Aug. 19, 2025
Breaking the Narcissistic Cycle: A Therapist's Perspective with Darren Elliott I Ep. 82
What happens when the person who says they love you suddenly turns cold, making you question your own reality? Therapist Darren Elliott pulls back the curtain on narcissism, revealing it's not just a label we throw at difficult people, but a profound emotional disconnection that affects everyone to some degree.
After experiencing the bewildering pain of narcissistic relationships firsthand, Elliott found himself on an unexpected journey – from victim to therapist specializing in treating the very people many clinicians avoid. His compassionate approach challenges our understanding of narcissism as he explains "the split" that causes narcissists to operate in two disconnected emotional states. "When they're in that negative energy, they've literally forgotten all the stuff that happened in their positive energy," Elliott reveals, describing how someone can adore you one moment and seem to hate you the next.
Through his innovative "Love Loops" concept and the Narcissism Recovery Project, Elliott offers hope for both those affected by narcissistic relationships and those struggling with narcissistic traits themselves. The conversation takes surprising turns, exploring how traditional masculinity even the pressure to maintain a "perfect family" narrative can contribute to narcissistic patterns. Elliott also shares how his drag persona, Doreen Devine, uses comedy to make these difficult topics accessible, helping people recognize narcissistic behaviors without shame.
Whether you've been called a narcissist, loved someone who displays these traits, or simply want to understand the emotional dynamics at play in difficult relationships, this episode provides eye-opening insights about our human need for connection. As Elliott reminds us, "We are just a bunch of human pack animals, and our natural state is loving each other." Join us for this transformative conversation about healing the disconnection at the heart of narcissism.
Darren's Links:
https://www.1in3podcast.com/guests/darren-elliott/
https://www.thenarcissismrecoveryproject.com/
1 in 3 is intended for mature audiences. Episodes contain explicit content and may be triggering to some.
If you are in the United States and need help right now, call the national domestic violence hotline at 800-799-7233 or text the word “start” to 88788.
Contact 1 in 3:
- Send your emails to 1in3podcast@gmail.com
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Thank you for listening!
Cover art by Laura Swift Dahlke
Music by Tim Crowe
00:47 - Episode Introduction
01:58 - Darren's Personal Journey
07:35 - What Is Narcissism?
11:45 - Emotional Disconnection and Empathy
18:28 - The Narcissistic Split Explained
24:39 - Treating Narcissism and Recovery
35:57 - The Narcissism Recovery Project
47:18 - Comedy, Queer Identity and Narcissism
01:00:12 - Closing Thoughts and Resources
WEBVTT
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Hi Warriors, welcome to 1 in 3.
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I'm your host, ingrid.
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Guess what?
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Yeah, today we are diving into another episode on narcissism.
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Honestly, I don't think I could cover this topic too much, but hey, if you think I need to chill, you seriously have to let me know.
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This one's a little bit different, though, dare.
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I say fun.
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I know it doesn't make sense, but hang tight, you'll get it soon.
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Today I'm joined by Darren Elliott, and he shares his unique take on narcissism.
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Let's get into it, hi, darren.
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Thank you for joining me today.
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This is one of my favorite topics to discuss, not one of my favorite things to have experienced, but I'm glad you have decided to come on today.
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Thank you, Ingrid.
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I think we're going to make an unusual episode, making narcissism actually fun.
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It's not really a fun topic, but it's such a passion and there's so much to learn from, and it is really something that impacts us all, as you know.
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Yeah, definitely.
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So before we jump into the whole guts of the conversation, could you give a background on yourself?
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Yeah, sure, so I am, and in fact, while I'm giving my background, if I can go a little longer, people can identify with what's happening there too.
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You know I grew up in a lovely Christian family and our family story was we were a perfect, happy Christian family, all happy and healthy and great, Until one day my brother, who was 13 when I was 12, accidentally shot himself in the head with a gun, and it was an accident.
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We're diving, deep diving.
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Yeah, we're just going to jump right on in.
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And then thereafter the family story changed to being we were the perfect, happy family.
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And then that happened to Mark and then everything went off the rails.
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Well, I remember being a depressed kid before my brother accidentally shot himself in the head.
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I remember him being an angry kid before that happened.
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I don't think he did it on purpose.
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I do think he did it by accident.
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But the perfect family story is something that's extremely common in narcissistic families, where there's a a family narrative and we're all sort of fighting to keep that narrative alive and we don't even realize we're doing it.
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So narcissism tends to be invisible if you're living in the middle of it and my background, for me, it was invisible until I was middle-aged and I was being abused for the last time in my relationships and like, oh my, what has just happened?
