The Devil Wears Prada centres on our protagonist, Andy (Andrea), the somewhat naïve striver who wants to break into the journalism world with a start as an assistant to the Editor-in-Chief of Runway Magazine (a fictional Vogue), Miranda Priestly. Miranda is your textbook calculating, ruthless, narcissistic leader that everyone reveres, fears, and despises at once. She is Runway magazine. As her loyal creative director Nigel says, “Her opinion is the only one that matters.” This makes her incredibly powerful and very protected, as she positioned herself as a guardian of Runway’s reputation and a producer of legitimacy and acceptability.

Runway is a successful magazine because it defines fashion and inspires reverence with Miranda at the helm. This means she needs the right people around her to sustain that position: visionaries, enablers, and high-performing compliant operators who embody its image and understand what’s required to maintain the institution, not just perform the work.

Andy enters this environment with a reasonable yet naïve set of assumptions. She knows nothing about Runway or fashion and doesn’t yet understand what the role demands. She treats the job as a temporary foothold into journalism, assuming that doing it competently will be enough to move on. This is an attitude common among early career professionals entering institutional environments for the first time.

Inside Runway, Andy’s assumptions are demolished in real time. Emily enforces Miranda’s expectations to the extreme, like a good cult devotee and expects Andy to keep up or get out of her way, because Andy’s mistakes reflect on her. Nigel is the loyal Golden Child, offering the right balance of snark and advice for Andy to function while remaining fully aligned with what Miranda and the magazine require.

Andy’s naivety is short lived as she chooses to assimilate into the culture. It occurs through small adjustments that make sense to her at the time. She begins to see what matters to Miranda and acts accordingly, anticipating what Miranda needs before it is asked. Her change is rewarded by Miranda’s approving glances that serve as breadcrumbs as she’s given more responsibility and more loyalty tests to maintain approval.

Andy steps into opportunities that Emily has been working toward and takes them without hesitation. She knows what they represent and she takes them anyway.

No one pulls her aside at work. She brushes off her friends’ and boyfriend’s disapproval as a lack of understanding of her pressures. There’s no moral reckoning as she stares in the bathroom mirror. She’s worked hard and sacrificed her relationships to get to where she is, and she’s not stopping now. “I had no choice” is the perfect narrative to assuage her guilt.

It’s easy to fixate on Miranda as the cause of the stress and cutthroat behaviour. She’s a rare woman at the helm of a high-profile and iconic business, and there are enemies waiting in the wings to replace her with a younger, cheaper model. She’s the one who holds all the power and is excellent at abusing it to get what she wants. She’s ruthless, demanding, manipulative, narcissistic and is exactly what the institution needs her to be to remain relevant and successful, while keeping herself out of early retirement.

So is it Miranda or is it the type of system she’s in that pays her to do what it needs for longevity in a cutthroat industry?

This question is relevant if we assume individuals operate independently of the conditions that reward them. If you’ve read my work, you’ll know that I don’t believe they do.

Miranda is a product of Runway, not the other way around. She didn’t arrive fully formed and impose herself on the institution. She became what the institution could use and keep.

Every institution begins with a creative spark to fill a gap in a market or to solve a real problem, and ends by protecting itself from the consequences of having done that well.

What happens at Runway follows a pattern that emerges in any institution that succeeds long enough.

Behold the institution life cycle!

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The life cycle of institutions

1. Early stage
People deal with things as they arise, often in the middle of something else, without the need for a meeting to discuss it. A layout is opened up on a desk and anyone who glances over offers immediate reactions and thinks out loud rather than after reflection. Someone points out a problem and the person responsible responds in that moment, adjusting, defending, or abandoning it while everyone watches in real time. Decisions happen on the spot and the work changes before the conversation is over.

Producing the work and talking about it happen at the same time. The right people are whoever is there. No one waits to be included or worries how their comment is received. There isn’t pressure to be compliant or agree with anyone. Everything is out in the open, including mistakes and missteps, and they’re corrected without fanfare or needing a ‘difficult conversation.’

Some people start getting it right more often, and everyone notices. An editor calls a change that improves the page and it sticks, then does it again the next day and is right again. No one pretends all opinions carry equal weight, though they’re not managing that difference yet. They still argue, just with a growing sense of which calls tend to hold.

When something works, it stays because it works. It doesn’t need to be pre-approved or routed through anyone else to survive.

2. Growth stage

As more people start to rely on the work, fewer things can be resolved in the moment. Discussions no longer remain contained because a bad decision has wider impact, costs more, and takes longer to fix than before1. People feel a stressful pressure rather than the exciting startup pressure, even if no one says so.

Ideas are no longer presented raw and unfiltered, and have to go through a soundboard process with someone else beforehand to refine them enough to share. No one argues things out in the open anymore because they’re discreetly handled before a meeting or never raised at all.

People still speak, though not in the same way. A point that would have been pushed all the way through is raised once and then left alone if there isn’t enthusiastic uptake. Someone notices which reactions slow things down or create tension and avoids triggering them the next time. Their contributions are tempered by self-restraint and discernment to avoid getting under the boss’s skin.

Conversations take a bit longer to reach the same outcomes. Ideas that need more back and forth begin to feel heavier than they’re worth, and some get dropped earlier.

Deadlines start to matter in a way they didn’t before. Fewer things are reworked on the spot. The space that once allowed for messy fixes in real time starts to close.

Nothing dramatic has happened. People are still doing their jobs and the work still gets done, just within a narrower set of conditions than before.

3. Preservation stage

More people depend on the work being predictable, so fewer decisions are left loose. People settle things earlier and bring forward something that already fits what is known to be acceptable.

Someone checks with their manager before sharing something more widely. Another waits for sign-off because it hasn’t gone through the right line yet. People start copying others in so nothing moves without the right visibility.

There are more managers, and they expect to be kept informed. Updates become part of the work. Meetings are booked with specific people. Notes get taken and circulated. Forms get filled out and processes get followed. HR sits alongside the work, setting expectations about behaviour and how issues are handled2.

People still contribute, though they do it with more awareness of how it will be received. A point is raised once and then left alone if it creates tension. The same person brings a version of it later that is easier to accept. The work still gets done, it just happens through clearer lines, more checks, and more people involved in keeping it that way.

4. Late stage

Everything still looks perfect. Every output comes together exactly the way it’s supposed to: polished, controlled, impossible to fault at first glance. Nothing is messy or unfinished, and that’s the point because nothing is actually new. The ideas are familiar, just updated enough to pass as fresh, like something you’re sure you’ve seen before but can’t quite place, drawn from what has already worked elsewhere and reshaped to fit what now passes.

Meetings are now about making sure nothing causes a problem rather than pushing anything forward. Work gets approved because it’s safe, it won’t upset a partner, a stakeholder, or anyone important enough to have a say over revenue or reputation. A piece that might have started out sharp or interesting gets softened along the way, shaped against an unspoken list of what you’re no longer allowed to say, until it fits neatly into place. Everyone can tell when something might go too far, and it disappears before anyone has to say no out loud, as if it was never there.

The leader is still the leader, their name still carries weight and keeps the system intact. Anything that reaches them has already been filtered, shaped, and narrowed down to what will hold up publicly and commercially3. They remain the centre of everything because the brand depends on it, even as the terms are set around them and their influence no longer extends the way it once did.

People say the right things, reference the right people, and stick to what has worked before. No one wants to be the one who pushes too hard or introduces something that doesn’t please the leader and puts them under scrutiny.

The workplace still signals quality and authority and looks like it’s the leader, when it’s not. It follows what’s already working somewhere else, shaped by those with more influence, refines it, and presents it as its own4. It is holding its place by a thread while everything that once made it matter keeps happening somewhere else, and you wouldn’t know it because of the constant PR machine keeping it that way.

Runway would be described by many workplace culture critics as a toxic workplace, and I would have agreed each time I watched it until recently. It’s how a mature institution in decline operates within the established conditions required to sustain its position of relevance and status.

A workplace that looks like it’s dysfunctional begins to make sense when viewed as part of a broader pattern. The behaviour of its employees follows a progression that has been described in parts across different fields. This piece has those parts assembled into a coherent model I haven’t come across before.

My prediction for The Devil Wears Prada sequel

Andy walks back in twenty years older and still eager, like someone returning to something that once mattered, intending to get it right this time. She carries experience and expects that to be acknowledged. Miranda does her usual ‘who are you,’ treating Andy as an insignificant blip, re-establishing the dynamic immediately. This is a typical grandiose narcissistic leader move to entice Andy to prove herself, while putting her in a constant state of cognitive dissonance by withholding approval and dropping loyalty tests dressed as opportunities, each one calibrated to see how far Andy will go now that she has more to lose and more to prove. Andy is quickly back in her awkward twenties playing this game, like she’s earning her place instead of taking it. That is, until an opportunity arises that allows her to deliver exactly what’s needed, producing her rise in status with Miranda’s approval.

Andy delivers something that seems to work that stabilises the immediate pressure. She secures what Runway needs in the short term and allows Miranda to maintain continuity without conceding control. That outcome is claimed by the institution and treated as evidence of its ongoing strength.

The approval is immediate and fleeting, and the next demand follows before she has time to use the loo.

Andy now recognises the pattern. She’s seen it before, just without the access, the stakes, or the illusion that it might lead somewhere different. She knows what’s required to stay where she is and what it would take to move beyond it.

She keeps going anyway.

Miranda glances up, already onto the next thing.

“That’s all.”

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I recognise this isn’t how everyone experiences these environments. Some people don’t notice these distortions as readily, some aren’t significantly affected by them, and others have stronger incentives to continue despite them. I’ve found that while I can handle highly charged situations and sustained conflict, the ongoing misalignment itself becomes harder to justify remaining within.

Most people still need to work for an institution for a variety of reasons tied to their security, especially if they’re not yet making a living off Substack subscriptions. Leaving institutional work isn’t always a realistic or relevant option. The point of this piece is not to dismiss that reality, but to describe how these systems actually function so people can make more informed decisions about how they participate in them. How people respond to that reality tends to come down to what they can see, what they can tolerate, and their constraints.

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A large part of my LinkedIn feed over the last 5 years is toxic workplace and systems posts. This includes bullying, toxic leaders and workplaces, and my contribution of scapegoating. The same ideas are recycled between influencers and commenters, and the commentary treats these patterns as if they’re new, unexpected, awful (understandably), and something that should be stopped or fixed. Of course, I was on the toxic workplace bandwagon and contributed to this discourse over the years with plenty of posts condemning systems and leaders for being toxic.

The increased frequency of these posts, and the LinkedIn influencer-experts who speak about workplace inclusion, safety, psychological safety, wellness, attunement and leadership as things that will improve workplaces, and who champion changing culture into psychologically safe ones, point to a shared assumption that workplaces can be designed to be toxic-free and be made to function in a particular way if the right interventions are applied.

This entire discourse assumes workplaces are meant to function according to their stated values and have somehow gone off track, which is the wrong assumption to make. Workplaces function as designed. When a person realises this can feel like betrayal, because it means confronting the possibility that the institution they trusted was never governed by the rules it claimed to uphold. What people experience as toxicity is often the result of encountering that design while still believing the myth.

An entire field of complexity science has developed to describe how systems behave. In organisational life, its language has been smuggled into workplace thinking, where complexity is often framed as something to manage and improve. That language now shapes fields such as leadership, organisational psychology, and wellbeing, all of which promise better functioning workplaces.

These fields are positioned as helping people navigate the world of work while helping organisations improve. Many people turn to these frameworks in good faith, trying to make sense of experiences that feel confusing and deeply unsettling. In practice, they also function as mechanisms of assimilation. They help people adapt to existing conditions, make sense of their experience, and continue operating within environments that aren’t structured around the assumptions those same frameworks promote. Even the wellbeing science feeding many of these interventions remains unsettled on the basic question of how wellbeing itself should be defined.

This framework emerged from repeated observation of the same distortions across very different late-stage systems (ie. academia, large corporations, hospital systems, government departments), rather than reading up on political theory. I’ve always been suspicious of tidy explanations for complex environments when my observations keep showing otherwise. The patterns become visible when you spend enough time inside environments where stated values and actual behaviour diverge and where people try to make sense of contradictions that official narratives can’t explain. I’ve encountered fragments of similar thinking in the work of various writers, including on Substack, but this model is grounded in pattern recognition rather than scholarship. Its value lies in whether it explains what people are actually experiencing.

The stories we tell ourselves about work

These myths only make sense if you assume the workplace is meant to function according to its stated values. These distortions survive because most people make sense of workplaces through a small set of familiar myths, each one offering a comforting explanation for why things seem wrong. Most people hold onto these narratives for understandable reasons. Letting them go can mean facing the painful possibility that the institution they trusted was never operating by the rules they believed in.

First is the idealised workplace narrative, the corporate Garden of Eden. Work is supposed to be psychologically safe, inclusive, fair, accountable. Good people speak openly, competence is valued, and reasonable behaviour is rewarded. In this fantasy, politics barely exists. If the culture is healthy enough, merit rises to the top and the workplace behaves exactly as the leadership brochure promised.

Then comes the toxicity narrative, which treats every unpleasant workplace as a fallen version of that paradise. Toxic leaders, broken cultures, poor communication, unsafe environments, absent accountability are all signs that something pure has been corrupted. Politics is treated as contamination as though power plays are a foreign substance that somehow leaked into an otherwise pure workplace and spoiled the atmosphere.

The intervention narrative is the optimism industry built on top of that diagnosis. If only we had more attuned leaders, stronger feedback loops, more inclusion, more training, more frameworks, and one more workshop involving coloured markers and breakout groups, the workplace could finally be restored to health. Politics, in this version, is a removable defect, a design flaw awaiting the right consultant to engineer it away.

There’s the intrusion narrative, beloved by those convinced politics arrived from outside in muddy boots. In this version, workplaces were once meritocratic, rational, and performance-driven, until equity agendas, DEIB language, identity claims, and social causes stormed in and ruined the purity of the enterprise. Politics is framed as an alien intrusion as though the workplace had always been an orderly meritocracy.

Finally comes the power pathology narrative, where politics is blamed on the usual suspects: narcissists, favourites, empire-builders, protected actors, bad incentives, and the wrong personalities in charge. The workplace itself is presumed fundamentally sound. The problem, apparently, is that it has been temporarily hijacked by the wrong cast of characters.

These narratives compete, overlap, and borrow from one another, but they all depend on the same comforting premise that workplaces are supposed to operate according to the ideal, and that politics appears only when something has gone wrong.

What they can’t entertain is the possibility that nothing has gone wrong at all.

Toxic… or just incompatible?

Toxic workplace has become the catch-all diagnosis for the moment a person discovers that the rules they thought governed an organisation are not the rules actually in play.

The experience on the inside seems so real. The place appears hostile and political, and colleagues seem manipulative, cliquish, evasive, self-protective — fluent in behaviour that wasn’t described in the onboarding handbook. The natural conclusion is that something has gone wrong for the workplace to be so dysfunctional and morally compromised.

The explanation is often less dramatic, though no less painful. Sometimes what is being experienced is the shock of discovering that the system is operating according to rules the person never knew they were expected to accept. They may no longer be compatible with the environment they are in, or may never have been, because they were working from assumptions the workplace itself does not actually honour.

