11 COWARDLY Tactics Of The COVERT NARCISSIST

it's true that the covert narcissist can be ruthless but when you take a peak behind the curtain you'll see that their actions are almost always driven by fear that little man or woman as it may be doesn't want to be exposed so instead of acting bold and brave you'll find the covert narcissist attempts to inflict pain upon others in incredibly cowardly ways and if you need to see more evidence buckle up because we're exposing 11 tactics of the Cowardly covert narcissist today so first let's talk about one of the most cowardly things that people do and unfortunately people do it on a regular basis not just narcissists but the covert narcissist is very likely to use gossip as a tool to hurt someone else and listen it does not take a lot of Bravery to gossip behind someone's back does it this is really the basis of the smear campaign so even if a narcissist will say the same things to your face the fact that they're saying it behind your back when you're you're not there to defend yourself is incredibly cowardly but often times they won't say those things to your face and they won't say them because they don't want to deal with the aftermath and there's really nothing more cowardly than that so let's look at a comment from one of you who've dealt with this my mom seemed to be the sweetest person to random people but when we got home she would have a list of flaws about the people she talked to I learned to recognize how she really felt about a person while she was talking to them it's like a could feel her lack of emotional attachment towards that person she's the most venomous person I know and sadly this is often how the Cowardly covert narcissist gets people on board because other people know how venomous they can be behind your back and they don't want to be a target of that especially since when somebody's talking behind your back you don't have the opportunity to stand up for yourself so they can be out there spreading lies about you and there's really not much you can do about it you can address it after the fact but the more you address it after the fact the guiltier you look you look like you're defending yourself because you have a reason to defend yourself so the smear campaign is really incredibly ugly and cowardly so for those of you who don't know me my name is Christina and I'm a narcissistic abuse recovery coach and as we go through this list if you relate to some or most of it and you want some extra support check out the link in the description for more information on 101 coaching with me so now let's dive into number two and I know that most of you have dealt with this one and this is separate public and private personas and this can happen to varying degrees but when you're dealing with a covert narcissist you get the sense that if you were to talk about the worst of it with people who they know maybe even casually or even people who they know very well those people might not believe you they might not believe that that person would say those things to you or do those things to you act in that way because they present themselves very differently to other people to people who are on the outside but once you're home once you're alone you really get that abusive behavior and it's not okay but the fact that other people get a different version of this person makes you feel even more isolated and so now when we talk about cowardice let's look at why someone might do this it's because they don't want other people to know who they really are they want to look like the good guy because if other people would know those things about them they would have to deal with the Fallout and the aftermath but when it's AED when it's only to you there's only so much Fallout they have to deal with and they can always go on a smear campaign and make sure that no one believes you if you do start talking about how they truly are so again I know this is one that most of you have dealt with I want to highlight a comment from one of you who's been there just to drive home the point that you are not alone I remember my ex always being overly friendly in public he would be so completely fake and nice to perfect strangers I remember thinking this isn't really him at all and if you can relate to that to feeling like you're dealing with two different people like a little Jackal and hide situation hit that like button now and let's look at one more comment that takes this a little bit deeper I've seen my ex make out with his best friend's wife take advantage of a drunk friend of mine say horrible things about his own mother steal from work and assault a cab driver only to leave me in the car while he fled the scene twice anyone who meets him however thinks he's harmless if not a little goofy the most obvious display of duplicity I have ever encountered utterly confounding so now let's get back to another cowardly tactic that we haven't talked about on this channel for quite some time and this is when the covert narcissist indirectly makes fun of someone so this can be done kind of like we just talked about in the smear campaign when they're not there to defend themselves or it could be one of those cases where it's like the greatest truths are said in just so essentially they're insulting you maybe they have a what what they think is a funny nickname but it's actually really insulting to you and maybe you've told them that and they just keep on going and they'll go on with jokes like this in public in front of other people even after you tell them It embarrasses you and if you continue to try to get them to stop they're going to make you feel small and make you feel like you're making a big deal out of