Hacking Narcissism

The purpose

It usually starts small. A woman encounters another person whose way of being activates discomfort. I use way of being because virtually anything about another person can make a woman uncomfortable. She perceives that person as the problem, then reacts with behaviour that shifts the power dynamic in her favour and soothes her discomfort.

She might try to gain access to the person, establish herself as their equal, assume authority over them, diminish their standing or recruit others to help put them back in the place where she believes they belong.

The aggression is often outside the woman’s awareness because she views her conduct as a reasonable response to someone else. She believes she’s offering advice, improving an idea, protecting a group or correcting a problem. Her explanation allows her to interfere with another person while preserving her self-image as caring and well intentioned.

Narcissistic behaviour in a relationship or interaction, also known as interpersonal narcissism, centres one person’s comfort through attempts to control another person. It emerges when someone feels discomfort and assumes the person who activated it should change to make them feel better. The kicker is that she is probably unaware that this is what she’s doing, which makes pointing it out exasperating when you’re on the receiving end and can see it clearly. An immature woman won’t be able to see what you see because her priority is protecting her ideal self-image — I’m a caring and compassionate person who doesn’t hurt people.

This capacity exists in all of us. The task, which is not everyone’s priority, is to catch the moment when an internal reaction leads us to self-soothe by controlling another person.

Women receive little help with this because we’ve inherited the myth that we already possess the relational qualities required to manage it. It’s as though our comfort with discussing emotions (I know, not all women) means we have empathy, and that fluency in therapy speak proves we’re caring and mature.

If you read on, you’ll see why this myth doesn’t hold up.

The microfoundations of coercive control

Coercive control gets everyone’s attention once intimidation, surveillance, isolation, restriction or threats have formed a recognisable pattern of abuse. By then, the person doing it has supplied the receipts. Far less attention goes to the earlier manoeuvres that pass as a woman being caring, helpful and apparently burdened with standards everyone else keeps failing to meet.

Women can control people during perfectly ordinary interactions. A woman can question another adult’s judgement under the cover of concern, overrule her wishes in the spirit of compassion, appoint herself adviser without waiting to be asked or recruit group approval until resistance becomes socially expensive. She doesn’t need to issue a threat when disapproval, humiliation or exclusion communicates the consequences perfectly well. The other person works out the costs of disagreement and starts adjusting ASAP.

I describe these behaviours as the microfoundations of coercive control because they show how women establish influence, punish resistance, and train other people to anticipate consequences. Calling every intrusive woman an abuser would turn a serious construct into mush. Examining the behaviour carefully allows us to see women using the same basic moves that appear in the sustained patterns described by coercive control and abuse researchers, without assuming every woman who uses them will become an abuser.

She might sincerely believe she’s helping, protecting, educating or defending standards while using another person to settle her own discomfort. This allows her halo to remain perfectly in place while the other person feels pressured to comply to earn their peace.

Same mechanics, different costume — relationships, workplaces, communities, political groups. Pressure, status and social consequences, dressed up as whatever makes the target easiest to manage.

Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash

Relational skills must be learned to cultivate relational competence

I developed intellectual skills in learning how to investigate, debate, and establish the credibility of my knowledge during my scientific training. They helped me examine evidence and persuade other people that my interpretation had merit while being able to pull apart theories by spotting biases and holes in arguments. These are excellent skills for developing my judgement in assessing quality information but they certainly didn’t teach me how to relate to another person.

I learned about reflective practice through the rigour required to become an effective group facilitator. It helped notice my assumptions and suspend interpretations to attune to someone else’s experience and understand their perspective. I had to listen closely, test what I thought I had heard and notice when my own reactions interfered with the process and restrain them. This was mindblowing and an addicting process until I realised I was too invested in how people experienced me as a facilitator. So, I also had to develop emotional detachment to remain impartial and objective, while also engaging the group through a learning process.

Emotional detachment allows a person to think while someone else is expressing distress, anger, outrage, or a perspective that challenges their own. It makes genuine empathy possible because empathy requires enough objectivity to distinguish the other person’s experience from the story we are telling ourselves about it.

Without this discipline, we project. We hear another person through our own history, decide what her experience means and respond to our interpretation. We can sound deeply empathic while relating almost entirely to ourselves.

Women are prone to mistaking emotional expression and involvement for connection. We might feel strongly in response to someone, call it being empathic, and assume the intensity tells us something accurate about her. We validate her feelings, reassure her, offer solutions or tell her what her experience means. Each response can centre our need to feel helpful and bring her distress into a form we can tolerate.

Our caring identity can also convince us that we understand another person before we’ve made a serious attempt to do so. We act on the compassion we feel toward someone we believe needs protection while ignoring the person directly affected by our intervention. The certainty that we're helping removes the curiosity that would have shown us who was actually being hurt.

The feelings driving female aggression

Shame, envy and anger and their associate constructs provide information about what another person has activated in us. Trouble begins when a woman treats her emotional reaction as evidence of someone else’s wrongdoing and employs control and punishment to relieve it.

Aggression dressed as care

Female aggression often hides inside the qualities women believe prove our goodness. A woman weaponises compassion when she uses the language of empathy, care and protection to claim authority over another person, overrule her wishes or recruit others to enforce a correction. Her caring identity gives control such respectable cover that she might feel wounded when someone objects.

Connection as a Trojan horse for extraction

Women don’t always attack the woman who threatens them. Sometimes we befriend her, praise her and invite her to collaborate, then help ourselves to whatever makes our preferred self-image more convincing.

When the group protects aggression

A woman can avoid examining herself indefinitely when a group supplies the right villain and rewards her version of events. Tribalism provides excellent laundering services.

Women can explain these behaviours through patriarchy, feminism, trauma, neurodivergence, spirituality, compassion or good intentions but every explanation can become another hiding place when it saves us from examining what we did to another person.

We can’t confront female aggression while we keep pointing to how caring we are whenever someone raises how badly we behaved. Caring about people is no substitute for learning how to relate to them. We don’t get those skills for free just because we’re women.

I hope you enjoy this field guide to navigating female aggression, including your own.

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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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Ladies, we have a toxic compassion problem

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:41:42 GMT

This is the second article in a series on female relational competence and the irony that women are widely assumed to excel at it while repeatedly displaying behaviours that other people experience as the opposite. The first article argued that women often bypass the work required to build relationships. This one argues that they also bypass the work required to understand another person before acting. The third article will examine how trauma informed thinking contributes to this problem. Together, these articles challenge the enduring assumption that relational competence comes naturally to women.

I’m including myself in this conversation because I’ve corrected people while feeling entirely justified by my intentions and had to examine the aggression behind my own certainty.

I was once at a talk listening to a woman present her work. During question time, someone stood up and said, “I’d like to push back on something you said.”

“Thank you for your presentation. I really appreciated your perspective. It’s such an important area and I completely understand why you’ve approached it that way. I’ve worked in this field for many years... [long winded explanation of contribution to the field] ...the current thinking has changed considerably. Best practice now encourages us to think differently about the language we use because words have consequences...”

I leaned in, wondering what was going to get challenged. Then I heard, “I just wanted to challenge your use of the phrase...”

I looked around the room expecting at least a few eye rolls. Instead I noticed nodding heads and, might I say, approval from many women in the room.

The challenger was a woman.

a year ago · 126 likes · 15 comments · Holly MathNerd

You look at enough social media threads and you can't help noticing the pattern. A clinician recently published an article on LinkedIn honouring a world renowned psychiatrist who had dedicated his career to treating treatment resistant depression and had died by suicide. He reflected on his colleague’s death and discussed advances in the field. Women soon filled the comments with repeated objections to the phrase “committed suicide”, turning an article about the psychiatrist’s life and work into a demonstration of female social regulation.

There is a good argument for using died by suicide. The word committed has historically been associated with crime, and suicide reporting can influence people in a vulnerable state. Public health organisations recommend language that reduces stigma and avoids romanticising or sensationalising death. provided a convincing evidence-based argument as to why in this case, language actually matters. None of that requires twenty people to make the same correction under one man’s post.

Holly’s Substack

How to Help Men

I won’t comment on the intent behind the article, the quality of its content or the writing itself. There are already plenty of public accusations about typos, poor writing and self-promotion under the post. My focus is on analysing the reaction and the mechanisms driving it, which seemed wildly disproportionate to the language violation.

From his name, where he practises and the way the article is written, he appears to be an older francophone clinician based in France, writing in English as an additional language. Like many English speaking countries, France has gradually shifted away from phrases such as a commis un suicide in favour of alternatives that avoid associations with criminality. Even so, the older expression remains familiar, particularly among older clinicians and in everyday speech.