That mismatch is profoundly disorienting because it feels like betrayal, and often it is. People assume they’re witnessing a deviation from normal workplace functioning when they might be encountering the workplace functioning exactly as it’s structured to function.

The word toxic then appears as a way of naming the shock of political misfit. For many people, it is the only language available for an experience that’s both violating and difficult to explain. This doesn’t make the experience imaginary but it can make the diagnosis wrong. Sometimes the workplace hasn’t gone bad at all and is revealing that its real operating logic is incompatible with what you can ethically or psychologically remain inside. For some people, that leads to exit. For others, it leads to a more deliberate way of staying.

Why politics exists (and isn’t going anywhere)

By workplace politics, I don’t mean party politics, though some people insist on bringing that in too. I mean the ordinary daily business of influence, favour, positioning, and survival inside hierarchies where everyone pretends merit matters. Most people don’t enter workplaces intending to become political actors. They adapt gradually to the pressures, incentives, and unspoken rules that govern institutional life.

As workplaces grow, they become layered bureaucracies, with more managers arriving to manage other managers. Risk becomes sacred and the real boss as the institution becomes less interested in accuracy and accountability than in being protected. The larger the organisation, the more energy goes into shielding it from embarrassment and liability. Entire professional classes emerge whose main function is managing exposure while remaining far removed from the actual work.

Promotion follows the same logic as advancement goes to people who reflect the values the workplace wants mirrored back to itself, not necessarily to those who do the strongest work. People often rise by appearing politically reliable and institutionally credible, sometimes regardless of whether their actual contribution is especially strong.

Information stops circulating as neutral fact and becomes currency in its own right. It matters less whether something is true than whether it’s useful, and anointed authorities decide which truths are safe to acknowledge.

Overall, workplace politics is the ordinary machinery of influence that takes over once preserving the organisation matters more than serving its stated purpose.

Politics isn’t the problem. It’s the operating system.

In late-stage workplaces, immunosurveillance becomes a constant background activity, with everyone participating whether they realise it or not. People pick up on small shifts, repeat remarks they happened to overhear, compare impressions in corridors, and work out who or what is beginning to register as a threat. By the time anything reaches a formal process, the classification has usually already happened, and the situation isn’t being treated as a neutral problem to assess.

Most signals pass through unnoticed, but the ones that disturb internal order attract attention quickly. Sometimes that’s genuine misconduct. Just as often it’s a competent person pointing to something the organisation would rather keep buried. These are often people acting in good faith, unaware that naming what they see has already altered how they will be perceived. From that point, responses across the workplace begin to align in ways that resemble an immune response to a foreign body.

Once a signal is flagged, re-classification begins and the status of the person carrying it starts to change. A high performer might be praised and trusted for years, but once they get too confident and begin to ask questions they’re not authorised to ask, their competence acquires a different meaning.

The process is predictable and often resembles a prolonged humiliation ritual. For the person inside it, this can be profoundly destabilising. Not only is their credibility inside the system being dismantled, but often their sense of reality about what is happening to them as well. The issue itself slips into the background while attention shifts to the person who raised it, and how to best remove the threat.

This is the autoimmune response in organisational life, where something concerning has been detected but the response turns against the carrier rather than the fault itself. The system can no longer distinguish between threat and diagnosis, and the messenger becomes the target while the underlying problem remains.

The reverse pattern appears too in the form of immunosuppression, where signals that would expose something too costly to acknowledge are dampened or ignored. Problems are downplayed because acknowledging them would trigger scrutiny the organisation isn’t structured to handle. The fault persists because suppressing the signal is treated as less risky than activating a response.

That’s why workplace politics appears so irrational from the inside. People think they’re watching reasoned decisions when they’re often watching an immune response select its target in service of self-preservation.

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The political ecosystem no one admits exists

Workplaces generate an entire ecosystem of outside actors who are often treated as though they’re all doing versions of the same repair work when they’re not. Some are beautifying the story, some are helping people inside the system manage the moral distress of remaining within it, some are helping people survive it and move on, and some are pushing out paperwork once the damage has already been done.

The system requires supports to keep people functioning within it, and to remove those who no longer fit once they’ve been identified as the problem.

Perception managers, alignment practitioners, and enforcers support the system in different ways. Reality restorers help people step out of it with clarity.

Reality restorers help people who have already been targeted recognise what’s happening and consider their options, including leaving. The system will remove them either way. The difference is that they can leave with clarity and some dignity, rather than being worn down or pushed out on the system’s terms.

These distinctions are often lost. My work is often grouped together with consultants, leadership experts, culture advisers, and workplace repair specialists as if we’re all operating in the same lane when we’re not. Confusion occurs because every role around a dysfunctional workplace is mistaken for some version of fixing it. Many people in these roles are acting in good faith, trying to reduce confusion, improve conditions, or help people make sense of experiences that are often difficult to navigate.

Perception managers stabilise the story. They are often the most visible voices (LinkedIn Top Voice) on leadership, culture, and workplace behaviour, providing language that makes dysfunction tolerable enough for people to remain within the system without having to confront the full contradiction all at once. They translate what people are experiencing into something that is manageable and coherent, even when the underlying conditions haven’t changed. This is why their work is so well received at senior levels.

Alignment practitioners reduce friction. They can see the gap between what an organisation says and what it does, and they help leaders narrow that gap enough to make the place feel less morally compromising. In practice, this is demonstrated by strengthening direct communication, improving the quality of feedback, and enabling leaders to back their people where hesitation or self-protection would usually prevail. They create conditions where people inside constrained systems can act with more integrity in specific moments. Their work improves the experience and tolerability of the system, even when its underlying dynamics remain unchanged.

Reality restorers clarify what actually happened. They’re a bit different in that their work begins where the others’ end. These practitioners don’t care about an organisation’s self-image enough to try to improve it, nor are they there to help leadership realign. They work with the people who’ve been targeted as the problem, often competent people who said something unauthorised and got caught in the autoimmune response. Their role is to help them see the system they’re actually in, rather than the distorted version they were told they were in, so they can make decisions based on real conditions rather than institutional narratives.

Enforcers are the investigators, assessors, workplace psychologists, and formal reviewers who arrive once the immune response is already underway. By then it’s already been decided who or what the problem is. Their role is to translate that into procedure, documentation, findings, and consequences, all wrapped in the reassuring language of neutrality. In doing so, they produce a version of events the organisation can stand behind. The focus stays on resolving the case rather than examining the conditions that produced it. They’re formalising decisions that have already been made rather than determining them.

Now what?

This is usually the moment when someone proposes better leadership, transparency, stronger policy enforcement, or perhaps a fresh workshop on crucial conversations as though one more laminated framework might finally do the trick.

It reflects how deeply many people still want to believe these systems can become what they claim to be, and how hard it is to let go of the redemption narrative once you’ve invested in it.

If the workplace is doing exactly what it is built to do, then the question is no longer how to repair it but how long you intend to keep arguing with its nature. Many people spend years trying to persuade an organisation to become something it has already shown no interest in being.

That recognition is rarely immediate or clean. For many people it comes only after years of trying to make sense of contradictions that never resolved, while assuming the fault must somehow be their own.

The real shift comes when the fantasy of reform gives way to recognition. Once you understand that the workplace is preserving itself, not failing by accident, your choices change. You stop treating every contradiction as a problem to solve and start deciding whether this is a game whose rules you are willing to live under. This is the essence of agency.

That’s what most workplace discourse avoids saying out loud. Not every environment is meant to be fixed and not every misfit is a call to activism. Sometimes the clearest sign of intelligence is recognising when to leave, or how you need to adjust to stay.

There is no such thing as a toxic system. There’s a system you’ve outgrown, or one you understand more clearly than before, and the mismatch is now having a toxic effect on you.

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

By supporting my research and writing, you’re supporting an effort to understand the processes shaping reality and relationships, to disentangle from dysfunctional relational dynamics, and to remain anchored to truths that guide perception rather than allowing external influences to shape it. Your support enables me to continue making sense of patterns that many people recognise but struggle to articulate, and to clarify the actions that allow people to free themselves from those patterns.

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I hate the spiritual path because it destroys the illusion that you get to keep what you’ve materially earned. The whole idea that doing it right leads to wealth or stability is a comforting fiction. You can be stripped of your income, stability, and the privileges you worked hard to attain without a performance review.

I hate the spiritual path because the moment I step out of line, I experience the consequences. I can’t pretend I didn’t know better and or my actions were guided by misunderstanding. There’s no delay or way to deflect responsibility. I know exactly what I’m doing and I can’t proceed as if I don’t because that would be too easy.

I hate the spiritual path because once you see it, the alternative is no longer available. To go back would mean ignoring what you now recognise in your own behaviour and continuing anyway. It means saying things you know are not true and staying in situations that require a fake version of you. Self-betrayal stings once you’ve seen it clearly, and it doesn’t stop.

I hate the spiritual path because it strips you of borrowed authority. Titles, roles, affiliations, and proximity to people or institutions that once gave you legitimacy stop working. You stop assuming that authority is protective or fair and see how quickly it shifts when something is at stake. It dismantles the belief that doing the right thing will protect you. You can follow the rules the way you always have and still lose your role, status, access, and reputation.

I hate the spiritual path because what remains after everything is stripped is far from reassuring. There’s no new identity to replace the old one. There’s no title, no affiliation, no structure to rely on. What’s left is your judgement in real situations and the results of the decisions you make. Nothing else supports it.

I hate the spiritual path because there is no external feedback. No one can tell you you’re doing well or that you’re on track. There’s no recognition, reward, or signal that you’ve made the right move and whatever you think is that signal is an interpretation. Nothing confirms you’re on track. You can’t lose yourself in achievement or build an identity around being good, helpful, successful, or right. All you have are principles and disciplined practice to work with and trust that they’re enough.

I hate the spiritual path because good intentions aren’t enough. I think I’m acting in my own best interest or handling a situation properly until I see that the decision was driven by a need for validation or control rather than surrender to something more reliable than my own preferences.

I hate the spiritual path because it exposes patterns that don’t change until I do. It doesn’t care what I say I am. It reflects what I actually am, and if those don’t match, I sense it. What I avoid returns with more pressure. What I justify becomes harder to justify. What I ignore becomes confronting. The intensity increases until I either change my response or accept the consequences of repeating it.

I hate the spiritual path because you can’t blame the system anymore. You see how that deflects responsibility away from behaviour. You see how repeated actions, including your own, produce outcomes that are unavoidable. You have to keep agency and responsibility at the forefront. You start to see how ideology is used to justify behaviour rather than correct it.

I hate the spiritual path because you can’t choose when you see yourself clearly. It shows you at the worst possible time, in specific moments, through specific behaviours, in things you said and things you justified. It becomes an endless cringefest that you have to endure.

I hate the spiritual path because it forces you into discernment whether you want it or not. You realise how much of what you were chasing was about feeling special and important, and how quickly you feel special when you get it, and how little that actually means. You realise how often you abandoned your own discernment to stay in good standing, to avoid conflict, or to avoid loss, and you can’t unsee it once you see it.

I hate the spiritual path because you can’t outsource it. No teacher, framework, or language can protect you. At some point, it’s just you and your choices.

I hate the spiritual path because you see narcissistic behaviour more clearly, in yourself and in other people. You see how people act to secure status, protection, and significance, and you can’t participate in those games anymore. You have to navigate it without using the same tactics to control perception or restore superiority.

I hate the spiritual path because people try to turn it into a system they can sell. They package it into steps and formulas as if they have worked out how it operates. Gurupreneurs act as if alignment produces predictable outcomes, as if thinking, feeling, and acting the Right Way™ will give you the life you want. This gives people the impression that if it is not working, they are doing it wrong, rather than recognising that the path itself does not operate on preference or outcome. It can’t be standardised, which is annoying when you want to succeed and attain enlightenment. The moment it becomes a formula, it’s a performance. The more you try to control it, the further you move from it. Some people reflect your own longing back to you in a way that feels like insight but doesn’t change anything.

I hate the spiritual path because you realise not everything that looks like a path is one. A cult and a spiritual path are not the same thing, and your devotion can be the right action in the wrong place, or the wrong action. You see how easily authority can be mimicked, how easily you can attach to something that looks meaningful, and how long it can take to recognise that you’ve misplaced your trust without letting wounded pride convince you that a real spiritual path should be easy.

I hate the spiritual path because peace doesn’t come the way you expect. It’s not something you get and keep. It comes when you stop forcing things, and it goes when you try to control what isn’t yours to control. You can experience it, lose it, and realise how quickly you return to urgency. I hate that you have to choose between peace and the things you think will give you peace, like the roles, the income, and what you built your life around.

I hate the spiritual path because you can’t use it to justify leaving people who don’t meet your expectations. You see how quickly that turns into a fantasy where other people are the problem and you’re the one Doing The Work™. You see how easy it is to devalue stability and what’s good enough because it doesn’t match the fantasy you believe you deserve. You can no longer position yourself as more aware and use that to distance yourself from people who haven’t changed in the way you expect. You’re not shaping other people to match your ideal. It sucks because you have to get over your resentment and develop compassion, when resentment and contempt are more satisfying.

I hate the spiritual path because you don’t end up on it by accident. You end up here because what you were told would work didn’t, or because it worked but it felt off. You wanted something real and you get it, but not alongside the things you used to feel secure, like the title, the income, the recognition, the identity you built, and the relationships that depended on that version of you. You can’t to keep all of that and follow this at the same time.

I hate the spiritual path because I stop caring about smashing glass ceilings, getting a seat at the table, or getting more women into leadership positions. I can see exactly why I wanted those things, and that path wasn’t as principled as I made it sound. Attaining success is easy in comparison because you follow rules and you get validation and recognition. This path doesn’t work like that, and I can’t pretend those motivations were anything else.

This is a path that only allows truth and requires ongoing trust in something I don’t control and can’t map out in advance. There’s no standard to meet and no confirmation I’m doing it right. It’s difficult and wonderful.

I hate the spiritual path but it’s the only path I’ll follow in this lifetime.

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

By supporting my research and writing, you’re supporting an effort to understand the processes shaping reality and relationships, to disentangle from dysfunctional relational dynamics, and to remain anchored to truths that guide perception rather than allowing external influences to shape it. Your support enables me to continue making sense of patterns that many people recognise but struggle to articulate, and to clarify the actions that allow people to free themselves from those patterns.

Here’s how you can help:

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I finally hosted my first solo Substack Live and discussed the politics of scapegoating.

In this discussion I explore why scapegoating appears so reliably across human groups. Why do communities, institutions, and organisations repeatedly target a person or group and treat them as the source of a problem? Why do these patterns persist even when the consequences are widely recognised?

I examine scapegoating as a collective process used by groups to restore stability and protect their self-image in response to perceived internal threats, and how these dynamics play out across relationships, workplaces, institutions, and societies.

If you don’t already know me, I am an independent researcher and analyst who examines the hidden relational and political dynamics that shape relationships, organisations, and public life. My work focuses on helping people recognise patterns that are widely experienced but poorly understood — from scapegoating and status games to narrative control and moral dilemmas.

