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Hosted by Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq. and Megan Hunter, MBA, It’s All Your Fault! High Conflict People explores the five types of people who can ruin your life—people with high conflict personalities and how they weave themselves into our lives in romance, at work, next door, at school, places of worship, and just about everywhere, causing chaos, exhaustion, and dread for everyone else.
They are the most difficult of difficult people — some would say they’re toxic. Without them, tv shows, movies, and the news would be boring, but who wants to live that way in your own life!
Have you ever wanted to know what drives them to act this way?
In the It’s All Your Fault podcast, we’ll take you behind the scenes to understand what’s happening in the brain and illuminates why we pick HCPs as life partners, why we hire them, and how we can handle interactions and relationships with them. We break down everything you ever wanted to know about people with the 5 high conflict personality types: narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial/sociopath, and paranoid.
And we’ll give you tips on how to spot them and how to deal with them.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions, those involving high conflict people. I'm Megan Hunter and I'm here with my co-host, bill Eddie.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hi everybody.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute and we do a lot of training and consulting coaching and have developed a lot of educational programs and methods all to do with high conflict. We're happy you're with us today listening in and watching. For those of you watching us on YouTube today, we're going to take listener questions Again, we took some last week and I thought they were really, really great and we have a few more today, bill, and we'll try to get through them kind of quickly, but also very thoroughly at the same time. So starting off, hello. I think I may be a high conflict person. I'm diagnosed autistic and A DHD, which might partially explain it. I have very poor emotional management skills. I'm impulsive and reactive and I struggle to allow partners to leave me. I'm already on psychotherapy, but what can I do to improve my relations? So there we have it, bill. That's really interesting, somebody really holding up that mirror and kind of developing self-awareness and wondering what to do.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I think that's terrific. And the big thing we find in a way that separates the roughly 10% of people with high conflict personalities from other people in terms of thinking is the lack of self-awareness. So if you're developing that self-awareness, that's really a big step on the road to having happier relationships and more self-control. And I want to just emphasize, we talk about high conflict people, high conflict personalities. The question isn't lesser people or anything like that. They have a different operating system and part of it's lacking that self-awareness piece. So developing self-awareness, one of the big, big, big steps and just really want to congratulate you for that. The main thing I would say of course is have a therapist work with someone, find out if medications may help take the edge off some of the impulsive behaviors and things like that. What we have to offer are a set of basically conflict management skills.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
So I would say practice our Biff method, brief, informative, friendly, and firm for writing emails. And that actually will help orient your thinking more towards a more managed, more moderate way of interacting with people. Also, your statements is being able to tell people that you have some empathy for them. You see someone in pain, you can kind of reach out to them and say, I have some empathy for you. And if someone's upset with you, is being able to take a deep breath and then try to look at things from their point of view, but also look at expressing your point of view in matter of fact terms, what I feel what I want will help you. So those two skills particularly helpful. A third we have is making proposals and you can say, well, I don't know what to do here, but I would propose that we do such and such. Would you agree with that or have questions about it? So our main teaching are these skills, these tools for helping people actually get along, but we don't give mental health advice or training. That's something to do with a mental health counselor. And it sounds like you're already working on that, so good for you.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, definitely a counselor can I guess help so much with learning about emotion management skills and like you said, bill, just using Biff and air and proposals, those are skills and it gives you something to do that's proactive in place of being highly emotional. It's good to replace some of these things and I think we don't think of it in that way often. We just think of I've got to use a skill, but it's really you're replacing something else. So if we're working on using a skill, we're thinking we're using the thinking part of our brain more instead of using being stuck in that reactive part. So win-win. Alright, next question. Could you provide a good resource on how to mediate with a sociopath when children are involved? I've been to court and the judge recommends trying mediation. My ex refuses most requests and will not provide financial disclosures of our two businesses, although it was requested three times by the court. So the question here, bill, is in their words, how to mediate with sociopath when children are involved. And I'm quite sure you're probably going to have some thoughts on that, even how to phrase that and how to think of it.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Right. Well, two main categories of answer. One is you can try mediation, don't have really high expectations with someone who's a sociopath, sociopath, antisocial, personality disorder, pretty much equivalent terms, people that lie a lot, people that don't carry responsibility a lot, a lack of remorse, all of that. So it's kind of a personality that's kind of built around being an adversary rather than someone to really cooperate with. But especially if you're court ordered to do mediation, do a session or two, see what you can get from that. But in that, think about it in very concrete terms. What I'll do, what I want you to do, don't necessarily get real deep into the why's. Focus on proposals.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
