Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse
Confused by your relationship? Constantly second-guessing yourself, walking on eggshells, or feeling emotionally drained? Whether you’re still in the chaos or finding your footing after leaving, this podcast is your lifeline.
Join mental health experts Dr. Kerry McAvoy and Lisa Sonni as they uncover the hidden dynamics of toxic relationships. From understanding destructive personalities and their manipulative tactics to exploring the stages of abuse and how to rebuild after the damage, you’ll gain the clarity and tools needed to break free and heal.
If you’re ready to reclaim your self-worth and discover the path to emotional freedom, hit play and start your recovery journey today.
Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse
The Four Most Dangerous Personalities Types to Avoid: An Interview with Joe Navarro, Former FBI Special Agent
What signs warn that we’ve met not just a toxic person, but someone dangerous?
This week Joe Navarro, author and former FBI special agent joins us to discuss the four most dangerous personalities. Navarro is most well-known for his work as a body language expert. He’s authored several books, including What Every Body is Saying, Dangerous Personalities, Louder Than Words, and The Dictionary of Body Language.
To Watch the Podcast Extra Interview
▶︎ Get practical help on how to recognize and escape a dangerous situation in this week’s Podcast Extra exclusive Interview with Joe Navarro. Get immediate access to the newsletter and video interview when you join today: substack.com/@breakingfreenarcabuse
More About Joe Navarro
Joe Navarro’s Books
The Dictionary of Body Language
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Kerry McAvoy, PhD
Lisa Sonni
More About Us!
Kerry Kerr McAvoy, Ph.D.
Dr. Kerry, a retired psychologist and author, is an expert on cultivating healthy relationships and deconstructing narcissism. Her blogs have been featured in Mamami, YourTango, Scary Mommy, and The Good Men Project. In Love You More, Dr. McAvoy gives an uncensored glimpse into her survival of narcissistic abuse, and her workbook, First Steps to Leaving a Narcissist, helps victims break free from the confusion common in abusive relationships. She hosts the Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse podcast and offers trauma-related advice on social media.
Lisa Sonni
Lisa Sonni is a certified Life & Relationship Coach, specializing in trauma bond recovery and abuse education, who helps clients from all walks of life overcome challenges stemming from traumatic partnerships. She has published an online self-guided course, The Trauma Bond Recovery Course, and several books, The Trauma Bond Recovery Journal, and Surviving to Thriving: A Six-Step Blueprint to Narcissistic Abuse Healing and Recovery.
With 7 professional certifications and her own experience as a survivor of narcissistic abuse, her expertise is geared towards getting clients t
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00:00:04:19 - 00:00:31:14
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
Victims are often one of the last to recognize the dangerousness of their situation. Well, today, Lisa and I interview Joe Navarro, former FBI special agent who wrote the book Dangerous Personalities and FBI profiler shows you how to identify and protect yourself from harmful people. Joe is going to discuss why we often minimize and fail to see the risk of some personalities.
00:00:31:16 - 00:00:53:10
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
I am so excited today to have a very special guest, somebody that I have long time admired. And in fact, I remember coming across this book, Dangerous Personality, several years ago and just devouring it. So I'm so thrilled to introduce Joe Navarro, a former FBI special agent, as our guest today. And he's going to talk about dangerous personalities, which I think is a very timely and fascinating topic.
00:00:53:12 - 00:00:58:09
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
How did you get interested in writing the book after you've worked as an agent?
00:00:58:14 - 00:01:26:17
Joe Navarro
Great question, and thank you for having me. When I retired from the FBI, I had all this training, unbelievable training that I had received both as a criminal profile killer. But then later, within the confines of the National Security Visions Behavioral Analysis Program. So I had mentors such as the chief psychiatrist for the CIA, along with any number of other authorities.
00:01:26:18 - 00:02:02:07
Joe Navarro
And I thought one of the things that we use profiling for is to try to keep people safe on the national security side. We use it to try to anticipate what nation state actors might be doing through espionage. And one of the things that had happened was in studying the behavior of of criminals and other people and bad actors, something interesting was constantly popping up that there were four types of, let's say, personalities that accounted for the majority of people that were causing harm.
