Hooked On Hope: Intermittent Reinforcement And Narcissists

In this episode, we dive into the psychological and neuroscientific dynamics of intermittent reinforcement in narcissistic relationships. Learn how this "emotional gambling" hooks you, how it affects your brain, and, most importantly, actionable strategies to break free and heal.

Tune in for insights, examples, and practical steps to reclaim your emotional and mental well-being.

Transcript

Hi and welcome to Healing from Narcissistic Relationships.

Today I want to talk to you about Intermittent Reinforcement and also Operant Conditioning.

And you might have heard about Operant Conditioning at school,

You know BF Skinner,

Mice in mazes and levels that needs to be pressed,

That sort of thing.

But let's start with Intermittent Reinforcement.

What's the definition?

Well,

Intermittent Reinforcement is a reward system in which the reinforcement is,

For example,

Attention,

Affection,

And it is provided,

Here's the key word,

Sporadically,

Sporadically rather than consistently.

And this unpredictability makes the behavior more persistent.

How might this look like in a toxic relationship?

For example,

A narcissistic partner will alternate between showering you with love,

With attention,

With gifts,

And then periods of neglect and criticism or emotional withdrawal.

And it's exactly this unpredictability that strengthens your emotional investment because you learn to chase the positive reinforcement,

Hoping that it will return.

And you might have heard of breadcrumbing,

When somebody just gives you tiny little bits of things and you become dependent on them.

And in between you feel starved and you start doing all sorts of things just for breadcrumbs.

Let's now talk about Operant Conditioning.

Operant Conditioning refers to the process by which behaviors are shaped by consequences.

And those consequences are either reinforcement,

Positive or negative,

Or punishment.

Positive reinforcement in a narcissistic relationship might be that the narcissist may positively reinforce compliance from you by being affectionate when you agree with them or when you're doing something they want.

Their negative reinforcement may involve them stopping their silent treatment if you apologize for something you haven't even done.

And of course then there is the punishment.

And the punishment could be the stonewalling as well,

The silent treatment,

Right?

They're withdrawing something.

So as you see,

Both methods have something in common.

Both manipulate behavior and they associate it with actions and consequences.

What happens as a result is that this creates a dependency because they use it manipulatively.

And of course what they do is they elicit very strong emotional responses like hope,

Fear or anxiety.

Now you have learned about both manipulation tactics and don't worry at the end I will give you a lot of things you can do to undo those manipulations.

But first of all let's talk about what this does to your brain because that's really really important.

So what happens when you experience intermittent reinforcement?

You have a dopamine response,

Right?

This unpredictability of intermittent reinforcement triggers a dopamine surge in your brain's reward system.

And of course this anticipation of the reward becomes addictive,

Much like gambling.

And you are actually gambling.

And you might be in the middle of a relationship and you're gambling by trying all sorts of different methods to get on the good side again.

Or maybe you're in the middle of a breakup and you're kind of gambling by maybe trying again because maybe this break was really healthy and maybe you're missing them and maybe they miss you too.

And maybe something has happened in those days and weeks where you haven't talked.

So that's gambling.

The other reaction in your brain is a hyperactivation of your emotional centers.

And this is where your amygdala,

Which is responsible for fear and anxiety,

And your prefrontal cortex,

Which is responsible for decision making,

Are involved.

And this leads to a heightened emotional and cognitive attachment.

The punishments you receive in a toxic relationship activate areas associated with pain and avoidance.

Let's give you some more examples of intermittent reinforcement.

Narcissistic partner or whoever the toxic person in your life is,

They might occasionally praise you.

They might make you crave this kind of validation.

They might say things,

Or well,

You might say things like,

Well,

He was loving last week.

Maybe if I try harder,

Maybe he'll be like that again.

And in some way,

Over time you forget that actually it is not normal having to work this hard for someone else's validation.

In a healthy relationship,

Both partners validate each other all the time through different ways.

It might be an acknowledging nod.

It might be a hug.

It comes natural.

They see you and they hear you.

You don't have to fight for it,

But you might have learned to fight for it.

Maybe you have grown up with a parent or two parents who didn't validate you,

And you learned to believe that you don't deserve validation unless you are perfect.

Otherwise you are not good enough.

And so that then transferred over to your relationships.

Let me give you another example.

And again,

I want to talk about silent treatment because this is really,

Really common in toxic relationships.

It's a punishment to reduce a behavior that the toxic person dislikes,

For example,

Questioning their decisions or setting boundaries.

