Bill Eddy
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
That's the one that said 38% overlap borderlines in narcissists. I think that it fits for me because when I teach lawyers, from my own experience, I can say, you have a client that comes on like a narcissist. They're very self-centered and putting you down, saying they're superior. Here's some tips to deal with them.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But they also may have wide mood swings, which is more associated with borderline. So you need to... butter up their ego, honestly, not, you know, praise them for something that's real, that they did, but also they really need empathy. They have wide mood swings, that's someone that needs a lot of empathy. Say, wow, I can see how upset you are, this is so important, and they calm down.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
responses to deal with someone that has that combination you mentioned borderline and histrionic there's a lot of similarities so we see overlap with that but I've seen every combination but what I don't know in family court is is it the disorder or just traits and the disorder doesn't matter to me it's the pattern that matters because if I see this pattern I know I should do that that's the key
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Well, what's interesting, and it's very rewarding work when things can go well, When the lawyers get it, the judge gets it, everyone gets it, what's happening, they can make orders that fit the situation and help protect children from bad behavior and help get parents some help. So substance abuse is a bigger issue in family court than personality disorders, but almost neck and neck.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
We talk about substance abuse all the time openly. There's treatment. Everyone recognizes the signs. We don't talk about personality disorders in our culture. And that's like flying under the radar.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It leads to high conflict behavior. Exactly.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah, absolutely. And you may have seen me shaking my head, no, and said, should we point this out to people? That's the last thing you want to do. In fact, don't do that. And the reason why is personality disorders. Oh, let me just quickly distinguish between personality disorders, high conflict personalities.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The difference, and there's a chart in the beginning of the book with two circles overlapping, a lot of overlap. But the main thing about personality disorders is they're stuck in a narrow range of interpersonal behavior. So some aren't high conflict people, some are. The thing about high conflict people is that they're preoccupied with blame. That blaming others is a big part of their life.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So when you're dealing with a high conflict person who's blaming and has a personality disorder, you get a stuck pattern of behavior. You get high conflict personalities or high conflict people. So they're persistent in acting that way. That's the overlap with personality disorders is they don't reflect, they don't change, they just keep blame is everybody out there.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So recognizing that difference and similarity. So about half of people, I think, with personality disorders, and this is just my estimate, have high conflict personalities and about half don't. I've worked with borderlines in the psych hospital, narcissists that...
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Don't blame other people, narcissists that are just self-centered and borderlines who are more frustrated with themselves than anybody else. So that's an important distinction.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
In my estimation. I don't have research yet. Right.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And that's why they have conflicts. And they escalate instead of getting worked on and resolved.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah, so part of it goes with the specific personalities. So high conflict people with borderline personality traits or histrionic personality traits are often more openly dramatic. And so they might really shock you. Suddenly they start yelling, screaming. throwing things just because you're having an average conversation, very disproportionate.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But some, and it tends to be more of the antisocial personality, some narcissistic personalities can look really reasonable on the surface. And they've actually had a lifetime of experience at looking good, which kind of covers up all the stuff under the surface. And I think of a couple examples. So, for example, and I deal sometimes with domestic violence cases. So let's say an abuser...
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
says in court, says, oh, well, I was helping her because she was so upset. I took her keys away and I held her down on the bed because I was afraid she would leave and get into a car crash. Well, there may be rare occasions where that's true, but that's a common story that we get from domestic abusers.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Or in court, I've seen this, where there'll be a very reasonable person kind of explaining the situation. And their partner, more often a woman, is just emotional, is a mess, maybe even in tears. And people don't realize about 80% of divorces in court today, people represent themselves. And so there's these conversations. And the judge is like, well, this guy's being really reasonable.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And this woman's a mess. I mean, you know, I'm going to go with what he's saying. And so a lot of stuff slips under the radar that way. But gender-wise, it could be the reverse. And a lot of relationships people get into, people make themselves look really good. And then the negative stuff comes out weeks, months, maybe a year later. you decide to commit. Because nowadays, who knows?
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
You may have someone that really is good at covering their bad behavior.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yes. And that's many, many of the high conflict divorces that I've worked on as a lawyer and before that as a therapist and sometimes as a mediator are, in my mind, kind of the bad luck stories. Got a decent person, usually my client, of course, but something happened, they got together too fast and And then all this stuff came out.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I really believe in today's world that it is a matter of luck. And that's why you should take a year to find out, did I draw the short straw in this relationship? Have I got this perfect looking person? Great record, all these good things. But close relationships is where personality disorders come out, interpersonal difficulties and the high conflict behaviors, mostly close relationships.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So they might, everyone might like them at work, but when you're home alone with them, they could be really terrible, yelling, hitting, doing all of this stuff. So that's why we say wait a year. I've had a lot of cases where people tell me, we just fell in love, it was beautiful and everything was wonderful for about six months.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And then when I committed to get married, all this stuff started showing up. But I got married anyway because I figured, well, time and love will heal everything. Only it didn't. So in today's world, there's a higher risk of getting a high conflict relationship, I must say. And the description you gave is what people often tell me. They say, my grandparents...
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
got married a week after they met, and they just celebrated their 60th anniversary, they're still in love, everything's wonderful. Your grandparents tended to know who they were marrying. In today's world, not only don't you know, you don't have a history, but high conflict people have learned to cover up the full range of who they are. And they're not bad people.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And that's something I want to emphasize. They just have a different personality. And they may have been born this way, but they don't come with markings. They don't come with the music like of Jaws. They look good. And anybody, I think, is at risk of falling into a relationship like this.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Except for the last one, is it's really don't commit like getting married within the first year. Sometimes moving in together is a good way to find out what it's like up close with this person. Yeah, you learn a lot by living with somebody. That's right. That's right. And personality disorders, part of the definition is interpersonal dysfunction. And that's close. That's close relationships.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So if you haven't had that close relationship, you don't see what happens when you leave your socks out or the caps off the toothpaste and some little thing is some huge storm.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Right. But the key is patterns of behavior. So one thing I want to say is everybody gets angry sometimes. That's fine. Everybody yells sometimes. Everybody, you know, criticizes sometimes. But if they have a pattern, like their life pattern of relationship is to yell and scream and criticize and all that, whoa, this pattern is probably going to keep going.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And as I mentioned earlier, I believe, with personality disorders, it's a narrower pattern of behavior. So it's more pattern-driven behavior. in several different settings, family, maybe at work when it's closed, maybe in the community when it's closed. So these are recognizable patterns, as recognizable as alcoholism and addiction once people learn. So that's the key.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Give yourself some time, see if this stuff comes to the surface.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Right. I think it can be helpful. You know, I tell people, Google your partner and find out, you know, if there's some history there that may impact you. Definitely. But don't believe that's sufficient. What I say is that you really want to talk to is relatives and friends of this person. And what you really want to do is see them in action with their relatives and friends.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yes, because that's close relationships. That's the key. This is all about close relationships. And that's what catches people by surprise. They say, this person looks good at work.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Some people have worked together for 10 years, and maybe they were in other relationships, and they both got divorced, commiserated with each other, and they get together, and it's like, we've known each other for 10 years, you know, we're going to have a great relationship. And they find out this is like a stranger almost, because it's a close relationship now. And that's the difference.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
How people behave in a close relationship often triggers like personality disordered stuff, fear of abandonment, fear of looking inferior, fear of being dominated, fear of not getting enough attention. The personality disorders seem to have excessive fears in these areas.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yes. And I'd say you mentioned the word stability, and that's really a key. So if they have close friends they've had for 10, 20, 30 years, that's a really good sign. Bad signs are... I don't want you talking to my family. They're evil people. They'll say terrible things about me. You can't trust them. They'll end up, they'll turn on you. They'll hate you. All this stuff.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
You can't even ever talk to my, I can't even let you know who my family is and what their emails and phone numbers are.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
That's a warning sign. Yeah, definite warning sign.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah, and if your family's really difficult, introduce your partner to your family and let them see this is a difficult family and this is why I had to distance from them. Because a lot of people, to be healthy, do have to get some more distance. But it's the secretiveness, it's the, just secrets in general are not a good thing for relationships.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
That's the biggest piece that's missing in a way compared to 50 years ago when people knew. It was hard to have family secrets 50 years ago. Now, even though people may be all over the internet, you might not really know their secrets. And that's what you need to find out. What about advocates?
