Welcome to Most Popular, the podcast about pop culture and the impact it has on society. I'm Dr. Adrienne Trier Bieniek. I'm a professor of sociology, and I will be your host. Today is a special kind of episode for me because I am talking with one of my colleagues at Valencia College. So I get to talk to Sally Leslie.

Sally is the director of faculty and instructional development at Valencia, and she also hosts a podcast. It's a podcast called Reclaiming Pride, LGBT Plus Survivors of Narcissistic Abuse. Our conversation mainly focuses on the way that LGBTQ plus folks are limited when they look for resources on issues that pertain to being in a marriage or a couple.

And because of this, one of the things we find ourselves talking a lot about is the connection between self help books, which is a lot for me to say in one sentence, the connection between self help books and mental health. The industry of self help books is about a 13 billion dollar industry, like billion with a B according to [00:01:00] 2022 reports.

And yet, as Sally will talk about, finding resources for people who are not in heterosexual relationships is difficult. Which, it seems to me that if there is a market for such things, surely a multi billion dollar industry would take note, but what do I know? I'm just a bird. sociologists trying to make a dent in this big blue marble.

We are all on. I'm so happy to bring you my conversation with Sally Leslie. My name is Sally Leslie, and I'm originally from London. And I trained as a teacher in London. All of my education is in London, actually. And I taught my first job in a high school in Southeast London, and the national media had it on the cover of newspapers as the school the SAS couldn't save.

And for those of you who don't know, the SAS is kind of like the British equivalent of the marines or the air, airborne. Is that what they, you know, the, you know, the really tough people who don't have a place and swim, swim in the water and plava. But yeah. So we were brought in as a task force to save [00:02:00] the school and we did I taught English there, and drama and then I kind of moved to another school and taught, I was a head of a drama department, and then I taught college, and then I moved to New York City, where I taught underserved populations there for 16 years, and I also served as Director of Institutional Effectiveness for DeVry University there in New York as well.

And then I moved to Florida in 2016 and now I'm a director at Valencia College and I am Zooming from said Florida. From somewhere in Florida. From sunny Florida. What did you do with drama? So, I, well, I teach drama, so what I like to do is actually infuse drama into the English classes that I teach.

I actually went to drama school when I was in my late teens. I went to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and I only went part time but I took a drama A level and an English A level, and weirdly enough, a religious studies A level as well, because [00:03:00] I thought it was going to be about world religions, and then we got, like, a priest's, not, not a priest, a vicar's daughter who taught us, and we ended up doing.

John's Gospel and the early church, so it was not what I bargained for, but I do know everything about the catacombs in Rome, if you ever want to know. But we were kind of trapped in it at that point, so we just did it. So that's how it started and yeah, and I did drama school and then I ended up going to drama groups.

I ended up teaching drama groups and then ended up going to teacher training college, which is what you've got to do over there to be a teacher. You have to get a degree in it. And yeah, and I trained as an English and drama teacher and went into high schools and, and taught English and drama. I do not know how we have not been friends earlier because that was my major for my first few years of college.

Yeah. Yeah. I had a theater scholarship for the first two years of my college, two years, a year and a half, two years. And it's kind of a long story. But I, I truly loved like, learning about Shakespeare and doing all of [00:04:00] these, like we did some really great American author plays like Henrick Ibson.

And it was so, it was so fun. So what led you, let's talk about your, what your podcast is and what led you to want to work on mental health specifically with LGBTQ plus community in general, narcissism specifically. What led you to all of that? Yeah.

So, I think, you know, if I, if I start vaguely at the beginning somewhere, education's always been my escape. I grew up in a, in a hard place, so I grew up in a house where, well, my mum was an alcoholic and there was a lot of violence in the home. My parents were violent towards each other not, not necessarily to me.

directly, but and so when I went to school, I was actually one of the only kids in my class that actually enjoyed it. So I ended up being, you know, long story short, I ended up being a teacher. I always wanted to give back to people who had come from hard places or in hard places, and I've always used education to do that.

So I've always served underserved populations in London and in New York [00:05:00] City. And so, Yeah, that's really kind of what brought me to the education piece of it. And then I ended up in a 13 year relationship with somebody who was extremely abusive, emotionally, physically abusive. You know, I'll get into this a little bit later, but I guess I spent hours in bookstores not wanting to go home in New York.

