Narcissism and Grief with Dr. Ramani and David Kessler + Q&A ~ Dr. Ramani

So let's go ahead then and let's take on these questions.

Okay, let's do the questions because that's really what I wanted to make tonight about.

Usually it's like one, two, a couple of quick questions on a live.

Let's go deep into these questions that I'm hoping have accumulated, like I said, and I hope you enjoyed the program.

So that's what we got here.

how do you reconcile the grief of losing the narcissistic person? For example, knowing the person you love never existed and missing them with the realization that they will never change.

So, you know, this is a really, really insightful question by Renee, because what Renee has picked up on is this particular element here of knowing the person you loved never existed.

And in essence, we've kind of like put that person together.

We sort of There was someone we hoped that they would be, that they were this person for at least for some period of time we believed was empathic and compassionate and all these things.

And those things probably weren't, they were more flimsy.

But also remember that there were parts of this that were, I don't want to say that this entire relationship is a fiction.

That part's untrue.

there might there are qualities of this person one thing that comes up over and over again let's say this person was so smart it's a narcissistic person is so smart and i really appreciated the intellect or they are so wise about this one they knew so much about movies and i loved that part of them but once we lose them right we've lost someone who we kind of kind of constructed a lot of in our head so we're not even sure exactly what we're losing we're losing some real things and that grief can actually is quite quite real all of the grief is very real But that grief is like, this is not in my life.

You do miss them.

Let's break out of this cycle.

What I'll never buy is that people think, oh, you don't really miss them because you kind of made it up in your head.

You didn't make it up in your head.

It was something in your life, good, bad, or indifferent.

It was something in your life.

And so, yes, you miss that.

So then it's that realization that they'll never change.

Frankly, I think if you can harness that recognition.

that they were not gonna change, not for you, not for someone else.

There can be a real power in that in terms of helping you work through the grief.

Because something I'll often do with folks is I'll say, can you play this out? Can you say, okay, there is this, the person I was in the relationship with, there was the person I kind of thought I was in the relationship with, so you're losing both of them, okay? And then there is also that sense of you're also losing a third thing, which is the hope it was going to change and get better.