“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu
The covert narcissist with the passive aggressive behavioral patterns is like a vampire - he does not see his own reflection when he looks in a mirror. He denies, runs, hides, attacks, blames and does everything possible to avoid the self reflection. With such a long term training of manipulations and unhealthy copying mechanism taught in childhood, he became the master of mindfuckery. He can drive even stable and normal person crazy and every time he enters someone else´s life, he turn it all upside down. The knowledge and education on covert narcissism is one of the greatest way to protect yourself from the toxicity that the covert narcissist is bringing into people´s life. As the passive aggressive individual shows the aggression in a passive aggressive way and their abuse is very hidden and covert, it is very hard to recognize the signs. The knowledge is giving you the advantage of recognizing the unhealthy behavior on time before the damage to you can be done.
The covert narcissist with the passive aggressive behavioral patterns is like a vampire - he does not see his own reflection when he looks in a mirror. He denies, runs, hides, attacks, blames and does everything possible to avoid the self reflection. With such a long term training of manipulations and unhealthy copying mechanism taught in childhood, he became the master of mindfuckery. He can drive even stable and normal person crazy and every time he enters someone else´s life, he turn it all upside down. The knowledge and education on covert narcissism is one of the greatest way to protect yourself from the toxicity that the covert narcissist is bringing into people´s life. As the passive aggressive individual shows the aggression in a passive aggressive way and their abuse is very hidden and covert, it is very hard to recognize the signs. The knowledge is giving you the advantage of recognizing the unhealthy behavior on time before the damage to you can be done.
What are the signs of a covert narcissist showcasing the symptoms of passive aggressive personality disorder?
1. The covert narcissist´s avoidance of confrontation and poor communication skills causing other people headaches and damage.
The individual with passive aggressive personality disorder avoids the confrontation at all cost in a fear of failing or being rejected or criticized. Their communication style is very indirect, immature and they lack of capacity to communicate openly and clearly.
As they have been raised in a family dynamics where any kind of deep communication has been prohibited and avoided, they carry this dysfunction to their adulthood too. The covert narcissists are not capable of properly specify an issue or express their emotions. They are deeply disconnected from themselves.
Their cowardice prevent them to talk to other people openly so they have tendency to gossip frequently behind other people´s back. They often use triangulation technique to turn everybody against everybody. It takes only one toxic covert narcissist to smash the whole team of people. They can turn once healthy environment into a horror crime scene. They are masters of causing the problems where once were non. Due to their gossiping people often lose their jobs, social circles and businesses. The covert narcissists play a chess with people´s life with smear campaigns. They often claim that they hate dramas, yet they are frequently the cause of most of the dramas around them.
You never know where you stand with them. Everything around them is a mystery, in a fog and they expect you to be telepathic. They are angry when you do not telepathically recognize their feelings, wants and needs and they will covertly irritate you and indirectly expressing their negative feelings to you instead of openly addressing them. When they feel upset, they have tendencies to post memes on Facebook, smashing the doors loudly when leaving the room or increasing the sound on TV to the maximum while you are trying to talk to them just to avoid the confrontation. They are masters in building a stress and frustration in other people with their poor communication skills.
They evading the problems. Every time the problem appears (often times they are the cause of the problem), they disappear without a word giving the silent treatment and leaving others to clean their mess. Once their mistake or wrong doing surface, they have tendencies to shift the blame to others and never take any accountability and responsibility for their actions.
They create chaos in their own life by their indecisive nature. One day they will agree with you on plan A, the next day they change the course to pursue the plan B without even notifying you. You will be the last person being informed about the changes the covert narcissist did in your own life. They often wavering from course of action to its opposite creating the chaos in other people´s life. They change the mind too often, make people confused and sucking them into their life of instability.
2. The covert narcissists always say yes when they want to say no. And it causes lot of problems.
As they had to please their dysfunctional parents in their childhood at all cost and always keep the facade of happiness and agreeableness even when they felt depressed, frustrated or angry, they took this dysfunctional copying mechanism also into their adulthood. They have not been allowed to say "no" to their caregivers and the anger was considered an unacceptable emotion. They have been trained since childhood to sugarcoat the hostility they felt towards their parents by acting and pretending to be overly nice as a surviving strategy. They have been always forced to say "yes" as there never have been the option "no". This is the reason why they grew up into an emotionally dishonest people. No matter what question you ask, their answer will be always "yes" (they will even answer with a smile on their face) to avoid any conflict with you but then they will do whatever they want. Their actions never match their words. When you ask them a question, they will always answer whatever you want to hear, not what they actually really think or feel. Once you corner them and they can´t avoid the confrontation, they will still do not share their honest view, they will lie and manipulate, try to find an easy way out or promise you whatever you want knowing in advance they will never proceed with the promise. They subconsciously or consciously create an illusion of agreeable, supportive and nice person who are actually dishonest, backstabbing and a saboteur behind the scenes. Their dishonesty is a form of emotional and psychological abuse they are inflicting onto other people and sometimes the confusion and chaos they create is causing other people lot of pain, frustration and damage.
