Two more types of narcissist — The A-hole & The Social Butterfly
These are the easiest to spot of the narcissists.
The overt narcissist, grandiose, superior, rude, selfish and everything is about them.
Sure, they may be able to fake being something else for a while, but their true colours shine through eventually.
To the A-hole people are divided into two types of people; the good and the bad.
With the good they seek their approval and attention, by flattery or fawning. The good will have or be something that the narcissist aspires to or something that boosters their image.
With the bad, they want to drag them down, belittle them, make them feel worthless.
In the bad the narcissists sees a reflection of the bits of themselves they don’t like or something they are jealous of. It is not a true reflection of that person, it is what the narcissist ‘sees’. They project their bad bits onto the bad people.
What is most confusing is that sometimes people can shift from good to bad or vice versa.
The narcissist is inconsistent in their labelling of people, if someone ‘bad’ suddenly becomes successful or something that the narcissist values then they will become ‘good’. And the inverse is true too.
With the narcissists children they are divided by their roles, golden child the ‘good’ child, the scapegoat the ‘bad’ child and the lost child.
Most people see the rude side of the overt narcissist, it will come out at some point or other with everyone.
They are unpleasant, especially in circumstances when they feel that they are superior. They will be rude to shop staff or servers in restaurants, it gives them an ego boost to crap on other people.
If they are the boss, they will enjoy throwing their weight around and making everyone afraid for their jobs. Their attitude is that making people fear for their jobs makes them more productive.
The a-hole narcissist, revels in feeling superior and will use every situation to assert their superiority.
They will often have to move house or change friendship groups, once people have worked out what they really are they will have to find new targets.
These people have no social skills, they don’t have conversations with people and they make no secret of the fact that they don’t care about other people.
The a-hole is not capable of forming true and deep connections with people, because they don’t care about others. It doesn’t matter if that person is their partner, their children, family members, friend, whoever, they don’t have that deep emotional connection.
They make no secret of the fact that they use people.
Once someone has served their purpose they are discarded, no matter who they are. The a-hole walks away, with no cares, because they never cared in the first place.
The Social Butterfly
These are the people that want to know everyone. They will try to ingratiate themselves with everyone, especially if there is a restricted circle of people such as expats.
They will join clubs, leisure activities, volunteer at charities and perhaps even join political parties.
However, their intentions are not for good. Their intentions are just about their image and about appearances.
Everything that they join will be to serve a purpose, to make them look like a certain kind of person.
It makes them look good to volunteer at the local charities.
If their image of a spiritual person is important to them, this will be the theme of their choices of things to join.
None of it is about who they really are, their true values and beliefs. This is because they don’t have any, they only have their image.
They can be inconsistent, if one moment one thing is important to them they can shift it if something else serves them better.
It’s all about how these things serve them.
It could be as a booster to their image.
Money could be their focus, the more people they know the more people can buy things or services from them.
They want to control their world, so if someone won’t buy their products and services they will be smeared about.
Often their focus is money.
They depend on knowing lots of people for their revenue. The more people they know the better chances of making more money.
Their actions are not about forging genuine and sincere connections with people.
If they show any interest in you it may be because they’ve formed a judgement about you and your financial situation. You have enough money to make you worth bothering with. If, however they discover they were wrong about your situation you will be ignored, or even worse smeared about.
Perhaps you booster their image, whatever that may be. That gives you a value to them.
They are cliquey, only certain people are allowed into their circle, either other toxic people or people with unhealed narcissistic wounds that make them vulnerable to the narcissist’s games. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that fall into this category.
Anyone else is looked at with suspicion and often seen as a threat.
The social butterfly will use their influence with people to start smear campaigns about those who have displeased them. Then they will recruit their minions (flying monkeys) to further spread the smear campaign. If you don’t serve them, they will seek to destroy you.
These lies will be spread about you, but there’s no use fighting it.
It’s just like the mean girls at school, but just grown ups doing the bitching instead.
They are often covert narcissists.
Often, they will join a group of friends that’s already been established.
The social butterfly with ingratiate herself with a few of the core members, until they become a member of that group. Then they will manipulate the members of the group and turn them against those not convinced by them.
The people in the group won’t even be aware that that’s what happened. They’ve been played and they may never see it.
The group quickly becomes centralised around the narcissist.
Only people that 100% go along with the narcissist will become a member of the group.
People will be rewarded with membership of the group but can just as quickly be punished with being ousted.
The group may have been originally formed by good people, but the arrival of the social butterfly soon changes the dynamic to be toxic.
The social butterfly thrives on social media, where image is most important and it can be fake and shallow.
None of the actions of the social butterfly are about forming genuine and sincere connections with people.
It is all about how people can serve them.
If they think someone will serve them, they will appear to be a good friend. However, if they think that the other person won’t serve them, then they are quickly dropped. This will leave the other person very confused.
The social butterfly is focused on their survival.
They will fight to survive; in their case their social standing is the very thing that their survival depends on.
Their image is very important to them.
With a narcissist all they have is the image that they want to project onto the world.
It’s not the truth about them. The truth is that they are bad to their very core, and they believe their image conceals this from people.
So, they will do all they have to reenforce this image to the outside world. It’s all they have.
They will fight with a fury to maintain their image because it protects them.
And it means that they can target people for the attention and energy that they so desperately need. If the truth were known about them, they would have no-one, something that a narcissist really fears.
Therefore, they start smear campaigns about people, they triangulate between people and they gossip- because it gives them control.
If they can control people, they can control how people are perceived. And once they’ve manipulated people into believing them then it gives them all the power and control over them.
Conclusion
Whilst it can be easy to spot the a-hole narcissist, it’s sometimes not so easy to protect yourself from them.
They are energetic vampires taking all that they can from you, even if it is drama-fuelled and negative towards them. They don’t care.
As for the social butterfly they can be more difficult to spot, sometimes until it’s too late.
The best thing, to try to steer clear of them. If it’s not possible and they start a smear campaign about you, it’s best to ignore it even though you may want to defend yourself.
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Originally published at https://comebackbrighter.com on March 8, 2022.