Paid subscribers gain access to deeper analysis and the actionable tools I develop to help people recognise and navigate these dynamics in the real world. Your subscription supports the continued development of this work.

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I love analysing language and identifying the mental models presented in posts and comment threads that affirm a dominant belief that men are dangerous. I’m not discounting the pushback, as there is some, but it’s a minority.

Here are the dominant mental models present:

– Men are inherently dangerous.
– Misogyny is foundational to men.
– Male genius is built on harm.
– If a man appears safe, he probably isn’t.
– Men’s sexual pathology is widespread.
– Men are wired to conquer.
– Men require correction and oversight.
– Women are morally or spiritually superior.
– Male status equals unearned power.
– Male dissent equals complicity.
– Safety requires distrust.

Negative biases about men include: predatory, entitled, emotionally stunted, collectively responsible.

Positive biases about women include: wiser, more ethical, more life-giving, less dangerous, closer to nature, spiritually aligned.

This is where the conversation about harm and abuse requires discipline, not escalation.

Feminist discourse frequently invokes shadow work, integration, parts work, and the necessity of confronting disowned and rejected aspects of the self. Yet the tone of many of these threads suggests something closer to collective projection. Traits condemned in men are increasingly treated as if they belong exclusively to men, with corruption, abuse of power, and sexual exploitation framed as inherently male while moral clarity and ethical grounding are innate to women.

I want to say here that none of this minimises the reality of abuse. Rape threats, deepfake pornography, racialised harassment, and sexual coercion are degrading and inexcusable. When men engage in this behaviour and experience no meaningful consequences, it tells observers that status can insulate misconduct and that proclaimed social values against abuse are selectively enforced. This hypocrisy corrodes trust and understandably destabilises people who believed those values were real and that institutional accountability is naturally enforced.

The capacity for harm is not sex-specific. There are plenty of examples of women colluding with abusive men and exercising coercive power. Women can betray, manipulate, and rationalise their own misconduct. Denial of these traits in women, or calling them internalised misogyny or patriarchy, excuses wrongful use of agency while simultaneously implying women lack agency to behave morally, often because of systemic -isms.

It’s appropriate and necessary to examine behaviour — anyone’s behaviour without generalising pathology to an entire sex while idealising the other. When critique shifts from behaviour to identity, it ceases to be analytic and becomes ideological.

Those unfamiliar with my work sometimes assume that because I write and speak about narcissism, I diagnose and label people. My work is about interpersonal narcissism and recognising that each of us has narcissistic traits that influence behaviour. I can use narcissism as an adjective to shortcut an understanding about a constellation of self-preserving, controlling, and hostile behaviours among groups rather than a noun that labels an individual or group with a pathology. It’s more precise to describe individuals and groups with poor character, emotional, and moral development based on predictable patterns of language and behaviour than to simply refer to them as narcissists.

I also want to highlight an internal contradiction here. Patriarchy is criticised for externalising responsibility and consolidating power while feminism, at its best, claims to promote agency and self-awareness. Yet when harm is reframed as intrinsic to men and virtue as intrinsic to women, responsibility is externalised. Vice exists entirely outside the self and virtue is presumed within it.

In my work on discernment, I describe how destabilisation can induce a rush toward grasping certainty. When trust is broken by a public figure or an institution, the individual looks for coherence and relief from ambiguity. One way to achieve that relief is by enlarging the category of threat. If certain powerful men betrayed their values, it can be stabilising to conclude that all men as a group are unsafe. When institutions protect these men, the psyche’s logic is to decide that the system itself is irredeemable. While it may or may not be true, that step can restore a sense of order by simplifying the situation’s complexity.

Discernment demands that we tolerate the discomfort of not having a totalising explanation and resist the urge to replace one authority with another because the new authority appears morally safer or ideologically aligned. This is the same mechanism that drives people to join one cult after the other without purging the parent stand-in, whether that authority is ideological or paternal.

Hacking Narcissism

How to develop discernment

I published an earlier version of this a few years ago. I decided it was time to refresh it and focus on discernment and why it matters to effectively navigate the constant bombardment of information that carries an emotional charge that makes us susceptible to being influenced and manipulated…

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9 months ago · 93 likes · 19 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

No one can truly hold another person accountable in the way public discourse and social justice activism rhetoric often implies, because integrity isn’t imposed from the outside. People who want to remain incorruptible hold themselves to account. Those whose morals deteriorate under status and influence rarely do so in isolation, since their rise is typically accompanied by elevation, financing, admiration, and insulation from networks of followers, investors, institutions, and media ecosystems that benefit from their charisma and proximity to power. Corruption therefore tends to emerge as a relational and cultural dynamic whereby many participants enable what later appears to be the fault of one individual.

Power, status, wealth, and recognition exert a predictable pull on anyone whose self-worth depends on external validation. Assuming immunity under similar conditions reflects a misunderstanding of how seductive those forces become when reinforced by privileges and authority conferred by others. The desire to feel exceptional, chosen, indispensable, or affirmed by powerful institutions isn’t a male trait but a human vulnerability that cuts across sex, ideology, and affiliation.

The destabilisation caused by betrayal also produces another predictable move: institutional paternalism. Patriarchy is described as the structure that enabled harm, yet the proposed solution is often an appeal to authority to intervene decisively and secure the environment. Founders, platforms, institutions, or governing bodies are asked to regulate behaviour and restore safety. This makes sense in a workplace where people’s livelihoods are intertwined with work performance and professional reputation. This is unrealistic in online environments where participants choose to engage and invest their energy in fostering connections and saying whatever they want — and can choose to leave. If the argument is that male-dominated structures enable harm, then appealing to those same structures to restore safety isn’t dismantling anything. It’s asking for a more protective version of the same authority. That immaturity becomes most visible when trust breaks and the instinct is to seek a stronger guardian.

Radicalisation begins when betrayal is interpreted through a lens that preserves one’s own innocence and places corruption entirely outside the self. It’s psychologically stabilising because it protects one’s identity from scrutiny, yet stalls growth.

This is why I continue to emphasise discernment. Discernment is about developing the capacity to evaluate individuals, systems, and narratives with objectivity without surrendering one’s inner authority to the emotions that cloud judgement and any other authority that stokes those emotions.

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

By supporting my research and writing, you’re supporting an effort to understand the processes shaping reality and relationships, to disentangle from dysfunctional relational dynamics, and to remain anchored to truths that guide perception rather than allowing external influences to shape it. Your support enables me to continue making sense of patterns that many people recognise but struggle to articulate, and to clarify the actions that allow people to free themselves from those patterns.

Here’s how you can help:

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Very few are willing to disrupt this narrative. To suggest that scapegoating has a function, even a purpose, risks being accused of victim shaming or siding with workplace oppressors.

So I will.

Scapegoating in mission-driven groups — workplaces, professional networks, and other purpose-formed hierarchies — is more than an ousting of the individual posing a threat to the social order of the group. It can operate as a collective defence of authority (a figure and an institution), whether consciously coordinated or not, and act as a catalyst for the maturation of the scapegoat.

This is harder to accept for those who describe scapegoats as the seer or the truth-teller, particularly in conversations about family systems. More recently, the victim-turned-awakened-hero framing has appeared in workplace discourse. It preserves dignity after exclusion by suggesting the removal occurred because the individual perceived what others did not.

Sometimes that’s true. In many professional settings, however, scapegoating doesn’t require unusual insight or courage. Often the individual simply followed the stated rules in a culture governed by unstated ones. The reaction arises less from prophecy than from crossing an invisible boundary.

Scapegoating functions as an initiation process for the scapegoat while serving a protective function for authority — the group order. This argument concerns adult group settings, not family systems. Most people don’t recognise it as initiation while it’s happening because humiliation focuses attention on the injured self rather than on the mechanism unfolding.

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What is an Initiation Rite?

Anthropologically, initiation rites mark a transition in status. Arnold van Gennep described them as involving separation from a prior role, a liminal period in which former protections are suspended, and eventual re-entry into the community in altered standing. Spiritually, initiation has been understood as a stripping away of illusion and a symbolic death of prior identity that cannot be reversed once seen clearly.

In the context I’m describing, there’s no return to the group that enforced the separation, you don’t re-enter in upgraded form, and there’s no ceremony that restores your standing. The titles and access that once carried weight disappear, and the legitimacy that came from affiliation goes with them. From that point forward, authority depends on your judgment and the standards you practice. Credibility comes from what you do and how you do it, not from institutions or affiliations attached to your name.

Phase I: Pre-Ritual Conditions

The workplace or group setting operates with mafia-like logic long before anyone is formally targeted, but you can’t really put your finger on what exactly feels off.

You notice how things that were discussed in a conversation are recorded with subtle reframes. Decisions are described as contextual, evolving, or sensitive rather than final. When you try to clarify expectations, you don’t get concrete answers, or you get a different answer from someone else. Things that were flagged as priorities in one instance no longer apply in the next within a short time frame, and shifting goalposts make it easy to catch you in an act of wrongdoing according to the overruling authority.

Meetings are performative time wasters where decisions appear already made, yet you still have to play along as an active contributor. Information circulates through relationships rather than established communication lines, and access becomes currency rather than a function of role. You pay attention to who gets access and who is stripped of it after they were invited to provide feedback. The actual rules of conduct appear quite different from the verbal agreements made in good faith.

You become more careful with your wording and, to compensate, soften what you say so it’s received gently, qualify what you mean, watch how others react before committing to a position, or remain silent altogether. Disagreement is rarely presented directly; it appears as humour, tentativeness, exclusions that accumulate over time, or gestures so subtle that no one could claim them as opposition.

Psychological warfare is embedded in ordinary operations, and enforcement of the unwritten rules remains collective and deniable. When someone later becomes inconvenient, no one needs instruction because the habits are already entrenched and the culture has trained its members how to respond.

It’s within this environment that the future scapegoat still takes the culture at face value and assumes that competence and effort guide standing rather than proximity to authority. Once the scapegoating mechanism activates, it looks administrative rather than ceremonial, and any ritual aspect is administered through bureaucracy rather than spectacle. The entire humiliation process is intended to strip the initiate of status, access, and authority.

Hacking Narcissism

The Scapegoating Playbook at work

This post may be truncated in your inbox. For the full experience, read it on Substack…

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a year ago · 52 likes · 15 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

Phase II: The Stripping

This process functions as a rite of passage because it forces a shift in how an adult relates to authority. In childhood and early adulthood, protection is tied to attachment to figures or systems presumed to be protective and fair. Scapegoating disrupts that arrangement by demonstrating, through experience rather than argument, that protection is conditional and that authority operates through incentives, fear, and self-interest when challenged.

This interruption marks the transition from dependency to adult responsibility. Alignment with authority no longer guarantees protection, and blind trust gives way to discernment.

The belief that doing the right thing, working hard, or adhering to shared values will be recognised under pressure is discarded. When situations become politically charged, leaders protect their standing and the version of events that secures their position. Integrity and effort still matter, but they no longer function as protection because judgment and survival can’t be delegated. The initiate realises that institutions and missions are directed by people who prioritise continuity and self-preservation over fairness, even while speaking in the language of principle.

What initiation does in traditional settings is dismantle prior assumptions about protection and remove the status that once shielded the individual. It marks entry into maturity by ending reliance on external sources of protection.

Scapegoating serves the same function. It strips prior status and dismantles the assumptions that once shielded the individual. Life can no longer be organised around naïve trust in authority or the belief that obedience or loyalty will guarantee protection.

Return to former standing within the group isn’t possible. There’s no restoration of a previous role and no repair of the relationships that were broken.

At this stage, the initiate relates to authority differently. Roles and titles no longer determine security, and goodwill or shared values aren’t assumed. Before agreeing to anything, they consider what’s at stake, what happens if it turns, and who bears the cost. They name terms explicitly rather than relying on implied loyalty or shared purpose.

This shift comes at a cost because the loss is irreversible. Adult life resumes with a different understanding of authority and its limits.

This is the stripping phase of the rite.

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Hacking Narcissism

How to develop discernment

I published an earlier version of this a few years ago. I decided it was time to refresh it and focus on discernment and why it matters to effectively navigate the constant bombardment of information that carries an emotional charge that makes us susceptible to being influenced and manipulated…

Read more

9 months ago · 89 likes · 19 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

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Of course, one can argue that his work contributed a great deal of good to people’s lives, and that we should divorce the personality from the impact. But that argument no longer holds when spirituality and sacred knowledge, intended to cultivate character, are instead used to further a career while engaging in exploitative activities that feed the already inflated ego.

I was exposed to some of Chopra’s “teachings” many years ago while I was a cancer biologist, and they struck me as diluted spiritual quackery. Since then, I’ve walked past his books in stores and scrolled past content connected to him online. I was able to discern a fake spiritual authority, despite later ending up in a moderate spiritual cult myself. I joined because I believed it was superior to anything else I’d encountered, though to its credit, I did learn a genuinely useful healing modality. Like many such spaces, it was a cobbling together of borrowed practices, which I still draw on today.

Chopra aside, I’ve consistently criticised the use of self-anointed spiritual authority as gurupreneurship among the spiritually inclined and accountability averse. I come across countless posts that follow the same marketing strategy, designed to bedazzle people with ideals of a spiritual life while quietly centring profit. The delivery is familiar: blonde, white, boho-chic women with prayer mudras in their profile pictures, implying that you too can be this blessed if you choose their three-month program.

What’s striking now is how this tactic has mutated. Chopra’s authority was built by cherry-picking science and cloaking metaphysical claims in academic language, which gave his work the appearance of intellectual legitimacy. Today’s gurupreneur no longer needs science at all. Authority is generated through feeling, intuition, and divine instruction, with scepticism reframed as resistance. The mechanism is the same, but the delivery is more intimate, more affective, and harder to contest. Instead of telling you what to think, the modern guru tells you how to interpret your inner sensations, then positions themselves as the authority over what those sensations mean.

Hacking Narcissism

Selling the sacred: The rise of the Gurupreneur

This piece was inspired by a question from Anuradha Pandey while I was travelling to India. She asked…

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2 years ago · 75 likes · 50 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

Today’s reel was no different. I decided to unpack the marketing strategy being used (you’ll see the irony of that), alongside the appeal to position oneself as the authority over your thoughts and choices.

Below is the script from a reel on Instagram. I’m not sharing the reel itself because there’s one degree of separation. My goal is to expose the trickery that people with less discernment fall for, so they can see the spellcasting in writing and choose to resist.

The transcript with key gurupreneur moves selectively highlighted:

I had a plan for this reel, but I am going to throw it out the window because it feels interesting.

I am in an interesting place building this business at the moment because I have taken on a really high-end business coach, actually a team of business coaches. They are applying very traditional marketing strategies that are highly effective for our business. But it is such a fine line because of the nature of what I do, and what the divine does through me.

I just want to say that the work that comes through me produces an incredible experience for people.

One of my students messaged me and said, “I want everybody to know this magic. I want everyone to know this magic.” She wanted me to share her story because of all the richness it has created in her life. The deep inner connection to community, to love, to devotion that it has created for her.

It is so hard to package that up and market it.

Because until you experience it for yourself, you are never going to understand the depth of it.

All I can say is this: if you feel something in here, if you feel something in your heart, that is the start.