00:02:02:08 - 00:02:26:03
Joe Navarro
And the book I referred to victimizing others psychologically, emotionally, physically, mentally and financially. And these four personality types kept percolating to the surface, accounting for the vast majority, for instance, of people that are incarcerated and so forth. So I thought, okay, let me write about that.
00:02:26:06 - 00:02:45:21
Lisa Sonni
I love that. What an amazing story and reason to write this book, and I will concur. It is such an important book because there are a lot of misconceptions about these types of personalities, and I mean especially narcissists. I think. But these types of people. So what do you think is the biggest misconception about them that people need to know?
00:02:45:23 - 00:03:11:16
Joe Navarro
Well, I think the biggest misconception is how we use the term narcissism so broadly and so ill defined. I deal with many cultures, and when you go abroad and you're in Latin America or in Egypt or Taiwan or other countries, narcissism has a different meaning. We hear it here in the United States and we attach certain things to it.
00:03:11:17 - 00:03:43:08
Joe Navarro
But the global meaning for it is quite disparate. So that was the first thing is like we got to get out of the United States mindset because we only account for 5% of the world's population. So what is everybody else perceiving? The second thing is the misconception that we attribute self-centeredness or being egotistical, which any one of us can go through different periods in time as narcissism, especially with narcissism.
00:03:43:11 - 00:04:18:06
Joe Navarro
The attributes that I looked at were based on the attributes that didn't come from psychology, but rather what the victims experienced. In fact, the whole book is based on what did the victims report? What did they observe? What was the mindset of these individuals, and then what was the relevance of that in their lives? Which inevitably, as Stuart Janowski said, these are individuals that are flawed of character, and inevitably they leave a debris field of human suffering.
00:04:18:09 - 00:04:46:03
Joe Navarro
So that was one of the characteristics. Is there a debris field of human suffering that they live behind, or what people call narcissism? Oh, he's just a guy that likes to look in the mirror five times an hour. Well, that doesn't bother me. So I think that was a big part of it, is looking at it from the people that I would run into, having been in law enforcement and saying, what's it like to have a narcissistic father?
00:04:46:03 - 00:05:12:15
Joe Navarro
And now you're you're calling the police or to have a narcissistic boss, and now that's influencing your health. So my perspective has always been from the victims. We do a great disservice to humanity if we don't take into account almost like an ethologist. What do victims experience? Trust me, there's a lot of wisdom in listening. Hour after hour, to the victims.
00:05:12:17 - 00:05:31:03
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
That's really powerful that you're focused rather on the outcome instead of just on the personality development that you really shifted the focus. I find that really fascinating. You outline for different types of personalities that are dangerous. What made you focus on those four types, or maybe even define what's dangerous about each of those types?
00:05:31:05 - 00:06:00:05
Joe Navarro
Yeah, no. Happy to. So before you go back to what I initially said, they victimize you either physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally or financially. And we use that as sort of the threshold that they closed. What I found was how the you know, obviously the narcissist, which by the way, varies in populations. I mean, the DSM, I think at one time said it only accounted for maybe 2% of the population.
00:06:00:10 - 00:06:29:05
Joe Navarro
You should see some of the organizations I've been to where the numbers are, you know, a standing with the principal characteristic of overvaluation of self and devaluation of others that to me, not grandiosity, which, by the way, as you go around the world and you say, well, did you see aspects of grandiosity, maybe with the nation state leader or somebody you know, or someone making some pompous remark about this or that?
00:06:29:05 - 00:06:55:15
Joe Navarro
But but when it comes to the ability to devalue others, that really stood out. And and I said in certain professions, as you well know, in medicine, in law enforcement, police work, and if you look oftentimes at CEOs, those numbers rise a lot. The other one that popped out from the kind of work that I did was the emotionally unstable.
00:06:55:18 - 00:07:24:20
Joe Navarro
Now, you know, I've been asked, well, what are you referring to in those? Are you look at, you know, access to cluster B, right. So are you looking at the borderline personality, a lot of those traits with that emotional instability. Is there a little bit of the other personality weaved in there? Yeah, you could have that. But basically I'm looking at very mercurial individuals for whatever the reason.