And you might be thinking,

Well,

When I stop asking questions,

Maybe they will start talking to me again.

Or maybe if I apologize for setting boundaries,

Maybe then they will be talking to me again.

I see this in my practice all the time.

And the first thing that needs to happen is reality testing.

Because oftentimes people have been so brainwashed by whoever their toxic person or persons are in their life,

That they don't even think or come to think that they might be enough.

But in fact,

They are enough.

But for somebody toxic,

Somebody narcissistic,

Nobody will ever be enough.

Nothing will ever be enough.

Because narcissistic people are like hungry ghosts.

They are always hungry.

They are always starving for that supply.

They're always starving.

They need it.

And so whatever you try to provide,

Whatever behavior you are trying to show to please them,

To appease them,

It will never,

Ever be enough.

It might feel enough for a while,

And then something happens,

And then they need more and more and more.

So the first step,

So here we are with the steps of what you can do,

Because you need to retrain your brain.

We will talk about that.

It's the very first step.

It's very obvious.

You need to recognize this pattern,

And you need to educate yourself about this.

You think,

Okay,

Yeah,

But I don't want to read loads of books,

Or I have read so and so many books.

Well,

It is important because awareness activates your prefrontal cortex.

It's responsible for and critical for decision-making,

And it helps you override the amygdala's emotional reactivity.

That happens when you are learning about these things,

When you're educating yourself.

And that might be reading things.

You learn about intermittent reinforcement effects,

And one really good technique is to journal the cycles of reward and neglect in your relationship to see the pattern clearly.

So you can do that in notes,

On your phone,

Or you can have a journal.

Every time you notice something that feels like the cycle of reward and neglect,

Write it down.

Write down those episodes of good and bad treatment,

And that will help you to note the unpredictability and its impact on your emotions.

Every time it happens,

Or you can go back in your memory and write these things down,

And remember how you felt when it happened,

And what you did,

And how you reacted.

And you will see,

Yes,

There is a pattern,

And there is a reaction how you feel,

And that is followed by a behavior from you,

Like appeasement,

Or apologizing for something you haven't done.

And then you see a reaction from the other person,

And so on.

And the cycle restarts over and over and over again.

The second step is very,

Very crucial,

And not easy.

It's creating psychological and physical distance.

And you know why this works?

Because it reduces the triggers that activate your reward system.

It stops those dopamine surges,

And that helps you to desensitize your brain to the in quotes,

Addiction.

You are going cold turkey.

What I mean by that,

If this is a romantic relationship,

Or any kind of relationship,

Stop checking their social media,

Don't go through their Facebook,

Delete,

Block,

You know,

Don't have their number,

Just forget it,

Delete it.

So,

The second step is extremely crucial,

And it's also quite difficult,

And that is creating psychological and physical distance.

Let me tell you what that does to your brain.

First of all,

It reduces the triggers that activate the reward system.

You're not exposed to them anymore.

You don't get those dopamine surges anymore,

And that will help you with time to desensitize your brain to that addiction,

To that gambling,

Right?

Basically,

You go cold turkey.

It really is like the process of breaking a substance addiction,

Because we have,

Of course,

Chemically attached to this person.

What are you thinking?

Oh,

That sounds tough.

Yeah,

It does.

What you need to do is no contact rule.

That's one option.

If you want to do no contact,

You need to cut off all communication with this individual,

And that means also deleting their social media,

Their phone number,

Everything,

And stop checking it,

Because if you check,

You still get that dopamine hit,

And that's what you want to avoid.

Now,

Of course,

Sometimes no contact is possible.

Let's say you have children with that individual,

Or there's,

You know,

If it's a parent or someone else and a work colleague.

So,

If no contact isn't possible,

You can use the grey rock technique,

And that keeps your interactions minimal,

Very unemotional,

And very neutral.

Let's say you get some kind of manipulative text.

It might be passive aggressive stuff that you're getting.

You just respond with a very factual,

Emotionless answer,

Such as,

Okay,

Or okay,

Noted,

Right?

So,

That's it.

You don't respond to it.

You don't feed them.

Now,

Word of warning.

When you start doing grey rock,

The other person won't like it,

And they might ramp up their toxic behavior.

So,

Please be aware that this might be happening.

So,

When you're starting grey rock,

You really need to take care of yourself.

Journal.

Do something nice.

Book a day in the spa or massage.

Surround yourself with friends,

Because they don't like the fact that suddenly they lose power.

They sense that,

Because suddenly they're not getting that supply,

Because remember,

The supply is not just compliance.

