9 Dirty Tricks Narcissists Use, And Why You Should Never Let Them Win

They aren’t random cruelties. They are a management system. Once you understand the function, the technique loses its power to disorient.

Photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash

Six months after I left Marcus — the man I spent almost three years in a coercive relationship with before I finally walked out — I sat down on a Sunday afternoon and wrote a list of the things he had done that I still couldn’t explain. Not the big moments. Those I had explained, overexplained, rehearsed in the car and at 2am and in therapy until they had their own grooves. The small ones. The recurring ones. The nine things that had happened so consistently that they couldn’t be coincidence and yet which I had, each time, treated as coincidence.

Writing them down in sequence, I noticed something that I could only see from the outside: they were not nine separate things. They were one system, nine expressions. Every single technique on the list served the same function — to keep me inside a frame I hadn’t chosen, unable to trust my own reading of what was happening, producing the responses the relationship required.

That is not a collection of dirty tricks. That is a management system. And management systems have logic. Logic can be named. And naming it, I found, was the thing that most reliably removed a technique’s power to disorient — not because knowing the name made me immune, but because it shortened the recovery time. I still got hit. I understood faster what had happened. Understanding faster is the closest thing to winning that this situation offers, and it is enough.

Here are the nine. Not as a checklist. As the list I wrote on that Sunday afternoon, finally given the words I didn’t have while I was inside it.

1. The Warmth That Was Working Ahead of You

The intensity of the early relationship is always the first thing to discuss and always the thing most likely to be misunderstood. It is called love bombing and the name suggests excess — too much, too fast, too bright. What the name doesn’t capture is the function.

The function is not to make her fall in love. It is to establish a baseline. A comparison point. A specific emotional register — the feeling of being the most important person in any room, of being known and chosen and certain — that her later experience will be measured against. By the time the relationship turns, the baseline is already set. The question she will ask herself is not “what is happening?” It is “what happened to the man who looked at me like that?” And the question keeps her inside the frame, looking backward for the version of him she is trying to recover.

It is not the warmth that was the technique. It was what the warmth was doing while she was feeling it: setting the terms under which everything that came later would be judged.

I remember the specific evening Marcus said something that I wrote in my journal as I think this is the real thing. I was holding a glass of water I had stopped drinking. The certainty in my chest was genuine. What I understand now is that the certainty was the point. The baseline was being established. The warmth was working ahead of me.

The function is not to make you fall in love. It is to establish a baseline. A comparison point. By the time the relationship turns, the comparison is already set — and the question keeps you inside the frame, looking backward for the version of him you’re trying to recover.

2. The Confusion That Wasn’t Confusion

Gaslighting is the most documented technique and the most misunderstood. The common version — he tells you something didn’t happen, you know it did, you doubt yourself — is real but it is the obvious version. The more effective version doesn’t deny events.

It recontextualises them.

Not: that didn’t happen. But: that’s not what that meant. Not: I didn’t say that. But: that’s not what I was saying when I said that. The event is permitted to exist. The meaning is quietly reassigned. And the reassignment is always in one direction: toward an interpretation in which he is not the person you’re describing.

What this version of the technique produces is not certainty that you’re wrong. It produces the specific uncertainty of someone who can locate the event but cannot hold the meaning steady — who knows something happened but cannot say confidently what it meant. That uncertainty is the target. A woman who is uncertain about meaning is a woman who needs more information before she can act. More information means more time inside the relationship. More time is what the system requires.

The confusion was not a side effect. It was what the technique was producing.

3. The Trial He Never Had to Show Up For

The silent treatment is described as withdrawal. It is not withdrawal. Withdrawal is passive. This is active — a specific mechanism that requires your participation to run, and which you provide without being asked.

He goes quiet. You review the preceding hours. You find candidates — things you said, things you didn’t say, tones you might have used. You generate the accusation, construct the case against yourself, delivers the verdict, and begins apologising or over-explaining or reaching out, all before he has said a single word. The trial happened entirely inside you. He was the judge without attending the proceedings.