Committed suicide closely mirrors the traditional French phrasing and is a plausible linguistic transfer rather than evidence that he intended to make a moral statement about suicide. He might have translated the expression he had used for decades without realising that English speaking mental health circles now prefer different terminology. Any of those explanations seems more likely than the idea that a psychiatrist writing respectfully about the death of a colleague and the advances in treating depression intended to stigmatise people who die by suicide.

I've just demonstrated that, with a little curiosity, there were several reasonable hypotheses available before anyone chose to publicly correct him. Despite all that, it’s difficult to see why this required repeated public correction from people who had already seen that several others had made exactly the same point.

Someone could have sent him a private message and likely did. One person could have left a respectful public comment explaining why different language is now preferred and what led to the change (although that might risk qualifying as womansplaining). I imagine that the information would have reached him either way. Instead, woman after woman (and a few men) repeated the correction, thanked one another for making it, responded to other commenters and behaved as though they had become the authorities over his post.

This is the spot of the screenshots from the discussion with identifying details removed illustrating the pattern I’m describing that paid subscribers can see.

If educating the author, and by extension everyone reading the thread, wasn't the primary function of the women’s behaviour, then what was?

The myth of female innate compassion

Women are seen as naturally empathetic, caring, and compassionate, with a great capacity to comfort and soothe, and attuned to the emotional needs of others. Some are fierce protectors of the vulnerable and underdogs, so it’s no surprise that women are overrepresented in social justice activism and advocacy circles. You could say that it’s women who are more sensitive to threats to the wellbeing of others. Because women are seen in this light and are expected to live up to it in many workplaces and social circles, openly questioning these assumptions about these female traits is socially risky.

The women I observed didn’t demonstrate any of these characteristics but did their best to live up to an image of them. These women expressed their concern for vulnerable people (the dead and their survivors), appealed to best practice and expressed a desire to reduce discomfort. The responses attracted approval from other women and reinforced a compassionate identity. They also repeatedly targeted another adult after the informational value of the correction had largely been exhausted, in an effort to protect the dignity of the subject while disregarding the dignity of the author.

I can’t say that women are naturally compassionate, empathetic, caring or kind. Those attributes must be cultivated and aren’t embodied in a sex because that’s what we want to see in ourselves. What women naturally possess is the capacity for anger and aggression when they believe someone has crossed a line.

The behaviour on that thread was covert aggression presented as compassion and advocacy.

Covert aggression

I’ve previously described this form of covert aggression. Women assert dominance without appearing dominant by delivering control through concern, politeness or moral values. The socially acceptable delivery conceals the aggressive attempt to regulate another adult’s actions and perceptions, and makes anyone who objects appear unreasonable.

makes a useful distinction between anger and aggression. Anger is a feeling that alerts us to a perceived threat, injustice, boundary crossing or rule violation. Aggression is the action we take in response. As people mature emotionally and morally, they learn to separate anger from aggression long enough to decide what the situation calls for and whether acting on their anger will serve a worthwhile purpose.

Painting With Lightning

You Just Want To Be Mad

It’s ironic. But few things cause a heated argument in the psychotherapy field faster than sticking a bunch of practitioners in a room together who disagree about anger. The discussion might look more like a passive-aggressive Cold War than open conflict, all covert sniping and tight smiles. But it’s there if you know where to look…

a month ago · 77 likes · 29 comments · Skye Sclera

Women often say they don’t have permission to feel angry when what they mean is that other people resist their aggression. No one can prevent a woman from feeling angry. However, people can object when she uses that anger to reprimand or humiliate someone else, or when she attempts to control them through public shaming and enforced compliance, even if she’s unaware that anger is her fuel.

Aggression has a legitimate protective function. When someone threatens a child or vulnerable person, anger signals a trespass and aggression helps defend the person and restore the boundary. We expect mothers to become fierce when the situation calls for it. Few people object to a woman baring her teeth when someone is trying to harm her child.

The threat on LinkedIn was a French psychiatrist using an outdated phrase.

The women still responded as though something vulnerable required their immediate protection. In their minds, it did. The phrase committed suicide had crossed a boundary around language, dignity and the treatment of people who die by suicide. This was their communal territory, the author had breached the rule, and someone needed to restore order.

Apparently, several someones.

By the time the twentieth woman repeated the correction, the thread displayed the same act from multiple women who knew the rule, accepted the authority behind it and felt entitled or obliged to enforce it.

Public health authorities, mental health organisations and professional bodies give the preferred language its authority. The phrase died by suicide carries more than a wording preference. It represents current knowledge, professional legitimacy and concern for the people the rule claims to protect. Once the language acquires that status, correcting someone can feel like defending something larger and more important than either person in the exchange.

Each woman appealed to that higher authority and borrowed its power to correct the author. She didn’t need to establish her own expertise because the rule spoke through her, almost like a god whose commandments require enforcement and whose moral authority overrides the standing of any individual who speaks differently. The author’s expertise complicated matters because he also carried authority, although his use of the prohibited phrase placed him beneath the authority of best practice in that exchange.

Publicly correcting him protected the norm and affirmed the authority behind it. The correction also diminished him by positioning him as someone who required instruction under his own post. That effect didn’t require a conscious attempt to strip him of authority. It followed from placing the rule above him and treating his language as evidence that his own judgement carried less weight.

Toxic compassion

The women turned protective aggression into toxic compassion when they defended the dignity of people who die by suicide by disregarding the dignity of the person who crossed the boundary. The rule identified who deserved protection, while the man standing in front of them somehow fell outside its jurisdiction.

Toxic compassion also places women in the Rescuer role within Karpman’s Drama Triangle. It assigns the Victim position to people the language might harm and the Persecutor position to the person who used it, giving the Rescuer moral permission to intervene. Rescuing disempowers everyone by treating one group as helpless and another adult as someone who requires correction and control.

They delivered their aggression through concern, professional guidance and advocacy for vulnerable people. Other women rewarded each correction because it enforced the norm, affirmed the authority governing the language and protected the people whom the rule sought to defend. Their mutual approval allowed every woman involved to treat her aggression as faithful service to a higher authority that no caring or informed person should question.

Women rarely call this aggression because the word threatens the identity their actions affirm. Compassionate women don’t imagine themselves controlling other adults. They call it educating, protecting or helping. Toxic compassion allows them to act aggressively while preserving the belief that care drives everything they do.

Humans tend to judge their own actions through access to their intentions. We know what we meant and what we hoped to achieve. The other person encounters what we actually did. A woman can tell herself that she protected people from harmful language. The author faced twenty women publicly reprimanding him under an article he wrote to honour a departed colleague and discuss advances in treating depression.

These expectations shape how women interpret their own behaviour. Women rarely examine the regulatory function of actions they perform in the name of compassion, care, protection and advocacy. While these women focused on the harmful impact of his language, they appeared largely unaware of the impact of their own corrective actions. Like most of us, they were far better at evaluating another person’s behaviour than at examining the impact of their own while they were engaged in it. The same attempt to protect one person’s dignity can diminish another’s.

The distortion appears in the gap between self perception and interpersonal effect. Every woman leaves believing she educated the author, helped everyone reading, and made the discussion safer through the use of approved language. She leaves with her identity as a caring, compassionate, and considerate woman reinforced. Other people see the same behaviour as an attempt to correct, regulate or control them. The distortion protects the woman’s self perception while making it difficult for her to notice the actual effect on others. The stronger the coalition’s approval, the less reason she has to question whether the behaviour achieved what she believed it achieved.

Other women praised the aggression and repeated it. Their approval told each woman that she had acted well and gave her no reason to examine the humiliation or pressure created by the pile on. If the author withdrew or avoided similar conversations in future, the women could interpret his silence as successful education. Toxic compassion removes the feedback that might force someone to confront the aggression in her care.

I know this because I’ve done it too. I’ve corrected people under posts and in conversation while feeling entirely justified by the point I wanted to make. I still have to catch the impulse to let anger propel me into aggression before I’ve made any serious attempt to understand why someone spoke as they did. Anger creates urgency and certainty, and certainty makes curiosity feel unnecessary.

This is how women aggressively police what other people say and then wonder why those people stop discussing certain subjects around them. People quickly learn which interpretations the group permits and which words will bring twenty self appointed educators to the door. No one has to adopt the language the group approves, but beware if you don’t.

Photo by Kyle Hinkson on Unsplash

Compassion competence

This isn’t another piece about women needing to fit themselves into an acceptable mould so that patriarchal systems can accept them. We create and enforce these rules amongst ourselves, then direct aggression at anyone who crosses them. Before crying “The Patriarchy”, we need to examine whether we demand understanding from others while refusing to extend it ourselves, then call our aggression compassion when someone fails to speak in the approved way.

