"Covert Salad" - how covert narcissists use word salad as a tactic

I'm going to briefly discuss a tactic with you that is a preferred tactic of covert narcissists and is their use of something called the word salad so let's get our definitions right a covert narcissist as opposed to an overt narcissist what's the difference well the way that I've simplified it and it's pretty gross over simplification but it really helps to get a foothold on quite a complicated psychiatric definition is that the over narcissist thinks that they're awesome and that they deserve special treatment and generally speaking the world agrees with them they have enough people in

external reality to say yes yes you are awesome we should all do what you say that it satisfies them that they can afford to be overt the covert narcissist thinks that they're amazing but generally speaking the world does not agree with them so the world their external reality is not giving them feedback that yes they're perfectly entitled to special treatment that the rules don't apply to them what does this create in what is fundamentally a narcissist there isn't really two distinct types everybody with NPD kind of flows between these two states so they actually function

in reality in a more nuanced view as the the two primary emotional superstates of the NPD overt and covert and they actually represent two separate strategies the overt strategy would be [ __ ] you I'm taking this because I'm amazing and you're my slave the covert strategy would be oh please let me have that because I'm in a lot of pain and I need more than you and I'm really a good person but I'm the victim of some terrible tragedy give me the thing that I wanted the entire time Weedle Weedle Weedle how does this

manifest more deeply than that well it means that where the overt usually I'm saying the overt and the covert though they're two separate people they're really not they're two emotional superstates um feels confident because they have a secure source of narcissistic Supply the covert is in a constant state of desperately and frantically trying to hold on fleeting little bits of pieces of contrived narcissistic Supply that are always running out so one is a more confident State one is a deeply insecure State one can afford to be Brash and bold and Arrogant with their agenda and

say Yes I want to take over the world why because I'm the superhero and I represent the super race and this is what we need the other one would have to use much more sneaky means to get people to go along with that and they would have to lie their ass off in order to get there not that the overt narcist doesn't lie of course they do but the covert narcist cannot afford to be so direct because people don't really agree with their world view this disparity if you imagine a narcissist who's constantly living in

a state of provocation and narcissistic U of narcissistic um injury because of reality so the covert narcist wakes up thinks I'm [ __ ] amazing and and one of the first things they see after waking up or they'll be reminded of is something that reminds them that the world doesn't agree that they're amazing they run the pattern um if only everyone would listen to me uh if only everybody would understand my misunderstood genius and also I'm always the biggest victim in the room no matter what happened to you and no matter what awful thing I

did to you something that you did to me that you didn't realize you did to me made me feel even more emotionally worse so we start to blur the boundaries we we get deep inside of moral relativism and start using frequently narcissist will use psycho Babble if they've learned it to say well yes I did kill all of your kittens uh an entire bag full of 20 of them I dumped into the river but you don't understand that when you merely stroked one of them one of my kittens and showed it love that fired off

issues for me from childhood that made me feel infinitely worse than you felt when I drown 20 of your kittens do you see frequently you will be accused by the covert narcissist of doing the very thing that they themselves have already done and worse now why because they live in this split state where they're constantly receiving narcissistic injury from the external environment but also from themselves the super ego is always disappointed in them and always judging them for failing to receive the entitled treatment and the narcissistic Supply they truly B believe they deserve so they're

actually frequently not confident brashing outgo and having a good time they're more frequently quite emotionally labile quite insecure the emotions go up and down they're very insecure they have to be more manipulative in order to get what they want so manipulation is is as natural and normal for them as just breathing would be and so use of techniques like the word salad become more frequent if you're a true over narcissist and you're in an over narcissistic State and you're cornered having lied about something then the truly over narcistic answer would be yes I lied because

you can't handle the truth yes I lied for the good of God who I'm speaking to for the good of the Communist Regime for the good of the fascist regime for the good of this for the good of that I lied or simply yes of course I lied you idiot did you really think I would tell you the truth you [ __ ] worthless [ __ ] you something you know countering it by by just leaning into outrage instead of pulling out of the outrage and going oh I mustn't make this worse just leaning in

and going yeah of course I lied to you you're an idiot why would I ever tell somebody like you the truth and actually using that as a new opportunity to just rain down more uh blows psychically onto your already shattered ego that's the overt Nest Way the covert is the junkie who whose suppliers are always going offline you know those people you see these poor lost souls uh you see them around cities they're into heroin they're into crack they're into whatever whatever they're into and they they end up all these addicts once they become truly