I remember lying awake one night — he had gone cold at dinner without explanation — running the previous forty-eight hours, assembling a list of seventeen possible causes. I apologised for three of them in my head while he slept. By morning I had constructed a complete explanation for why his silence was my fault, presented it to myself as a reasonable conclusion, and woken up already in the wrong.

He had not done any of that. I had done all of it for him. That is the mechanism. The silence was not the punishment. The silence was the prompt. The punishment was what I administered to myself.

4. The Accusation That Arrived Too Early

Projection is often explained as a psychological defence — he accuses you of what he is doing because he cannot face it in himself. That may be true at some level. It is not the most useful frame for understanding what it does to you.

What it does is pre-discredit you.

If he accuses you of lying before you have lied, your later denial of lying carries less weight — you’re denying something he has already predicted you would deny. If he accuses you of being unfaithful before you have considered leaving, your later questions about his faithfulness sound like the projection he has already named. He has placed the accusation in the record before the event it is accusing you of. You spend the relationship trying to disprove a thing that wasn’t true, which means you’re always on defence, which means the record is always partly his.

It is not defensive. It is preparatory. The accusation arrives early because early placement is the function.

The accusation arrives before the event it is accusing you of. You spend the relationship trying to disprove a thing that wasn’t true — always on defence, which means the record is always partly his.

5. The Standard That Was Never Going to Stay Still

Moving the goalposts is the technique that took me longest to name because it is the one most easily explained as ordinary human inconsistency. People change their minds. Circumstances change. What someone wants from a relationship in month three may not be what they want in month eighteen. I gave this explanation more credit than it deserved for approximately two years.

What distinguishes the technique from ordinary inconsistency is the direction of the movement. The standard does not move randomly. It moves specifically away from wherever you currently are. When you’re emotionally available, the standard shifts to independence. When you create independence, the standard shifts back to closeness. When you’re direct, the tone is the problem. When you soften your tone, you’re being avoidant. There is no position you can reach that does not produce a new displacement.

A standard that moves specifically away from wherever you land is not inconsistency. It is a mechanism for ensuring failure is always available as evidence. Permanent failure is a permanent tool. The goalposts don’t move because he changes his mind. They move because the failure is the point.

6. The Future That Was Never Going to Arrive

Future faking is the technique most likely to keep a woman inside a relationship she has already understood is not working, because it exploits the most reasonable thing about her: her willingness to give something time to become what it was promised to be.

When things settle down, things will be different. When we move to a bigger place. When the job situation resolves. When this period is over. Each promise creates a specific debt: she cannot evaluate the relationship accurately without allowing it time to reach the promised state. The promised state is always just far enough ahead that current evidence cannot be considered final. She is waiting for the data that will let her decide. The data keeps being deferred.

I waited for things to settle down for eleven months. The settling-down date moved four times. I understood this later as a structural feature — the deferral was not a failure of the promise, it was the function of the promise. You cannot leave a relationship you have not yet given fair time to become what it said it would be. Fair time is infinite if the destination keeps moving.

7. The Third Party Who Arrived at the Right Moment

Triangulation is usually described in terms of jealousy — he introduces another person to make you insecure, to compete, to work harder for his attention. That is part of it. It is not the most useful part.

The most useful thing to understand about triangulation is the timing. The third party arrives at specific moments — the moments when you’re closest to accuracy, when your investigation of his behaviour is gaining traction, when you have asked a question that is difficult to deflect. The appearance of the third party at those moments is not a coincidence. It is a redirect. Your attention moves from what you were investigating to the threat the third party represents. The investigation closes. The question that was getting close to something goes unanswered.

He is not introducing the third party to make you jealous. He is introducing them to change the subject. The jealousy is a side effect of the redirect, not the mechanism itself.

