Red Flags of Narcissism

Since narcissists are such expert con artists, how do you spot them? By not judging by appearances. Or reputation.

A specific behavior, such as being haughty, inconsiderate, or ignoring someone, can occur in widely varying contexts. So, it can be done for many reasons, not just narcissistic reasons. Nonetheless, there are few behaviors so unique to persons suffering from NPD that they should serve as red flags.

Here are eight red flags:

· puts on a conspicuous display of goodness and kindness

· damages the images of most others

· has a history of past upheavals

· is hated for mysterious reasons by people close to them

· exhibits unnatural and perplexing behavior — backwards reactions to things

· is a control freak, trampling privacy/boundaries

· is extremely self-absorbed

· has a hostile reaction to attention and credit given others.
Return to Table of Contents

Shows Off Goodness and Kindness

I used to give people who made a show of religiousness, kindness, caring, or any other goodness the benefit of the doubt. I am really sorry I didn't listen to my common sense that doing things to be seen doing them is fraud, not just adultery. I don't expect you to take my word for it, but this is what my life has taught me: anyone putting on the goody-two-shoes act a little too thick I get away from, because I know they're just using it as make-up to cover a zit.

In other words, they're dis-simulating their true selves. The aim is to carve out a false image that is the antithesis — negative — of their true selves. It's a work of art, not the real thing.

The truly good, kind, and caring do good to do it, not to be seen doing it. And the difference between them and show-offs is obvious.
Return to Table of Contents

Vandalizes Others' Images

Then there is the other side of the coin, which is an even more menacing sign of bad faith — what narcissists do to the images of others. Consumed with pathological envy, they make themselves look good the bogus way, by making others look bad.

Overall, individuals high in narcissism displayed amplified responses to social comparison information, experiencing greater positive affect from downward comparisons and greater hostile affect from upward comparisons.

— Bogart, L.M., Benotsh, E.G. and Pavlovic, J.D. (2004), Feeling Superior but Threatened: The Relation of Narcissism to Social Comparison, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Vol. 26, Iss. 1, pp. 35-44.

In other words, malignant narcissists feel that praiseworthy information about you diminishes them, and they feel that denigrating information about you elevates them. Hence, like the rapist, narcissists must tear their betters "down off that pedestal" by maligning them. Therefore "malignant" is a good name for malignant narcissists, because every malignant narcissist's middle name is Malign.

Narcissistic rage, character assassination and projection are some of the overt ways in which the narcissist expresses himself. For example, she may envy a work colleague's beauty, and project her feelings into her colleague by accusing her of being envious.

— Winning Teams: Can You Recognize a Narcissist?

Whom do narcissists malign? Almost everyone. If you suspect someone of being a narcissist, praise a person who obviously deserves it to him or her and observe their reaction. It shows.

Malignant narcissists speak well of very few others. Only their narcissistic parent (when no longer vulnerable to that parent) and anyone they can aggrandize themselves by association with at others' expense.

For example, if you don't get along with someone, the narcissist will say, "I get along with him fine." He will have nothing but praise for that person. Likewise, if you got bad service at a restaurant, the narcissist will say, "They gave me excellent service." The narcissist praises the other because it reflects badly on you and well on him.

Similarly, the narcissist with a trophy wife goes around praising her beauty. He's aggrandizing himself by association with her. And at the expense of everyone not good enough to win a trophy wife like his. He'll likewise aggrandize himself by association with some important person he knows, praising that person everywhere he goes to name-drop.

But such special cases are the only ones you hear a good word about from a narcissist. In fact, a narcissist will stubbornly refuse to admit any fault in them at all. They are ideal, perfect in his or her eyes.

But the rest of humanity gets the opposite. Often, narcissists glibly sneak bad ideas about others into your head. They do this by chipping away at that person's image subtly and relentlessly every time they mention him or her. Often perfuming the bad offering to cover up its smell.

An example is the man who never spoke of his wife except when talking about something else and laughing that, "Yeah, and the wife got pretty shook up about it."

That doesn't sound so bad, does it? But often this was pure fiction. More important, is that the way you'd like to hear yourself spoken of? Is that the way you'd talk about someone you want others to like? What type of picture does that paint of her? Is his talk of her tending to make people think well of her and respect her? Does it endear her to them?

That narcissist would have blown a gasket if anyone had ever described him as easily shook up. Yet for forty years he relentlessly chipped away at his wife's image with little vandalizing remarks like that, never saying anything about her that made you tend to like and admire her. Always characterizing her in a way that diminished her.