addicted they end up with the same face they end up with the same voice the same speech patterns and they all walk the same way they're constantly they're really really fit they're dying but they're fit in the final months of their death cuz they're constantly walking around town at full Pace with a really intense look on their face with their crackhead mates looking for the next hit we can find a little bit of something over here and then we can find a little bit something over here but we've got no money and we can't afford

good here so we're always Jones in for the next fix it's a much more excuse me the evil is coming out of me it's all psychic Let The Healing comments the darkness the demons they um what the the the state that they're coming from the core state they're coming from is vulnerability So when you say this is why in the literature especially in the old dur literature on narcissist ISM it wasn't called covert narcissism in fact it's really the internet that's calling it covert narcissism the literature usually refers to a fragile narcissist or a vulnerable

narcissist a narcissist with a very fragile sense of self and a very fragile therefore grasp of reality and self-image and the vulnerable narcissist where there will be many ostentatious displays of vulnerability I'm such a victim I'm so weak I could never I would never do that thing that I just completely totally did um you see this happening it's playing out a lot as the uh personality disorder is being disseminated through the culture you will see this happening a lot you'll find people you've seen it in the news in the last 6 months being caught red-handed

doing something and then in their defense either in in court or during interviews saying I would never do that they just stole somebody else's chocolate milkshake they guzzled it down they still have the chocolate around their lips and dripping down their chin and they get caught and they're like how do you defend yourself and they go why steal the chocolate milkshake I would never do that it's on your face right now I would never steal somebody's chocolate milkshake I'd never do that there uh countless examples of of people doing and saying this what is this

it's a split it's a splitting away from the shameful act so the covert or fragile or vulnerable narcissist actually feels a ton of Shame they constantly living in shame for their grandiose fantasies they're like I have these grandio fantasies and then the inner critic or or super ego depending on how you want to Define it the super ego the great judge the inner critic inside of them is inflamed and goes you fool you don't deserve those things look at yourself you're so BL blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and then their state goes down

and they feel like [ __ ] so they're constantly doing this this is why some people some researchers have said when you're looking at the clustering for the traits that we would test for that would Define borderline personality disorder oops a daisy it looks like they're right inside there for vulnerable narcissism I'm not going to get into the whole thing of people who've been diagnosed as as borderline personality disorder when really what they have is just cptsd my um personal way of of of sorting that one is to say look if you're not exploitative you're

not entitled and you're not deliberately and consciously causing other people pain to get what you want it can't really be boardline personality disorder other people people I respect people with way more qualifications and and research backing them than I have will say that that is wrong the boardline personality disorder is is distinct it's a debate that is that is ongoing what about the word salad word salad is when you just spew a series of words that actually don't really connect to each other within the context of the of the speaker's own own sentence or paragraph

nor do they connect with the question or the conversation that led them to come to that where does it come from it's actually a psychiatric term and it was used to define the way people uh who've been diagnosed with schizophrenia would sometimes speak they would speak sentences and they were clearly trying to express themselves but the uh the the brain couldn't process and apply a proper syntax so they're trying to speak and what comes out is just dissociated little clips and bits of phrases about different things and it's just garbage it doesn't mean anything in

the modern media and in the modern Parliament we've taken that term which was from Psychiatry and and Linguistics within Psychiatry and applied it to what politicians do so you ask a politician a direct question and they word salid the answer you get like a sequence of words that is about the subject that that clearly is around the question that you've asked or is appropriate to that sec sequence in the conversation but it really isn't answering anything and it's really not saying anything what are the two advantages for the covert narcissist for using word salad number

one it can make it seem as though you are answering the question whilst you are not so the flow of any conversation or indeed interrogation would be you speak I speak you speak I speak so you speak we in perhaps an argument over something Dreadful I've done you speak I speak you speak I speak you say something you ask me a question perhaps it's something I can't answer or you make a point that is a solid steel point that I can't argue against but I can't say nothing because of the way language is formed if

you have the last word you have won you've made your point and I've conceded a defeat which whether you're covert or overt if you're in the narcissistic personality cluster you can't allow that it's a deeply deeply um competitive Outlook in fact it's so hyper competitiveness is such a a key and consistent trait that I've seen when dealing with narcissistic personality disorder I'm surprised it's not listed as one of the uh major traits of narcissism hyper competitiveness meaning they can turn anything into a competition if you start to raise the issue of empathy with them and

say hey maybe you could be a little more empathic to how I feel or to how that waiter feels or to how your friends feel when you speak to them like because when you're interacting with a narcissist you won't just see them abusing you you'll see them abusing other people what they will do is they'll turn that into a competition over who has more empathy and who's the more empathic person that can happen not always but competition hyper competitiveness is brought in it will be a oh so you're putting yourself above me for empathy well