nothing right because you know after all I was just joking you don't have to get so serious so plenty of people do this not just narcissists but this is a go to move for the covert narcissist because it is a very cowardly way to tear you down they absolutely don't have to take responsibility or accountability for their behavior and if you've dealt with this I know you know how it feels how you can be made to feel even like you're the problem because you can't let go even though they were just joking but here's the thing people like this rarely can take such jokes when they're directed back at them they can dish it out but they can't take it and if you know someone like this let's hear about it in the comments and since we're talking about jokes I want to share one of my favorite jokes about narcissism because we could have a little fun too can't we how many narcissists does it take to screw in a light bulb well that's a trick question isn't it because narcissists exclusively use gaslighting no bulbs necessary and don't worry we're going to cover that cowardly tactic very soon so stay tuned for that for now let's talk social media can you guess which cowardly tactic I'm about to cover right now if so hit that pause button and let me know in the comments and the reason why I'm asking you this right now is because there are endless ways that a covert narcissist will act cowardly on social media I'm actually going to cover two right now but if you paused this video and shared your thoughts in the comments I bet we're going to find a whole lot more so the first way is super common and again not only narcissists do this but this is a go-to move for the Cowardly covert narcissist and it is sharing cryptic messages on social media media where everyone knows exactly who you're talking about but you don't say it and really this is just to avoid responsibility and accountability because a person who will do this if someone stands up to them they will sit back and say oh well actually that wasn't about you but you must have a guilty conscience I haven't gotten caught up in this personally but I've seen it play out online so many times where the person who posted the cryptic message will deny what are probably their actual reasons for POS posting it without actually ever sharing what their reasons for posting it were and for the second cowardly way that covert narcissists use social media I'm going to start by letting this comment do the talking she divorced me on Facebook what a coward so this is an interesting one and it seems very specific but I can absolutely see a covert narcissist doing this over and over again and that is changing their relationship status on Facebook or wherever without actually talking about it that's not how you break up with someone that is worse than breaking up with someone over text all right so now let's talk about gaslighting we often talk about gaslighting but we don't talk about how cowardly it really is to Gaslight someone it's incredibly Insidious and it's probably one of the worst things that you can do to a person is make them doubt themselves and their reality and there are serious and Lasting implications of it but it's also incredibly cowardly look at it this way let's say you're in a relationship with someone and they're cheating on you so instead of owning it and dealing with the consequences they're just going to make you think that you're crazy and if they can successfully make you think that you're crazy they can continue on with this Behavior behind your back for longer and longer because the more you buy into their gaslighting the more they get away with the thing they're trying to get away with and sometimes with gaslighting the thing they're trying to get away with is just essentially to make you doubt yourself and to make you think that you're crazy because ultimately if they can successfully do that then you become easier to manipulate so I shared one example of how this can go down let's look at another one from the comment section the most cowardly thing I've seen from a covert narcissist is when they said something very bad about another friend's girlfriend and when confronted a few days later stated that he didn't remember saying it this is despite the fact that everyone in the room heard him say it so now here's a cowardly tactic that I'm not sure we've talked about here at least not to this extent and that is interrupting you or speaking over you and that sounds aggressive right it doesn't sound cowardly but I wanted to talk about it in this context because I've experienced this myself and I've experienced it so much that I feel like I have more of a peak behind the curtain here so sometimes it can be an aggressive move and sometimes it can be incredibly cowardly so when someone is speaking over you sometimes it's because they know that they will not win this argument if you do get your point across they know that you're standing on the moral High ground or that you have a valid point it just doesn't align what their narrative and so they just need to shut you down real quick and that in my opinion is incredibly cowardly because if they knew they were right they wouldn't have to do that when someone is doing this maybe not every time but most of the time they know they're wrong and they know they can't actually stand up to you so they have to shut you down so the next cowardly tactic of the covert narcissist that we're going to talk about today is sudden angry outbursts yes we're talking about narcissistic rage but we're also talking about more than that you see narcissistic rage comes on more as a knee-jerk reaction it's because you pushed a shame button within the narcissist and they