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
What's interesting, and I'd like to someday learn more of the neuroscience behind this, but high conflict people have heightened emotions. The cluster B personality disorders are known as dramatic, emotional, and erratic. That's the DSM-5-TR says that, the manual for mental health professionals. And so their heightened emotions are are contagious.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And in general, what I've learned about this work a lot is emotions are contagious and high conflict emotions are highly contagious. So what happens, and I see this so much as a lawyer and with other lawyers and with therapists, is
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The high conflict person comes into your office and says, I've been terribly treated by, let's say my ex, you know, man or woman, because it happens to both, been terribly treated and you've got to save me, you've got to protect me, you've got to win, you've got to, sometimes they say you have to destroy the other party. That's always a warning sign when their goal is to destroy the other party.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It's not a good sign. But they're so emotional. You say, my goodness, this person's been through so much. Now I have the emotions. And what I teach in my seminars is I understand it has a lot to do with the amygdala. that the amygdala catches the intense fear or intense anger, that those are heightened. And so now mine's going, oh, Billy, you've got to do something.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I'm like, my body wants me to take action. And I want to save this person from their evil co-parent, for example. And so what we see with negative advocates is they're emotionally hooked to but uninformed. They don't really know what's going on. And I'll give you an example. A court case with a high conflict person brought their whole family.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I had a case with false allegations, terrible allegations. My client happened to be the father. The mother was making false allegations of child sexual abuse. And I've had all types of true cases, false cases. So this is a real problem a real issue, but there also were false allegations. In this case, that's what was happening.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So the mother brings her whole family and the judge realizes what's going on in the case because of the evidence presented and sanctions the mother for knowingly false allegations. What does that equate to in the legal system? So my client, the father, spent about $40,000 getting a psychological evaluation, having a trial, doing all of this attorney's fees.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so the court made her pay $10,000 of his attorney's fees and costs. So that's what the sanction is. And there's a code section that says knowingly false allegations of child abuse are a basis to make one party pay the other party's fees. So she never paid it, by the way. And she owned no property. We weren't able to get it because she had property in other people's names.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But the idea was that she brought her whole family there. She brought her mother, mother's boyfriend. She brought her roommate, who was a psychology grad student. who was like encouraging her, oh, your daughter's being abused. You've got to do something. These were all negative advocates. And when the judge made her ruling and spelled out the information, that was very clear.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I mean, we caught the mother lying. She persuaded other people to lie for her. We caught them in lie. So it was a really surprisingly open case. And the family started yelling at the judge. They said, this is a crime and this is a shame and blah, blah, blah. The judge said, you take yourselves out of here immediately or I will have the bailiffs take you out.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And they stood up and laughed and shouted, this is an abomination or something like that. These were the negative advocates. They didn't know what the full picture was. They believed their family member who was a skilled liar, I believe, and this is very interesting, I got to talk to her therapist, a therapist she had. I was released to talk to her.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And the therapist that was in the open was, she has borderline personality disorder, and that was an open thing. And the therapist said, and there's something else. And I said, antisocial personality disorder? And she said, I can't say, but I wouldn't disagree with you.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah. And with antisocial, that's where you get a lot of lying and stuff like that. It's a rare case, but since I have the social work background and I've had many true cases of child sexual abuse, especially as a therapist, I can see the difference, whereas a lot of lawyers don't know what to look for. But this was an exceptional case, antisocial and borderline personality disorder.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
She had a lot of traits. And at first, the judge was very critical of my client and us, and he had supervised contact. But the supervisor said, this is fascinating, when the child would be exchanged, the girl would like kind of walk, kind of tentatively towards the father. The mother dropped her and left. Supervisor brought her to the father. She was like kind of tentative.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
She'd see the father, and she'd look. The mother's out of sight. She'd jump on him, laugh, and have a wonderful time.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I think he did. And what's interesting is they got together when they were quite young. I think maybe she was 18, he was 20, something like that. That's pretty young by today's standards. Yeah. And so excitement, new, all of that. I'm pretty sure they did. And what's interesting is they had gotten divorced. that the issue I described was an after-divorce custody issue.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But they had gotten divorced maybe four or five years into their marriage, and she assaulted him, and he had the scars and all of this. So he had actually custody of this girl who was eight years old when the story I just told you happened, which is also helpful because she was verbal. She could describe. She actually described how her mother coerced her to say things that weren't true.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But yeah, so they got together young, I think quick. Then they got divorced, but the patterns continued. And that's one thing we see. A lot of high-conflict divorces keep going even after the divorce. The actual divorce date is like a speed bump in the lifetime of high conflict if they have children together.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I think exactly. And as I mention in my book about bullies, I think polarization really demonstrates that. So once you're in your group... and you see the other group as not only having a different point of view, but as the enemy, then your brain doesn't need to work on it anymore. That's case closed. They're the enemy. The only question is, what do we do now?
