vulnerable narcissist traits — 1 thorough investigation

vulnerable narcissist traits sounds like a self-help title meant to sell you a candle. i bought the candle. the candle did not help. i am about to write what would have helped, in 2019, if anyone had handed it to me.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday. carla is on the third floor at the all-hands run-through. i have, at a generous estimate, about an hour before anyone notices the cursor has not moved on the spreadsheet that was supposed to move it.

so. the candle. the candle was lavender. the candle had a single word on it in a serif font and the word was calm. that is, in many ways, the entire problem with the genre. the genre has decided that the antidote to a personality structure is a scented column of wax. i am here to tell you it is not. the antidote is a list, and i have one. the list is what would have saved me a couple of years and one specific relationship that ended quietly, the way the dangerous ones do.

i’d like to point out, before we get into the working list, that i am not a clinician. a clinician has a license. i have a desk and a deadline that no one has set for me. i looked the topic up, in the way i look things up, which is to say i read parts of three things and a forum post and listened to half a podcast in the elevator. that is what passes for research at this address.

vulnerable narcissist traits, the working list i wrote on the back of a receipt

the receipt was from a coffee shop. i’ll get to the coffee shop. the receipt had a working list of vulnerable narcissist traits on the back, written with a pen that was running out of blue, and i am going to transcribe it now and pretend the transcription is journalism. it is not. it is a man at a desk on a wednesday with a list and a memory.

the headline thing — and this is the line that, if you take only one sentence from the post, take this one — is that the trait is that the trait disguises itself as vulnerability. the grandiose cousin posts on linkedin in the third person. the vulnerable cousin, by contrast, sighs in the kitchen and waits for you to ask. they are the same engine. one runs hot, one runs cold. one wears a victory lap, one wears a cardigan. you can be hurt by both, but you spot the cardigan two years later than the victory lap. that is the entire SEO of this post, in one paragraph.

i’d like to point you, while we’re early, at my earlier piece on gaslighting and other things my partner insisted did not happen, because the cardigan version of narcissism is the one that, in my experience, does the most disputing of basic facts on a tuesday. that post is the long one. this post is the listicle. they live in the same building.

the working list, then, in the order the pen produced it:

the coffee shop where this draft happened, before we get to the items

i’d like to say a sentence about the coffee shop, because the coffee shop is the reason this draft has a shape. i was not at the desk when i made the list. i was on a saturday i’d rather not document, in a coffee shop with a barista who knows my order and does not, blessedly, ask about my week. the receipt was on the counter. the pen was a freebie from a conference i did not, technically, attend. the candle was at home, doing nothing.

i mention the coffee shop only because the writing of the list happened there and the writing of the post happens here, at the desk, which is canon, and the difference between the two locations is the difference between a man with feelings and a man with a deadline. the man with feelings made the list. the man with the deadline is typing it up. neither of them, you’ll be relieved to know, paid for the second coffee.

also, while we are here: the famously rickety my piece on the dunning-kruger effect, which i will not pretend to have understood the first time overlaps with this topic at one specific corner. the kruger corner is this — vulnerable narcissists are often confidently wrong about how much insight they have into their own behavior. they will tell you, sincerely, that they are over-aware of their flaws. dunning would, i suspect, have a small chart for this. the chart would be embarrassing for everyone in it, including me.

items 1 to 4, with the credit-cards defense embedded for free

i promised a list. i delivered, in the previous section, a digression. that’s the post you came for, but it’s not the post you’re getting yet. here, finally, are items one through four.

1. the chronic minor injury. not a real one. an emotional one. they have, at all times, a slightly bruised feeling about a thing that happened in a meeting, in a chat, at a wedding, at the dinner you thought went well. the bruise is the operating system. you spend a lot of time asking, gently, if they are okay, and they are usually fine, in italics, with a pause that means not actually fine. the pause is the trait.

2. the silent scoring. they do not announce that they are keeping a tally. they keep one. you find out about the tally during a fight that began about something else, in 2024, when an item from 2019 enters the conversation with a date and a timestamp. the database is real. the database has been online the whole time.

3. the comparison wound. any compliment delivered to anyone in their vicinity is, somehow, a small insult to them. you mention a coworker’s promotion at the dinner table. they go quiet. they ask, neutrally, if you think the coworker deserved it. you say yes. they ask, more neutrally, if you think they would have deserved one. the dinner is over. the dishwasher is loading itself, metaphorically.

4. the pre-emptive apology that is not an apology. “i’m sorry you feel that way” is the calling card. “i’m sorry if i’m being too much” is the deluxe edition. neither of these is an apology. both of these are a way to enter the room while declining to enter the room. you, the listener, end up apologizing to them for having had a feeling. that is the trick. the trick is mechanical. the trick works.

items 5 to 8, with the notification riff and the affiliate confession

back to the list. the receipt has, by my count of the back side, four more entries before the pen gave up on me near the bottom.

5. the cardigan storm. a sudden, quiet hostility that arrives without an obvious trigger and departs without one. you ask what’s wrong. they say nothing. they then, over the next hour, say nothing in seven distinct ways. by hour two you are apologizing for the something that is, formally, nothing. you go to bed exhausted. they sleep well. the cardigan storm has done its work.

6. the third-party validation loop. they need an audience that is not you. they will, at a wedding, at a dinner, in a group chat, repeat a story about your shared life that has been gently rewritten so that they are, in the rewrite, slightly more sympathetic. you do not, in the moment, correct it. you correct it later, alone, in the kitchen, to the third yoga mat under the couch, who does not, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, weigh in either way. that yoga mat, by the way, is the same yoga mat i bought in 2023 — i still have it, it is still under the couch, and i will, while we’re here, mention that you can (if you are inclined) buy a yoga mat through a link i’d put here if i had one ready, the proceeds of which would go toward replacing the seventh microwave. the candle, regrettably, was not affiliate. that one was a personal loss.

7. the notification-shaped grievance. their phone buzzes. they look. their face changes. you ask. they say “it’s nothing”. it is, on inspection — sometimes weeks later, when a message app is left open near you on a saturday — almost always, in fact, nothing. it was a notification about a person from a previous chapter who said a thing on a platform. the_notification was the thing. but the face was the trait. the face is what you are dating.

8. the small fall. they fall, often, just slightly, in conversations. they trip on a word. they say “i don’t know if i’m explaining this right”. they pause to gather themselves. it works on you the first hundred times. you start, by the hundred and first time, to notice that the small fall arrives just before they ask for the thing they want. the small fall is a sales technique. someone, somewhere, taught it to them. or worse, no one did. they invented it on a tuesday and then kept it.

verdict — the traits are a resume, the credit cards are personality

the candle, by the way, is on the kitchen counter, between the unopened mail pile and the third yoga mat that lives in the apartment as a kind of furniture. neither of those objects, in case you are wondering, has ever held a grudge. that, possibly, is why i have kept them.

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