Why Narcissism Is Having Its Moment, and How to Spot It Early

Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, author of It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, has spent more than two decades on a question most of the field once ignored: what happens to a person who lives inside a close relationship with someone whose personality is organized around entitlement, grandiosity and control? In a two-hour Big Think interview, she makes a case that the popular conversation about narcissism gets three things wrong. It treats the word as a catch-all insult rather than a recognizable pattern. It assumes the only healthy response is to leave. And it misreads the people who end up in these relationships as the problem. Her counter-argument is precise, clinical and, in places, surprisingly hopeful: narcissistic relationships are confusing rather than hopeless, choice is the central ingredient of recovery, and healing does not depend on getting a clean ending.

What was it like to study narcissism before anyone was talking about it?

Durvasula's interest began in the early 2000s, when she was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Her research looked at how narcissistic people made decisions and how they showed up in relationships. The turn came later, in private practice, when clients started arriving with accounts of partners and family members whose behavior matched what she had been measuring in the lab. The question that followed was simple: what would happen if people in these relationships were told that what they were living through was a pattern?

"It's just not a difficult relationship. It's a pattern."

Ramani Durvasula, Big Think interview

For many clients, she said, that reframing was a lightbulb moment. Shifting the question from "why is my partner so difficult?" to "what is this pattern and how does it work?" gave people a way to stop blaming themselves for a dynamic that was built to be confusing. She also noticed a gap in the mental health literature. There was little work on how personality styles like narcissism shaped close relationships, and she came to see the effects as consistent across intimate partnerships, family ties, particularly with a parent, and workplace relationships. "Very similar things happen to a person in one of those relationships," she said.

The field's reception was not warm. At one point, a mentor who had come through graduate school with her asked what she was doing and called the subject a silly thing. Durvasula's answer was that there was something there. (Big Think interview, 6:46 for the discussion that follows.) She has since spent decades documenting that something.

Why is narcissism having its moment now?

Durvasula is wry about the change. She has been working on narcissism since the early 2000s, when, she recalled, almost nobody was talking about it. Then several forces converged. Social media rewarded attention-seeking and the "look at me" posture. Geopolitics shifted. And the traits at the center of her research, entitlement and grandiosity, became visible in celebrity culture, corporate life and politics. Since roughly 2016 and 2018, she argued, the word has been unavoidable.

She also points to the vocabulary that rose alongside it. "Toxic" was a word of the year. "Gaslighting" was a word of the year. Even "rizz," the slang for charisma, has had its own word-of-the-year moment. Narcissism-adjacent language, in her reading, is part of a wider movement of social tectonic plates that pushed the concept into everyday talk.

The most useful thing she says about this trend is historical. Open any history book, Durvasula argued, and the people written about were often grandiose, focused on power and dominance, and willing to hurt others. If they were not narcissistic, she suggested, they may have been psychopathic. The pattern is ancient. What is new is that we have a name for it and a much louder public conversation about it. That is both the opportunity and the danger: a word that circulates everywhere can be applied to everyone, which dilutes its meaning for the people who need it most.

Does the advice to just leave actually work?

This is where Durvasula is most insistent, and where her view departs from much of the self-help genre. In the books and online advice she critiques, the assumed solution is simple: if you are in a relationship with a narcissistic person, get out. She says that solution is "simply not accessible to the vast majority of people."

She does not minimize danger. In relationships with acute, imminent threat of violence, she said, the conversation turns to safety planning, the territory of domestic violence work. But most narcissistic relationships, in her account, involve no physical violence and no imminent threat. What they involve is a person caught in a confusing situation. When a book tells that person to leave, many people do the opposite: they double down on the relationship, because leaving feels impossible, and they decide the problem must not be as bad as it looks. Denial, she argued, is itself a real risk.

Her work, she said, has been "almost agnostic about leaving." Her first book on narcissism in relationships was titled Should I Stay or Should I Go?, and the premise has run through her writing since. The core idea is agency, which she defines plainly: "Agency is just another word for choice." In an emotionally abusive relationship, choice seems to disappear. The person feels like a passenger on a manipulative ride. Healing, in her framing, means recovering the sense that choices exist, even when the choice is to stay.

"I'd say well over half of cases, it's not about leaving."

Ramani Durvasula, Big Think interview

She gives examples of what that choice can look like: deciding not to leave because of a commitment to children or to a family system that would not accept separation. Choosing to stay is not the same as accepting the status quo, she argues. A person can make a deliberate decision to remain in the relationship while changing how they engage with it. That distinction, between a passive ride and an active posture, runs through the rest of her approach.

For those who do leave, she is candid about the cost. Separation often brings anger, accusations and what she calls post-separation abuse. For those who stay, the strain is ongoing and daily. Neither path is painless, and neither, in her view, determines whether a person can heal.

How do you recognize the pattern early?

The interview's opening chapter is titled "How to identify narcissism," and Durvasula's central move is to treat narcissism as a pattern that can be recognized, not a vague judgment about someone's character. Her point is that a pattern can be named, tracked and understood, and that naming it is often the first step out of self-doubt. Many people in these relationships, she explained, have been told they are overly sensitive or are not communicating clearly enough. Pattern-recognition gives them something firmer to stand on.

Durvasula also pushes back on the popular picture of the narcissist as an obvious bully. The interview's own description captures the more useful observation: narcissistic people are often charming at the dinner party and cruel in the car ride home, which suggests they can control the behavior. That split is what makes early recognition hard. The warmth is real in the moment, and so is the cruelty, and the person on the receiving end is left trying to reconcile two different people.

The interview then moves into a series of more granular distinctions, including five types of narcissism, the traits that help narcissists hide inside corporate C-suites, and why "codependency" is the wrong lens for understanding these relationships (Big Think interview, 31:41 and 53:22). Those segments are where her clinical vocabulary is most detailed, and they are worth watching in full rather than being reduced to a checklist.

How do you grieve and recover after a narcissistic relationship?

The final section of the interview turns toward recovery, which Durvasula frames as its own kind of work. She says many people ask how to grieve a relationship that did not end cleanly, or that ended without the justice or acknowledgment they wanted. Her answer begins with radical acceptance and with naming the grief. The loss can be real even when the relationship was harmful, and it helps to say exactly what was lost.

"Many people ask me, 'How do we grieve...'"

Ramani Durvasula, Big Think interview (approx. 103:00)

The chapter titles signal the rest of her framework: healing without closure, what she calls the truth about no contact, and why healing happens in relationship. That last phrase is worth noticing. For someone whose life was shaped by a relationship that undermined their reality, recovery often involves relationships again, with people who can reflect back what is actually happening. The excerpt that circulates of the full transcript cuts off before those arguments are fully developed, so a reader should treat the chapter titles as a map and the full interview as the source.

Where to go from here

If the ideas here are new to you, start with the throughline: narcissism is a recognizable pattern, not a permanent label. Choice, or agency, is the anchor of Durvasula's approach, and it does not require a dramatic exit to be meaningful. If you are in a relationship that feels like this, her book It's Not You and her earlier Should I Stay or Should I Go? extend the framework well beyond what a single interview can cover. The full Big Think interview, with its chapter breaks on identifying narcissism, signs of a narcissistic relationship and recovery, is the most direct way to hear her reasoning in her own voice. And if you are in acute danger, the priority is safety, not interpretation. Her work starts from the same place.