Empathy is a sincere attempt to understand another person’s perspective, context and experience without needing to agree with them or do anything about it.

Compassion responds to what the situation calls for while preserving the humanity and dignity of everyone involved. It draws on empathy and remains rooted in nonjudgment. Compassion can set a hard boundary or deliver an unwelcome truth. The response can seem harsh to the person receiving it without humiliating them or reducing them to an offender who no longer deserves dignity.

Toxic compassion bypasses empathy and responds judgmentally to what someone has said because their words violated an accepted rule. The effort to protect people whom the language might harm then justifies aggression against the person who used it.

We women often want men to listen carefully, understand our perspective and interpret our words within context. We undermine that demand when we assume we already understand a man well enough to correct him without extending the same effort towards understanding him. Show me that you understood what I wrote and the spirit in which I wrote it before telling me how I should have written it.

These women directed their empathy towards the people they imagined the phrase might harm and directed aggression towards the man who used it. They assumed the worst meaning of his language while withholding good intent from a psychiatrist writing respectfully about his colleague’s death.

Protecting one group’s dignity by publicly shaming another person is toxic compassion. A caring identity doesn’t change the aggression, and a compassionate intention doesn’t excuse sacrificing the person standing in front of us.

, when have you been so certain that you were helping that you never stopped to ask about the effect you were having on the person in front of you?

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Here’s how you can help:

Order my books: The Little Book of Assertiveness: Speak up with confidence and The Scapegoating Playbook at Work
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Relational Intelligence is your toxic workplace superpower

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:59:54 GMT

My thing is developing frameworks and methods derived from reality tests rather than a synthesis of theories and evidence from academic disciplines and peer reviewed journals. You won’t find this framework anywhere else, although you might recognise parts of it without the mechanism that explains why they work. If you're looking for more than theory and want something you can action in your own difficult workplace situation, this is for you.

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Readers note: This is an updated version of an article I originally published in 2025.

Most workplace advice fails because it assumes you’re working with psychologically healthy people. Organisations ~~waste~~ spend millions developing leadership capability while allowing one narcissistic executive to undo most of the benefit before lunch.

Many institutionally-backed leadership experts have never had to survive a true low trust workplace. It’s easy to recommend transparency when nobody has ever used your honesty against you. Their advice assumes people actually want to work with you. That assumption doesn’t hold up in workplaces actively endorsing and protecting leaders demonstrating narcissistic behaviour, political self protection, and image management.

The modern workplace is full of people harbouring unresolved conflicts from past jobs, betrayals by former colleagues, and wounds from systems that were meant to protect them. Some turn up ready to collaborate while others continue fighting the same battle with new people. Narcissistic leaders, psychopathic CEOs, politically skilled but ethically bankrupt managers, and HR leaders who protect the image instead of the people are part of everyday organisational life and influence how everyone else behaves.

You’ve entered the hidden social system that exists inside every workplace without realising it. The people who navigate that system well aren’t always the smartest or the most capable but the most competent at recognising the incentives driving other people’s behaviour.

That’s relational intelligence1.

Over the past decade, I have worked with professionals navigating scapegoating, bullying, and politically complex workplaces while developing and applying relational practices that make collaboration possible in low trust environments. I kept seeing the same workplace dynamics that existing leadership frameworks couldn’t explain, so I developed one that could.

Relational intelligence isn’t another corporate buzzword or a rebranding of emotional intelligence. It’s a practical framework for navigating workplaces and professional networks that’s essential when trust is low, politics inform decisions, and technical competence alone is insufficient to protect one’s credibility and career.

It’s often reduced to self-awareness, empathy, or the ability to read people. None of those is sufficient. People misread each other every day, convince themselves they’re right, then behave as though their interpretation is fact. Relational intelligence is the discipline of treating your own judgement as provisional, testing it against reality, refining it as other people’s behaviour reveals the incentives driving them, and adjusting your own behaviour accordingly. It’s an indispensable process when working with narcissistic leaders, other dark tetrad characters and their bureaucratic enablers who protect those people instead of the people.

None of this guarantees you won’t become a target. Responsibility for scapegoating always rests with the people and institutions that create and sustain it. Relational intelligence helps you identify the hidden social system early, understand how it operates, and respond with greater precision before relationships begin to deteriorate.

Photo by Ahmed Badawy on Unsplash

The seven moves of relational intelligence

Why you keep getting fucked over at work

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:25:26 GMT

This article was written in response to the many readers here and across other platforms who have asked why they keep getting fucked over at work, despite doing everything they were taught would lead to success. This is a premium article. Upgrade your subscription for full access.

You’ve probably spent years trying to understand why this keeps happening.

You’ve blamed narcissists, dark tetrad personalities, toxic workplaces, office politics, weak leadership, dysfunctional cultures, or bad luck. You changed jobs hoping the next workplace would be different. Perhaps you’ve wondered whether there’s something about you that attracts these situations or already concluded that your empathy, integrity and ethics make you a target to these psychopaths.

I won’t deny that narcissistic people, workplace bullies and toxic workplaces exist and make life hell. They absolutely do, or I wouldn’t have written so much about them already.

Before we go any further, I want to be clear about one thing. If you're currently experiencing bullying, hostility, aggression or abuse, or have experienced it in the past, you are not the cause of another person's decision to target you. Nothing in this article changes that. The purpose of this specific piece is to help you understand why the same workplace pattern can keep repeating, not to blame you for another person's behaviour.

If you’ve repeatedly found yourself working for narcissistic leaders, being scapegoated, excluded, undermined, or becoming the person expected to clean up everyone else’s mess, there is one part of the story that almost everyone overlooks because whether you like it or not, you’re the common denominator in these events.

Why do so many women think this behaviour is normal?

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:25:03 GMT

Social media has created the conditions that blur the distinction between familiarity and relationship. Reading someone’s work, following them for a period of time, using the same platform, writing about similar topics, or sharing broadly compatible values can create a feeling of connection that doesn’t actually exist. This is the essence of a parasocial relationship, a one sided sense of familiarity that can lead people to assume a level of reciprocity and influence that has never been established. Relationships are built through repeated interaction, curiosity, rapport, demonstrated understanding, and the gradual development of trust, allowing both people to determine whether they value each other’s judgment enough to be influenced by it.

Social media norms have normalised increasingly immediate and transactional interactions while removing many of the social cues and consequences that ordinarily regulate how relationships begin. As people adapt to those norms, a gradual loss of basic manners has intensified the sense of urgency to connect, creating the impression that existing in the same virtual space is akin to a professional speed dating event where everyone is looking for the same thing: getting yourself out there by any means possible. The slower process of relationship building has been deleted and it’s as if people forgot it ever existed.

In professional relationships influence is earned through building rapport and trust before it can be exercised. Yet I constantly receive messages from women who discover my work and within the first interaction they:

press me to make time to speak with them
propose collaborations
suggest additions to my thinking
offer frameworks they believe my audience would benefit from
ask for my platform to share their ideas
offer to fill in gaps and provide value to my audience

There’s an underlying assumption in these messages that we’re already operating as peers despite never having met or worked together. Self-described expertise is then treated as sufficient to influence another person’s work without an invitation to do so.

Interactions that involve outreach to someone who has something you want or need, or whose work you respect, have an etiquette and follow a process that both parties use to assess trustworthiness, competence, motives, and the potential for relationship formation. You don’t walk into a conference, meet a keynote speaker for the first time, and begin by explaining how their framework should be expanded, and you don’t introduce yourself to a respected consultant by explaining how their methodology would be stronger if they incorporated your model. You earn the right to influence another person’s thinking by first demonstrating that you understand it and by building enough rapport for them to decide whether your judgment is one they value. We read, observe, ask questions, demonstrate understanding, and build rapport before assuming our ideas deserve serious consideration because influence follows trust, not self described expertise. When someone bypasses those stages, they bypass the process by which influence is legitimately earned.

The overwhelming majority of these messages are from women. I’ve written repeatedly about covert status seeking, unhelpful feedback, relational aggression, and the etiquette of professional relationships because the same underlying pattern keeps appearing in different forms. Disowned insecurity and envy distort the normal process of relationship formation, making these approaches seem entirely appropriate to the person sending them while bypassing the rapport and reciprocity that legitimate influence depends on.

Why does this behaviour seem socially acceptable to so many women, particularly those in the helping, coaching, and therapeutic professions who often regard themselves as highly self-aware?

From investigating my own and others’ behaviour patterns, and analysing hundreds of private messages and emails over many years, this is my explanation.