[ __ ] you I'm [ __ ] 10 times more empathic than you buddy and so I it's not a contest I'm just saying like maybe if you consider how other people feel when you speak to them you wouldn't speak to them the way that you talk to them right now you might be a little more sensitive or a little bit more patient if you had a bit more empathy just saying oh so you you're saying you understand more about people and more about how to talk to people than I do and so on and

so forth it gets turned around so the two things that word salad lets them do it lets them seem like they're answering a question like they're they're hitting that beat in the conversation or in the interrogation we're boxing you get two digs we move around a little bit and then I get three digs and we move around a little bit and you get another three digs and so on and so forth It's like a back and forth um and it can feel this way when you're Pro when you're trying to argue with somebody with a

narcissistic personality disorder it can feel like a like I can almost hear the the the the the ping pong ptin ponk patin patonk patin patonk and I'm just say this is ping pong this is we're not too adults sincerely discussing an issue moving towards a solution so the model in my mind of our adult adult conversation as we hold hands face the problem together and move along our path towards a solution it's a [ __ ] fantasy inside of my head in your head this is a boxing match in your head in the person you're

doing this with in the narcissist head it's a ping-pong game they just have to keep playing it back to you so that's the first thing it lets them do the second thing it lets them do is it lets them covertly manipulate your state and so there's two things and part two has two subsections to it so I'm a covert narcissist and I've been asked a question or put in a position where I really know that I'm in the wrong but I don't want to admit that I'm wrong one thing I could do is I could

use word salad which is like a sequence of words so if you say did you um did you uh hack into my email account and read my emails cuz I have evidence totally here that you completely did and I go well you know yes yes there are emails and and people use emails to to talk to each other all the time so don't make it about whether I looked at them or you looked at them I mean all the people who wrote those emails too they also looked at them when they open their email address

don't tell me you've never opened an email before CU I [ __ ] know you have so don't come at me with this load of [ __ ] sometimes people use letters and they write those letters with parchment and a bit of ink and a quill and they send them by Ravens like in like in Game of of Thrones is that what you're saying are you saying I'm a white walker from Game of Thrones that's not an amazing example of word salad I made it up um really we thought you wrote that beforehand I made

it up off the cuff but it's it's it's kind of addressing what you said but it's taking it in a different direction now within that there's two there's two subsections here one is I can control your state and generate confusion and it is confusing um it's it's absolutely it's confusing it's a technique that we're trained to use in eural linguistic programming and hypnosis to draw the other person into trend uh when you use a sentence that has neural linguistic programming it's called linguistic ambiguity so you say a sentence uh that doesn't really follow its own

syntax and as the person becomes confused you're doing this for a nice reason you're doing this to get them to relax to release their phobia of you know whatever it is or their anxiety about this or that or to make them feel more confident you're using it for nice reasons but as you're talking to them and en you're using your special hypnotic tone of voice which is so smooth and calm and relaxing you'd say something like I don't know whether it was time for you before to relax and sleep down now or maybe just later

what we could find ourselves doing is going into that state right before sleep where people find they can dream and have everything that they ever desired and what and so on and so for there's no that sentence if you write it out is like what my English teacher would punch me around the back of they like this doesn't it doesn't go anywhere it doesn't make sense what by using word salad linguistic ambiguity I induce a state of um in in the hypnosis way positive um confusion which then allows the brain to sort of go into

the submissive state of I don't really know what he's saying I'll let the embedded commands go in and the word salad I just gave you if it made you feel relaxed it's cuz if you play it back I say the word relax go down to dream to sleep I probably said something about flowing or letting go I don't know what I said but that's where the embedded commands go in I'm not saying everybody with narcissistic personality disorder has a great understanding of NLP they don't but they seem to have uh an understanding of manipulation through

