Chapter 2 - What is a Female Covert Narcissist?

Note: If you haven’t read Chapter 1, while not strictly necessary, I recommend reading that first for context.

Just What Is a Female Covert Narcissist?

The term “narcissist” gets tossed around a lot in in modern discourse, and often incorrectly, but in this article we’ll focus on a smaller subset of that. In my first couple of articles I referenced my late wife, Anne, as a female covert narcissist, or FCN. Generally, covert narcissism is a sub-type of narcissistic personality disorder where the subject tends to demonstrate their self-centeredness, their need for admiration, and manipulative tendencies in subtle, often well masked ways. One might think of them as the polar opposite of the bold and domineering grandiose narcissist we’re more familiar with. Additionally, the female covert narcissist tends to present a little differently from the male version (that I won’t cover here), hence the distinction by sex.

Now, I could go through a long and boring list of traits filled with clinical language of what one could expect from a FCN, but I’d rather not cause your soul to leave your body from boredom. Instead, I will give personal examples of these key traits from my own lived experience as this series of articles progresses and, hopefully, do so in a manner that both keeps your interest and makes the information “stick”.

The Early Days of Being With a Female Covert Narcissist

When I first meet Anne, our first in-person interaction was easy, seamless, almost like we’d been friends before, or like there was almost no work to do to know each other.🚩 My first date with Anne on a summer morning turned into a second date that evening. Saying she felt so safe with me that she could just open up, Anne very quickly laid out her vulnerabilities, telling all about the bad relationship she’d just left, and how badly other prior relationships had ended as well. 🚩 In no time at all I was reciprocating, laying out all of my hopes and dreams, spilling my fears, and even my own vulnerabilities. 🚩

I did my best to stay objective for the first few weeks, going so far as to date a couple of other interested ladies. But those interactions could not compete with the excitement of being with Anne and pretty quickly faded out.

We couldn’t keep away from each other, sometimes to the exclusion of things we should have been doing instead. Everything we did together in our newfound love had that happy golden glow around it 🚩where seemingly everything the other person does is wonderful and seems to align with your own thoughts and beliefs.

Being Mormons, we weren’t engaging in sex before we were married, but like most new couples at this stage, it was nearly impossible keep our hands off each other. And all the while there were exciting conversations that regularly revolved around sex, intimacy, and, at their core, Anne reinforcing her sexuality with me without any prompting from me.🚩

As our relationship progressed and Anne and I were engaged, there came one late evening where we were relaxing on the couch together and I was getting ready to head home. Anne began to playfully wheedle me for details of my dating in the weeks right after we’d met. I quite honestly told her that in the early days after we’d met I’d gone out with a couple of other girls, not knowing where we’d really end up as a couple, but nothing serious. Immediately the playfulness disappeared and I was informed that it was a severe betrayal that I had done so because “we were dating.” (Anne conveniently forgot that she had previously told me that she herself had continued to date others for a few weeks after we’d met, but when brought up I was gaslighting her.)🚩

What followed was a rash of threats, anger, gaslighting, and ultimatums for me. So, of course, I begged for forgiveness, made many promises, and eventually “convinced” Anne to accept my apologies and go on with our engagement and wedding. Even as I made those promises I had that unsettled feeling like I knew I was somehow making a terrible mistake. I was. But I was also addicted to the relationship.

Break It Down

Notice all those red flags above? Any one or two of those might have been OK, but taken together that’s a strong warning to RUN, and don’t look back. Now, one could argue that, taken singly, each of the red flags means nothing in itself, and that’s true because most people will show a little narcissism from time to time. But to recognize a FCN, you really have to take in the whole picture to understand what’s going on, and I cannot emphasize this enough: female covert narcissists are absolute MASTERS at faking empathy and connection.

#1. Intimacy and Connection Are Too Fast. FCNs are extremely adept at faking a deep connection early on. They’ve learned just the right things to say and do to create an illusion with which to pull you into a relationship and get you addicted to their charms. You’ll often hear variations of things like “I’m easy to fall in love with” or “we’re soulmates” or, in Anne’s case, “twin flames”.

New relationships are by nature exciting and fun, but they should come with some building time as two people slowly and naturally come to a deeper understanding of each other. Time is a key ingredient to truly, deeply knowing someone because it’s difficult to keep up a facade for an extended period. FCNs push this process extremely quickly because it gets both of you a great big high and leaves you dependent on her for more. Once you’re hooked, they’ll use it against you like a jujitsu move to control and manipulate you by extracting promises that will serve them throughout the relationship.