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And the research saying that when you talk to the people in your group Rather than coming together, you move farther apart. And to me, what's fascinating in terms of legal cases, and especially in family law, is you have, like the family I described, you have the family talking to each other. You pull a lawyer into that. The lawyer talks to them.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The lawyer gets heightened anger maybe or commitment to save this person. And maybe you get a therapist into the picture and they all just talk to themselves. They pull farther and farther apart. And that's often when we have our high conflict court case. They come back to court every six to 12 months. Sometimes for years.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I have cases where people have been in court like every year for eight or nine years. And these are cases where the divorce was done long ago. What people don't realize is the worst custody disputes tend to happen after the divorce is over. And I think it's because people are spending more and more time talking to their own team, to their own group, and that pulls them farther apart.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Their view of the other side is worse and worse and worse. And that's why I think the structure really matters. So I think politically, we have these two different universes that don't necessarily talk to each other. And they really create a sense of community. People are looking for community, and they find it. But it's fed by, I think, the media ecosystem. Everyone has their own media.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so we have these two universes talking to themselves, growing farther and farther apart. And that's why elections don't seem to have made a difference in any of this. Because elections kind of decides who does government, but they don't resolve the adversarial communities. And they get a lot of attention. And sad to say, I think our culture has shifted from government
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
that politics as about government and the details and nitty-gritty and the values of government are what's good for our group, good for our country, unity, citizenship, we should be together in this, that politics have shifted to entertainment. The values of entertainment are be extreme, be emotional. And entertainment's driven by drama, you know, for... thousands of years.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And drama is opposing us against them. And as I mentioned in the Bullies book, there's a terrible crisis, there's an evil villain, and there's a superhero. And if you have someone tell that story to their community, they will love that person. So now we have two communities in politics loving themselves and hating the other And the elections don't resolve that.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
That's a speed bump on the road to high conflict. And that's not a good sign, and we have to find ways to bridge the gaps. And there are ways. You get people one-to-one talk to each other. There's a lot of groups trying to say, let's connect rather than separate. If we get too far out of balance, we're going to have bigger and bigger high conflict problems.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The more people's eyes are open to this pattern, the more they can say, hey, I seem to be part of this group, but my neighbors think differently. I'm going to listen to them. It's listening that's missing.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Right. Well, what we're seeing is these kind of – media systems, I call them, are attracted to high conflict personalities and high conflict personalities are attracted to attention. They want attention. So there's this almost marriage of media exposure and high conflict personalities. And so that's what pulls people together. I think everyone's looking for community these days.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And it used to be around work, like a shared task. But now we do so much of our work alone or tiny groups. And so you get a real sense of community. People used to get it from church or synagogue or mosque, wherever. And that's weakened. And so we get that now a lot, the intense emotional community from politics. And so there's a community for you, and there's a community for you.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So they pull themselves together. They get that, I don't know, dopamine hit or whatever it is, and strengthens them. So what's happening is we're pulling apart. But to me, the answer is exposing the patterns and understanding our brains. is recognize what's happening. This person's probably exaggerating when they say that those people are evil.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
This person's probably exaggerating when they say those people are stupid. Whatever it is that we have to realize, okay, don't buy that completely. And what's fascinating to me, I don't know how it happened, but I get text message solicitations to contribute to campaigns from conservatives and liberals. I get both. And guess what? They look like each other.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And they're like, the end of the world is coming. You've got to give $10 or $100 to save the world. And the end of the world is coming because of them.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And it's fear-based, but it hooks your emotions. I know this stuff, so I can go, OK, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe away. But a lot of people don't know that this is happening. They don't understand how emotions are contagious and how I think high conflict emotions are more contagious. So to me, it's educating people about these dynamics so you don't engage so much with them.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Like I won't watch more than a half an hour of TV news, but you can have 24-7 TV news. And since... In 1995, 1996, when they allowed, they gave you licenses for radio and television that didn't have to tell the other side of the story. Before that, you used the fairness doctrine. You have to say what the other side is. You're for a candidate, you have to hear from the other side.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
You didn't have to after 1995, 96. So we had MSNBC and Fox News slightly off center, slightly conservative, slightly liberal. Well, now we've had 30 years of that, much farther apart. and communities around each of these. And yet, if you go, okay, I'm probably hearing some exaggerations here, so I can check myself. And this person's trying to be a hero and demonize those people.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I'm not going to do that. So... I'm not one for government regulation. What I want is for everyone to be able to say, okay, I see what's happening. I'm not going to get my emotions hooked. And I think, to me, that's one of the goals is for people to learn I don't have to absorb the emotions because that's where the problem is. People are emotionally hooked and uninformed.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah, so what's interesting is often your gut feeling tells you something's up here. Like the person suddenly has a shocking opinion of somebody else. They say, you know, that person's a total jerk, and yet you know that person, and they're not a total jerk. Suddenly something's disproportionate. I think disproportionate emotions is often a trigger.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I put in a lot of my books now what I call the web methods, is pay attention to their words, your emotions, and their behavior. So starting with words, do they use a lot of blaming words? You know, it's all that person's fault. Do they use all or nothing words? They seem to see things through a narrow lens that, you know, there's all good, there's all bad.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Unmanaged emotions, which they may or may not show, like I explained. Some people are good at hiding all that, even though it drives them inside. And the extreme behaviors, do they do things 90% of people would never do? And I'll give an example here. And this is, I won't say the city, but there was a mayor, there was someone who worked, who was a congressperson.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And they decided to run for mayor in their city instead of flying to go to Congress. But when they were flying to go to Congress back and forth, this is in California, I'll say that much. People can easily research this. So this person flying back and forth one day, one night, Standing, you know, there was a line to get your bags at the airport after you got off the plane.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And he was told to wait in line to get his bags. And he said, don't you know who I am? And he pushed his way to the front of the line and had an argument with the person behind the counter. Said, don't you know who I am? I want my bag right now. And she said, we don't have it now. You can't have it right now. And he pushed her and knocked her over.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
He shoved this airline worker behind the counter and knocked her over. This was a mayor of a major... Not yet. He wasn't mayor yet. He was a congressperson.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But this is a high-profile person. So this is all over the news the next day. This is 20 years ago maybe, 15 years ago, something like that. Goodness. Anyway, so it's in the newspaper the next day. And newspaper says, Congressman so-and-so gets into physical altercation with airline worker, knocks her over. Half the people said, that's terrible. And the other half of people said, wait, wait.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
He was sleep deprived. He was flying across country. You have to understand that he was stressed. And here's where my web method comes in. 90% of people would not have done that even if they were sleep deprived. And I fly back and forth a lot. And I'm not, I don't do that.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah, exactly. So anyway, so he's running for mayor. And I'm going, this guy's a high conflict person. If he gets elected, he's not going to be a very good mayor. He's going to have a lot of trouble with the people close to him. And so guess what happened? He gets elected.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Within, I think it's eight months, he is, and this is before the Me Too movement got started, but people are reporting he's harassing women, sexually harassing women. Women come into his office to meet with him, professional, experienced, important, and he's like wanting to touch them a lot. Inappropriately, they don't want to be touched. Anyway, so women start complaining about him.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Word kind of gets out, yeah, this happened with a lot of different people, that he's not sexually assaulting them, but he's treating them badly.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And that's the thing with personality disorders is a narrower range of behavior that's repeated in a variety of settings. So he's fitting all of that. So which personality disorder, I'm not going to diagnose him, but it narrows down to one or two. So it's not context dependent. Right. It's pervasive. Pervasive.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And that word is in the Diagnostic Manual, that it's pervasive across, I think, several settings. I think that's the words. But let me just finish. Because the end of the story is he's also... got committees and people that are supposed to accomplish things. He doesn't want them to think. He wants to do the thinking and tell them what to do. So he goes around alienating a lot of people.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Within eight months, he's out of office because enough people were upset And the way he got out of office is some of the heads of government told him, I think it was the city attorney or something, if you quit now, we'll help you with your legal expenses because he's starting to get sued for some of this stuff. Suing the city, suing him. We'll help you with your legal expenses if you quit now.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
