Kerry: [00:00:00] Victims often don't know they're in a dangerous situation until they find themselves in the thick of it. Today, Eleni Salgado, who is a domestic violence advocate and the author of the book, But They're So Nice, joins me to talk about the insidious nature of covert aggression and covert abuse. If you'd like to follow her, be sure to check out her content on Instagram and TikTok.
I'll make sure to put the link to her handle in the show notes.
This is Breaking Free from Narcissistic Abuse and I'm your host, Dr. Keri Ker McEvoy, a mental health specialist with over 20 years of counseling experience. Each week we're going to take a deep dive into the dynamics of narcissistic abuse. As a listener supported podcast, thank you for considering becoming a subscriber for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
Eleni, I am so excited that you're here joining me today on this podcast, and I'm particularly interested in talking about covert abuse and covert narcissism. I've seen your content on TikTok, and I just love the way that you educate us about covert abuse, [00:01:00] even the power and control wheel. You go into a great depth, which is helpful. So, explain for people who have never heard of covert abuse before, what is it exactly?
Eleni Sagredos: Covert abuse is any abuse that isn't obvious. It's not in your face, it's not overt abuse, they're not yelling at you or hitting you, but, it involves a lot of manipulation and gaslighting and passive aggressive remarks that kind of chip away at you over time.
So it's kind of like death by a thousand paper cuts, the slow drip of poison which is, I think why a lot of people that are in these relationships might not even realize they're being abused until years down the line.
Kerry: Are you coming at this from your own personal experience? Or is it something you just have seen a lot?
Eleni Sagredos: I was part of a family with a very abusive father. And then I found my, and he was more of an overt abuser. So I'm like, okay, I've seen an abuser. I know how they act. I know how they behave. Like I could clock them. And then my own personal experience,
and experienced a covert abuser, and that was [00:02:00] something I wasn't familiar with at all. And leaving the relationship, I was confused. I didn't understand what I had experienced or the words or the language to use to describe it. I just knew that it wasn't normal. Did a lot of research.
I later became a DVA, so I'm a certified domestic violence advocate, took some classes there, really learned about what is abuse, what is power control and how it could look and manifest outside of those overt acts of aggression.
Kerry: It's amazing how those experiences can be so pivotal that we walk out and think, I have to understand that. I don't know if you read my story, Love You More, but when I exited that relationship, I felt shattered, partly because it's a shattering experience, but also because as a psychologist, I thought I should have known better, and then to have been so sort of demolished psychologically, been duped, really, outright duped by someone.
I hear you went through something similar, that you went on a journey to figure out what actually happened here.
Eleni Sagredos: There's like a quote, like a social media [00:03:00] quote: I went looking for love and I left the relationship with a PhD in narcissism. I think a lot of people can relate to that, you know? The way I think the mind first starts healing is trying to wrap your mind around like what you just went through so that you understand and process it.
A lot of people go into that education phase and I think I went into that education phase times 10 and I read all the books and I like, really dove into it and really tried to understand it. And it was, That moment where I was like, okay, so I think he had all the characteristics of a narcissist, but it wasn't like the grandiose boasting type of narcissist.
It was the reserved, cold, a little calculative, maybe a little closer to psychopathy, but I think a lot of covert narcissists are a little bit like that where they're cold and calculative, they talk down to you, but it's hard to pinpoint. When you read the literature about narcissism and abuse, your experience doesn't align with those manifestations.
So you're trying to understand what it is, and I know a lot of people [00:04:00] then read books and, Healing from Hidden Abuse. Those are big books for covert abuse. And all the pieces start adding and then become an expert.
Kerry: Certainly by life, that's for sure. And I love the title of your book, which is, But They're So Nice. I don't know if you, how much you know of my story, but my narcissistic ex, and I believe he's a narcissistic sociopath, honestly, because the sum of the story is it was a marriage con.
Eleni Sagredos: They have that behavior where they feed off of other people. They like con people.
Kerry: It's very parasitic. Very vampire ish actually. And throughout that whole thing, he never raised his voice at me. Never called me one name the entire time. Always appeared so gentlemanly and in control and in fact that's what he used withdrawal and rejection and stonewalling as a way to punish me.