#2. Plays the Vulnerable Victim. Being a sympathetic victim is a frequent tool in the FCN’s toolbox of manipulation. By highlighting previous bad relationships, she seeks to use your need to be needed and to be seen as a protector to draw you into an “us versus them” dynamic with her. And this dynamic is key because it helps keep you focused on external threats to her while working to fend off anything that might tip her unregulated emotions, rather than the ever increasingly dysfunctional dynamic that takes place in every narcissistic relationship.

#3. Past Relationships Always End Badly. This is a nearly universal rule. No matter the cause of previous break ups, the FCN will always show herself in a good light while projection, gaslighting, and even outright lies may all be deployed in the service of dramatizing the split and downplaying or even erasing any role they may have played in it. This also plays into flag #2.

#4. Weaponizing Limerence. Most of us can think back to the first time we fell in love. Everything about the other person was wrapped in a warm golden glow of idealization with intrusive thoughts about them bringing butterflies to you stomach. Every idle moment is filled with wonder and delight thinking about your new love and even their significant flaws seem to fade away into the background. Limerence is an emotional rollercoaster, fueled by uncertainty, and loaded with a host of physical symptoms: racing heart, euphoria, loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, or even feeling “high” around the other person.

For a FCN, that feeling is just as addicting; it fills their need, their craving, for for external validation and approval. But like any high, it doesn’t last and, sooner or later, the limerence will falter, the mask will slip, and you will bear the blame.

#5. Love/Sex Bombing. Like narcissism, this term has gotten a lot of use in popular culture in more recent years, not least because it can be mistaken for plain old lust in a society where many couples are engaging in hookup culture. That tends to muddy the waters on this flag a bit. But you can see through this ambiguity relatively easily by realizing that it’s not only about being bombarded with hot monkey sex, but more importantly she is working to create a false emotional intimacy very quickly.

The distinction here is important because, while sex can be an important building block and maintenance item for a good and loving relationship, it can also be a tool for hijacking your nervous system and getting you addicted. For the FCN, it serves the purpose of forming an emotional bond that will last and give her the best supply. The emotional bond that you feel is her primary goal because it keeps you around even after the mask slips and the true narcissist starts to show through.

#6. The Mask Slips. At some point in the relationship the mask will slip, and the FCN will create a scenario in which she claims to be hurt, and in her mind she may be, so that she can use all of the sensitive spots, all of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that you’ve divulged to her against you like emotional jujitsu. Her goal: to extract promises from you that she can use like shackles to keep you in the relationship.

These shackles will be your integrity, loyalty, protectiveness, honesty, and more. No matter how many years go by, no matter how hard you work to satisfy her needs, those same hurts that were used to chain you down in the first place will continue to come up again and again. If you attempt to set a boundary and call a halt to these manipulations, you risk a major blowup because she will feel like you’re rejecting her. And this, too, will go into her stockpile of ammunition against you the next time she needs to manipulate you for her own ends.

The Big Question: Why??

Here’s a simple answer too a complex thing - covert narcissists seek to hijack your nervous system so that they can manipulate you into regulating theirs. Read that again, and think about it for a moment before going on.

Deep down, narcissists of all stripes are broken and wounded, and they know it. They live in abject terror of of being rejected or “exposed” for being somehow less than others, thus their endless need for narcissistic supply. Put another way, they have a pathological need for external validation to temporarily fill the void where authentic self-worth should be. Most often they fill this void with the sort of vapid, empty validation one might expect in a world of social media and passing acquaintances, but it never lasts.

For evolutionary reasons, female covert narcissists are particularly adept at manipulation and faking empathy, and they come with a two-fold mission: 1) they seek a stronger type of validation to fill the void, especially if you happen to be strongly empathetic yourself and 2) someone to help regulate their emotional state both with that validation and by running interference against outside influences so that she feels safe from rejection.

Much like a sugar high, the shallow external validation one gets from common sources like social media and passing acquaintances doesn’t last long and needs replenishing quickly, often with diminishing returns. But if normal supply is like a sugar high for a narcissist, supply from an empath is like heroin. They know that the empath sees not only their outward persona, but also the broken and wounded person hidden within them, holds a space for both, and naively chooses to stay anyway because they can see the potential of the narcissist. This does not necessarily, however, change their supply-seeking behavior.

FCNs will ultimately seek to hijack your better nature and use it to control you to get you to act as a buffer for their own fragile ego, placing you in the role of rescuer, if you will. And if for any reason she feels you aren’t fulfilling that role to her satisfaction, she’ll hit you with accusations, threats, loyalty binds, or any number of other manipulations to get or keep you there.

The FCN needs to feel like she owns you to be safe from her fear of rejection. Threaten that enough and she’ll go to extremes to manipulate you back into the relationship and, if that fails, she will begin the discard process, which we’ll touch on in another article.

Be well.

-Fritz