Ramani Durvasula

Last updated

Ramani Durvasula
Ramani Durvasula convention.jpg
Ramani Durvasula 2023
Born
Ramani Suryakantham Durvasula

Occupations
  • Psychologist
  • professor
  • author
  • public speaker
YouTube information
Channel
Years active2011present
Genre(s) Personal development, mainly topics involving narcissistic abuse
Subscribers1.67M [1]
(4 May 2024)
Total views230M [1]
(4 May 2024)
Associated actsMedCircle

Ramani Suryakantham Durvasula is an American clinical psychologist, retired [2] professor of psychology, media expert, and author. She has appeared on media outlets discussing narcissistic personality disorder and narcissistic abuse, including Red Table Talk, Bravo, the Lifetime Movie Network, National Geographic, and the History Channel, as well as programs such as the TODAY show and Good Morning America .

Contents

Early life

Ramani Suryakantham Durvasula [3] was born in Englewood, New Jersey.[ citation needed ]

Education

In 1989, Durvasula obtained a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Connecticut. [4] She has also received a Master of Arts in Psychology and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1997. [5]

Career

Durvasula has a private practice in Santa Monica and another in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. [5] She is also Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and a visiting professor of psychology at the University of Johannesburg. [5] Her books include “Don’t You Know Who I Am”: How to Stay Sane in the Era of Narcissism, Entitlement and Incivility, [6] Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist, [7] and You Are WHY You Eat: Change Your Food Attitude, Change Your Life, [8] as well as peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers.

Durvasula first appeared on television on an episode of Remote Control . [9] She was the co-host of the show My Shopping Addiction on the Oxygen network, and has provided commentary on the TODAY show and Good Morning America. [5] Channels such as Bravo, the Lifetime Movie Network, National Geographic, the History Channel, Discovery Science, and Investigation Discovery have also featured her. In the Fall of 2010, she appeared in the Bravo series “Thintervention,” where she led group therapy sessions to help six participants find out the source of their overeating. [10] She is co-host of the podcast Sexual Disorientation. [5] She has been interviewed on internet media platforms as well, notably MedCircle and TONE Network. She has spoken at TEDx Sedona and South by Southwest. [5] At the American Psychological Association, she was on the Committee on Socioeconomic Status from 2014 to 2017 (serving as president in 2016), [11] and is a member of the advisory board of the Minority Fellowship Program. [5] The National Institutes of Health has funded her research on personality disorders; [5] they approved a $1.5 million grant for her to study the link between HIV and mental illness. [10] The four-year study, that included 288 patients, determined that 92 percent of participants had experienced depression, substance use disorder, or another Axis-I disorder, and that nearly half met criteria for at least one Axis-II disorder (e.g. antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder). [12]

Recent image of Ramani Ramani Durvasula - self.jpg
Recent image of Ramani

Accolades

In 2003, Durvasula received the “Emerging Scholar” Award from the American Association of University Women and the “Distinguished Woman” Award from the CSULA. [13] California State University named her Outstanding Professor of the year in 2012. [5]

Personal life

Durvasula, who has a sister, moved to Los Angeles in 1991. On August 31, 1996, she married Charles H. Hinkin, a Professor-in-Residence in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA School of Medicine. The couple had two daughters, Maya and Shanti, but separated in 2008 and divorced the following year. [14] [15] After the divorce, Durvasula raised their daughters on her own. [16] [17] She is in an on-and-off relationship with Richard Wearn. [18]

In an interview discussing contraception, Durvasula said that she began struggling with her weight in her mid-20s. After having children, the pressure of juggling her career and personal life led her to find "comfort" in food. [19] She faced unkindness from the other mothers at her daughters' school, who were mostly slim. When preparing for a wedding, she found that none of the saris her mother had brought from India fit her. Determined to lose weight, she began to go on daily walks and eat smaller portions. Within just over a year, she lost 32.5 kg. [20]

In an interview with Steven Bartlett, she disclosed that she was sexually assaulted and later stalked while at university, an ordeal that ultimately led her to leave the university. [21]

Filmography

Podcasts

Bibliography

Papers

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narcissistic personality disorder</span> Personality disorder

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people's feelings. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the sub-types of the broader category known as personality disorders. It is often comorbid with other mental disorders and associated with significant functional impairment and psychosocial disability.

In psychology, entitlement mentality is defined as a sense of deservingness or being owed a favor when little or nothing has been done to deserve special treatment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Narcissism</span> Excessive preoccupation with oneself

Narcissism is a self–centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others.

Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising a mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, sadism, and a paranoid outlook on life. Malignant narcissism is not a diagnostic category defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR). Rather, it is a subcategory of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) which could also include traits of antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder.

