All right. So now let’s talk about gaslighting, a cowardly manipulation tactic. Gaslighting is something we often talk about, but we don’t talk about how cowardly it really is to gaslight someone. It’s incredibly insidious, and 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 for 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: the power of interruption and speaking over. Here, at least not to this extent. And that means 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 peek 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 moral high ground or that you have a valid point. It just doesn’t align with their narrative. And so they just need to shut you down really 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, oftentimes, 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 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.
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