I never knew what a narcissist was until after I left Sly.

After I left, I did a lot of research. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. I looked up all of the words that are out there describing narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and the characteristics and behaviors associated with it. I learned about gaslighting, manipulation, projection, flying monkeys, trauma bonds, love bombing, devaluation, and everything else I could get my hands on.

I filled my brain with all things narcissist.

I think part of that was because I desperately needed to understand what had happened to me. When you’ve spent years questioning your own reality, finally discovering words for things you’ve experienced can be incredibly validating.

But after a few years, I started noticing something else.

I seemed to have developed what I jokingly call a sixth sense about certain people.

It’s similar to a gut feeling, although even now I’m not sure exactly how to describe it.

I’ll meet someone and something just feels… off.

Sometimes I feel slightly intimidated. I’m not even sure intimidated is exactly the right word. It’s more like the other person somehow feels bigger than I am—or that’s how they make me feel.

There’s anxiety. Discomfort. A deep sense that something isn’t right.

And the strange part is that I can’t always tell you why.

It could be something they’re saying. It could be how they’re saying it. Their posture. The way they shake my hand. Where their attention lies during a conversation. How they look at me when I’m speaking. How much they talk about themselves. How they react when someone disagrees with them.

And especially how they talk about other people.

None of those things individually means someone is a narcissist. Let me make that very clear.

Someone can have poor eye contact, talk too much about themselves, have an awkward handshake, be arrogant, be socially uncomfortable, or simply rub me the wrong way. None of those things gives me—or anyone else—the ability to diagnose them with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

A gut feeling is not a diagnosis.

But I’ve learned that, for me, a gut feeling can be a reason to pay attention.

What Exactly Am I Picking Up On?

Because I’m a definitions person, naturally I went looking for an explanation.

There are several different concepts that may be involved in what survivors sometimes describe as increased intuition after abuse.

Hypervigilance is a heightened state of alertness to potential threats. If you’ve spent years in an unpredictable environment, you may become extremely sensitive to changes in another person’s tone, expression, body language, mood, or behavior.

That makes sense to me.

When you live with someone whose mood can determine what kind of night you’re going to have, you learn to pay attention.

You notice how the door closes.

You notice footsteps.

You notice the tone of a single word.

You notice the look on someone’s face.

You notice whether they’re irritated before they’ve ever told you they’re irritated.

You learn to read the room because, at one point, reading the room helped you survive it.

But I don’t think hypervigilance necessarily explains all of what I’m talking about.

There’s also pattern recognition—our ability to recognize similarities and recurring patterns based on previous experiences.

Then there’s implicit learning, which is particularly interesting to me. We can learn patterns through repeated exposure without necessarily being consciously aware of everything we’ve learned.

I wasn’t sitting in my marriage taking notes on Sly’s behavior.

I was living it.

Day after day. Year after year.

My brain was getting an education I never asked for.

And then there’s intuition—that immediate feeling or judgment that seems to arrive without deliberate conscious reasoning. What we call a “gut feeling” doesn’t necessarily mean something mystical is happening. Sometimes our brains may be processing little pieces of information so quickly that the feeling arrives before we’re consciously able to explain what produced it.

Maybe that’s why I can’t always answer the question:

What is it about this person?

Maybe part of me has recognized something before the rest of me has figured it out.

Then There Was Willy

There was a man involved in an organization that Jake was a part of. I’ll call him Willy.

I remember the first time I met him.

Jake needed to stop by his house to pick up some materials or something, and I went along. When we arrived, Willy was sitting at his computer. He never got up.

He was very soft-spoken, seemingly very intelligent, and came across initially as a nice, thoughtful person. He acknowledged me, told me it was nice to meet me, and there wasn’t anything blatantly offensive about the interaction.

He was also extremely long-winded.

He talked a lot about himself and not really much else. There was something persuasive about the way he spoke.

And as I stood there in his living room, I became increasingly uncomfortable.

Nothing dramatic happened.

He didn’t insult me.

He didn’t threaten me.

He didn’t say anything that gave me a concrete reason to walk out of that house believing he was a bad person.

But something inside me was screaming that I didn’t like him.

When Jake and I got back into the truck, I told him.

There was something about Willy that I couldn’t put my finger on, but I didn’t feel like he was a good person.

And I never really changed my mind.

Over the years, I had opportunities to observe him.

Interestingly, after that first meeting, there were many times when I was in his presence and he behaved as though I didn’t exist. He wouldn’t even say hello.

Then one day at a picnic, I happened to be standing near him when nobody else was around.

He looked at me and said:

“Aren’t you going to say hello to me?”

I remember that interaction because something about it struck me.

After repeatedly not acknowledging me, suddenly the responsibility for the lack of acknowledgment was mine.

Over the years, I watched how he interacted with other people. He developed a very loyal group around him. There were problems within the organization, attempts to gain control, alliances with people in positions of influence, and eventually an enormous division among the members.