And I ended up in self help sections where I'd be looking at books on emotional abuse. And, and there's one particular one that I started with called Walking on Eggshells. I think it's by Randy Krager or something like that. And I just remember sitting on the floor and if, because if I didn't sit, I would have fallen down because I realized I was reading about the person I was with.

It was almost as I was like, have you been in my house? Like, you know what I mean? It was absolutely uncanny and crazy. And the further I dug and the more I went to Barnes and Nobles. Before going home, the closer I got to what was actually going on until I finally read [00:06:00] the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, the DSM, and realized that the person I was with had a B cluster personality disorder.

And that kind of one of the, one of the cluster personality disorders within that is narcissistic personality disorder. And I think you have to get about six of the nine points for each, there's this sort of behavioral indicators for each of the disorders in the DSM. You have to get about six of the nine in order to be considered you know, having that disorder.

She checked all nine with, with, with stars. It was, it's crazy. It's like reading. It's like, what are you doing in my house? And, but the only thing was then I started to look for books, material on the computer, all kinds of things for particularly gay people in these relationships. And literally, Adrian, all I could find was stuff for straight people.

And it was not that it necessarily matters because the pathology doesn't change. You know, when you're. in a, an abusive relationship. [00:07:00] It doesn't necessarily matter if you're gay or straight, it's still abusive. However, you never see yourself reflected. It was, this is how a man is with his wife. He's very domineering to her and this poor woman, you know, that kind of interplay or, you know, the woman isn't so physically violent, but she can be very mentally abusive to her man.

You know, you have to cut through all of that. In order to kind of just get to the pathology that you're trying to read about I dug and dug and looked and looked, there's no podcast, there were no, there's no nothing about this, absolutely nothing and I'm, and I always swore to myself that if I ever got out of that, I would do something for the LGBT plus community about being in a toxic relationship, specifically a narcissistic relationship.

And that's, so I decided the quickest way to get to people was to do a podcast. So that's really what led me to it. There was just no representation for us. And the books that I, I ended [00:08:00] up buying books, they traveled around with me in the back of my car. They ended up in lockers at work, in my office, in the various jobs I've been in New York and Florida because I couldn't bring them home.

You know, so I'd be there, you know, with these books everywhere I went. you know, because if I brought them home, it would be awful. But they were kind of a lifeline for me. And I just knew, and even though I wasn't represented in any of them I just knew that what was happening in that relationship was exactly what, what was going on in those books.

That all makes sense. It makes perfect sense. It's interesting because one of the things I talk, I actually have a couple of thoughts. One of the things I talk a lot about in class is that research has historically been done on men and white men, and that that is pretty much the theme. And even now there's If you are reading any sort of study, you know, one of the things I naturally do is I look at the demographic and I see, and I look to see, like, unless it's a study specifically aimed at men or women what is the gender breakdown?

What is the racial breakdown? What is the [00:09:00] sexual orientation breakdown? And it's usually really pathetically low for any sort of diversity in most studies to the, at this point. And it's not saying all people I think are starting to make a little bit more of an effort to understand that just this homogenous group does not, doesn't speak for everyone.

So I'm not surprised when you say that self help books were curated in that way. And I'm, I'm a little shocked that there was even gender mentioned at all, but it's often mentioned. Yeah. Unless it's, it's Aimed at women but the self help as a genre really is aimed at, it's one of the critiques of it is that it's aimed at women, like women are expected to I think even if you look in like the way the bookstore is broken down, like books that are meant to help men are labeled health, but books are in fitness and books that are meant to help women are labeled self help.

Yes. So there's already so many. So much inequality baked in to what you were reading that I'm [00:10:00] not surprised at all, that there was nothing that, that addressed LGBTQ plus stuff. It seems like it seems like it shouldn't, because I feel like a common thread that's, if anything has come out over the last few years, it's that identity does matter.

And I feel like scholars need to do a better job of that. And it, it really bugs me that we continue to not do that. a good job of that. And we continue to look at simple studies that, you know, give us the data we want. And we just sort of move on from there. Yeah. It simplifies it a lot, but there's a one particular writer who who's written quite a, a seminal text on gaslighting and narcissistic abuse.

