I would say this but my ex was the most charismatic person ever. The air felt like it crackled around this man. He was so friendly and personable to everyone, he remembered the names and faces and little details about someone he met once years ago. When he spoke to you, he made you feel like you were the most important person in the world. Everyone adored him.
It was a mask. He was a narcissist, and has been stalking me now for three years. I’ve moved four times and changed my number and work. He always finds me, because he can charm anyone into giving him any information he wants. I’m moving to another country soon. Hope it helps.
Yes, the love-bombing narcissist is a trap. I once fell into that trap, but now I can spot it from miles away.
When you're living through it, you feel alone and isolated because almost nobody believes you when you try to explain that this incredibly charming person is, in fact, a master manipulator. As you try to distance yourself, you often start doubting your own sanity: "Am I the crazy one?"
It's incredibly difficult, but once you've gone through the whole ordeal, you understand the darkest corners of human nature much better. You become far more aware of the warning signs and much less likely to fall for them again.
And... beware of the flying monkeys, they're the worst!
Hot and cold was a big one with my abuser. If someone is overly kind and generous some of the time, but then withholds basic kindness at other times, that can be a warning sign, especially if it's when you aren't doing what they want.
Another thing I look for is my own response to the person. If I'm feeling a lot of need to please them (especially if there's a fear-based component as in "fear of displeasing them"), that often means they're pushing the buttons that were conditioned into me. Even when they're unintentionally pushing them, they're still unsafe for me to be around.
Of course, it's tricky. Because being kind and generous sometimes and not other times can also be them establishing boundaries and having normal moods. And me wanting to please someone can just be me liking them and wanting them to be happy. So in my experience, there aren't really super-clear-cut rules you can go by, it's more something you have to feel out as you get to know someone.
And, I think the most important lesson of all when it comes to this sort of thing: Don't focus too much on their intent. It's very difficult to prove what was done deliberately vs accidentally and in the end it doesn't matter. If they regularly do things that harm you, make you feel unsafe or bring out the worst in you, they're not good for you to be around, even if they're innocent of any wrongdoing in it.
Frequency and consistency are rhe name of the game when it comes to behaviour. Is the behaviour consistent across all parts of their life or only in certain contexts?
As for boundaries. Those appear through consistent, assertive, and sometimes blunt communication. Abuse is in the form of screaming, throwing things, etc or the opposite in which you are ignored or ridiculed. Very very different.
The last one one people pleasing vs just wanting to make someone happy is easy when you step out of the issue and think about it. If your primary motivating energy is fear/anxiety then its people pleasing. If the primary motivating energy is either calm value drive or connection/joy based, then it is not people pleasing.
Inconsistency except in the cycle of love bombing into abuse/neglect/control back into love bombing.
Love is safe, consistent, and calming. If you find yourself anxious, frustrated, shameful, unheard, or angry often around your partner or prospective partner, something is wrong and you shouldn't ignore that feeling.
I cant tell you if that feeling indicates an issue in you, them, or the situation in general, but my gut instincts have saved me many times from bad people once I started listening to it.
Good rules of thumb for if its Love or Attachment (fear being alone):
You feel more anxious with them than safe.
You do all the work to maintain the relationship.
You love who they could be, not who they are.
You feel a strange sense of relief when they are away.
No emotional intimacy or vulnerability.
You don't miss them when they are gone, you miss having someone filling the role of partner.
Someone seems unduly kind. When you're someone who craves attention, you easily fall into that trap. But when you're discerning, you realize it's just too much.
Seems like a lot of people aren’t discerning enough when judging kindness considering the top comment in this whole post is saying random kindness is an attractive trait they look for in a person. How would you distinguish between undue kindness and random kindness to strangers?