Every single person who has come through this work with me, and as a result had their entire life transformed, started with that tiny little feeling.

And so many of them had resistance. Resistance like, “Maybe I cannot afford it,” or “I do not have time,” or “I am saving up for something else,” or “It is not my priority right now.”

I really want you to pay attention to that feeling in the heart, because that is the divine giving you instructions.

Anytime resistance shows up in your life, anytime resistance creates a limitation, it is giving you an opportunity to transcend.

It is giving you an opportunity to choose freedom.

So with that, I had a plan for this reel, but I did not want to throw it out.

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What’s actually happening in this reel

The highlighted lines in the reel reveal a familiar gurupreneur marketing structure, one that has become almost standard in spiritually inclined, accountability averse online spaces. Here are the tactics used:

Self-anointed spiritual authority. By framing her work as something “the divine does through me,” the speaker positions herself as a conduit rather than a practitioner. Once authority is attributed to a divine source, the human intermediary is shielded from scrutiny while simultaneously elevated above normal standards of evaluation. The work is no longer something you can assess because it’s something you either submit to or misunderstand.

Delayed understanding as a consent tactic. The insistence that “until you experience it for yourself, you’re never going to understand the depth of it” explicitly reverses the order of consent. You’re told that you must commit first and only then will comprehension follow. Only insiders are granted epistemic authority, while outsiders are positioned as unqualified to judge.

Replacement of thinking with feeling. The repeated instruction to pay attention to a sensation “in the heart” treats feeling as guidance rather than information. That feeling is framed as coming from a higher source that knows better than you do. This is a powerful move because it trains people to mistrust cognition and elevate affect instead. If you feel something, the feeling itself is treated as sufficient.

Pathologising scepticism. Practical, ordinary considerations like affordability, time, or competing priorities are explicitly named and then reclassified as “resistance.” In this framework, doubt and hesitation are not functions of discernment and self-protection. Instead, they are treated as spiritual blockages that no one would want. Resistance is then reframed as an opportunity to “transcend” and “choose freedom.” In other words, the mechanisms people use to avoid being duped, pressured, or financially overextended are recoded as the reason they should override themselves.

This is coercion. Once resistance is pathologised, saying no is no longer a neutral choice. It becomes evidence of a poverty mindset and a deficit consciousness. Consent is the moral choice and participation is elevated into a spiritual virtue. Opting out becomes almost impossible without interpreting oneself as having failed a test and deliberately depriving yourself of divinity.

Taken together, these moves constitute gurupreneurship whereby spiritual language is being used to dissolve psychological boundaries, vilify scepticism, and position the speaker as the final authority over your inner signals. This ignores that spirituality is used to cultivate the very attributes necessary to thwart coercive attempts, like discernment. The transaction is no longer framed as a program you might or might not want and is instead framed as a response to divine instruction.

People with discernment can see the transparent manipulation. For those still learning how spiritual authority is performed rather than earned, it is spellbinding. That is precisely why it needs to be seen in writing.

In this context, resistance is the skill.

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How to spot a gurupreneur

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My view changed after years inside systems enforced by professional managerial class (PMC) women. What I experienced was assimilation rather than liberation, despite the promise of feminism. Over time, it became harder to ignore that the system was only one part of a much messier set of conditions shaping who benefits, who advances, and who gets pushed out through scapegoating.

As a result, I’ve become increasingly sceptical of how quickly the system is blamed when people don’t get the outcomes they want.

I’m not denying that systems are important. They absolutely are. Systems shape incentives and enforceable limits on behaviour. They distribute opportunity and protect certain outcomes over others. They aren’t neutral, but they’re also not divine, omnipotent, or self-correcting. They’re manmade, built to enable coordination or flourishing under particular assumptions about how people will act.

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Most systems function exactly as designed because those assumptions are rarely examined once the system is in motion. These assumptions are that people will act in good faith, share broadly similar moral norms, and regulate themselves without constant enforcement. In other words, many systems presume moral homogeneity, self-restraint, and personal responsibility, while neglecting the unconscious emotional drivers that shape action and decision-making.

When those assumptions are shown to be false because norms fragment, feedback loops weaken, and accountability diffuses, even well-intentioned systems destabilise. What looks like corruption is often a combination of bad faith and the system revealing its own assumptions. In that sense, systemic failure reflects misconduct, lack of accountability, and design premises that no longer constrain behaviour as intended.

This is part of my thinking about how quickly blaming the system becomes a stopping point rather than a starting question. In some cases, it functions less as analysis and more as a way of deflecting responsibility away from the behaviour of the people inside it. Blaming the system can offer certainty and moral clarity, but it also risks simplifying the more uncomfortable interplay between structure and behaviour into something easier to understand, but not necessarily accurate.

Responsibility is harder to pin down if the system is always to blame.

When outcomes are described as systemic, it becomes unclear who acted, who had options, who chose not to restrain themselves, or where repeated behaviour should be examined. Responsibility diffuses.

This is why I’m offering the definitions below as a form of inoculation. They reflect how I try to think: interrupting the pull toward black-and-white explanations, noticing when situations slide into the Karpman Drama Triad, and returning attention to agency and individual responsibility without pretending systems don’t matter.

They’re meant to counter language that explains repeated bad behaviour without naming the people involved. Systems, cultures, structures, and ideologies are blamed, while the individuals who act, repeatedly, are described as invisible, faultless, or powerless.

The point of these definitions isn’t to deny context or conditioning. Behaviour is shaped by different forces such as incentives, pressure, and what’s at stake in any situation. My point is to keep human agency and personal responsibility at the forefront when systems are discussed.

These definitions apply to patterns of repeated behaviour, not one-off incidents. I’m bothering to propose some clarity because we’re living in a time when moral language signals moral behaviour, substituting for behaviour constraint.

Part of what complicates these conversations is how moral language now operates in public and institutional settings. By moral language, I don’t mean ethics in a philosophical sense, or ordinary judgments about right and wrong. I mean language that frames situations primarily in terms of moral standing rather than behaviour: who’s good or bad, harmed or protected, righteous (and at times, the oppressed) or oppressive.

Moral language pulls attention away from behaviour and makes it harder to see how outcomes are actually produced.

Some systems do real damage when the same people in the same roles keep responding in the same ways despite having humane alternatives, and no one stops them.

Individual responsibility

Systems influence behaviour, but individuals enact injury. In interpersonal contexts, responsibility remains with the person who repeatedly chose, continued to choose, or failed to restrain behaviour that causes material, relational, or psychological injury to another over time or across repeated interactions.

This definition applies to:

• repeated acts against the same person

• the same injurious behaviour enacted across multiple people

• situations where there were multiple opportunities for restraint or correction

It doesn’t apply to isolated incidents, emergencies, or singular high pressure events involving forced decisions under severe time constraint.

Group responsibility

Systems influence collective behaviour, but groups generate injury through repeated, coordinated, tolerated, or unrestrained patterns of action. Responsibility therefore lies with those who initiate, enable, legitimise, or fail to constrain behaviours that cause material, relational, or psychological injury across time or across multiple people.

At the group level, responsibility is role-based, not collective guilt. It belongs to those with influence, authority, legitimacy, or a duty to restrain, not to membership alone.

When structure becomes the explanation

These definitions keep coming up for me when I look at contemporary debates about inequality, where the system is treated as the cause rather than as the context in which people act.

Structural analysis can be useful. It can show constraints, incentives, and history but it often stops there. In debates about gender inequality, pay gaps, or leadership representation, disparities are frequently taken as proof of systemic wrongdoing on their own, while the behaviours, strategies, decisions, and trade-offs that sustain those patterns are left largely untouched.

This framing becomes especially compelling when people hold authority but can’t influence outcomes. Authority without influence produces frustration and a sense of powerlessness. Structural explanations offer a way to name that frustration without having to account for how influence is actually granted, withheld, or lost.

My overall issue is that structure increasingly functions as the endpoint of explanation. Explaining outcomes this way makes responsibility unassignable. Attention shifts away from human action and systems are treated as sufficient causes in situations that would otherwise require examining who acted, who benefited, who complied, and who repeatedly chose not to intervene. I understand the appeal of certainty in situations marked by harm and conflict, but narratives that externalise responsibility tend to entrench grievance and entitlement rather than interrupt the behaviour producing the harm.

That framing can be satisfying but I’m not convinced it helps much if the goal is to understand why outcomes persist or how they might actually change.

I’m sharing this because I’m finding it harder to think clearly when everything is explained away as systemic and no one is responsible for anything anymore. If you see this differently, or have a better way of making sense of responsibility and systems, I’m genuinely interested in hearing it.

Thanks for reading,

Nathalie

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

By supporting my research and writing, you’re supporting an effort to understand the processes shaping reality and relationships, to disentangle from dysfunctional relational dynamics, and to remain anchored to truths that guide perception rather than allowing external influences to shape it. Your support enables me to continue making sense of patterns that many people recognise but struggle to articulate, and to clarify the actions that allow people to free themselves from those patterns.

Here’s how you can help:

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s that time again when academics and academically affiliated professionals are looking to grow their visibility beyond the ivory tower through social media platforms. I’m speaking specifically about LinkedIn and Substack, which are treated as legitimate extensions of academic and therapeutic authority and attract professionals who want to build their platform, social protection, and status so their name carries significance beyond the halls of academia.

The pattern is knowledge vampirism.

Knowledge vampirism involves the extraction of other people’s insight, experience, and thinking while retaining authorship, legitimacy, and benefit, usually under the language of contribution, collaboration, or service.

This pattern is covert narcissism in action. Covert narcissism, as the term implies, isn’t passive or benign. It’s a control strategy that secures dominance while concealing power behind likability, reasonableness, and apparent humility. The knowledge vampire presents themselves as calm, reasonable, helpful, and safe, so that entitlement and expectation are experienced as cooperation rather than demand.

This pattern works because it exploits trust that’s already extended to academic authority.

Hacking Narcissism

How to spot and protect against Knowledge Vampires

Dear Reader…

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4 years ago · 89 likes · 38 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

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This is visible in therapeutic spaces, particularly in how client material is reused.

Therapists publish content derived from direct experiences with clients. Names are changed and details are altered, but the substance comes from the session. The therapist remains positioned as the expert while using material generated by the client to produce public teaching, writing, or paid content. The client paid for the session, and the therapist then profits again from the same material.

This practice is ethically questionable. These therapists rarely tell clients exactly how their material will be used, how it might generate income or status, or what protections exist once their material goes public. Even when permission is technically obtained, consent is shaped by gratitude, dependence, and the client’s desire to support someone who helped them, despite already paying for a service. Therapists don’t offer meaningful compensation, and they treat the client’s contribution as incidental rather than essential.

If a therapist intends to use learning from sessions in a public forum, that intention must be explicit. Therapists can speak about themes, patterns, and processes without lifting dialogue or narrative. However, when public content depends on what clients bring into the room, the client is now doing labour that should be compensated, not appropriated.

Academics engage in the same behaviour under the banner of collaboration. In practice, this often looks like asking a colleague, supervisee, or peer to think something through, then using that analysis in one’s own work without attribution. A question is asked, an answer is given, and the knowledge is treated as if it belongs to the person who asked.

I developed the concept of knowledge vampirism1 to describe this exact pattern of extraction. The knowledge vampire embodies covert narcissistic traits and targets people who are generous, thoughtful, and willing to share insight drawn from their own experience. Academics are especially protected in this dynamic because they’re perceived as public-minded researchers improving society, while operating inside a competitive system that rewards visibility, funding, and institutional favour. When legitimacy and survival depend on continued status, everyone involved can bend ethical boundaries without penalty, and knowledge vampires receive institutional benefits instead of the source.

Speak to any academic who has left academia and they will describe the mafia-like reality of being inside once Golden Child status is lost.

This is why academics work to preserve Golden Child status. It benefits the institution and it benefits them. Those benefits are then rhetorically passed on to the public under the promise of improvement, even as academics know that speaking about problems truthfully can cost them funding, promotions, contracts, speaking invitations, or institutional protection. These risks determine what can be said, how its said, and what must remain unspoken.

So here’s where the imbalance becomes obvious. Academics will tell you all the things you want to hear about how their work is going to improve your life, so you’ll be grateful enough to want to help them help you. Except they need you more than you need them.

What you contribute in the name of creating free tools or resources are the tools themselves. You’re giving them what you already use, think with, and rely on, but without authorship, attribution, or compensation. You’re handing over something they need for free.

I can hear some people saying “but knowledge is free.”

It isn’t.

If knowledge were free, universities would not charge tuition, researchers would not compete for grants, therapists would not bill for sessions, and publishers would not gate content. Knowledge embeds thinking processes, logic, experience, and expertise developed through analysis, questioning, and reflection. It’s the product of work that transforms information into something usable. That work is compensated everywhere except where people are persuaded to give it away.

The claim that knowledge becomes free when it is extracted from others rather than produced directly is a convenient asymmetry that legitimises exploitation.

The same standard applies to academics. When academics conduct research that requires input from the public, they are required to submit an ethics application before the study can proceed. That application specifies how knowledge will be sourced, how participants will be informed, and how their contribution will be compensated. Participants are asked to consent with clear information about how their input will be used and who will benefit.

That requirement exists because knowledge is not free. Universities and researchers benefit from the findings, while it is often unclear whether the published work, if it even reaches publication, will benefit the public it claims to serve.

This is the ethical boundary that gets crossed on social media.

Why crowdsourcing online bypasses research ethics

In formal research settings, public input triggers ethics requirements because it produces value. That value accrues to the researcher and the institution through status, which is why reciprocity is required.

Crowdsourcing on social media bypasses this entire structure while retaining the same downstream benefits. Platforms function as a substitute for ethics approval, and engagement becomes a substitute for consent. Contributors are not told how their input will be analysed, stored, synthesised, or attributed. They aren’t offered authorship options, compensation pathways, or meaningful withdrawal rights. Their participation is framed as voluntary generosity rather than labour, even though the researcher could not produce the work without it.

The claim that contributors are compensated through access to “free tools” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In these arrangements, contributors are the producers of the tools, not their recipients. Their experiences, language, distinctions, and practical strategies form the substance of the work, while the researcher supplies naming, packaging, and institutional legitimacy. That legitimacy becomes linked to the researcher’s name, not to the people whose thinking, often shaped by painful experience, made that work and those tools possible.

A researcher who is genuinely extending knowledge does so by pushing beyond the limits of their own academic paradigm that I described here, not by recycling and repackaging insight extracted from willing and often naïve contributors under the guise of participation.

Hacking Narcissism

When reality refuses to cooperate with how academia understands women

I never looked back after leaving academia 15 years ago. I went through hell because I gave up an identity and the prestige that went with it, and didn’t have a better one to replace it. One of the reasons I left the illustrious and noble-passing world of cancer research is because the research theories and findings are mostly bullshit. Not all - just m…

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5 months ago · 81 likes · 34 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

Free knowledge and the justification of knowledge vampirism

Here’s a scenario I’ve come across countless times on LinkedIn. The tactics are not meaningfully different from how cult figures and their inner circles draw people in, secure loyalty, and gradually narrow who belongs, who matters, and who is positioned as essential while maintaining the illusion of choice.

