TRANSCRIPT
What is a covert narcissist? My first example of really getting to know a covert narcissist was living as a child with my mom. My dad was much more of an overt narcissist. If you’re gonna use that word, narcissist, I don’t really like the term that much, but it has a meaning in society, so I’m gonna use it anyway.
Well, my dad being a narcissist, it was all about him. It was all about his needs. Everything that happened was seen through his eyes. It was all about making himself be glorious and grand, and everybody had to love him. We all had to appease his needs. That idea that when there’s a narcissist in the room, they’re the only one who’s breathing all the air, and everyone maybe only gets to breathe the air that the narcissist exhales. It’s almost like they’re the God in the middle of the room, and everyone has to worship them. And when they have power, it can be hell because that person needs to be worshipped, and they can be enraged, and they can be very vindictive against people who don’t meet their needs, especially when they have power over those other people.
So I think the worst, the hardest people to be around? Narcissists. Okay, it’s children, children of narcissists. It’s a terribly painful thing because you can’t get away from your parents when they’re narcissists. So my dad is someone who could be called much more of an overt narcissist. But what about my mom?
Actually, the first time I ever heard the word narcissist used was my mom referring to my father that way after they split up, after he left her because she wasn’t supposedly meeting enough of his needs. And she said she even showed me the DSM, the Bible of psychiatry, and she showed me, “This is the criteria for what defines a narcissist.” And I read it, and I was like, “Huh, it does really apply to my dad. How interesting.” I never really thought of it much. This is about 25 or more years ago, but I kept thinking about it. And the more I thought about my parents in their relationship, and I saw how my mom defined herself so much as a victim of a narcissist, I thought about it more. And then I realized, wait a second, it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t that simple at all.
Especially since deep down, when I really felt how I had been affected by both of my parents, I thought I’ve actually been traumatized just as much by my mom as by my father. And when I went back at some point and read the criteria for narcissism, I realized that in a strange and subtle way, my mom qualified for all those criteria as much as my dad did. And in a way, it really made me think, hmm, I wonder if that’s why they lasted so long as a couple. They really were complementary parts. He was an overt narcissist, and she was more of a covert narcissist.
So what do I mean by covert narcissist? What I mean by covert narcissist is that my mom actually demonstrated all of those things about being a narcissist, but she just did it sort of in a more subtle way, a more crafty way. In a way, she had a little bit more consciousness than my father did. She was a bit more aware of her behavior, but she had all those same motivations. She just, like my dad, wanted it to be all about her. In her mind, she was the center of attention. This was life, was all a big play, a big play for her, a big movie script, and she was the star in it.
And in a way, for a long time, she was manipulating my father to do what she wanted. And part of the way that she did it is she let him be an overt narcissist. Actually, she picked him because in a way, she could control him by letting him be an overt narcissist, by feeding his narcissism, making him feel good, kissing his butt, as it were. She got him very attached to her, and in a way, she got her needs met through this. And in her mind, it was also all about her. She was just very subtle about it, and she hid it better.
In a way, I think my dad was someone who was psychologically stunted at the age of about three or four. He was really traumatized and hurt in that way, so that his narcissism, as it were, played out through the lens of a very needy, hurt, enraged four-year-old. Very primitive in that way. My mom was probably traumatized at the age, more of her personality, at the age of about seven or eight. So she still had a lot of unresolved childhood needs. She wanted it to be all about her. She wanted everybody to love her and focus on her and pay attention to her and be there for her and think of her first. And her perspective, in a way, was all that counted, but not through the lens of a four-year-old, more like through the lens of a seven or eight-year-old.
And in that way, as seven or eight-year-olds can be when they’re very hurt, they can use their more developed mind to be more crafty. So in a way, my mom was much more crafty. Her narcissism, she was able to hide it better, and that’s how she was able to be covert about it.
So I’m trying to think of a good example that I could give. Let me think if I see if I can think of one. Well, one example I can think of with my mom, how she was a covert narcissist, is she kind of stole a lot of my friends when I was a kid. Really deep down, she wanted everybody to be there for her and loved her. So what she would do is, in a very crafty way, she would kind of seduce my friends. Not sexually, but she would do it in ways she would find what their unresolved needs were, and then she would be there for them.
She would be sort of like a perfect surrogate parent for my friends. Like, I remember one of my friends was having real trouble with reading and writing. So what she did is she came in, and she would just of her own volition tutor him and give all this special attention to him and sort of be like a perfect teacher mother for him because he came from a very abandoned home. And she was so proud of how much she helped him, and she made it seem like she was doing it just out of the goodness of her heart and just out of kindness. But I saw what she was doing, and I knew it wasn’t that because I had experienced a bit with her in my life.
What she was doing was she was getting him to love her. She was getting him to like her. She was getting him to be on her side, to be attached to her. And part of how I knew this also is she didn’t care about my relationship with him. She wasn’t nurturing my relationship with him. She was actually stealing him and getting him to love her. She was someone who didn’t have a lot of personal friends in her life, so she was getting my 10-year-old friend to be her friend, to pay attention to her, to think she was great. And the gratification that she got from it was that she got to be a hero who was worshipped and adored by a needy, hurt, traumatized child.
And in a way, it was like she needed to be a better friend for him than I was. She had to prove, in a way, to me that she was better than me. And the sad thing was she even told me stories that when she was a child, she had a sibling who used to steal her friends by doing the exact same thing. Yet she didn’t even realize that she was replicating that actual dynamic. She needed to be the hero. She needed to be the star. She needed to be the center of attention. But her way of doing it, again and again, she did it with my dad, and she did it with other people, co-workers, friends, even, was by being the perfect friend, the most giving person, the most caring person. But really, it was all conditionally given. She was doing all this loving and caring and giving such focused attention so really they would kind of become addicted to her because that fundamentally.