00:07:24:20 - 00:08:04:20
Joe Navarro
And I never get into that in the books. I'm well aware that there are many reasons that we see these things. Again, the perspective is the victim and looking at their impulsiveness, their abuse of drugs and alcohol and their irrational behavior, they're lashing out. And I'm well aware that, for instance, in many circumstances, what is attributed to one gender as borderline personality, when it's a man doing it or we just call them antisocial only because of the testosterone factor, because, you know, the ability to do greater physical harm.
00:08:04:21 - 00:08:29:09
Joe Navarro
I saw that a lot within families, the instability in families. And I remember interviewing one victim who at the age of 17, had to divorce her parents, one who was a malignant narcissist. Clinically, the judge insisted on them being examined. And the mother who was I referred to them as emotionally unstable, but she was diagnosed as borderline personality.
00:08:29:12 - 00:09:08:20
Joe Navarro
That child barely survived, and I had never heard of divorcing your parents until that. And then I started to research it, and I was able to get Ahold of 1 or 2 other individuals, and what they painted was exactly that the emotional instability, the inability to count on anything at any time, the walking on eggshells, constant of getting up in the morning and checking with siblings to see what the mood is of either parent and the effects of that which, by the way, many a times the effects that we see are nonverbal.
00:09:08:20 - 00:09:35:09
Joe Navarro
It's reflected in their skin, it's reflected in their countenance. For instance, when the parent comes into view, they immediately become stoic. Their arms fall to their side. There's less flexion in the fingers. There's all these behaviors that we would associate with a large feline in the presence. Right. Archaic humans being surrounded by tigers. And so don't move. Don't make any noise.
00:09:35:09 - 00:10:04:22
Joe Navarro
Don't even talk. I just had to write about that. The third one is one that is really mistaken by the public because of the terms that we use to describe them. You know, yeah, he's a strange dog or he's just a little different or he's just odd. And what we're looking at really is the paranoid, the clinically paranoid personality who is distrustful, who sees dangers in everything.
00:10:04:22 - 00:10:30:13
Joe Navarro
A child playing in the yard is someone that you must lash out at and point weapons at and all sorts of behaviors. But then when I started dealing with the corporate world and talking to H.R., you start to notice that these are the ones that are always questioning management. They're always seeing a cabal. Anytime a decision is made as to who got promoted, who got invited, why wasn't I called?
00:10:30:13 - 00:10:57:23
Joe Navarro
And all this stuff extremely disruptive to institutions. And unfortunately they're huge wound collectors. And in the book I talk about wound collecting that was actually written in a previous book, because I had written about extremists, that they collect wounds. And then people started using some of the terms that I had started using, and they said, well, they're grievance collectors.
00:10:58:02 - 00:11:33:18
Joe Navarro
One collector is more than grievance. Wound collecting is grievance collecting on steroids, because now you go out of the way to collect grievances so that they justify your behavior. So when I look at, for instance, people that leave the job and come back and shoot the colleagues that they work for, inevitably, without exception, there are tomes of information that indicate that they're wound collectors, and they allow these things to permeate.
00:11:33:19 - 00:11:55:22
Joe Navarro
They ideate it, but they don't allow the wound to heal. And that's the big difference. The efforts they go through to collect wounds and you see it with, and I don't have all the names and stuff in front of me where you, you know, go in there on a Sunday and you shoot people worshiping in a black, traditionally African-American church.
00:11:56:02 - 00:12:24:11
Joe Navarro
And you look at the rhetoric and they're thinking, and that's all wound collecting. And then what you call antisocial personality disorder, which is really, I think, in my humble opinion, it's a poor nomenclature. First of all, they're violators of human rights. So they're human rights violators. Let's get that clearly out there. Secondly, they can be anywhere from what I term sociopathy, which is, you know, if you live in a neighborhood.
00:12:24:11 - 00:12:54:08
Joe Navarro
And I did in Miami, where things fell off the truck all the time and stealing and doing things is not frowned upon. That, to me is sociopathy. But then at the extreme end, you have Robert Hare's true definition of a psychopath. And looking at the work of other research where, you know, using fMRI, we can actually see the prefrontal cortex is in no way affected by the things they do or think or visualize and so forth.