What do you mean about the why's? Don't get into the why's.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So like, well, why do you want that? Or why won't you do this? Why don't you agree to something or other? And I see that people say with other high conflict people, they say, well, why can't you agree to such and such? But you're not going to get into the whys with any success. So just say, here's a proposal, ask me your questions and then say yes, no, or I'll think about it. And if you say no, we'll go to the next proposal and if you'll think about it, that's great. Now, I want to suggest a little book that I co-wrote with Michael Lomax called Mediating High Conflict Disputes. If you're looking for a book that really explains a kind of step-by-step structure that seems to help more with high conflict personalities and antisocial is one of the five that we see as more likely to be a high conflict personality.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
And so it talks about that. It's mostly just structure around proposals, questions, response proposals, questions, response. Anyway, that's my first half of my answer. My second half of my answer is don't mediate forever. Usually one or two sessions makes it clear if they're going to be making progress or not. And the second choice really is you need to really thinking about setting limits and imposing consequences. And if they won't provide financial information, then use the courts, talk to your lawyer about what consequences are there. And I think of a two day trial. I had once the husband, my client was the wife and the husband had three businesses and he couldn't tell the truth about any of them. And the judge at the end of the trial basically awarded all the decisions, went in favor of my client. The guy was an anti sociopath, probably I didn't meet him, I didn't do a diagnostic inventory. But his behavior fit we often talk about is sociopathic. And with that, you just got to have expectations and consequences, set limits and impose consequences and don't make your expectations too high. There's a very difficult personality to deal with.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And I like what you said about try it a couple of times, and I think that's something that I probably don't say enough in when I'm giving trainings and talking with people about this is that you don't have to try forever. It's not like if I try that your statement a 77th time that now it's going to work. There are some personalities that are just extraordinarily difficult. And so try a couple times like writing Biffs. I know you and I were talking about this recently where a mom kept asking the dad or wanted to ask the dad for something to do with their daughter and he responded with a resounding no. And then she just sent another Biff and he came back with another resounding no. And she then wanted to come back with another Biff and asked the same question in just different ways, but biffing it and thinking maybe it would help. But I remember you saying try it a couple of times and then stop.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I think that's true with most of the methods we talk about is go to your plan B, go to what to do if that's a dead end.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Yeah. Yep. Alright, another, not much of a question, but more of a comment from a listener. I was listening to the Seeds of Personality episode, understanding psychopath's, origins and Impact part two. You noted that personalities don't change quickly when people are older. In the case of behavioral variant, frontotemporal dementia, the personality change is the first sign of dementia. You might advise your listeners that if they do see a rapid change in personality, that they consult with the neurologist. So really interesting comment. And the listeners also provided a link, so we'll put that link in the show notes. So what do you say, bill?
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Well, first of all, personalities don't change that much over a lifetime. All of our personality, that's part of who we are and is pretty stable over a lifetime. I think in your twenties you may make some changes in your personality, you may try different things, be around different people, but by the time you're thirties is pretty much who you're going to be, even by the time you're 20, it's mostly who you're going to be. And so if you see someone's personality changing dramatically, really at any age, but especially at older age is get a medical checkup, have them checked out because it could be, I had a friend of mine had a tumor the size of a golf ball in her head right near her ear. It didn't really change her personality, but it knocked out her hearing and she was just kind of ignoring some strange things. But her husband said, Hey, you need to get checked. And thank goodness he did, because if it had grown much more, fortunately it wasn't malignant. If it had grown much more, it could have done some real damage. So if you see a big change, check it out.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, so thank you listener for writing in about that. It's good to cover all the bases and to have more information.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Alright, next question. Can a covert, emotionally abusive and manipulative person convince a normal emotionally healthy partner that they are the ones that have a high conflict personality? Can they work on this over time and cause the other person to display those characteristics, even if it's not who that person really is? So kind of fascinating, right? I mean it's really about the impact that a high conflict person can have on us. And I like to talk about having kind of a shield up and sometimes you need a shield so that stuff doesn't permeate you. So what happens if you don't know that and you don't have that shield up or it's just really hard for you to have that? And over time you just start to think, I've got a problem and it's me,
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Right? Well, let me just start with coercive controlling violence, domestic violence where the perpetrator of the violence really convinces their victim, it's all their fault. And I remember once having a situation where I was actually doing a mediation, it was a divorce mediation, and they had agreed, and I interviewed them separately, is this safe and will they work together? And they did. But at one point the husband pulls out this crumpled up note and it was from the wife that she'd written to him probably five years, 10 years earlier, saying, I'm sorry, I don't clean better, I'm sorry, I don't cook better, I'm sorry, all this.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