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It was the end of a relationship that had just destroyed me, and the end of the relationship looked like an off switch because we were like loving and romantic and wonderful.
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And then we had a conversation and then we were done.
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We lived together, we had dreams together.
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It was like, but there was a talk about do you want to buy a house in this city?
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And I was like no, not really, and it wasn't even a heated discussion, it was just like and then the next day I overhear that he is and we're done.
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And it was just like we were just suddenly done.
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It was not hard for them to go from 100 to zero.
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It devastated me.
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I didn't understand what was happening.
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It ripped my guts out.
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I didn't have an off switch.
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I didn't understand at all what was happening.
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But narcissism tends to have a split.
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But the point is I grew up in a family system.
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I did not recognize it, I did not see it until mid-40s when this happened.
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And then the pain of it and the therapist not understanding what was happening.
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Again and again, and again.
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And in my own family we all ended up in therapy.
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But the therapist didn't help.
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They didn't understand what was happening.
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This was really, really not understood 10 years ago and it's just sort of understood now.
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So I ended up in therapy school, just to save myself, could you say.
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Once I recognized that what I was dealing with was narcissistic abuse, I still didn't see it in my own family system.
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I just recognized it happened to me in my relationship.
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So I started this five-year psychotherapy program and when we got to the point that we could work with clients.
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I started working with narcissists because it was my passion and as soon as I could get clients on Psychology.
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Today, I started working with narcissistic clients because they couldn't find anyone to work with them, or even willing to work with them, and I was like well, I'm a student therapist, let's see what we can do.
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They were willing to do that.
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They're almost never aware, as you know.
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So that's the thing.
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It only happens when they're about to lose everything.
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So they have a great wife and they have beautiful kids and they have such a great life, but none of their family like them.
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Their wife has given them the last heave-ho therapy or we're done, and then they come in for therapy and usually the partners found me, not them.
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That makes sense and it really is.
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They've been pushed and, pushed, and pushed and they come in thinking, well, apparently she thinks something's wrong with me and if I'm not here with you I have to leave.
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So we start there.
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Some people come in thinking they're a narcissist and they're not.
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Couples come in not knowing that one of them is.
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That happens too.
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I'm watching the volley and I was like, oh dear, oh dear.
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I watched the ball go over and then the narcissist twists the ball and then serves it back and it looks like it's not even the same ball.
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And then the not-narcissist serves it back and they twist it again and send it back and I'm like, okay, now, traditional therapy does not work for this.
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It has not been successful because traditional therapy is holding everything in neutrality.
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Oh, a bunch of miscommunications.
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Oh, it's just a misunderstanding.
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They often keep them together and keep the abuse going because the narcissist is sort of playing the same game with them that they're playing with their partner.
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When I start working with someone who's suffering from narcissism, the first thing I need to do is guess what's happening inside for them.
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So I start predicting.
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When I said that, did you feel like this?
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I did Right.
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How do you do that?
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Okay, yeah, you got me hooked.
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I'm in for this.
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Because they have a split, and that's what's going so very wrong.
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And when I mean a split, well, firstly, let's get into narcissism real quick, because it's a word that's thrown around like candy and it's misused as an insult mostly.
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Yes, you're right.
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Firstly, we all have narcissism.
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So it's not something we have or don't have, it's something we all do have.
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So it's not something we have or don't have, it's something we all do have.
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But secondly, it's a process that Freud was using the term narcissism to describe childhood processes, childish processes, in fact, that we're meant to grow out of.
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And the thing is so during childhood, where thousands of neuropathways are being created every single day and we're getting imprinted.
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By the way, you know, we come out just with our little eyes and nose and ears and all we know is what's going on around us.
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And the people in our lives form the relationship patterns that we recognize as familiar and normal.
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If those relationship patterns are mom's a narcissist and dad's an empath, or dad's a narcissist, those are going to be normal for us.
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Whatever it is that we're growing up with is normal for us.
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Firstly so and you know the train just went off the rails there- I was with you.
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Because it goes so many places.
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No, but I literally forgot where that train was coming from.
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Just take me back a step.
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So we're talking about what is narcissism?
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Oh, right, yeah, Okay, we're talking about the split, and then I went off.
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There's so many different details because every different little topic could be a chapter by itself, and my ADHD.
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It sometimes takes me to the next step and forgets what the step before was, and then I forget oh, we were talking about this because I can go down a whole new path.
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So what narcissism is and isn't.
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Well, the main problem of narcissism is the things haven't grown up.
