7 symptoms of covert narcissism — what they don’t tell you

covert is the polite word. covert is what you call it when you cannot prove anything in a court of law because nothing technically happened. nothing technically happened to me for about eighteen months. i lost ten pounds doing it.

at my desk on the second floor. it is thursday, 11:34am. the sprint retro is happening two floors above me with people pretending they care about velocity. nobody on this side of the building is verifying anything, which is the gap i tend to write into.

so. the symptoms of covert narcissism, as i have lived them and as my old friend tom would, with the steady tone of a man who owns a house and a volvo, describe them. tom is not in the apartment. tom is, presumably, mowing his lawn in the suburb where the lawns are mowed. but tom has read more about this than i have, and tom has, in his patient way, run me through the list more than once, and when i sat down to write this i thought, first, of tom.

symptoms of covert narcissism: the symptoms of covert narcissism are quiet — hypersensitivity to criticism, passive resentment, silent superiority, weaponized helplessness, victim positioning, modest brags, and a slow, polite editing of the people around them. they are not loud. they are administrative. that is, in fact, the first symptom worth naming.

QUIET. IS. NOT. THE. SAME. AS. KIND.

i need that on the wall the same way i needed the last one on the wall, which was about calm not being safe, which i wrote about in a longer piece on gaslighting and what my ex insists did not happen. that piece is the larger room this one lives inside. covert is the upstairs apartment in that building. you can hear the floor creak above you. you cannot, without going up there, prove the floor creaked.

symptoms of covert narcissism, the working list

here is the working list. it is not the textbook list. the textbook list is in books and i will get to it. this is the list i wrote on the back of an envelope from the unopened mail pile, the envelope nobody, conveniently, will ever ask me to open.

1. the soft sigh. not a complaint. a sigh. the sigh comes when you suggest a thing. the sigh contains a paragraph. you, helpfully, drop the suggestion.
2. the apologetic correction. “i’m so sorry, but actually.” the i’m so sorry is the tell. real corrections do not begin with an apology to the person being corrected.
3. the silent score. they remember every favor they did. they do not remember any favor they received. when the favors come up, only one column has entries.
4. the modest brag. “i don’t even know why he picked me, honestly.” they know exactly why. they have a folder.
5. the chronic small wound. there is always a thing they are recovering from. always. the recovery is the room temperature of the relationship.
6. the help that is also surveillance. they bring you soup. the soup comes with three questions about where you were last night.
7. the calm withdrawal. when you push back, they go quiet. for two days. there is no fight. there is a fog. you, inevitably, apologize for the fog.

seven, by my count earlier today. there are more. there are always more. you stop writing them when the envelope runs out, and the envelope runs out before the symptoms do.

the textbook symptoms, briefly, with my footnotes

the textbook list is longer and it is, in the official literature i did not exactly read but did skim while waiting for a slow page to load, organized around a few headings. they call it vulnerable or covert or closet narcissism. the labels move depending on which decade the textbook is from. the symptoms, broadly, do not.

• hypersensitivity to criticism. footnote: a comment from a coworker, neutral in tone, lives in their chest cavity for nine days. you will hear about it.
• chronic envy, downplayed. footnote: they are not jealous of your friend’s promotion, they are simply confused that the company has chosen to recognize that level of mediocrity. confused, mind you. not jealous.
• passive aggression instead of confrontation. footnote: the dishwasher loaded wrong. the door closed slightly too hard. nothing was said. everything was said.
• fragile self-image masked by humility. footnote: the most aggressively self-deprecating person in the room is, statistically, the person who would most like you to disagree with the self-deprecation.
• victim positioning, sustained. footnote: every story ends with them being misunderstood by someone less perceptive. every story.
• weaponized helplessness. footnote: they can’t, you understand, do this one thing. they have never been able to. they will need you to do it. forever.

if you want the cousin topic — the overt version of the same engine — that one i wrote up under narcissist definition and traits, which lists the nine clinical items the manual asks for. five of those, you get the label. covert narcissism is the same engine in a quieter coat. same engine. quieter coat.

