Bill Eddy
speaker
272 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Bill Eddy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, it's fascinating because I started out as a clinical social worker, working with children and families in psychiatric hospitals, outpatient clinics, but I really like conflict resolution. So I went to law school to get a law degree so I could do mediation, other conflict resolution, and I practiced family law.
And when I started in family court, I noticed right away that a lot of the conflicts seem to be driven by people's personalities rather than the legal issue. Because I was also doing mediation in my office. I go to court in the morning, do mediation in the afternoon. Same exact issues. In the morning, people were stuck for two or three years.
In the afternoon, two or three mediation sessions, shook hands, went separate ways. So in family court, a lot of people aren't familiar with this, but since the 1980s, there's been the use of the term high-conflict families.
And family court lawyers, judges, mediators, therapists identified high conflict families as repeatedly coming to court to make decisions, as having a lot of hostility, of just seeming driven in one direction, unable to be flexible, and in many ways, unable to truly have empathy for their kids. So they'd fight over their kids.
And so high conflict families was a term, when I became a lawyer in 1993, I was like, wait a minute, these aren't high conflict families. These have maybe one, maybe two people with high conflict personalities or traits of personality disorders, which I knew about since 1980, and working in hospitals and outpatient clinics. Because you're also a clinical psychologist. Clinical social worker.
Clinical social worker. So I got a master's in social work in 1981. Then I got licensed to do therapy on my own. So I'm a licensed clinical social worker in California. I can diagnose disorders. I can do treatment without supervision. I went through that, and that's how I became licensed.
So when I came into Family Core, I go, this is the same patterns when I was working, say, with people in the psychiatric hospital who had addictions, depression, all these problems. And my job as the hospital social worker was to help them with their outside problems, their family problems. So I did family counseling for the patients.
With their job, maybe their employer wanted to fire them because of their behavior, and I tried to help keep their job. Maybe they were getting evicted. Their landlord couldn't stand their behavior. And I'd solve one problem, and I'd go, I've got you into marriage counseling, and your husband or wife's committed to working on the relationship. And they'd go, yay, I accomplished something.
Next day, Bill, my landlord, wants to kick me out. Okay, I'd convince their landlord to give them one more chance. Yay, Bill, my job wants to fire me. Can you help? What they have is a pattern of conflict behavior that doesn't get resolved. And that's the high conflict families that I saw in family court. So that's where that...
connection came from, which I would not have arrived at if I hadn't been a therapist and also a lawyer.
Yeah. Well, let me say a little bit about the difference between high conflict personalities and personality disorders. Because we have a lot of research on personality disorders, including statistics, which I'll give you. We don't have a lot of research on high conflict personalities. People have talked about it, like I said, since the 1980s in family court.
And my own observations with thousands of cases of high conflict personalities is it's pretty much men and women. My law practice, I represented pretty much 50-50 men and women, mostly custody disputes, mothers and fathers. So I got a good impression. Personality disorders, there's a lot of research on.
And I mentioned in the book some statistics and they came from the personality disorder research. So what they found is They studied the 10 personality disorders.
In the early 2000s, a big study, National Institutes of Health, the alcoholism subdivision of NIH, they wanted to see how prevalent personality disorders were with substance abuse, with domestic conflicts, with criminal behavior, and workplace conflicts. And so this study, they looked at all 10 personalities, came up with numbers for each. Five of them seem prone to high conflict behavior.
So these five, I can give you statistics on. And I can give you breakdown male and female, all from 20 years ago. Big study because it hasn't been repeated since. So basically cluster B, that's narcissistic, borderline, antisocial, histrionic, but we see a lot of paranoid in legal disputes.
And some research says paranoid personality disorder is the most likely to sue their employer of the personality disorders. So that's gotten attention too. So here's some numbers. First of all, narcissistic personality disorder they found was about 6% of adults in the United States. They found the statistics on that was 38% female and 62% male. So that's more heavily male. 20 years ago.
Could be different now because of environmental influences. Borderline, also about 6%. This was 53% female, 47% male. Almost 50-50. And that shocked the mental health world because we've always thought of borderline as a female disorder. But Marsha Lanahan, the big name in treatment for borderline, says she agrees. She thinks that's true.
And I think that's true as a family lawyer because a lot of the men that we see engaged in domestic violence seem to have the borderline personality pattern. And the domestic violence is much more male than female. Then antisocial is around 4%, and that's about 75% male, 25% female.
Histrionic is about 2%, and they found this is about 50-50, which again surprised people because you think drama, center of attention, all of that. And this may be very much environmental influence. Our culture today teaches, especially young men, to try to get attention. Ride your skateboard behind a car or jump off a building, do all these dramatic things to get attention.
And social media has really encouraged that. Everyone wants attention and now you kind of have to fight for it in our culture. And so men as well as women are getting out there often in dramatic ways. So it came out about 50-50. Paranoid, it's about 4%. Came out, I think it was 57 to 43%, somewhere right around that, a little more heavily female. but not all that far apart.
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