3. The covert narcissists are professional saboteurs.
The covert narcissists with passive aggressive personality disorder have deep issues with accepting the authority and they are not capable to submit to any authority, not even in case when the order or law is logical and beneficial for them. There is no reasoning with the covert narcissists. They illogically sabotage just for the sake of rebellion. They dislike people who are in charge and they do everything in order to sabotage them and covertly rebel against them. They might smile at them but they covertly hate them. They act immature and avoid responsibilities. They do not want to take a responsibility but will never openly and directly express their resentment. They have highly inflexible, erratic, shady and unreliable personality. They punish people with their stubbornness. Their main strategy is a passive resistance to demands. It is a condition in which a covert narcissists seems actively comply with demands, desires, needs and wants of other people but actually passively resist them. They voluntarily agree with something (often with a smile on their face, excitement in their voice and enthusiasm) and then punish people for "forcing" them to agree with them and do the things they actually do not want to do. They agree on something with you with a smile on their face, but inside they are hostile and angry to you. They are very difficult people to deal with in personal relationships and also at work place. They covertly sabotage everything. Instead of openly admit they do not agree or they do not want to comply with the demand, they have tendencies to covertly create obstacles and covert obstructions, they fail on purpose to accomplish a requested task, they purposely working or doing things slowly and poorly, they avoid things they do not like to do leaving them undone or half done, purposely miss deadlines, turn up late to meetings or appointments, they "forget" to pay in time, they ignore the rules or frequently change them, they perform their tasks inefficiently on purpose and they procrastinate a lot. Then they make nonsense excuses why they did not complied with the task, they pretend to forget or pretend they do not understand the task playing dumb. They are frequently promising and always find a lot of pseudo reasons why they did not keep the promises. They often try to rationalize a complete nonsense and they are chronic hypochondriacs. They lie and deny often. They do not sabotage only their own activities, they also sabotage the activities of others and often with a very damaging results and on the expense of sabotaged people. They frequently do not comply with demands even they know the whole team is depending on them and if they do not comply the whole team fails. It often results in decrease of overall efficiency of whole team and cause the frustration among the whole group of people. The passive aggressive covert narcissists want other people to make the efforts but in the same time they sabotage them and block them from doing so.
4. The covert narcissists are hypersensitive to criticism and have a high conflict personality
The covert narcissists who co-morbid with passive aggressive personality disorder are highly sensitive to any criticism. Even slightest criticism causes them narcissistic emotional injury. Paradoxically, they frequently criticize others using covert or overt insults as a main method of criticizing. They are often unreasonably critical, they dislike ideas of others even they are useful and logical. Nothing and nobody can satisfy them. Sometimes they argue only for sake of arguing to regulate their emotions as they are not capable to regulate them themselves. They complain frequently and most of their complaints are unreasonable. They have very argumentative personality. Even when they are nice to you for a moment, its only for you to figure out later that they just covertly insulted you by a backhanded compliments. They never commend you for a good job you did but they are the first who would quickly be there to kick you when you fail.
5. The covert narcissists have a negativistic attitude.
For those who do not know the covert narcissists closer, they might appear to them as a very nice people. But those who have been forced to live or work with this disordered individuals already know that the niceness is only a fake mask. If you know them properly, you will experience the horrific glory of their dark side. They have overall negative outlook on themselves, people and the whole world. They have destructive personality and they often destroy people in their process. In front of their audience they are very charming and nice, behind the doors they are neurotic emotional and psychological bullies with frequent depressive episodes changing the moods from one second to another. The moment they enter the living room, the air gets heavier, the dark cloud appears on the ceiling and their negative energy will infect everybody around them. If they are not in a happy mood, nobody will! They are often sarcastic, negative, angry, argumentative, moody and always dissatisfied with everything and everybody. They create a very hostile environment with a bad energy. When they lose their positive and negative supply, they have tendencies to fall into a sadness and depression (known as "collapsed narcissist"). They are very revengeful and if people fail to comply everything they demand or if they are angry to them, they spend a lot of time planning the revenge on them. They punish people often in a very covert way. Living with a covert narcissist mean you have to constantly walk on the eggshells. They are very easily irritable and impatience having very low tolerance to stress, frustration and low capacity to deal with difficult moments or times. Their overall view is negative and they will always try to prove you that the world is bad, the help is not possible, nothing makes sense so why to make an effort and the life sucks.
