Beware of people who wish to keep all of your conversations strictly between you two (unless they’re an actual celebrity)

One of the biggest tell-tell signs of a person with a narcissistic personality disorder is that they want to keep all of your conversations strictly private. They make sure YOU know YOU cannot say anything about them to a third party, but that won’t stop them from dishing anything they want to anyone they want. They may agree to keep your secrets, but they’ll also hold those secrets as leverage if you try to wiggle away from under their power. They love nondisclosure agreements that they believe will be valid in all and any cases – including hiding actual crimes, which they do not protect anyone from. They might also insist on the secrecy of correspondence as if it would forbid you from reciting what was told to you in a letter or an email, which it does not. It only protects correspondence from third parties but not from whoever received or sent the letter.

The reason for this is that the narcissist knows they are manipulating you while you are having a private conversation. They don’t want you to go to someone you’re discussing to check the facts. They want other people to rely on THEIR version of events, truths, and other people’s feelings, words, and actions.

Never agree to absolute secrecy with someone you wouldn’t go to jail for as an accomplish unless it’s your literal job to keep their secrets, and the law wouldn’t protect you if you kept them for the wrong person.

In normal situations, however, their objective is simply to avoid guilt, blame, shame, criticism, and shunning from others and remain in control of the narrative of their social circles: “Narcissist is an amazing humanitarian, great person, good company, and always right.” Rather than: “Narcissist was right on occasions 1, 2, and 5, but Another Person was right on occasions 3, 4, and 6,” which would be humiliating to a narcissist.

The only people with a right to paranoia without suspicion of narcissism are celebrities and politicians with every reason to believe their private lives will wind up splashed across newspapers if someone decides to spill the beans. Such as Justin Bieber, who told ONE PERSON, his best friend at that, that he lost his virginity; newspapers read: “Bieber is bragging about having had sex with Selena Gomez.” (Normally, teens would talk about these things without it winding up in the news; hence celebrities have a special right to overt privacy without suspicion of narcissism. Regarding Justin Bieber, adults writing news about him as a teen have lost their sense of responsibility and reason more than once.)

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