10 Signs of Vulnerable Narcissistic Abuse | The "Dark Cloud" Theory of Covert Narcissism

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel well this is dr. grande today's question asks how can one spot vulnerable narcissistic abuse in a romantic relationship so I put together this video of ten signs of vulnerable narcissistic abuse so as I indicated this applies to romantic relationships and with these particular ten signs I looked at heterosexual romantic relationships not only in the scientific literature but in my clinical experience so I'm really talking about a specific type of romantic relationship it's important to remember that when we talk about narcissistic abuse that in a relationship both people could have narcissism so one level of narcissism could be a little higher than another because narcissism is really on a continuum also there are two types of narcissism grandiose and vulnerable I already did a video in the past ten signs of grandiose narcissistic abuse here I'll just be talking about vulnerable narcissistic abuse now some narcissistic abuse has characteristics from grandiose and vulnerable put together so it's not always clear-cut where you have grandiose narcissism on one side and that contributes to abuse and unn vulnerable on the other and people kind of fall into one category or another and to make things even a little bit more complex sometimes people move from a grandiose narcissistic profile over to vulnerable narcissism and back we call this oscillation between the different types of narcissism so it gets a little confusing but again here I'm just kind of honing in on vulnerable narcissism so I'm going to take a look at the characteristics specific to vulnerable narcissism it's important understand at first though there are some characteristics that we see across both types that would be self-centeredness a sense of entitlement and need for admiration those are characteristics of both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism now specific to vulnerable narcissism we see a low level of extraversion so somebody who has vulnerable narcissism tends to be introverted and they tend to have high neuroticism so anxiety depression anger and other types of symptoms that could come out especially when somebody's under stress so they appear to be more sensitive to stressful situations now other characteristics we see that are generally considered unique to vulnerable narcissism in terms of the narcissism sphere in general would be this tendency to be resentful distrustful to be insecure to have a lot of feelings of shame to be hypersensitive to criticism to be defensive socially awkward shy pessimistic and to be unforgiving we also see internal anger and aggression but sometimes it can also be external and we see jealousy which of course we also see with grandiose narcissism but with the jealousy with vulnerable narcissism it's more about a feeling of inferiority so now moving to the list the ten signs of vulnerable narcissistic abuse we see here that these are characteristics these are signs I've seen associated with vulnerable narcissistic abuse but there could be other explanations and any particular circumstance for example mental disorder symptoms could explain some of these symptoms as well so the first sign of vulnerable narcissistic abuse is in a romantic relationship again I'm talking about heterosexual romantic relationship where we see that somebody starts arguments in which they portray themselves as the victim when the evidence doesn't really support that they're the victim and kind of another aspect of this sign is kind of playing the victim from something that happened a long time ago so maybe the vulnerable narcissist was legitimately a victim but it happened like 10 20 30 years ago the victimization and they bring it up kind of as if it's a current issue so we see a tendency here to be unforgiving right little things just can't be released they can't let the little things go and this is interesting because it's kind of consistent with paranoid personality disorder has kind of a few features of that disorder now we know when we look at vulnerable narcissism if we take it to an extreme there isn't a clear pathology aligned with it like there is with grandiose narcissism with grandiose narcissism we see narcissistic personality disorder at the extreme with vulnerable narcissism we really don't see that but we see certain symptoms of certain disorders seem to be present and this one as I mentioned seems to align with paranoid personality sorter now with this first sign I'm going to introduce the idea of the dark cloud which is kind of one of my theories about vulnerable narcissism and it ties to several of the signs of vulnerable narcissistic abuse but here the unforgiving nature would be just one aspect of the dark cloud I'll talk about again with some of these other signs so the second sign is continual negativity and this just tends to wear people down in relationships that's why I consider it an abusive sign the vulnerable narcissists always sees disaster and pain and suffering and grief and they never really seem to have an optimistic view of anything so you end up in a situation was just all negativity now this also ties into the dark cloud right there's this idea that there's always a dark cloud kind of hanging over their head and it kind of extends to other people and that's when it gets a bit abusive but this aspect of the dark cloud is more in general and not really specific to a person so to talk about the dark cloud as specific to a person I'm going to move to the third sign of vulnerable narcissistic abuse and that would be the specific dark cloud that's what I call it and this is specific to a romantic relationship to one particular romantic relationship and elements of this we see would be that there's no forgiveness no matter what somebody does so sometimes a mistake can be made a relationship and there can be a compromise worked out or somebody can ask for forgiveness and that can occur but with this specific dark cloud no matter what somebody does forgiveness won't occur there's no there's no fixing the problem the way of her described by people in clinical settings is they feel as though they're hated by the vulnerable narcissists so they always feel like that hatred is there whether they're being actively abused or not there's the sense that there's this constant hatred there's no forgiveness there's no way to set things right with the vulnerable narcissists at least that's one sign of vulnerable narcissistic abuse now to move on to the fourth sign we see that there are a lot of non-productive arguments that occur in the context of these relationships there's no progress and just like with the third sign there's really no compromise no compromise occurs that kind of heals whatever the argument is about so the argument just continues and it's kind of a war of attrition right there's no response that's adequate just like the third sign there's nothing that can be said they can fix it so it just becomes this war of attrition it's simply just abuse it's arguing just to cause pain because there is no acceptable solution so in a sense sometimes somebody who has vulnerable narcissism they can tolerate arguments better than somebody who doesn't not most of the time interestingly but some of the time they can and they can use this ability to just where the