Karen Mitchell PhD

 Here are a few unusual red flags for malignant/covert narcissists… 

1. Lengthy staring. Dark personalities/human predators do not experience discomfort in the same way as others because they don’t feel fear. They are therefore very comfortable with lengthy eye contact and often use staring as a positive influencing tactic. This could be eye staring or following you around a room. They also use lengthy staring as a means to intimidate, to make someone feel uncomfortable, to control.

 2. Watching your hands as you speak. Human predators do not experience emotions because of brain anomalies (other than a pathological anger response). They therefore often look at people’s hand movements as they are speaking to try and understand what their emotional vulnerabilities are. When we speak of subjects we are more invested in we generally move our hands more in discussion. Human predators are always interested in our vulnerabilities in order to leverage these to cause us pain or harm when they choose. 

3. Smirking. Dark personalities smirk out of an arrogant sense of ‘I have fooled them all and I am amazing’. They also smirk when they hurt someone because they find it deeply satisfying. The smirk can sometimes be just a tiny upward movement on one side of the mouth. 

 4. Charity. Human predators often engage with charities as part of their facade of being a good person. If a media story about a charity contains information about a person in relation to the charity that is a big red flag. People who are genuinely philanthropic rarely include much information if any about themselves in relation to charities they support. Human predators on the other hand use charities to promote themselves.

 5. Peering. Where a situation might be difficult for a human predator to understand, for example a situation which might elicit a lot of emotion in other people, they may squint and lean forward almost as if studying the situation to try and understand it. 6. Housework. Oddly, there seems to be a trend that housework is not something many human predators are willing to do. Their strong sense of entitlement probably precludes it. They may therefore use intimidating behaviour around housework as a means to ‘train’ others to do it. I’m interested if you have had experience with any of these red flags….