He withdrew love, that the punishment was to disappear. And I think you're right, we get done and we think, is that really abuse because it looks so, polite. And there was so much civility in the relationship. Yeah, there were hot moments where he [00:05:00] might have thrown a phone at a wall, but those were really rare and far in between.
And the other thing he did that threw me off so much was he kept claiming he was working so hard-- that he had never done so much, and he was in therapy supposedly. Now today, I'm not for sure I believe he was really going to therapy, but you see all this work and you think this person's invested and I've never seen somebody work so hard, especially when you come out of a family where that wasn't the priority, getting help.
Kerry: So you're confused, then you think, okay maybe I'm expecting too much or wanting too much. I know this is something you talk a lot about coercive control. It wasn't until it was all said and done that I realized that our schedule was coercive control, that I was experiencing tremendous ambient abuse.
So describe that for people. Maybe they never heard of ambient abuse or coercive control. How can we recognize that we're in a coercively controlling situation?
Eleni Sagredos: I am a big advocate for listening to your body and how it feels because I think before your mind has caught up, your body feels that [00:06:00] there's something wrong. If you feel afraid of doing X because of your partner, I think that's a big indication that you're being controlled. I come back and I have
more groceries than normal? Will I be judged when I get home and interrogated about the amount of money that I just spent? This a repeating pattern? Because abuse is a pattern, right? So I think that is a huge indication. Are you afraid of doing something that should be normal. This is your freedom is impacted.
That's a huge piece of coercive control. It's a person that's controlling and coercing your environment, your life, the way that you move and behave. That's the first thing, absolutely, How do you feel around your partner?
Kerry: I can already hear people pushing back and saying, Yeah, but isn't that part of a relationship because you're impacting each other? In fact, I did one on financial abuse, which I think you actually weighed in and said, Oh, yeah, that's financial abuse. But the amount of comments like, No, that's fiscal responsibility.
[00:07:00] Because that person's behavior is impacting how the two of them are budgeting. She wasn't staying within the budget. When we get used to relationships where we live in fear, and we're trying to manage that other person's emotional response, we start to think that's just what relationships are like, is that we're doing this dance of trying to avoid conflict.
How did you recognize that's actually there's something wrong with that, that it really shouldn't be like...
Eleni Sagredos: yeah, I think that plus the talking down too. Like if this person is also making you feel small and less than, because there's ways of approaching financial issues in a relationship that doesn't mean that you're condescending and talking down to your partner. A partnership is that --it's a partnership.
You guys are both on equal grounds and you speak to each other as equals because you're a partner through life. If you notice that your partner is acting more like a parent, that is a controlling relationship.
Kerry: Yes. a mentor, like they're always teaching you. Here's one of [00:08:00] my phrases that I hate. It triggers me when somebody does that. Oh, I'm so proud of you.
You're so proud of me. You've evaluated me or they'll say, good job. Good job. You're not my boss. I'm not performing for you. This is a collegial or a friendship. I guess that's where I was driving with this is that I think
unfortunately, our culture is, it's so pervasive, this kind of thinking this hierarchical thinking. It's throughout everywhere. We don't know the degree that it's a little coercive. It's a little patronizing and insulting.
Eleni Sagredos: I think we've normalized it too. Yeah. And that's the
problem. I think that's such a big issue because then you get into these relationships and because you've normalized it, and society has normalized it. You think it's normal and then it escalates.
Kerry: When you look back to that relationship, do you end up having insight into thinking, oh I missed this, or, I wish I had seen that, or, I really wish I'd understood what that meant..
Eleni Sagredos: There's so many times especially in [00:09:00] early stages of healing and learning where I feel like I went around my apartment sounding like a crazy person because I was like, Oh, that was a lie. Oh, that was abuse. Oh, so you're having these aha moments. Sometimes out loud. And you're like putting the pieces together.
And so many times I'd be like, I wish I said that, I wish I stood up for myself. I wish I did that. But you have to be like really gentle on yourself because you didn't see it at the time. You were operating in the knowledge and the understanding that you had at the time. It's so normal beat yourself up, but at the end of the day, like that happened, you handle it the only way you could and now you're learning from it.