Their supply is any kind of emotional reaction.

So,

Seeing you're getting sad or angry also gives them supply,

Because they learn that they have power over you,

And all of a sudden,

They are not getting that.

Now,

You've educated yourself about intimate reinforcement and toxic relationships,

And you have created psychological and physical distance.

So,

What do you do next?

Because you still need to change how your brain works,

Right?

It's still there.

Everything has been,

Let's say,

It needs rewiring.

So,

You need to replace the reward system with healthy alternatives.

You don't want those dopamine surges anymore from toxic behavior.

So,

The brain's reward system is malleable,

And it can be rewired by creating new healthy sources of dopamine,

And those can be activities like exercise,

Creative hobbies,

And they can stimulate this release of dopamine and endorphins without any kind of toxic reinforcement.

Also,

You might still hold a lot of tension in your body,

So doing something that helps you to release that stress,

That tension in your body,

Is really,

Really important.

And people who have been in long-term relationships,

Have grown up around toxic parents,

You might have complex PTSD,

You might be completely disconnected from your body.

So,

Doing something gently,

Carefully that connects you back to your body in a safe way is super healthy.

You might engage in activities like running or dancing,

Which is very joyful,

Or yoga,

And they boost your dopamine.

And you can also engage in creative outlets.

Let's say you can try painting or writing,

Or maybe cooking,

And it will also provide you with a sense of accomplishment and joy.

It could be learning a new language,

Because you might engage with other people who have the same goal in a language class,

For example.

What's really important is to surround yourself with healthy people,

So build supportive relationships,

Connect with people who offer consistent and healthy support.

And that could be something very simple like a book club or an art class,

And you will form slowly meaningful connections,

And you get your validation from there.

And also,

You will experience a sense of okayness.

Now,

I'm stating the obvious,

And that's mindfulness.

You will have heard about mindfulness so many times.

But mindfulness and yoga,

They help you with emotional regulation.

There's loads of research out there.

I won't quote any specific studies.

They are all out there,

Very easy to find in Google.

And what they do is that mindfulness reduces the activity of your amygdala.

I mentioned this is responsible for your stress and your fear and your anxiety,

And it strengthens the prefrontal cortex,

Again,

That part of your brain that is responsible for decision making.

And over time,

This rewiring will diminish your emotional reactivity to triggers with time.

When you avoid contact with toxic people,

And you surround yourself with healthy relationships,

And you educate yourself about things.

And what I mean by that,

When you educate yourself,

I'm not saying delve into the past all the time,

Just think about constantly what has happened,

What has happened.

There is a point when it's enough,

When you have learned about these things and you have reflected and analyzed enough.

And it can be a trap for a lot of people where they suddenly become almost obsessed with reading about narcissists and their behavior and toxic relationships.

And you must understand that at some point,

Enough is enough.

Because first of all,

Narcissistic behavior,

Once you see it,

It can't be unseen.

And it's actually very easy to spot from that point onwards.

But also,

There is a lot of chaos around people who are toxic.

And how do you make sense of chaos?

So don't fall into that rabbit hole,

Because it's no good for you.

What you want is then focus on your future.

So you might want to prospect and look ahead.

How do you want your life to look like?

Who do you want to be?

Really important is you are working on rebuilding your self-worth.

And you're doing that by distancing yourself from that toxic person,

By surrounding yourself with healthy people,

By doing things that help you to reconnect with your body,

By learning things,

By giving yourself opportunities of experiencing a sense of accomplishment.

Something that I teach my clients is to look at their character strengths.

And you can go to the VIA character strength website,

And you can take the free test,

And it shows you your 24 character strengths.

We all have them,

But it shows you which one your most significant are,

And which your lower strengths are.

And you can try to spot your strengths in everyday behaviors.

At the end of the day,

You can think about three strengths you have shown during this day,

And the impact they had had on you and your relationships.

So you learn to validate yourself and not just depend on other people's validation.

You learn to shape your vision inwards in a really healthy way,

Because in a toxic relationship,

What you have learned is to constantly look for what's wrong with you,

What's missing,

What's lacking.

And now you are relearning,

Because we all have this negativity.

We all have this negativity bias.

We evolved that way.

It's really important,

Because if you see somebody being eaten by a sable-toothed tiger,

You're not going to go there again,

Because you know that animal lives over there,

Right?

There's danger.

And so now,

Still,

We are looking out for danger wherever it might be.

And when you're around toxic people,

You do that even more.

So your negativity bias is even stronger.

And all you do is you're just changing your vision into reality.

