The double life: public charm, private destruction

In the article that follows, I address the gap between the public image and the private reality in a controlling relationship. On this theme, I designed a test de relation toxique that helps you see where you stand, with a guide to take the reflection further. And if you have concrete messages to decode, ScanMyLove analyses your conversations with your partner from a simple export and reveals their real dynamic. I have also written two books on this subject, Se libérer des relations toxiques and Trauma Bonding, if you would like to go further.

It is ten in the evening. He is telling a story, and telling it well. The woman sitting next to you leans over: "You are lucky, he is adorable."

Two hours earlier, in the car, that same person told you in a perfectly calm voice that you had become pathetic. You swallowed your tears in the car park, touched up your make-up, and walked in smiling.

So you go on smiling, and you say nothing. Because you already know what would happen: she has a charming man in front of her, and you have only a sentence spoken with no witness. You would lose.

This is not ordinary hypocrisy

Everyone behaves better at the office than in their pyjamas. That is not what this is about.

What you are observing is two incompatible characters, who share neither the same values nor the same memory of events. In public, the friend who comes to help you move house, who lends out his home, who pays for the orthodontics of a neighbour's daughter without telling anyone — except that everyone knows. In private, three days of silence because you laughed at someone else's joke.

That gap is not a side effect of the way this works. It is part of it.

Why the public character is not optional

To understand this, you have to overturn a received idea. What you take for outsized self-confidence is nothing of the sort.

A formed identity holds contradictory things together: one knows oneself to be generous and sometimes petty without those pieces cancelling each other out, and criticism touches without destroying. That whole is missing here. Many people put it spontaneously: "at times, I had the impression there was nobody behind it." Not insensitivity — quite the opposite, it is raw — but an absence of centre: nothing that can say, without an outside gaze, "I am worth something."

Lacking an internal foundation, this person depends vitally on the way others look at him. Admiration is not an added pleasure: it is a prop. Remove the gazes and the structure wavers. The public character is therefore not a mask one chooses to put on: it is a load-bearing part.

Paul-Claude Racamier, who coined the expression "narcissistic perversion" in 1986, put it in exactly those terms: the other is used there as a function, not recognised as a subject. You were not met as a person: you were recruited as a mirror.

The fuel changes, it does not run out

One question remains: why the charm outside and the harshness inside?

Because admiration dries up. A couple settles down, a career stalls, the gazes grow less fresh. What then occurs is a switch that many people can date almost to the day without having understood its logic: when admiration stops coming, one changes fuel, one does not give up.

The second fuel is fear, because being feared confirms power as surely as being admired does. The third is envy, because arousing jealousy proves that one possesses what others lack.

The discrepancy becomes clear: these are two fuels extracted from two different grounds. Admiration outside, where it is still available. Fear and guilt at home, from the person who cannot leave.

Take the test: Test de relation toxique → — You do not need a diagnosis about someone in order to assess what a relationship is doing to you.

The three reasons why nobody believes you

This is the most painful part, and the most universal. None of the three reasons has anything to do with a failing on your part.

1. The format of the evidence

Your friends have hundreds of hours of direct observation of the public character. You bring an account. What has been seen weighs more than what has been recounted. You do not lose because you tell it badly: you lose because you are telling, while they have seen.

2. This violence leaves no trace

Marie-France Hirigoyen, who named moral harassment in 1998, showed that the most destructive form is almost never the one that shouts. It is the one made of micro-disqualifications: a sigh at just the right moment, a question whose intonation turns it into a verdict, a remark that wounds and then takes shelter behind "it was a joke".

In front of a witness, none of these can be argued. "He sighed" is not a grievance — you know it, which is why you do not say it. Only the sequence, over months, becomes devastating. And nobody has seen it apart from you.

3. You end up pleading his case

This is the hardest one to hear. Exhausted, used to playing things down, you add the mitigating circumstances as you talk: "he was tired", "maybe I had been clumsy".

The person listening hears a hesitant woman defending a man he finds charming. He draws the logical conclusion. You have just supplied, yourself, the argument that works against you.

Isolation is not a consequence: it is the condition

Here is what to take away from everything above.

A mechanism that rests on a gap between two stages does not survive those two stages being brought together. So the witnesses must not exist, or must not believe you.

That is why gradual isolation always accompanies this kind of relationship: your friends disqualified one by one, the conflicts manufactured with your family, the outings that cost more than they bring. It is not collateral damage. It is what makes the rest possible, and it is put in place long before you think of speaking to anyone about it.

It even happens that a version of the couple has circulated among those close to you before you open your mouth: in it, the other is worried and devoted, and you are fragile, "going through a complicated time". The day you look for support, the ground is already taken.

What helps, concretely

Stop trying to convince those around you. It is counter-intuitive, and yet it is the first relief. You will not win that trial, and every attempt costs you. One person who believes you is worth more than ten who have to be convinced. Keep a record of dated facts. One line = a date + a place + what was said, word for word, with no adjectives. Add a narrow column: who was there? You will find an overwhelming majority of "nobody". Look at that column for a long moment: it does not prove that you are making things up, it shows the opposite — where things happen, and why you have no witnesses.

⚠️ This notebook must be kept safe, outside your home or protected by a code nobody else knows. A document of this kind, if discovered, almost always triggers an escalation.

Accept that both stages are true at the same time. As long as you are looking for which of the two is "the real him", you will stay in the fog. The day you accept that they coexist, the discrepancy stops being an enigma and becomes information.

A necessary clarification

Nothing in the above entitles you to make a diagnosis about anyone. Only a professional who meets the person can assess, and the expression "narcissistic pervert" appears in no medical classification anyway — neither the DSM-5 nor the ICD-11. That is the subject of the article on Racamier, Hirigoyen et Cyrulnik.

You need no label at all in order to protect yourself. What hurts you hurts you, whether or not it carries a learned name.

If your physical safety is at stake, that takes precedence over everything else. Contact your local emergency services, and wherever you are in the world, findahelpline.com lists the free and confidential helplines available in your country. befrienders.org also offers emotional support in many languages.

References

• Hirigoyen, M.-F. (1998). Le Harcèlement moral : la violence perverse au quotidien. Syros.
• Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.
• Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. International Universities Press.
• Racamier, P.-C. (1992). Le Génie des origines : psychanalyse et psychoses. Payot.