If you scroll down to the description of this video, you would find links to other videos which analyze and decode the secret speech patterns of overt, grandiose narcissists.
Now I know it's a lot to ask, to scroll down to the description. It's onerous and so on, but I think you will be rewarded.
Today we're going to discuss the secret speech patterns and speech acts and the hidden texts of the covert narcissists.
Covert narcissists are not the same as overt grandiose narcissists. A covert narcissist is a collapsed narcissist. It's a narcissist who keeps failing to obtain a regular flow of high quality narcissistic supply.
But it is still a narcissist. It's a narcissist in dire straits in circumstances which are highly injurious that cause repeated narcissistic injury or even narcissistic mortification.
But the core of the pathology of narcissism remains.
For example, the covert narcissists still feels entitled. He still feels unique and special and godlike and omnipotent and omniscient. He still has this inflated, fantastic, grandiose, counterfactual self-concept.
The problem with the covert narcissist is the inability to obtain feedback or input from the human environment which would somehow buttress, sustain, maintain, uphold and affirm this totally delusional and magical self-concept.
Now, collapsed narcissists go through covert phases and then revert to the pure original form of overt grandiose narcissism.
But if the failure is persistent, repeated, and there's no way out, no strategy works, then this kind of narcissists will remain immured and immersed in a permanent state of resentment and bitterness and seething envy and suppressed rage and displaced anger.
This is known as negative affectivity. This kind of narcissists is what we call the shy or fragile or vulnerable narcissists.
Now when you say shy and fragile, you have in mind a puppy with puppy eyes, a cute little creature.
So these epithets, these descriptions of the narcissists are very misleading.
We are not talking about a shy, fragile, vulnerable sweetheart. We are talking a predator. We're dealing with a predator who simply failed, has failed or is failing to secure prey, but is hell-bent and intent on making it right, on victimizing other people, as a way to elevate his sense of self-worth, regulate and stabilize his internal environment.
No difference in principle between overt, grandiose, psychopathic, callous, ruthless, cruel, vicious, dysempathic narcissists and the covert variance. No difference clinically.
With one exception, the inability to obtain narcissistic supply, the failure to garner attention and recognition and adulation and admiration, or even being feared or hated, no attention, being ignored, and this drives the covert narcissist beyond the edge and it alters and has an impact on the way the covert narcissists uses language and speech.
And this is the topic of today's video.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a professor of psychology.
The covert narcissists speech is divided in five types. There's a classification. It's divided in five categories.
There's the passive aggressive speech.
The pseudo humility and pseudo stupidity type of speech, also known as solicitation speech, there's a Machiavellian or manipulative speech, the controlling speech, and the envious speech.
To discuss each one of these, I'll deal with each one of these in turn.
Let's start with the most visible and ostentatious display of the darkness at the covert narcissist's core, this penumbral rices of a cauldron of seething negative affect, envy, anger, hatred, rejection, resentment, and so on so forth.
The most visible sign of all these is known as passive aggression.
Passive aggressive speech is a speech that masquerades as prosocial, communal, empathic, caring, compassionate, and attentive speech while subverting the hidden text, subverting the real meaning of the speech.
So what you see or what you hear is not what you get.
The passive aggressive speech is underhanded.
For example, a backhanded compliment is a subversive passive aggressive speech you know a speech that sabotages and undermines a speech that diverts and misleads all these kinds of speech acts are passive aggressive.
Passive aggressive is defined in the dictionary of the American Psychological Association as characteristic of behavior that is seemingly innocuous, accidental, or neutral, but that indirectly displays an unconscious aggressive motive.
For example, a person who constantly keeps people waiting and then is baffled at why they resent this behavior. This kind of person is passive-aggressively disavowing an unconscious wish to be special and to provoke those who fail to acknowledge the specialness.
So this is the definition in the dictionary.
And passive aggression is typical not only of the covert narcissistic speech, but also of covert narcissists behaviors.
The behavior patterns of the covert narcissists are intended to subvert, to undermine, to ruin the foundations, to render interpersonal intercourse and relationships and interchange and exchange impossible.