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If you're not playing soccer, you don't get good at soccer.
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If you're not being emotionally attuned to, if you're avoiding your emotional experiences, you're not going to get emotionally mature either.
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You don't become emotionally mature by not feeling your emotions.
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Emotion is a capacity, and our capacity to feel takes work, and many men, specifically, have been taught not to feel, and that in itself causes narcissism, because if we learn not to feel, we also learn not to feel with others.
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So if you have a partner who never goes to sadness, they also don't go to your sadness, which means they don't have empathy for sadness.
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That's the first thing that's going wrong, because they don't go to sadness.
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So how do they know how you feel?
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They don't, and then you literally feel misunderstood because you are literally misunderstood.
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They do not go to those emotions, so they absolutely do not understand what your experience is.
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And then they end up doing really hurtful things and they don't acknowledge and they don't recognize often how hurtful it is because they don't let themselves feel those things.
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And often this is tied to toxic positivity.
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It's often tied to let's just be cheerful, let's just be happy.
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Oh, let's look at the bright side and avoid feeling this and avoid feeling that we can't avoid our feelings.
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It ends up sort of accumulating because we experience our emotions as energy and one of the myths that we're dealing with right now.
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Men and women both have nervous systems.
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That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone?
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No, it should not.
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And they work pretty much the same.
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In fact, there's highly sensitive men and there's highly sensitive women.
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But culturally, women are sort of encouraged to develop emotionally, they're encouraged to be vulnerable, they're encouraged to connect with each other in deeper ways and that causes them to grow up emotionally.
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They're dealing with their emotions, they're dealing with their friends' emotions and we mature that way.
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Men traditionally, are being told buck up and be a man.
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And if they're crying they're like oh, stop crying, that's nothing, be a man.
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And so then they slowly shut down and over time they shut down.
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But we're not born shut down.
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But a big part of what's gone wrong in a lot of countries and it's certainly true for the US is men came back from war traumatized and dads and granddads and partners came back from war absolutely traumatized and we had no idea what that meant.
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So they come back from war and then they're expected to be happy.
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They're like oh, aren't you happy to be home?
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They're not happy to be home.
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They actually feel trauma, horrible, but they're trying to.
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No, I'm so happy, I'm so happy to be here.
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And they learned to ignore this huge bubble of trauma by shutting down and by being strong all the time.
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And if they have really, really strong ideals, they might be able to hold it together.
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But so many became alcoholic and so many and they also just taught the next generation not to feel their emotions because they couldn't themselves and they became abusive partners usually and the wife would be like, oh, he wasn't like this before the war, poor guy.
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So they accept the abuse.
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It's like, yeah, he doesn't mean it, he wasn't like this before.
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This is just the war.
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It became normalized in so many families and kids became desensitized in so many families and that generation really created the macho generation.
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If you can't feel, and that generation really created the macho generation.
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If you can't feel, it's like a billionaire who has no empathy, considering empathy a weakness because it's not something they have themselves.
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Empathy is a strength, right.
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Empathy is a higher level emotional skill that not everyone gets to, because if you're not feeling those feelings, like I said, you're not feeling them with others and you don't have empathy.
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Empathy is not feeling those feelings like I said, you're not feeling them with others and you don't have empathy.
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Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone, it's feeling with someone.
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And.
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I can give a real clear example of empathy.
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I don't want to throw under the bus, but it was just such a clear one.
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There's a dog here sitting with me.
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There's Jake, oh you can barely see him.
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Jake.
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There's Jake, we sitting with me, and there's Jake.
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Oh, you can barely see him, jake.
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There's Jake.
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We lost Jake's daughter last year, so it was a really horrible thing, and she was seven.
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It was unexpected.
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She was well Saturday.
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She was gone Monday.
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We were crying, we were upset, we were heartbroken.
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We call my partner's mother.
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She sees us crying on the phone Immediately.
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She's crying.
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That's what empathy looks like.
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Our mirror neurons cause us to feel the same way the other person's feeling and then they feel understood by us because we're literally feeling with them and we evolved to do this.
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But people have learned not to do this and if you're not doing this, then you're lacking that deep connection.
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So we made another phone call right after talking to their mother and the next phone call we made they looked and they saw us and they're like, oh, what's going on?
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It's like lady died.
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We're crying.
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Oh, that's too bad.
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The weather here is really really hot.
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Oh, my goodness.
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Immediately changed the subject, no feeling with, and then eventually came back to it.
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It's like, well, that's a shame, lady died, I guess it was her time, and then that was it and I was like so minimize and not feel with and try to fix are usually what someone's going to do if they're not feeling with others.