have to shut you down which in itself is cowardly because they can't deal with their own stuff so they need to quiet you but very similar to the last point we talked about interrupting you and talking over you often times if that doesn't work and the narcissist needs to shut you down they will intentionally rage out because if they can scare you into submission they don't have to deal with consequences and even though this sounds sounds like a bully move if they were actually good at their manipulations they wouldn't have to resort to this would they this is another one of those bully tactics that's coming from a place of fear and that fear is the fear of being exposed so now let's look at a comment from one of you who's dealt with this first hand so this person heard the words I can't talk to you when you get too emotional after having a narcissist rage at me when I finally been broken and start crying and that comment I feel like really sums it up because that is why the narcissist was raging to get that person to back down and to either be fearful or sad or combination of both things but no matter what the ultimate goal was to get them to back down and then they come in with the oh I can't I can't deal with this which was the truth all along they can't deal with it they can't deal with the other person's emotions they can't even deal with their own emotions and they resort to these cowardly tactics to make sure that they don't have to and I know there's at least one of you right now getting ready to get to the keyboard and tell me that it's not always just rage that they use to accomplish this and we're gonna get to that soon I promise but now let's have a conversation that's incredibly important when we talk about these cowardly tactics and that is reactive abuse so if you're dealing with a narcissist of any sort I know you've dealt with reactive abuse and whether the person you're dealing with is more grandiose or more covert eventually this is going to become an issue there's going to be some reactive abuse present and really what this term explains and not very well in my opinion but it explains when someone is baiting you into an argument and when it's reactive abuse it is very covert baiting it's kind of almost like they're poking at you they're poking at a wound something they know bothers you and something that you have circled back around on so many times with this same person it's maddening and it's infuriating that they would still be touching on this with you and often they do this in front of other people so that when you react you look like the abusive person and the Cowardly part about this is that they do it on purpose to make you look bad and going back to the man behind the curtain analogy this is very much a situation where they're trying to pull the strings and stay completely covered they don't want anyone to see what they're doing and usually they get away with it because usually by the time they're baiting you in this way your nervous system is on high alert and you've dealt with this so many times before and it doesn't take much to set you off so I'll share a personal story that I probably haven't shared in years but I think it really illustrates this baiting for reactive abuse so when I was in a relationship like this essentially I always did all the cooking I didn't really have a problem with it but I did have a problem with insensitivity and being overlooked so whenever we had an audience that insensitivity button within me would get pushed and I have to be honest it took me years before I actually realized this person was doing this on purpose and that's really the problem with reactive abuse is that we become so reactive that we're blinded to really what's going on but anyway so we had this person's family over I made a me for everyone and the one thing that this other person was handling was getting the cups and so I watched him point and count how many to each person to figure out how many cups he needed to get so he walked over he might have even done it twice walked over to the cabinet brought out the cups and he was one short of course and this might have gone unnoticed if he just put the cups right on the table and everybody grabbed their own but that's not what he did he put a cup in front of every person as we were all sitting around the table and naturally everyone got a cup except for me still at this point you're probably saying it's not a big deal but what did he do when he realized that he did not have enough cups well he sat down to start eating the meal that I made for everyone instead of actually getting up and fixing the mistake because you see it wasn't a mistake he did it on purpose and when I said something about it I saw the change in him and he said the words oh you're going to make a big deal out of this now aren't you and I don't know even though I was very much in the thick of it at that moment I was starting to see glimpses of what was happening and so I decided to just let it go even though everything in me wanted to make a big deal out of it and yes that is something small and a narcissist will be quick to tell you that is something Petty but when someone is consistently overlooking you and we're going to get to that in more detail in a little bit it can make you feel small and insignificant and honestly that's the purpose of it and it's an incredibly cowardly way of going about it because just like someone can say oh I was just joking they can eily say oh it's just a mistake but it's a mistake that they make consistently when they have an audience and it's the same mistake that they make over and over and over again and you start wondering how it's possible that this