8. The Reversal That Happened Before You Finished the Sentence

DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — is the technique that produces the specific bewilderment of finding yourself apologising for something you raised, having arrived at the apology so quickly you cannot reconstruct the path. It is the most disorienting of the nine because the speed is the mechanism, not the content.

The denial arrives before you finish making the point. The attack arrives before you have processed the denial. The reversal arrives before you have processed the attack. By the time the conversation reaches a resting point, You’re in the wrong position — You’re the one who has caused distress, raised a problem unfairly, made something out of nothing — and the sequence happened so fast that you cannot trace how you got there.

The content of the DARVO does not need to be convincing. It needs to be fast. The speed creates the gap in which the position swap occurs. Slowing down, which takes practice and feels rude in the moment, is the only counter. Ask for time to think. Name what just happened. The swap requires speed to complete. Interrupting the speed interrupts the swap.

9. The Warmth That Was Real and Meant Something Different Than You Thought

Hoovering is the hardest of the nine to write about because it requires admitting something that the other eight don’t: the warmth, when he comes back, is genuine. It is not performed. He is not faking the affection or manufacturing the tenderness. The hoovering works precisely because the feeling behind it is real.

What is not real — or rather, what is real but not what you think it is — is the cause.

He returns not because he has missed you in the way you have missed him. He returns because the supply — the emotional reactivity, the continued engagement, the signal that you can still be reached — has dropped below a level the system requires. The warmth is a genuine response to that drop. It is the system recalibrating, not the man reconsidering.

Adaeze — a close friend who had left her own difficult relationship the year before and had very little patience for my attempts to explain Marcus away — said something the third time he came back. I had been describing, with considerable care, the specific quality of his return — how different it felt, how it seemed like something had genuinely shifted. She listened to all of it and then said, flatly: “He ran out of something and you have it.”

I was annoyed. She was right. The warmth was real. Its cause was supply management, not love. And understanding that distinction — sitting with how much it hurts that both things can be true simultaneously — is the thing that finally made the hoovering lose its power. Not because the warmth stopped feeling like warmth. Because I finally understood what the warmth was for.

The warmth, when he comes back, is genuine. That is what makes hoovering the hardest of the nine. He is not faking the affection. What is not real is the cause — the warmth is the system recalibrating, not the man reconsidering.

What the Nine Things Are Actually For

None of these techniques are primarily designed to hurt you. That is the thing worth understanding most clearly, because the belief that they are designed to hurt keeps you in the frame you’re trying to exit — keeps you trying to understand what you did to deserve them, what you could do to make them stop, what version of yourself would be less of a target.

They are not designed to hurt. Hurting you is a side effect. They are designed to manage you — to keep you inside the frame, producing the supply, serving the function. The pain is incidental to the purpose. Understanding this does not make the pain smaller. It removes the question of desert from the equation. You did not deserve them. They were not a response to who you were. They were a system running, and you were the environment the system was running in.

I noticed most of these while they were happening. What I could not do was trust what I noticed — because each technique, applied consistently, had degraded my confidence in my own perception to the point where noticing felt like the problem rather than the signal. The list I wrote six months after leaving was not new information. It was old information finally trusted.

That is what the nine things being named does. Not prevent them. Not produce immunity. Give the noticing something to land on. Make the recognition faster the next time, and the recovery shorter, and the time spent inside the disorient briefer.

That is not winning exactly. But it is the thing that winning was always pointing toward: the moment you understand the system well enough that it cannot run on you the way it used to.

That moment is available. It starts with being able to name what just happened.

If you recognised yourself in the nine — in the noticing that couldn’t quite be trusted — this is for you.

*Why You Still Think About the Narcissist — and Why Nothing Is Wrong With You is a short written experience for the confusion, self-blame, and mental looping that stay long after the relationship ends. It helps your mind understand what was actually happening — so the noticing can finally be trusted.*

Most people try to heal before they understand. This does the opposite.