And she has this small section in the middle of her book saying that she got a letter from a gay woman saying, Oh, Hey, you know, we're not represented and all of that. And then for about a paragraph, she talks about how sorry she is. That she hasn't represented gay people and then continues to be heteronormative for the rest of her book.

So I emailed her and I went on her site and I [00:11:00] said, Oh, Hey, you know, I've got this podcast. You know, it's about LGBT plus people who are in narcissistic relationships and survival and you know what that looks like. She never wrote me back. It's just like, I, I dunno, it's just, it's too, like you say, for some people it's just too complicated.

Like they feel they don't know about it. And I'm like, Yeah, maybe, or maybe they, I think sometimes, at least with researchers, I think sometimes researchers are really like obstinate and just think, well, why, why does that matter? I'm already doing this and I'm doing, I'm being a good soldier and plowing through what I need to plow through.

Like, why does it matter if I look at my demographics? And yes. And getting through to someone and being like, it does matter. It is so hard. I mean, you know, I studied this stuff for, I've done studying the stuff for 20 years and I'm just now seeing stuff come out. That's got a lot of intentional, like [00:12:00] demography behind it instead of, you know, this was a convenient sample for me and it got me what I needed to get published.

And that, you know, it's not, it's not like it's wrong. It's just, it's. It's challenging a mindset that's pretty well structured into publishing. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, okay, so here's not, not to go off on a wild tangent, but here's one of the reasons that it matters. It matters in vivo. It matters in the situations that people are in.

So here's an example for you. So I was in the, I'm just about to release an episode called riding in cars with narcissists. So how toxic people trap you in moving vehicles and use road rage as violence, right? And that's coming out on Sunday. So one of the stories that I give in there is a time that happened when I was in the car with, with my ex and she was being physically violent and emotionally abusive and swerving around the road.

And we ended up pulling over. And she'd been so kind of angry and violent, she was all out of breath, and I was shaking and crying and so on, and these cops were behind us, and they had pulled us [00:13:00] over they came out of nowhere, I don't know where they were, I mean obviously I wasn't focused on what was around me, I was just kind of, you know, it was awful, and he kind of, she rolled the window down, he came up to the window, he looked across at me, because obviously she's in the driver's seat, he, he looked across at me and he said, is everything okay ma'am?

And I, you know, was scared of her. So I said, yes, it is. And he left her alone. Now, he knew everything wasn't okay. And I wonder if she had been a man, would they have pulled him out of the car? Because I think what happens in situations like that is, first, they don't think you're together. You're just two friends, or your sisters, or your cousins, or whatever.

Women aren't violent like that. So she's not going to hurt me because she's a woman. She can't hurt me, right? Meanwhile, she could have killed us both. You know, I mean, I think if she'd have been a man that would have been different. And that's not to say that, you know, men are automatically violent or anything like that.

I'm just saying that I think he would have taken more caution had it been a man and had I been in a heterosexual relationship. That's why [00:14:00] identity matters because I think these things often get overlooked. It's like people will overlook it. It's like when you see those hidden videos with a woman being violent towards a man in the street and people laugh, you know, that, you know, those hidden camera things where you just see and people think it's funny, but then they switch it and they have him grab her and loads of people try and intervene because automatically it's more serious.

I'm not saying it isn't more serious, but I'm saying that why laugh at somebody being violent towards somebody else, or why ignore what could potentially be happening, and that's why identity matters in these things, is that it actually can be dangerous if you think that somebody can't do these things, if that makes sense.

No, it makes perfect sense. It's also, it really falls in line, right? With what it's like, if there's a checklist of things that folks wish that people in law enforcement or people in some sort of criminal justice, if they wish they knew this just, it's all of the things on that checklist, right? You know, you, you look at the [00:15:00] person in the vehicle, you don't, Stereotype what you see in front of you.

There's a lot of institutional discrimination happening there. Yes. This leads well into when, when we started talking about doing this episode, you had mentioned that 1 of the things that you saw when you were reading these papers. Books was that you said it was something like a fear of code switching, where you wanted people to be able to have a resource without having to worry about code switching.

