And all these are passive-aggressive techniques.

The key to communicating with the narcissist effectively is to ignore the hidden message, to ignore all this, to not respond to the occult message, to the hidden message, to not allow the narcissist to push your buttons and triggers.

But some people find it very difficult to accomplish. Some people are still in the throes of the over-indulgence with the narcissist, or the narcissist still has some hold over them via his introject, for example.

The narcissist is inside your head, even when he’s long gone physically, he’s still inside your head. You can get yourself out of the narcissist, but you cannot get the narcissist out of yourself.

So, the best solution is to use professionals to communicate with the narcissist.

If you can help it, never ever communicate with the narcissist directly. Force him to communicate with your lawyers, with your accountants, with your best friend, with your family member, with your father, with someone. Force him to communicate with people who are oblivious to the hidden message.

You remember that the hidden message is based upon shared experiences, shared past, shared past, shared communication in the past. And so, people from the outside, outsiders, they simply don’t spot, they don’t detect the hidden message.

And so, they’re going to respond to the overt, open, reasonable, socially acceptable, commonsensical, envelope message. And that’s what you want. You want to keep the communication surface on the surface. You do not want to go deep with the narcissist into the rabbit hole of his communications.

So, if you refer the narcissist to other people who are constitutionally incapable of even detecting the hidden message, the communication will devolve into envelope communication, surface communication, and you will not be triggered into actions that you’re bound to regret later.

If at all possible, go no contact. Any communication refers to an intermediary, to a buffer, to a firewall, and this buffer or firewall will ignore the hidden message and convey to you only the open one.

And so, it’s a filter. The narcissist engages in something called palindromic speech. The communication of narcissists is either inward facing, they verbalize their inner dialogues, conversing loud sometimes with themselves, with the audience as a mere foil to their stream of consciousness. So, this is the inward looking communication.

Or it could be outward facing. When the narcissist communicates with himself, you are just an observer. You’re an audience. He’s bouncing thoughts off you. You’re like a blank screen upon which he can project anything. That’s his inner communication, actually. You’re witnessing his inner communication.

And I repeat, some narcissists do it aloud. I mean, they verbalize it.

And then there’s outward facing communication. Narcissists talk in order to impress their interlocutors, in order to evade actually providing information, to obfuscate vulnerabilities.

So, what they do is they don’t communicate, they impress, they manipulate, they obfuscate, they obscure, they evade.

Narcissists in the language is a narcissistic weapon in the narcissist’s arsenal.

Pay attention to several warning signs.

Number one, the use of indefinite pronouns and modifiers like this or someone or that. When the narcissist does not specify, does not clarify any of the other parts of the speech, leaving the listener guessing as to what had occurred to whom, when, where, and why.

So, indefinite pronouns and modifiers are a major sign of palindromic speech.

By the way, many self-styled experts and coaches and so on online, they use the phrase word salad. Word salad is strictly limited to schizophrenics. Schizophrenics have something called disorganized speech and this is a word salad.

Narcissists do not engage in word salad. No one actually engages in word salad except schizophrenics or people with psychotic disorders.

So, it’s a misuse of the phrase borrowed from clinical literature wrongly by ignorant people.

Number two. We are not discussing warning signs when you listen to the narcissist or communicate with him verbally or in writing. There are warning signs of palindromic speech.

Palindromic speech is the hidden message.

So, number one, indefinite pronouns and modifiers.

Number two, if the narcissist is addressing an audience or you demand the truth and accountability from him, you can safely assume exaggeration, confabulation, reframing, and outright lying on his part. This is done partly also to cover up the narcissist’s pervasive dissociation.

Number three. When the narcissist expostulates on his motivation for doing something, or when he recounts what had happened, he is either wrong, reframing to justify his misbehavior or to restore ego syntony, or he’s just lying out of self-interest, or he has dissociative gaps, amnesic gaps, and he’s trying to bridge them with a confabulation. He tries to sell you on what makes sense rather than on the truth.

If he doesn’t know the truth, he will provide you with a plausible replacement, substitute, or alternative.

You remember alternative facts? If you keep reiterating the question, if you insist on an answer, if you insist on the truth, if you persist, he often contradicts himself and comes up with conflicting versions of the same events.

Never trust what the narcissist says. Do not let his gaslighting undermine your trust in your senses, your judgment, your observations, your memories, your identity, and your common sense.

Make sure that only what you see is what you get.