Women are socialised to seek connection and belonging through relationships. They pursue status indirectly rather than through overt competition, making relationships one of the primary ways women establish influence. Many women also have an implicit model of sisterhood where supporting another woman, saying yes to requests, opening doors, sharing platforms, making introductions, and collaborating are treated as natural obligations rather than a privilege earned through trust. That model shoves into the shadow the darker realities of female relationships where rivalry, status regulation, and insecurity can fuel professional ambition and shape how women relate to one another. Social media provides the conditions that normalise bypassing the relationship building process, making familiarity easy to mistake for reciprocity. When women perceive another woman as having higher status, envy and insecurity can become invisible drivers of rapport-bypassing outreach while they perceive their behaviour as generosity, contribution, networking, helping, collaboration, or support rather than status regulation.

Women rarely experience their own status anxiety reactions as status anxiety because the internal narrative is they're strengthening relationships, supporting another woman, opening a door, contributing something useful, or creating connection. The behaviour serves a status regulating function while remaining outside their awareness of what they're actually doing.

Before you call me a woman hater, I’ve made connections through Substack with women including , , , , , , and many others because they approached me with genuine interest in my work, curiosity, generosity, and grace, allowing rapport and trust to develop naturally over time. I’d collaborate with any of them any day, if they wanted to collaborate with me. I don’t need to be on anyone’s pedestal to engage with someone who is being sincere. I do however recoil when I can see the same pattern when it's delivered with the overconfidence and entitlement compensating for a momentary feeling of inferiority.

That doesn’t mean every invitation to collaborate is driven by envy and insecurity, nor that only women behave this way. It does explain why I receive so many messages that assume familiarity, reciprocity, and influence before a relationship exists. From the sender’s perspective, they’re offering me something valuable. From mine, they’re asking me to give them trust that hasn’t been earned.

Thanks for reading,

Nathalie

Have you spotted this pattern or is it just me?

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The Devouring Mother In Your Life

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:16:11 GMT

I was a massive Trekkie in my 20s. I consumed every episodes of The Next Generation countless times. By the time the second offshoot of TNG came out, I lost interest in the enterprise altogether. It lost its originality despite introducing more interesting characters. I can’t bring myself to watch the newest incarnation today because... no.

I unknowingly carried the Borg with me from my parent’s basement into various sharehouses, workplaces and relationships to see how easily I slipped into accommodating dominant personalities and becoming more as they expected me to be to my detriment. Analysis of these experiences helped me understand the mechanisms through which any of us can undergo passive and partial assimilation in narcissistic relationships, whether they are with another individual or in a group like a cult or a workplace. I’ve also written about assimilation as a process that women (and men) undergo once they are recruited into modern feminism and begin to see the world through the eyes of the oppressed rather than the eyes of someone developing capacity to navigate the human-system interface with greater skill and discernment.

This piece is an attempt to build a broader model of passive assimilation to describe a recurring civilisational phenomenon that ultimately sacrifices liberty and negatively impacts all of us. I have described related components of this model in other writing, so I don’t explore them in detail here.

The Borg Queen

While contemplating the Borg recently, I was reminded of the introduction of the Borg Queen (thank you ). The original Borg were a collective consciousness that assimilated entire species into a shared identity and required no central personality to make them compelling. The writers added the Queen because audiences wanted a villain they could connect to. The Borg needed a face and a force behind their function.

The Queen possesses enormous power through the Collective she commands. Entire species are assimilated through force while being told that assimilation is a gift. She also has a gift for gaslighting as she reframes the loss of individuality through assimilation as evolution and liberation. Resistance is futile because resistance is also ignorant. The Borg Queen understands human needs and uses that understanding to recruit exceptional individuals into a system that has already demonstrated its willingness to conquer anyone who resists.

The significance of that decision extends far beyond Star Trek because the Borg Queen transformed a collective consciousness into a personality. As any true narcissist, her attention is directed toward exceptional individuals rather than ordinary drones. Picard, Data, and Seven of Nine are all highly intelligent, influential, respected, or uniquely gifted figures whose assimilation provides legitimacy, prestige, and influence to the Collective itself.

The Borg Queen also exposes a cultural blind spot. Contemporary culture readily recognises male aggression, male narcissism, male domination, and male predation. Female expressions of the same traits attract far less scrutiny for many reasons. The Borg are overtly coercive, assimilating entire species through force. The Queen adds another layer by directing her attention toward exceptional individuals whose assimilation would strengthen the Collective. She understands human desires and exploits them to get what she wants. She demonstrates many of the behaviours associated with Cluster B pathology while embodying a form of predation expressed through feminine traits often observed in women with dark tetrad traits.

The dark tetrad describes four personality traits associated with socially destructive behaviour: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. These traits describe recurring patterns of behaviour that pursue advantage, control, domination, and the use of other people as instruments through manipulation, coercion, exploitation, force, and cruelty. The Borg Queen embodies many of these characteristics while relying heavily on feminine traits that lower resistance, secure trust, and facilitate possession.

The popularity of the Borg Queen shows something telling about human nature. The audience wasn’t satisfied with a faceless collective because people instinctively search for the force directing events from behind the curtain. The writers supplied a female incarnation of the Collective whose methods relied on dark masculine and feminine traits aimed at furthering its agenda by recruiting and assimilating influential, high status individuals. This character gave form to an ancient fear of annihilation through surrender to a more powerful force.

Expansion Through Assimilation

Other people become hosts for the needs, identity, ambitions, and objectives of the person or collective being served. Expansion depends upon securing access to increasingly valuable individuals and converting their status, credibility, influence, and achievements into resources that serve the collective.

Peter Turchin's concept of elite overproduction can help explain why assimilative movements become attractive during periods of social instability. As increasing numbers of educated, credentialed, and ambitious individuals compete for a limited number of positions that confer influence, authority, and prestige, many find themselves unable to achieve the status they anticipated. Collectivist movements provide an alternative route to significance and prestige. Membership offers a range of privileges and influence through association with the collective itself. The individual acquires status by serving the movement while the movement acquires authority through the recruitment of increasingly accomplished and influential members.

From this perspective, the Borg Queen's pursuit of exceptional individuals reflects more than simple expansion. Elites possess credibility, influence, expertise, networks, and symbolic authority that can be converted into collective power. Every successful assimilation increases the legitimacy of the collective while reducing the authority of independent centres of influence. The status of the assimilated becomes a resource that attracts further recruits, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of expansion. Does any of this sound familiar?

Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash

The Devouring Mother

The devouring mother is an archetypal figure who impedes the psychological development of others by making separation difficult. Rather than encouraging people to become fully independent, she maintains influence by encouraging dependence and identification with herself or the system she represents. Over time, people become less able to trust their own judgment and increasingly rely on the person, group, or institution that tells them what to think, believe, and value.

She can appear in mythology, religion, literature, families, intimate relationships, workplaces, institutions, and political movements whenever the development of the individual becomes secondary to the preservation or expansion of a person, group, institution, or belief system.

The Borg Queen embodies a form of the devouring mother shaped by Cluster B pathology and dark tetrad traits. Her drive to assimilate is amplified by predation, transforming dependence and distorted nurturing into possession while turning expansion into a destructive force.

Every assimilation increases the power of the Collective and creates pressure for further expansion. Every independent source of authority, judgment, influence, knowledge, or identity becomes a target for assimilation. She seeks possession, not coexistence through the Borg Collective.

The devouring mother resembles a counterfeit divine competing for universal expansion. Her appetite is total assimilation. Individuality, distinction, independence, and separate centres of consciousness become targets for consumption. Expansion continues until nothing remains outside her influence. The objective is to consume everything that exists and assimilate it into a single consciousness.

Her appetite for expansion is inherently destructive. People who remain distinct, capable of independent judgment, and resistant to assimilation eventually become obstacles to expansion and therefore threats to be eliminated. Assimilation is preferred because it increases the power of the collective, making destruction a necessary strategy when assimilation fails.

That’s why the Borg is such a powerful metaphor. Assimilation is not a means to an end. Assimilation is the end through its quest to engulf everything. The terror is in encountering a force whose appetite for destruction has no natural limit.

The significance of the Borg Queen extends beyond Star Trek because she embodies a particular dark expression of the devouring mother, an insatiable force that appears repeatedly throughout human history and can be seen clearly in the world today.

The devouring mother operates through social and political movements by exercising power through distortion and sustaining her authority through sanctification, granting moral status to identities, beliefs, and behaviours that serve the interests of the collective. The individual acquires a ready-made identity, purpose, and explanation for suffering while retaining the ~~delusion~~ conviction that these conclusions were reached independently through the exercise of free will. Collectivist movements become effective vehicles for this process because they supply identity, status, morality, belonging, and meaning simultaneously, reducing the need for independent judgment while preserving the illusion of autonomy.