And I'm wondering if you could talk about what that is and, and, what the word is and then how you apply it. Sure, I think that with the code switching and what I was talking about there was that when I was reading a lot of those books and looking at a lot of the literature and listening to, you know, other broadcasts about narcissistic abuse is that your, what you're listening to, first of all, is someone rationalize how men are when they're with women and how women are when they're with men.

So you basically have to ignore all of that. Or what you can do is listen to the woman part and [00:16:00] wonder to yourself, Hmm, is she like that? Or if you're, you know, a man in a relationship with an abusive man, you can think, Hmm, is he like that? Not really, actually, because sometimes, you know, the dynamics change when it is a man with a man or a woman with a woman, I would say.

So that's kind of the code switching that I'm talking about. It's not a linguistic form of code switching, which is where that phrase is usually used. I'm talking about kind of more of a behavioral pathological code switch, where you're wondering, okay, does this apply to us or not?

I have a whole load of books on narcissism in the other room that I read all the time and they help. you know, inform my episodes and conversations that I have with people, and they're all heteronormative.

And they, when I look up, I, you know, I'll have to go in the index, and I'll have to look up lesbian, or I'll have to look up homosexuality and it's either never there, Or it's considered part of a pathology. So you've still got that kind of really, you know, ancient Freudian thing where the [00:17:00] medical, you know, much as they have come many leaps and bounds forward, they still think that we're stuck in the, what is it?

The, the Oedipal stage or something like that, where Freud said that we're trapped and therefore we never really got past it. And we're all stunted as gay people, all of that garbage. But Really and truly, it's kind of still there. Echoes of that is still there in a lot of those textbooks. And it's funny that when I went to the UK and I was reading the British Medical Journal, which is kind of their version of the DSM, they don't really recognize narcissistic personality disorder in the way that we do in the United States.

However, their research on it is voracious. They've done brain scans on people who've been diagnosed with NPD and also borderline personality disorder. It's funny. They've seen differences in brain chemistry. They've seen differences in the size of the prefrontal cortex similar to people with Alzheimer's severe depression, and also severe autism.

Yeah. They've all got that [00:18:00] same piece of the brain that, that controls empathy is smaller. And that's in your prefrontal cortex and it's the same with people with MPD. They're literally physically different. So yeah, I mean, anyway, that, that was a wild tangent, but no, no, that was, that was. Given the pathology is so strong and yet we are still in the dark ages when it comes to representing anybody can have this, not just straight people.

So you're constantly kind of cutting through that heteronormativity really when you read and watch. So heteronormativity, if, if you're listening and you're not familiar is, is that heterosexuality is normal. It's the norm and I'm using air quotes. You can't, you know, see it obviously, but heterosexuality is considered a norm.

And it's interesting because when you're. Well, first, let me say this. What do you, when you say narcissistic abuse, what do you mean by that? So it can be emotional, it can be physical, it can be both. It's psychological always. Sometimes there's a physically violent component. Sometimes there isn't with me, there [00:19:00] was and so.

The characteristics of narcissistic abuse can include someone having volatile behavior. They will literally turn on a dime. There's a complete lack of empathy. What they do is they learn something called performative empathy, where they, you know, they know how to play out. Oh, you know, you poor thing, but they actually feel nothing.

Aggression underpins a lot of it too. It can include something called gaslighting, which is basically making someone doubt themselves and completely opposing their point of view until they literally doubt themselves and will agree with your point of view even though they know it's not true. That comes from an old movie called Gaslight from 1944 where a man was trying to Drive his wife crazy by turning the lights down and then telling her they there was nothing dim about the house.

It was perfectly fine. Constant criticism humiliation, coercion, financial abuse, sometimes sexual [00:20:00] abuse. They also do something called triangulation where they'll use other people. To gang up with them. That's in, in the psychiatric community. That's called flying monkeys. So they'll get kind of their flying monkeys.

If you think about the Wizard of Oz, that's where it comes from. The silent treatment is another huge one. I remember when this first happened and I'd never experienced anything like this in my life. It could last for days, it could last for weeks sometimes months where, and you actually don't know what you did.

Like you could literally wake, you'd have a great night and then you'd wake up in the morning and the person wouldn't speak to you and you wouldn't know why. But then they would accuse you of being not in tune and not caring enough to know why. Like you've done something, but you didn't care enough to know why, so therefore that's why you're being punished, like, all the time.