00:12:54:13 - 00:13:23:03
Joe Navarro
And so you have a very wide area. What's interesting to me is as you go around the world, those terms are insignia effect. Those are only significant here in America. Across the world, most people don't have terms of art. They don't know anything about psychiatry. They don't know anything about the work of Checkley and everybody else. What they say is, oh, no, he's a bad guy, you know, it's from the victim's perspective.
00:13:23:03 - 00:13:59:04
Joe Navarro
And I think we do an injustice group thing, these individuals very imprecisely, because I think with sociopathy, you know, I've seen people grow up in a bad neighborhood. They join the military, they get their act together, they become great professionals, and they have leading lives. And then there are people. There's nothing you can do. And whether you're looking at Read Malloy, who wrote the Mark of Cain and the psychopathic Mind or any number of others, or some of the mentors that I had, and so that's good for professionals.
00:13:59:04 - 00:14:25:11
Joe Navarro
I think professionals need to look at that and say, well, are we dealing with the psychopath? But I'm also shocked at how often even professionals throw terms out there that are loose. Oh, he's a sociopath. The victims don't care about that. What they care about is what is the totality of their behaviors, and what are the thresholds to say, I'm in danger or there's going to be psychology damage to associating with this individual.
00:14:25:12 - 00:14:30:19
Joe Navarro
So those are the main four personality types that I wrote about.
00:14:30:21 - 00:14:53:06
Lisa Sonni
I am believably fascinating that you've put that into terms that I think people can kind of understand, seeing these categories and trying to recognize traits, perhaps in their own partners or in their own families. You've obviously, you know, interviewed and learned about some of the world's worst offenders. What do you think are some insights from those interviews, those experiences that might actually change how survivors view their abusers?
00:14:53:09 - 00:15:15:11
Joe Navarro
Terrific question, Lisa. I think the best thing that we can do, the best thing I can do, and the thing that potential victims out there can do, is begin to realize there are people that don't have their best interests in mind, and that people that are severely flawed of character, you can't give them a pill to heal them.
00:15:15:11 - 00:15:37:17
Joe Navarro
There's no amount of SSRI that will heal them. I was once interviewed by Wolf Blitzer and it was after the Vegas shooting where the sniper took out, I think, 50 people. And he said, Joe, why do you think he did it? I said, Wolf, stop right there. He did it because he can. And there's a failure to accept that people will do things because they can.
00:15:37:19 - 00:15:57:19
Joe Navarro
And we don't have to ask the why. I mean, you look at Ted Bundy, 26 women. He took one of the women he killed. I was 33ft away from at Brigham Young University when she was abducted. Now, I didn't know that at the time. I was on duty at the time. And I can show where I was at.
00:15:57:23 - 00:16:30:07
Joe Navarro
Approximately when she was abducted, I was on duty and this transpired. And his explanation was porn. Well, that was in 1973, 74. Can you imagine what he would say now? Yeah. It's irrelevant. As one of my mentors said, it explains it, but doesn't excuse. I think we can spend inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what were the infinite varieties of prevent indicators, or reasons why a person became that way.
00:16:30:11 - 00:17:00:19
Joe Navarro
I think there comes a time where we have to realize some people are just that way. So education is number one, and number two. That, and I think what my books mainly do is because there are these robust checklists, which, by the way, came from the victim. So it's incredible to me how many people go through this and say, oh, it didn't dawn on me until I checked all the trades, and my husband has 76 of these traits.
00:17:00:19 - 00:17:25:09
Joe Navarro
Well guess what? You only have to really have about 25 of them. The DSM only requires, I think, what, nine? But nobody's told them. No, no, it's not normal for your husband to come home and you have to pass straight yourself on the floor before him and compel your children to do the same while he sits and you report what you did that day.
00:17:25:10 - 00:17:55:01
Joe Navarro
That is just narcissism at its exquisite worse. Look, all we have to do is look at the Stanford experiments or look at the Milgram experiment. It only takes a lab coat and a clipboard to get people to do horrendous things. And another woman I interviewed, she'd been married about 14 years, but narcissists, it has been just way out of line on everything and all her money she had to turn over from the day she was married.
