what are some of the signs of a high conflict personality um because in an Ideal World we avoid these people and again we're not trying to say that they're bad people some of them are bad people some of them aren't but um since I'm not a clinical psychologist you are you can make the assessment um uh certainly better than I can what what are some of the ways to avoid these circumstances besides the first year rule um and then let's talk about some ways to disentangle from these people right um based on their unique uh
phenotypes so is there a question or set of questions one should ask themselves when they are potentially um dating someone potentially becoming friends with somebody potentially becoming co-workers with somebody and so on yeah so what's interesting is often your gut feeling tells you something's up here like the person suddenly has a shocking opinion of somebody else they say you know that person's a total jerk and yet you know that person and they're not a total jerk they suddenly something's disproportionate I think disproportionate um emotions is often a trigger I put I put in in a
lot of my books now what I call the web method is pay attention to their words your emotions and their behavior so starting with words do they use a lot of blaming words you know it's all that person's fault um is do they use All or Nothing words they seem to see things through a narrow lens that you know there's all good there's all bad um unmanaged emotions which they may or may not show like I explained some people are good at hiding all that even though it drives them inside and the extreme behaviors do
they do things 90% of people would never do and I'll give an example here and this is um I I won't say the city but there was a mayor there was someone who worked who was a congress person and they decided to run for mayor in their City instead of flying to go to Congress but when they were flying to go to Congress back and forth this is in California I'll say that much people can easily research this so this person flying back and forth one day one night standing you know there was a line
to get your bags at the airport after you got off the plane and and he was told to wait in line to get his bags and he said don't you know who I am and he pushed his way to the front of the line and had an argument with the person behind the counter said don't you know who I am I want my bag right now and she said we don't have have it now you can't have it right now and he pushed her and knocked her over he shoved this this Airline worker behind the
counter and knocked her over this was a mayor of a major not yet he wasn't mayor yet he was a congress person anyway so that means sorry no no knock I know some some very decent Congress people but like okay um well in any case right this person could be any number of different professions like yes yeah this is antisocial Behavior but this is a high profile person so this is in the all over the news the next day this is um 20 years ago maybe 15 years ago something like that goodness anyway so it's
in the newspaper the next day and newspaper says Congressman so and so gets into physical altercation with uh Airline worker knock her over half the people said that's terrible and the other half people said wait wait he was sleep deprived he was flying across country you have to understand that he was stressed and here's where my web method comes in 90% of people would not have done that even if they were sleep deprived and I fly back and forth a lot and I'm not I'm I don't do that I I would like to think 99%
of people do that I think you're right 99% get physical with an airline person over a bag The Cutting to the front of the line is is egregious the the shoving the airline person is like Beyond The Pale yeah exactly so this is so anyway so he's running for mayor and I'm going this guy's a high conflict person if he gets elected he's not going to be a very good mayor he's going to have a lot of trouble with the people close to him and so guess what happened he gets elected Within I think it's
eight months he is and this is before the me too movement got started but people are reporting he's harassing women sexually harassing women women come into his office to meet with him professional experienced important and he's like wanting to touch them a lot inappropriately they they don't want to be touched um anyway so women start complaining about him word kind of gets out yeah this happened with a lot of different people that he's he's not sexually assaulting them but he's he's treating them badly so it cuts across domains it's like in so so it's it's
not just in the office it's it's it's there but it's also at the airport it's it's basically anytime he's not getting what he wants he he throws a tantrum and and that's the thing with with personality disorders is a narrower range of behavior that's repeated in a variety of settings so he's fitting all of that so which personality swur I'm not going to diagnose him but it Narrows down to one or two so it's not context dependent it it is right it's pervasive pervasive and that word is in the diagnostic manual that it's pervasive across
I think several settings I think that's the words but let me let me just finish so because the end of the story the end of the story is he's also um got committees and people that are supposed to accomplish things he doesn't want them to think he wants them to he wants to do the thinking and tell them what to do so he goes around alienating a lot of people within eight months he's out of office because enough people were upset and the way he got out of office is some of the heads of government
told him U I think it was the City attorney or something if you quit now we help you with your legal expenses cuz he's starting to get sued for some of this stuff suing the city suing him will help you with your legal expenses if you quit now and there was starting to be a petition movement for some I don't know the mechanics like a special election or something to get rid of him anyway within eight months he was out of the office and now you don't hear about him in that City it's a very
interesting uh literally high-profile although still an anous based on this conversation case um I wonder if on a more um subtle or typical level the following is informative or not I'm not looking for a validation of the example I'm about to give but I've been um very surprised at times how um if a person who I'm with for the first time out on a meal will behave towards the weight staff yes not explicitly disparaging of them but sometimes mildly disparaging of them yeah or um feeling as if uh the amount of of liquid poured into
their glass was somehow an indication of how the waiter felt about them or didn't feel about them like reading like reading into these things where you're just thinking to yourself like whoa life must be really tough for you like who's paying attention to this stuff and um and so that that's that's one that I've noticed in in people um and it's and it's proved informative it's really a useful thing to see that's part of what you see their behavior and their behavior towards other people this was it was a brilliant thing I don't remember the
name of of the program but there was a guy who was head of a company and he used to when he was interviewing people for highlevel jobs he pretended he was a taxi driver or something would pick them up at the airport as as the taxi driver and see how they treated him as the taxi driver and then he gets in the interview room and he's the guy interviewing them and in some cases people treated them really disrespectfully and it's like now I know this is not someone I want clever I made the decision to
not work for um somebody years ago um when I was on the a different very different stage of my career based on how that person treated a janitor yeah and it was amazing because it was one very brief interaction and it wasn't like this person yelled at the janitor it was the kind of dismissiveness yeah um and I remember it was this your web approach it was um it was his I guess I just revealed it was his words towards the janor it was my emotional response was s like I felt like I'd been kind