Huberman Lab
Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And there was starting to be a petition movement for some... I don't know the mechanics, like a special election or something to get rid of him. Anyway, within eight months, he was out of the office. And now you don't hear about him in that city.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It's really a useful thing to see. That's part of what you see, their behavior and their behavior towards other people This was a brilliant thing. I don't remember the name of the program, but there was a guy who was head of a company. And he used to, when he was interviewing people for high-level jobs, he pretended he was a taxi driver or something, would pick them up at the airport.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
the taxi driver and see how they treated him as the taxi driver and then he gets in the interview room and he's the guy interviewing them and in some cases people treated him really disrespectfully and it's like now I know this is not someone I want.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I think the body is like a first responder and that we should pay attention to that. And especially with high conflict personalities, especially... The con artists, which is part of antisocial personality, and the ones I've dealt with are very good at this, is their words are just right. And your brain is like soothed by them.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
You go, this person gets it, and I'm totally comfortable, they're charming, all of that. And your gut goes, wait, they're out of sync. I have this cold feeling. Why do I have this cold feeling? And I think that they're aimed at your cerebral thinking and that your guts kind of... gets it because they're in a way predatory, like antisocial tend to be predatory.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Well... For me, of course, dealing like with court especially, there's a lot of stuff in writing. And so being able to look at what's written and a lot of blame words, the all or nothing words, she did this and she did that and disparaging words, she's stupid or whatever.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
or he's a bully, he's this and that, which triggers for me, maybe he is, or maybe the person saying it is, but it heightens my attention.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
First of all, I want to make sure that I get this point across, and that is there's a lot of temptation to label people with the mental disorders, the personality disorders. And it's absolutely essential that people don't do that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
If you think somebody might be a narcissist or might have borderline personality or be antisocial, keep that to yourself and adapt how you work with them to be more effective or be more cautious, whatever. But the worst thing, I think, is people say, oh, and everyone agrees that person's a narcissist, so we kind of gang up on that person. That's not helpful. The goal is not rejecting people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The goal is adapting what you do to either manage the relationship, decide, okay, that's not someone I'm gonna get close to, but I can still work with them or have them as neighbors or whatever. So I wanna emphasize that, because I think you're right. There's a lot of that today. And people come to me with that concern and say, Bill, you teach about personality disorders.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yes, so people understand patterns of behavior and how to adapt your own behavior. I'm not teaching people to label other people. So that's real important.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So we have to be cautious. But on the other hand, aware. And the more you're aware of patterns, like being aware of someone with an alcohol abuse issue is to go, okay, I'm not going to be serving him alcohol with dinner. It's a great person, but I'm just going to leave that out of the evening meal. Adapt to what we do rather than judging them.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I don't see people with personality disorders as lesser beings. I see them as having a different set of behaviors. that they acquire pretty much in childhood. So I don't hold it against them. I may dislike their patterns of behavior, but I really don't hate people like that. I've been a therapist with clients like that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So I think our awareness needs to be there so we adapt how we work with people. But I think the gut feeling is... is so important. And as a therapist, I was trained, pay attention to your gut because that's going to help you with your clients. And that's why the web method, their words, their behavior, but how I feel often gives me tips.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah. I would say, first of all, that we see high conflict people in every occupation, in every culture, in every community, every economic status. I think that, I don't think there's research on this, but I think that healthcare and higher education are are two fields where there's a slightly higher incidence of high conflict people because there's a higher tolerance.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Oh, also I would say churches. And we get consultations with churches sometimes. There's a high tolerance for behavior that's outside the norm.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yes. Yes. Students and faculty and staff? Yes, both. Administrators sometimes. And I believe it's because of the higher tolerance.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Let me mention, I do a lot of consultation. And one of the things that people come to me about is... is people with little power bases, like department heads in universities. I remember one university I did a consultation with about a department head, and they were a medical school. And they had a high conflict person high up in the structure who was really...
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I was told, damaging some of the students' careers because they looked at them cross-eyed or something like that. So they wouldn't write the kind of recommendation that they needed. And how can we deal with this person? Because they're embedded in their position. So gave them a variety of tips. But that's That's why I think people do need to have their eyes open in these fields.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I want to add, since I'm talking about occupations, we see this a little bit more in nonprofits and nonprofit administrators. Because, again, nonprofits are good people doing good things, but they have this higher tolerance for administrators of bad behavior because they're good people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The mission is good, and they're invested in this mission, so they must be good. Do you think that's part of what got them there? Yes. And the thing that's so tricky is everybody's somewhat unique, but also these are some recognizable patterns of behavior once you know to look for them. Right. And this is something we're doing much more in the workplace now.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And employers want to know, we want to promote this person. Is that a good or bad idea? Well, let's look at the patterns of behavior. Because once you put them in an embedded position, things are going to be harder. I've been approached by city councils. They say, we've got somebody on our city council that's a high conflict person. What do we do? Do we confront them?
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Do we publicly talk about them? All that stuff. I say, neither of those is good. Learn how to manage them until they move on. And they often do because people slowly go, we don't like working with this person.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Right. And we can get manipulated that way. That's what's tricky. But you raised several important points. I want to respond to them all if I can remember them. The first is that this is in many ways quite nuanced. The key thing to look out for with high conflict people a preoccupation with blaming others and not taking responsibility.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So you might have a big personality that's not a high conflict person. You might have a me, quiet person who is a high conflict person. So You can't go by what your eyes see and your ears hear. It's really a question of evidence. And that's why I think maybe I got into this after I became a lawyer, that there's no way to quickly know, although you may quickly suspect,
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And then want to look deeper. But I want to give an example because now that I seem to have criticized department heads and – Well, I cited at least one that is really wonderful.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Right, right. And so the thing I want to emphasize that my favorite example is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, I would say, hands down was a high conflict person. Famous for it. There was a guy in Silicon Valley wrote a book, The No A-Hole Rule. And he talked about Steve Jobs in there because he knew Steve Jobs. He was in Silicon Valley.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So I remember reading his biography, like a thousand pages or whatever, and what stood out to me was that he blamed people, Sometimes all or nothing thinking. They talked about his distortion... Reality distortion field. Reality distortion field. And that's exactly what high conflict people do. All or nothing thinking. You've got to do this. You can do this. People say, that's not possible.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It's physically impossible, Steve. You can't do this. And then he would push them. And one example that stood out to me was touch screen, glass that you touch and it knows where you are. I think, and I may have it wrong, but from reading his autobiography, that he harangued Corningware Glass Company, Corning Company, something like that, to create that. And they said, you can't do it.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It's not physically possible. He says, do it and do it in the next 90 days. And they did. They invented this thing that they probably would not have done unless he pushed them. So high conflict person, but I don't think he had a personality disorder. People say, oh, he's an incredible narcissist. But personality disorder is characterized by lack of change.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