language and patterns of behavior that they all share it's like they all go to the same school or they or they all go to the same Academy and this is one of them so word salad induces confusion and helplessness which makes the other person kind of give up and it also makes makes them more open to suggestion so if you wanted to use this positively you would use a phrase of linguistic ambiguity and then you would say and hey now you can feel good and relax and that's how you'd use it in a therapeutic or

a hypnotherapeutic situation if you're a covert narcissist you would answer the point that was made to you with something that doesn't go anywhere so the two things it can do one is induce confusion and helplessness the second thing it can do is the covert narcissist can use word salid for blatant provocation of negative States so they could make you feel if I just use word salad to whatever question you ask me eventually you'll feel helpless annoyed and you'll be like [ __ ] it I just give up fine you win and you move on but

I could also use word salad to introduce things that trigger things in you I could use it to imply that you how would I piss somebody off I guess um that you're that you're just a nasty person that you're dis dishonest that you're immoral that you're I don't know just think of the horrible things that you could sing at somebody so I get asked that so let's imagine there's a system here here's the coot narcissist here's their strategy which is the word salad and here right here is the state that they want you to go

into so they are going to choose the state they want you to go into let's say uh rage cuz it's great if you can get somebody to rage out well then they lose the argument if you can provoke somebody to the point where they're so enraged they fling something at you or or at the wall or they punch something or they turn around and say something Dreadful like they call you something re like the most horrible thing they can because you wound them up that's a good that's a good way of winning the argument and

having it all closed down then all that shame and guilt will be in their state and not in you so you've won you've transferred the shame the girl so you can word salad in order to provoke as well it's a fantastic tool it's frequently used watch out for it I am going to start talking a little bit more um about covert narcissism on this channel um because it's kind of one of those things that I mentioned and then and then I I I let it go and I'm realizing that this is the major threat over

narcissism isn't really a major God God knows an over narcissist can ruin your day ruin your life but at least you can see that shark coming at least the Fin's in the water and the noise is going dir you you get all that when the overt narcissist is coming your way the covert narcissist is much worse because they'll come as a victim they'll come as a little lost puppy that you just need to take home and fix and everything will be okay and by doing this oh sad puppy uh like the cat in um Puss

and Boots the cat and Shrek by doing that they evoke certain feelings in you that get you to take your armor off that allow you into the inner sanctum where there's no boundaries and then once they're in there they can do the biggest amount of damage so you actually even if you have some boundaries you'll take them down for somebody who's really good at covert narcissism final point one thing to look out for with covert narcissism is um flip-flopping between two or three personalities um the over narcissist can afford to be a dick and be

a dick all the time I've known people with overtly narcissistic traits and I've said this on the channel before who actually weren't that um uh corrupting I'm not saying you should ever uh willingly engage in a little bit of contact with an MPD it's going to hurt you that's just what they're going to do but if somebody has overtly narcissistic traits and you take them for what they are and you keep them at a distance it doesn't have to hurt a covert narcissist what should you do with the coover narcissist you won't know until you're

in pain you won't know that you're even in danger until like in June where you're the good guys from House of tradies and then house har Conan comes up and goes hey homie can I have a hug and you give them a hug and then they slip the poison blade in you're like ah this Poison's a bad one it's worse than the Gom jaar I feel little fiery and agonized and I'm going to die soon and that's when you realize that you're in trouble cuz they don't come waving a knife at you like Sting with

ginger hair what Sting with ginger hair yeah Sting with ginger hair and going I'm going to cut you cuz I'm I want to cat you they don't do that because they're not a character from Kang Arthur they'll come up and they'll hug and they will induce a a receptive state in you first that gets the Holtzman field to turn off you like I don't need this super futuristic suit of armor anymore I'm going to switch it off I I switched it off now let's cuddle and then at the point of the cuddling that's when the

knife slips in and that's when you realize you're in trouble so cover narcissism is usually something that is dealt with post Hawk you've gone down the road with them already and you're like oh [ __ ] you have stolen both my kidneys I need them then you you're already like you're already in pain you're already in trouble you're already uh um on on on the wrong foot knocked off balance and that makes that makes you vulnerable so I want you to be aware of these things but word salad is a very very common tactic so

please be aware of it watch out for it thanks very much for your time and your attention and I look forward to speaking to you soon cheerio that's not how I'm going to start ending videos Cheerio that's that's not a thing thank you for your time and your attention and I look forward to speaking to you soon that's how we're going to do it