This article is part of an ongoing series on behavioural psychology, exploring personality, scarcity, social dynamics and the ways our environments shape behaviour.
Or how narcissistic people reveal themselves in plain sight
She came at me with a carving knife.
It happened after I confronted her about her behaviour. What stayed with me afterwards was not only the violence, but something stranger. During a couples counselling session she literally admitted what she had done, in front of both me and the counsellor.
And the counsellor did not even flinch.
That was almost as difficult to process as the admission itself. I was sitting there listening to somebody openly acknowledge that they had tried to kill me, while the supposedly independent person in the room reacted as though nothing particularly remarkable had happened.
For years I could not make sense of that. If somebody knows their behaviour is unacceptable, surely the obvious strategy is to conceal it. Deny it. Rewrite it. Make sure nobody else ever sees the thing you are trying to hide.
Except that is not always what happens.
Some of the most narcissistic people I have encountered have done something almost completely counterintuitive. They tell you what they are doing while they are doing it. They joke about it. They describe the behaviour in other people. They send you material about manipulation while behaving manipulatively themselves.
The mistake is assuming concealment means secrecy. Sometimes it means confusion.
I am not interested in pretending there is a magic checklist that lets you diagnose somebody with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Everyone behaves narcissistically sometimes. Privacy is not narcissism. Selfishness is not narcissism. One bad argument certainly is not narcissism.
What interests me is the cluster.
Over time, particular behaviours begin to point in the same direction. Extraction. Information control. Gaslighting. Isolation. A strange preoccupation with hierarchy. An inability to tolerate being exposed or diminished. Once I started looking at the pattern rather than trying to explain every incident individually, things that had confused me for years became much easier to read.
Control where none is needed
One of the more peculiar indicators is arbitrary withholding.
I have encountered people who happily know exactly where you live but become evasive about where they live. They insist on meeting somewhere away from their home. They answer half of perfectly ordinary questions, or create little pockets of secrecy where there is no obvious reason for secrecy to exist.
There can obviously be good reasons for privacy. That is not the behaviour I mean.
The interesting part is the asymmetry. They know about you, while you know less about them. They decide what you are allowed to know, when you are allowed to know it and how much effort you need to expend to get an answer.
Often the information itself is almost worthless, the control is not.
You find yourself asking for something completely ordinary while they retain the right to decide whether you get it. A tiny hierarchy has been created. They know. You do not. They decide. You ask.
Once you notice that pattern, other apparently trivial behaviours start to look different. The question is no longer simply why somebody would withhold a particular piece of information. It is why so many interactions seem to leave one person fractionally more powerful than the other.
Confusion is more useful than lying
Gaslighting gets talked about so much now that the word has almost lost its usefulness, but the underlying behaviour matters.
I used to think gaslighting was mainly about persuading somebody that something false was true. Sometimes it is. The more effective version, though, does not need to persuade you of anything.
It only needs to make you uncertain.
Something happens and you challenge it. Suddenly the conversation is about the tone you used when you challenged it. Then something you said months ago appears. Then somebody else’s opinion gets introduced. Then there is an accusation you have never heard before. You respond to that, which generates another argument, and twenty minutes later the original event has almost disappeared.
You keep trying to solve it because you assume there is a misunderstanding somewhere in the middle. That can be a mistake, sometimes the confusion is the point.
This is also why intelligent manipulators can be much harder to deal with than crude ones. Intelligence makes it possible to introduce exactly enough complexity to keep another person engaged. You are not merely defending yourself. You are trying to understand something that keeps changing shape.
The puzzle becomes consuming.
The Bond villain problem
The strangest behaviour, though, is still the hiding in plain sight.
I once had a counsellor who I became convinced was displaying many of these behaviours herself. At one point she sent me material about manipulation that seemed remarkably close to behaviour I believed she was exhibiting. That initially made me doubt my own interpretation.
Why would somebody send you material explaining the very thing they were doing? But that question assumes disclosure and concealment are opposites, they are not necessarily.
Imagine telling somebody exactly how a manipulation works while doing something very similar to them. If they later accuse you, the disclosure itself becomes useful camouflage. Why would I have warned you about this if I were doing it myself?
I have seen versions of the same thing elsewhere. People joking about being manipulative. Telling stories in which they plainly exploit somebody but presenting the story as evidence of how clever they are. Repeatedly drawing attention to behaviours that seem uncomfortably close to their own.
I have even encountered people who adopted names or variations on their names that appeared, at least to me, almost like private jokes about how they behaved. I cannot use the real examples, but imagine someone choosing Evan Moore because they always want even more. Or Mia First, because everything ultimately comes back to me first. Or Ian Charge, because being in control is central to how they see themselves.
It sounds ridiculous. Almost like a Bond character. That is partly why it works.
Normal people assume nobody would be arrogant enough to advertise the thing they were trying to conceal. When somebody does something that blatant, we search for a more complicated explanation. Maybe it is coincidence. Maybe they are joking. Maybe I have misunderstood, maybe I am being paranoid, that uncertainty is useful.
I cannot know whether every clue I have noticed over the years was deliberate. Nobody can reliably know another person’s private motivation. But I no longer automatically dismiss an obvious clue simply because it seems too obvious. People tell you a surprising amount about themselves, sometimes they just assume you will not believe them.
Look at the direction of travel
No single behaviour here proves anything.
Someone may be private because they have very good reasons to be private. Somebody may behave defensively because they are frightened. Somebody may dislike one of your friends because your friend is, in fact, an arsehole.
The signal is the cluster and the direction in which the relationship is moving.
Presentation is one data point. History is dozens. I have become much more interested in what somebody has managed to sustain before I arrived – relationships, friendships, jobs, collaborations. None of those things proves anything on its own, but repeated instability across several parts of a life is much harder to dismiss as bad luck. It is another part of the cluster.
Are ordinary pieces of information becoming strangely controlled? Do disagreements leave you less certain about what happened than when they began? Does the other person repeatedly need to establish some small advantage in situations where no advantage should be necessary? Do jokes, stories and supposedly throwaway comments repeatedly reveal contempt, superiority or pleasure in manipulating people?
And what is happening to you while all this goes on?
Are you becoming clearer or more confused? More confident in your judgement or less? Do you increasingly feel that if you could only understand the other person properly, everything might finally make sense? That last one is particularly dangerous.
I spent years trying to understand behaviour that seemed contradictory because I assumed the contradiction meant I was missing something. Sometimes I was, sometimes the contradiction was the behaviour.
The people who are hardest to spot are not necessarily the ones who conceal themselves most successfully.
Sometimes they are the ones standing directly in front of you, telling you exactly who they are, secure in the belief that you will find a way not to believe them.
In the next post, I look at what happens when these patterns become an extractive relationship in The Parasite and the Host. If you found this useful, read that next.
