Valerie Bertinelli says she missed narcissistic red flags in relationships: 'Made me question my self-worth'
Making it clear she’s in no rush to get back onto the dating scene, Valerie Bertinelli explained this week that she now actively looks for narcissism "red flags" when meeting men.
In her "Getting Naked" podcast on Wednesday titled "Know Your Narcissist," Bertinelli revealed that she didn’t even realize she was dealing with narcissism in her own romantic relationships until several years ago after first recognizing it in the fraught political climate.
"I don’t want to throw anybody that’s been in my life under a bus, I just want to talk about experiences that have been challenging and made me question my self-worth," the "One Day at a Time" star told her guest Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist and author.
"When we know who we are, Valerie, when someone is coming at us like the way that narcissistic people do, we can be a lot more steadfast," the doctor advised. "The only way a narcissistic relationship works is if we abandon ourselves."
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Bertinelli agreed with her assessment, admitting that in the narcissistic relationships she’d been involved in, "I totally abandoned myself to a point where my family was like ‘Where are you? We need you? Come back to us.’"
She said while she was in the relationships, she didn’t feel that way.
"You feel truly like you’re just going to make this person happy," the 66-year-old explained. "You know you can do it. ‘I know I can make them happy. I know if I work hard enough, I can make them happy. I know that I don’t want to be selfish. I don’t want to hurt them, so if they’re telling me that I’m doing these things. I can make myself better.’"
When Durvasula noted that it’s human to want "intimate relationships," Bertinelli joked: "Well, I did. I'm not so much want[ing] that right now."
Durvasula revealed that "a lot of the core of narcissism is this insecurity, this fragility."
Bertinelli interjected to say that the narcissists she’s known, though, "seem like they're not insecure. They're so like — it's magnetizing to see someone that sure of themselves," and Durvasula explained that narcissists "are good at what we call expressed self-confidence," essentially being know-it-alls.
The doctor further explained that the traits of a narcissist encompass low empathy, arrogance, entitlement, grandiosity and pathological selfishness.
"They can only center [around] themselves," she added. "They're status seeking. So, they want whatever is going to make them look powerful to the world. They are not able to tolerate things like frustration, disappointment, stress, or anything that doesn't sort of prop up that grandiose sort of fantasy of them. They're driven very much by power, domination, control. They need to be the ones on top."
And those traits, she explained, show up as "manipulation, invalidation, dismissiveness, gaslighting, rage, silent treatment, competitiveness, making us small so they can feel big, betrayal, promising things that they never follow through on."
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Prefacing her analysis of her own past relationships with "I can only speak about my own experience and being very careful not to," Bertinelli said: "I would never ever think that that person had any of those traits, but the way that they showed up was, oh boy, all of the things you said."
She added that she wanted her podcast to help people from "falling into that trap."
"I have a little joke that it's just like, ‘OK, somebody's got to tell me every single different kind of narcissist there is out there because I need to know what to not fall into.’" she said. "Again, I even talked to my therapist. I said, 'Please tell me what red flags are exactly so I can keep an eye out for them.'"
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She noted that in a past relationship someone she didn’t name had repeatedly told her she was a narcissist and that she was hurting them.
"And I was like, ‘Well, I don't want to be hurting people. I don't want to be selfish. I don't want to do all these things. Please, God, tell me.’ And I'm like, at a certain point, I said: ‘I don't understand why you're with me. Like I can't do anything right,’" she said.
But the doctor explained to her that person was manipulating her.
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"‘You will be lovable if you do the things I'm telling you to do,’" she said a narcissist would tell her. "That's the twist."
Bertinelli also suggested the person had told her she prioritizes her son, Wolfgang Van Halen, too much, which Durvasula described as a great example of low empathy, when a romantic partner can’t understand that a relationship with your child is a different kind of love.
She added that when Bertinelli thought she was building intimacy with the person by opening up, "you were basically filling an armory with weapons that they were going to use against you."
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Bertinelli said now if she sees any sign of "love bombing," where people flatter the other person to manipulate them, she can’t tell if it’s genuine affection or not.
"Because there is a point where like getting love notes or being spoken beautifully to and telling — like there's a point of letting someone know how you feel about them, and then there's the love bombing and the like it get moving fast," she said.
The doctor replied: "Idealization is not a place for a relationship to start. And to all you romantics out there, suck it because I'm going to tell you right now, it is just not."
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Bertinelli also specified the "insidious" isolation she had experienced in a relationship.
"It starts — it's not ‘Don't see your family.’ It's when you are with your family, they'll be constantly texting and constantly and starting an argument through texts and calling. And I'm like, ‘I can't talk right now,’" which she said left her feeling like she couldn’t see her family because it upset her significant other.
After breaking up with her boyfriend of 10 months in late 2024, following her divorce from her second husband in 2022, Bertinelli explained at the Los Angeles Time Festival of Books last weekend that she was "really scared of dating right now."
She continued, "I've had, you know, two — I'm just scared."
Bertinelli told Fox News Digital at the panel that she realized for the first time through writing her memoir, "Getting Naked," "I didn't give myself enough credit for the strength I already had inside me. And that I'm — that I don't have to listen to people be negative to me."
The star said that she was "surprised that I was able to learn that. Finally! That I don't have to listen to people be horrible to me. I don't have to tolerate intolerable behavior."
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She added to Fox News Digital that when she wrote her 2022 book "Enough Already" she thought she had learned that lesson, "but I still put up with intolerable behavior after that."
"It wasn't until I really dug down and got to the root of my shame and the dark side that I made friends with it," she said. "Then I thought, ‘Now I'm done. Now I can just say, f--- you. That's it, I'm done. I'm out,’ you know?"
After divorcing her first husband, Eddie Van Halen, in 2007, she married businessman Tom Vitale in 2010. At the end of their marriage, Bertinelli began to refer to Vitale as "the narcissist," saying that he emotionally abused her, calling her "fat and lazy."
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She also called being officially divorced from Vitale the "second-best day of my life."
Bertinelli began dating writer Mike Goodnough in 2024 and said she was in love, but by year’s end, the relationship had fizzled.
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A year ago, Goodnough claimed Bertinelli was "playing a one-woman tennis match thinking there is someone on the other side of the net" after their breakup, accusing her of falsely making his social media posts about herself and "lashes out angrily" at him.
He also accused her of "hostile, dishonest, and uncalled for backhanded swipes."
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"Valerie is in a war with her ghosts. I’m just the guy who catches the bullets. And that isn’t new," he added.
After their breakup, Bertinelli said in an Instagram post she had been "irreversibly changed by him for the better" and said that she had "fumbled the last true good man I met."