14 Traits of The Nice Guy Narcissist

You’ll notice that if you actually challenge them in any meaningful or fundamental way, they’ll get cold and nasty very, very quickly. But only in private. They will not do this in public, and they’ll be very careful not to leave any evidence behind.

Number 8: Public Image.

You’ll notice they work very, very hard to maintain their public image. They’re focused on how they look on social media, they’re very focused on how they look in photographs, and they’re very focused on reputation management, as though they were a kind of PR company of one.

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.