other person down I think the grandiose narcissist actually has more of this ability but when we see it activated invulnerable narcissism it can be strong I usually think of it with vulnerable narcissism as much more time limited though because again eventually the vulnerable narcissist isn't going to want the argument either and then what I find is that they want to end the argument quickly so they look for a resolution to the argument really quickly after they've been causing argument for days or weeks so that's the fourth sign non-productive arguments the fifth sign is this idea that anger and hatred are just below the surface all the time right it's kind of like handling an unstable explosive it might not explode but it may explode and you never know when that's happen the victims of vulnerable narcissistic abuse what I found tend to know what they could say to start a fight with a vulnerable narcissist if they wanted to start a fight so it's not like they have to have a few tries to say something to cause the fight they always know the right term or subject matter or whatever they can bring out the right topic that can generate a fight not that they would do this but it's always having that knowledge again the anger and the hatred just flow the surface and very easily activate it the sixth sign of vulnerable narcissistic abuse is when somebody in a romantic relationship like this accuses the other person without evidence on a regular basis and this tends to be around like affairs and infidelity like so accusing somebody of having too much interest in another person right so they're highly jealous and this moves back to kind of the victim dynamic and this is interesting because it connects back to some of the symptoms we see with two different personality sorters borderline personality as well as paranoid personality which I mentioned before so the seventh sign of vulnerable narcissistic abuse is sexual narcissism and this was also a sign for grandiose narcissistic abuse but with that type of narcissism with grandiose narcissism we see this Tennessee for the grandiose narcissist to want somebody to submit sexually in order to prevent a fight or to prevent the narcissist from leaving so the sexual interest becomes kind of increasingly dominant or humiliating with vulnerable narcissism it's a bit different the pressure to have sex is to prove that you love that person enough to prove that you won't leave them and this really ties in quite strongly with characteristics we see from borderline personality disorder so here it's not so much about kind of domination but a continuum need to prove that you love someone enough and ostensibly of course the act of sex kind of proves that but of course it really doesn't and this just leads to other problems but either way this type of sexual narcissism characterizes vulnerable narcissistic abuse sign number eight involves poor listening skills this seems to be a problem with both grandiose and vulnerable narcissism but what's interesting about vulnerable narcissism and this sign is the poor listening skills are often disguised as good listening skills so it's not always obvious that somebody's not listening which kind of speaks back to another term used for vulnerable narcissism which is covert narcissism kind of suggesting that this type of narcissism is a little harder to detect now it's sign number eight here the poor listening skills we can see that seems to be the case so what happens is that somebody who has vulnerable narcissism can attend to a conversation good enough to kind of pass as a good listener while really they're off in their own world so this really speaks to kind of the low extraversion characteristic or the introversion characteristic so they're able to kind of think about something maybe analyze another situation or be off kind of in a fantasy while pretending to be a good listener sign number nine is a disgust for friends outside of that romantic dyad right so somebody's in a relationship with a vulnerable narcissist that narcissist is gonna have discussed for that other person's friends and this comes down to jealousy and specifically jealousy of time spent with other people or attention paid to other people so if you're on the phone with somebody like a friend and the vulnerable narcissist comes into the room they want you to end that phone call they want your attention that's really kind of the jealousy component taken to an extreme and what they might say is you're not prioritizing well you're not putting them first so there's kind of a guilt trip that's played in the situation and if we look at the scientific literature this gets connected to the high attachment anxiety that we see with vulnerable narcissism and also the possessiveness which is really a key component of vulnerable narcissism in romantic relationships so moving to the last sign of vulnerable narcissistic abuse I save this one to the end because I think it's kind of and how it differentiates grandiose narcissism from vulnerable and this is repeated grand efforts to change failed attempts at reform that's who we see with vulnerable narcissism what we kind of see here is a struggle at some level right like the vulnerable narcissist kind of realizes that change would be helpful they realize that something isn't quite right in the relationship and unlike the grandiose narcissist they do want to make some sort of effort to change that they see it they know something's wrong and they want to change it but again what happens most of the time is there are these grand efforts but they still fail and the attempt at making any type of lasting or meaningful change so in a sense there's better insight with this type of narcissism there's again that realization that something is wrong but it's hard to act on that to accomplish some sort of meaningful change I do think though that when the grand efforts for change are available when that effort seems to be taking place that's a good time to see a counselor I think really anytime is a good time to see a counselor when we see vulnerable narcissistic abuse but in particular when somebody seems to be more open to changing so I think that would be a good time to involve a counselor and try to capitalize on that desire to change because a lot of time that desire leads to efforts that are kind of misdirected and maybe the counselor can point somebody in a more productive direction so I know whenever I talk about narcissism and abuse and these different topics they're gonna be different opinions people that agree and disagree with me on different points please put your opinions on this in the comments it always generates really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of ten signs of vulnerable narcissistic abuse to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 882,295

Keywords: vulnerable narcissistic abuse, romantic relationship, narcissistic abuse, heterosexual romantic relationships, dark cloud, grandiose, vulnerable, self-centeredness, a sense of entitlement, need for admiration, extraversion, extraverted, introverted, introversion, neuroticism, anxiety, depression, anger, resentfulness, distrustfulness, insecurity, shame, hypersensitivity to criticism, defensiveness, socially awkwardness, shyness, pessimism, unforgiving, internalized anger, aggression, jealousy

Id: tEd6x0l3b6U

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019