6. The covert narcissists are the villains but always play the victim card.
The covert narcissists are the professional victims. They are so special, but nobody understand them, everybody is here to get them and hurt them. They expect other people to empathize with them but they always fail to show empathy towards others. They hurt people, then they manipulate the situation to make themselves look like the victim and make the villain out of the real victims. They exploit others, ruining other people´s life, they are chronic takers but never givers, then they frequently complain about feeling under-appreciate or cheated. They use the victim card to obtain the sympathy of other people even they do not deserve it and they are actually the cause of the problem, wrong doing, mistake and the real villain in the story. They often play martyr and they only do good deeds when there are cameras pointed on them and when they can post the picture of doing the good deed on the social medias to obtain the positive narcissistic supply. They never help people without not getting something out of it or without being in a spotlight of a camera. They are even capable of killing their own wifes or husbands just to collect sympathy and attention from the surrounding and pretending to grieve. They frequently guilt trip others. When people want to help them, they refuse the help and continue to play the victim. By losing the position of a martyr and a victim, they would lose the control and power over other people and they would be not able to manipulate them with a guilt tripping. They guilt trip other people telling them that they never did anything for them while those people cut themselves into pieces to fulfill every nonsense demand of the covert narcissists. The more you do for them, the more they will be claiming you do nothing for them just to manipulate you to do even more for them. They lack of ability of self reflection. Any positive effort to help them is being destroyed by the covert narcissist himself. They are always a victim of a circumstances and other people, they are not capable to objectively reflect on the situation and themselves. They blame everybody around them while they depict themselves as saint and flawless.
7. The covert narcissists are pathologically envy and jealous.
They have very low self esteem even they mask it behind expensive clothes, excessive make up or grandiose speech. They frequently compare themselves to other people. They have complexes and a constant feeling of failing. They are pathologically envy about those more fortunate and they voice exaggerated complains of personal misfortune. Their envy is so deeply rooted in them, they hate the happy people, the rich people, the talented people. They would even envy the sick person if that person got something for free, like a kidney transplant or having their eight fingers stitch back to their hands after a horrific accident. They are always in competition with others, even you do not even realize that they compete with you. If you bought a car, the covert narcissist needs to over do you with two cars, if you are sick, the covert narcissist is sicker. They despise people they envy. Often, they would go as far as using dirty practices to kill people out of jealousy, steal their husbands or wifes or rip them of of their possessions and make them homeless. They are very jealous of their partners, even years after the break up because they are very possessive and they see people as their possessions. Even it were them who broke up with the partners, they would destroy those partners right before leaving them as they can´t bear the feeling that those people would be able to be happy without them or do good without them. They are secretively happy about other people´s misfortune. They lack of capacity to be happy for other people´s success.
8. The covert narcissists lack of assertiveness and they have low self esteem.
As the assertiveness has been suppressed in their childhood by complying to the parent´s commands like a robots, they are not use to to have their own personalities, ideas and thoughts. They often adopt other people´s belief systems and opinions without even questioning them. They manipulate other people, but because of lack of sense of self, they are easily manipulated too. They do not know who they are thus they are often stealing other people´s identities. Their self esteem has been corroded by a dysfunctional parent to the point they are very passive and they lack of assertiveness in careers, hobbies and relationships. They usually never come up with any pro activity, big dreams, anything special, some solution or idea, they never built anything meaningful in their life, but they are very quick to judge others, even being so disrespectful to complain about everything that is being handed to them for free. They often criticize ideas and actions of others while themselves are not productive and have no results. They sit doing nothing, constantly obsessing of watching and controlling others and criticize them. They never finish anything as they self sabotage themselves due their poor self confidence and critical inner voice developed in childhood. They talk to themselves with a negative self talk and out of a fear of failure they do not follow their dreams or comply on something they really want. They are often hiding behind strong people´s backs. They always want to be in a presence of famous or rich people to create the illusion to be famous, important and rich too. If they accomplished something in their life, its often due to dirty games, stolen ideas, robbery or parasitism on others. They always claim they are independent and self sufficient while they
always need others to help them to reach their goals as they are unable
to achieve them independently and without the help.
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