Book Review Ramani Durvasula Its Not You

Clear-eyed, practical and empathic guide to minimising the impact of the narcissistic person in your life. And for welcoming more peace and order into your life as a result.

Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Genre: Non-Fiction, Self-Help, Self-Development, Psychology, Relationships, Healing.

Publisher: Penguin Life

Review in one word: Eye-opening

If you are looking for a definitive guide to identifying narcissists in your life then this is the only book you will ever need.

Dr Durvasula is a global authority on identifying and healing from narcissists. She tells you how you can move forward, protect yourself and make decisions, in spite of the devious manipulative behaviour of the narcissistic person in your life.

“Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. The person who holds the narrative holds the power. Until now, we have only told the story of the hunter.”

She writes in a clear, direct, empathic, and deeply practical way about how you can identify narcissistic people. How to differentiate between when a non-narcissistic person is just having a bad day and when you are wrangling with a narcissist. How to stop gaslighting yourself and what your options are to best protect yourself and others impacted by their behaviour.

The “Dimmer” Patterns: Dismissiveness, invalidation, minimisation, manipulation, exploitativeness, and rage

“These are specific behavioral patterns that encompass the devaluation you experience in narcissistic relationships.

I use the acronym DIMMER to describe this set of patterns because the narcissistic relationship can be viewed as a switch that dims your sense of self and well-being.

To be in a narcissistic relationship is to have your needs, feelings, beliefs, experiences, thoughts, hopes, and even sense of self be dismissed and invalidated.

This may be as simple as the narcissistic person not listening or contemptuously dismissing something you say (“That’s just ridiculous, nobody cares about what you are saying”).

Over time this can feel dehumanizing because anything you bring up is written off as unimportant or is simply not attended to, and it can slowly feel like you do not exist. The experience of dismissiveness and invalidation can occur gradually, and what initially may feel like a difference of opinion can evolve into a large-scale brush-off.”

It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD

Dr Durvasula acknowledges that in many cases, people can’t just abandon or disown the narcissistic person in their lives, even if they are causing huge amounts of chaos, pain and disorder. If the person in question is a parent, a boss, one’s child or anybody else with a strong claim on one’s life or economic position, it may not even be possible to detach completely. For these situations, Dr Durvasula provides ways to minimise the mental, physical and emotional toll it takes interacting with the narcissistic person.

“Radical acceptance gives you permission to heal, because you stop channeling your energy into trying to fix the relationship and instead focus on moving yourself forward. The alternative is to remain stuck in the unfounded hope that it could get better and stay in these invalidating cycles in perpetuity.”

It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD

If you have ever been bullied, harassed, made to feel tiny, disbelieved or gaslit by a narcissist, you will read the first part of this book and have A-HA moments one after another, after another. This may make you feel angry and cause you relive the moments when they betrayed you. It may bring into sharp clarity the tactics they use to get what they want. There was a lot of takeaways from this book, but the main one is that narcissists don’t change. If they use manipulative and dark tactics to control you in the past, they will continue to do so in the future. This is both deeply sad and also in a way liberating, as it allows you to take the necessary steps to reduce or limit contact with them, or go no contact altogether.

“You aren’t damaged just because you were in a narcissistic relationship, and you aren’t somehow less than because your parent was a narcissistic person or you are with a narcissistic partner. Seeing the narcissistic behavior doesn’t make you “bad” but rather quite courageous. To clearly see and accept a pattern that is painful to acknowledge yet be willing to make realistic choices and protect yourself is the height of fearlessness and resilience”

It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD

“In my experience as a psychologist working with people recovering from narcissistic abuse, I have observed that it is the injustice raised by these relationships that has the most profound impact on healing. The process of grief can be facilitated by some sense of closure, fairness, or meaning—and none of that is happens when you are grieving these types of losses, especially in the acute phases of grief. The injustice can also feed the rumination process. Narcissistic people rarely genuinely apologize, face meaningful consequences for their behavior, take accountability or responsibility, or meaningfully acknowledge your pain. As a result, narcissistic relationships can feel deeply unjust—you get hurt and psychologically wrecked, and they get to move on with their lives with little insight into the damage they wrought. A core belief for you may be that life is fair, so when these relationships repeatedly show that it is not, it can be unsettling and uncomfortable. You may then blame yourself, which is a manifestation of the internal experience of injustice, and this can make it more difficult to let go and heal.

It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD

“It’s also time to rewrite your narratives on resilience. Your feelings and emotions were either not allowed or were gaslighted in your narcissistic relationships. People who have less power in their families, relationships, and the world at large learned long ago that their emotions are often not tolerated or permissible. Many of you learned long ago to push your feelings down, and that strength and resilience were associated with being stoic. In many cultures, not expressing emotion and leaving feelings unexpressed are mistakenly framed as resilience. But silent endurance is not resilience, even though it may be more comfortable for the people around you. As you reshape your narrative, connect to any feeling and emotion you have and are experiencing as you go through life”

It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD

The second part of the book shows how you can integrate new ways of seeing the world and seeing yourself that are far more healthy, allowing you to disentangle yourself mentally, physically and emotionally from the narcissistic person. This part of the book was incredibly helpful, practical and useful.

Dr Ramani Durvasula is a knowledgable and incredibly helpful clinical psychologist with decades of experience in-person therapy. She became a Youtube sensation with her incredibly popular channel where she dissects every aspect of having a relationship with a narcissist. I would give this book five stars. There are many books out there about coping with narcissists but this one is realistic, clear-eyed and practical.