Kerry: Is that how you've made peace with the shame that you've felt? Because I know I walked away feeling not only psychologically insecure. It was a pretty devastating experience. And then the more I learned, because like you said, you're right, it is a process of uncovering. And the more you learn, [00:10:00] stupider you feel as you uncover even more.
I found out he was serial cheating two months into the marriage. So I had gotten married, was on the honeymoon, and found out on the last night of the honeymoon, I got a letter from the other woman. We immediately went into intensive treatment for, I thought it was sex addictions, I thought what we were doing.
And interestingly enough, I knew he was a narcissist. And we just don't teach, at least when I was in school, we didn't teach you that there's all this ramifications that come with narcissistic relationships. So I didn't know that it was going to be damaging to me. I just thought he'd be a difficult person at times.
That's all I thought was going to be wrong. So I'm in this intensive and this therapist says to me, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Okay. You've only know just a little bit so sure enough it continues like it's the gift It doesn't stop giving. After I'm out of the relationship and trying to heal.
I'm making more discoveries. I'm making massive conclusions and I'm really like being blown away and I'm feeling shattered by that so for me, it was this double layer of feeling like, How could I as a psychologist not have seen this and known and how [00:11:00] stupid I feel, but it also, it's just that you're looking back and you make these discoveries and the discoveries are so devastating as the betrayal of it, but it's also that you feel like an idiot.
You didn't see it at the time.
Eleni Sagredos: My God. The two pieces. One was that, even a psychologist. Sometimes I use you as an example, but you're not the only person I know that has like a therapy background that have been in abusive relationships. I think it's unfortunately common because you have a higher level of empathy.
You care about people and that's probably why you got into this profession. They find people with higher empathy that rationalizing behavior and are intelligent. And so they use that against you, right? Because you'll rationalize away the behavior.
I think we, as a society, underestimate when we people say as a narcissist, we don't say how dangerous that is. We think, oh, a narcissistic relationship, oh, a narcissist, they're fine. It's not that bad. They're just a little difficult. These are people that are so incredibly disordered that they ruin the lives of people [00:12:00] around them, and they exploit people and
Eleni Sagredos: they ruined their own lives at the end of the day. And they put people in danger, like physical danger in a lot of cases emotional danger, emotional and safety. So I hate when I see people like undermine it.
Oh, they're just like a narcissist. I'm like, oh my gosh, no, that's like such a horrible, horrible pathology. And then the other thing was like, did I feel shame? I think for me, initially I felt duped. I felt like I was tricked. Like you get out of your, you wonder Oh my God. The whole relationship was fake.
I felt like everything was fake. Was any of it real? That is, I think a big thing that we get into feeling after an artistic relationship because like the big defining factor is that person comes in with a persona, a mask, and you fall in love with that persona. So after the mask slips and you're putting together the pieces of information and the abuse and really understanding what you went through, you're going to feel a huge sense of grief, but [00:13:00] also like you were tricked.
So I felt less shame and more like. Oh my God, I was duped, I was tricked, and I felt fear, actually, because I didn't know people like this existed, and that they were
so convincing. You know, I thought, like I said, I had experience with an overt abuser in my life, so I thought I could point out the big angry guy.
No problem. I could point him out in the bar and I could avoid him and he's, yelling at the waiter. No problem. What I felt was fear. Oh my God, people like this exist. They are walking among us and they're so incredibly convincing.
Covert narcissists masquerade as the rest of us. And when we meet them, we don't know that we've met somebody really toxic because they play the victim so well.
Kerry: And that role of victim is a sympathy card. And we mistaken sympathy for empathy.
Eleni Sagredos: Yes.
Kerry: We end up thinking, Oh, look, they feel sorry about stuff. Oh, look they're upset about stuff. That means this person has [00:14:00] sensitivity. No, it doesn't. It's just maybe another form of them centering themselves.
But instead of centering of look how great I am. It's look at how bad I am or how helpless I am. It's the poor me instead of the big me. And we miss that. In fact, I was going to ask you why you thought people think this personality is so dangerous. When I assess danger, I'm thinking of lethality, but I have a feeling we're talking about something else.
We're not talking about, Oh, are they going to just, literally go out and kill me. So what do you think when you hear people say, this is the most dangerous group of people, Why do you think they think that?