Modern feminism, therapy culture, activist movements, communism, socialism, transhumanism, and parts of institutional life increasingly appear to embody the same fantasy of transcendence through collectivism. The individual becomes the problem because of independent judgment and distinctiveness that makes us human. The solution is absorption into a morally superior collective identity that promises perfection through transcendence and embodying the belief “surrender yourself to the collective and your suffering will disappear.” It is propaganda built on the promise that surrendering individuality and liberty will bring about a better future for everyone.

The devouring mother behind any assimilating collective reaches beyond the movement even after it has been abandoned, wherever the promise of perfection and transcendence through surrender continues to have appeal.

People who eventually leave these systems often discover that they no longer know what they think because their capacity for independent judgment has been neglected through disuse. The collective supplied interpretation, meaning, and direction for so long that exercising discernment became increasingly unnecessary. Leaving one assimilating collective can create the experience of awakening because they recognise the system for what it is and walk away from it without ever dismantling the fantasy that made them vulnerable to assimilation in the first place. Many are lulled back to sleep by the soothing promises of another collective while believing they have become more conscious and enlightened than before. The devouring mother has no intention of letting them go and gives them what they need in a different form.

"I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Borg."

-The Borg Queen

If this struck a chord, please share it. Unlike the Borg, I can't assimilate new readers without your assistance.

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Living in a world built on loss

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:34:23 GMT

An interesting thing about Substack is discovering what people are willing to pay for, and stop paying for.

Many readers are paying for an interpretation of the latest thing. They want someone to explain what a political event means, what a public figure’s latest outburst signifies, which is the latest health scam, or which system is wronging society. These are important events and topics but they can suck up algorithmic attention more than the middle ground, reflective pieces that intend to educate through facilitating insight than imposing and persuading a perspective. Algorithms notice what captures attention and reward the tricks that keep people looking, clicking, commenting and sharing. We just love strong opinions that we already agree with and some are willing to pay for it.

There is an endless market for analysis of people who are chronically online, frothing at mouth and saying the craziest things to stoke their attentionometer. I think some people await events so that they can talk about it endlessly either through validating their predictions of the harmful ‘other side’ or confirming the righteousness of their side.

Photo by G Creates on Unsplash

Humans love drama. Drama is stimulating as it gets our blood boiling, our passion erupting, and we live for it. We can’t help but see the world through one of the roles of the Dreaded Drama Triangle. It’s our default lens and it makes us feel alive to participate in a conversation about an event and to feel that it’s somehow tied to our daily life or makes us feel more significant to have a take on the event.

I’ve experienced a few heavy losses recently and that has made me shut out the world a little bit while observing the world continue to turn. I’ve been seeing through it. While these events seem really important and there’s a pressure to have thoughts and feelings about these events because somehow they make a difference to how the grand scheme of things unfold, or so we think, they don’t have more significance or less significance than all the other losses I experience in day to day life, which is kind of my point. I live a life that constantly experiences loss, yet I don’t talk about the small and constant losses. I would rather focus on the impersonal and transpersonal losses, as if somehow that gives me a sense of power to change or prevent them, rather than focus on and grieve the losses that occur every single day.

We live lives filled with loss yet we rarely speak about it. We focus on the large-scale tragedies and catastrophes because they might seem safer to rage about. They keep us from having to face the losses that belong to us.

Not that I want to read about people’s little losses in another aggrieved essay. I’m really talking about the things that suddenly or gradually drop out of our lives that are normal but also devastating.

Some of those losses include:

The loss of loyalty to a political side.
Loss of an identity.
Loss of freedom to go out at night in any neighbourhood.
The loss of a sense of safety or community.
Loss of quiet because everything beeps at us.
Loss of privacy.
Loss of trust, even among friends.

We can’t possibly keep up with the rate of loss, so we focus on gains, small wins, distractions. When we remain oblivious to our losses and don’t mourn them, they accumulate in our psyche, erupting as hostility, outrage, and unhinged comments directed at strangers online.

Some of what I would describe as Cluster B behaviour is simply what distress can look like when too many losses have gone unmourned. The Cluster B behaviour I’ve seen pop up in some close relationships of normally emotionally stable people are signs of distress from unmourned losses.

The things I see on social media are a collective cry of despair under the guise of justice, moral posturing, strong conviction, and certainty.

The losses go beyond the things we’ve actually lost. We are grieving the collapse of the fantasy we were promised about how life should be. We aim for a better future, which we are actually living, but that progress is accompanied by the fruits of decisions that eroded social trust. The fantasy is interrupted by wars, corruption, mass violence, betrayals of public trust, and private disappointments. Each disruption cracks the illusion that life can be smooth and predictable if we just work hard enough or hold the right beliefs.

I’m not speaking only about geopolitics. In our workplaces, where many of us spend most of our waking hours, there are constant disappointments and betrayals in the form of withheld promotions, mishandled investigations, rewarded scapegoating, protected incompetence, and institutional cowardice. Each of these moments is a small puncture in the already false belief about fairness in the system. Together, they reflect and reinforce the lowered social trust that many people experience.

So it’s easier to project that grief outward than acknowledge it. We cut each other down to feel momentarily in control and powerful. The more the losses accumulate, the more frantic we become in asserting that our version of reality is the right one.

Each time we glimpse evil, something inside us breaks. We lose another bit of innocence, a slice of faith that humanity is redeemable. Evil’s intent is to divide us, so the more we consume of it on our feeds, the more we’re marked by it. We are not designed to ingest horror on demand, yet we scroll on.

Our sense of safety is challenged along with our relationship with reality itself. This can cause anyone who is unaware of this rupture to withdraw trust, increase suspicion, and become less convinced that anyone is acting in good faith. To compensate for this uncertainty, certainty hardens along with defensiveness and attachment to explanations that restore a sense of order, even if they’re delusional.

The loss of innocence and naiveté is also the loss of a way of seeing the world. What’s now seen can’t be unseen.

A persistent distorted worldview founded on a suspicious belief system and attached to a fantasy version of reality can cause people to swing between denial and obsession, clinging to a version of reality that no longer exists, a fantasy past they never lived, or a utopian future. Others become consumed by what they have discovered. One refuses to acknowledge reality while the other sees nothing else.

Perhaps this is why so much public discourse feels increasingly disconnected from ordinary life. People aren’t simply arguing about facts but are struggling to reconcile the gap between the world they believed they inhabited and the world they now perceive. The argument is rarely about the argument and is more often about a reality that has already been lost.

It’s not only what we see, but also what we say. The Jewish concept of lashon hara reminds us that speaking ill of another person, even when it is true, has a spiritual cost. Online, lashon hara is everywhere. We’re not absolved of the consequences of speaking vile things about someone just because we disagree with them, neither are witnesses. The person being spoken about absorbs some of that negativity unless they have built enough spiritual strength to repel it. I’m not being metaphorical as I’m describing a circulation of harm that touches everyone involved.

There are things in this world that deserve condemnation and behaviour that deserve to be called out for what they are. My concern is with what happens when our attention is shaped around these things to the point that they begin shaping how we see reality itself. The more we immerse ourselves in evil, the more likely we are to become marked by it. The injury is carried through what we witness and through repeated participation in cycles of outrage, contempt, humiliation and division.

I believe we’re facing a collective spiritual injury. We’re harmed by what we see, by what we say, by what we participate in when we turn each other into enemies to soothe our own pain.

At some point we have to decide what we want more: another fight, another turn on the dreaded drama triangle ride, or the hard, discrete work of mourning. If we’re serious about peace, we have to stop feeding the spectacle. We have to grieve what we have lost and recover the strength to resist reenacting the game of division.

The moral high ground has been overdone and subverted. There is none. There’s duty to each other and a vision that those who would rather belong in spiteful misanthropic groups will someday be shaken out of their spell so they can breathe in humanity again. Most spells eventually run out of power. We have an open invitation to look inward and reflect on the state of our own minds and spirits. If you believe in God, or in a higher order of meaning, then the task is not to win arguments but to become clear enough for something greater to work through you. We can’t do that when we’re reactive and focused on being right. Ego inflation hijacks the very capacities we need for discernment, duty, long-range thinking.

The work is to become aware enough to act in alignment with something larger than our own reactivity without needing to withdraw from the world. It’s what makes responsible action, dharma, possible.

Peace might begin with accepting that some things have already been lost because reality has moved and we have not moved with it. Mourning is how we catch up and how we stop fighting for worlds that no longer exist.

What reality are you still fighting to preserve that has already changed?

What loss has been asking to be mourned?

Thanks for reading,

Nathalie

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The wound that needs an audience

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:36:40 GMT

When people think about radicalisation, they tend to imagine extremists, conspiracy theorists, political activists, or people captured by increasingly rigid ideologies. I’m more interested in a different group: healthcare professionals, educators, academics, HR practitioners, social workers, and other members of the professional managerial class whose identities are built around helping, caring, educating, protecting, and doing good.

