Why EVERY Covert Narcissist Uses the Exact Same Tactics
You’re bringing them down because their reactions are so inconsistent. You can never predict which version of them you’re going to get. And you start monitoring yourself constantly.
So before you share good news, you gauge their mood. Before you express frustration, you consider whether they can handle it in that moment. Before you show any emotion, you’re calculating the risk.
So you start managing your facial expressions. You learn not to look too happy because it might trigger their irritation. Or you learn not to look too sad because it might trigger their impatience.
You learn to keep your face neutral and pleasant—giving them just enough emotional information to keep them stable, but not too much that you trigger an unpredictable reaction.
So what this does over time is it completely disconnects you from your own emotional experience. You become so focused on managing their reactions to your feelings that you stop actually feeling your feelings.
You become an emotional performer—constantly adjusting your expression based on what you think they can handle. And they get to live in a world where your emotions never inconvenience them, where you’ve essentially trained yourself to be emotionally invisible.
And they’ll often comment on how calm or easygoing you are, not realizing that what they’re seeing isn’t your natural temperament. It’s the result of months or years of emotional suppression that they conditioned into you.
Now, the last thing they do is use silent treatment as precision punishment. And this is probably their most powerful tool because it exploits our primal fear of social exclusion while leaving absolutely no evidence.
So when you do something they don’t like—maybe you disagree with them, or maybe you don’t give them the reaction they wanted—maybe you set a boundary—and they just go silent, it’s not necessarily obvious or dramatic. They just become unavailable.
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