Eleni Sagredos: I think it almost comes down to going back to "the bear versus man" analogy, but it's like the bear I can tell is a bear the overt abuser I to a point can clock them. With a covert narcissist because they are wolves in sheep's clothing they make you vulnerable you trust them and when you trust someone so implicitly because they are... they're kind to you, they [00:15:00] seem caring, they show up as like a knight in shining armor and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I've met my person, they're like, so great, how did I get so lucky?"
And then when they turn around and they show you their true colors and they abuse you or they're incredibly cruel and, harmful and you find out, "Oh my gosh, this person lacks empathy entirely and they're callous." That is such a hard revelation because what you experienced then after is betrayal trauma and healing from betrayal trauma is so difficult.
So I think it's that the psychological warfare that you're trying to handle in the relationship and not even realize what's happening. They break you down slowly and you just wake up one day and your self esteem is just not what it was in the beginning of the relationship and you're a shell of yourself and then afterwards when the fog finally clears You have to heal you have to heal from that [00:16:00]betrayal trauma. So
Kerry: Okay, you asked yourself the question, did he ever love me? And I know this is, by the way, you and I are using gendered pronouns because it happened to us with a man. In fact, I think, and I'd like to know, so this is the second question, but I still want to follow up with my first question.
I think there are more women who are covert narcissists and there are men, is my suspicion,
Eleni Sagredos: I
Kerry: because I think they fly under the, we could even talk about why that is, I have a theory, I don't know this in research, but I have a theory about why, but the question I wanted to originally ask you is, do you now, looking back, do you think he loved you or do you think he didn't?
Eleni Sagredos: I think he loved in the only capacity he knew how but it's not It's not true love, right? True love is selfless. It's kind. That is love.
Someone that loves you doesn't treat you that way. I don't think that they love in the way that we love.
Kerry: I think there's a huge group of people, and I'm not saying they're all narcissists, but they had some narcissistic traits, and they love somebody to the degree that person benefits them.
But if they were to give that person up for the good of that person, [00:17:00] you know, sacrificially, like say, I realize I'm willing to let my love go because you're going to do so much better without me.
I think a lot of people can't do that. And this group of people really don't know how to do that. This, their love is very opportunistic. In my case,, I'm now convinced mine did not love me. And I think that was the other level of injury for me was to realize, like, how could I have been in a relationship for 31 years with somebody that I knew loved me but passed away? Maybe it wasn't perfectly, but he did truly love me. And I even found out after he was gone, people would tell me little acts of things that he did in my service. They would come up and say, you never knew this, but he watched out for you and this is what he did on your benefit. Whereas, the ex, I continue to find out more crappy stuff he's done behind my back.
I don't get the good stories, I hear all the worse stories that I was never aware of. But mine was a con, and I think, how could I have missed that? How could I have mistaken that this person loved me when they really didn't [00:18:00] love me. It, yeah, it was very devastating to discover that.
But here's why I think women get missed. I feel really sad about this as our society. I think that the feminine stereotype, if we could stand back and like, think of, for example, a Marilyn Monroe, or think about the women that we have idealized as the woman .
is not very healthy. She's actually quite sick. She's she's codependent,
And she doesn't have a really good sense of herself. She's manipulative. She uses her sexual appeal to draw people in. She doesn't ask for what she really wants.
She's passive aggressive . She plays games a bit. So when we stand back and look at that, I think that we then mistaken that, unfortunately, as a woman, so when men get into relationship with that type of woman they get tore apart by her and they're surprised and then they step away and say well, that's just women.
No, that's a particular type of woman. It's not women. I talk a lot to men privately on the side about the [00:19:00] stuff, and I see this confusion. That's women. No, that's a group of women. In fact, I don't know women like that. 'cause I don't have these women in my circles.
I, I deliberately get rid of them.
Eleni Sagredos: Yes.
Kerry: But you keep talking about women. No, it's a certain type of
woman and I'm not in that group.
Eleni Sagredos: I see similar comments that, oh, all women do this, and I'm like, not the women that I know. That's not
Kerry: I always scratch my head. Who are you talking about? I don't know. But I don't disbelieve their stories. I know their stories are true. In the fact, there's a research study that came out, I think it was like early eighties.