It is a speech, this passive aggressive aspect, the speech and the behavior, are actually nihilistic they're intended to eliminate to negate to silence to destroy to hurt and all the time without accepting responsibility disavowing accountability, pretending not to know what you're doing, denying any awareness.
And this duplicity, these mixed signals are the core of the pain and the hurt and the discomfort and the egodystony experienced by the recipients of the passive-aggressive discharge.
So when you're exposed to passive aggressive speech or passive aggressive behavior you feel highly uncomfortable and you don't know why on the surface on the face of it superciliously the speech is innocuous, innocent, well-meaning, friendly and yet you feel, you have this nagging intuition that underneath it, there is envy and hatred and rejection and resentment and the wish to somehow hurt you and damage you and undermine you and take you down and push you back.
And it is this discrepancy between what is called the hidden text the occult text and the overt text this discrepancy between them is what gives rise to the discomfort and upset caused by passive-aggressive speech acts.
They're very typical of covert narcissists.
The second category is solicitation.
This is a speech that is intended to trigger illicit and provoke highly specific reactions in the recipients of the speech, in those who listen to the speech, or hear what has been said.
So take for example pseudo-humility.
Pseudohumility is when the covert narcissist pretends to be humble, modest, claims to own his mistakes when he admits or confesses to having done wrong.
And all the time the intention is to elicit from you a countervailing reaction.
So if the covert narcissist says, oh, I'm so ugly, you're supposed to say you're not ugly at all, you're actually handsome.
Or if the covert narcissists says, I'm so stupid, I keep doing these mistakes. You're supposed to say you're not stupid at all. Actually, you're highly intelligent. You're an intellectual. You're wrong about that.
So you're supposed to negate the pseudo-humble speech. Pseudo-humility is intended to trigger its own contradiction and negation.
It is a way of eliciting narcissistic supply, however, indirectly and manipulatively.
So the covert narcissists would make claims that appear on the surface to be self-deprecating, self-negating, self-humbling, humbling, modest, humble, would eat humble pie ostentatiously, and yet all the time, throughout the Speech Act, the covert narcissists fully expect you to disagree with him, to contradict him, and to tell him how great he is, and how much, to what extent, he conforms to his fantastic, inflated, grandiose self-concept.
Another technique within the solicitation speech acts is pseudo-stupidity.
The covert narcissist is going to pretend that he is stupid, that is helpless, that is ignorant, initiate, in need of enlightenment and education and elucidation, and triggering you, the listener, triggering you to assume the mantle of a guru or a teacher or a patron and thereby assume responsibility for the covert narcissist mistakes and defeats.
Covert narcissist misbehaves, fails, tries to accomplish something, and then fails. And then you come into the sin, the covert narcissists, admits and confesses to his own shortcomings and errors of judgment and so on.
And you're supposed to say, it's okay, everyone is like that you've done nothing wrong and so on thereby assuming the ownership of the mistake and the failure and absolving the covert narcissists of any responsibility and any accountability for the misdeeds and misjudgments.
So these are the soliciting speech acts.
The third category would be familiar to you.
It's a Machiavellian manipulative speech.
Machiavellian manipulative speech is intended to modify your behavior.
Manipulation is a way to modify behavior. All human beings, normal and healthy, narcissists and not, psychopaths or not, all human beings manipulate the behavior of other people via speech acts, body language and displays of behavior.
It's totally normal, totally healthy.
What is different with the covert narcissist and the overt narcissist is that the manipulation is not benign, is not innocuous.
The manipulation is intended to accomplish some goal which is deleterious and detrimental to the manipulated person.
Whereas a healthy person or a normal person would manipulate the behaviors of people around him or her in a way that is not damaging to these people, in a way that would not hurt them, would not cause them pain, would not set them back, would not take them down.
The manipulation, the Machiavellian manipulation of the covert narcissist is intended to hurt you, to damage you, to render you inferior in suffering, to inflict on your pain.
So the manipulation is about modifying your behaviors so as to render you self-defeating and self-destructive and self-trashing and self-molesting and self-mutilating and self-harmful.