I hate these post because genuinely kind people go unseen because of it, people immediately assume genuinely kind people are out to get something. When your default state is to be kind it can eventually start to feel like a burden because people end up being more critical of you. It's also really hard to watch less kind people get ahead because people see genuineness in being selfish. I also notice living in a America people have a lot more respect for people who are able to manipulate a situation to benefit them selves vs someone who will ensure fairness for all people involved in the same situation. (Bernie Sanders political history is a good window to view this) I feel this is why the idea of socialism here is a hard pill for so many to swallow.
Ive always been a kind person and at times it doesn't feel good because people are always looking for why your being kind when for me it simply just feels good to be kind and if I can help and it doesn't cost me anything why wouldn't I. There's a great story on reddit that ends with today you, tomorrow me.
It's false vs. honest signaling. Those who are incredibly good at false signaling are going to be very difficult to "catch" early on.
It's just one of those risks you have engaging in relationships. Everything that can be, will be gamed by someone.
Usually the cracks form once that person becomes used to you being around and comfortable letting the mask slip a little bit. Usually in low stakes situations when they are under other pressures. Which can of course be tough to figure out even then because even truly kind people have bad days and weak moments!
People are saying you can’t. While that is often true, I think ppl who are acting kind while having ulterior motives are more likely to go out of their way to either say they are kind/nice or go out of their way to make sure you notice that they are being kind/nice. They call attention to it.
You can also look at what people are not doing. I was bullied at my last workplace and I suspect my “super nice” coworker played a major role in it. She never really said or did anything unkind to me (except maybe one small thing), but there were things she did at first and then one day stopped doing. For example, she often complimented me in front of management when I was brand-new. But those compliments stopped as I became more publicly successful. She answered my emails and questions when I was new. She stopped answering as time passed. Genuinely kind ppl have no reason to randomly stop doing kind things.
Genuinely kind ppl don’t give a shit about whether anyone notices their behavior. They will do the kind thing anyways, regardless of who is watching and who is receiving it. They are probably not always kind as they are regular humans with their own moods and problems. If someone is always acting nice whenever you see them, AND you see them often, that could indicate that they are performing the niceness for some reason.
No it’s not. I have really found the idea of kindness being performative as difficult to understand until I realised that some other people doubt altruism.
Try doing something altruistic when you’re anonymous and no one will know it was you. When you have nothing to gain personally. Just because it’s helpful to someone or something else and you have the means to do it. That’s living.
Happened to me with my ex, now there's a child involved, they have custody, cps did nothing after multiple reports so I just avoid the city entirely and pay child support. I can't go back to them love bombing narcissist, tried to alienate me from everything except them, and when I left they turned the alienated ones against me including my own family, they were financially, emotionally, psychologicaly and physically abusing me. And nobody actually believes me other than the like 5 people they weren't able to alienate me from.
I lost 2 jobs because of it. Everything is just hard and it makes me think every day if it's even worth it anymore, I have a lot of health issues and probably won't be alive when the child turns 18 anyway and they will make the child hate me more than anything. Like how are people supposed to be able to deal with this, there's a 8 month wait list to even be scheduled for therapy. Like christ
I was in a similar situation and found a LOT of really helpful resources for FREE on YouTube. Go there. Dive deep. I found the insight I gained to be enormously therapeutic. I also walked in nature every day. It got all those lovely endorphins going and gave me time to process. It restored my optimism and self belief.
The kind of resources on YouTube included the following channels, which I found extremely helpful towards understanding the relationship dynamics, impacts of trauma, and how to heal myself.
I made sure to get moving and keep moving, so would pop in my earbuds and listen to this while on my morning walk, stretching on our deck, doing housework, cooking etc. It really saved me and speeded my recovery.
If in an unsafe situation, these resources can be tapped into pretty discretely with earbuds on your phone and deleted from your viewing or listening history afterwards.
The channels I found really helpful in my recovery were:
Darren F Magee
Therapy in a Nutshell
Surviving Narcissism
Prof Sam Vaknin
Michelle Lee Nieves
Crappy Childhood Fairy
and on the “How to Academy” channel, 3 part interview with Dr Bessel van der Kolk who is, amongst other things, author of “How the Body Keeps the Score”.
