Sign number six: this is one of the trickiest in many ways. The covert narcissist looks to other people to take care of them and to do things for them. So, they might present as really needy in a way that initially, you believe. They have excuses for why things didn’t go well, why they can’t pay their bills or take care of this or take care of that, why they didn’t achieve what they should have achieved in life because they’re smarter than everybody else. But they also may not say that to you. They will have all these excuses and all these ways in which they really need your help. And this can be very confusing because those of us with a lot of empathy, we like to help others, we don’t like it if somebody is in need and needs help, it doesn’t feel good to not help them, so we want to help them. And the first few times, we will help; we will jump right in and help the covert narcissist, and over time, we’ll realize, ‘Hmm, they’re not grateful, they’re not doing anything to change their situation. I keep feeling guilty that I’m not doing enough; I should be doing more and more and more.’ So, that victim’s stance is so confusing to us.
Sign number seven: their primary mode of communication is passive-aggressive. Pretty much almost everything I’ve described so far, all these other traits, all of it has passive-aggressive communication. The covert narcissist does not directly say, ‘Hey, I’d really appreciate it if you would help me with the laundry today,’ or, ‘I’d really love to go to a Japanese restaurant this evening, how do you feel?’ Right? They’re not going to be assertively normal, reasonably sort of stating their needs and wants and, like, ‘Hey, this is what I’d like, what do you—how do you feel?’ Because that’s sort of a normal way. The passive-aggressive person will try to get you to do what they want without ever actually saying what they want. And then, when we combine that with that kind of victim’s stance, it could be something like, ‘Oh, I just—I know laundry’s my job because I don’t earn as much money as you, and I know I always have to do this,’ and they’ll use that kind of victim stance to make you feel guilty so you do what they want, right? We’re kind of back to the same theme. But really paying attention to the passive-aggressive language, passive-aggressive communication, at its very nature, is kind of a lie. It’s not—it’s false, it’s not saying what the truth is or what the truth of what you feel. It’s not owning it, right? And there are plenty of people who can use passive-aggressive language in many situations who are not narcissists, okay? There’s kind of, like, almost everything I’ve talked about that could, as I said, sometimes you might do some of these things, but it’s not a pervasive way of being that is really focused on manipulating somebody else to do what you want without empathy for that person, which brings us to number eight: the covert narcissist fakes empathy. They might appear to have enormous empathy. The covert narcissist might say to you, like, ‘Oh, I cry at movies all the time,’ when they actually don’t, but they are very skilled at pretending to have empathy. So, narcissists in general do not have full empathy. They might have cognitive empathy, they might have the ability to understand their thinking, understand why people feel what they feel, and then they use that knowledge to manipulate the person, but it’s not full empathy. It’s not like understanding cognitively and then physically feeling for the other person and then effectively feeling, right, caring. And as I’m talking about this, I’m thinking of how covert narcissists tend to love their animals because I’ll have clients who grew up with a covert narcissist parent, and they’ll be like, ‘They always show the dogs more love and affection than they showed me, so that really made me feel like I was worthless because the dogs got all this attention.’ And I can’t say, ‘She’s a narcissist’ or ‘He’s a narcissist that has no empathy’ because they have all this empathy for the dogs. Dogs, in particular, give their owners undying admiration; they are almost like the perfect feeder for the admiration that the narcissist needs. So, it’s just sort of a strange thing that I have noticed, story after story after story. You will have the covert narcissist being somebody who just loves their pets, dogs in particular.
So, I wanted to share these signs of a covert narcissist with you because it is a personality type that is somewhat unrecognized, and it could be you’re in a relationship that you find super confusing, but you’re like, ‘Well, I don’t really think they’re narcissistic, they don’t brag, they’re not that typical presentation of a narcissist.’ But if there are covert narcissists, it’s just as damaging.
10 Weird Habits Of A Covert Narcissists
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