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And you don't have to be a narcissist to not feel with others.
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Trauma causes us to not feel with others, but narcissists also do not feel with others.
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That is what's going wrong, right?
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So that's what the two processes look like, and they don't realize they're doing it.
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They think they're there for you if they say the thing Like I don't know, I was so supportive, but they literally never go to any of those emotions with you.
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And a lot of the work of narcissism, firstly, is getting in their inner circle because there's no one there, and really that's the crux of narcissism too, is there's no one they fully trust.
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So there's always a cloak of even my partner I don't totally let into my secret experience.
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There's things I hide from my partner, there's things I hide from, and that's what narcissism looks like.
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It lives in shame, and to work with narcissism we actually need to bring it into the light.
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It needs to just be out in the open.
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So if someone comes in and they have a family, lucky them.
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And it's the only reason they come in To meet someone who's struggling with narcissism, who's not in a relationship.
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They just don't have the motivation for change.
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They need to have something they're going to lose.
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The whole family needs to be involved in it because they all need to learn what narcissist things look like.
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And then they all become against the narcissism, not against the person.
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So it just becomes what we accept can shift and what we fight ends up getting stuck.
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And what people usually do with narcissism is try not to be narcissistic, just try not to be, try not to be.
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It's like try not to be anxious, don't be anxious, don't be depressed.
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It doesn't work for any of those things.
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We need to be able to feel through what we're experiencing with our nervous systems, and that's so much of the work.
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So they learn to feel, but they have trauma work at the beginning because there's too much they've been avoiding for too long and everything feels dangerous.
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So the work is widening that window of tolerance.
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They come in with this range of emotion where they're just feeling sort of cheerful and happy and okay, and then they're not feeling up here and they're not feeling down here.
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And that's what people also misunderstand and need to understand too.
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When you are desensitizing yourself to painful emotions, to fear, to uncomfortableness, to disappointment, to anger, even to sadness, to grief.
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You are desensitizing your nervous system also to pleasure, to joy.
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You can't just choose which things.
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You're desensitizing your nervous system also to pleasure, to joy.
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You can't just choose which things you're desensitizing to.
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You're turning down the volume on everything when you do that, and that's what people don't realize and that's part of toxic positivity.
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You're turning down the volume and then you never quite feel satisfied either.
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So instead of feeling actual joy, they're chasing dopamine, chasing dopamine, chasing dopamine.
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The biggest trip, the best dinner, the best this, the best, this, going over here, going over there, I mean more likely to have affairs chasing the dopamine.
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It's common in society as well, right, because we've been taught to chase dopamine, doom scrolling on our phones, chasing dopamine.
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We go from device to device to device.
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So many people.
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If you're avoiding those emotions, you are not fully living and you will feel numb.
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And the less you allow your feel, the more numb you will feel, because you're literally avoiding your nervous system.
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So of course you feel numb.
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You're not letting yourself feel things, but we don't seem to realize that we can't just not feel the negatives, we need to be able to feel the negative.
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As an example, I started singing two years ago.
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Just a couple of years ago.
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I was a singer when I was younger.
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It was my joy, it really was my biggest joy.
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But it wasn't something my dad could do, so he didn't like it and he wanted me to be an engineer.
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But all my teachers were like your voice is a gift, you have to be a singer.
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But to force me into engineering, he shamed me for singing again and again and again and again.
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So I would sing at church and he'd be saying, oh, wasn't Darren great, but didn't he do a great job?
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And then around the corner he would immediately make me feel like garbage, like oh, you weren't very good.
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I was just being supportive and they were just being kind.
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Now you're not all that.
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Stop being a show-off.
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No one likes a show-off.
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Don't make people listen to you.
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And he did it enough times that I literally had a shame response when I sang and I felt guilty and I felt like I was making people listen to me and no one likes a show-off.
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Like those paradoxical ideas Stopped me singing.
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Eventually I just gave it up and I didn't bring it up again until the old guy died, and during pandemic as well.
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So I started singing.
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I started singing at home and eventually I wanted to sing in front of others and so I started singing live on Facebook, live on Instagram, sitting at the piano singing, and then you press the button going live, and all of a sudden the heart rate goes up and all of a sudden I feel a flush.
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It's hard to breathe, my hands are awkward on the piano, but when I say, oh my gosh, you guys, I turn this on and now I'm feeling so anxious, my heart rate's going really fast.
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And then, as I include myself, literally even though they're not there, I calm down and now I'm not anxious anymore.
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