In fact, this "shook up" thing is almost cultural, used by many men on women. So, ladies, here's a bazooka: Beat him to the punch in saying it — tell him not to get "shook up," and watch the stunned look on his face. He suddenly will see offense in that remark.

However subtle the vandalism may be, you never hear a narcissist say anything about anyone that you would like to hear said about you.

Worse, narcissists are gossips. They eagerly listen to and spread slander. They are self-righteous finger-pointers, pulling the same stunt Lucifer did in the old Gnostic myth about Lucifer coming before God everyday and accusing other angels of being bad. The result was "war in high places" until the good angels, lead by St. Michael the Archangel, cast down Lucifer (now called "Satan," that is, "the slanderer") to the status they deserve.

Narcissists can make it sound like a virtue, but giving others a bad name isn't a good deed. Even if the report is true, it cannot possibly be done in the spirit of goodwill unless it is done in true witness — that is, responsible witness, on the record, not behind the back. Just because the badmouth perfumes his speech with words like love and Christian and concern and for the sake of our children (always the justification when there is no justification) and sports a halo does not change the spirit in which slander is done.

Shakespeare gives us a marvelous example of sugaring o'er slander with false concern or pity in a speech the usurper King Claudius makes to Hamlet before the whole court:

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,

To give these mourning duties to your father;

But you must know, your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound

In filial obligation for some term

To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief;

It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,

A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,

An understanding simple and unschool'd;

For what we know must be, and is as common

As any the most vulgar thing to sense,

Why should we in our peevish opposition

Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,

A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,

To reason most absurd, whose common theme

Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,

From the first corse till he that died to-day,

'This must be so.' We pray you throw to earth

This unprevailing woe, and think of us

As of a father; for let the world take note

You are the most immediate to our throne,

And with no less nobility of love

Than that which dearest father bears his son

Do I impart toward you. For your intent

In going back to school in Wittenberg,

It is most retrograde to our desire;

And we beseech you, bend you to remain

Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,

Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

Such kind and pious words, eh? Yet, how would you like that said to you in front of a hundred people? Notice how sweetly and left-handedly Claudius calls Hamlet obsequious, obstinate, impious, stubborn, unmanly, willful, weak, impatient, a simpleton, ignorant, senseless, peevish, a sinner against God and the dead and nature, irrational, impotent, and intent on doing things retrograde to the king's desire. Talk about "betrayal with a kiss."

The whole court immediately starts treating Hamlet as though he's radioactive. His girlfriend's father and brother immediately order her to dump him. He's a marked man.

And for doing what? For not forgetting the dead king, his father, and cutting short the customary mourning period to celebrate the remarriage of the queen to the usurper. Typical narcissist — can make even a virtuous act sound heinous.

If you know that narcissists are inveterate character assassins, it's easy to spot them. A narcissist has a trail of trashed good names and careers in his wake. He will even have told you strange and terrible lies about the people in his own immediate family.

If you know the person he is telling you something strange about, compare the accusation with your own observations. A narcissist will have ignored that person's real faults and smeared one of his or her virtues as a vice! And, if you know the narcissist, you'll find the narcissist himself is guilty of the very thing he's accusing this other person of.
Return to Table of Contents

History of Past Upheavals

If you know a narcissist's history, you will usually see a track record of mysterious upheavals in his life. He suddenly up and moves to a different school or job in a different town every few years. That is, every time the good angels in his Pathological Space start comparing notes, get his number, and become enraged. In one narcissist I know of, these upheavals began with one in the eighth grade.
Return to Table of Contents

Hated for Mysterious Reasons by People Close to Them

In fact, another red flag is being hated — I mean really hated — for mysterious reasons. And by people that hating is uncharacteristic of. If, say, a person's adult son or daughter doesn't even visit him in the hospital or go to his funeral,* there is a heavy-duty reason for that. Fortunately, it's not our responsibility to judge. But we do need to appreciate the weight of such a startling fact. People do things for reasons. They are not always good reasons or just reasons, but people do things for reasons.

* Good examples: Abraham Lincoln did not go to his father's funeral, and Barbara Bush did not go to her mother's funeral.
Return to Table of Contents

Perplexing Behavior - Backwards Reactions to Things

The reddest red flag is perverted behavior. Leave out the sexual connotation: I use that word perverted because it means "thoroughly twisted" or "turned backwards." Any act can be perverted. Perverted behavior is the extreme opposite of what is called for. This is behavior that goes against nature, behavior that makes you want to pinch yourself.

