make yourself better.

And I had such a problem with that one because it suggests, again, it validates where you're at is not good enough, which is a huge issue. And the other is that wasn't a snow day, right? That lockdown was not a vacation and it wasn't the time to pick up some new activity that has a huge learning curve because cognitively, we were all just so stressed. We didn't have the room for that. And so people are seeing all these people doing these amazing things in these pictures, and everyone's looking good, and I haven't showered in a month.

Yeah, I taught myself how to speak Hungarian during COVID.

People are watching this, almost feeling bad for feeling an appropriate reaction to a collective trauma. We're totally allowed, and it would have been completely appropriate to be sad, anxious, depressed, angry, but people were made to feel guilty that they weren't doing hot yoga 3 hours a day.

You know what it reminds me of, though? It reminds me of the narcissistic perspective, because the narcissist does not want us having any quote unquote negative emotions because that's a stress to them. So if they put out this seemingly innocuous message that, you know, be happy, be grateful, think on the positive side. What they're really doing is they're shutting down all of our pain, our fear, our hurt, our rage, because it's more convenient to the narcissist in the world. They don't have to deal with it. They don't have to listen to it. And so it really serves the narcissistic collective and the rest of us who are normal human beings, who have normal human feelings and who are actually going to benefit from looking at those feelings and dealing with it. We are screwed over by those few narcissists who are in the guise of something, quote unquote positive, are shutting us down from our normal human experience.

And then we feel shame, we feel embarrassment, we feel guilt, and we keep it stuck inside. We get sick emotionally and physically sick. That was something that really kind of started coming about and then that kind of morphed into I saw this a lot from the pandemic into New Year's. Talk to Positivity. Like New Year, new, you know, New Year. Same exact year is December 31. It became really, I think, necessary to talk about it because no one was rolling into January 1st a better anything. We were surviving. And we kind of missed the mark on letting people know that it was okay to literally just be surviving and nothing changes except the date. It's an arbitrary date. And so I think it helps people to accept the fact and to feel okay not being okay. It's okay to not feel okay.

It's necessary to have permission to have whatever experience you are having and whether it's convenient for the narcissists out there or not.

Exactly.

Well, that's really cool. So I see that you have a new workbook out. Would you like to talk about that?

Sure. So I have a second workbook that comes at the end of August called Find Good Habits and it is part of a series. The first one was, Find your Calm came out in May. So, they're very similar structure. They are interactive workbooks, a little bit different than your kind of typical anxiety or goal-setting workbook. They come from a very behavioral acceptance-based model. So it's a lot of strategies on exactly what you were saying, learn to sit with your discomfort, learn to tolerate your discomfort, and at the same time engaging in behaviors that are consistent with your values, rather than waiting to feel a certain way before you do X, Y, and Z. And so, like I said, it's very interactive. And the good thing about it is you can pick it up wherever you want. And a lot of the exercises are things that you can do when nobody would know you're doing them. You could be in a meeting, you could be on a podcast zoom call, and nobody would know that you're doing these exercises. And they're easy and they're simple. Again, like I said, they're very behavior based, so I tried to make them practical.

So it's not journaling, which obviously has its place, but it's more what are you feeling right now? What was your trigger? What can you do to get where you need to be? If this feeling doesn't change, I think it's going to be really helpful for people, not just who have anxiety, depression, but just everyday general life stress.

And where can people find the workbooks?

The workbooks are on Amazon, Target, Barnes and Noble, and then on my website, Dr Jamie Zuckerman.com.

Wonderful. And your name is spelled Jaime for our listeners,

Yes. My parents decided to make things difficult.

They made you high me,

I could never find the key chains of my name spelled.

Are you going to be doing, like you said, a series of these books?

So it was part of a series. The publisher did a kind of a mental health series. So I think there are five books in the series. I did two of them, and then other people wrote the other one. Yeah.

Okay. And are you looking to do other writing in the future, like other kinds of books or workbooks?

Yeah, I have a bunch of ideas, so we'll see where they go. I contribute a lot to article. I love writing, so I try to get involved as much as I can. So hopefully, yes, sooner than later, there will be more out. So fingers crossed.

That's wonderful. So I always like to ask people when we're wrapping up for a call to action, something you can offer the listener, something they can try doing that will help just improve the quality of their life a little bit. What can you suggest?

One of the things I like to do personally, and I tell my patients often to do this too, it's kind of like a general rule of thumb. If something feels uncomfortable in a particular situation because you're doing something different, usually the healthier behavior. Sometimes, things that are familiar to feel more comfortable are just more comfortable because we're used to it, not because it's healthy. So when people are trying to make changes in their life. Just understand that if something feels uncomfortable, it's probably the healthier of the options and that you always have an option.

Oh, that's a wonderful point. It reminds me of when I tell my patients that if they're going to therapy, that's not really helpful. They're very, very relaxed and comfortable, but if they have something called the squirm factor, I call it the squirm factor. If they're squirming just a little, not so much that they want to run out of the room, but just a little, it's probably good therapy.

Yeah. You don't leave this session feeling a little uncomfortable, like, we didn't do our job exactly.

We're too nice, right?

Yeah. So I would say that that's kind of my go to.

That sounds really good. Well, listen, it's been really fun talking with you, and I think that we've touched on a few really good, clear points that people can take away with them that can really help them think about things in a little bit of a different way moving forward.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. This is great. Thank you. Thank you for doing this work, because I think it's wonderful that people can hear this.

This is Dr. Marcia Sirota. Thank you for listening. Please leave a review and your comments wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at Marcia Sirota Md.com, where you'll learn about upcoming online events as well. Also, we love getting referrals from our listeners about future podcast guests, so please email us at info@marciasodamd.com.