Many of these professions have become increasingly ideological over the past decade. The usual explanations focus on politics, incentives, institutional capture, or personality pathology. I suspect unresolved moral injury plays a larger role than is acknowledged.

A reliable way to generate engagement on LinkedIn is to post about moral injury. The comments fill quickly with people describing their own experiences, validating each other’s distress, and agreeing that workplaces should be safer, leaders more accountable, and the whole situation generally less awful and traumatising. The post gets shared. Someone adds a fire emoji and nothing changes.

Photo by Andryck Lopez on Unsplash

I’ve watched this cycle long enough to find it interesting and irritating, especially when I test out that theory on my posts. The visibility of these posts tells me how many people are carrying the residue of experiences they can’t yet describe accurately. The algorithms amplify victim grievance posts, rewarding the production of more victim grievance posts, which is part of why I think the discourse stays where it is.

The discourse on moral distress and injury tends to focus on what was done to people while ignoring the uncomfortable reality that people contributed to the conditions that later became the source of their injury. This reinforces the innocence narrative that prevents the wound from healing while building a fortress, even an industry, around it.

The discourse protects the wound instead of helping people examine it. Moral distress and moral injury were not only descriptions of suffering. They were attempts to understand what happens when a person knows something is wrong and continues participating regardless.

Moral distress was first described by philosopher and nurse Andrew Jameton in 1984, who defined it as the experience of knowing the right thing to do and being prevented from doing it by institutional constraints1. His original context was nursing, where practitioners regularly encountered situations in which they could identify the right course of action and were structurally blocked from taking it. The distress was the accumulating weight of being unable to act on what they knew to be right.

Moral injury is a different and more serious condition. Jonathan Shay developed the concept through his work with Vietnam veterans where he observed that what broke many of them was being required by legitimate authority to participate in actions they knew were wrong while believing the authority they served was just and the mission worthwhile2.

The injury came from perpetrating or witnessing serious wrongdoing under the sanction of a trusted authority, the failure of that authority to acknowledge it, and the absence of any place where the truth could be spoken and taken seriously. Shay called this the second wound.

Litz and colleagues later expanded the definition of moral injury to include perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs3. Perpetration was always part of the definition. The popular discourse amputated that dimension because victimhood generates engagement and perpetration generates disgust. We can empathise with the victim and condemn the perpetrator. The difficulty begins when they are the same person. The compartmentalisation occurs when that person is us.

For those in the helping professions, participation threatens a deeply held identity as a good, caring, ethical person. The injured self and the benevolent self can coexist comfortably, whereas the participating self is harder to accommodate. So naturally, one self is preserved while the other is split off.

Take the Morality Assessment

Both terms have since migrated into healthcare and, more recently, into corporate and institutional life. In the process they have been laundered into near-uselessness by the same people who put fire emojis on LinkedIn posts about trauma. Moral distress is now invoked for any frustration with a manager. Moral injury for any experience that leaves someone feeling wronged. Because feelings.

The original concepts were concerned with the conditions that produced the suffering, not merely the suffering itself. Moral distress referred to a gap between what a person knew to be right and what they were permitted to do. Moral injury involved a betrayal by legitimate authority compounded by participation in, or witness of, a serious moral violation and the absence of any meaningful resolution.

Unresolved or disowned moral injury appears to be one pathway through which otherwise reasonable people become increasingly radicalised over time.

During COVID, clinicians administering triage protocols made decisions about whose life was worth resourcing, along lines encoding existing assumptions about age, disability, and perceived social utility4. They were simultaneously victims of impossible conditions and the instrument through which institutional judgments about human worth got enacted.

The moral injury literature from that period consistently downplayed the perpetrator or participant dimension into the language of impossible choices — both accurate and incomplete explanations. Frameworks that place responsibility entirely on institutions become much easier to embrace when one's own participation remains unexamined, particularly when doing so threatens a benevolent self-image.

This can help explain why systemic explanations have become so compelling across medicine, education, academia, HR, and other helping professions. After years of being told the problem was their resilience, coping skills, emotional regulation, or adaptability, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, shifting responsibility from the individual to the institution. Pendulums rarely stop in the middle. The outcome was a discourse that became sophisticated about institutional harm and increasingly reluctant to examine participation.

Moral injury becomes more likely when institutions prioritise self-protection over their stated purpose. In these environments, people witness attitudes and behaviours that place them in a bind. Speaking up has consequences and so does staying quiet. Some begin protecting themselves by becoming passive, others align themselves more closely with the dominant authority, and some play both sides.

The progression from distress to injury is difficult to interrupt because participation doesn’t look like participation. A person stays quiet when someone is mistreated and interprets the discomfort as a performance problem rather than a moral one. They become more determined to remain in good standing than to examine what that standing requires of them. By the time the pattern is visible, they have already participated in behaviours they would once have condemned in others.

The discourse never quite gets to the possibility that the same people generating engagement on posts about moral injury may also have participated in the conditions that produced it. Sometimes unwittingly, sometimes through the ordinary compliance that comes from needing to keep a job, status, reputation, and security which exert a stronger influence on behaviour than most people care to admit.

The observation rarely survives for long because acknowledging one's participation disrupts the innocence narrative. The conversation remains focused on suffering, which after years of stigma around suffering, particularly in healthcare, comes as a relief. The incentives, social pressures, and behaviours that helped produce the injury receive less attention.

I started paying attention to this pattern by noticing it in myself. I could talk fluently about moral injury, institutional betrayal, and complicity while constructing a story in which I was the person things had been done to. The story was true enough to be convincing and incomplete enough to be useful. Like most half-truths, it allowed me to avoid examining what I was getting from the story and what examining it might cost me socially, professionally, and in terms of the identity I'd built around having survived something that came with lived experience points and vanity metrics.

The pattern becomes harder to recognise because moral injury can become part of a person's identity, hardening over time into embitterment5. Experiences of betrayal, exclusion, humiliation, and injustice accumulate to form a self-image that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge.

The self-image attached to the injury and its preservation can become more important than examining the conditions maintaining it. The wound becomes part of the person's identity, how they understand themselves, how they are seen by others, and the status that comes with it.

This is one pathway through which otherwise reasonable people become increasingly radicalised over time. The wound becomes harder to challenge because challenging it now threatens an identity, an earned social position and its privileges, and a community of people who think and feel the same. The beliefs attached to the wound form a scab protecting against alternative explanations, rendering them intolerable and narrowing the range of conclusions the person is willing to entertain. The person becomes increasingly certain about who is responsible for their suffering and increasingly unwilling to examine their own participation in it. The wound now has an audience invested in its preservation.

Many people assume they will recognise a moral violation when they encounter one and respond in a way that is consistent with their values. The vast body of research on human behaviour and psychology suggests otherwise.

I developed the assessment below to identify the conditions under which beliefs, loyalties, and interests come into conflict. Moral injury often begins in situations where competing obligations, incentives, relationships, and pressures make it difficult to see clearly. The assessment is designed to help identify those conditions before you find yourself in them.

If the assessment is helpful, what did you discover about yourself?

Hack Narcissism and support my work

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
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Jameton, A. (1984). Nursing practice: The ethical issues. Prentice-Hall.

Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat trauma and the undoing of character. Atheneum.

Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706.

Jeffs, L., Merkley, J., Tregunno, D., & Yamada, J. (2024). Long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: Moral tensions and moral injury in healthcare workers. PLOS ONE, 19(9), e0309385.

Linden, M. (2021). Embitterment and posttraumatic embitterment disorder (PTED): An old, frequent, and still underrecognized problem. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 90(2), 73–80.

The Covert Narcissism Audit

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:37:55 GMT

Covert narcissism is an overlooked and under discussed character deficit among a cohort of seemingly functional adults. I’ve written about different expressions of covert narcissistic traits across workplace leadership, social activism, gendered expression, therapy culture, project collaborations, moderate cults, and friendships over the years, and I’m still not done. Given covert narcissistic strategies are so effective at disarming people into trust and emotional investment, often to their own disadvantage later on, I thought it would be useful to compile my existing and emerging work on the topic into an audit to help people identify patterns they might already be sensing in someone else...or in themselves.

People with more grandiose narcissistic traits engage with the world with visible self belief. Their confidence shields them from doubt and criticism. They assume they deserve recognition and often pursue it directly through status, attention, visibility, achievement, dominance, or admiration. Their entitlement is obvious because they express it openly. They’re the world’s alpha wannabes carrying a truckload of entitlement.