Observe the behaviors and reactions of the narcissist and everyone around the narcissist for clues as to what had really transpired. Don’t let the narcissist club you on the head and don’t wake up in his platonic cave of shadows of an alternative reality.

Palindromic speech is any kind of statement about facts or inner mental states that intentionally, often, or inadvertently, more rarely, creates confusion and disorientation in the listener.

Gaslighting, lying, these are examples of crass and malicious palindromic speech acts.

Confabulation and illogical incoherent discourse. These are benign variants intended to breach dissociative gaps in memory or to buttress grandiosity.

And palindromic speech, which I’m saying again, that’s the core of the hidden message, palindromic speech makes use of various semantic devices.

Pay close attention. When you talk to the narcissist, you need to be hypervigilant. You need to analyze any and every word, every phrase, every syntactical choice.

Why did he put the words in this order? Why did he choose to say something? Why did he choose to not say something?

That’s the hidden text, the manifest text, the hidden text. So you’re all the time on your toes, you’re all the time analyzing when you can’t just take it for granted.

And the narcissist makes use of several semantic devices.

Number one, referential shifts.

Referential shift is when the words refer to one thing while appearing to be actually referencing another thing. It seems that he’s talking about A when actually he’s talking about B.

He means to talk about B, but he’s talking about A because talking about A disguises his real intentions, opinions, and judgments and manipulation with regards to B.

So this is referential shift.

Dabell and Tondoy, word when he uses words or phrases, which are open to two, sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations or meanings. So the same word can mean this thing, can mean A or can mean B, but A and B can’t be together. They’re mutually exclusive. They contradict each other.

And yet he uses a word that can be interpreted in several ways or a phrase that can be interpreted in several ways. This is double meaning.

The next one is contextual drift.

Contextual drift is when the narcissist subtly, subterraneanly, imperceptibly alters, changes the context of the conversation. And by changing the context of the conversation, he changes the message and he changes the reality test. He reframes the whole thing even as you’re listening and you’re not aware of it because he’s very good at what he does.

So suddenly you find yourself discussing something you had no intention to discuss. And you ask yourself, how did I get here? That’s contextual drift.

Next one is manipulative speech, goal oriented utterances intended to impress or to accomplish aims, not to communicate.

There is misattribution or attribution errors, suggesting or preferring the wrong connections, the wrong links between alleged or ostensible motivations and intentions and actual actions.

So he interprets actions in terms of wrong motivations, wrong intentions. And in this way, he deflects blame, for example, or he casts his own actions in the best possible light, or he casts your actions in the worst possible light. He assigns roles and he assigns roles by misinterpreting, very often deliberately, intentions and motivations.

Some narcissists, small minority, are paranoid. So attribution errors are very common in paranoia and among conspiracy theories, they have psychological trait called conspiracism.

The next semantic device used in palidromic speech and hidden messages is circumstantial mitigation, an external locus of control, a victim stance, events conspire, a people collude to yield the misconduct.

And so he says, I misbehaved, what I did was wrong, but you’re guilty. It’s your fault. You pushed me to do it. Or circumstances made me do it, or I couldn’t help myself, or something overcame, came over me. So there’s an external locus of control. And there’s a victim stance, events conspired, people colluded, and this gave rise to the misconduct. And he abrogates personal responsibility. He assumes the passive voice.

And finally, there’s logical policies, simply very, very famous example is post hoc, ergo poctum hoc. In other words, if A had followed B, it means that A had caused B, which is absolutely wrong. It could be, but it doesn’t have to be. Or correlation is causation, or reference to authority, or ad hominem attacks, and so on.

Now, since he uses logical malapropisms and policies to support his palindromic speech, and palindromic speech is efficacious, efficacious because the base rate of the base rate cognitive bias states in one of its renditions that people automatically fully believe 95% of what they are told, sight unseen, people don’t bother to verify, they don’t bother to cross check, they don’t bother to confirm in 95% of the cases, they just take it for granted. They assume that most people are good, well intentioned. They assume that most people are good, that the world is benign, that people are not evil and malevolent and malicious. So they have a base rate cognitive bias, they accept.

And palindromic speech uses this vulnerability, this weakness, and that renders palindromic speech very efficacious.

And palindromic speech mitigates the ineluctable hurt and pain associated with truth telling.

Honestly, no one likes to hear the truth. People hate truth tellers, which is why I’m hated. I’m kidding you’re not. I think I’m hated because I’m a truth teller.