00:17:55:04 - 00:18:22:11
Joe Navarro
She had no idea. No idea how much money she had, what had happened to it, not even where it was located. And she was forbidden from even asking where that money is, which generated nothing but animosity and angst. And when you listen to those again from the victim, you realize that the best thing you can do, and that's really all the book does, is validate that this isn't right.
00:18:22:15 - 00:18:44:10
Joe Navarro
This is not right. This is intolerable, this is inhumane, and so forth. And, you know, people ask me why you don't talk about healing. I'm not a healer. I'm reporting what the victims tell me. I hope that they would find a healing. But I've yet to meet a narcissist that says there's anything wrong with me. I mean, it's just counterintuitive.
00:18:44:10 - 00:19:19:21
Joe Navarro
The paranoid. I mean, the clinically paranoid. And what's interesting is because we know through emotional contagion that affects the whole family. I had a family lady finally sought refuge right here in Tampa. Tampa, Florida. She was living in Clearwater at the time. Her husband would make her low crawl any time somebody rang the doorbell so that she would not be silhouetted, and then she had to look from one specific keyhole to see who was there, and then report back, but never allow anybody to know that they were home.
00:19:20:03 - 00:19:51:05
Joe Navarro
Where did that get transferred to her children? And so when you listen to these things and you catalog these things, and you get to the point where I had to shower myself because, you know, Nietzsche was right, when you start looking into that abyss, it looks back at you and you just can't believe the inhumanity. Grown men who were driven to attempt suicide because of the emotional instability of their partner.
00:19:51:08 - 00:20:21:05
Joe Navarro
And so I think they needed something to look at and say the totality of these things tell me that this isn't sustainable. And the question I always ask them is, how long is this sustainable and how much longer? How much more are you willing to tolerate? Now, I understand children may be involved in other things, but if they tell me they can't take any more, then, you know, that's when I say take a look at the checklist, go see a professional, make alliances and start getting help.
00:20:21:10 - 00:20:40:05
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
That's a really hard step, though. That's because having survived a very, very dangerous relationship in which my ex was likely trying to poison me, there's a level of disbelief that you have that another person's capable of that kind of harm. And I know that's what I bet. Here I am a psychologist and I'm battling my own disbelief about that.
00:20:40:05 - 00:21:00:12
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
And I also encounter, I know Lisa and I both encounter it in the public, the public. I don't even talk about the fact that I was probably poisoned just because people I know, people don't really do that. Yes, people really do do that. So how do you help somebody overcome their own incredulity that there is that kind of potential, that evil in another person?
00:21:00:14 - 00:21:01:00
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
Yeah.
00:21:01:00 - 00:21:37:09
Joe Navarro
And that's a great question. And like you and by the way, I was reading your body language because the tension is still there. One of the things over and over I've seen that helps is to it's so much different when you can see it in writing and it's in front of you. And by the way, I've dealt with a lot of clinicians who come from what was taught at school and the circumstances of maybe where they're employed, where maybe they're in a forensic setting, but all of a sudden now they're confronted with another kind of inhumanity.
00:21:37:09 - 00:21:59:04
Joe Navarro
Listen, in no way is this ever a victim's fault. Ignorance is not a victim's fault. And unfortunately, there are institutions out there that say, well, you know, you have to be kind to everybody and they slap you on the face. You have to give them the other cheek. That works with normal people, with the flood of character. That doesn't work.
00:21:59:04 - 00:22:19:14
Joe Navarro
That's never worked. Let's say you're, you know, you believe in the Bible. Even God couldn't deal with Cain. What did he do? He put a mark on him so other people would know who he is and then distance himself. The book makes the same recommendation. The best thing you can do is distance yourself. But you have to educate yourself.
00:22:19:18 - 00:22:55:22
Joe Navarro
And no matter where you come in life, realize that to not be treated as equal and he can be something as insignificant as you know. You guys drink water, I'll drink the Pepsi because it's more expensive. I'm an example of that. The the constant devaluation, the instability. And then, you know, the 67 year old woman who contacted me, she wasn't going to be a part of the book, but I was at an event and she was talking to me, and her son took all of her money, all of it, everything.
