Number 9: Exhausting being around them.
Being around them is exhausting, and you’ll start to see over time the gap between the public persona and who they really are is becoming wider and wider. This can create a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance in us because we’re storing two experiences of the same person separately. This becomes quite traumatic. I can actually build a trauma bond with the individual. So when they’re being good, you store that in one hard drive of your memory. When they’re being nasty and abusive, you see that in a different hard drive of your memory. And then, in order to adapt to your intimate relationship with them, you have to split yourself and become two different people who’s associating with this individual in two different ways. The cognitive dissonance is experienced as a somatic, body-based stress where an individual is being asked to hold two conflicting ideas or pieces of information inside the head at the same time.
You will also notice that you start to become nervous about their emotional responses to you and to scenarios, so you start to try and control your responses and even control the scenarios so that you don’t get that nasty emotional response. We call this walking on eggshells.
Number 10: Communication falls into…
You’ll see that broadly speaking, all of their communication falls into one of two categories. 1: they’re either humble bragging about who they are, what they’ve done, how amazing they are, how amazing their projects are, and the impact they’ve had in the world. Or 2: covert requests for help and assistance. They will have a lot of people around them who function as minions, and if you look and you’re honest and you’re humble, you’ll probably find you’re one of them. The closer you are to them, that means they’ve allowed you into the inner circle, it’s because the more useful you are. You’re either offering money, you’re offering s*x, you’re offering access to status and fame, or you’re helping them move forward in their objectives in some way.
Number 11: Inner Circle.
It’s only those people who’ve made it through to the inner circle who start to see the true face of the nice guy, nice school narcissist. It’s only you who are going to see what they’re really like. All of their fans, all of the people outside of this close inner circle will be completely oblivious and just think that they are wonderful human beings.
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