In other words, it's a surprise, a shock, the last thing you expected.

Like maybe everyone in that classroom was sitting up straight with all eyes riveted upon Teacher and you could have heard a pin drop. Ka-BOOM! He flies into snarling rage at some kid he won't identify as though that kid just flipped him the bird or something.

Or maybe you've been dating him for six months, and he has been saying from day one that he wanted you marry him. You finally tell him you love him. Ka-BOOM! He gets mad and tells you that you don't love him. And demands that you wear your hair a different way. If you really love him, you will, you know.

Perplexing.

In my experience, afterwards you are unable to say what the blow-up was even about. That isn't normal. When you have an argument with a normal person, afterwards you can say what it was about.

Though such off-the-wall flights into rage are the most memorable instances of perverted behavior, they aren't the only kind. In fact, other kinds are more telling.

For example, take a situation that has a nearly irresistible pull on the heartstrings. Imagine that some person in the room is suffering great grief and sorrow and breaks down into tears. Seeing that affects normal people like gravity, attracting them to that person to comfort her or him. But what does a narcissist do? The exact opposite. Remember, she must deny attention to that person, and she can't stand to see anyone else give attention to that person. So, you'd think anti-gravity was impelling her out the door on the far end of that room as she hurries out jabbering cheerily about everything BUT what is going on.

That's what I mean by "perverted" reactions to things — weird, backwards reactions to things. Behaviors that make you feel like you just stepped into The Twilight Zone and need to pinch yourself.

It's always a sign that a person is dangerous in some way. Perverted behavior is characteristic of psychopaths and malignant narcissists. Normal people rarely exhibit perverted behavior unless under extreme pressure to do so, and even normal people are dangerous at such times. For, that's when "normal" people all look the other way to allow things like the Holocaust while pretending that they don't know what's going on.

Inappropriate laughter is an example of perverted behavior. I'm not talking about the inappropriate laughter that sometimes comes from a nervous or self-conscious person, or from people under a great weight of fear, pressure, or sorrow. That's a release, and we understand it. I'm talking about inappropriate laughter that makes you wonder where it came from.

For instance, when the Challenger (space shuttle) exploded on take-off, we saw it live on television. As with the 9/11 Attack, the networks replayed the spectacular footage every two minutes while shocked America got the news and gathered around television sets. One narcissist I know of was so in need of getting his stunned co-workers' attention off the TV and onto himself that he put on a comedy act, parodying what the victims were saying to each other as the rocket plummeted into the sea. Though his fellow workers were scared to death of becoming the object of one of his persecutions, they were shocked at this chilling display of inhumanity and could manage only nervous laughter at the creep's attention-getting jokes.

That happens only when the victims aren't regarded as human beings. Either because they have been demonized by dehumanizing caricatures in propaganda or because the laugher is a psychopath or narcissist.

Other examples of perverted behavior are:

· reacting with contempt to what should evoke sympathy

· reacting with aversion to what should attract

· reacting with anger to what should please (such as finding some mysterious offense in an attempt to suck up)

· getting angrier in reaction to what should appease (Narcissistic Rage)

In short, whenever you see a backwards reaction to something, believe your eyes and ears. Accept this behavior's perplexity and know what you know — that there is something seriously wrong with that person. And don't forget about it tomorrow when he's Dr. Jekyll again.
Return to Table of Contents

Tramples Privacy / Boundaries as a Control Freak

Yet another red flag is a universal disrespect for other people's privacy, boundaries. This is a result of the narcissist viewing people as mere objects there for her sake to serve her needs and desires.

I gave an example in the previous section, in the boyfriend who disrespects your right to decide how you wear your hair. It's your body, not his. You're the one who lives with the consequences of the decision, not him. You aren't his car, something he owns and therefore can paint a different color if he wishes. You own you.

But he is treating your body as HIS property by presuming the rights of its owner over it.

Here's another, more literal, example. Your property line affects him like waving a red flag affects a bull. He must violate it and make what's your territory his territory. So, he parks on your lawn, ties his big mean dog out at the edge of his property to use yours (and menace you with Rover). He reacts to your claim of ownership as though you are stealing from him. Nothing short of a big fence will stop him from making your property his. And then he'll probably ram it with his truck if he thinks you'll be intimidated by that.