person cannot understand this and the answer is they do understand it they understand it very well they understand it maybe a little too well and this is why you keep ending up in that same situation and then what happens after they trigger you let's look at a comment and then after they piss you off they smile and walk away cowards someone else says they hide from the cruelty they inflict that comment had 117 likes so I'm guessing a lot of you agree so now as promised let's dig deeper into that pretending you don't exist tactic so I guess today is a day of sharing for me there's a story that I shared very early on when I started this Channel and a lot of you related to it a really surprising number if you ask me because it was something very very specific and this relates back to that pretending you don't exist this is a quick share I promise so when I was in this same relationship multiple times we would be sitting on the couch watching television and out of nowhere this person would stand up not say a word turn off the television turn off the light and go to bed and remember we were sitting there together and I feel like this is the ultimate way to pretend someone doesn't exist is actually pretend they're not in the room like they're ghost or something and again it's something that if you make a big deal out of it they can call you petty and oh it's not a big deal it was just a mistake but when it happened happens multiple times and when it happens along with other things that they do that make you feel like you don't matter or you don't exist it kind of is a big deal because that can really get to you it can start to destroy your self-esteem and your self-worth so I'm not going to share all the comments from you guys who had the same experience I'm just going to share one of the six comments from people who said they had the exact same experience so here it is had that experience of the TV on lights being turned off on me in the 18 months before the final discard thank God I'm out of it and I hope everyone who left a comment relating to that is also out of it and I can relate to the feeling of thank God I am out of it too and if you are in this right now I want you to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel whether you can actually physically leave this relationship or not you can start to get back your sense of self and your selfworth that this person is attacking in such a cowardly way so another thing that a cowardly covert narcissist will do is try to get to you through other people and the most cowardly of them all is by using children to get to you and there's definitely a scale of not okayness when it comes to these things but I will say I don't think it's ever okay to purposely use children as pawns and since we're on this topic another cowardly tactic that you'll see with a covert narcissist is the narcissist having conversations with the child that they should be having with the other parent so essentially instead of dealing with the other parent and having those conversations they are taking the child aside and saying you know what this parent's wrong they don't know what they're talking about and those things that they want you to do you shouldn't do them if you know that somehow you're trying to undermine the other parent it's pretty cowardly to use anyone else to do that instead of just addressing it yourself so I said earlier when we were talking about the rage response when the narcissist is trying to shut you down and how that can be a cowardly tactic I mentioned that there was another way for them to go about doing the same thing and that way is through using the silent treatment and again it's not only narcissists who do this is a very passive aggressive behavior and passive aggressive behaviors are all cowardly and I say this as someone who used to be extremely passive aggressive thankfully many of us can live learn and grow but in using the silent treatment essentially they're putting everything on you and it's up to you to fix the situation it's like they're checking out and they probably won't even tell you what's wrong so you have to figure it out and I said this I think in my last video you can probably come up with five things that weren't the thing and now you've given them more ammunition to be mad at you so again it's skirting the issues it's avoiding accountability it's really just trying to maintain that hidden Persona behind the curtain all while manipulating and hurting other people and that is incredibly cowardly so if you can relate to all this and again if you need extra support check out the link in the description but if you do relate to all this I'm going to guess that you might be dealing with a cowardly covert narcissist but don't worry they're not as Untouchable as they would have you believe and if you start paying attention you will start to see exactly how the Cowardly covert narcissist tells on themselves and really you don't have to do a thing just watch the video that just popped up on the screen and you'll start seeing it all play out in real time but before you go if you haven't already be sure to hit that like button and I'll see you next time

Channel: Common Ego

Views: 100,017

Keywords: covert narcissist, covert narcissism, narcissistic abuse, vulnerable narcissist, narcissistic personality disorder, gaslighting, covert narcissist coward, covert narcissist mother, covert narcissist female, covert narcissist husband, covert narcissist wife, covert narcissist in relationships, covert narcissist father, covert narcissist friend, emotional abuse, silent treatment, narcissistic abuse recovery

Id: unyspI8AtSI

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024