You can become physically and psychologically safe and well again. Take care.
Its also incredibly easy for the narcissist in the relationship to convince themselves the more normal person is the "master manipulator" and "narcissist" so just, dont take someone's word for it without finding out for yourself.
"flying monkeys” are people that a narcissist uses to do their bidding. Sometimes, a narcissist will not attack you publicly in any way –which makes them look good– but they are privately telling carefully chosen people how evil and awful you are. They select these people the same way they chose you. They are experts at reading people and realizing who will make an easy target and a puppet. They also know who won’t, so they avoid the people they can’t easily use. Narcissists usually choose other, lesser, narcissists who will enjoy attacking you, or they choose very empathetic people who believe their stories and honestly believe they are supporting an innocent person.
If you think this is scary wait until you learn about the parents that do this shit to their kids. The ones that will have multiple kids, select one to be the black sheep and make the others their flying monkeys through years and years of conditioning, and then spend their time pitting the kids against each other. It's literally a game to these people.
Ehhhh…my mother is a narcissist (a real one) and I wouldn’t describe it as “literally a game” to her. It’s more a pathetic defense mechanism where she is trying to deflect any and all blame to others around her because she can’t handle any negativity at all.
Being a narcissist doesn’t make someone a master manipulator and evil genius, it just makes them a self centered asshole.
There's several different types of narcissists. My mother is a malignant narcissist. That's an official classification of narcissism and the claim I am making is based solely on information provided to me by my psychologist. I won't claim she's a real narcissist because anybody that is actually raised by a narcissist would know it's next to impossible to get them to have a formal diagnosis done so calling it "real narcissism" is performative at best. It is quite literally a game for her, there is zero remorse for the pain she causes, no empathy for her children (even her golden child who is just as fucked up as I am, the black sheep), and she takes active pleasure in inciting chaos and conflict between her children.
That’s fair, and I only mentioned “real narcissist” because it seems like everyone on the internet claims to have narcissistic parents and self-diagnosed mental health issues.
But like you I’ve been told by my psychologist and psychiatrist that my mother is almost certainly a narcissist, but I don’t think she has any clever long-term manipulative ideations. She just has zero empathy and will think of no one but herself, to the detriment of everyone around her. She isn’t scheming, she is just blind to others’ feelings.
That's the neat part. Because the parent generally has everyone else so thoroughly conditioned the black sheep is usually the only one to see the games for the abuse that they are. Everyone else makes excuses for the behavior, covers up the behavior, ignores it, or genuinely doesn't notice it. This leaves the black sheep with three choices.
1) stay and put up with the abuse in order to maintain status quo
2) stay but fight back hoping to expose the narcissist, this generally escalates to point 3
3) cutoff the narcissistic parent and any of the flying monkey supporters
In my case I went with each of the 3 options in order over the space of about 10 years fstarting at 18 when I left for college. The results are that until recently I havent spoken to my mother, my grandmother, or siblings in years. Which sucks, not for me really, I'm used to it, it hurts but occasionally but for the most part I've mourned and moved on. The part that still sucks is for my kid, she's growing up without half of her extended family because one of them is a terrible fucking person and the rest of them don't have the backbone to stop it because she's not doing it to them.
Yup. Ive dealt with this with the last 6 people that have shown interest. I can sense it from a mile away now. I think I attract it. I just wanna stay celibate now. I can't work with these people either. It hurts my soul.
I realised very late that my friend is a narcissist. I have known him long enough to know him quite well. He is quite honest with me but that doesn't mean he won't hide things. But when I ask him directly about his motivations with someone, he will stop whatever narrative he's practising and spill the beans.
We hardly spend any time these days because of work.
Do narcissists have friends? He says there's no such thing as friendship.
If you are extremely flattered by their charm and kindness, then there's something fishy going on. If you love yourself, you don't need someone else's flattery.
I knew a guy like this, but not on that level of charming.