That sort of thing happens. You're constantly, as you can imagine, walking on eggshells, so you're constantly on edge around this person. You're constantly in a continued heightened sense of fear, and this becomes normalized. [00:21:00] So, your amygdala, is probably a lot bigger. They've shown that in people who are victims of abuse and also who have PTSD, who've been in war zones, have the same brain chemistry.

And your hippocampus, which holds all of your memories is that actually starts to shrivel. And your amygdala starts to grow because your fight, flight, or freeze is exercised. So very often, every waking moment even if you're away from them, you're worried about what you're going to come home to, or if they're going to show up at your job, or if they're going to call you, or, you know, what's going to happen when you get home.

Like, I would come home and it would have been fine in the morning, and then I'd open the door and she'd block me from coming in and grab the bag off my shoulder and throw it down the stairs. I mean, it was just really unhinged. Everything's always your fault. Regardless of, you know, anybody could see that it isn't.

They make it clear that they're constantly disappointed in you for something or disgusted by you or both. You literally never know what you're, what's going to happen next. They tell you how to speak, eat, [00:22:00] walk. They tell you what you can and cannot say what to believe and what not to believe.

The control is absolutely endless. So it's, it's also there's a lot of control and coercion in the relationship as well. So all of those things. would be basically happening all the time. And it's funny because she wasn't a stupid person. She was highly intelligent. She had a, you know, she's a doctorate now.

She had a degree from an Ivy League. She was at Columbia. I mean, she was a teacher. She was, really, really smart. But then what you've got to realize is those two, those two functions are completely different.

And it's amazing. Like, you know, I would say that to her sometimes, like, you're really smart. Can you, are you actually saying this right now? And it's, it's useless because those two, those two functions are separate. It's interesting. Well, you know, I think one of the things we forget about people is that two things can be true.

Yeah. You know someone can be a [00:23:00] horrible partner or husband or wife or whatever, could be just terrible at it, but a really fun coworker to have around, like a really great, easy person. And likewise, yeah, exactly. Like you can have a, you can have both of those things be true about someone. It's funny you mentioned PTSD because I think one of the misconceptions about it.

Is that it is just for veterans, right? That it's just something people have been to war experience because that's kind of the bulk of where you hear about it. But it can be anything. I mean, you can, you can make your through any sort of trauma and have some sort of PTSD on the other end of it. I did, I have, I've got like acute PTSD.

So I did EMDR years ago where they do like the, the vibrations and you which was an interesting treatment and it worked. It definitely helped. But that's when I learned that like anybody can, can experience it. It doesn't matter what your trauma is. If you come out the other end and it's [00:24:00] affecting you in some way, sometimes even years, in my case, it was decades later.

It's still there. And it's interesting that for some reason we think like. You, you get PTSD or you have some sort of mental health thing, you get some meds, you have some therapy, bingo, bingo, done. Like that's done. Yeah, fine. Yeah. For life. Oh, you're right now. That's it. That's it. Years of years of awfulness just out the window.

Yeah, exactly. Have you read You probably have, but Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've sent that, I've sent that book to so many people. Yeah. It's, it's, I mean, it's, it's kind of dated in some respects, I think, because it was written a while ago, but it still holds true that you've got what I tend to say about myself is I've got CPTSD, so it's complex PTSD.

So I have I had a very volatile childhood, as I mentioned at the beginning, and there's PTSD from that. And now, obviously, I've got stuff going on from [00:25:00] my last relationship, and the exact reason I was in it was because of the childhood that I had. And so, exactly, I was just gonna say, yeah, inherited trauma.

I do episodes on that and things like that. So, And what makes it, what makes it even more of a perfect storm, if you want to call it that, is that people with narcissistic personality disorder tend to go for very empathic people, they go for damaged people, they go for broken people, because they're easiest to control and I'm one of those people, and it took me a while.

To admit that. I remember someone who I now know is a doctor of family therapy, but was a colleague of mine in New York. And she said, you know, that's why she's with you is because of all the things that you've been through. You know that, right? And it was so hard. I couldn't admit it at the time. I was like, what are you trying to say?

There's something wrong with me? Like, you know, and not really know, but it's just that all the things that you go through make you who you are. And to your point until you kind of, can harness that somehow and understand that and do what you did, like do some work around [00:26:00] EMDR or whatever works for you, then it's going to, the cycle is going to continue to, you know, whether you like that or not, the cycle is going to continue to repeat.

