3 Examples of Narcissists Who Play the Victim

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 hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can provide a few examples of narcissists who play the victim so answer this question by looking at three examples of a narcissist who plays the victim this type of narcissist looks for people to have compassion and sympathy for them when it's not warranted by the circumstances so another way of putting this is that they tend to deceive they exaggerate or fabricate stories of loss oppression or persecution and then try to make sure that everybody knows about their story they may promote it through social media by telling people in person anyway they can get the word out there again about the story they made up now this type of narcissist is usually thought of as a vulnerable narcissist as opposed to a grandiose narcissist a grandiose narcissist is typically socially dominant confident and resistant to criticism the vulnerable narcissist has a lot of shame the resentful insecure and they're hyper sensitive to criticism just like with many behaviors this playing the victim behavior occurs on a continuum there are people who tend to play the victim a little bit and then there are people who really just go over-the-top and that's what I'm really talking about here the people that really take this behavior to the extreme even to the point where the behavior can become criminal like staging a scene or situation to look like a crime has occurred against them this personality type actually has some overlap with factitious disorder and posed on self and potentially factitious disorder imposed on another the latter disorder is also known as munchausen syndrome by proxy a disorder where a caregiver hurts someone in their care to attract sympathy for them for themselves right now for the person they're caring for but for the caregiver this situation though with the narcissist who plays the victim is a bit different in the sense that the narcissist is not pretending to be sick not making it seem like someone else is sick either they're just engaging in a number of irrational and dramatic activities to attract attention typically these types of narcissists are unsuccessful I've seen a few exceptions to this but not many typically this is an individual who has attempted to succeed they've attempted to gain attention for a positive reason but they have failed so in the conventional competition we see in society the race for status power wealth affection a good job the narcissist has not been able to compete and realizing they can't win in a conventional game they rewrite the rules they turn things around and try to gain attention for a negative reason and of course again as I mentioned they fabricate situations they make up things they have a high level of neuroticism and they're quite cows so they lack empathy so if we combine this with the criminal activity that we often see many would qualify as being sociopathic sometimes they plan out their victim role quite carefully and that's mostly what we see here in the examples I'm going to be talking about although much of the time it's actually impulsive they don't think through it much at all this type of narcissist is unusual in the sense that typically a narcissist wants attention for a positive reason they want people to recognize how great they are how beautiful they are how successful they are this type of narcissist though is really looking for somebody to feel sorry for them to recognize that they have it worse than anyone else it's really an odd expression of narcissism that doesn't really fit perfectly with our understanding of narcissistic personality because of this poor fit some have made the argument that a person who plays the victim like this may have some narcissistic characteristics but they would not qualify for a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder I think in some cases they actually could qualify for NPD I don't think that would be unusual and often they would have features from other cluster B personality disorders as well like histrionic and antisocial now moving to these examples of the narcissist who plays the victim for the sake of expediency I'll just refer to them as the narcissist as always when I use examples details have been changed to protect identities so moving here to the first example this one features someone who planned a scenario poorly but they did actually plan it out it was not impulsive so consider this example we see a workplace setting like an office and the pace of work is slow kind of a boring place to work the relational dynamics and the politics in the office play out slowly and not much movement takes place there's not a lot of drama on a day-to-day basis there are only a few ways for somebody to distinguish themselves and to receive attention so a tough environment for a narcissist in this office we see one of the workers is a woman in her 50s she's the narcissist in this example she gets increasingly frustrated that she's not being recognized as a phenomenal employee she doesn't have one particular co-worker that she's really angry with but she knows that she does feel angry and she wants some place to vent that anger and she really wants people to be paying attention to her so one night she plans to stage an incident the next day at work she takes a screwdriver and she sharpens it and she goes out to the store and by his distinctive bow stem covers for her car so these are the little caps that go on the valve stem usually they're just plastic and don't have anything written on them but you can also buy custom ones that have the make of a car or some other logo on the end of them she goes out to her car the night before she wants to stage his cincin and she places a small amount of mud on all four of her tires so that somebody rubbed against that tire the mud would transfer to them at least in theory so she goes to work the next day and when no one is looking she takes the sharpened screwdriver and attempts to puncture one of the tires of her car but then realizes that tires are a little bit harder to puncture than she thought so instead she takes that screwdriver and scratches up the paint on the quarter panel near that tire she goes back into the building and finds one of the empty offices an office were somebody used to work but nobody's there now and there's a jacket that's been hanging on the hook behind the door for a long time so it's been there awhile and no one really knows who it originally belonged to she takes that jacket back out to her car and rubs it on that tire so trying to