I wasn’t privy to everything that happened, so I’m not going to pretend that I know every detail.

And I’m also not going to diagnose Willy.

I can’t tell you that Willy is a narcissist.

What I can tell you is that the feeling I had standing in his living room that first day never went away. And as the years passed, I observed behaviors that gave me reasons to continue being cautious around him.

Something had put my radar up.

So I watched.

This isn’t something I’ve only recognized in hindsight, either. There have been several times when I’ve told Jake that something about a person bothered me long before I could explain why.

Sometimes he doesn’t see it at first.

And that’s okay. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what I’m seeing yet.

But there have been enough occasions over the years when, months or even years later, Jake has come back to me and said, “You were right about him.”

He’s even told other people that I was right about someone from the beginning.

I don’t say that as some kind of I told you so. I don’t think I’m infallible, and I certainly don’t think every uncomfortable feeling I have about another person is automatically correct.

What fascinates me is that sometimes I seem to notice something before I consciously understand what I’ve noticed.

By the time Jake sees it, there may be obvious behavior that can be pointed to and explained. When I first felt it, there wasn’t. There was simply that feeling:

Something is off.

Maybe that’s what experience does. It doesn’t necessarily give you all the answers. Sometimes it just teaches you which questions to start asking.

When Someone Makes Themselves Bigger by Making Everyone Else Smaller

I’ve experienced that same uneasy feeling around other people.

One of those people is someone I’ve previously called Aiden on this blog.

Aiden and I haven’t always gotten along, and I’ve written before about my concerns surrounding behaviors children can learn from manipulative or narcissistic parents.

There are things I’ve observed in Aiden over the years that remind me deeply of behaviors I experienced with Sly.

Again, I am not diagnosing him as a narcissist.

I’m talking about behaviors.

The way someone speaks negatively about other people.

The way they put someone else down while subtly making themselves appear superior.

The words they choose.

How they treat people when there’s nothing to gain from being kind to them.

How they respond when someone challenges them.

How they tell stories about conflicts in which everyone else somehow seems to be the problem.

There is one particular behavior that immediately gets my attention now:

When someone repeatedly makes themselves bigger by making everyone around them smaller.

I know that pattern.

I’ve lived that pattern.

And once you’ve experienced certain behaviors over and over again, they become incredibly difficult to unsee.

But Is It Intuition—or Hypervigilance?

This is where things get complicated.

Because trauma can absolutely make us hypervigilant.

When your nervous system has learned to look for danger, sometimes it will find danger where there isn’t any. A person’s tone might remind you of someone else. An innocent behavior might trigger an old memory. Someone may simply have a personality you don’t particularly like.

Surviving narcissistic abuse does not give us a magical ability to identify narcissists.

We can be wrong.

I can be wrong.

That’s why I’ve learned not to treat that uneasy feeling as a verdict.

I treat it as information.

When that radar goes up, I don’t need to immediately decide:

This person is a narcissist.

I can simply think:

Something about this interaction is making me uncomfortable. I don’t know why yet. I’m going to pay attention.

And then I observe.

How does this person treat people when nobody important is watching?

How do they talk about people who aren’t in the room?

What happens when they’re told no?

What happens when someone disagrees with them?

Do their actions consistently match their words?

Can they accept responsibility?

Do they respect boundaries?

Do they seem interested in relationships, or primarily in what relationships can provide for them?

One uncomfortable interaction doesn’t answer those questions.

Patterns do.

Learning to Trust Myself Again

There’s an irony in all of this that isn’t lost on me.

Narcissistic abuse taught me not to trust myself.

For years, I was conditioned to question what I saw, what I heard, what I remembered, what I felt, and even what I knew.

You’re wrong.

That didn’t happen.

You’re overreacting.

You’re crazy.

After hearing those messages enough, you stop needing someone else to say them.

You start saying them to yourself.

And yet, after leaving narcissistic abuse, one of the things I’ve slowly had to learn is how to listen to myself again.

That doesn’t mean believing every fear.

It doesn’t mean assuming every uncomfortable person is dangerous.

And it certainly doesn’t mean diagnosing everyone who reminds me of Sly.

It means I’m allowed to notice when something makes me uncomfortable.

I’m allowed to wonder why.

I’m allowed to take my time with someone.

I’m allowed to watch their behavior.

I’m allowed to maintain boundaries while I figure them out.

And I don’t have to talk myself out of what I’m feeling simply because I can’t immediately prove why I’m feeling it.

Maybe what I jokingly call my “sixth sense” isn’t a sixth sense at all.

Maybe it’s hypervigilance sometimes.

Maybe sometimes it’s intuition.

Maybe it’s pattern recognition built from years of experience.

Maybe it’s my brain noticing a tone, expression, inconsistency, posture, choice of words, or subtle behavior and quietly whispering:

You’ve seen this before.

I don’t always know.

What I do know is that I’ve stopped automatically silencing that voice.

I don’t let it make the final judgment.

But I do let it tell me when it’s time to pay attention.