So, a covert narcissists, for example, may catastrophize. And by catastrophizing, induce in you anxiety, which would then modify your behavior in a way which is counterproductive, self-undermining, and wrong.
Or the covert narcissists may act helpless, needy and thereby trigger in you protective instincts or a savior, healer, fixer, rescuer, complex and force you into the Karpman drama triangle, wherein you would act a certain role which is alien to you, which is not you.
So one major test of unhealthy pathological manipulation compared to healthy normal manipulation is that unhealthy pathological manipulation changes you in a way that is alien to your essence and to your core identity.
This process is known as estrangement. This kind of manipulation induces in you estrangement. You feel that you are a stranger to yourself. You can't explain to yourself why you're behaving in certain ways you have been pawned you've been manipulated.
The fourth category of the controlling speech acts or controlling speech controlling speech can take myriad forms and it's impossible to make an exhaustive list of how the covert narcissists controls you verbally via speech acts.
So it could, for example, be a form of surveillance, surveillance like spying on you, intruding on you, monitoring you, supervising you, being ever-present, never leaving your space, not allowing you to have your own territory, diminishing or undermining your agency and independence and personal autonomy and so on.
So this is one category of controlling speech.
Then there is the fantasy speech.
The fantasy speech impairs your reality testing, deranges you. You become divorced from the world as it is. Your ability to gauge and evaluate reality is undermined, a form of gaslighting.
And so you are drawn into an alternative virtual reality, the fantasy of the covert narcissists, you find yourself drowning in the swamp of his lurid and wicked imagination.
This is the fantasy speech.
Then you have the coercive speech. The speech that includes intimidation and threats and combined with promises, intermittent reinforcement, hot and cold.
And so the coercive speech is an integral part usually of a situation which is known as coercive control.
And then there's control from the bottom.
I mentioned neediness and clinginess and helplessness. It's a form of codependent control.
Covert narcissists imitates and simulates people with borderline personality disorder and people with dependent personality disorder, codependence.
And the covert narcissist feints, fakes, helplessness, neediness. I can't do it without you. I need you. If you're gone, if you leave me, I will die.
And so this is a form of emotional extortion and is known as control from the bottom.
And finally, the last category of speech is the envious speech.
Envy is the fuel of the covert narcissist.
If I had to isolate a single, most prominent and most dominant affect emotion within the covert narcissist's mind, it would be envy. The second would be resentment.
But the resentment is coupled with envy. The covert narcissist is resentful because he or she is envious.
Envy is the name of the game.
And of course it seeps in by osmosis, it permeates the covert narcissist speech.
Covert narcissist often displays envious speech. He compares himself to others. He complains of having been discriminated against. There's a lot of relative positioning, smearing other people, taking them down, focusing on their reputation, doubting their accomplishments, creating frameworks where everything that other people have achieved is either purloined and plagiarized and stolen or relatively unimportant within the context.
So the covert narcissist tries to diminish other people, other people and their accomplishments. And by diminishing them, by devaluing them, by rendering them inferior or fallacious, fakes, he accuses other people of being fakes and frauds.
He does all this in order to elevate himself by comparison, render himself or herself superior. There's a lot of that going on in the covert narcissists speech.
Covert narcissists needs to kind of denigrate other people, doubt them, question their accomplishments, prove that they have misbehaved, that they have stolen or absconded with other people's property, including intellectual property. That is the need of the covert narcissist.
This is the last category of speech.
One very important thing about covert narcissists, whereas the overt or grandiose narcissist is capable of normal healthy speech speech that does not require deciphering the covert narcissist is not. The covert narcissist is not capable of normal daily communication. The totality of the covert narcissist speech is not capable of normal daily communication.
The totality of the covert narcissist's speech, with not a single exception, is goal-oriented, agenda-driven. And the agenda is negative affects. Envy, hatred, resentment, the wish to punish other people, undermine them, take them down, destroy them, the Machiavellian need to manipulate, the control, that everything is imbued and infused with these psychopathologies.
In this sense covert narcissism is a much deeper pathology, more pervasive, more profound than overt narcissism. And the speech of the covert narcissists proves this to us.