Anti-Harmony: The Invisible Pattern Behind Narcissistic Behavior

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Anti-harmonization.

By obtaining a visceral understanding of how harmonization feels like, anti-harmonization stands out jarringly in everything a narcissist does.

There is something off about them.

This is an often repeated saying. But what does it truly mean? What is so ‘off’ about them?

I believe what ‘off’ refers to is dissonance.

You can feel this ‘off’ feeling in everything they do, including even when they try hard to get along with you.

A person who genuinely gets along with you just gets along. That makes it natural.

A love bombing, anti-harmonious person feels discordant, off-key when they try to get along. They’re being nice, but something's not quite right, and it’s hard to put a finger on it. It’s like they are trying to get along, but failing because there is no ‘you’ in their getting along, they are trying at empty air, which made their getting along just putting on a show. But it’s so hard to articulate and pin down.

But now you can put a finger on it, and it’s called anti-harmony.

Harmony always feels peaceful and fulfilling. That’s because it comes with its own inbuilt, realtime closure. Harmony types don’t like loose ends, and they don’t like contradictions, ambivalence and hypocrisy — they are all the same thing. Harmony types want to give you closure because they love you. And they love you through the closure they give you.

Anti-harmony always feels confusing, because of dissonance, discordance is inherently confusing. It is how you also feel when you are listening to their musical equivalent. Discordant or off-key singing is unpleasant because it feels off, it vexes your ears and your soul. The main social cause of the dissonance and discordance is the contradictions (casual hypocrisy), loose ends (bad give and take), and ambivalence (hot and cold, avoidance, sweet mean, withholding) anti-harmony types constantly leave for others. They are natural enemies of closure.

Even brief encounters with them leave anti-closure feelings. They habitually vex others.

Harmony types leave behind an ‘ahhh’ feeling, anti-harmony types leave behind a ‘but why?’ feeling. Harmony types leave behind warmth, anti-harmony types leave behind unresolved issues and insecure feelings — they leave behind stress.

One example recently is how a commenter left a gushing comment underneath one of my answers. I noted that despite his gushingly positive comment, he failed to upvote my answer. So I wrote a reply telling him that if he found the answer useful, he should upvote it.

10 hours later, I found that he upvoted my rebuke comment, but tellingly still left my answer un upvoted. This commenter is not someone who doesn’t understand the upvote system, as he has upvoted other answers.

So what’s happening here?

It’s certainly confusing isn’t it?

Are some people too obtuse to get simple things right?

No. Instead, that’s how anti-harmony always looks like.

It always looks confusing and frustrating (which is the opposite of peaceful and fulfilling).

Like someone who can hit the right notes but patently refuses to, and it leaves you vexed. And we should never ignore this vexed feeling. It is our red flag to detecting anti-harmony activity. Anti-closure is what leaves vexed feelings. Anti-harmony types love loose ends, and loose ends leaves you vexed. It is not an accident, it’s their bad habit of having little concern for the feelings of others.

We only get confused and frustrated when we keep assuming that he wants to harmonize with us, but is somehow too dense to get it right.

But if we instead assume the right paradigm, which is anti-harmony, then everything gets resolved, and we can feel the peace and fulfilment coming back in us. We still failed to get his upvote (which was never the point anyway), but we are no longer troubled by his behavior, as we are no longer trying to force fit bad behavior on a good person (we are no longer force fitting contradictions, we are no longer perpetuating cognitive dissonance) (the point is to see what he does in response to rebuke, to uncover his unrepentance) (our self-provided closure is to finally realize that he is anti-harmony).

This little analogy can be magnified and extrapolated to explain 100% of the things narcissists do. How they promise but never deliver, how they raise expectations but disappoint, how they blow hot and cold (instead of doing the right thing and just casually replying your PMs they withhold replies, then when you rebuke them, they apologize profusely and give you their international phone number and urge you to call them {for what?}, telling you they have a feeling we can be great friends {say what?}), how their concern for you doesn’t feel like concern it feels like presumption and gaslighting, how when they reply their replies are just somehow subtly invalidating or antagonizing, how when you converse they always practice weaponized miscommunication (engaging them leaves you feeling vexed), why they seem to secretly weaponize everything all the time, etc.

