Narcissistic people are often charming at the dinner party and cruel in the car ride home, which tells you they can control it. Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, author of It’s Not You, has studied narcissism since long before it became a buzzword, and she argues that most of what circulates online gets it wrong.

I'm Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and the author of It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People.

Chapter 1: How to identify narcissism

It's a pattern

In the early 2000s, I started becoming interested in narcissism and actually in narcissism itself while I was a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and was specifically looking at how narcissistic people made decisions and showed up in relationships.…