In other words, he is incapable of "distinguishing between mine and thine." Again, he is treating your property as his by asserting the rights of its owner over it.

Even your mind is not your own in his eyes.

Which is why a narcissist sticks his nose into everything, for he considers your business his business. He feels it incumbent on him to bestow judgment every single thing people think, say, do, wear, or even feel. His disapproval (or the threat of it) is a stick this control freak with a God Complex herds people with.

He is possessing you.

Individuals with NPD are likely to attempt to get their needs met in relationships without acknowledging the independent existence of those from which they "expect to feed."

— Sharon C. Ekleberry, Dual Diagnosis and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder

So, he presumptuously makes other people's choices for them. Often to ridiculous extremes, such as telling people how to wear their hair, what clothes to wear, where to buy things and what brands to buy, what chair to sit in, what end to start on, which route to take, and so on. You can tell he's doing it just to do it, because he makes people change their choice to comply with his wishes. In fact, if the same person is doing what he said to do the last time, the narcissist tells her to do it differently this time.

In short, a narcissist views others as objects on a chessboard, or tools, robots, the executioners of his will. One I know of, a private school principal, demonstrates the desperate compulsion narcissists have to control people. He is said to have nearly driven almost a thousand people to justifiable homicide by blasting over an hour's worth of nonstop orders over a blaring squawk box about what to do in an annual Christmas celebration that everybody had carried off without instructions for decades. Nobody can walk into a room and sit down without this clown telling them to sit somewhere else.
Return to Table of Contents

Extreme Self-Absorption

Extreme self-absorption is another red flag. Unless a narcissist is a "doting" narcissist who keeps a "star" child he's exploiting under a microscope, just ask him about his family. You will be astounded at what he doesn't know about them.

That's the dead give-away.

To test a person, write a basic character description of each member of his immediate family. Note things like whether this person is religious, excitable, highly motivated — that's all, just basic stuff that anyone who sees them regularly should know about them. If you ask a narcissist to match each character description with the family member it belongs to, he will gape at you as though you just asked him to show the derivation of E = mc2.

It will astound him that you would expect him to know such things about his wife and children.

Because you know more about cartoon characters than a narcissist knows about the members of his immediate family. For, he can learn nothing about what he willfully, relentlessly, and reflexively pays no attention to.

Narcissists are notorious for being unable to remember people's names or to even recognize their faces outside the usual setting. That's because people all look the same to you when they all look like this.

In your encounters with them, you make sure you get 100% of their attention while giving them zero of yours. So, what did they say? Anything? Did they even get a word in edgewise? If they did, you didn't hear it.

A narcissist may, for example, recognize her son in the home but not when she runs into him in the grocery store — giving him a stupid stare as he approaches, until he clues her by saying, "Hi, Mom."

Here are some other illustrative examples from narcissists I have known or heard about:

· Does not know how to spell his daughter's name.

· Never had any idea what kind of grades his kids got.

· Does not know his wife or children's birthdays.

· Has never visited the major Website his/her child/sibling published.

· Does not know how old his children are.

· Does not know that his daughter was a National Merit Finalist.

· Has no idea how good his kids are at any sport or other activity.

· Does not know what perfume his wife wears.

· Has never read the book his child wrote.

· Never does learn the names of the students in his/her classes.

· Cannot get the names of people "with two first names" straight. (viz., Jean Paul, Howard Dean, John Kerry, or even John Edwards)

· Does not know the names of his children's spouses, let alone his grandchildren.

· Has never shown up to watch his son play varsity sports.

· Does not know what his children majored in at college or what degrees they earned.

· Does not know whether his teen-age son/daughter is dating.

· Has never met the boy his teen-age daughter has been dating for three years.

One could hardly be less interested in a fly on the wall.
Return to Table of Contents

Hostile Reaction to Attention or Credit Given Others

And then, of course, we get to the heart of malignant narcissism, Narcissistic Envy.

You will notice that, invariably, when anyone is given recognition before the group, a narcissist immediately starts showing dislike for, or animosity toward, that person. Immediately he sets out on a campaign of character assassination.

Envy is bitter, an extremely unpleasant emotion. It's normal only when some other party really has robbed us of our due.

A narcissist's unnatural envy is so universal and so strong that he cannot even stand being in a place where someone else gets attention. If he cannot keep that from happening, he will find some way to absent himself from the situation — if only by turning away from others and staring at a corner of the ceiling.
Return to Table of Contents