of kicked in the stomach I was like Hey like that was like it just felt like a like a very un what I would call like the football play unnecessary roughness yes it was mild from the perspective of like no one got physical or called anyone names but it was but I remember thinking like oh like that sucked right and then their behavior was just to just go right back to what they were talking about and I I knew in that moment I was really crestfallen because in that moment I knew oh my goodness I
can't work for this person yeah like I just can't and I made the decision not to and actually their response to my deciding not to for a variety of other reasons too confirmed everything that I suspected in that one little interaction yes but it's interesting because we're trained to um collect data rather you know carefully you know and we don't want to we don't want to make snap judgments somebody could truly be having a bad day but in this case it was it was the right decision to not work for them thank goodness I thank
my lucky stars made some really bad decisions about people in my life that was a really good decision uh I never spent a day regretting it and I went to work for someone else who was terrific instead great so but as you said these things sometimes hit at at a somatic level as opposed to some sort of um wait did you know some like very cerebral analytic thing it it kind of hits at a what must be a very primitive circuit I can't help the neuroscientist in me wants to say like it's got to be
something at the level of the body where we go wait that was messed up yeah and and you can't really point to a specific word and then you start to question yourself that's the problem you you wonder was well maybe their tone wasn't Maybe it's my own perception but I don't know maybe maybe the body doesn't lie maybe it knows I think the body is like a first responder and that we should pay attention to that and especially with high conflict personalities especially the con artists which is part of antisocial personality and the ones I've
dealt with are very good at this is their words are just right and your brain is like soothed by them you go this person gets it and I'm totally comfortable they're Charming all of that and your gut goes wait there's they're out of sink I have this cold feeling why do I have this cold feeling and I think that they're they're aimed at your your cerebral thinking and that your guts kind of gets it because they're in a way predatory like antisocial tend to be predatory those people have dead eyes I've known a few yeah
I've known a few men and women and their eyes are I can only describe and I'm a vision neuroscientist that's like what my the career's been and those are two little pieces of brain right there and there's something about the the deadness and and I don't have a science to support what I'm about to say there's something about the deadness in their eyes maybe their pupils don't change shape with levels of arousal the same way other pups do because we know that happens in in healthy people with an healthy autonomic nervous system but there's something
lacking yeah um and people make up all sorts of theories online like I'm not a big blinker um I don't BL when I'm concentrating blinks break up my flow and and this is actually a way I can remember things people have these theories about blinking non- blink the research doesn't support any relationship between blink frequency and personality they had this whole theory about Zuck too like he doesn't blink therefore he's whatever he's a robot none of that holds up what does hold up however is this mismatch between words and the affect that it creates in
US yeah it's sort of like it sounds right but it doesn't feel right I wish we understood more about this at the level of science there are a lot of theories not a lot of not a lot of tools someday I think yeah yeah the tools for measuring the stuff are getting better um I wanted to ask you about other ways of of just knowing if you're interacting with a high conflict person um when the cues are more subtle are there other things um or examples of the web method that come to mind well for
me of course dealing like with cord especially there's a lot of stuff in writing and so being able to look at what's written and lot of blame words the All or Nothing words she did this and she did that and disparaging words she's stupid or whatever or He's a Bully he's this and that which triggers for me maybe he is or maybe the person saying it is but it height my attention yeah how do you disambiguate between projection and a real thing like online now I mean one of the most pop one of the fastest
ways to get a popular social media account is for somebody to give advice about how to avoid bad people you know name calling gaslighting narcissist sociopath psychopath um histrionic like these these are clinical terms that now the general public can leverages to like you know sort of amplify community and then in part I understand from talking to people on the tech side is that social media is social the accounts that grow fastest are the ones where you don't need much language to convey what you're trying to convey like a a sport or dance or an
animal the and among the others that grow very quickly um and therefore rewarding to people are ones where there's um where you're recruiting these negative Advocates first I want to make sure that that I get this point across and that is there's a lot of Temptation to label people with like the mental disorders the personality disorders and it's absolutely essential that people don't do that if you think somebody might be a narcissist or might have borderline personality or be antisocial keep that to yourself and adapt how you work with them to be more effective or
be more cautious whatever but the worst thing I think is people say oh and everyone agrees that person's a narcissist so we kind of gang up on that person that's not helpful the goal is not rejecting people the goal is adapting what you do to either manage the relationship decide okay that's not someone I'm going to get close to but you know I can still work with them or have them as neighbors or whatever so I want to emphasize that because I think you're right there's a lot of that today and and people come to
me with that concern say Bill you teach about personality disorders yes so people understand patterns of behavior and how to adapt your own behavior I'm not teaching people to label other people so that's real important um yeah people go to school for many years and do 3,000 plus clinical hours to learn how to do that uh to do that properly it's like saying uh it's like diagnosing anything right I mean a dermatologist might be able to help diagnose a a a skin patch for potential cancer um but we're taught that we're not supposed to do
that ourselves right so we have to be cautious but on the other hand aware and the more you're aware of patterns like like being aware of someone with an alcohol abuse issue is to go okay I'm not going to be serving him alcohol with dinner it's a great person but I'm just going to leave that out of the evening meal adapt what we do rather than judging them and I don't see people with personality disorders as lesser beings I see them as having a different set of behaviors that they acquired pretty much in childhood so
I don't hold it against them I may dislike their patterns of behavior but I I really don't hate people like that I've been a therapist with clients like that so I think our awareness needs to be there so we adapt how we work with people but I think the the gut feeling is is so important and as a therapist I was trained pay attention to your gut because that's going to help you with your clients and that's why the web method their words their behavior but how I feel often gives me tips [Music]
