When The Mask Slips
Navigating Ego, Power & Boundary Violations in Community Spaces
There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from realizing you were right about someone, but only after things have gone far enough to cause harm.
For years, I had a quiet, uneasy feeling about someone in my wider community. Nothing overt. Nothing dramatic. Just a subtle sense that something didn’t quite line up… an edge of discomfort I couldn’t fully articulate but felt in my body.
Sometimes I thought… am I projecting? Am I being judgmental? Am I missing something?
It took a recent incident, one that crossed very clear relational boundaries, for me to better understand what was potentially going on.
This article is not about naming or shaming any one individual. It’s about naming a pattern that exists in communities—especially those centered around healing, consciousness, medicine and “relational attunement”.
A pattern that I have witnessed multiple times as a steward of community.
My hope is that this article will help others who are building communities or navigating challenging interpersonal dynamics.
The Slow Accumulation of Unease
The hardest dynamics to name are rarely explosive from the start. They’re quiet. Subtle. Easy to rationalize.
They look like:
off-hand comments that subtly undermine others
a tendency to speak about people rather than with them
positioning oneself as uniquely insightful or morally clear
offering unsolicited interpretations of others’ relationships
an unusual interest in proximity to power, leadership or intimacy
overbearingness
language that sounds emotionally intelligent but feels strangely hollow or misdirected
In isolation, none of these are definitive red flags. But over time, they form a pattern; one that often gets dismissed because the person speaks the right language, shows up in the right rooms and appears committed to growth.
When Vulnerability Becomes an Opening
People who operate from ego often reveal themselves most clearly when others are hurting or when they are desiring to assert themselves to get access to some form of power.
Instead of responding with restraint, caution, distance and care, they move toward the vulnerability. They interpret pain as access. Confusion as permission. Struggle as an opportunity to insert themselves as interpreters, helpers or fixers.
What makes this especially dangerous in healing or medicine-adjacent communities is the way boundary violations can be dressed up as insight, concern or devotion.
The language sounds mature. The framing sounds compassionate. But the impact is destabilizing, harmful and oftentimes manipulative.
There is an important difference between:
- supporting someone in pain, and
- using someone’s pain to justify intimacy, influence or authority
Ego in Spiritual Clothing
One of the most disorienting but also interesting realizations for me over the past few years has been recognizing how ego can masquerade as depth.
Some people don’t posture as dominant in obvious ways. Instead, they posture as “evolved” (or sometimes, they do both):
- more attuned
- more courageous
- more emotionally available
- more devoted
- more conscious
They speak fluently about integrity while undermining it in practice. They critique others’ leadership while positioning themselves as the standard to uphold. They frame their judgments as “truth,” their projections as “clarity,” and their entitlement as “service.”
And because they often believe their own narrative, they can be incredibly convincing… especially to those who are newer, more vulnerable or seeking a form of belonging.
Strength Without Containment Is Not Safety
Physical strength, emotional intelligence, social influence or spiritual insight can all look impressive on the surface. But strength without containment isn’t safety. It’s volatility.
Someone who is truly safe isn’t just capable, they’re reliable. Their restraint is consistent. Their care doesn’t fluctuate with circumstance, desire or ego threat. They don’t lash out when challenged, collapse when confronted or rationalize harm when it serves them.
In conscious or healing spaces, this distinction matters deeply. A person may speak fluently about boundaries, consent, and attunement—but if their behavior becomes unpredictable under pressure, their strength is no longer an asset. It becomes something others have to manage and deal with.
Reliability is what builds trust.
Not intensity. Not insight. Not charisma.
A regulated nervous system is quieter than a powerful one.
Pattern Recognition Without Pathologizing
In a previous professional role with MAPS Canada, I was involved in navigating a similarly complex situation, one that eventually led to someone being suspended from that community.
One thing I noticed in and around this time was that this individual had been removed from multiple spaces and communities.
My experience with them was not an isolated incident. It was a repeated pattern.
At the time, a psychiatrist I knew—someone familiar with both the relational dynamics of this individual and the broader context—suggested that what we were witnessing aligned closely with narcissistic patterns of behavior.
Now, I want to be careful here.
Naming narcissism is not about diagnosis or demonization.
It’s about pattern recognition.
What I’ve learned is that people operating from narcissistic structures often rely on subtle forms of leverage rather than overt force. They use fear, obligation or guilt to maintain access and influence. They blur boundaries while framing themselves as indispensable. They position resistance as harm, accountability as attack and restraint as rejection.
What makes this especially difficult in healing or spiritual communities is that these tactics can masquerade as care, devotion or depth as I discussed previously. And because they are rarely overt, they often go unnamed.
Recognizing patterns early is not about judgment, it’s about prevention.
The Dark Triad
One framework that helped clarify things for me is what psychologists refer to as the Dark Triad—a cluster of personality traits that includes narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
I remember learning about these in my university psychology classes but I was reminded of the framework when I came across a video from Arthur Brooks and I’m sharing this framework now as a general educational lens that helped me contextualize certain relational patterns I’ve encountered over the years.