lack of self-awareness, lack of flexibility, and they shoot themselves in the foot and it interferes with their success. He, I think, was close to that, but he had enough flexibility and he picked a team that pushed back on him and he liked that. So he's an example to me of high conflict person,
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
probably not personality disorder, and successful because he probably had some traits of these personalities.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So what I see is you totally have to look for the evidence, that you can't make an assumption, but if your gut says, maybe something's off here, pay attention to that, but look for the facts, talk to other people that know this person, see them in other situations, because there's incredible people like him
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
that accomplish a lot of really good stuff that you don't want to say, oh, we can't have him. Apple fired him in the 1990s, and he seemed to learn from that. He seemed to grow from that. People with personality disorders don't seem to grow and change, and that's their problem. They're stuck. High conflict people, they blame others. If they have some traits, maybe you can do a workaround.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So there's many people in position. Surgeons are one group I want to mention briefly because as a clinical social worker, I worked in hospitals and dealt with doctors a lot. As a lawyer, I've represented doctors in their divorces. Several, I think, are high conflict people, but most aren't. And that's what I want to say. Most departments' heads aren't high conflict people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Most surgeons aren't high conflict people, even though they get a reputation for that. Police is another area, military is another area, probably slightly higher incidence because they're in a position where they can dominate and control people. But most police aren't like that. Most people in the military aren't high conflict people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They're professional people, they like their job, they know their job, they have empathy, they work with people. So even though some of these occupations there's a higher incidence, And that's certainly true for lawyers, I think. But most people, most lawyers aren't like that. Most lawyers I know are really committed to their work, really want to help their clients.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So I want to kind of be clear that this is nuanced stuff. But when you're hiring people, when you're getting into a dating relationship, you want to watch more closely because it's the close relationships where high conflict behavior comes out more.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Exactly. And because when you hear from different people the same problem, then that should raise your antenna. Okay. A lot of people say, yeah, but this person can be really irritable. And you go, okay, oh, they're irritable in different settings. I'm going to think about that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It's really somewhat dependent on the nature of the relationship. I do a lot of consultation. We do a lot of training with High Conflict Institute. So we get married people getting divorced. We get business partnerships. where there's one partner that they're going, we got to deal with this. We have employees trying to get away from a high conflict supervisor.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And we have supervisors trying to deal with a high conflict employee. So slightly different settings.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
A close, so a partner kind of relationship.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah. So first of all, we strongly recommend against the direct hit is don't tell the person, look, you do this, this, this, and this, and that's terrible. And I don't want to be, I don't want to work with you. I don't want to be in a relationship with you. I don't want to be close to you because of your behavior. That High conflict people puts them through the roof. They will defend themselves.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And for the next months or years, they may put you in litigation. They may stalk you, depending on your relationship. They will hate you for that. They'll blame you. They will blame you and that fulfills their picture that it's all your fault. And now, look, you have violated the most basic thing is that you will never blame me. So don't blame them.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Second thing is don't blame yourself because that reinforces to them. Like if you say, you know, I just can't, you know, I'm a sensitive person and I just can't, you know, keep up with you. I know I'm defective and I know I'm no good at this, this, and this. And so I just have to end this relationship and I promise. so much apologize. It's all my fault. You know, I do everything wrong.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I'm going to go really look at myself and get some therapy. And I'm so sorry, but I just can't, you know, keep up with you. You're such a really good this, this, and this. And I just can't keep up with that. Well, they're going to blame you for that. And you're, depending on their personality, if they tend to have borderline traits, they're going to feel abandoned by you.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They have narcissistic traits. They're going to feel put down by you. They're going to, because you're supposed to see them as superior. If they have antisocial traits, they're going to feel like, wait a minute, you know, you're supposed to be submissive to me. And yet you're walking away. So you don't want to blame yourself. So you're going to go, well, what's left?
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
What's left is we aren't a good fit. Our goals have gone in different directions. I'm really ready for a career change. I want to go back to school or, you know, I just realized I'm not ready for a committed relationship anymore. So it's not about you and it's not about them. It's not about blame. You want to try to keep it away from blame.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Now some people say it's dishonest to not tell them everything. And let's talk about brutal honesty. High conflict people really love brutal honesty, and they'll tell you, I'm just being honest. You're stupid or a jerk or whatever. That's high conflict people. Reasonable people don't tell everybody every negative thing they think. That's just not healthy for relationships.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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...
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So it's okay to say, you know, we seem to be going in different directions or I have different plans I've realized I want to change. So those are basic principles. The worst thing in ending a relationship or reducing contact is to go back and forth. The worst thing is to pour out your feelings to the person.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I had this people getting divorced and they tell them, I'm so sorry and I love you so much. Pouring out your feelings to someone brings them closer to you. So you want to start holding back some and the other person say, well, let's work. Let's go to counseling. Let's do this. And if you're not sure, go to counseling. I recommend that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But if you're sure, just say, you know, I'm kind of not there anymore. I really need to be more on my own. So don't go back and forth because that really makes it raw and sometimes presages violence in divorces. A high conflict person, especially with some of the personality disorder traits, can't handle the opening and closing, opening and closing.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But the other thing is I say do it in steps so the person can adjust. You might say, you know, I'm thinking about making a career change or I'm thinking that maybe this relationship isn't the right one for me anymore. So the person gets used to the idea this may be coming to an end and then I'd like to move out and have more time alone to think.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And then you're at a safe distance and you say, I've thought about it and we really need to get divorced. And let's go to a divorce mediator. I want to be amicable. You know, I don't hate you in many ways. I still love you, but we're just not meant to be a couple anymore. If there's kids involved, then, you know, I really want us to have a supportive relationship for them.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
If there aren't, then maybe this really is the end. But it's step by step so this person can adjust to the fact that you really are leaving, but not too long and not too many steps because then their expectations are raised, oh, maybe you're not really leaving. So these are general principles. Depends a lot on the specifics.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
connection came from, which I would not have arrived at if I hadn't been a therapist and also a lawyer.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
victim playing person that seems like it's a little trickier let me back up a minute because I want to say there's some times where you just need to get out and do it all at once and don't ease yourself out serious physical or emotional risks so you may need to get away before you hint that I no longer want to be married to you and I've worked with people consulted with them on established you know
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Moving out when the other person isn't there, they and the kids go to a safe place. They've got their lawyer. And then they tell this person that I'm getting divorced from you. Because people get killed when they separate with certain high conflict domestic violence people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So also in the workplace, sometimes they're going to destroy, they're going to send emails, they're going to be really destructive. They may, you might say, I'm going to leave in a month. And they're so angry that they're going to really destroy your business.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
It's nuanced. Yeah. And that's where getting consultation, having a therapist, a lawyer, a high-conflict consultant, someone that you kind of walk it through with, maybe even practice what you're going to say with.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So, yeah, so mostly gradual but sometimes fast. It really depends.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Now you asked about the person who plays the victim. And I would suggest that that's very common with high conflict people, that when aggressive behavior doesn't work, they switch to, oh, how can you do this to me? I'm so sad.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And what's interesting, the word that I didn't come up with this, other people came up with in divorce settings, where let's say you're divorcing someone with high conflict personality, And they're like, I hate you, I hate you don't leave me kind of personality. And so, you know, I'm divorcing you and they're like, you know, rage at you. And then, no, I'm really leaving.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Then they switch and beg and plead. And I've got cases where people say, and, you know, my ex-to-be just seduced me and somehow I went along with it because it felt real good. And it's back and forth from the high conflict person and they call it hoovering. You go, hoovering? Where did that word come from? The hoover vacuum. What happens is they vacuum, they suck you back into the relationship.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And it's very common. with some of the high conflict personalities. They can't stand to lose you. And when rage doesn't work, then they try to seduce you back in. And some people have allowed themselves to get back in. And that's not good. You've got to be ready for that. Don't be surprised by that. And don't give in to that if you're sure it's over.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
