Covert Narcissists & Triangulation - How & WHY Do They Do It?

Triangulation is a very common tactic that narcissists like to use. It's when they bring a third person into the relationship who they triangulate you with, whether they maybe limit or create new communication between you and this third person except through the narcissist. It’s a form of baiting, which is a psychological tactic that involves intentionally provoking someone to elicit an emotional, aggressive, or angry response. It may be used as a form of intimidation or control, as a source of power and control to assert dominance and to manipulate your emotions.

It gives them narcissistic supply because by them provoking reactions, they are ensuring attention and validation for the false self. Then also, it regulates their emotions because it gives them an opportunity to shift their emotional discomfort onto you, which is why they will engage in this form of tactical manipulation. They will push and provoke you to trigger defensive responses, making you appear reactive.

They will gaslight you to distort reality and to create confusion and self-doubt, and they will engage in projective identification, a defensive mechanism where they unconsciously split off parts of their true self, flaws, or behaviours, which they then attribute to you. They do this as a result of various psychological motivations, insecurities to deflect attention from their own vulnerabilities, to diminish your confidence and achievements, and boredom to create drama and excitement.

A narcissist’s common baiting techniques may include blame shifting, condescending remarks, emotional hooks, gaslighting by omission, and playing the victim. This is why you must protect yourself from the potential harm that this may otherwise cause you by setting clear boundaries and establishing firm limits. Stay calm and not react emotionally, not taking the bait and instead ignoring provocative comments, maintaining emotional distance and limiting engagement, and seeking support from trusted friends, family, or professionals.

Recognise the red flags: inconsistent behaviour, words and actions that don’t align, emotional instability and frequent mood swings, grandiosity, lack of empathy, and addictive tactics such as coercion, guilt-tripping, or gaslighting. Prioritise self-love and self-care instead of taking the bait and feeding into their drama and chaos, because they will use triangulation to manipulate you, gain power and control, and feed their need for validation.

It’s a form of emotional manipulation to create conflict because they enjoy stirring up drama and tension between people. They divide and conquer. They weaken relationships to maintain control, which gives them emotional supply because then they get attention and validation from multiple sources. It allows them to shift the power dynamics. They use triangulation to influence people, which maintains their superiority by positioning themselves as the central figure.

Triangulation also empowers them because it avoids intimacy by keeping the relationship superficial. It fulfils their psychological needs, gives them validation, reinforces the grandiose image, and alleviates their fear of abandonment by ensuring backup relationships. This is why they will engage in various triangulation tactics such as gossiping and playing the victim.

They may use flirting, charm, and attention to play with your insecurities and exploit your vulnerabilities in order to create jealousy or interest, while gaslighting you and distorting reality to create confusion. They do it because it is effective. It creates divisions, separates people into groups, creates tremendous destruction in romantic relationships and families, and it can also destroy you internally.

It can diminish your self-esteem and self-worth, and depending on the severity of the disorder, their intellectual intelligence, emotional intelligence, past experiences, and empathy capacity, they may be aware of this. Sometimes triangulation can be subtle, which may make it challenging to recognise, but there are signs to look for.

There may be visible cues such as hinting, where they will drop subtle hints about others to create doubt or tension. They may give backhanded compliments, belittle others, or make passive-aggressive comments where they make indirect sarcastic remarks. They may also utilise behavioural tactics such as excluding others, where they will purposely leave you or another person out of conversations or activities.

They may play down their behaviour by feigning ignorance or innocence. They may gaslight you by omission, withholding information to create uncertainty. They may engage in flirting, making subtle advances to create jealousy, but if you confront them about their behaviour, they will minimise your emotions.

They may use guilt-tripping, emotional blackmail, or play the victim to gain sympathy. They may also utilise digital triangulation, which may include provocative social media posts, ambiguous or flirtatious text messages, online interactions, or flirting to create jealousy.

They may engage in covert triangulation by manipulating others to convey messages or create conflict, spreading rumours and playing both sides within conflicts while secretly fuelling them. But even though their triangulation tactics can be subtle, there are ways to recognise them.

You can do this by paying attention to inconsistencies in their words and actions, noticing emotional manipulation or gaslighting, identifying patterns of exclusion or favouritism, being aware of subtle changes in their behaviour or tone, and trusting your instincts.

Because nothing is ever their fault, they use triangulation because it allows them to stay in that victim role. They love to be either in the victim or rescuer role to achieve emotional control, sympathy, and validation. But it is all a fantasy because while it may appear as though they are oscillating between the victim, rescuer, or persecutor roles, in reality they are always in the persecutor role.

The victim and rescuer roles can become forms of subtle persecution and coercion. When the narcissist plays the victim, they need another person to be the role of persecutor because it fulfils their psychological needs by confirming their victimhood and gaining sympathy, focusing attention on themselves, and eliciting control by manipulating other people's emotions.

So when they are playing the victim role, they must allocate another person to be this real or imagined persecutor. It could be anyone who disagrees, criticises, or sets boundaries, or someone who they may have manipulated into attacking or criticising them. It may also be a projected persecutor, someone who they have accused of harming them when, in fact, they are the aggressors.

The narcissist will often become the aggressor by accusing a rejected persecutor of behaviours they themselves exhibit, or by attributing their own faults or intentions onto the projected persecutor. They do this through blame shifting, transferring responsibility, emotional blackmail, coercion, and pressuring a projected persecutor to do their bidding.

It is an attack, a provocation, and a form of aggression because the narcissist is in denial of reality. They may accuse the projected persecutor of lying or being overly sensitive. They may also exhibit minimisation, where they downplay their own aggressive behaviour, or blame shifting, where they transfer responsibility onto the projected persecutor who was actually the true victim.