In psychology, narcissistic injury, also known as narcissistic wound or wounded ego, is emotional trauma that overwhelms an individual's defense mechanisms and devastates their pride and self-worth. In some cases, the shame or disgrace is so significant that the individual can never again truly feel good about who they are. This is sometimes referred to as a "narcissistic scar".

In psychoanalytic theory, narcissistic supply is a pathological or excessive need for attention or admiration from codependents, or such a need in the orally fixated, that does not take into account the feelings, opinions or preferences of other people.

In psychology, manipulation is defined as subterfuge designed to influence or control another, usually in an underhanded manner which facilitates one's personal aims. Methods used to distort the individual's perception of reality may include seduction, suggestion, and blackmail to induce submission. Usage of the term varies depending on which behavior is specifically included, whether referring to the general population or used in clinical contexts. Manipulation is generally considered a dishonest form of social influence as it is used at the expense of others.

A narcissistic parent is a parent affected by narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder. Typically, narcissistic parents are exclusively and possessively close to their children and are threatened by their children's growing independence. This results in a pattern of narcissistic attachment, with the parent considering that the child exists solely to fulfill the parent's needs and wishes. A narcissistic parent will often try to control their children with threats and emotional abuse. Narcissistic parenting adversely affects the psychological development of children, affecting their reasoning and their emotional, ethical, and societal behaviors and attitudes. Personal boundaries are often disregarded with the goal of molding and manipulating the child to satisfy the parent's expectations.

Healthy narcissism is a positive sense of self that is in alignment with the greater good. The concept of healthy narcissism was first coined by Paul Federn and gained prominence in the 1970s through the research of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg. It developed slowly out of the psychoanalytic tradition, and became popular in the late twentieth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam Vaknin</span> Israeli writer of fiction and non-fiction, also on narcissistic personality disorder

Shmuel "Sam" Vaknin is an Israeli writer and professor of psychology. He is the author of Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited (1999), was the last editor-in-chief of the now-defunct political news website Global Politician, and runs a private website about narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

The true self and the false self are a psychological dualism conceptualized by English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott used "true self" to denote a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self with little to no contradiction. "False self", by contrast, denotes a sense of self created as a defensive facade, which in extreme cases can leave an individual lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty behind an inconsistent and incompetent appearance of being real, such as in narcissism.

Narcissistic leadership is a leadership style in which the leader is only interested in themself. Their priority is themselves – at the expense of their people/group members. This leader exhibits the characteristics of a narcissist: arrogance, dominance and hostility. It is a sufficiently common leadership style that it has acquired its own name. Narcissism is most often described as unhealthy and destructive. It has been described as "driven by unyielding arrogance, self-absorption, and a personal egotistic need for power and admiration".

In social psychology, collective narcissism is the tendency to exaggerate the positive image and importance of a group to which one belongs. The group may be defined by ideology, race, political beliefs/stance, religion, sexual orientation, social class, language, nationality, employment status, education level, cultural values, or any other ingroup. While the classic definition of narcissism focuses on the individual, collective narcissism extends this concept to similar excessively high opinions of a person's social group, and suggests that a group can function as a narcissistic entity.

In psychology, narcissistic withdrawal is a stage in narcissism and a narcissistic defense characterized by "turning away from parental figures, and by the fantasy that essential needs can be satisfied by the individual alone". In adulthood, it is more likely to be an ego defense with repressed origins. Individuals feel obliged to withdraw from any relationship that threatens to be more than short-term, avoiding the risk of narcissistic injury, and will instead retreat into a comfort zone. The idea was first described by Melanie Klein in her psychoanalytic research on stages of narcissism in children.

Narcissistic defenses are those processes whereby the idealized aspects of the self are preserved, and its limitations denied. They tend to be rigid and totalistic. They are often driven by feelings of shame and guilt, conscious or unconscious.

Abusive power and control is behavior used by an abusive person to gain and/or maintain control over another person. Abusers are commonly motivated by devaluation, personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, or the enjoyment of exercising power and control. The victims of this behavior are often subject to psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse.

Narcissism in the workplace involves the impact of narcissistic employees and managers in workplace settings.

In gender studies, the analysis of gender differences in narcissism shows that male narcissism and female narcissism differ in a number of aspects.

Karyl McBride is an American author and marriage and family therapist. She has written several books about narcissistic relationships, including Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers.

Michael Kinsey is an American clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and author. He is known for his work with parent-child attachment, personality psychology, and abusive power and control in interpersonal relationships. He is also the founder and publisher of the psychology blog Mindsplain.

References

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Works cited