If you're not sure it's over, get couples counseling and see where it might go.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I wouldn't say it's the majority of cases for sure, but it's a common symptom with high conflict people. And you hit on it. It's like they can't handle the pain. And so they really bring the person back in. But if this is the direction you're going, you need to let them start coping with the pain, either step by step or if it's dangerous, all at once. But don't go back if you can help it.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah. I think in some ways, to some extent, that's high conflict parents who see everything in all or nothing terms, see their kids as offended by other kids or they're protecting their children. And I am concerned about it. And I also agree it isn't just social media. In many ways, I've been watching this since families got smaller. So I remember growing up, most families had several kids.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The divorces I do now often have one or two kids. And that's been true in many ways since the 1970s. And a lot of it has to do with birth control. So don't just blame social media, also blame birth control. That when people could decide how large a family they have, they decided to have smaller families.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Birth control pills came out in the 60s and the 70s, suddenly we started noticing people are having two kids. And by the 80s, 90s, 2000s, a lot of people have one kid. My most high conflict divorce cases have one kid. because it's hard to share one kid. It's a little bit easier to share two kids. It's a lot easier to share four kids. It's like, you can have them for the weekend.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I'm not going to fight with you about that. Please take them. And the small family, and this is I think structurally a lot, the small family structure is feeding parents becoming enmeshed with their kids, some parents. And so their kids become their partners, especially in these high conflict divorces.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Now dad's a bad guy, mom's a bad woman, and the child, especially often the oldest child, now is my best friend, my kind of junior partner in the world. And that's where you see a lot of – you start getting alienated kids. Now they hate dad and mom's perfect or they hate mom and dad's perfect.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And it's partly the culture is fulfilling that, that we're now seeing everything in like opposing terms, all or nothing terms, etc. And the big message I want to get across with this with all parents and kids is it's a question of skills, that the kids aren't growing up with the skills to manage the nuances.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so we teach a lot of our skills and we teach parents, teach these to your kids in divorce. Flexible thinking, teach them flexible thinking, teach them managed emotions, teach them to moderate their behavior. Teach them to check themselves. Wait a minute. Am I doing something here rather than always you, you, you? And we developed a method.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
We call it New Ways for Families, which was designed for high conflict divorce cases for both parents to kind of learn these skills and practice either with a therapist or a coach or just watching online and typing in answers. To practice these four, we call these the four big skills for life. And this is, I think, what parents need to teach their kids is you can solve that problem.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Tell me what happened. Okay, let's talk about what you could say to Johnny. And we teach skills we call ear statements, empathy, attention, and respect, a statement that shows that. And so we teach parents. Teach your child, you know, your best friend who just broke up with you might be feeling hurt about something. Maybe something they said. What can you do?
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So we encourage kids to help their kids manage the situation. And we encourage them to manage their relationship with the other parent. They come back from a visitation or access from a weekend, let's say, with dad. And child says, you know, dad didn't look at my drawing. I drew a picture and dad didn't look at my drawing. High conflict parent says, oh, your dad's a jerk.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
You know, I always hated that about him. A reasonable parent says, oh, that's sad. Well, you know what? Next time, if he doesn't look at the picture right away, maybe wait an hour and then show him the picture again. Maybe he got busy. Maybe this or that. Teach your child to manage the relationship, even with the other parent. And those parents don't have high conflict divorces.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
High conflict divorces have the other. Your dad's a jerk, you know, forget about him. He'll never pay attention to you. And that's when you see parents estranged or alienated. The kids are alienated from the parents.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
That's another big part of it is you have to find out how to share. So I had three siblings and we grew up and it's fascinating.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
A brother, two sisters, so four. And what's fascinating for me, and I think it helped shape my personality and approach to life, is we grew up without television. We didn't have something to watch after school. We had to deal with each other. So, you know, we might play kickball in the backyard or we might read or something or other. But we had to learn conflict resolution with each other.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And our parents were like, you know, you go talk to your brother, Bill. I don't have time to hear your complaint. And so structurally, it's shocking going from that to doing people's divorces with one or two children. And even two is better than just one because they do learn conflict. But parents feel so guilty today, and that's our culture is really not fair to parents, I think.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
To know that, teach your child ways to deal with it themselves.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah. You get punched in the face if you say that. Right.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And the chimps are our closest relative, I think.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah, yeah. But I want to really reinforce what you're saying is about the community of learning and kids growing up in the community of learning. And I think it plays a role with bullies. Because what happens is the community of kids figures out who's bullies and confronts them with their behavior. And people ask me, well, are adult bullies, because my book is about adult bullies,
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Were they bullies as kids? And I'll say it seems to be pretty universally they were as kids. But most kids try bullying at least once, and they grow out of it because they get feedback. They learn that's not going to work. You're not going to have friends. I'm not going to be around.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So bullies learn to either change their behavior or to live on the fringe of the group if they don't change their behavior. And so part of why we're seeing more adult bullies today, I think, is because they used to be on the fringe because, or they learned how to get along. But if they're on the fringe because nobody liked them and they didn't change their behavior.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
What we're seeing today is bullies are finding each other. And this is one of the negatives of social media, I think. And I agree, there's a lot of good things. But this is one of the surprising things when I researched my book. Bullies are finding a group for themselves. And instead of the group teaching them not to be a bully,
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The group reinforces being a bully, says you were justified in doing that. And one of the shocking things is to find that school shooters have a support system online.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
That they seem to, some of the research says they always have a social media group. They have peers that they're trying to somewhat impress and that may actually egg them on. And that if they track down, they find these folks have, and I think they should look for that, find out who they've been talking to, who they communicate with.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so what I think we're seeing is bullies are reinforcing their bad behavior rather than social pressure for them to learn good behavior, which is, for me, I've done a lot of group therapy. I've treated people that go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and the group reinforces and teaches them good behavior. But bullies are finding other bullies and reinforcing their bad behavior.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And that's an issue we have to address, especially with young men, is we have to get on top of that and redirect them into socially pro-social activities. And most people don't realize that. I didn't realize that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I haven't heard about female bullies finding each other. Well, actually, I should take that back. And this gets into a sensitive area about personality disorders. But borderline personality disorder is one of the more treatable personality disorders. And people become aware that they have this disorder a lot from internet information. But what seems to happen, there's a couple stages for them.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They become aware before they change their behavior. And like DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, is a really good treatment for that. But therapists, and my wife was a DBT therapist, said that they become aware of it before they change their behavior. So they do self-sabotaging things even though they shouldn't.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I know I shouldn't do this, but... And then finally they learn to change their behavior. Well, some people are discovering their borderline and finding other people online and reinforcing their borderline view of the world. There's evil people and good people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And occasionally they write reviews of my books and say how awful a person I am because I talk about personality disorders, even though I say don't identify anybody And I believe personality disorders in most cases could be helped if they're open to that. So I think there's some degree of, say, female people with that personality finding each other and reinforcing that behavior.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
