If you constantly feel confused, exhausted, or to blame for every issue in your relationship, you might be dealing with covert narcissist traits that are difficult to name. Once you see them, everything changes.

HOW TO SPOT COVERT NARCISSIST TRAITS: 5 BEHAVIORS TO NOTICE

1. HE’S YOUR INSTANT SOULMATE

Notice if your relationship moves incredibly fast, and he seems perfectly tailored just for you.

It may be hard to remember this phase if you’ve been married for 10 or 20 years, but think back to when you met. Did it feel very serendipitous? Did it feel like you’d met your soulmate? That part can actually be grooming.

Stay with me until the end, where I go into detail about my strategy for spotting this mirroring trap when you are dating.

2. CIRCULAR CONVERSATIONS OVER TINY ISSUES

You gently ask him to text you if he is going to be late coming home. Somehow, it turns into an exhausting debate about how “you’re so suspicious” or “you don’t appreciate how hard he works.”

Instead of discussing plans together, these conversations become emotionally draining loops. It might look like simple “miscommunication” on the surface, but the pattern shows something else. Healthy communication leads to clarity, while this manipulative type of communication leads to pure exhaustion and self-doubt when dealing with covert narcissist traits.

3. THE BLAME-SHIFTING VICTIM TRAP

If you try to share a concern with a covert narcissist, he’s likely to put it back on to you. That happened to me. I’d tell him maybe that a sarcastic comment hurt my feelings, and the next thing I knew he would tell me that I hurt his feelings without acknowledging what happened to me at all. In my relationship, I would end up apologizing or trying to help him feel better, and meanwhile, my concerns were never addressed.

If he’s constantly the misunderstood victim, he’s avoiding taking responsibility for his own bad behavior.

4. SPENDING TIME ALONE WITH HIM FEELS DEPLETING

You might notice that out and about, you have a good time together, like if you’re going to a movie or doing a project together. A lot of women describe how they might go to a dinner party with him, and everything is great. But the second they get into the car together, alone, he’s like cold, silent, completely disconnected. Maybe blaming her for how the party didn’t go well, even though the party went just fine. Or a vacation with the whole family usually goes pretty well. But if you just take a couple trips, it’s like not fun at all.

Healthy relationships usually feel really great in downtime together, but if he has covert narcissist traits, alone time will feel a little weird.

5. HE HIDES BEHIND EXPLANATIONS WITH COVERT NARCISSIST TRAITS

If he continues to do really harmful things that you’ve never done and your healthy friends have never done, and then he explains it away by saying he had a traumatic childhood, or maybe stress from work, maybe an addiction, maybe even anxiety or depression. He might even say he’s struggling, confused, or working on himself.

But if the behavior stays the same, those explanations only keep you stuck. Look at what he is actually doing right now to manipulate reality and harm your wellbeing.

If you’re unsure if you’re experiencing covert narcissist traits, take our free emotional abuse test to see if he’s using any one of the 19 different types of emotional abuse.

Key takeaways from the interview:

Early Signs of Covert Narcissist Traits
When Therapy and Labels Miss Emotional Abuse
How to Help Victims of Covert Emotional Abuse
Rebuilding Self-Trust After Covert Narcissist Abuse

TRANSCRIPT: WHEN YOU SEE HIS COVERT NARCISSIST TRAITS EVERYTHING CHANGES

Anne: I interviewed three women from our community. We’re gonna start with Cynthia’s story, and then after you’re gonna hear from Maisie and Lorna.

Welcome. Cynthia.

Cynthia: Hello, Anne. It’s great to be here.

Anne: So Cynthia, let’s start with your story.

Cynthia: In the beginning he was so kind, generous. He had a great relationship with his mum. He was very outgoing and he built a very quick relationship with my mum as well. It made me feel very safe. This is great, like we’re all getting along. I had no idea he was hiding covert narcissist traits.

We had a huge fight before the marriage, actually, and he got counseling that week. He came to me and said, “My therapist thinks you are the angry one, actually, not me.” So he’d managed to convince the therapist that I was the bad one.

Anne: They very easily manipulate therapists. Because there’s lies. And then there’s levels of lies on those lies. We have no way of knowing what somebody said or didn’t say. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the therapist said that.

COVERT NARCISSIST TRAITS APPEAR AFTER THE WEDDING

Cynthia: absolutely.

On the wedding day, his best man talked about him and showed pictures of him. There was one picture that was really awful. My family is quite conservative. I just remember feeling really embarrassed, like, what on earth have I done?

Then it was the evening, I went to sleep. He said he was going to say goodbye to people, and I just thought he would come to bed maybe half an hour later, and I woke up at 4:00 AM alone in the bridal suite. Things just got worse from then on. I’d wanted to be a mum since I was seven years old. I was actually going through fertility treatment with him. And he was starting to blame my hormonal imbalance. It was just his way of putting me down every single month.

He even got my mum convinced that I was in perimenopause. And at this time, I’d already engaged with a psychologist, because I just felt like this is impossible to do anything with him.

I was on antidepressants.

We went out for a walk one day and I said, “Okay, so if we’re going on holiday in December and you want to do the fertility treatment in January, does that mean you’re not going to use the sauna in the spa hotel that we’re staying in?”

And he was like, “No, no, I still wanna use the sauna. Maybe I’ll just use for one minute.” I said, “Well then we’ll have to wait until April then, ’cause we have to wait then three months after the holiday to do the treatment.

HE PRIORITIZED HIS PLEASURE OVER MY PAIN

Anne: So was he like a huge sauna fan before this? When you’re dating and when you’re, first married was he like, “sauna is my life. It is the most important thing to me.”

This is a clue for women to look for, this is a piece of the puzzle. If there’s something that he hasn’t really cared that much about before, and then suddenly he’s caring about it a lot, that might be an indication to you that he’s lying.

Cynthia: In the year leading up to the treatment, he didn’t once use a sauna. Why isn’t he just use the sauna now if he’s desperate? He didn’t. All of a sudden became a tactic for him, I felt, to control me. He knew I desperately wanted a child and I spent thousands on freezing my eggs and all of a sudden using a sauna was more important than that.

And you know we were talking about the whole sauna thing for about six weeks.

Anne: That’s crazy. I just wanna tell you how crazy that is. you’re talking about a sauna for six weeks.

It’s so heartbreaking ’cause it feels like he cares about this one thing more than he cares about me, not realizing that he cares about everything more than he cares about us. In the moment, ...