Signs of Narcissism: Crossing Boundaries & Audacious Behavior
I’ve always noticed patterns. Patterns in behavior. Patterns in books. Patterns in stories. I believe part of it comes from a desire to make some sense of a world that can often be chaotic. Through noticing patterns in behavior, among other things, I’ve started honing an ability to spot a narcissist.
Unfortunately, I’ve encountered several narcissists in my life. Folks who likely have Narcissistic Personality Disorder and maybe a few other personality diagnoses that they will never receive help for. I believe more narcissists exist in the world than we realize, but one place I believe attracts them en masse is a place many often go to for safety and security: the church.
This is where I received most of my informal education about narcissists. It’s in noticing the patterns in the narcissists I’ve known, people who did not know one another and often were separated by thousands of miles, that I witnessed two patterns emerge: narcissists consistently cross boundaries and often exhibit audacious behavior in public.
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Crossing Boundaries
I stood outside the office kitchenette, paper plate barely supporting the weight of salad and three slices of pizza from the previous evening’s youth event. I was speaking to my coworker about recruiting teenagers to volunteer for children’s church, when the senior pastor approached. “Pizza party go well last night?” he asked me.
“It did.” I smiled like he wasn’t interrupting our conversation.
He continued to chat with us. Then, ever so casually, he reached out and plucked a slice of pizza off my plate. He walked away, and my coworker chuckled at the awkwardness of what we had just witnessed.
“It’s okay,” I said, laughing. “I come from a big family. We have no boundaries.” It was true. My siblings and I always tasted each other’s food or grabbed stuff off one another’s plates—even in adulthood. It was a sign of endearment and trust, so I took it as a sign of the senior pastor’s comfort level with me. As new staff, I was not offended, and in an odd way I felt sort of—special.
As an isolated incident, it wasn’t a big deal. And for several months into this new job, it remained in my memory as an isolated incident. That was until I heard a story about how this same senior pastor had taken a bite out of someone else’s sandwich, without permission, straight off the staff member’s desk.
Grabbing a slice of pizza off someone’s plate? A little weird, but okay. Taking a bite out of someone’s sandwich without asking or without it being offered? That was tipping the bizarre scale.
Even these two scenarios wouldn’t be enough to raise an alarm and label someone a narcissist, but when I share that a few years later, over thirty people wrote a letter to the church’s governing body because of this pastor’s abusive behavior, it casts a little more light on the pastor’s propensity to cross boundaries.
Narcissists will often deliberately push limits, testing how far they can go and how much you will let them get away with. A little bit here. A little bit there. Before you know it, you’ve gotten used to it. “Oh, that’s just Bob,” you tell yourself. “Olivia is just socially awkward,” you might remark to a friend. You continue to concede more and more until you relinquish things that make you really uncomfortable, at which point, if you were to start protesting, the narcissist would turn the tables on you. You’d appear as the unreasonable one, not realizing that the narcissist has been slowly working to erode your autonomy from the first slice of pizza he snatched from your plate.
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Audacious Behavior
This same pastor who crossed boundaries with people in the office was also prone to audacious behavior no one else would get away with. I started to notice—fairly early on—that he would often do things that nobody else would ever dare to do. In group staff meetings, I’d look around and wonder, “Did anyone else notice how he completely took over the meeting from the executive director?” But since everyone usually acted as if what was happening wasn’t happening, I just stayed quiet.
For example, two staff members resigned around the same time. They were two more employees in an extended mass exodus of staff leaving the church. So many of the staff were leaving that I made a Game of Thrones bracket to try and predict who would be next. (Not funny, but sometimes dark humor is for dark days.)
Another coworker and I took on throwing these two departing staff members a farewell party. They specifically requested no sadness. Just fun. No stories or sharing. Just laughter and food and drink.
We accommodated with a game show and wine and cheese.
As we gathered around the charcuterie board, laughing with glasses full of sparkling wine, the senior pastor suddenly drew all the attention to himself as he began sharing how much each of these two departing staff members meant to him (never mind that literally everyone in the room knew that they were leaving to get away from him and the toxic atmosphere of the church). Before he’d even finished the first paragraph of his speech, the senior pastor was weeping. Like, full-on-tears-streaming-down-his-face weeping.
I glanced furtively at my coworker/co-party-planner wondering if we should do something. The two staff members had deliberately asked for fun and no sadness, yet here the senior pastor had commandeered the space and shifted the entire mood in one self-indulgent, rhetorical swoop. As I sat helplessly looking for a gap in the speech, to perhaps insert some levity or shift the mood, it became so very obvious to me that the senior pastor wasn’t there to celebrate the two employees, whom he called his very dear friends; he was there to express his feelings.
It was absolutely all about him and that was exactly the way he wanted it.
He left the party immediately after his speech, and we all returned to fun and games, perhaps with a bit more enthusiasm to wash away the awkwardness. It was around this time that I realized I was absolutely over this senior pastor. I felt like what he’d done was entirely selfish, and I wanted to apologize to my soon-to-be-ex-coworkers on his behalf.
That’s another thing about narcissists: somehow, they manage to make you feel responsible for their boundary crossing and audacious behavior. We all do awkward things. We all commit social faux pas. The difference between most people and a narcissist is the narcissist always shifts the blame for their behavior to someone else—even if this shifting is ever so subtle.
One or two instances may not be enough to call foul (and I wouldn’t recommend it). But over time, a narcissist will reveal themselves in a pattern of audacious behavior and crossing boundaries. Watch. Listen. Observe. They will reveal themselves before long.
Katherine Spearing MA, CTRC is the founder of Tears of Eden is a trauma recovery practitioner who works primarily with clients who have survived cults, high-control environments, Spiritual Abuse, and sexual abuse. Her next book on Spiritual Abuse addresses the survivor’s recovery journey, coming in 2025.
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