Personality Disorders.
Covert Narcissistic Abuse — Ten Tactics.
Top ten tactics of the covert narcissist.
Covert narcissistic abuse is distinct from grandiose in that the coverts are likely to try you for the rest of your life!
The coverts love the passive aggressive tactics, to ghost or go silent in the hope they’ll garner further attention, which can push a victim who hasn’t played the game before over the edge — enter narcissistic abuse.
When you know how low they can go, you’re more than grateful for that ghosting — assuming you didn’t start it in the first place with gray or no contact.
I recently read a reddit post from someone asking why victims of narcissistic abuse are “armchair psychologists” stating that she had dated plenty of guys like narcissists, but didn’t decide she could diagnose them. If you do not get it; they were not narcissists.
This is a very common mistake made by the simple-minded, narcissistic-free general public, lord only knows why they bother looking at anything to do with narcissism if they don’t like it — hello algorithms.
Nonetheless, studies show that abuse by covert narcissists leans more toward the passive-aggressive kind and can be detrimental to victims due to its ‘well-hidden and behind closed doors’ nature.
Covert narcissists are very childlike, often with far too much time on their hands they’ll go to great lengths to harm others in passive-aggressive ways; lying, gossiping, sneaking around, harassing, playing childish manipulative and vindictive games, and all while showing zero empathy, responsibility, or accountability for their actions.
- Devaluation.
Once the narcissist has data mined everything about you that he or she can from you and your loved ones, and they’re just comfortable enough to know you’re not going to give up on them too easily, they start to chip away at your sense of self.
Starting off with small criticisms, bringing others into the game, even trying to include your own friends and family, then later, just when you don’t know who to trust, they go into full abuse mode attacks.
2. Playing the victim.
When you pull them up on their nasty little tactics, they’ll accuse you of making false accusations, denying and twisting their words and actions into seemingly feasible incidents that you, in fact, caused!
3. DARVO.
4. Blame.
5. Gossip.
6. Breadcrumbing.
7. Hoovering.
8. Suicidal ideation.
9. False apologies.
10. Triangulation.
I haven’t put gaslighting above because I’m tired of hearing it, it’s from a movie from years ago, and while it’s cute and accurate, it can easily and more clearly be covered in actual words.
