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Are You Dealing With a Sensitive Introvert or a Covert Narcissist: 23 Ways to Tell
Usually, when we picture a narcissist, we picture someone vain, confident, and completely uninterested in anyone else but himself. (I’ll let you choose your own favorite celebrity example.) But according to science, there’s actually a whole other, quieter harder-to-spot type of narcissist out there — the covert narcissist.
All narcissist are self-obsessed, but it turns out not all are confident of their own greatness. While your garden-variety egomaniac will preen and brag and generally make herself the center of attention, a covert narcissist will be just as self-focused, but in a defensive way. Covert narcissists are convinced on their specialness, but they’re not convinced the world gives them their due, so they’re constantly on the lookout for slights, insults, and underestimations of their specialness.
In other words, covert narcissists trade swagger for sensitivity, social discomfort, and sob stories. And that can be the perfect honey trap for kinder and more empathetic souls, therapist Elinor Greenberg warns on Business Insider. “They make themselves look like the victim,” she says. “There tends to be a string of misfortune, like every single ex is a jerk, every single friend they have is unhealthy.”