And I think she had been worn down. I'm sure she wrote that to try to calm him down, but she probably came to believe it. And that's one thing that happens in my book, our New World of Adult Bullies. I give the example of a singer songwriter from the UK who got into an abusive relationship with another artist in Los Angeles. And over the course of a year she said she just was ground down. She was well to do, she was famous, and yet she became isolated. He told her she shouldn't look at men, she had to look down at the restaurant, if the waiter came by, all these things. At the end of the year, she was able to break free with the help of a therapist, and now she's suing the guy. She said, I wanted to go public because I want people to know if this can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
So I think that's that kind of coercive control where they take over your whole life step by step that you think it's your fault. Now, do you think you're a high conflict person? Well, if an abusive person tells you that enough, you're probably going to believe that. But I want to shift over just to high conflict divorces. And what I see it's not unusual is a high one, high conflict person, one who's not high conflict, but the not high conflict person starts to develop the behavior of the high conflict person in terms of yelling, in terms of making threats, in terms of more rigid positions, kind of mirroring the person with the more difficult behavior. And you see that in families, in the workplace, et cetera. So people do kind of mirror that behavior even though that's not normal for them. And the thing is to help people get unstuck from that and not absorb that and to be able to see that's not who they usually are. But if you're in a situation where you're absorbing the other person's behavior, that's one approach is to become just as aggressive. But it's not as good as just asserting yourself with who you really are. And in most court cases, that will help you a lot.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, I mean, becoming aggressive might land one of you in jail or both. We've seen that quite a lot. And I think there's some people who kind of take it and take it and they just get more ground down and more ground down and they try not to say anything. They don't know what to say. They don't seem to have any support. I mean, we hear that a lot that I just didn't tell anyone because I thought no one would believe me, how terrible it was, how awful this relationship is. And over time, my self-esteem eroded and then I finally snapped. And then there is a problem. Snapping is aggressive and it's way outside their norm. So you have to pay attention to those things if you are acting outside of your own norm, whether it's up or down. Cause for exploration, right?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
I'd suggest getting a new world of adult bullies because that has like 60 examples and mostly of people being able to stop the bully. And so you can see you're really alone. This is something lots of people are going through
Speaker 1 (17:53):
For sure. Yeah, it's surprising to people when they find out they're not the only one.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Alright, and the final question today, I just finished listening to five types of people who can ruin your life, which for our listeners, that's one of Bill's more recent books. And I'm wondering about one thing in chapter 10 where the example scenario is a workplace issue. The suggestion is to seek out the Ombudsman's office for assistance. This may have been a hypothetical situation, but there could be a hitch if the Ombuds office is used in real situations. Are there industry standards for a business establishing and staffing an Ombuds office? The reason I ask is that my employer's Ombuds office was part of and funded by the risk management department. The Ombuds office function was first and foremost to protect the business from exposure to risk, including employee complaints or litigation by mitigating the issues in a counseling environment. So the question being, are there industry standards for a business establishing and staffing and Ombuds office and the complications around that?
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah, there are, and Ombuds play a role. I see them most commonly with universities, government agencies, and some of the biggest businesses, I'd say majority of companies don't have an ombuds, but a significant minority do maybe 25% something 30%. And their job is kind of to be neutral, to facilitate resolution of conflicts. I'd like to say that in most cases, I think they are pretty neutral, but there are cases where the organization has a heavier foot on the scale. And I know I've dealt with one organization where the human resource manager was like best friends with the head of the company who was the difficult person. And so just be aware on a small scale that that does exist. And as with everything, have your eyes wide open, but find people you can get support from solving a conflict. And if you can't trust the Ombuds person is maybe going to some other manager or some other department and looking at what can I do to solve whatever problem I have. But I'd say mostly you can trust the Ombuds. So I don't want people to think that that role is always just to support the company. They're designed to be insulated so they can really be neutral. And then I'd say majority of cases, because we do training both Megan, you both of us have done trainings with Ombuds a lot and I think they're really a good role and have helped a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Yeah, most definitely. And I think lot of, they handle a lot of high conflict complaints because the high conflict brain wants to seek out decision makers and authorities to agree with them that an agency is all bad or an employer is all bad or something. So it's really, I think, been helpful for them to have our training so they can address things in the right way, the best way possible probably. At least we think so. Well good. Thank you Bill. And thank you again listeners for sending in those questions. Next week we're going to talk about Bully Bosses. We've been getting a lot of feedback about this, and as you and I both know, bill, the number one search term on our website for a long time has been managing my narcissistic boss. So I don't think anything's changed. So since you wrote the book, our New World of Adult Bullies, I think that's a very appropriate topic. So we'll be talking about that. In the meantime, send your questions to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. Until next time, keep learning and practicing and be kind to yourself and others while we try to keep the conflict small and find the missing piece.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
It's All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins and Ziv Moran. Find the show notes and transcripts at True story fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.