But what I read was, and I cited in my book in the, I'm trying to remember, I don't remember which chapter, but that some researcher at a university said, look for their social media connections. And you'll find that there was a reinforcement of this behavior rather than people saying, hey, you can't do that. You've got to cut it out.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
There's something I want to fit in here. And that is that we need to understand that people with personality disorders didn't choose to have them. And so I have a lot of compassion for people like that. And so I have a lot of students over the years, and they write reflective journals. And occasionally they put in their journal, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I remember this one woman said, so when you talked about borderline personality disorder, it was a little uncomfortable for me, but I found it helpful. And she was actually one of the better students in the class. And so she had that level of awareness, but she was still working on herself to manage the emotional roller coaster and such.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so what's important to me is some people with borderline personality disorder may be angry with me because I talk about it, because they're early stage with this. But other people say, thank you, Bill, that was helpful. And so there's kind of a range there. But I also want to say three basic reasons I think people develop personality disorders. The first is genetic tendencies.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And various researchers say like 20 to 80 percent may be genetic. the genetic tendency depending on the person, that early childhood, first five years of life, maybe attachment difficulties may be a driving factor, but also cultural environment. Some people say the researcher in San Diego wrote the narcissism epidemic, and she says from her research that the decade you're born in
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
influences your personality development as much as your family.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I don't agree with that because she's not a therapist and looked at the mental health. She looked at big surveys, college students especially. But I think that's more significant than we realize and more significant than I used to think. And so part of what you're saying is today's culture is reinforcing not taking responsibility Whereas in the past, you had to solve problems yourself.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yeah. Several things, and I can be brief with each of them. First, there's what I call the four forget-about-its. It's forget about trying to give the person insight into how they're behaving. That blows up the person. You know, just like I said, don't blame them for you ending the relationship. So just forget about giving them insight. Instead, talk about what we can do now. Talk about options.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Talk about Don't go inward with them, go outward with them. So when you go inward, you escalate their defensiveness. So don't try to give them insight into themselves. And a lot of people say, how can I make him see that what he's doing is so wrong? Or how can I make her understand that she's creating the problem we're trying to solve? Just forget about that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Talk about, okay, here's what our options are. Let's talk about what to do. Second is don't emphasize the past. And people argue forever with high conflict people about the past, and you never resolve the past with a high conflict person. And I'll tell you in a minute why that may be. Focus on what to do now and the future. Future focus, not past focus.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Maybe you need some information to understand a problem, but then emphasize the future. The third is don't focus on emotions. And especially don't yell at them, don't burst into tears, don't tell them how frustrating they are, all of that. And this is what I'm going to tell you now is a theory that I hope someone figures out.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And that is people with personality disorders and high conflict personalities don't seem to go through the five stages of the grieving and healing process. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, sadness, and acceptance. They seem to get stuck at denial and anger. So what happens is they don't resolve things. They don't, quotes, get over things. They don't get over the divorce.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They don't get over the job loss. They don't get over having to sell their house because they couldn't pay the mortgage. They don't experience the normal human healing and grieving process. So they're stuck. And so a lot of situations with them turn to anger. They're angry. but they're not resolved. So high conflict people are constantly talking about the past and how aggrieved they are.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They shouldn't have done that to me. I was right to have done this. And people start noticing, when I say that, like students in my class, oh yeah, that's what I see. They keep repeating themselves. And they go to as many people as they can and tell the story. I believe they're trying to grieve and heal, but they don't have the mechanism. And I don't know exactly why.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So I'm hoping someday neuroscience will figure out what connection is missing and can we give people that so that they can grieve and heal. Well, what that means is if you focus on emotions, you're focusing on an area that's unresolved and has a lot of hurt. And so if you say, well, how do you feel about that? They almost always say, I feel terrible. I suggest not saying, how are you doing today?
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Because the answer I get is terrible. You know what she did yesterday. You know what he did last week. So instead, do small talk. Do it about anything except about how are you feeling today. So don't ask how you're feeling. Focus on thinking and doing. And an example I teach lawyers and mediators is don't say, how do you feel about that proposal? Say, what do you think about that?
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Could you picture doing that? How could you do that? How could that work for you? Because if you focus, how do you feel? I feel insulted. I feel abandoned. And then they drown in that. And next thing you know, you've lost them. So avoid emotions. Don't focus on emotions, but acknowledge emotions. Say, I can see your frustration. Now here's how I can help you today. The fourth is don't use names.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Don't label people. Don't say you're a high-conflict person. And lawyers do that to motivate their clients. That doesn't work. Don't say you have a personality disorder. You may be wrong, and that never motivates anybody. So that's the four forget about it. So that's key stuff for people to avoid. So that was a long answer. But when you're ready, I have four simple tips for things to do.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Okay. I'm so glad you asked that question. So we have what I call the CARS method. And we've actually trademarked this CARS method. connecting, analyzing, responding, and setting limits. First is connect with the person. So someone's angry with you or you're trying to help somebody with their problem. Is connect with them by giving them a statement that shows empathy, attention, and or respect.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
You know, I can see how hard this is. I see your disappointment. I hear your frustration. I can understand. By saying I can, I'm showing I see them as an equal rather than looking down on them. So that's the empathy rather than sympathy. Pay attention. Say, I'll pay attention. Tell me more. I want to understand your situation. And listen some.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so what I see all the time is people say, it's like, oh, good, because I'm going to listen to them. They don't have to prove, they don't have to fight to get my attention. And high conflict people often are fighting to get attention because they've turned everybody off. And that's why I teach lawyers and therapists that.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They're going to come to you as much as anything else to get your attention. So let them tell their story. Listen to them. Acknowledge the emotion. So empathy, attention, and respect. Find something you respect about them. They respect the kind of work they do. You respect their relationship with their son or daughter. or you respect their commitment to resolving this dispute. So use those words.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And what's fascinating is I teach this to people who I consult with, and then they come back and say, I did that, and it really worked. The person calmed down. I had one woman who said, my boss was giving me a hard time, and so I'd run into my office to try not to interact with her.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I said, next time, especially like Monday morning or something, is go up to her and say, like, you know, how was your weekend? Or say, you know, I appreciated the presentation you gave last week. Give her some empathy, attention, and or respect. You don't have to do all three of these. Just any one of these often calms the relationship down.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I remember checking back with this woman a month later and says, guess what, Bill? Now I'm her favorite employee. But she's picking on somebody else, so I gave somebody else your book. But the idea is connect with people. So empathy, attention, and respect. And ear statements, we call it.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And people say they really remember that because you can use that with anybody, anywhere, even with your kids. Genuine respect, right? You're not puffing them up. This all has to be honest.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Yes. Think about that. Now, if you don't respect them and you don't have empathy for them, tell them you'll pay attention and listen. And often you'll start developing some empathy or respect for them. But you can always pay attention and listen. So that's connecting. The second area, and these aren't exactly steps, but these are four areas high conflict people have difficulty.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
The second is emotions kind of cloud their thinking, so we want to help them think. So you want to move to analyzing. Give them a way to think. So you're kind of calming the emotions and now you're saying, let's think about this. So present problems as a choice. You know, you could do this now or do this tomorrow. Or here's the options I see. There's three ways you could approach this problem.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So you're getting people thinking about the problem rather than reacting. And when you give a choice, it kind of forces them into logical problem solving. So one way you can do this is, especially if you have a professional relationship, like employer-employee, therapist, client, stuff like that, is have them write a list.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