00:22:56:03 - 00:23:22:17
Joe Navarro
And she said, Joe, I'm 67. I was living on Social Security and just a tiny little bit of money that I'd save up. And now I have to go back to work and you say, well, who would do this kind of thing? No remorse on her son's part? No conscience. Whoa. You know, now we got Robert here and extreme criminal facility because he was able to extract the money from from the bank using all sorts of IDs and so forth.
00:23:22:22 - 00:23:55:13
Joe Navarro
And so you realize there's a chunk of people out there that don't mean well. And it's not about just looking at them. It's about taking note of their behaviors. And when there's a preponderance of behaviors, especially a constellation of behaviors that are immoral, illegal, dehumanizing, and so forth, then you can say, you know what these ailments that you're feeling, this feeling of depression, there's a reason for that.
00:23:55:13 - 00:24:19:03
Joe Navarro
And I don't blame you for wanting to get away from them. In my experience, I find that that is the only solution that is efficacious, you know, working things out, not when they're at that level. Right. And by the way, there was one person who was able to catalog over 110 of these items, and even then they weren't sure what they should do.
00:24:19:07 - 00:24:20:03
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
Right? Right.
00:24:20:05 - 00:24:46:23
Joe Navarro
And, you know, so finally I said, I don't sit here in judgment, but my question to you is because you came to me is how long are you willing to tolerate these things? She said something fascinating. Eventually you get used to the mud. I had tears in my eyes. Now, you know. Keep in mind not everybody sophisticated with the big words and the terms of art and, you know, the psychodynamic theory and all this.
00:24:47:00 - 00:24:54:05
Joe Navarro
Sometimes that's all they've got to work with, that you eventually get used to the mud. There's a volume right there.
00:24:54:07 - 00:24:56:01
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
There is, there really is.
00:24:56:03 - 00:25:17:21
Joe Navarro
And I'll be honest to how many times I wish I could share the emails with you where they say, well, I'd try to call. And the first question they hear is, do you have insurance? Yeah, I'll just leave it right there. Yeah, yeah. But I tell everybody, put yourself on the side of a victim and ask yourself, really, where are you going to get help.
00:25:17:23 - 00:25:28:09
Joe Navarro
Law enforcement can't possibly provide it. And the institutions that are out there try to get to the front door when the first question is, do you have insurance?
00:25:28:12 - 00:25:44:00
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
Yeah, I could tell you and I and Lisa could talk forever because I had so many questions percolating in my brain. But let's jump over to the podcast extra, because I think the critical question we were leading up to, but didn't address, that I really would love to address over there, because what I'm hearing you say is we need to wake up.
00:25:44:00 - 00:25:56:13
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
That's sort of the gist of this message, and I love how the assessment tool in your book really did that, by the way, I took it mine scored positive on two and started pretty significant on the third and nearly three different types, as you.
00:25:56:13 - 00:26:01:09
Joe Navarro
Can easily be very comorbid, which a lot of people find difficult to accept.
00:26:01:12 - 00:26:19:01
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
Yeah. Which and I love your point you make in the book, is that the more of these indexes, the positive on the increasing level of danger. So let's jump over and talk about in the podcast extra, you realize maybe you take your assessment in that book and realize this person I'm with is dangerous and I can't take more.
00:26:19:03 - 00:26:38:08
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
How do they begin to get out when they're with a dangerous personality? So we're going to wrap this up. Thank you so much, Joe, for being on the show with us today. I would love to have you back. This has been fabulous because I know we have so many different directions we could head in, and I know people are going to want to do a follow up, but thank you for being our guest today and I hope people will join us at the podcast extra.
00:26:38:11 - 00:26:41:12
Joe Navarro
Well, thank you for having me.
00:26:41:13 - 00:27:07:02
Dr. Kerry McAvoy
Well, that's a wrap for this week's episode. Are you following me on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube? Find me at Kerry McAvoy, Ph.D. And whether you're in, consider leaving or have left a narcissistic relationship. I'm community support at my Toxic-Free Relationship Club. You can learn about this resource as well as others at KerryMcAvoyphd.com and I'll see you back here next week.