the symptoms tom shows that nobody flags

i want to be careful here. tom is not the worst person i know. tom is, in many measurable ways, doing better than i am, and my mother would tell you so on a sunday call without flinching. tom has the wife. tom has the two kids. tom has the volvo. tom has a pension that he understands, which is a sentence i could not write about myself with a clear conscience.

but tom — and i say this with love, the love a man has for an older friend who has, over twenty years, occasionally left him a little smaller in a room — tom checks several of the soft boxes. tom does the apologetic correction at dinner parties. tom does the modest brag about his kids in a way that is, technically, about how tired he is. tom does the silent score on who, exactly, drove to whose house last christmas. tom is not, on any clinical scale, a narcissist. but tom shows symptoms.

this is the thing nobody flags about the symptoms of covert narcissism: a lot of regular, decent, suburb-owning people have three or four of them. that is the trap. you cannot run a list on a person and pull a verdict. you can only run a list on a person and notice the weather.

the symptoms i show that everybody flags

let’s be even-handed about this. i have, in the apartment, on different days of different years, shown several of the symptoms on this list. the chronic small wound, for instance — i do that. the apartment has a folder, mental, of grievances against the building, against the heater, against the seventh microwave, which is the seventh i have personally killed and which, in a way the textbook would frown at, i have eulogized in writing. that is, technically, a chronic small wound.

the modest brag — i do that too. the third yoga mat, unrolled by the window, has been a topic of mine for months in a tone that is, on inspection, not entirely self-deprecating. i mention the mat the way someone mentions a marathon they didn’t quite run but were thinking about running, which is a man asking to be congratulated for an attempted gesture.

but i lose points on the calm withdrawal. i do not go quiet for two days. i go loud for forty minutes and then i text dave. that is not covert. that is whatever the loud version is. for the wider taxonomy of how this kind of behavior gets folded under the casual word “toxic,” i wrote a longer thing about what a toxic person actually is, in plain language, which i’d point you to if you’ve made it this far, and a separate piece on how to define toxic people without diluting the word, which is the same neighborhood with a different angle.

when the symptoms align and when they are weather

here is the part nobody wants to write because it does not have a clean answer. some of these symptoms are weather. some of them are climate. weather is a bad mood on a thursday. climate is the year-round pattern that determines what grows in the apartment and what does not. the symptoms of covert narcissism only count as a diagnosis when they align as climate.

tom’s apologetic correction is weather. tom’s wife, who has lived with tom for sixteen years, has a quieter sense of which it is. she would know. i do not. i see tom every other christmas and once for a wedding nobody wanted to attend. you do not diagnose climate from a christmas visit. you diagnose climate from being the carpet in the apartment for a year.

i was the carpet for eighteen months. that was a climate. i can tell you that with the clarity of a man who has, in the meantime, written down on a receipt the seven things that broke him and put the receipt in a wallet and carried the wallet around for two years. and even with all that, i am cautious about pinning the label on someone who has shown me three of the seven across two dinners. for a denser list of the things that follow when the climate is real, see the characteristics of narcissistic abuse, which is the resulting weather system.

also, while we are admitting our smallness on the record: the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters. that is a position i have held since at least 2019 and i will go to my grave with it. unrelated. mostly. ish.

verdict — the covert is louder once you know where to look

if you want the older film that gave the verb its life, before any of this language existed in any clinical book — there is a 1944 movie about a man making a woman doubt her own senses in an apartment with dimming lights. the film is titled, fittingly, gaslight (1944). ingrid bergman in the apartment, ingrid bergman doubting the apartment, the apartment in fact lying. covert narcissism predates the word for it. the word came later. the apartment is older.

the sprint retro went over by twelve minutes. nobody from the third floor has come down to look for me, which is the kind of thursday i prefer. the seventh microwave is at home, alone, doing what microwaves do.

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