They're talking, they're saying, this is wrong, and that's wrong, and that's wrong. You say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Write a list of these problems so I get a clearer picture. When you write a list, you calm down. And I've had this over and over again. Angry people, when they're writing a list, calm down. They start thinking about it. I've done this with a doctor once.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
He was having trouble with the nurses. And it was like they're doing everything wrong. All right, write a list of all the things they're doing wrong. And pretty soon, you start thinking, you know, there's this other thing they do, but it's not so bad, actually. And I want them to do this on the left-hand side of the page.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Because on the right-hand page side, we're going to start looking at what are possible solutions. And you really calm people down. I've done this as a media. I've had both people, okay, I want you to write two lists. like business partners. Now say you're trying to decide whether to split up or keep the business partnership.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So I want you both to write a list, what you would do if you split up, wind down the partnership, the steps you'd have to take, and another list, what the steps would be if you could make it work between you. So let's meet in a week and we'll look at your list. Come back a week later, they say, you know what? We both wrote our list.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
We immediately called each other and realized we should terminate the partnership, but we have one last big project we want to do together. And we realize now we can go our separate ways in peace. We really have different goals. It's not her fault. It's not her fault. This was two women who worked together. And so writing a list helps. This is all under analyzing, the A of the chorus method.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Having the person make a proposal. Say, make me a proposal. I tell managers, as soon as you can, tell your employees that now that I'm your manager, whenever you bring me a problem, and I want you to bring me problems when they're small, because conflicts that are small are much easier to resolve. Always bring a solution to the problem.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I want to hear your proposed solution because you know the problem better than I do. You're getting them to think. So high conflict people, I believe, have a bandwidth for problem solving. And some are brilliant heads of companies, inventors, all that stuff. They got a big bandwidth for conflict, but they also have a bandwidth for problem solving. You want to aim at that and bring that out.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So that's analyzing. R is for responding. High conflict people, because they blame so much, are always saying, you should have done this, you didn't do that. Our tendency is to argue with high conflict people, and that's a forget about it. You're trying to give them insight, it's not going to work. So instead, give them what we call a BIF response that's brief,
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Informative, just straight information. Don't tell them you're wrong. Just tell them what the information is. And do it in a friendly manner. And have it be firm. Have it end the discussion. Most commonly, BIF responses are in writing. And we teach this as an email method. And we estimate there's about a million people doing BIF now. Because we taught it to about half a million people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
professionals and individuals. We've got four little Biff books.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And those four things. Friendly is immaterial? Well, a touch of friendliness. So what I say, like someone writes to you and say, you know, you're doing everything wrong. And you write back and you say, thank you for telling me your concerns. Here's some information you may not like. Say someone tells me, Bill, your methods are never going to work. And I get instantly defensive.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so thank you for telling me your concerns. You may not be aware, but about a million people are using this method now. And I wish you well. Something like that. So a touch of friendliness doesn't have to be a lot. And firm doesn't mean harsh. It just means try to end the hostile conversation.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So don't respond to their distortions maybe even when they say you've done this or misinformation or hostility. It's just give them a biff response. And I tell that sometimes to... business owners, sometimes public figures is they might say, like politicians sometimes, terrible things are said about them and they go, but they're not true.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And they're going to go, well, I'm going to ignore that because no one will believe that. But then people believe it. A great example, Domino's pizza about 10 years ago. This is a great story. I love it. And I also eat Domino's pizza. I won't get into the details, but somebody said something that grossed people out and their stock just dropped. Two employees did something to the pizza.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So first, they were going, we're going to ignore that. Everyone's going to realize that was a dumb thing two employees did. Well, their stock dropped like 10% or something like that. So two days later, the head of Domino's Pizza puts out a 90-second video. And it gets spread around. And what he says is, two former employees did this gross thing. And that doesn't represent us.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And most important to us is our customers. We're totally dedicated to you. This is never going to happen again. We've done everything to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So they bounced right back. And in my mind, 90-second video? Didn't do a 20-minute explanation of how we do this. Just a 90-second video. Head of the company put it out there, bounced right back.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And to me, that was a BIF response, even though we never heard of it. Brief, informative, friendly, and firm.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
What's S? The S is setting limits. And this may be the most important with high conflict people because they, one of their biggest problems is they don't stop themselves. They keep going in areas where most people stop themselves. They keep talking, they talk a lot, they create a problem and keep creating the problem. They don't stop. And so people around them have to stop them.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And we're not used to stopping other people's behavior. Most people manage themselves. And part of writing my books is I believe today that we have more high conflict behavior and everyone needs to learn skills to set limits on bullies, on high conflict people's behavior. It's all about behavior. They're not bad people, but they don't have the self-restraint. So setting limits and key things here.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Don't blame them. Don't blame yourself. Say there's a policy, there's a rule, there's a law. How it looks to people is do this instead of doing that. So that behavior. And if you keep doing that behavior, here's what the consequence is. So I have a method I call SLIC. So everything I've got initials. You've got a lot of acronyms. That's all right. Scientists have acronyms.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Military science and apparently the LED. High conflict methods. So SLIC is setting limits and imposing consequences. So with high conflict people, you might set the limit. Like you say, you know, I'll give an example as a lawyer. I represented a woman victim of domestic violence. Her ex-husband-to-be didn't have a lawyer. So that means he's allowed to talk to me.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
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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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
I have to talk to him, negotiate, solve problems. So he calls me up and he says, We've got to solve this problem. You tell that blankety blank blank wife of mine. I said, hold on, you can't talk about my client that way. He said, I'll talk about her any way I want to. She's a blankety blank blank or whatever. So he didn't respect my limit at all.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
So then I said, if you keep talking like that, I'm going to hang up. And so it's up to you." He says, I'll talk about her any way I want. Keeps talking like that. I said, okay, you've chosen for me to hang up. I'm hanging up now. Call me when you're ready to be civil. So, end of call. Next morning he calls me back. He says, Mr. Eddy, we have to solve this problem.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
My blankety-blank-blank wife, and I say, hang on. Remember, I'm going to hang up if you talk like that. She says, oh, no, no, no, don't hang up. We have to solve this problem. I'll try not to say those words. and he doesn't say those words, we get to address the problem. So the consequence is what stopped him, not the limit.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And I think it's a brain thing that they're so absorbed in the emotions of the moment that they can't picture that their behavior has a consequence. So if the people around them point out There's a consequence if you do that as kind of a jolt to them. Oh, I don't want that consequence.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
And so with high conflict people, you often have to tell them the consequence when you set the limit and be ready to impose the consequence. So that's setting limits, imposing consequences. They have to go together with high conflict people.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Thank you so much. I appreciate the chance to speak with you and get this out.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Altogether, it's really roughly 50-50.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Is that possible to fall into multiple categories? And the study actually broke down some of that. So in the research, particularly one that I remember is borderline and narcissists. And it came out around 38% overlap. People who are borderline also can often be narcissistic? Have narcissistic personality disorder. I see. And so this is personality disorder overlap.
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Bill Eddy: How to Deal With High Conflict People
Now, there's a whole continuum here. So many people have traits but don't have a disorder. The current DSM says the total personality disorder is around 10%. Now, that's taking an average of studies from around the world. The study I quoted earlier in the U.S. said 15% have a personality disorder. So in the U.S., we're seeing that's significant.