transfer the mud to that jacket she also removes one of those custom valve stem covers that she just put on the car she brings in the jacket the valve stem cover and the screwdriver and puts all those items on the desk in that empty office then she goes out to her car and pretends to notice the scratches and goes back in and starts complaining to her co-workers she can't believe that somebody would do this who would damage her car like that who would be so cruel to her what is she going to do is the car even drivable which of course it was drivable through the scratches on it so her plan is to wait for the co-workers to discover the evidence in the empty office and then connect those items to the damage that she did to her car after this in theory they would run to her and say somebody in office must have damaged the car so it's like she was trying to create a murder mystery without the murder right she thought everybody would turn into like a little detective and try to figure this out on her behalf so kind of an unusual plan of course but did it actually work well not surprisingly her plan failed and it failed pretty much in every way so she did all this as I mentioned put the items in the desk she waited several hours she mentioned to a few people that she saw some interesting things sitting on that desk again after complaining about her car being scratched up but nobody went in there eventually she approached her supervisor and directly asked him to investigate these items that she saw in this empty office she wanted to kind of play it cool though so she waited a little while before going back to her supervisor and saying anything else she was confident that he would have found the items and was making the connection between those items and the damage to the car however she grew impatient so she went to her supervisor and asked him well did you find anything in that office and he said I only found a broken screwdriver and the jacket that used to hang in that office I threw them away I'm not sure why you didn't throw them away so she asked what he meant and he said well that was the jacket they were rubbing against the side of your car earlier by the way rubbing a jacket on the side of cars won't remove scratches also you should really clean your car more often it filthy so the supervisor had seen her during like the second part of her plan when she went back out and got the jacket dirty with the mud but he didn't figure out the whole thing he didn't see her scratching the car with the screwdriver so she was not completely caught in her bad act here but more or less she kind of was right because what she was trying to achieve was broken apart she wasn't gonna get her goal he didn't figure out again what was going on but he did know that the jacket wasn't being worn by somebody else who damaged the car right so kind of took away that whole idea that there was a mystery car damager running around in this office so she went back into the office and she saw that the valve stem cover was still sitting there he never even picked that up he bite it and see it and in the end she did about $250 with the damage to her own vehicle right so none of our goals were met and her car was damaged this is a really good example of how the narcissist believes that other people are ready to feel sorry for them at a moment's notice like they're anxious to view the narcissist as the victim when most people really don't care that much they're indifferent they don't care about somebody's car getting scratched up that much they're not obsessed with that now even though they may be a little concerned they're not interested enough to launch an investigation and attempt to find out who did it and make the whole big murder mystery type thing happen so again the narcissist just believes that other people are always thinking about them we see kind of that self-centered orientation so now moving to the second example this example features how someone might play the victim in a romantic relationship by exaggerating harm that was actually done so taking real harm and then blowing it out of proportion it also illustrates how this type of plan can backfire when both people are narcissistic so here we see a marriage that involves a young couple a husband and wife and they are not really nice to each other it's a contentious relationship there is abuse going on in both directions but the husband becomes increasingly frustrated because the wife is becoming physical in her behavior like in the arguing she's pushing him and some of the arguments now of course any amount of aggression in a relationship is unacceptable here we are talking about a low level of aggression now so even though it's wrong this narcissist is really going to exaggerate what's really happening the behavior this wife was exhibiting with the pushing is probably more symbolic and emotionally harmful than actually physically harmful it's not like an aggressive push like a shove it's almost just contact and just pushing somebody way a little bit more of a gesture that the wife does to demonstrate that she has power and control so she can push him around and he's not going to do anything about it again both people here are narcissistic so the husband starts thinking that he's had enough of this so he comes up with this plan to appear injured the next time he gets pushed so not long after this an argument breaks out predictably and he escalates it deliberately to make sure that the life pushes him and then when she does this he kind of steps backward like the push moved him backward and bumps his head against a doorframe then he calls the police and says that he's severely injured the wife sees what he's doing instead of getting worried she goes and hits her head against the kitchen cabinet and calls the police and says that he pushed her and she hit her head so the police questioned both of them separately at the station and they stick to the story right they stick to the story that they were the victim and the assault so they both end up getting charged right so that's how it was solved they both ended up with an assault charge now of course before it goes to court a deal has worked out and both charges are disposed of but still you have all this drama happening right getting charged having to go through all that just not worth it right the narcissistic behavior just really didn't work for either one of these individuals this is a good example of how the narcissist believes they're really clever like no one can figure out the scam that they're trying to run and they're the only one that can execute such a scam forgetting