 A few days ago, in one of my more optimistic moments, I made a video about what happens when two narcissists meet each other, and even worse, what happens when a narcissist comes across a psychopath. Don't ask, just go there and watch the video. This brought on in avalanche a tsunami of comments, direct messages, emails, and carrier pigeons asking me what happens when a covert narcissist comes across another covert narcissist. What happens when they cross paths? This is the topic of today's video. My name is Sam Baknin, I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently of the faculty of SEAPS. What happens when two covert narcissists cross paths, if not swords? Start with a problem. While an overt narcissist can easily recognize another overt narcissist, both overt narcissists and covert narcissists are very bad at recognizing other covert narcissists. Covert narcissists are, you guessed it, covert. They're covert. They're under the radar. They're stealthy. They're surreptitious. They're hidden and occult. Covert narcissists rarely appear to be narcissists. They pretend to be empathic and nice and kind and compassionate. They often pose as victims, victims of other narcissists, for example. So it's very difficult to identify, recognize, and then act when you come across a covert narcissist. And overt narcissists have no advantage when it comes to detecting covert narcissists. This is the first problem. Consequently, when an overt narcissist comes across a covert narcissist, the covert narcissist usually becomes the overt narcissist's source of supply. Covert narcissists are very Machiavellian. They know which buttons to push. They know to provide the narcissist with grade A narcissistic supply. And the overt narcissist becomes addicted and dependent upon the covert narcissist. The situation is very different when two covert narcissists team up. As I said, the covert narcissist enhances, amplifies, magnifies, buttresses the grandiosity of the overt narcissist. The covert narcissist encourages the cognitive distortions of the overt grandiose narcissist, the classic narcissist. He provides the overt narcissist with narcissistic supply, which is essentially a drug. The overt narcissist is a junkie. The covert narcissist is the pusher. But when the covert narcissist comes across another covert narcissist, what they trade between them, the coinage, the means of exchange, is not grandiosity. It's victimhood. Covert narcissists affirm each other's essential goodness and victimhood. In other words, if when two covert narcissists meet each other, come across each other, cross paths, find themselves in the same environment, need to communicate somehow. What they do is they affirm, they confirm each other's alleged or ostensible goodness. You're a good person. You're impeccable. You're angelic. You're perfect. It's a form of perfection. And so the coverts affirm each other's perfection. And they also sustain and support each other's self-perception as hapless, helpless, accidental victims of other malevolent people, especially overt narcissists and psychopaths. So the coverts would signal to each other, virtual signal. So coverts engage in virtual signaling. The coverts would signal to each other, we are good people. We are victims of bad people. We did nothing wrong. We did not contribute to our predicament. We're helpless. We're childlike. We are the collateral damage of the narcissist. We are the byproducts of the narcissist's compulsive need to obtain supply or the psychopath's premeditated malice, victim who is a key component in the disturbed identity of the covert narcissist. It's perhaps the only feature that never wavers and never changes. And so coverts, whereas a covert would provide the overt narcissist, the grandiose narcissist, with affirmations and confirmation and adulation and admiration and batres, the overt narcissist, self-image, self-perception, grandiose, inflated self-image and self-perception, when two coverts meet, they don't display grandiosity because coverts are, you guessed it, covert. When a display is victim, but the victimhood of coverts is grandiose. So by enhancing each other's victimhood, by affirming each other's victimhood, by trading victimhood stories, by trauma dumping on each other and so on and so forth, what the coverts do, they become more and more grandiose as victims. Their victimhood becomes the locus of their grandiosity. I am the number one victim no one has ever been victimized like me and no one has ever come across an abuser worse than mine. And of course you can see this in forums of covert narcissists also known as empaths. So this is the first thing. The second thing is that gradually one of the two coverts assumes the roles of an overt narcissist who begins to dominate the interaction of the relationship. I call it pseudo overt narcissists. So when two coverts meet, collaborate, interact, collude, conspire, cooperate, when two coverts are in the same space, one of them gradually becomes grandiose or overt. While the other one becomes submissive, obsequious, foaning. And so the pseudo overt narcissists, the erstwhile covert, acts the role of the overt narcissist. He becomes more and more grandiose, more and more ostentatious, more and more demanding, more and more addicted to narcissistic supply, which in this case is channeled via victimhood and virtue signaling, competitive victimhood, its goal. Whereas the other covert in the interaction would assume the role of a supplier with obeisance, obedience, submissiveness, which is conspicuous, emphasized. So they develop a kind of cult, kind of ritualized private religion of two, where one of them is the cult leader, the deity, the god figure, the godhead. And the other one is the worshipper. And they engage in rituals which become more and more compulsive over time, more and more rigid. Ultimately though, two coverts can no more fit together, can no more coexist and co-survive than two overts. In my previous video, I made clear to you that when two overt grandiose narcissists meet or interact, it's going to lead to a god-awful conflict, an eruption, a mess, one upmanship, an attempt to outdo the other, to be more, to be the best, so competition. Two overts, two grandiose narcissists engage almost exclusively in competition, in order to establish supremacy, hierarchy, superiority, so as to support the cognitive distortion of grandiosity. When two coverts meet, it's a race to the bottom, not a race up, but a race down. Who is more victim? Who has been more subjugated and subdued and tortured and molested and maltreated and abused and so on and so forth? So it's a race to the bottom. But at some stage, this also leads to friction and conflict and hatred and arguments and externalized aggression. And so they end up exploding exactly as a pair of overt or grandiose narcissists would. A pair of covert narcissists explode at each other. They end up being at each other's throats. There is no long-term coexistence of same type narcissists. Somatic and somatic, cerebral and cerebral, overt and overt, covert and covert, cannot survive for long within a structured relationship, interpersonal relationship of any kind. Only opposite types can and do survive a somatic with a cerebral, a covert with an overt. But never the twin shall meet if they are of the same type. Okay, I hope I clarified this one for you and I wish you an overt pleasant day with covert undertones of pleasure.