A credentialed academic with institutional affiliation posts yet another victim–hero narrative about the dark triad leader and the enlightened system that will finally stop them. The content is familiar but what’s different is the hook and who’s being singled out — or chosen.

Here is an outline of an academic or academically-affiliated knowledge vampire:

1. Positions their research as collaborative, treating the platform as an informal research environment.

This creates the appearance of shared purpose while control over direction, framing, and ownership remains unilateral. Calling the platform a research space lends legitimacy without activating research ethics, gaslighting contributors into experiencing themselves as collaborators rather than unpaid inputs. Participation is narrowed to those who are seen as insightful, thoughtful, or aligned, introducing an early sense of exclusivity under the language of collegiality.

2. Presents themselves as the source of results while offering to produce free resources for the audience.

Claiming ownership over the results allows the academic to establish themselves as the dominant authority from the outset. By simultaneously offering free resources, they present themselves as generous and indispensable. They imply that the audience’s existing knowledge is incomplete or unusable without their intervention, positioning themselves as the necessary translator who can make that knowledge authoritative. This move casts the academic as the saviour and the audience as dependent, while authority remains entirely with the person already holding institutional legitimacy.

3. Expresses gratitude for audience engagement, personal disclosures, and shared experiences.

The academic repeatedly thanks the audience for their engagement, disclosures, and willingness to share. Once people are thanked for what they have already given, stopping feels awkward or disloyal. By calling lived experience engagement or stories, the academic lightens the language and disguises the reality that people are offering insight, pattern recognition, and understanding built through experience. What’s being taken is intellectual and emotional labour, with attention functioning as a selective reward. Gratitude simply reframes it as generosity freely given, making ongoing extraction easier to sustain.

4. Frames their engagement as a form of help that goes beyond information-sharing.

The academic deliberately shifts the language from information sharing to help. Intellectual contribution is recast as a response to need rather than as analysis or expertise. This move gaslights contributors about what is actually happening, encouraging them to interpret their participation as empathy or usefulness rather than as the provision of knowledge. Participation, once casual or optional, is now construed as a response to something important and urgent. Once help is invoked, the emotionally captured participant perceives a gentle pressure to continue engaging in order to uphold a self-image of benevolence. Empathy and the need to feel useful are pulled into the interaction, converting voluntary contribution into a sense of obligation that makes extraction possible.

Thank you for reading this far. You can see why my rant needed its own post.
My aim is to make these dynamics visible so people can spot them and avoid getting drawn into them.
If this work is useful to you, consider supporting my research and practice-based evidence through a paid subscription.

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I’ve been working on a few pieces on morality. It’s not a sexy topic, but it’s inseparable from interpersonal narcissism and how people justify their behaviour toward others. This series is an attempt to examine how morality is currently understood, and the assumptions that have shaped that understanding.

Morality is often discussed as though it were a stable personal attribute, something a person possesses by virtue of holding the right beliefs, values, or political commitments. In the pieces that follow, I explore how this view operates when people are under social pressure.

One article looks outward at morality as it’s studied, taught, and legitimised by experts. I ask why moral psychology and ethics repeatedly fail to explain real behaviour, especially in public life, institutions, and conflict. I describe how these fields tend to overestimate reasoning and underestimate incentives, emotion, status, and self-protection.

The other article looks inward at how individuals experience themselves as moral. I examine the conditions under which judgment breaks down resulting in moral incongruence. I discuss how people are often capable of coherent moral reasoning when nothing is at stake, and how that consistency erodes in predictable ways once there’s a cost.

Both pieces make the same basic claim from different angles: morality is less about what people believe or say, and more about what governs their judgment when there’s something to lose.

Together, these pieces continue to challenge the idea that moral clarity comes from identity, education, or alignment with approved authorities. They treat morality as a form of self-governance that requires restraint, discipline, and structural support, not just good intentions or correct views.

I’m not trying to make anyone feel immoral, just as I’m not trying to convince anyone that we’re narcissists. If we want to make sense of the moral failure visible in our institutions and society, we need to understand how morality actually operates in this age of narcissism.

Thanks for reading and supporting my work,

Nathalie

Where do your ideas about morality and moral behaviour come from?

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

By supporting my research and writing, you’re supporting an effort to understand the processes shaping reality and relationships, to disentangle from dysfunctional relational dynamics, and to remain anchored to truths that guide perception rather than allowing external influences to shape it. Your support enables me to continue making sense of patterns that many people recognise but struggle to articulate, and to clarify the actions that allow people to free themselves from those patterns.

Here’s how you can help:

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

  Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Once you see this mechanism clearly in a biological system, it’s not hard to start seeing it human relational ecosystems.

This systems-based understanding extends into organisations and is where I draw inspiration for my analyses of human-system interaction and group dynamics in workplaces. Workplaces function as environments that organise behaviour through incentive structures governing access, status, protection, legitimacy, and advancement. These structures covertly shape how people relate over time. Behaviour adapts to what sustains viability within the system, producing stable and highly predictable patterns of conduct, even if the conduct is morally questionable yet is perceived as upstanding.

This adaptation is formative in what I’ve written about as a passive assimilation process. Individuals who see themselves as ethical, principled, and well-intentioned, but lack the capacity to express these qualities, learn to withhold information, downplay and delay concerns, avoid pointing out problems, and redirect responsibility in response to organisational signals. They develop an understanding of what enables success through repeated participation in everyday work interactions, reshaping the moral disposition with which they entered the workplace.

Hacking Narcissism

What happens when you don't resist assimilation

I was born and raised in Canada. When I was 5 years old, we and many other families moved from Montreal to Toronto because of Bill 101. This bill declared Quebec a francophone province and would require all institutions and businesses to operate entirely in French…

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2 years ago · 66 likes · 15 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

From this perspective, workplace dynamics can be traced directly to how incentives are structured and enforced. Psychological safety, trust, scapegoating, and narcissistic behaviours feature in environments where authority and protection are exercised through informal rules rather than explicit accountability. People adjust themselves based on what preserves standing, limits risk, and maintains favour, which is why these patterns persist even in organisations that publicly endorse ethical values.

In this conversation with the Team Lab Podcast hosts, Angela Migliaccio and Cori Caldwell, we explore how everyday workplace interactions shape conduct over time, how people adapt to what is reinforced or discouraged, and how relational patterns stabilise within teams and organisations. The discussion focuses on how trust, psychological safety, scapegoating, and authority operate in practice rather than as stated ideals. This podcast offers a dose of reality by making sense of workplace behaviour as it unfolds to support discernment and deliberate choices about how to engage, adapt, or exit.

Let us know your thoughts about this conversation here and/or on their podcast page. You can find them on Apple iTunes, Spotify and YouTube. You can also read the transcript of our conversation below.

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Here are the themes we covered:

• Introduction and Framing of Workplace Dysfunction

• From Science to Workplace Systems

• Psychological Safety vs Toxic Workplaces

• Scapegoating in the Workplace

• Narcissistic Behaviour in Leadership

• Limits of Awareness, Coaching, and Culture Change

• Navigating Toxic Power Structures

• Advice for Gen Z Entering the Workforce

• Authenticity and the Myth of “Bringing Your Whole Self to Work”

• The Formative Curriculum of Work

Transcript

Corey:
Welcome back to Team Lab. I’m Corey.

Angela:
And I’m Angela. Today we’re diving into the deep end, tackling the prickly issue of toxic leadership and dysfunction in the workplace.

Corey:
Our guest today is Dr. Nathalie Martinek, an author, speaker, and facilitator who helps professionals build relational leadership capacity and navigate the subtle power dynamics that shape trust, connection, and harm at work.

Angela:
Nathalie is one of the leading voices on narcissistic leadership, something many of us have experienced with managers, peers, or senior leaders, but often felt powerless to shift.

Corey:
This often shows up systemically. For example, you might see a cross-functional trust gap where teams sound aligned in meetings, but everything falls apart in the handoffs.

Angela:
Nathalie gets very specific about what psychological safety actually looks like: people can speak up, they’re taken seriously, and disagreement doesn’t turn into punishment. You can empathise without having to agree.

Corey:
She’s the author of The Little Book of Assertiveness and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work, and she writes Hacking Narcissism on Substack.

Angela:
If you’re dealing with visible or invisible dysfunction at work, you don’t want to miss this conversation.

From science to workplace systems

Corey:
You may not be able to predict the lottery, but you bring a scientific lens to human systems. You started in a lab and then moved into workplace dynamics. Can you talk about that transition?

Nathalie:
My last role as a scientist was in cancer research, studying the process of cancer formation and tumour metastasis. That greatly paralleled what I was experiencing in the workplace, which was a carcinogenic environment and the metastasis of certain toxic behaviours, not only around me but in me as well.

I realised I was becoming much like the system I was trying to fight against. That opened my eyes to the impact environments have on behaviour. I became more interested in how that happens. How someone who believes she is ethical, moral, does the right thing, is a good person, can start behaving in ways that are not that.

That intrigued me. Once I left the lab and hung up my scientist coat, I became more interested in human behaviour and what influences us to act the way we do in certain environments. My expertise was in how environments influence tumours, their ability to become mobile, to move around, to infect, co-opt, and hijack the body’s normal functioning to feed and serve them.

That is very similar to narcissistic behaviour. Personality traits that we all have, which in certain environments and conditions are brought out as survival mechanisms. If we’re not aware that that’s what we’re doing in order to succeed and fulfil our ambitions, those traits can dominate us.

That’s what intrigued me. We’re all capable of acting against our moral principles in certain environments and not even being aware of it. Life took me down that path to where I am now.

Psychological safety and toxic environments

Angela:
We’ve all worked in environments where we didn’t feel safe. Sometimes we don’t realise how toxic they are. Can you talk about the difference between psychological safety and a toxic workplace?

Nathalie:
Psychological safety, as I understand it, means being in a team or group where everyone is able to express themselves with respect for each other. We have others in mind. We don’t want to cause harm, but we do want to be honest. We want to share feedback, learn from each other, and make adjustments so that we can continue to have a culture where thoughts, ideas, disagreements, and pushbacks can be expressed without being taken personally.

There is a shared purpose. A desire to collaborate, cooperate, reflect, and learn together in service of the group’s goals.

In a toxic environment, that cannot exist. There is a hierarchy and a power structure where certain people need to be pleased and appeased. To do that, you can’t be honest. You can’t give feedback that contradicts the unspoken norms or the desired narratives. Not everyone has the same opportunity to express themselves.

Some people can speak freely. Others cannot.

There is a hierarchy of inequality. What you say can be used against you. You can experience retaliation, either directly from the individual you’ve challenged or from the group, because they’ve been enlisted by the person with the most power.

That power goes unspoken and unacknowledged, but it is there.

Corey:
You mentioned that you can have psychologically safe teams inside wider systems that aren’t safe. How long can those teams survive?

Nathalie:
They can’t survive indefinitely. They internalise the stress of the wider system they’re trying to buffer themselves from, especially if the leader shielding the group doesn’t have enough power to influence broader change.

If the group knows how to function well together, knows what good looks like, and knows what needs to happen to benefit the wider organisation, the problem is that the other teams need an appetite for that. They need to see it as valuable and be open to learning.

A lot of people say they’re open, but openness requires behavioural and mindset change. Not everyone is interested in that. Many people are more interested in appearing open than actually being open.

So the manager trying to influence outward, trying to create a more cohesive culture, will encounter resistance. Over time, that resistance wears them down.

If a new leader comes in and says psychological safety is important but also believes the organisation is already psychologically safe, there is nothing you can do. You can’t contradict them. You can’t challenge them. Their self-image is more important than reality.

Scapegoating as a systemic response

Angela:
You talk a lot about scapegoating. Can you explain how that shows up in workplaces?

Nathalie:
Scapegoating is a type of workplace abuse that doesn’t get highlighted the way bullying does. Bullying is more overt. It’s interpersonal. Someone assaults another person because they have a problem with them.

Scapegoating is different. It’s a systemic response to an internal threat. The system turns on an individual, but the people participating in the system can’t see that this is what they’re doing. They just see someone who is a problem.

That person carries the blame and the shame of the system so the system never has to look at itself. The shame is outsourced. It’s projected onto one object. The system then tries, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, to push that person out.

Once the scapegoat exits, the system experiences relief. They believe the problem is gone. Then the system repeats the same pattern because it never reflects or examines itself.

A system isn’t an abstract thing. It’s made up of people. There is usually one person who initiates the scapegoating process. Often this happens when someone is very competent, high-achieving, aligned with policies and processes, or pointing out areas for improvement.

If the leader is insecure, shame-based, or feels inferior, that person becomes a threat. Instead of learning from them, the leader projects that shame onto them.

They start planting seeds of doubt in others. Others participate because it suits them. It’s easier to believe in a problem person than to see themselves as part of the problem.

That’s the distinction between scapegoating and bullying.

Corey:
Can an entire team become the scapegoat?

Nathalie:
Yes. A team can become the scapegoat. Or a representative of the team. Sometimes it’s both.

There isn’t an HR program that addresses this. HR are often participants in the scapegoating mechanism. What HR person wants to admit they were involved in the alienation and exile of someone who was actually doing a very good job?

It can come out in an exit interview, but by then it’s too late.

Narcissistic behaviour in leadership

Corey:
You’ve written extensively about narcissistic leaders. How did you start identifying this in workplace settings?

Nathalie:
I want to distinguish between what people call a narcissist and what I talk about as narcissistic behaviour.

Narcissistic behaviour is about asserting dominance and control over another person’s perception of you. It’s about maintaining an ideal self-image. It’s self-preservation. Defensive behaviour. Often unconscious.

There are people who do this consciously. They manipulate, dominate, gaslight, and diminish others to preserve their sense of power and authority, especially when someone threatens that simply by being competent or challenging.

But we are all part of relationship dynamics. We all contribute. The last thing I want to do is say that manager is the problem and it has nothing to do with me.

Once a dynamic is established, once someone is dominant and someone else isn’t, trying to change that will often lead to conflict and retaliation. That person is hellbent on staying in the power position.

In low-trust environments, you see these traits amplified. There is competition, envy, shame, resentment. People smile on the surface, but beneath that there is constant threat monitoring.

In Australia, there’s a lot of polite aggression. Not passive. Subtle. People are actively doing it, even if they’re not aware of it.

Leaders often present as empathetic and compassionate. They talk about psychological safety. Then behind the scenes they scapegoat someone else and start smear campaigns.

This creates cognitive dissonance. People want to believe the ideal image. Accepting the other reality means recognising you’re participating in a toxic system.

Believing the ideal is easier than dealing with the demoralising truth.

Can awareness change these systems?

Angela:
Can coaching or awareness shift these behaviours?

Nathalie:
Only if people are willing to recognise that any problem they experience in the workplace has their participation in it. That doesn’t mean they caused it, but that they are part of it.

If people are interested in discovering how they’re playing a role, often unconsciously, then they can interrupt the pattern and change it.

People need an appetite for that. They need to be willing to reflect on their behaviour and change it. I don’t think that desire exists for everyone.

It also requires an environment that doesn’t punish people for discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves.

Many workplaces run initiatives that invite vulnerability, but someone is taking notes. That information can be used later for retaliation.