that if they falsely accused somebody that person just might falsely accuse them right back now again the wife's pushing behavior is unacceptable but the way to handle this wasn't to exaggerate the problem and fake some sort of injury that's a very immature way to try to solve a problem like this another interesting part about this example if think about it you have two people that in the end really just ran their heads in the salad hop chicks right so this is not consistent with a lot of insight and traditionally not considered consistent with a high level of intelligence and this brings me to the third example this example has a degree of planning to it and this also takes place in an office setting the narcissist here is a woman in her late 30s who works as a receptionist she is antagonistic condescending and critical of other people and not well-liked in the organization she has repeatedly asked to be promoted in the company but she doesn't have the educational level for the other jobs that are available and she's told her employer that she doesn't need the education that she really knows everything she needs to know so she feels disrespected and she's made that pretty clear to her employer now as part of her job she takes messages for some of the managers who work in that office and the company posted a job opening online it was actually her position so somebody called in in reference to that posting and she realized that she was going to be replaced right when that person called in asking about the same job that she had she kind of saw the writing on the wall so she left work early that day after hearing the news because she was angry but she didn't want to directly confront the managers of that company instead she came up with a different plan one that really illustrates the playing the victim role so this original plan was to pretend that one of her relatives died so that she could get sympathy from her employer and they would not fire her however if she pretended that one of her family members died it may be easy for the employer to figure out that that didn't happen because of course no one was actually dying so instead she decided to send herself flowers like several arrangements of flowers and have the cards in those arrangements read something nonspecific like sorry for your loss nobody should have to go through this type of pain and we can't believe this happened to such a great person so notice how she refers to herself as great even in her plan to get sympathy for other people right just a real lack of insight here so the idea here would be that she would sneak the flowers in when one else was at the front of the building right so she would put them on her desk and pretend the delivery person had brought them by now she was actually buying these arrangements from a local flower shop they were expensive and she could have had them delivered but she didn't want to pay for that so she was buying them and then kind of making it look like they were delivered to her so she bought several arrangements over the course of the next few days she tried to look sad now the first arrangement that she pretended was delivered really didn't get that much of a response some people just commented and said oh there's a nice flowers so with the next arrangement she made sure the card was massive and the letters were written really large and bold so everybody would see that it was about some type of loss that had occurred right they would know that something bad had happened when people saw this new larger card they would ask her what happened and she would say something like it's too tragic for me to talk about I can't believe something like this could happen to me I've never done anything bad to anybody again we kind of see this self-centeredness here and how she responds to her coworkers now this narcissist did not get caught no one ever saw her bring the flowers in from her car nobody realized that she didn't really have a loss but in the end within a week or so her employer fired her and hired a new receptionist right so her attempt to play the victim didn't actually gain her anything at all it actually cost her money for the flowers now her plan probably confused some of her co-workers and many of them probably felt sorry for her a little bit but in the end she was still let go what I find most interesting about this particular example is that even when she was fired she kept sending arrangements for another two weeks and of course now she had to pay that delivery fee because she couldn't sneak them in she didn't work there so the new receptionist would call her and say hey there's more flowers here for you and she would go in and I guess just try to make everybody feel guilty so there are these flowers here she was going in she was sad here they had fired her and replaced her with this other person so she was really continuing to play the victim even when there was really no potential of gaining anything from that company right like they weren't gonna hire her back it was just to again kind of promote guilt and maybe try to cause feelings of shame and still retain that place as having the center of attention she didn't want to let that go it's interesting because at first it seems like the motive is purely not to lose the job but really it's deeper than that it's about getting the attention it's about having people feel sorry for her so in this example again we see that the narcissist really overestimates how much people care about her she didn't understand that her behavior was so aggravating that didn't matter what had happened to her they were still going to fire her they couldn't tolerate her behavior the narcissist doesn't care about other people they don't have compassion for others but they assume that other people are always thinking about them so these are three examples of a narcissist who plays the victim I know whenever I talk about topics like this there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 871,572

Keywords: narcissist who plays the victim, playing the victim, victim, narcissistic personality disorder, grandiose narcissism, vulnerable narcissism, covert narcissism, shame, anger, aggression, hypersensitivity, introverted, defensive, avoidant, anxious, depressed, socially awkward, neurotic, shy, manipulative, blame-shifting, gaslighting, self-esteem, manipulation, arrogance, self-centeredness, jealousy, special, unique, fantasy, entitlement, grandiosity, requires admiration, lack of empathy

Id: JhPlvPhL64g

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 12 2020

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