Unfortunately, the right paradigm of anti-harmony for this situation would suggest that he was purely messing with me, that the positive comment he left, as well as his narrative of victimization are just precisely what someone who practices aggression, discardance, and rebellion would do. And that he probably goes around in life doing precisely this most of the time. That’s disturbing. And painful to accept.

Often, we refuse to think in terms of anti-harmony as the answer to what’s irritating or confusing us because it would lead us down scary rabbit holes. Often these rabbit holes lead to the conclusion that someone was deliberately anti-harmonious with us. That’s an ugly picture, and it scares us to believe that we have been, and keep running into anti-harmonious people daily. But that happens to be a paradigm I’m forced to subscribe to after decades of pattern matching and figuring out personal stochastic data. It’s simply what makes the most sense for me personally. A paradigm of everyone with unconditional harmonization just doesn’t fit my life experience.

Anti-harmony is real, and it’s scary, and we often miss it because we get too scared to admit it to ourselves.

But this paradigm of anti-harmony as THE red flag works.

Let’s stress test the paradigm.

Can narcissists harmonize?

No.

Harmony requires empathy. It requires love. It requires denying yourself and putting others in front of you, setting aside your own terms and self-interest in favor of what others want or seek, even at least temporarily. That is precisely what no narcissist can habitually do.

Harmony requires healthy give and take, which involves graciousness, the acknowledgement that someone has been benevolent towards you, and the desire to be benevolent back towards them. This is also what no narcissist can do. Narcissists are not just all about disregarding others, narcissists function in a universe of ungraciousness. They automatically assume everyone is ungracious. And they are ungracious too. To them, everything makes sense through the model of ungraciousness. And that’s why they are ungracious today. And that’s their modus operandi. It’s their lifestyle.

Which leads narcissists down the path of habitually returning some form of evil for good (including disregarding obligations for reciprocation), which is just another name for anti-harmony.

Anti-harmony is seldom an accident.

(In fact, anti-harmony is always the result of covert micro-discardance — you being secretly discarded) (hot and cold is just micro-lovebombing followed by micro-discardance, cycled over and over again without the macro final discard)

The problem is that we have been taught and have taught ourselves to ignore this red flag, because if we fully recognize it, we would have to rebuke or shun someone, which is precisely what harmony loving people hate to do.

(If you find that you have to resort to rebuke, you already know deep down inside that they are 80% likely to be anti-harmony anyway)

So our own desire for harmony works against us when it comes to anti-harmony people.

And that is precisely what they exploit.

They exploit our blind desire for harmony to get under our radar with their micro-abuses and to continuously escape accountability for their micro-discardances and anti-closures.

Our own blind desire for harmony causes us to disregard and discard our own gut instincts. It causes us to dismiss our own irritation and confusion at anti-harmony behavior and actions. And ultimately, it causes us to fall for bigger and bigger abuse down the line.

We trick ourselves and set ourselves up later for degradation every time we choose to ignore evidence of anti-harmony now.

If we take anti-harmony seriously, we would become less harmonious ourselves.

But that’s actually a good thing. 100% unconditionally harmonious in this world is a bad thing. Children get too easily kidnapped like that, you just order them to get into the car, and they’re kidnapped, they have no concept to resist, because there are no evil people in their paradigm.

That is the price to pay for truly recognizing problematic people (not just narcissists). We become less fuzzy, we make ourselves look bad to pollyanna people, we become less blindly harmonious, we become more astute, we become wiser. And we get abused a lot less.

You don’t always have to rebuke someone who leaves you feeling vexed, as by that time, it is already 80% likely that they’re an anti-harmony type.