Once people realise disclosure can be weaponised, they won’t participate again.

Listener story: navigating a toxic leader

Corey:
We received a listener story from Raina, a director at a technology company dealing with a manipulative leader. She asked how to alert the authorities. What would you say?

Nathalie:
There is no authority to alert. The authorities are already recruited and participating.

You would need your own allies with high status in the organisation to intervene, and even then you’re dealing with extensions of the same power structure.

Even if you’re moved somewhere else, you’re still dealing with peers of that leader who will make your life miserable. They’re tentacles of the same system.

When someone is plucked from one team and placed under a charismatic, narcissistic leader, they become the outsider. They’re easy to blame and diminish.

If they’re competent, they’re already a threat because they expose inadequacies in the wider group.

Often the only option is to leave.

Are there healthy teams?

Angela:
Are there organisations or teams that don’t have these problems?

Nathalie:
I can’t speak for entire organisations because they’re made up of teams. Every team has its own subculture.

If an organisation has to broadcast how psychologically safe it is, it usually isn’t there yet.

But there are great teams. They have cohesion. They care about each other. They care about the work. They negotiate. They disagree. They leave space for dissent and are curious about it.

Competence alone isn’t enough. You need to be politically aware. That’s the real job, not the one in the position description.

Advice for Gen Z entering the workforce

Angela:
What advice would you give Gen Z entering their first jobs?

Nathalie:
You don’t know what you’re walking into.

You want to make a good impression. You don’t know anything yet. Some compliance is necessary, but not to the point of exploitation.

There are hidden rules of work. No one teaches them.

Don’t believe what people say about the culture. Watch what they do. Watch what’s rewarded. Watch what’s punished.

If leaders are untrustworthy, don’t tell them your thoughts and feelings. They don’t want them. They want to hear what serves them.

Play the game without losing your integrity. That might mean staying silent about some things. Not about abuse, but about opinions no one is interested in hearing.

Authenticity at work

Angela:
You’ve spoken critically about authenticity in the workplace.

Nathalie:
Authenticity has lost meaning.

You can only be authentic around people who make you feel completely safe. Work doesn’t need to be that place.

Work is a place to do a job and get paid. It doesn’t need to fulfil your values or express your full self.

Be friendly. Be warm. Be collegial. Be helpful. Don’t be a doormat. Don’t be more than that.

The formative curriculum of work

Nathalie:
Every workplace has a formative curriculum.

It’s not on any position description. It’s dealing with a tricky person day to day.

I can be avoidant. I can run away. I can switch teams. But I’ll meet another tricky person.

There is something in me that needs to be learned so I no longer have trigger points. So I can work with this person to the best of my ability without requiring them to change.

Maybe nobody else even sees the problem. Just me.

It makes the job harder. It’s an added task. But if I don’t deal with it here, I’ll deal with it somewhere else.

That takes strength of character and maturity.

Everyone brings their full self to work, baggage included, whether they like it or not.

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Hack Narcissism and support my work

Hacking Narcissism is for people trying to make sense of and effectively navigate a morally distorting and chaotic age. When moral development is disincentivised, people lose reliable reference points for discernment and struggle to distinguish between what’s real, what’s performative, and what’s covertly shaping their perception.

Narcissistic traits are expressed in everyone (often referred to as Cluster B traits). They flourish during periods of moral decline because they help secure status, protection, and significance in environments where norms of what appears correct, rather than what is grounded in moral principles, regulate behaviour. The effect of this behaviour is experienced in all types of relationships, including in workplaces, where people can be punished for violating norms they never agreed to and were never made explicit.

By supporting my research and writing, you’re supporting an effort to understand the processes shaping reality and relationships, to disentangle from dysfunctional relational dynamics, and to remain anchored to truths that guide perception rather than allowing external influences to shape it. Your support enables me to continue making sense of patterns that many people recognise but struggle to articulate, and to clarify the actions that allow people to free themselves from those patterns.

Here’s how you can help:

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

People use the language of the nervous system because it sounds scientific and makes their experience seem legitimate, important enough to focus on for a moment while giving it an identity. It gives them permission to draw attention to their state and feelings under the cover of physiology, sometimes with the expectation that another person will make adjustments to comfort and validate them. Once it’s about the nervous system, it becomes like a bone fracture that demands intervention, soothing, and something to fix.

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The body has become a brand. The nervous system is spoken of as a personality that must be catered to, regulated, and protected.

• “My nervous system is activated.”

• “My nervous system can’t handle this right now.”

• “I’m calming my nervous system.”

The words sound informed because they mimic expertise. Feelings have been replaced with physiological commentary, as though meaning itself required a scientific degree. It’s no longer enough to say I feel tense, on guard, or afraid and instead narrate the physiology based on a single bodily system, as if it were the sage among them all. We now describe the wiring as the experience of the self.

A fixation with identity and evidence has made people dependent on science to verify experiences that they already intuitively know as real. Intuition, once recognised in the

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I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised. History shows us again and again that most humans are not prone to goodness in environments that reward compliance and where survival depends on alignment with the authority figure or party that provides material, social, and professional security. It’s been difficult delivering that reality check to so many educated individuals who believed that integrity and excellence alone would support their career progression and protect them from bad actors. Without recognising that diplomacy, often dismissed as playing politics, is also part of any job because trust has to be built and sustained in hierarchical settings where those with authority routinely play by their own rules.

Goodness, as in, the desire and capacity to do good things that benefit others while avoiding having negative impact on others, doesn’t persist on its own. It doesn’t scale naturally, nor is it protected by education, intelligence, or stated values. What’s more likely to persist is our default toward self-preservation organised around saving face, especially in stressful circumstances. Any society that assumes goodness will survive without being actively supported, modelled, and defended eventually discovers that a convincing performance of virtue can replace duty and personal responsibility while self-restraint becomes a liability.

My past year came into focus when I read this piece by of his excellent Substack. The article describes default human behaviour, organised around shame, status, and survival, in the absence of restraint and responsibility (the narcissistic S). It draws heavily on examples from tribal and honour based cultures, particularly in parts of India and the Middle East, and suggests that similar dynamics emerge wherever moral development is weak. What struck me was how closely these descriptions resembled the behaviour I’ve observed inside modern institutions, including professional organisations and cult environments. From a dharmic1 perspective, this convergence is unsurprising in the Kali Yuga2, our current epoch, characterised by adharma and behaviour increasingly misaligned with cosmic law.

Political Ponerology

Third-World Morality Is Brain-Damaged

Merry Christmas, everybody, and thank you all for pushing this Substack over the 10,000-subscriber mark! Now, back to ponerology…

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4 months ago · 167 likes · 61 comments · Harrison Koehli

I was excited to read his piece because it highlights the human condition without sentimentality or demonization. It’s true that a large proportion of adults remain morally and developmentally stunted and organise their lives around self orientation, status protection, and shame avoidance. These adults learn how to prioritise saving face, master the performance of goodness, and rise through hierarchies because our lack of discernment conflates surface level social compliance with social responsibility. This closely resembles the tendency to perceive a confident demeanour as a sign of professional competence in institutions plagued with narcissistic leadership.

Institutions

Institutions are structured arrangements of formal and informal authority that stabilise human roles and conduct over time. They’re shaped by repeated actions, unspoken agreements, and incentive structures that reward some behaviours and suppress others. Livelihood, status, and perpetuity govern these systems, leaving little space for morality in action.

Institutions function as symbols onto which individuals project their needs for safety, income, identity, and authority, much like a parental authority. As people depend on institutions for survival and status, driven by the need for security, they protect them reflexively, regardless of moral behaviour. Over time, the institution becomes an idol that must be defended, even when doing so requires distortion, retaliation, or removal of those who disrupt its image. Accountability threatens this function, so behaviour that preserves the appearance of order is rewarded.

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As institutions are composed of groups, it’s worth examining group dynamics more closely. Groups tend to drift toward entropy unless restraint and responsibility are actively maintained. In groups led by insecurity, behaviour quickly organises around avoiding scrutiny and blame. People become careful about what they say, disagreement is risky, and cohesion is maintained through silence and fear of consequences. Peace requires people to tolerate accountability and accept consequences of decisions without retaliation, which requires emotional and moral maturity, often in deficit as you ascend the institutional ladder.

As groups grow, people who are uneasy with accountability gravitate toward risk averse, self-preserving behaviour. This includes deflecting responsibility, aligning with those in power, and removing perceived threats through processes like scapegoating. Others notice that this behaviour is rewarded and gradually become normalised and expected. Integrity, moral behaviour, and personal responsibility put one’s status and livelihood at risk because they disrupt this arrangement. People who insist on accountability face social and professional consequences such as exclusion, targeting, and removal. Compliance stabilises the group by rewarding alignment with the dominant authority and preserving existing norms, even when this happens unconsciously rather than through deliberate choice.

Moral behaviour

Moral behaviour doesn’t arise automatically through education, intelligence, or stated commitments. A persistent assumption shared across society, including among elites, professionals, and those who defer to them, is that education and professional prestige are associated with moral behaviour and trustworthiness.

High intelligence and strong commitments to justice don’t reliably protect against moral distortion and can increase susceptibility. Immunity requires a range of self-examination skills, including curiosity to investigate one’s own reaction to information, curiosity to explore different perspectives, honesty to excavate one’s true motives for holding a specific position, and willingness to confront the emotions that arise from personal reckoning. These capacities are demanding and unevenly developed, particularly when status and livelihood are at stake.

Intelligent people are often skilled at constructing coherent narratives even when critical facts are missing. Those with good intentions are especially open to frames that assign blame in the name of being on the right side of justice, while preserving their own moral standing. Once a position becomes established as the compassionate stance, conflicting information is no longer treated as something to examine but as a challenge to one’s legitimacy and reputation. This behaviour is sustained by institutional structure and by unexamined responses to status and threat, which I’ve explored elsewhere.

People who prioritise saving face rise because they experience little friction between speech and action. They punish a colleague in the morning and speak about values in the afternoon without inner turmoil. Undiscerning observers interpret this smoothness as competence and solid leadership.

Those with a more developed conscience hesitate before acting because they consider consequences and impact. Those who are used to displays of smooth confidence as true leadership perceive hesitation as weakness and unreliability. Over time, those who are able to spot the incongruence and distorted value system withdraw, are sidelined, or are forced out, leaving group dynamics increasingly dependent on performing virtues rather than embodying them.

Moral development depends on authority figures who demonstrate that accepting consequence strengthens authority. When authority is used to preserve image, groups regress, performance survives, and responsibility decays. Institutional self-preservation is rewarded, and these lessons reproduce themselves without instruction because they’re reinforced materially and socially.

Constraints

The people who do care tend to be those who feel beholden to their dharma, understood as a lived sense of duty rather than a belief or identity. Their behaviour is organised around obligation rather than reward and is demonstrated in their actions rather than declarations of benevolence. They exercise self-restraint where compliance would be easier, speak truthfully where distortion could protect them, and accept consequence instead of blaming others. This way of operating puts them at a disadvantage within most contemporary institutions, carrying personal and professional costs, yet it persists because duty is non-negotiable.

This is how people behave when their status and livelihood are at stake.

The present state

The human condition hasn’t changed. What has changed is the willingness to sustain the conditions under which goodness can survive. Responsibility now carries disproportionate cost, while performance offers protection. Unlike what many people are saying, the past few years didn’t reveal a sudden moral collapse. They clarified how much goodness depends on being actively supported.

I don’t know what will emerge from my work in 2026, given how 2025 unfolded. What I do know is that without continual reminders of our actual human tendencies, shame-based reactions to ordinary situations will continue to shape behaviour and draw people into collective despair. Many thoughtful writers are focused on thinking better and cultivating epistemic humility, and I’m thankful for them. However, that focus on its own does not address the problem I keep encountering.

My belief is that you can have all the great thinking skills and still be relationally unskilled, because our emotions drive behaviour, not our thoughts.

You’ll see more transgressive ideas about emotions as the true drivers of our actions, and a push toward moral development grounded in cosmic laws that defy logic, thought, and feeling.

You’ll also continue to experience a calm, humanising, and reflective approach to writing that doesn’t attempt to manipulate you into feeling special, righteous, virtuous, or superior. Approaches that rely on those dynamics can be effective, but they tend to exhaust both readers and writers over time.

I hope you will continue to stick with me and support my research and practice so I can provide helpful and actionable processes that liberate people from societal conditioning, reduce suffering, and promote peace.

Thank you for all your support in 2025 (and before). Onward to 2026!

-Nathalie

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PS Most of my work is going behind a paywall. There are articles as far back as 2021 that are as relevant today as they were then. Scandalous yet fleeting cultural moments and current events are often more satisfying to focus on, but they rarely explain the root causes of personal distress and interpersonal problems. My work focuses on recognising patterns driven by less visible forces that persist over time and make sense of what people are living through. A paid subscription supports my ongoing independent research and writing, and gives you access to that work and the language to see what’s actually happening.

Thank you for your support!

Yes, this is another post on scapegoating at work. I don’t think we can talk about it enough, and I’ve been obsessed with the topic for the past 9 months. It’s a form of workplace abuse most people don’t recognise because bullying has become a catch-all term. You can read more about scapegoating at work here and here.

I’ve been a guest on Dr. Shami’s podcast several times, and it’s an honour to speak to her audience about the topics I’ve been covering on Substack over the past two years. You can listen via Apple Podcasts, and if this episode speaks to you, please consider leaving a review.

In this episode of Six Hats, I joined Dr. Shami to talk about scapegoating at work and why it operates as a systemic response rather than a simple interpersonal issue. We explored how scapegoating often begins when competence, questions, or honest feedback register as a threat to fragile authority, and how organisations respond by subtly relocating blame onto one individual to restore order. I walked through the predictable stages of the scapegoating cycle, from early idealisation and grooming to devaluation, narrative control, group alignment, and eventual erasure or exit. We also discussed why feedback in these environments becomes vague and impossible to resolve, why escalating concerns to HR frequently accelerates harm, and why high-performing and neurodivergent professionals are so often targeted. Using examples from healthcare and other high pressure systems, I focused on how to recognise the pattern early, protect yourself strategically, and decide when leaving is the most rational move.

Episode guide

00:00 – 04:00 | Why scapegoating matters
Why scapegoating shows up so often at work, how I came to focus on it, and why so many people recognise this pattern once it’s identified.

04:00 – 10:00 | What scapegoating looks like
How scapegoating unfolds in everyday workplace interactions, how it begins in response to perceived threat, and how competence, questions, or feedback can quietly set it in motion.

10:00 – 15:30 | The Scapegoating Playbook
An outline of the key stages, including early idealisation, devaluation, narrative shaping, group alignment, and erasure, and why most people recognise what’s happening only after they’re already inside it.

15:30 – 22:00 | Power, HR, and organisational protection
How authority is protected inside organisations, how hr functions within these dynamics, and why escalation frequently intensifies the process.

22:00 – 28:00 | What to do if you’re targeted
How to think strategically once you suspect scapegoating, why direct confrontation tends to escalate risk, and how to assess your options realistically.

28:00 – end | Healthcare and closing reflections
Why scapegoating is common in healthcare and other high-pressure systems, and how recognising the pattern restores agency.