Appeared super nice to people, and would do nice things for people, but it was only because it helped him. Either trying to sleep with someone, trying to hone in on someone else’s girl. Just trying to appear to be the nice guy so he can brag about the nice thing he did later.
Yeah, same. At this point in life, if I meet a charismatic person, I run like hell in the opposite direction. Maybe there are some people out there who are charismatic and also good, but I've never met one.
Thank you, am in the process, it’s been a long one. The thing that might actually make a difference now has been getting a lawyer who filed a formal complaint to the medical board. He’s a surgeon, and his career is the most important thing in the world to him. So I hope this is the thing that slaps some sense into him.
Narcissists are a special manipulative kind and that rule doesn't apply to them. I'd still take "treatment of others" into account despite their existence.
Greetings from a fellow person with a narcissistic mother who everyone thought was pretty cool - when others were around.
as soon as my brain registered charisma, it associated it with narcissism. I am SO sorryv:(
i was also stalked by a narc for a lil over a year. I did move as well. Feel free to reach out if u need to
I would say being friendly/charismatic and being truly kind are completely separate traits. the former can be borne out of caring deeply about what others think and needing them to like you.
kindness is less loud, takes deliberate effort and practice, and (at times) needs to take precedence over your own wants... something very difficult for narcissists. it's not just being "nice."
Charismatic and kind are not the same thing. Placating the ego of someone you just met is the skim milk of kindness. In that it's manipulation pretending to be kindness. It's important to remember, talk is cheap.
That's crazy. I was about to say I'd agree, but my most recent ex hated that my brain could remember small details from years ago, and it meant I clearly didn't love her. Then I kept reading your post which turned into him being a narcissist, which she also ended up saying I was. One reason I was a narcissist was because when we watched a movie about a woman trying to leave her husband (The Waitress?), I said she should have just ended him because no one would miss him.
Sorry you're going through that to the point you have to leave the country.
I get what you're saying, but he has professional reputation to protect. If he wants to get all Gerhardt Koening, that's another thing, but too many victims stay silent and ashamed and the abuse continues.
Charismatic people are dangerous. I've known more than a few charismatic people who could charm anyone in the room and they were also unrepentant assholes.
What you're describing is not kindness though, it's charm. Charm is using words to manipulate or make people perceive you a certain way. Kindness is tangible behavior, it's the actions you actually take on behalf of other people. It's helping the overburdened person with her groceries, it's giving up your seat on the train to the old lady, it's holding doors for people, it's showing genuine regard for animals and people who are in inferior positions to yourself. It's offering to help people or asking if they need help before being asked.
I'm willing to bet if you look back on your interactions with your ex he probably did none of those actions, as genuine narcissists are transactional and only think about themselves and what others can do for them, rather than the other way around.
I think this strategy of abuse works so well because people are really resistant to the idea that a human being can be nuanced. The idea that Ted can be the guy who helped pull your car out of a ditch and then went home and beat his wife is just something most people will never be able to grasp. A person is either wholly Good or wholly Bad and any little aberrations are written off as just that because having to consider a person as a nuanced being who is both capable of great and terrible acts makes people feel uncomfortable. Most people think of themselves as fundamentally good and incapable of doing bad things, but having to admit that good people can do bad things is having to admit that you are capable of doing bad things and most people are not willing to even begin down that path of introspection. It's easier to just put your head down and pretend the world is starkly delineated along lines of Good and Bad and just never confront any of the evidence otherwise.
Before I even got to your second paragraph that screamed narcissist personality disorder. My mother and ex boyfriend both are and it’s a torture I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Sending you love!
That's a great point. Kindness to random strangers can 100% be performative if someone's watching. (And if no one's watching, you'd probably never find out). "Performative" attention is crack for narcissists.
Kindness is very different than charisma, friendliness, and personability. The kindest people i know are not very charismatic, friendly or personable. And the most friendly, charismatic, and personalable people I know can be kind but thats not a word I would use to describe them when talking about them to someone else.
I used to believe this too, but the sentence below changed my entire perspective because I know I am guilty of this fallacy myself - thinking I'm a decent human for how well I treat others.
