Are you dealing with a covert narcissist?
Did you know that in some ways they are actually the most dangerous form of narcissist?
Yep, it's true.
So stay tuned to find out why covert narcissists can be the most dangerous form of narcissist
and what the warning signs are.
Hi, I'm Rebecca Zung, top 1% divorce attorney and the bestselling author of the books Negotiate
Like You Matter and Breaking Free: a step by step divorce guide.
And I've helped thousands of people just like you go from lives of drama, trauma and chaos,
to step into lives of freedom, possibility and purpose.
And I give all my tips and tricks right here in these videos.
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Now, if you are dealing with a covert narcissist or any kind of narcissist, whether they're
overt or grandiose or malignant or covert is what we're going to be talking about today,
or a combination of any of the kinds of narcissist, then you're dealing with a hellish personality,
a heinous personality.
But there are some things about covert narcissists that can make them even more insidious than
the other types of narcissists.
And for those of you who have watched my other videos, which you will want to check out on
covert narcissism in relationships and the covert passive aggressive narcissist, and
I'll drop links to those below.
You know that I have a personal experience with dealing with covert narcissists, not
as husbands, but as people who were close to me, who I became the target of these heinous
creatures.
So this is the kind of narcissist that I personally disdain the most.
So in some ways, this is like my PSA, my public service announcement to warn you, to warn
you against this personality type and what to look for in this personality type.
So one of the things that you should know about covert narcissists is that they are
a hundred percent narcissist.
So they have what Dr. Craig Malkin calls the Triple E, which is that they exploit, they
feel entitled, and they lack empathy.
So they still are all a hundred percent narcissist, like all narcissists are.
And the other little dangerous thing about covert narcissists is that they can sometimes
be grandiose narcissists that act covert, which is confusing too.
Sometimes these different types of narcissists actually vacillate back and forth between
the various signs of the types of narcissists they are.
But what I'm going to be talking about today is actually more of your pure covert narcissist,
which is the kind that I've actually had to deal with and why I think that they're so
dangerous because if I could be fooled then anybody can be fooled.
And I really just had to literally work these people out of my life in the last year, and
it was not easy and they still try to pop back up and pop back in because that's what
narcissists do.
They never really let go.
They never really move on completely.
Sometimes it can be years before they pop back up again, but you can minimize it and
protect yourself in a lot of ways.
And that's why I'm doing this video because I want you to know the signs of abuse.
Okay?
So the thing about covert narcissists is that they don't look on the surface like regular
narcissists.
Regular narcissists, what I call the garden variety narcissist is more of your grandiose
varietal that goes around telling everybody how great they are all the time.
Covert narcissist don't do that.
And that's one of the things that I think is so dangerous about them is that on the
surface they appear very nice.
They appear like good people.
Lots of people love them.
They can be politicians, they can be clergy, they can be lawyers, doctors, they're often
in positions of respect because of course they're narcissists.
They want and they feed on that respect.
Remember that the narcissist actually has no inner sense of internal value.
They get all of their sense of value from the external.
They need endless amounts of what we call supply, which is anything that feeds their
ego, anything that feeds their external value or their feeling of external value.
So supply can be in the form of money, compliments, prestige.
Anything that they think is going to give them more value.
So here's the problem with a covert narcissist and one of the things that is so dangerous
about them, is you're not going to hear them say, "I'm the greatest.
Look at my ratings.
Look how fantastic I am.
I'm so smart.
I'm the number one this.
I'm the number one that," without anything to back it up.
They just go around saying all those things because they feed on that, they need to have
it, okay?
So what a covert narcissist is more likely to do is put themselves in positions where
they're going to get all of that, but they're not actually going to have to say it overtly.
And so we're told that narcissists are brash, braggadocious, loud, assertive.
Well, the thing is that covert narcissists don't come in that format.
They're usually much nicer.
They start off by giving you lots of things, that their version of love bombing is often
being the perfect person for you, they can put you in positions that you want to be in,
or give you speaking engagements that you think that you want, or introduce you to the
person that you want to be introduced to, or they're the perfect cook or the perfect
mother or whatever it is that you want.
This person just seems so nice and so wonderful and yes, malignant narcissist can do that
too.
But the difference with covert narcissist is that they don't come off that way, where
they're loud and braggadocious and flashy.
They come off as really nice, sometimes even quiet, sometimes passive, sometimes demure.
So that's one of the things that I think is super dangerous about covert narcissists.
One of the other things that I think is really dangerous about covert narcissist says is
that they come off looking very successful often on the surface.
And grandiose and malignant narcissists can do this too.
But grandiose narcissists come off as super ambitious, super successful, whereas the covert
narcissist is often, they make it look like they've had that sort of success.
But if you look just beneath the surface, they haven't actually gotten that success.
And so they have a lot of bitterness and resentment about the fact that everybody else has more
success than they do, and that their failures are other people's faults because something
happened with their business, or this person sabotage them in some way.
Or maybe they were just getting going and they had to close their business, so they
had to move or something happened.
And so they have all of these failed ambitions and feeling of emptiness and they often have
a tremendous sense of depression and emptiness.
And sometimes they'll even tell you that they have bouts of depression, but they don't tell
you it's because of their failures in business.
They'll tell you it's just that they have these afflictions.
Because one of the other things about covert narcissist says is they often are very good
at playing the victim.