 So I have two more questions. First of all, what with the podcast, what has been I don't want to say like the biggest lesson because I think we constantly learn lessons, but what has been something that, that keeps resonating with you as you've been doing them?

I think the main thing I've learned is that, cause I have a lot of straight listeners as well. And I have CIS male. straight listeners as well all over the world. And they've actually inspired a couple of my episodes. Like I did a three episode arc on narcissistic parents as well. And that was actually inspired by a straight man who listens to my show, who wrote to me.

I think so. Therefore, I think some, one of the main things I've learned is that it has, narcissism has no gender. It has no sexuality. However, a large swathe of people are left out of the narrative on things like on things about toxic abuse. And they need to be represented. So I've kind of learned both things, you know, in one, in one [00:27:00] sense, it doesn't matter.

But in another sense, it absolutely matters if that, if that kind of makes sense in the way I've explained it. Yeah, no, I think it, it makes perfect sense. It's as I'm listening to you, I keep thinking this is such a complex topic. And then my next thought is, but is it because it definitely falls in line with cycles of abuse and the things we know about abusive situations and the things we know about mental health and people's childhood and trauma.

And it just, it sounds so trite, but it makes perfect sense that all of that would land. On a narcissistic person and you would get the package that you're talking about. Like it, it's just like such a straight line in my mind that these things compile and make this person. Yes. Right. Yes. We talk in my classes a lot about peeling onions where when you, it's called the sociological imagination, but the idea is that when you look at, for example, like a social problem, there's more than [00:28:00] one layer to that problem.

So like Poverty is a good example, right? The top layer might be, well, someone doesn't have any money, but as you start to peel back the layer, you can figure out, well, what led them to this point in their life? Maybe they have money, but they don't have enough to get by. Maybe they've got some, you know, Like, we've been talking about some trauma in the past that's led them to make bad decisions.

Maybe they were never raised on how to figure out how to pay your bills. Like, you know, you start to peel back the onion and there's a lot of layers to what's going on. Yes. And it's, I think that's what you've been doing with the podcast and with the work you've done on yourself is you're peeling back those layers to figure out what, what led me to this point, what led me to that point?

How did we get here? And I think also sometimes since we're talking a little bit about self help, I think that's the beauty of the genre is that it does allow people to start to peel back their own layer and figure out what's going on and maybe a more accessible way than like pulling up a. study like I would do [00:29:00] from the library or something.

Thank you for sharing this. I I cannot express enough how appreciative I am that you were willing to talk about this with me. There's one question I ask everybody and I don't put it on the outline because I like the The bit of surprise?

The spontaneity? Yeah, the spontaneity of an answer. I think people will overthink it if I put it on the, because it's a fun question. It's not meant to be.

 So here's what I ask everyone. Since the podcast is called most popular who, or what do you think deserves to be voted most popular? And it can be anything. Oh, Oh, wow. It could be anything, anything you want. Yep. Oh, goodness me. Okay. So mine's going to be a concept.

I think the concept of kindness. kindness should be most popular. I think that, you know, we're, we're very divided a lot of the time as human [00:30:00] beings, whether it's what we believe, what we like to eat, what music we like to listen to, who we vote for and all the rest of it, who, who you're attracted to, who you are not and all of that.

But at the end of the day, I always have my kind of, if I was trapped in an elevator with this person, how, how would it go kind of thought, you know, And most often, we'd probably just have to get on with each other and that would be it. Or we'd just sit in silence because we would agree to disagree.

But it's highly unlikely that one of us would start to literally attack the other one, unless there was something wrong with you, which is what our conversation's been about. But most people aren't like that. I think most people at the end of the day, you know, look for kindness. And I think that's where we should always operate from, because I think that's what's gonna save us.

 I guess that Brené Brown said once always kind of sticks with me is always try and assume that someone's doing their best.

Even if they cut you off in traffic or whatever have you, you know, just try and be kind to [00:31:00] yourself primarily because unless you do that you can't be kind to anybody else. And then try and gift that to other people. I love that answer. Well, thank you for. Thank you. Thank you for asking. I love questions like that. Thank you.