So people hate truth tellers.

And palindromic speech caters to this bias. I’ve made up my mind, don’t confuse me with the facts.

And so palindromic speech colludes with psychological defense mechanisms, such as denial. And with behaviors, such as reframing and avoidance, it is powerful, powerful, very powerful, psychodynamic allies inside you.

The narcissist co-ops, the narcissist works with leverages your own psychological defenses. That’s what makes the narcissist speech so irresistible, so hurtful, so accomplished.

There are two other obstructive speech patterns, the hypothetical speech pattern, and the counterfactual speech pattern.

The narcissist borderline psychopath, they use hypothetical speech to test the waters, to see how their interlocutors would react to certain information.

So sentences like maybe, or possibly, or it could be that, or I think that, or I thought so but wasn’t sure, these are all forms of exploratory excursions.

The narcissist and borderline psychopath, they’re testing the waters. How are you going to react if they were to convert these sentences into certainties? How would you take it badly if they say something?

So they say, maybe I should have done this, maybe you should have done this. Maybe it’s kind of deniable, a plausible deniability. I said it, but it just said maybe, you know, it’s like someone insults you, humiliates you online, and then at the end they write just saying, you know.

So maybe X in the narcissist speech, maybe X means X had actually happened. X is the truth, but how do you feel about it? Maybe X, I’m testing.

Counterfactual speech is a lie or misinformation disguised as either a rhetorical question or a statement of settled and universally accepted fact. For example, maybe she flirted with me at the restaurant, but she didn’t come to my room later that evening now, did she?

Well, that’s a strong indicator that she did visit his room that night.

And so this is counterfactual speech.

There are three types of manipulative speech.

Victim speech, entitled demanding, dependent, transparent, whining, whining, grievances, grudges, that’s victim speech. It’s a manipulative type of speech.

Codependents and borderlines engage in this speech a lot, and so do narcissists.

Then there is child speech, entitled demanding, dependent, transparent, manipulative, naive, immature, fantastic. Narcissists have this.

And then there is a psychopathic speech, entitled envious, competitive, malicious, opaque, coded, dense, and multilayered.

Let’s discuss a bit, lying and confabulation.

If their mouths are moving, they’re lying.

Histrionics, borderlines, psychopaths, narcissists, they move their mouth, they’re lying. They lie all the time. Their lies may be goal oriented, to secure money, to secure sex, to secure narcissistic supply, or the presence of the intimate partner. The lies may be intended to regulate grandiosity, or a labile sense of self-worth, to buttress a stance of victimhood, or simply because the forbidden and the illicit and the risky are thrilling and novelty.

And this is in case of serial cheaters who lie and deceive promiscuous attention-allergic people and so on.

So when you communicate with these types, what they say is largely irrelevant. The only relevant information is why they had chosen to say what they had said. So don’t be attention to what they’re saying. Ask yourself, why are they saying it?

The selection of lies, the choice of confabulations, is revealing, telling, and informative.

And the same applies in psychotherapy, by the way.

The anomic, the intake phase. In the intake phase, most patients confabulate. They offer narratives that are egosyntonic, self-justifying.

So what the patient says is not nearly as important or crucial or edifying as to why the patient had chosen to say what the patient had said.

The choices they make in telling their stories are much more important than the stories.

Narcissists lecture. They never talk. They seek to impress. They never communicate. They ignore other people’s input. They actively suppress such input rather than listen.

The narcissist is so invested, so immersed in extracting narcissistic supply from his interlocutors, so concerned with dazzling them with his brilliance or with his sexual irresistibility, that the narcissist is oblivious to his body language, to his verbal cues, to his interjections, to events around him, or to the environment at large. It’s a compulsion, obsessive.

The narcissist expostulates, hemming and hawing, pontificates, opines, defines, edifies, rectifies, rants and raves and rambles for hours on end, ceaselessly and breathlessly.

All of you have been exposed to the narcissist’s monologues, unending monologues like this lecture, and always from a position of pompous self-importance and verbose superiority and for authority.

Yeah. People, his mum and numb audience, find the narcissist exhibitionistic, delusional and coercive grandiosity, so repellent, so off-putting, that they shun his unilateral company altogether at the end. That’s why most narcissists are left alone.

These people can’t stand them anymore.

But what about speech acts which are abusive? What happens with the narcissist, psychopath, borderline, never mind, abuse speech?

Not only use speech, but abuse speech.