I hope this conversation gives you insight into the unconscious behaviours governing systemic responses to perceived threat at work, and the parallels you can draw with other group dynamics.

Enjoy and thank you for listening!

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Hack narcissism and support my work

I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.

Here’s how you can help.

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

From time to time, a research paper crosses my path and piques my interest enough to read it. My underlying bias is that most research is irreproducible slop but the content can still be really interesting, including some of the findings. However, I rarely roast them…until now.

A recent integrative review on women in leadership tries to synthesise two decades of research across psychology, management and organisational science. It’s not a top tier international journal, but the way the LinkedIn leadership gurus who shall remain nameless raved about it made me salivate for something to gnash. Thankfully, it was a satisfying read for all the reasons I’ll outline here. Before you use my work against me to expose my unconscious motives for writing this, it’s not because I’m envious — don’t analyse me!

As social science often is, it’s methodical and earnest, promising new insights but reintroduces the same findings that have circulated since the early 2000s. Nothing shifts because the assumptions driving the analysis never shift. The authors being based in Germany might explain the lacklustre analysis that spends 16 pages justifying its own beliefs. Maybe it’s their devotion to tidy categories, liberal optimism about progress, or a near religious faith in social science as a tool for human improvement and flourishing. It’s the predictable outcome of a discipline that won’t examine its own premises.

The review opens with the usual claims about women’s communal nature, men’s agency, and the penalties women face when they don’t behave as expected. It reads as though the authors started with a template and slotted in contemporary citations. The underlying logic is treated as fact and never questioned throughout the paper. The research questions sit inside unexamined beliefs about gender, leadership and what counts as valid evidence.

The review runs on a set of mental models the authors never question. Here are a few of them:

Women lead through empathy and harmony.
Women are less narcissistic and therefore more trustworthy.
Women collaborate more and can build functional teams.
Women’s interpersonal style is a leadership strength.
Women are safer than men and can be trusted with power.
Men are naturally agentic and dominant.
Men rely on confidence and entitlement.
Men’s ambition is self serving while women’s ambition serves the collective.
Men and sexism remain the primary barrier to women’s advancement.
Women are morally superior. More women in leadership automatically improves outcomes.
Women don’t rise due to external factors, not internal ones.
When women succeed, it confirms the model.
When women struggle, it confirms the bias.

These are not harmless background ideas. They determine the data that gets selected, interpreted and presented, and they fall victim to circular reasoning. Women are described through communal traits because the field has spent decades insisting that women are communal. Men are described through agentic traits because the same field has spent decades repeating that men are agentic. Any deviation is treated as an anomaly that needs correcting. The mental models stay fixed while the world moves on.

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There are also mental models supported by biology, neuroscience, and animal behaviour that never make it into leadership research because they interfere with the preferred story. They sit outside what is acceptable to say, despite being widely observed in real workplaces and diverse social contexts. These are the patterns people recognise immediately but dare not express:

Women compete with other women.
Women form alliances and cut people out of them.
Women watch each other closely and keep score.
Women fight for status in covert and backstabbing ways.
Women use subtle aggression deliberately.
Women are violent.
Women can be calculating when it serves them.
Women punish other women who step outside the norm.
Women punish other women who are perceived as threats to their status.
Women are not automatically supportive of each other.
Women use niceness as a strategy, not as a virtue.
Female-coded behaviour is often controlling, not nurturing.
Communal often means socially acceptable manipulation for status.
Women can undermine and block other women.
Women can be vindictive when threatened.
Women can be aggressive socially, politically, financially, and reputationally.

None of these fit the communal script, so they’re ignored. This moral framing also explains why critique is treated as hostility rather than analysis, and why accountability is so easily deflected.

On the other hand, male power behaviour is generally overt and visible, therefore easier to name, shame, and blame. Some examples of these mental models include:

Men compete openly with other men.
Men challenge status directly.
Men use confrontation when their status is threatened.
Men rely on role, rank, and authority to assert their position.
Male-coded behaviour often signals dominance.
Men’s aggression is visible and therefore more likely to provoke a response.

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There is also sustained institutional pressure to keep the advancement of women narrative clean and morally legible. In practice, this means support the women, promote the women, remove the barriers, and never mention the internal dynamics that make female dominated workplaces some of the most politically fraught environments people ever work in. Don’t mention the women who ascend through manipulation, or the ones who protect their status by undermining other women while publicly performing solidarity. These patterns are inconvenient because they destabilise stories and the moral authority that rests on them. A destabilised story raises an uncomfortable question about whether equity frameworks have been quietly propping up the wrong people for the sake of optics, moral signalling, and institutional self-preservation, which is precisely why academic committees choose to live in denial.

Neuroscience complicates this even further, although you would not know it from the way leadership research is selectively cited and lauded. Not only are threat appraisal, social prediction, and emotional signalling variable between men and women but within them depending on hierarchy, exposure, and context. This means there is no fixed communal female brain or agentic male brain waiting to be unlocked through better representation. Instead, there are behavioural patterns shaped by incentives, like status, prestige, and supreme authority. When women learn that visible authority invites relational punishment, they adapt by becoming hypervigilant and politically cautious. When men learn they are rewarded for directness and confrontation, they become more overtly agentic. Behaviour responds to punishment and reward, not gender. This is basic science, just not the findings that get cited when the goal is to reassure everyone that women possess innate leadership virtues that only need institutional encouragement to flourish.

Yes, there’s more! These researchers are also out of touch with how narcissism is handled. The review uses measures that detect overt, grandiose expression which is more common in men. Meanwhile the covert, soft controlling, subtle aggression, image managing form that aligns with female socialisation is left unmeasured. Women then appear less narcissistic which allows the field to claim that women lead with humility. How convenient! The covert form of narcissism which drives a great deal of workplace politics doesn’t register in the data. The construct itself is obsolete but the authors treat it as foundational.

The problem goes deeper than poor measurement, and I have this beef with all personality studies divorced from the subject’s relational context. Narcissism is treated as an individual personality trait rather than an interpersonal pattern. This is an issue because narcissism is expressed relationally through impression management, coalition building, information control, and the strategic use of niceness or moral positioning in organisational settings. When narcissism is operationalised only as overt grandiosity, the forms more consistent with female socialisation remain undetected and appear nonexistent. Women are then perceived as less narcissistic, more humble and prosocial, which allows the field to recycle the claim that women lead differently and better. This oversight is a measurement choice that consistently flatters women and sustains the preferred narrative about female leadership while leaving the actual dynamics of workplace power untouched.

The paper also assumes that women rise through competence or interpersonal magic. This is the official story, one that obscures the less flattering unofficial one. Women rise when they understand the politics and perform assimilated compliance. They rise when they delegate strategically, skim credit effectively, and align themselves with whoever holds greater power and authority. Some women are highly competent in grooming, exploitation, and narrative reauthoring, using the language of collaboration and care to suppress challenge. A woman who can make her weakness another woman’s burden will go far. A woman who exposes the tactic will get scapegoated and ousted. These dynamics are widely recognised inside workplaces but remain curiously absent from the literature that claims to study them, beyond the endlessly recycled Queen Bee Syndrome theory.

The authors end the review by recommending more experimental methods, stronger causal designs, and greater clarity around when specific gendered patterns emerge. These suggestions are fine, but they solve nothing because they address the method rather than the flawed assumptions that shape the theories and hypotheses in the first place. They don’t question the categories or the narratives, nor do they question the political commitments and pressure influencing the analysis. They want sharper tools while keeping the same scaffolding. The result will be another twenty years of studies that try to look different on the surface and identical underneath, churning out new branded leadership fixes that serve the Feminist Victimhood Industrial Complex.

Once again, researchers demonstrate how disconnected they are from reality, which is hardly surprising given that academics were instrumental in institutionalising feminism and related ideologies that displaced merit with feelings while claiming moral authority in the process. They can’t be trusted to solve this because the problem is not structural — it’s conceptual. Women can and do rise, often very effectively, but they rise through political savviness, diplomacy, and role-based competence rather than through gender alone. Some women rise through politics, others through covert aggression, and others by mastering ego management, including their own. The academy avoids these ideas because acknowledging them would mean studying itself. Self-examination, as I’ve shared before, is not a strength of any accountability averse institution.

My work sits outside these constraints. The women I support and coach see what the research ignores and denies. Once their eyes open to how these systems actually operate, they stop trying to be the perfect communal leader and start learning the terrain as it is. The ones with resilience and grounded political skill rise because they rely on competence rather than manipulation. These are the women you would trust with anything because they can hold power without abusing it. The ones who choose not to stay no longer collapse under bullies or empowerment narratives. They disentangle themselves from the feminism they were trained to obey and develop real self-leadership instead. They become sharper, more strategic and far less naïve.

Hacking Narcissism

What happens when you don't resist assimilation

I was born and raised in Canada. When I was 5 years old, we and many other families moved from Montreal to Toronto because of Bill 101. This bill declared Quebec a francophone province and would require all institutions and businesses to operate entirely in French…

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2 years ago · 62 likes · 15 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

This is what women can do when they stop waiting for institutions to deliver the promised equity and start applying relational intelligence to every interaction. Some rise and some leave, but all become wiser and more discerning. None of this insight will come from the ivory tower because authors are embedded in frameworks and institutionalised prestige that shape what is legible, credible, and worth studying, limiting what they’re allowed see. The real understanding is emerging from those who are free to think without protecting an ideology or their assimilation privilege. Until then, the German precision of the next literature review will be impressive, but the content will remain the same.

Here is free access to the paper I just roasted if you want to see it for yourself.

Female Leadership Review

1.25MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Thanks for reading,

Nathalie

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Hack narcissism and support my work

I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting and overriding our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.

Here’s how you can help.

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Discernment strengthens as we become better at recognising patterns. It involves noticing the cues that signal when something is aligned and when something is off. This includes the bodily sensations that activate before we have language, the thoughts that circle around inconsistencies, and the shifts in behaviour that reveal how an interaction is unfolding. It’s shaped through ongoing attention to the sensations, signals, and shifts that take place within us and in our interactions.

A theme that consistently arises in my work with people navigating narcissistic behaviour, scapegoating, and other workplace abuses is betrayal. Like all painful events, betrayal becomes a doorway to developing character strengths while enduring the pain of shedding a false or now obsolete identity and the relational patterns built around it. It ruptures a person’s sense of self, the trust they held in others, and the fantasy of how they believed the world worked. While betrayal hurts like hell, it’s also one of the few ways to cultivate discernment because the pain of never wanting to experience it again ignites the desire to prevent it. Betrayal can be motivating when someone wants to learn from the experience and derive its wisdom, rather than only focusing on the pain of the wound.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• What discernment actually is
• Why we struggle to trust our own discernment
• How culture, social media, and information overload cloud our perception
• My Liberation Cycle: disrupt, extract, and release, a process that turns awareness into meaningful change
• How discernment protects energy, strengthens boundaries, and still sustains an open heart
• The cost of choosing truth over belonging, and how discernment can deepen connection rather than sever it
• Practical ways to begin practising discernment in daily life

Notable quotes from our conversation:

“Discernment is the ability to perceive what’s true, even when that truth is inconvenient.”

“It’s the capacity to see beyond your conditioning and the pressure to conform or deny reality.”

“Discernment develops because you’ve been betrayed or duped enough times that you decide it’s not going to happen again.”

“In any interaction we’re playing status games, and someone will try to dominate the narrative.”

“We often defer to someone else’s authority and ignore our own.”

“Just because someone believes strongly in what they’re saying doesn’t mean it’s true or that they can actually do it.”

“Feeling special should be treated as a cue for suspicion because it makes you vulnerable to exploitation.”

“People who are elevated too quickly often become the scapegoat. There’s nowhere to go but down.”

“Trust and discernment grow together. You can’t develop discernment if you don’t trust what your perception is telling you.”

“You can have connection without belonging anywhere, and still feel steady.”

“When a workplace tells you to ‘speak your truth,’ it usually means the opposite. I hold back and observe first.”

“If you rely on external validation to feel good about yourself, it becomes an addiction and erodes your discernment.”

If you enjoyed this conversation, I highly recommend subscribing to Lisa’s podcast HERE.

She was also contributed a thought provoking piece on what teenage boys are trying to tell us.

Hacking Narcissism

What teenage boys are trying to tell us (and why we need to listen)

In the past few years, I have been writing about female on female aggression and this has evolved into critiques of modern feminism as a cult and covert narcissistic ideology that justifies and enforces dominance through interpersonal victimhood, and uplifts no one. I’ve exposed the…

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10 months ago · 81 likes · 71 comments · Lisa Rochelle

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Hack narcissism and support my work

I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.

Here’s how you can help.

• Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and the Scapegoating Playbook at Work

• Support my work:

  • through a Substack subscription

  • by sharing my work with your loved ones and networks

  • by citing my work in your presentations and posts

  • by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation

    Hacking Narcissism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Trust creates the conditions for cooperation and belief, but it can also be used to shape perception. The same behaviours that signal reliability can be learned and performed without sincerity. The appearance of integrity can operate as a strategy of control. When people feel safe a relational context, they stop examining motives and outcomes, which is how influence becomes indistinguishable from manipulation. The intention to reassure becomes a way to manage others’ uncertainty, and trust shifts from a relational exchange to an instrument of control.

Trust is what allows one person to influence another’s wellbeing, believing that this influence will be exercised responsibly. When we seek help or guidance, trust becomes an active process rather than an ideal. It shifts from a general expectation about others to a deliberate act of entrusting. We allow another person to enter our uncertainty and shape our state of mind or circumstances. That act requires a temporary suspension of self-protection so the other can participate in our problem, decision or healing. In that moment, trust becomes a lived transaction that exposes our dependence on the integrity of the other.

The same act that makes collaboration and repair possible also opens the possibility of harm. Trust gives another person access to our confidence, our loyalty and sometimes our reputation. When the person receiving that trust acts from self-interest, the balance or power shifts. Individuals with narcissistic or manipulative traits often treat trust as an opportunity for leverage rather than as a mutual commitment grounded in mutual respect. They build credibility through warmth or expertise, then use it to secure admiration or control. Once they gain your trust, it becomes a resource to manage rather than a sacred responsibility to uphold.

Not everyone who exploits trust is aware they are doing it, no matter how obvious it is to you. Many professionals act from an unconscious narcissism that equates being perceived as good with being trustworthy, and their sense of integrity depends on protecting that image. When their trustworthiness is questioned, they defend their reputation instead of engaging with the challenge and sincerely examining their actions that made someone experience them as untrustworthy. Their need to appear ethical replaces the capacity to behave ethically.

Unsurprisingly, institutions mirror this process. They often reward performances of confidence, conflated with competence, rather than embodied character and maturity. The ones who look composed are promoted as safe and dependable. Over time, image becomes a proxy for trustworthiness. Policies and values statements create the appearance of fairness but often protect those who manage perception best. This is how institutional trust morphs into reputational trust, built through image control rather than through reciprocal relationships.

Confidence in institutions is restored through visible acts of responsibility that involve cost and transparency, not through apologies. Yet, like narcissistic individuals, bureaucratic systems often choose to look sorry rather than change. They apologise, promise review, coaching or training, and continue as before. Admitting fault exposes them to reputational, financial and legal risk, which are consequences accountability averse institutions (and people) are unwilling to wear.