All narcissists do that.
But the way covert narcissists do it is that they're sad and people aren't treating them
well and they just didn't get a good lot in life and the world is unfair to them and so
they end up feeling depressed and empty and they often have sicknesses so that they can
get sympathy from people around them, garner lots of pity from people.
"Oh, so and so's always getting a bad deal."
There's a lot of payoff sometimes for being a victim and a covert narcissist thrives on
that pay off from being the victim.
So the other thing about covert narcissists that I think is super dangerous is that they're
super passive aggressive.
And this is the one thing that really was very confusing for me and the two passive
aggressive narcissists that I had to deal with, the covert ones, is that they would
do these little things that on the surface would seem so nice.
"Oh, here I did this for you."
But while they're there doing this thing for you, they're crossing a boundary or they don't
do something that they say they're going to do, and then when you ask them about it, it's,
"Oh, I forgot," or "Oh, I misunderstood you," or "Oh, we had a conversation about that,
remember?
And we decided to do this."
And it's absolutely not something that we decided to do, but it's them trying to make
an excuse for behavior that they know has been hurtful to you.
And so they try to get you to say that basically you went along with that.
And it's little things.
It's that little drip, drip, drip on your forehead, little things.
In Debbie Mirza's book, The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist, she gives an example
of a husband would go into Starbucks to get coffee and the wife would stay in the car
and the husband would say, "Do you want anything?"
And she'd say, "Yeah, I'll have a vanilla latte," or whatever.
And he'd get back in the car and start to drive away.
And she'd say, "What happened to my latte?"
And he'd say, "Oh, I forgot to get it for you."
But then he wouldn't go back in to the place to get it.
And it was a little thing.
If you tell somebody, "Oh, I didn't get the latte that I wanted," then you come off sounding
petty and you start to think, "Well, do I blow up a whole marriage over that?
I mean, that seems so ridiculous."
But what they're really trying to do is send you this message, send you this message that
they think so little of you or that you're not worthy in some way.
Because that's how narcissists get supply.
They get supply by building themselves up and cutting you down.
And so they do these little tiny things that in the surface if you tell somebody about
it, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
Very, very passive aggressive and it can leave you feeling confused and after a while abused
and actually traumatized because of the way they act.
And if this is sounding really familiar to you, give me a totally in the comments.
Is it, they're a hundred percent narcissist, but they are really, really good at being
manipulative.
Very good at hiding their manipulation.
Very good at disguising it as something else, disguising it as, I just did this little thing
for you, and the hair on the back of your neck is standing up, that's not something
nice.
One of the things that I've heard during this, I'm taping this while we're still in this
global pandemic is that the covert narcissist in people's lives are leaving food by the
door.
And you know that that's a message of I know where you live or I still have control over
you or I know what you want, but the rest of the world is like, "Oh, the person left
you a care package.
How is that bad?
Why is that?"
Well, we all know that the person is so nice.
We all know that the person is such a good person.
So what's your problem?
And so while they're lining up their flying monkeys and they're telling everybody how
wonderful they are or how long they've been by you.
Because oftentimes you actually look like a stronger person because they've put themselves
in this light of being the nice, caring, kind person.
So you obviously must be the one that is wronging them in some way and you almost feel paralyzed
to, how do you even right that wrong of what people are thinking about you?
And the way I've just come to deal with it is number one, I have major boundaries.
I do not look at what these other people are doing.
I don't look at their social media, I've blocked them on my social media so that they can't
see what I'm doing and continue to have access to what I'm doing.
I don't want them to think that I'm interested in what they're doing at all because I'm not,
I just want to look forward, not back.
I don't want their energy in my space.
I don't want to even be thinking about them, when one of them pops into my mind, I pivot
immediately because the way I look at it is if I'm thinking about them, then I am not
in creation mode.
I'm not helping people.
I'm not doing things like making these videos and helping you guys so that you can look
forward also and concentrate on your now and the rest of your life and creating an incredible
future.
And so I just learned how to pivot and create major boundaries because I don't want these
people in my space and you shouldn't have them in there either.
So if you have to continue to co-parent with them or you have to continue to live with
them in some way, then figure out a way to protect yourself so that when they do these
things, you're no longer going to be sucked into it, and certainly do not let them see
you be upset by their behavior, because then they know that they have you.
Then they know that they still have this little modicum of control over you.
So here comes more, here comes more.
So you know the less you can interact, the more you can show that you aren't interested
and you direct your energies elsewhere, then that vibrational energy of connection that
you still have with that person will eventually peter off and hopefully eventually die.
So if you are dealing with a covert passive aggressive narcissist in your life, they can
be the most dangerous kind of narcissist because they are the most sneaky, the most insidious,
the most stealth.
And in some ways the most toxic because of how good they are about hiding their narcissism
and being under the radar.
And so if that is you, I'm sending you blessings, I'm sending you light from one survivor, thriver,
to another.
You can do this.
Just follow the light, get them the hell out of your life and look at your now and look
forward.
And if you are dealing with a covert passive aggressive narcissist or any kind of a narcissist
and you're getting ready to negotiate with them, then you must download my free crush
my negotiation prep worksheet.
The link will be below.
But if you just go to winmynegotiation.com it will be all yours.
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Thanks so much for joining me today.
Remember that today is a perfect day for negotiating your best life.
And I'll see you in the next video.