GUEST SERIES | Dr. Paul Conti: How to Build and Maintain Healthy Relationships

Mentalization greases the progress of all things good ... But I have to first mentalize about me before I mentalize about you ... If I'm thinking about you before I'm thinking about me, I'm on a fool's errand. You have to start with the self and to try and attain clarity of self, or to realize that you can't.

Striving for sameness doesn't make good things happen in relationships. I've been doing this for over 20 years, and I don't see that the alleged factors of sameness matter.

I truly believe this—that people who come at the world very strongly through envy by and large a narcissistic character structure, this is a small percentage of the population, but that small percentage does most of the damage on Earth.

We see people do much, much better when they're interconnected in the world around them, when they're still learning new things ... The person who's interconnected, learning new things, has a much greater probability of living longer and living healthier. So, what's that about? It's about a generative drive.

Someone who's coming at the world through a narcissistic character structure is exploitive of the other, and then can, say, survey a room and find that person who's at trauma, such that that person is going to be desperate not to leave a relationship. And then they can exploit that person and often behave in awful ways, and the other person won't leave.

Envy comes at that problem from the perspective that bringing down the other person is just as effective as bringing up the self. That's why envy is destructive.

It is better to give than to receive. The happiest people I see are the people who are giving. Now, of course, it feels great to receive, but it feels better to give because there's a goodness in the self in the giving.

If you show me a person who has no anxiety, I'll show you a mannequin.

We can't know that when you put two people together, you get something that's different than the sum of both people. It's not an overlap of maps; it's a new map ... But what we're looking for are maps that don't have very significant differences around just clear concrete things. But once we get beyond that, the maps can synergize in all sorts of beautiful and unpredictable ways.

The generative drive is nothing but productive. Envy is nothing but destructive.