The familiar instruction to trust the process is often a signal to suppress doubt. It asks you to silence the inner whispers of intuition that register danger or detect incongruence between stated values and actual behaviour. It’s a subtle form of emotional management that frames discernment as disloyalty. When you question a process, you’re positioned as resistant or ungrateful rather than perceptive.

The demand for trust in this context becomes moralised. You’re prompted to feel guilty for doubting good intentions, even when those intentions or their outcomes are producing the very harms your doubt was meant to prevent. The onus shifts from the system to the person raising the concern, who becomes responsible for the consequences of that system. The institution or authority figure avoids scrutiny by reframing healthy scepticism as a failure of faith and loyalty.

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The narcissistic dynamic employs soft control that relies on a convincing idealised image, assumed moral authority and emotional management to secure cooperation. The dominant individual or system exploits others’ wish to be seen as cooperative and morally upright, turning goodwill into compliance. In these environments, trust is not always a conscious act. People sense a familiar signature of authority that signals safety rather than danger and respond automatically. The absence of discernment makes this trust both easily given and easily manipulated.

When betrayal occurs, whether through a broken promise or systemic neglect, institutions protect their image before protecting those who depend on them. Preserving legitimacy becomes more important than restoring trust. Those who are harmed are expected to forgive, stay loyal by remaining silent, or demonstrate resilience so the system can maintain the illusion of stability. Time doesn’t heal wounds, nor does trust magically restore with the passage of time. It can only be repaired through acknowledgement of harm or betrayal and through consistent conduct that restores predictability and demonstrates accountability over time. Repair happens when actions provide evidence of accountability that is valued more than reputation. Repair occurs when accountability is demonstrated through consistent behaviour that restores confidence and shows that trust is deserved.

In my conversation with , I said that we need to make accountability sexy. By that I mean restoring accountability as a living expression of responsibility rather than punishment or surveillance.

The discussion that follows continues this inquiry with Dr Simon Rogoff, whose work examines narcissism and trauma through the lens of performance, fame and identity. He writes about how the drive to be seen and admired can evolve into a system of self-protection that hides vulnerability, both in individuals and in institutions. His essays trace the tension between image and reality and how culture confuses charisma with character.

You can read more of his work and subscribe to his Substack, The Psychology of Narcissism and Trauma, here:

Narcissism, Trauma, Fame and Power

What do the well-documented life stories of the iconically famous tell us about narcissism? And how does narcissism help us understand the links between trauma, fame and leadership? I am a clinical psychologist interested in celebrity and leadership.

By Dr Simon Rogoff

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Summary of what we discussed

00:00 to 10:00 We began by examining how trust forms between strangers and how easily warmth and familiarity can replace discernment.

10:00 to 20:00 We explored why people trust authority and charisma even when both are performances of confidence rather than signs of reliability.

20:00 to 30:00 We spoke about the ways narcissistic dynamics distort relationships, turning admiration and cooperation into tools of control.

30:00 to 40:00 We looked at how institutions mirror these dynamics by protecting image over accountability and mistaking reputation for integrity.

40:00 to 50:00 We discussed the emotional cost of betrayal and the psychological conditions that make repair possible.

50:00 to 60:00 We asked what accountability looks like when trust has been broken and how evidence rather than sentiment restores faith in people and systems.

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I believe that a common threat to our individual and collective thriving is an addiction to power and control. This addiction fuels and is fuelled by greed - the desire to accumulate and control resources in social, information (and attention), economic, ecological, geographical and political systems.

While activists focus on fighting macro issues, I believe that activism also needs to focus on the micro issues - the narcissistic traits that pollute relationships between you and I, and between each other, without contributing to existing injustice. It’s not as exciting as fighting the Big Baddies yet hacking, resisting, overriding and deprogramming our tendencies to control others that also manifest as our macro issues is my full-time job.

I’m dedicated to helping people understand all the ways narcissistic traits infiltrate and taint our interpersonal, professional, organisational and political relationships, and provide strategies for narcissism hackers to fight back and find peace.

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In my conversation with a psychotherapist and trauma therapist, Jeremy , we explored how workplace culture has shifted as masculinity was devalued and conflated with toxicity, among many other topics. This change made traits such as direction, assertiveness, hierarchy, and protection seem suspect. As men withdrew from leadership or muted their authority, organisations lost coherence, and women filled the gap, bringing different priorities and sensitivities into the system. What began as inclusion became feminisation where standards of excellence were replaced by feelings.

This shift affects both sexes, but women carry much of its visible distortion. Politics and hierarchy have always existed in institutions, but feminisation has changed how they function. Power is maintained through perception rather than principle. Status and belonging are now signalled through the performance of empathy and moral correctness, a value system that both women and men have learned to emulate in order to survive and succeed in these environments.

Many women were trained in rule-based environments where progress depended on performance and meeting the expectations of authority. As those structures were eroded in the name of inclusion and diversity, the emphasis shifted toward process, consensus, and the performance of moral correctness. The loss of structure, combined with the incongruence between what women were conditioned for and the culture they now have to navigate, creates instability. Women, being higher in neuroticism, experience this instability as anxiety and distress, which often manifest as narcissistic behaviour ie. control, silencing, micromanagement, and image management. This behaviour can be defensive and rooted in insecurity or it can be opportunistic and expressed as ambition or self-anointed authority that uses bullying exclusion and moral posturing to maintain control. Feminisation has turned conformity into a survival skill where many men and women participate in the same performance culture to avoid social punishment. Both appear in workplaces that reward the performance of a feminised value system rather than excellence.

Feminisation of institutions has made this outcome predictable. When the masculine frame that maintains order and stability collapses, the culture becomes unstable. Females who rely on structure to regulate uncertainty react more strongly to that instability. Their vigilance and relational control intensify as women try to re-establish predictability in systems that no longer provide it.

Historically, institutions were built by men through cooperation, hierarchy, and accountability. As those frameworks eroded, organisations traded procedural authority for moral performance, relying on perception management to sustain legitimacy. In the current environment, institutional life has been reshaped around optics and the language of moral performance, producing what I called safety theatre, where systems claim to protect and include but amplify insecurity and social monitoring instead.

I’m not saying that I’m nostalgic for patriarchal institutions. However, acting as if the solution is to erase every trace of the masculine has made things worse. Institutions still need the discipline, boundaries, structure, and long range thinking that come more naturally to men alongside the social intelligence and coordination that are more natural for women to bring for systems to function. When one side disappears, the other becomes distorted producing a culture overrun with management and surveillance on one end and paralysis on the other. Everyone is paying for the imbalance in different ways.

This tension between masculine and feminine energies plays out structurally and psychologically. We also spoke about how emotion and cognition reflect the same tension in our institutions. Emotion gives information about what matters while cognition decides what to do with that information. When emotion is silenced workplaces become rigid and disconnected. When emotion leads people lose focus and become reactive. The goal is to give emotion space to be expressed and understood so that people regulate and think clearly. The masculine function turns that energy into plans and boundaries and the feminine function ensures that what is felt and observed informs those plans. Both are necessary yet when either dominates organisations lose coherence and accountability and people lose trust in the institution’s ability to act with integrity.

We hope you enjoy our conversation. We covered a lot of territory that touch on the state of modern institutions, the shifting balance between men and women in leadership and culture, and the deeper psychological forces that shape how we relate to power, stability, and change.

The main themes from our discussion are outlined in the timestamped summaries below.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

For more of Jeremy’s work, I recommend subscribing to his Substack, where he unpacks psychological principles and theories in a way that makes them both accessible and applicable.

Next Level Psychology

I help readers to discover the secret psychological principles behind our daily lives and how to wield this knowledge to thrive.

By Fox

Summary of themes we covered

00:00 – 00:11 | Discernment and the need to feel special

• The psychology of being chosen and why belonging can override judgment

• How online and institutional spaces exploit the desire to feel exceptional

• The pull between charisma and wisdom in digital communities

00:11 – 00:21 | Validation and emotional dependency

• The rise of validation as a social value across therapy, work, and media

• The shift from empathy as containment to empathy as performance

• The consequences of dependence on affirmation instead of reflection

00:21 – 00:27 | Interpersonal narcissism and everyday power games

• Narcissism as a relational pattern rather than a diagnosis

• The subtle power tactics used to manage shame and preserve image

• The work of staying grounded amid manipulation and status management

00:29 – 00:37 | The shame, envy and contempt trifecta

• Examines the relationship between shame, envy and contempt as a social and emotional system

• Shows how envy fuels comparison and contempt sustains superiority

• Traces how these emotions generate cycles of resentment and rivalry

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Behind the paywall

00:38 – 00:59 | Masculinity, femininity and institutional imbalance

• Looks at institutions becoming emotionally saturated and risk averse

• Explores the effects of losing masculine structure and direction

• Describes how excessive sentimentality weakens decision making and stability

00:59 – 01:05 | Institutional collapse and the restoration of merit

• Outlines the erosion of trust and accountability across institutions

• Identifies scapegoating and performance as substitutes for competence

• Emphasises the re-establishment of merit and standards as a path to integrity

01:05 – 01:23 | Relational intelligence and institutional trust

• Extends the idea of relational intelligence to systems and structures

• Explains how reciprocity rather than assumption builds institutional trust

• Observes how narcissistic patterns appear in organisations and how to stay grounded within them

01:23 – 01:28 | Egregores and spiritual hunger

• Describes the formation of collective belief systems around unmet spiritual needs

• Examines belonging without transformation in pseudo-spiritual movements

• Highlights discernment as protection against emotional capture

01:28 – 01:31 | Manufactured struggle and moral fatigue

• Investigates how comfort culture creates artificial struggle for meaning

• Notes the substitution of outrage for genuine growth

• Ends with the call to build character and do meaningful work

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The mistake these high performers made came from limited awareness, not poor performance. They violated invisible authority lines and collided with boundaries that govern advancement within hierarchical systems. The reaction that followed, such as exclusion, micromanagement, reputational damage, or scapegoating, reflected the unspoken norms that exist to protect fragile egos and entrenched power structures.

Through years of analysing my own experiences in academic and health sectors, and observing the same dynamics across many other industries, I have come to see that the official position description rarely aligns with the expectations that actually determine success. When people take the written description at face value and assume that doing what is formally expected is sufficient to succeed, particularly in workplaces that rely on political skill, they discover that competence and conscientiousness can become their greatest liabilities.

In reality, there are four layers that shape every role:

1. the stated position description

2. the real position description

3. the hidden curriculum

4. the formative curriculum

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Status seeking is the pursuit of reputational, material, class, or social elevation through association with those who already hold it within a particular hierarchy or social sphere. It is the drive to increase one’s visibility and authority by connecting to people or ideas that carry established recognition. The status seeker measures their progress through proximity to admired figures, drawing validation from how others perceive their access to influence. Status seeking flourishes in hierarchical environments where association gives the appearance of belonging and status functions as a form of social security. We all seek some degree of status to grow and progress, but the problem begins when it becomes a way to extract value, access, or resources from others for personal gain, and at the other’s expense.

A feminist status seeker looks like every other well-intentioned professional woman committed to equity, inclusion, and progress. What sets her apart from other women is her motive: professional and social advancement that draws on competitive behaviour disguised as support and collaboration, spoken in the language of liberation.

She seeks attachment to women she admires and perceives as synergistic, and perceives that their social or professional status can provide important leverage to expose her work to broader audiences through her affiliation with the object of her envy affection.

Here’s how this collaboration will go down. The unconscious intent of the altruistic feminist is to subdue the message that gains her attention and recognition, assimilating its author into feminist rightthink so she is no longer challenged by what that message represents. She wishes to access another woman’s authority without developing her own, using stealth knowledge vampirism. The feminist status seeker aims to neutralise the message that draws attention to that woman, so she can later teach a more awakened version that aligns with feminist rightthink. Through soft, covert, coercive control, she will gaslight the object into gradually letting go of her position so that her message mirrors the approved moral authority of feminist rightthink and rightspeak. The object becomes absorbed by the devouring, corrective mother archetype that defines this form of feminism. This is the essence of passive assimilation under the guise of bridge building that claims to advance each other’s ideas and work.

I’m perpetually amused when I’m solicited by these covert coercive insecure women with requests of collaboration.

I also understand where this behaviour comes from. Many of us were trained to find comfort and success in affiliation with respected authorities. We learned that being liked and connection opens doors and code switching will make us more acceptable. This is true to a degree when code switching enables you to be genuinely respectful to others. The problem is when the acceptable code is defined by modern feminist rightthink that claims to reject the patriarchy while employing the same controlling tactics it critiques. Collaboration in this setting becomes a survival instinct of women who learned that proximity to the rightthink power core is what all of us women want.

I’ve done it too when I admired someone’s messaging and expression, reached out to connect but secretly saw her as a rival. Competition is in our DNA and a survival feature across the animal kingdom, but feminist status seekers often pretend it isn’t, that they’ve transcended it, or that it’s only acceptable as “healthy competition.” Competition driven by narcissistic defence is not the same as healthy competition that plays out in sport or project teams with a clear goal or reward. Narcissistic feminism turns competition into entitlement. It believes women deserve to win, yet fails to see how that belief embeds itself deep within the feminist psyche and justifies vicious takedowns disguised as collaboration.

I’m thankful I was never a card-carrying feminist for more than a few months and my objective in life is in cultivating virtues and gaining status as a person who has positively impacted others. I see that this is not a priority for feminist status seekers, which is why I don’t vibe with them.

What I’ve described in myself and others isn’t personal anymore. It’s a pattern that shapes professional and activist cultures where feminism often becomes a vehicle for control and image management.

I respect difference and welcome thoughtful disagreement. But there is a limit to what I will welcome under the expectation of openness. There are moments when remaining open is an intrusion, and this is one of them.

In professional and activist spaces, many educated feminists (members of the managerial class, AWFLs, and other well earned monikers) look for affiliation with people or frameworks that boost their credibility. They call it solidarity, bridge building, or collaboration, but it’s often a way to attach themselves to status and power. Their goal is to raise their own profile and legitimacy through the discourse of collective empowerment™.

If I wanted to weaponise this behaviour back at the toxic feminist practitioner, I’d call her a content coloniser (thanks to for coming up with this term), not a knowledge vampire. Every coloniser begins as a knowledge vampire, feeding on another person’s embodied expertise and wisdom. Once she’s extracted enough to build her own image of authority, she reshapes what she’s taken into posts, talks, or programs that present her as the more evolved thinker. Knowledge vampirism becomes content colonialism as a woman’s embodied knowledge is translated into the coloniser’s familiar activist language to gain prestige and legitimacy. Eventually, the material is recycled publicly until the original source is erased from view and the authority appears to have always belonged to the coloniser.

Let’s be real — this behaviour is about control. By positioning themselves as amplifiers or interpreters of other women’s work, they gain authority without professional risk. They mirror another’s language, reframe her ideas in justice or DEI terms, and gradually make her work sound like an extension of their own. It appears as shared purpose but functions as a takeover to consolidate their status among the approved feminist authorities. This is not collaboration.

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How to spot a feminist status seeker

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