Okay. Or late seventies. One of them was a, my professor was the researcher on the study. Paul Werner is his name. I'm not for sure if he's alive anymore. The fascinating study was among college students. They had a list of adjectives. Adjectives that you would use to describe people like courageous, brave, assertive.
Healthy, just words that describe people. And some of them were hard words like victim or pitiful or weak passive. And then they asked them, pick the words that [00:20:00] describe a healthy man.
And then they said, pick the words that describe a healthy woman. And then the last category was pick words that describe a mental patient. The words that described men were what you think, the confident, in charge, big kind of healthy person. The words that described women and mental patients hugely correlated with one another. That was a study on stereotypes, sexual
stereotypes. And I think that, unfortunately, we haven't deviated very far in the last 40 years, even though I think women , in themselves, have made more gains because now we can do all these things that we used to not be able to do.
We have bank accounts, we can get divorced. We now are in the workforce. We're doing all these things that we have never been able to do before. But I don't think our perspective, the sexual stereotype has changed, has caught up or kept up. And as a result, that's why men are so shocked when they get into a toxic relationship with a woman because they didn't realize she was toxic.
They thought she was just a typical average woman.
I also have to [00:21:00] wonder if the stereotype which comes first, the chicken or egg? If we pathologized a lot of things that women experience especially in the early fifties, they were like, Oh, she's hysterical.
Eleni Sagredos: Let's lock her up. And I'm not sure if it like, which came first, is it the chicken or egg? Is it the women are hysterical and unhealthy, or is their reactions to disrespectful behavior and being oppressed in, a society that oppresses us pathologized.
Kerry: I would say it's both and,
Eleni Sagredos: Yeah.
Kerry: I think that, it's always the simplest explanation when it comes to human nature is not the case. It's usually highly complex. A years ago, I read an article about why did Van Gogh cut off his ear. And I think you can even find it. It was graduate level, but the end result of the article was, we'll never know why, because there's a myriad reasons why.
There's a thousands of reasons why it cut off his ears. Yes, it may have because of his father's relationship or because it's spurned love or, for lots and lots of complicated reasons. And they're all accurate at the same time. That's the other part I know we don't like as humans, we [00:22:00] don't like the complexity of stuff, but it is really, really complex.
So to sort of like wrap up today. What do you think has been your biggest takeaway about covert abuse as you're moving forward as in a healing person?
Eleni Sagredos: There needs to be more education about it. I think just everyone needs to learn because even in a more overly abusive relationship starts out as covert abuse and then escalates. And I think, clocking it in the beginning when someone is talking down to you and you feel small in a relationship.
Why do you feel small? What is the language that you're using to describe your partner in your relationship? The behavior is how to spot manipulation like these need to be things that I feel should be taught in school. I think we need to learn this so that we can avoid dangerous people and those wolves in sheep's clothing.
Kerry: I don't think we do enough about even teaching about what it feels like to be in a dangerous situation. What it feels like we know what it feels like around us, but we don't know what it feels like inside of us. And that's where even you started today was saying we need to get better with being in tune with our bodies.
And when something [00:23:00] feels off, we need to say, "I don't feel safe." I may not know why. I may not never need to know why, but I need to get out because I don't feel safe.
Eleni Sagredos: That's really important.
Kerry: So in the podcast extra, we're going to jump over there and talk about the differences. We hinted at it today, but we didn't get into it. The differences between types of aggression. You, we've talked about the fact that you recognize overt aggression, the big bully, but you didn't recognize covert aggression.
So we're going to go over there and define what it is, and then talk about how to recognize it better. So I'm so super excited about that. Thank you for joining me, Eleni, today. It was a really great discussion. I just loved having you on.
Eleni Sagredos: Thank you so much for having me Carrie. I'm so excited to be here.
Kerry: Well, that's a wrap for this week's episode. Are you following me on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube? Find me at kerrymcavoyphd. And whether you're in, consider leaving, or have left a narcissistic relationship, find community support at my Toxic Free Relationship Club. You can learn about this resource as well as others at [00:24:00] kerrymcavoyphd.
com. And I'll see you back here next week.
