Doing Couple’s Therapy With a Narcissist

A few years ago, I went to Los Angeles to attend Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy training. He is world-renowned for his insightful take on male depression, healthy relationships, and narcissistic personalities in marriage, and has written several books on these subjects. (1) All are profound. Terry’s work is based on Pia Mellody’s’ model of Childhood Developmental Trauma; both he and I were trained in trauma by her, in his case many years before I did, and took what he learned and expanded it into a strategy for couples therapy. The fact that he has a plan for dealing with narcissists provoked curiosity because, in grad school, we were told those marriages couldn’t be repaired, and my personal experience has been that narcissists are in the top rung of most difficult people to do therapy with. Do they change? Not in my experience. I have met therapists who claim to love working with narcissists, but I find it hard to believe. I liken it to wrestling with someone four times my size with my hands tied behind my back. As soon as I pick up on the fact that I am dealing with someone with narcissistic traits, I take a deep breath and wonder why I became a couple’s therapist — it’s that hard.

So, no wonder I was willing to pay thousands of dollars to travel to get training from someone who has figured out a way to do it where you don’t come out blistered and bruised, and, you have a small chance at success. In the past, I would encourage each person to get individual therapy, but what I really wanted was for the spouse of the narcissist to get help to learn how to deal with their narcissist partner. They need to know if they are in an abusive relationship, find emotional support, and make sure they know how to get their emotional needs met on their own. Often, couples come in for couples therapy, stay briefly until I say something the narcissistic spouse doesn’t want to hear, and later, the long-suffering non-narcissist spouse returns on their own. They usually say something like, “You hit the nail on the head about my spouse’s narcissistic habits, and since you’ve met them, I want to do individual therapy with you.” That’s always a good idea.