When a Dark Triad personality asks you to help them shame, embarrass, stalk, or hunt down and abuse a target, keep your wits about you and do not buy into it. Decent human beings never seek to harm an ex-friend, estranged family member, or former love interest.
Note that any person asking friends or people attached to their social media network to attack another person has an agenda. The first step is determining whether or not it is one to abuse, dominate, humiliate, harm, or socially incapacitate a targeted victim for punishment based on a retaliation agenda.
If this is so, it says far more about the person striving to incite a mobbing attack than it ever says about the true personality or nature of the Manipulator’s target.
For that reason, when and if a true villain shows up at your door claiming they have been wronged and demanding your help to get even with their narcissistic rival opponent, stop to really consider what that person has just revealed to you about their character before you agree to drink the courtesy glass of Koolaid they are serving.
In “Abuse By Proxy” scenarios, a vendetta-fueled Abuser acting willingly as a Flying Monkey for a stronger predator targets and hunts preferred prey. Their justification is typically a claim that the person they are menacing deserves abuse based on the word of their aggrieved, rejected suitor.
The portrait painted of a targeted victim includes revisionist history, deliberate obfuscation or misrepresentation of circumstantial facts, and intentional characterization as a person with no redeeming social or emotional value to humankind whatsoever. The truth is Abusers by Proxy are selfish, shallow, less intelligent people unable to conceptualize the bigger picture.
Caustic personalities abuse because they CHOOSE to do so on a whim of self-indulgence. There is no true vigilante justice mechanism engaged — as torturing people psychologically, emotionally, or socially due to spite is seldom done to get even for any targeted victim’s real-life offenses.
Most of the time, the person being bullied or harassed the most is actually the KINDEST, sweetest, and least likely person to retaliate — making them the perfect timid mark for vengeful con artists to smear campaign against in order to get their jollies off by sadistically abusing a person they know at the core of their being is absolutely innocent (but more importantly powerless to stop their primary abuser’s callous actions).
They hear 10 minutes of a life story — taken out of context and shared retributively by a self -promoting Cluster B person — and use those details to create a fictional life story of their target’s character.
That fake image is used to justify incessant, ongoing abuse as well as to socially undermine the person’s credibility among casual acquaintances, prospective professional associations, and even weak-minded friends and family members. It’s a tactic called “poisoning the well” — using just enough truth to make a negative spin story about a person seem plausible.
The trouble with believing a person who smear campaigns and shares negative gossip about others is the speaker’s character should ALWAYS be questioned… never the person who is being verbally slandered or in writing libeled.
A huge red flag is meeting a person who has absolutely nothing nice to say about an ex. Another is noting whether or not the person spewing venom about a former love interest, ex-friend, or family member who is estranged has suffered a narcissistic injury of some sort. If they were rejected by their target and react with caustic antagonism, realize the personality type will be the FIRST to insist that they are an honest person — followed by them uttering a flurry of lies and misrepresentations shared in an attempt to recruit a Flying Monkey.
By lying to friends and family to enlist their help in attacking the person who bruised their ego, they not only abuse the recruited people’s trust — they turn them into abusers (even if they have no idea they are being abusive to a party because they presume the person is guilty rather than innocent).
For that reason, both the targeted victim and the secondary Abuser are mutually victimized by the more extreme Cluster B personality type. The art of manufacturing successful triangulations is a skill typically possessed by Malignant Narcissists, Sociopaths, Psychopaths, Narcopaths, and Dark Triads — with the last being the type thought to have originally dreamed up such toxic social terror plans and devices.
Nearly all Dark Triad triangulation attempts encourage Abuse by Proxy. It is simply their thing, people with “Obsessive Ex Syndrome” — something rejected suitors develop when and if their gaslighting victims wake up to the systematic patterns of brainwashing attempts. If the preferred scapegoat comes out of the fog and cognitively identifies with the fact they are a) not at fault or b) causing relationship issues they are typically shunted as fast as an abusive controller can ditch them.
To keep them quiet, Abusers by Proxy of the most toxic, anti-social, and menacing sort are then deliberately lied to during recruitment. The more they buy that they are targeting a person who deserves abuse for upsetting the stronger manipulator, the more likely they are to use brute force and completely divisive tactics against the former lover or relationship partner in an attempt on the Abuser by Proxy’s part to win favor with the Dark Triad who contracts the social or emotional hit on their past partner.
Truly, anyone using an Abuse by Proxy scenario to harm another human being displays traits of the following for diagnostic criteria:
- Narcissism
- Entitlement
- Machiavellianism
- Anti-Social personality tendencies
- Narcissistic “entitlement-based thinking”
- predatory behavior (violent)
- aggravated stalking (as opposed to stalking) behaviors
How toxic is the habit of going after other people at the behest of a person seeking revenge against a former friend, family member, or love interest? Incredibly.
People who engage in such practices voluntarily are typically overt or covert Sadists who enjoy things like pot-stirring, causing confusion, manufacturing chaos, and/or bullying and intimidating other people. They fit diagnostic criteria for being problem people who are prone to actively engaging in social as well as oftentimes situationally specific forms of violence.
They tend to display both narcissistic tendencies and traits of people with #ASPD based upon having both an interest in participating in devised Machiavellian ruses as well as showing an emotional capacity to engage in unjuried retributive justice based on the word of a clearly toxic, vengeful person.
No person who launches such slanderous or malevolent campaigns against a former partner should ever be trusted. Neither should any person agreeing to do an abuser’s bidding — regardless of their dogged insistence that the targeted narcissistic rival (or former love interest) “deserves it”.
It’s the most pernicious form of Flying Monkey attack — for a Dark Triad to recruit an anti-social peer to sadistically abuse a victim further for fun and sport on their behalf. It’s like having Dark Vader after you for the offense of nothing but being kind-hearted by nature rather than inherently mean-spirited, pathologically dishonest, cruel, abusive, willing to fight, or just plain bad.