They may attribute malicious intentions, make false accusations of abuse or aggression, and engage in mirroring or projection by throwing behaviour onto the projected persecutor. They may deflect criticism, redirect blame, and rationalise and justify their behaviour as a response to perceived persecution.

They may engage in emotional blackmail, guilt-tripping, intimidation, anger, rage, and self-pity. They may use verbal aggression such as labelling, name-calling, sarcasm, and belittling. They may also use covert aggression such as passive-aggressive behaviour, backhanded compliments, subtle sabotage, and undermining the perceived persecutor's efforts.

They may also use digital aggression, which may include cyberbullying, online stalking, social media manipulation, and spreading misinformation. These tactics create an aggressive projected persecutor by manipulating perceptions, distorting reality, shifting blame, creating coercion, encouraging submission, and intimidating through emotional displays.

The person that they are talking to about the projected persecutor is placed in the role of rescuer, someone who enables, supports, and sympathises with the narcissist. But sometimes the narcissist will put the person they are trying to gain support from into the role of victim, while placing themselves in the rescuer role because they are trying to create an alliance with this other person.

They are trying to make this other person feel like they are protecting them and taking care of them, making sure nothing bad happens to them because they have presented that person as a victim and themselves as the one who is going to rescue them from this horrible persecutor.

Triangulation is the narcissist's game board, and their goal is to get you onto the drama triangle so that they can manipulate you, relationships, and achieve emotional control. They achieve this by provoking you to react, so that they can point the finger at you and make you look like the persecutor.

When a narcissist is talking about someone else negatively, they are often trying to get you to take sides, even though this is a problem between them and someone else. They will pressure you to support them against the other person. They will not simply share information or talk with you about the problem; they will leave you with the idea that now you know about it, you have to be on their side.

Sometimes they may even pressure you into choosing who is right and who is wrong. They may use gossip because they want to put you into the rescuer role of the drama triangle, which is very different from when they have placed you in the persecutor role.

In this role, you may feel like you are being excluded from the group of three people. You may feel invisible because you are being completely ignored. But if you confront them, they will treat you as though you are jealous or problematic, and they may even force you into the persecutor role by treating you very unkindly and disrespectfully, especially when no one else is looking.

They will create chaos and then point the finger at your normal reactions to that abnormal behaviour, as though your reactions or you are the problem. When really, they are creating chaos because they want to turn people against each other. They want to be the one who controls the narrative, where the only narrative that is being told comes from them.

They also gain an advantage by manipulating you into conflict. It makes them feel like they have gained superiority over you, as though they are better than you, which is why they may have an obsession with you and are always trying to outdo you. They may constantly try to achieve, demonstrate, or assume superiority over you because they have an extreme inferiority complex.

They are constantly having to prove themselves, which is why they will try to make you look crazy by pointing out to the other person things that you are noticing, things that the other person has not noticed or seen. This can make you feel crazy and confused, which gives them both positive and negative supply.

Narcissists create triangulation because they have a need for drama. They want to make you look crazy, and they want to create division. They are doing it to hide the real problem, which is that they are crossing boundaries, lying, manipulating, gaslighting, and showing a lack of respect for you.

They may be highly critical and negative because they have an insatiable need for attention and control. If these unhealthy behavioural patterns are the real problem, it is something the narcissist does not want to face because they do not like to self-reflect. They do not like to work on themselves because their fragile, dysfunctional ego will not allow them to see themselves as flawed and imperfect.

This is why they use manipulation tactics like triangulation, because it creates confusion and allows their real behavioural problems to go unseen by those who may lack emotional intelligence. Instead, you end up carrying the blame for them, when the truth is that their selfishness, entitlement, disrespect of boundaries, lack of empathy, unwillingness to self-reflect, and unwillingness to take accountability are what are causing the problems.

They are creating problems that they do not want to work on. They do not want to work on themselves, and they do not want to make changes. So instead, they triangulate others into being blamed for the problems, which hides the real issue and allows the narcissist to receive both positive and negative supply.

They get positive supply from the people who are fooled into thinking that someone else is the problem. They get the attention, validation, and admiration that they desperately need in order to build their fragile sense of self-worth, which then helps them to bear their own toxic shame.

The people who are supporting this image end up validating the false self that the narcissist pretends to be, which gives them a huge amount of positive supply. Meanwhile, they may have baited you, gaslighted you, set you up to become reactive, rejected you, and blamed you for every single thing that went wrong.

This provides them with negative supply because they are intentionally provoking you into emotional reactions. These reactions may have caused you to feel fear, anger, resentment, helplessness, self-doubt, shame, and insecurity. The reason why they decided on this specific course is not just for attention; it is also for control.

Negative supply makes them feel more in control and powerful. It helps them to defend against the shame and helplessness that they feel deep down. By creating these situations, they can shift responsibility away from themselves and onto someone else.

This is why triangulation can be so damaging. It creates a situation where people are placed against each other while the narcissist positions themselves as the central figure. They create conflict, confusion, and emotional instability, while presenting themselves as the person who is innocent, misunderstood, or simply trying to resolve the situation.

The reality is that triangulation works because it manipulates perceptions. It changes how people see each other, creates uncertainty, and allows the narcissist to control the flow of information. Instead of people communicating directly, everything becomes filtered through the narcissist.

The most effective way to protect yourself is to recognise these patterns, maintain your boundaries, avoid being pulled into unnecessary conflicts, and focus on facts rather than emotional reactions. When you refuse to participate in the drama triangle, you remove the power that triangulation gives them.

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