People with more covert, also known as vulnerable narcissistic traits, experience the world very differently. They still believe they deserve recognition, importance, admiration, influence, or authority and experience themselves as exceptional in some way. The difference is that they lack the same certainty embodied by more grandiose personalities. Shame sits underneath narcissistic traits because narcissism depends on protecting a particular self image. They engage with others, especially those with higher status, with a painful awareness of the gap between who they believe they are and how they are perceived by others.

The gap is where the wound of embitterment festers. Embitterment is the emotional hardening that develops when a person feels repeatedly overlooked, underestimated, bypassed, excluded, unsupported, or denied the recognition they believe should have been theirs by now. The emotional elixir of inferiority, envy, resentment, grievance, shame and contempt congeal into a sense of perceived injustice. This is partly why covert narcissistic traits can be harder to recognise in helping professions, activism, and therapy culture. The person often experiences themselves as caring or empathic, while projection helps preserve that self image in moments of shame or inferiority.

Another person’s success, visibility, or recognition can become difficult to tolerate because it intensifies the feeling of being overlooked. Unlike people with more grandiose narcissistic traits, they don't pursue status directly as they're more sensitive to rejection and social failure. They want all the payoffs of risk taking in the public or social sphere but are afraid of putting themselves in situations where their importance or credibility could be tested openly.

The covert aspect of these narcissistic traits is the pursuit of status in stealth mode. Rather than openly dominating, they attach themselves to people who already possess the admired traits or characteristics that they want for themselves, and become an extension of that person.

Once emotionally bonded to a desirable person, they begin assimilating the traits they admire in that person. Over time, they experience those traits as their own, believing they always possessed them and eventually no longer needed the original source.

Envy often appears through imitation and subtle competition with the very people they once idealised. The shame underneath these traits is often mistaken for humility, while the fantasy of deserved greatness remains fully intact.

People with stronger covert narcissistic traits dominate through manipulating the emotional conditions of the dynamic so they’re always having a worse day than you, even if they do it through self-deprecating humour. They might also support you when things are going well for them, but use the support itself as a way to dominate or diminish in order to stay above you.

Here’s a checklist of patterns of behaviour (not a diagnostic screening tool) embodied by people who sit further toward the covert narcissistic side of the behavioural spectrum. My interest is always and has always been on relational dynamics of interpersonal narcissism, which means that the other party is contributing to the situation in which they find themselves at the mercy of covert narcissistic behaviour. Being aware of what’s being done to you, intentionally or not, is the first step to planning your way out.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The following audit is intended for recognising recurring interpersonal patterns, not diagnosing personality disorders. Upgrade your subscription to continue reading.

The Covert Narcissism Audit

Contemplating the mother wound on Mother’s Day

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sun, 10 May 2026 02:44:17 GMT

I know many wonderful women, both mothers and non-mothers, who share one thing in common. They were rendered invisible by their mothers and the enabling members of the family system through roles like scapegoat, servant, nuisance, golden child, parentified child, or emotional caretaker of everyone around them.

As I dug deeper with them, envy repeatedly emerged as the driving force beneath the wounding behaviour.

Envy is a status regulating mechanism used to preserve a social order within a hierarchy. The object of envy, the daughter, is seen as competition for male attention, particularly that of the father, but also as a threat to the mother’s status, visibility, authority, desirability, and psychological position within the family system. The mother, feeling threatened because of her own underdeveloped character and immaturity, experiences her daughter’s emergence as destabilising and reflexively (and sometimes deliberately) attempts to contain, diminish, criticise, shame, neglect, sabotage, invalidate, belittle, blame, ignore, and employ countless other strategies to prevent her daughter from rising or even attempting to rise, thus restoring internal order and preserving the carefully tended family hierarchy.

Envy that is disowned drives women to take down those they experience as threats to their status, turning them into rivals in response to their status anxiety, even when that person is their own daughter.

The daughter grows up believing she has a stain on her soul and is destined to be unloved, abandoned, invisible, or trapped in dysfunctional relationships because men cannot be trusted. Not surprisingly, the primary male authority in her life never protected or defended her from her mother’s aggression. Keeping the envious matriarch happy and preserving the social order is the enabling father’s priority in this family system.

For all the women whose mother wound is reactivated on Mother’s Day, you owe it to yourself to become visible to yourself, to build, create, love, take risks, to succeed in your endeavours, and to keep trying even when the inner bully that sounds like your mother tries to convince you that your existence is shameful, excessive, pointless or a waste.

The response to envy is to persevere, innovate, and pursue your goals so you rise in status on your own terms and become visible outside the defunct family system that tried to erase you.

Motherhood is hard. It confronts women with their own character, envy, insecurity, narcissism, immaturity, selfishness, status anxiety, and unresolved wounds. Some women mature through matrescence while others become trapped in cycles of control and aggression, taking their distress out on the children they're meant to nurture.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers reading this and love to all the daughters whose precious lives were made possible by a mother, regardless of her character.

HAVING a meltdown in SQL and the labor market correction

Photo by Giulia Canaia on Unsplash

Thank you to all my friends, family, and clients who have shared their experiences of motherhood with me over the years. Thank you to my mother whose unconditional love has been one of the stabilising forces in my life.

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Give less shit

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:21:25 GMT

This piece is in response to the many people who come to me to navigate politically delicate situations and moral dilemmas, whether at work or in other areas of their lives, and to learn how to withdraw from them without making things worse. I wrote it because people’s default response in these situations is to give more, explain more, and fix what’s happening, and that’s what backfires. This article explains how to give less shit in practice.

Who needs to give less shit

There are people who take their jobs more seriously than the workplace does.

There are two types of over invested people.

They invest heavily in the work itself and focus on delivery. If something isn’t working, they try to fix it. If a process is inefficient or risky, they point it out because they assume improving the work is what they’re there to do.
They invest heavily in the relationships around the work and focus on connection. They make themselves useful and supportive so they’re treated well, assuming that if they behave reasonably, others will respond in kind.

Both approaches are based on the same underlying assumption that effort will be recognised and reciprocated. These patterns aren’t limited to work. Work makes them easier to see, but the same behaviour applies anywhere there is something at stake.

Why giving a shit backfires

There are three types of people this workplace accommodates.

The self-serving operators. They present themselves as values-driven but they’re self-interested and narcissistic. They use people and values language to advance themselves and are comfortable undermining others if it benefits them. There’s no tension between what they say and what they do because they believe they’re doing the right thing and can always find fault in others, not themselves. They’re effective at wielding authority in a command and control style and crossing boundaries to stay in control — and everyone should know it.
The detached participants. They treat the role as a job that pays the bills and nothing more. They focus on tasks and salary and have no investment in how the work turns out.
The compliant adapters. They’re long-tenured, reliable workers. They stay out of politics and don’t challenge it. When things don’t make sense, they adjust themselves to fit cultural norms and keep going.

The over invested people are outside all three groups. They invest heavily in the work itself and focus on delivery. If something isn’t working, they try to fix it. If a process is inefficient or risky, they point it out because they assume improving the work is what they’re there to do. Others take a more nurturing approach to try to keep people on side and soothe mounting tension.

This creates tension because the way things are set up isn’t designed for that level of engagement. It relies on people either using the workplace as it is, ignoring it, or adapting to it. Their approach exposes gaps that others have learned to work around. As a result, they become the point of friction and a risk to how things are currently done, rather than examining how the work is being done. Once they’re seen as a threat, they’re pushed out through scapegoating and other forms of humiliation.

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What happens when you keep giving a shit

When people who perform at a high level are good at getting shit done with high quality outputs, they expect that if a workplace chose them, it’s assumed that others function in a similar way. They begin to realise that this isn’t the case when the workplace starts to turn on them for doing a good job. Doing a good job often means noticing problems and raising them to make improvements.

This moment is becoming more visible across industries. recently described the experience of realising that her strongest capabilities were effectively invisible within the systems she worked in. She frames it as illegibility, where skill sits outside what institutions can recognise or reward. This is often the point where the system registers someone operating outside what it can easily categorise or control and activates its immune response against them.

Radically Pragmatic

Downwardly mobile elites and the coming instability…

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Once this happens, it’s hard to turn things around and return to the reality they had when they first started meeting their targets or when they were acknowledged for their work. Those days are done and now they’re the culprit behind the issues their work exposed. They think the problem is their performance, so they increase it. The more they do, the more they become the problem. At this point, there’s nothing to fix. They’re trying to solve a problem that’s no longer about the work.

People come to see me when they’re dealing with coworkers in the latter category because the doing of the job has become entangled with a tarnished reputation and undermining behaviour by others. Instead of switching off and not taking the job seriously anymore, they get more invested in proving their value and regaining approval from the authorities that devalued them. In doing so, they work harder on the tasks and show the lengths of their accountability, sometimes involving admitting fault when there are multiple contributing factors to an issue.