I'm not saying wear rose-tinted glasses and become self-obsessed or megalomaniac or deluded.

No,

Just the reality,

That we all have our strengths and our weaknesses.

But your negativity bias,

You have learned to look at everything that you're lacking,

Which you're probably not lacking at all,

But you were made to feel like you do.

So you need to learn to look at your positives in a really healthy way.

Now,

Oftentimes,

These relationships,

Especially if they have been going on for quite a while or if you grew up with somebody like this,

They can cause PTSD,

Complex PTSD,

Actually,

Which is relational trauma.

And in that instance,

I really recommend therapy.

Of course,

I'm biased.

I'm a therapist myself.

But it's so important to work on that trauma,

To reframe those negative thought patterns,

And also to create actionable strategies for healing,

Some of which I have introduced you to today.

And you might also need to address deeper wounds that made you more susceptible to toxic relationships.

There are a lot of options there.

For example,

Cognitive behavioral therapy and the challenges,

Cognitive distortions.

You might want to engage in more talking therapies,

Talk through things more in depth.

And what I really recommend and something that has shown to help a great deal with especially PTSD is eye movement,

Desensitization,

And reprocessing.

In short,

EMDR,

And that's for trauma healing.

And more and more,

It's also used for complex PTSD.

There are also things like neural feedback that right now are not that easy to find.

But you might find somebody who does that.

And therapists,

They will help you to explore why you stayed in the relationship.

And they will teach you lots of tools to set boundaries as well,

And to spot people like that in the future,

And avoid these kind of toxic relationships.

And lastly,

I really want to emphasize that neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity means that our brain can rewire itself constantly.

We can create new patterns,

Replace old ones,

Replace destructive ones.

We can do that.

Our brain,

We can help our brain to rewire itself in a really healthy way.

And I like to explain this a little bit like a landscape.

So imagine your brain is a landscape.

And you have created,

As you grew up or in your relationship,

Where we create those paths,

Those roads.

And the more often we drive on those roads,

At first it starts off being a little path,

Or maybe we need to clear the path through the jungle a little bit.

And then at some point,

It becomes a highway,

Because we used it so many times.

And so it's easier to go down the highway because it's faster.

And you also kind of get a reward sometimes.

But the destination is not always a good one.

So you might be driving towards something that's actually quite unhealthy.

It might be a negative thought pattern,

For example.

And you might even have received some kind of pseudo reward for going down that negative path,

Some kind of payoff.

But that's for another session.

What you now are doing is you are shaping that landscape and you're taking those new paths.

You are first working through the jungle.

You're cutting your way through.

And you're taking this journey over and over again.

And slowly you can see how this path becomes clearer and clearer.

At some point,

It becomes a little road.

And in the end,

It will become a highway.

And this highway is a healthy one.

So your default behaviors become really healthy.

And guess what happens with those old unhealthy highways?

Nature takes over and they become that jungle.

And it won't be that easy to access them anymore.

And this is how you reshape your brain.

Just imagine your brain is this landscape and you are the architect.

You decide how it will look like.

You can also decide what roads you want to create.

So an exercise I do with clients is I literally ask them to draw a brain and then decide all those different roads and pathways and what they also represent.

So there might be one highway to boundary setting.

There might be one highway to self-soothing,

To self-regulation.

And then you decide how might this look like.

You can also decide on the scenery.

And that scenery might symbolize something.

You might decide that maybe you are driving on this highway with a car and you can decide what those different parts of your car symbolize.

So maybe you have passengers and they symbolize something.

Maybe they are your support network.

So you see,

You can be as creative as you like.

And creativity is actually one of the most powerful strengths in overcoming adversity.

So I hope that you found this really interesting.

I hope this was useful.

And until next time.

Reviews

Thankyou Martha.

3 years no contact and I still have my challenging days. IT has helped. It is a very difficult road to travel but I'm finding more tools as I go. Thank goodness 🙏

You talked about art. My counsellor suggested journalling & it took a while to start. As I was stuck for words, I instinctively drew a door with a toxic weed grown over all over it. Somewhere there was a lost key I needed to find to open the door, but first I had to clear away the weeds. Then the words came in the following pages.

Only recently I went back and looked at this journal and drawing on the 1st page... My goodness I've come a long way!

As I'm now healing, I to draw the key I found and me standing on the path to somewhere with that open door far, far away in the distance behind me.. and whatever comes instinctively. It will be lovely and I might even frame it and put on my wall to see how far I've come.

Namaste 🪷 🙏