man i feel this one to the core one time i had to deal with a guy from school lets call him t for privacy reasons t was an unpopular fella because he was always negative and smug i am also 90 sure he was a covert narcissist the guy hated me because like most people in this sub i navigated myself pretty authentically through the school i had high energy and high emotions and often spoke my mind this created enemies but also many friends pretty sure some of you guys can relate to this the people who didnt like this were the ones who took themselves too seriously and so did t  one time me and some classmates went to a party and t decided this was his ultimate moment to belittle me the entire evening because he found out the girl he liked had a crush on me i believe he tried to kill my vibe hard by constantly commenting on things i did to make me self-aware because im quite sensitive to that it ruined my evening he knew exactly what buttons to push in times where that happens i often dont really know what to do because i am too busy controlling my emotions to react to it in any meaningful way the way he acted towards me was beyond reason and the scary thing about it was that he did it covertly just sneakily enough to let it fly over peoples heads on top of that my stupid head told him he could sleep over at my place before the party big mistake  when we cycled back my brain raced as to what to do in hindsight i should have left him outside on the streets because he had been such a douchebag but years later it suddenly clicked what he was trying to do he was trying to pull some sort of double bind on me this is a psychological trick to drive people to a place of action in where both answers to a situation can be interpreted as negative   the use of confusion makes them difficult both to respond to and to resist  if i let him in my house he would gossip about me in school about how much of a push-over i am if i didnt let him in my house he would gossip in school about how much of an asshole i was to him and conveniently leave out the fact that he was extremely mean to me  at that time i didnt give it any second thought and just let him in and bite the bullet but i should have left him outside and call him out by telling him that i knew what he was trying to do and that i would be keeping my eye on him and that he cannot fuck with me like that ever again this entire ordeal might sound very minor but its gnawing on me to this very day it was so mean and so sneaky i cant believe someone can be like this but he also made me hyper-aware of narcissist and their tricks so thanks t narcissists are my cryptonite man they make me so self-aware that its pretty traumatic i am way too hypersensitive for their shenanigans