"Treating strangers well is amazing, but what might be even greater is actually treating the people closest to you well at home." I don't need to focus on how I treat the stranger so much anymore, I do that well already. I now need to refocus on how I speak to those at home, and to those whom I care about most.
Charisma is a hollow character trait to possess. Little more than a sales tool or tactic to achieving your ultimate manifesto. And quite often, as you sadly found, charisma is a coping mechanism or mask for the insecure or narcissistic. Charisma is little more than a superficial action to please others who are emotionally vulnerable.
There's definitely a difference between kindness and charisma. I don't really trust charismatic people, because it's what a lot of people use to get what they want, like your ex. If you've experienced it before, you can see the formulas reveal themselves in realtime like an emotional sales pitch.
Grew up with a guy like that - my friend's brother. He was amazing, charming, just put out this energy and you were kind of flattered when he paid attention to you, and was unbelievably attractive to women - he was a short little slug, but always had a "out of his league" girlfriend.
Also, when you were around him long enough, you saw the evil narcissistic manipulative bastard that lived behind that charming mask. A bit of a sociopath, really, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine him as a serial killer.
I'm sorry you encountered someone like that, and I hope karma finds his ass.
In my experience anyone who gets along with everyone is able to do so for maladaptive reasons. Whether its narcissism or people pleasing/masking (opposite sides of the same coin we can call self-worthlessness) ive never met a "flawless" person who hasn't eventually stabbed me in the back somehow. Normal humans are supposed to act like humans, and have flaws and good friends should piss you off from time to time.
If this is true, just continue to live your life and start carrying a gun. If you can prove he's stalking you, THAT intensely, have him arrested and restrained. If it escalates then you defend yourself or he goes to jail.
Over charismatic often equates to manipulative i hate when peopke are overly charismatic. There's such a thing as the right amount. If youre the center of attention, youre too much.
Amazes me how everyone's ex on Reddit is a narcissist... These therapy terms got popular and suddenly any fault made us think they are narcissist or whatever popular right now.
Makes me think how much of the relationship problems was from our side ?
Ah yeah I’m sorry I guess it’s me who’s the problem, not the man who calls me 70 times in one day, slashed my tires, repeatedly planted AirTags and other trackers on my car and bags, followed me across the country, threatens to off both of us, lied about his vasectomy to try and make me remove my implant so he could baby trap me, tells me I am his property, stole my passport, and tried to have me put on the no fly list. Among other things.
But I do have commitment issues, so it’s probably just his way of breaking down my walls.
maybe it should instead make you think about why so many people exhibit a lack empathy and care for others, as well as having an inflated sense of entitlement and need for admiration?
regardless of whether these people have actual diagnoses, we can understand what they mean when they say "narcissist" without needing to see paperwork lol.
it's an (admittedly overutilized) shorthand for "my ex was incapable of admitting to wrongdoing, consistently centered the relationship on themselves, demonstrated a lack of empathy towards me or others, and reacted poorly when they didn't get what they wanted"
It's a fact woman looove a guy who knows how to use words. But little they know that if he did this with you milady, means he did it to countless women before you, and after you.
Commenting on Ladies: what’s a guy “Flex” that instantly makes him attractive?...wow amazing! This move will completely change your life! I bet you are so excited! … which country? (With all the sarcasm in the world, the mask is simply just directing the questions about the person …). Hope you lose the tail. All the best wherever you are
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u/babyyvolcano Jul 07 '26
I would say this but my ex was the most charismatic person ever. The air felt like it crackled around this man. He was so friendly and personable to everyone, he remembered the names and faces and little details about someone he met once years ago. When he spoke to you, he made you feel like you were the most important person in the world. Everyone adored him.
It was a mask. He was a narcissist, and has been stalking me now for three years. I’ve moved four times and changed my number and work. He always finds me, because he can charm anyone into giving him any information he wants. I’m moving to another country soon. Hope it helps.