Is what she loved? Now, how do I know this? Also, how do I know that it wasn’t unconditional love? How do I know she wasn’t just being a caring, loving mother-like figure to my troubled friend? The reason was I saw, actually, in the dynamic with this specific friend, there came a point at one point where he did something that wasn’t very good, and she dropped him so quickly. She kicked him out of our home. She always said, “No, he’s like a Sunday. He’s a second son.” Except when push came to shove, she didn’t care about him at all.
And deep down, I felt that about my mom again and again. I didn’t feel that in her relationship with me. She only loved me when I was doing what she wanted. And what she really wanted was someone to dramatically look up to her and pay attention to her and treat her like a hero and a queen. And behind the scenes, behind all the kindness, behind all the love and niceness and friendliness, was a person who actually wasn’t very nice and wasn’t very loving.
And I know when I started speaking out about some of the really awful things she did to me, really terrible things, she wasn’t loving. She wasn’t caring. And I saw that actually, fundamentally, she was a lot like my dad. Very, very nasty, very self-centered, very enraged at me, not really primarily being there for her and not being there for the growing little boy that I really was.
So that’s an example of someone who’s a narcissist, but you don’t necessarily see it on the surface because they can come across very different. It’s in a way someone—well, I guess I would say my dad is an overt narcissist, with much less of a hypocrite than my mom. My dad was just overtly selfish, and it was all about him. My mom was much more clever and crafty. She really presented herself as a paragon of maturity and giving and caring, someone even who was long-suffering in her relationship with my dad, long-suffering in all the different things that she did. But really, it was just an act.
Now, the question is, how do you know if someone really is a covert narcissist? How do you know if they’re faking it? How do you know if they’re lying? Because the other thing is, a lot of people who do this kind of covert behavior, this kind of hypocrisy, they don’t even realize that they’re doing it. It’s coming out of an unconscious place inside of themselves. Like all narcissists, it’s coming out of their own history of trauma, their own history of not having their needs met. They’re a bundle of unmet needs, a needy, hurt little child who’s using this narcissistic behavior as a strategy to get the needs met they never got. The problem being, it never really works because they ultimately have to learn how to love themselves on the inside. No one else can ever meet that gaping need.
But how do you figure out if someone is that way, if someone is a covert narcissist? Well, one way is to take distance from them. One way is to pull back. And that’s when I really learned it with my mom. I learned it as an adult when I started realizing her behavior is very toxic to me. And she does a lot of double-talk, a lot of manipulation, a lot of gaslighting, as they say. And I started realizing it doesn’t make me feel good to be around this person.
Actually, also, the more that I love myself, the more that I respect myself, the more that I have boundaries, the more she doesn’t like me. The less she loves me, the more she manipulates me. That made me realize I need to pull back away from this person. And what I discovered is when I started pulling away more and more and having more boundaries and saying, “I need to take some time off. I need to take some time off to process my own stuff, to love myself much more,” what I realized is that surface of being loving and caring and unconditionally there for me was much more of an act. And it really wasn’t that deep. It wasn’t that thick. And underneath it was a very enraged person who felt that from her perspective, my responsibility was always to love her and be there for her.
And so when I pulled back, she got nasty. The veil of being all that loving and caring person was dropped, and the covert part of her narcissism wore away. The little “C” on covert was gone, and suddenly she became an overt narcissist. And then I thought, “Ah, this is a clue to what I have always felt. She really wasn’t there for me. She really didn’t care about me that much, except insofar as how much I could be there to gratify her.”
And that’s been something I’ve found. I think the real way to find out if someone is a covert narcissist is to have boundaries. And those boundaries basically don’t let their game work so well. Now, that’s not to say that having boundaries doesn’t have the exact same effect over someone who is an overt narcissist. Because what I’ve seen is when people are incredibly selfish, self-centered, it’s all about them. They’re incredibly grandiose. They see other people as just props in their existence, props in the little play that they’re playing out, and they’re the director and the lead actor.
Well, by having boundaries with that person, the basic way to have boundaries being to say, “No thanks, I don’t want to do that.” Or if they’re really harsh about it, if they’re nasty about it, just to say, “No, I’m sorry, no, this is a boundary. I don’t want to do that.” The reaction of an overt narcissist is also very unpleasant to boundaries. They don’t like it. The main reason being, they think they own you.
So in that way, my dad, as an overt narcissist, really thought he owned me. I thought I was an extension of him. He thought that I was part of him. He had a right to do whatever he wanted to me, pretty much, as far as his narcissism. When, no, there were certain things he didn’t do to me, but there was a lot that he did do to me that was a real violation of me because he didn’t know the difference between him and me. And me having boundaries really brought that to the forefront. Me having boundaries made him feel like not only was I rejecting him, but I was betraying him. How strange! By me taking care of myself and healing myself and becoming more honest and more self-loving, he took it as a betrayal.
So I learned that with him, but I wasn’t allowed to have boundaries with him. And later, when I did have boundaries with him as an adult, there were a lot of consequences—rage, theory, even physical attacks from him, nastiness. But what I’ve also found is it is the same with a covert narcissist. They don’t like boundaries for the exact same reason because they, like all people who are narcissists, see others as extensions of them, as props in their game, people to do their bidding, people whose fundamental purpose in life, from their perspective, is to love them and care for them.
So I saw that, and I see that in general also in the world. When I have more boundaries, when I’m more healthy, when I’m more loving with myself and don’t accept abuse, I can watch how other people react. And how other people react to that tells a lot about their inner character structure, tells a lot about how they feel about me, really. And what I learned fundamentally is the ways in which my mother is a covert narcissist and the ways in which my father, as an overt narcissist, both of these being examples of these two personality types, fundamentally were not that different from each other.