They’re working hard to show how accountable and trustworthy they are while expecting others to step up and do the same because that’s what you’re supposed to do at work.

This isn’t how the real world works.

Being accountable works against them in a workplace filled with people who look stressed and busy and are mostly delegating their tasks or inventing new processes instead of following ones that already work. They’re busy having meetings, discussing others behind closed doors and how to manage them, instead of focusing on completing the work they’re responsible for.

Why this keeps happening (even in good teams)

Your job isn’t only about doing the tasks. It also involves relating well to others at work. This is often the harder part of the job as no one prepares those entering the workforce for the political side of work. We’re still indoctrinating people into believing merit and hard skills are sufficient competences for career success instead of also training people to spot and outsmart the narcissistic boss, leader or peer you will inevitably work with. Not everyone with authority is reasonable or secure, and not all decisions are made on the basis of what works.

The tasks that need to get done are made more difficult because of the people involved. Without this, people walk into workplaces assuming they’re being evaluated on the work when they’re being evaluated on something else entirely.

Photo by Gaia&Co on Unsplash

The environment you’re actually in

Let’s put the job in context. You’re part of a larger ecosystem functioning to maintain an institution that is highly dependent on its reputation and revenue. These are the most important things to any institution. You would think your role would involve identifying risks to either of these things and to make improvement. In reality, your job is to avoid flagging faults or flaws that would interfere with the ideal self-image of the institution and the leadership who represent it, and whose authority (privileges) is dependent on it.

What I’m describing is a feature of a low trust, highly political institutions. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a high trust, high performance team. You’re still operating within an ecosystem that expects teams to live up to its reputational fantasy. This is the reality of institutions today. It’s our human condition manifest in the most ingenious and dire ways.

Within this context, the response to over invested people becomes more predictable.

This is the institutional immune response. When someone disrupts how the workplace is functioning by exposing gaps or attempting to change how things are done, they are identified as the disturbance to the environment. What follows is protection of the culture, rather than correction of the issue. Their behaviour is closely monitored, informal stories begin to circulate about their impact, and their actions are reframed as disruptive rather than useful. Managers and colleagues who have not addressed these issues directly begin to manage the person instead, often through exclusion and undermining. In some environments, this escalates into direct targeting, particularly where there are individuals who benefit from the existing dynamics or feel threatened by change. The focus shifts from what has been exposed to removing or neutralising the person who exposed it, allowing the environment to return to how it was.

Eventually, the doing of the job becomes entangled with a tarnished reputation and undermining behaviour by others. Instead of switching off or taking the job less seriously, the over invested person becomes more invested in proving their value and regaining approval from the authorities that devalued them. They work harder on the tasks and demonstrate accountability, sometimes admitting fault when there are multiple contributing factors to an issue. They’re working hard to show that they’re accountable and trustworthy while expecting others to step up and do the same, because that’s what they understand work to require. The more they invest, the more they are drawn into it, and the more their effort is used against them. Burnout sets in from the ongoing strain and confusion, and from trying to fix something that isn’t going to change through effort.

Give Less Shit

Instead of giving more and watching it backfire while it wears you down to burnout, it’s necessary to take a different approach.

Give less shit.

This doesn’t mean doing poor work. If you’re working somewhere, your name is attached to what you produce, so you still need to maintain a solid work ethic, and you’ll feel it if you don’t. It’s that your work ethic is probably higher than what the role requires. Giving less shit means reducing your effort to the level the environment actually demands without lowering your standard.

The rest of this piece breaks this down in detail so you can apply it to your own situation. Upgrade your subscription for full access.

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Miranda Priestly was never the problem

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:47:12 GMT

I’ve watched The Devil Wears Prada many times and never tire of it. It’s a movie with many winning aspects: a great cast, clothes, interesting characters, some drama, a narcissistic boss in a stressful industry, and a solid plot. I was more into the BlackBerry back then than the narcissistic leaders I focus on now, but thankfully, this movie satisfies both interests. It came out in 2006 and still presents a predictable and toxic workplace culture that was more acceptable, and even seen as necessary for success, than it is today, 20 years on.

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!

Still from the movie of Andy helping out Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada, 2006.

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 synthesises concepts from organisational sociology, political theory, and bureaucracy research into a behavioural model of institutional decline that I haven't encountered elsewhere.

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.”

This shift from doing the work to managing the consequences of the work reflects goal displacement, where processes begin to take precedence over purpose.
Merton, R. K. (1940). Bureaucratic Structure and Personality.

The emergence of formal processes, documentation, and role-based authority reflects the bureaucratisation of work described by Weber.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1922)

The concentration of decision-making at the top reflects Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy, in which organisational complexity drives the consolidation of power within leadership groups over time.
Michels, R. (1911). Political Parties.

This reflects Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy, where those focused on preserving the organisation come to dominate its direction, often at the expense of its original purpose.
Pournelle, J. (1989). “The Iron Law of Bureaucracy.”

Why workplaces are hostile

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:53:08 GMT

***Post publication note *** I’ve edited parts of this piece since publishing as I’ve clarified something about my own relationship to institutions. I can see distortion quickly, and while I’ve been able to participate in workplaces where stated values weren’t reflected in leadership behaviour, doing so required a level of stoicism when conditions didn’t improve. Over time, as the buffering elements that made that participation workable disappeared, it stopped making sense to keep playing along with the expected game, and leaving became the more viable option.

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.

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.

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

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.

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.

Hack Narcissism and support my work

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:
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I hate the spiritual path

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:26:25 GMT

I hate the spiritual path because there is an ultimate authority and it’s not me. You can call it God, the divine, universe, reality, life. The name doesn’t change how it operates. It doesn’t respond to what you want, what you think you deserve, or what you’ve worked for. It acts on its own will and doesn’t follow your expectations. It doesn’t reward effort in the way you’ve been taught to expect. What stays and goes from your life doesn’t answer to you, which would have been useful to know earlier before committing to this path.

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.

Photo by Le Vu on Unsplash

Hack Narcissism and support my work

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
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- by citing my work in your presentations and posts
- by inviting me to speak, deliver training or consult for your organisation
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The Politics of Scapegoating

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:32:11 GMT

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.

Dear Feminists

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 23:49:28 GMT

I’ve been cruising feminist Substack in light of the recent censorship attempt on Substack to make this a safer space. I can see how easy it is for women (and some men) who are upset about the revelations in the Epstein files of the names of revered men to become influenced toward radicalisation by posts that paint women as collective victims of men they’ve never encountered.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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.

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…

a year 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.

Hack Narcissism and support my work

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.

Scapegoating as a rite of passage

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:20:02 GMT

The way to sell something is to talk about the pain of the experience so others can relate, immediately gaining engagement and language for struggles they couldn’t previously articulate. Scapegoating an adult, whether in a family or a group, follows a familiar pattern. A group gradually turns on an individual, forcing them to exit the group, leaving the scapegoat feeling broken, betrayed, and bitter about what happened. We analyse the cruelty of the group and the trauma of the victim, and far less the individual as an agent within a predisposing ecosystem.

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.

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.

The Scapegoating Playbook at work

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

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.

Marketing Divinity

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:10:25 GMT

There have been many surprised reactions to discovering that America’s beloved guru, Deepak Chopra, is among many others on Epstein’s list. My recent doomscrolling on Instagram, an app notorious for spiritual entrepreneur-influencer content and satires of them, has been filled with analyses of the email exchanges between Chopra and Epstein, exposing his sleaze. He offered a public non-apology that framed his actions with women as justified, revealing how easily authority is preserved even when behaviour is exposed. This also exposed a familiar pattern of spiritual narcissism, where moral language is used to preserve status rather than cultivate character. The public lament that followed, upon discovering their beloved parasocial teacher can’t walk his talk, reminded me how poor people’s discernment of genuine authority often is.

How to develop discernment

a year ago · 89 likes · 19 comments · Nathalie Martinek PhD

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.

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…

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.

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.

How to spot a gurupreneur

Blame the system

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 11:56:52 GMT

I used to be someone who could deliver a passionate ~~rant~~ monologue about the big bad system. I believed we’d all be better off, especially women, if it were redesigned to serve us.

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.

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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How academics use LinkedIn and Substack to extract your knowledge and keep the credit

Nathalie Martinek PhD — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 09:53:47 GMT

I began a rant on Notes that became too long that I decided that this needed its own post. My rant was inspired by a few posts by academics on LinkedIn and Substack talking about their work and appealing to their parasocial community. I’m not seeing anything new in these posts, just a recurring pattern that sets my cult leader radar hackles up.

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.

How to spot and protect against Knowledge Vampires

Dear Reader…

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

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 vampirism 1 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.

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…

7 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.