Brooks, who has spoken extensively about this topic, offers a practical lens for recognizing these dynamics early, not so we can shame or pathologize people, but so we can protect ourselves and the communities we steward.
What stood out most to me is that Dark Triad patterns often don’t appear as overt aggression.
They appear as distortions of relationality—especially in environments that value vulnerability, morality or consciousness.
Below are some of the common signals, contextualized specifically for healing, spiritual, and community-oriented spaces.
How to Detect Dark Triad Patterns
1. Inflated Self-Importance
A consistent sense that they are more insightful, more attuned or more essential than others. This can show up as positioning themselves as a moral authority or indispensable figure in the room.
2. Entitlement
An assumption that access, intimacy, leadership or influence should be available to them, often without mutual consent or earned trust. When boundaries are set, they experience it as unfair or punitive.
3. Vanity and Image Management
An unusual preoccupation with how they are perceived, curating a persona of depth, care or righteousness. In conscious spaces, this often looks like spiritual branding rather than embodied humility.
4. Chronic Victimhood
A tendency to frame themselves as wronged, misunderstood, or targeted, especially when accountability is introduced. Harmful behavior is reframed as persecution.
5. Truth-Bending and Narrative Control
Selective storytelling, omissions, or outright distortions—always in service of protecting their image or access. When challenged, facts become flexible.
6. Manipulativeness
Using emotional intelligence, moral language, or relational proximity to influence others. This may involve guilt, obligation or fear rather than overt force.
7. Grandiosity
Exaggerating accomplishments, roles, or influence to gain trust quickly. In community spaces, this often looks like overstating one’s experience, training or impact.
8. Lack of Remorse
When harm is named, there is little genuine accountability. Apologies, if offered, are performative, conditional or quickly followed by justification.
9. Absence of Empathy
An inability, or unwillingness, to truly feel the impact of their actions on others. Emotional language may be fluent, but resonance is missing.
Each of these signals are taken from the following video from Arthur Brooks.
The DARVO Tactic
One particularly important pattern Brooks highlights in the video above which I had not come across before is DARVO, a tactic commonly used when someone with these traits is confronted:
Deny the behavior
Attack the person raising concerns
Reverse Victim and Offender
In community contexts, this can sound like:
“That didn’t happen.”
“You’re being reactive / unsafe / divisive.”
“I’m the one being harmed by this conversation.”
When you see this pattern, it’s a strong indicator that repair is unlikely… not because conflict can’t be worked through, but because accountability itself is experienced as a threat.
Why This Matters in Healing Spaces
What makes Dark Triad dynamics especially dangerous in healing, spiritual, or justice-oriented communities is that they often wear the language of care.
Concern becomes control.
Insight becomes intrusion.
Devotion becomes entitlement.
And because these environments value openness and compassion, people are often encouraged explicitly or implicitly to override their intuition in favor of generosity.
Recognizing these patterns early is not about becoming cynical. It’s about understanding that not all harm comes from ignorance, some comes from unchecked ego seeking access, validation or power.
Discernment here is not cruelty.
Boundaries are not punishment.
Distance is not abandonment.
The Cost to Community
What I’ve come to understand is that these dynamics don’t just affect individuals, they also impact communities.
They create:
confusion around boundaries
blurred lines between care and control
quiet power struggles
distraction from important community or organizational goals
fractured trust
environments where intuition is overridden by rhetoric
They also make it harder for people to speak up, because naming the issue can feel like being “unspiritual,” “reactive” or “divisive.”
In my experiences over the past five years, setting firm boundaries and creating distance has been necessary… not out of anger, but out of responsibility.
Responsibility to my relationships. Responsibility to my nervous system.
Responsibility to the spaces I help steward.
A Note on Discernment
One of the hardest lessons in community leadership is learning to trust quiet signals early, without rushing to judgment, but without abandoning discernment either.
It’s okay to take time.
It’s okay to be unsure.
And it’s okay to change your mind when new information arrives.
As we know, not everything is as it seems…
Someone can speak scientifically and knowledgeably about relational attunement and still act in ways that completely contradict it.
Someone can speak fluently about justice, equity and liberation and still lack the relational maturity, accountability and care required to treat people well.
Someone can offer healing services or claim to hold powerful containers but still lack the humility, restraint or accountability that is required and expected in these sort of spaces.
Why I’m Sharing This
I’m sharing this to raise awareness about a type of dynamic that too often goes unnamed.
If you’ve ever felt:
- confused after an interaction that looked “conscious” on the outside but felt wrong
- pressured to override your intuition because someone sounded convincing
- hesitant to name harm because it was wrapped in spiritual language
You’re not alone.
And you’re not wrong to pause, step back, or set boundaries—even when doing so is uncomfortable.
Discernment is not cynicism.
Boundaries are not unloving.
And integrity is revealed in patterns of actual behavior with real human beings, not branding.
May we continue building communities where care includes restraint, where leadership includes accountability and where the language of healing, attunement and integrity is matched by the embodied practice of it.
Farewell Until Next Time 🔮
Thank you for making it this far. If you have any thoughts about what I shared here, please leave a comment below. I would love to hear about how this article resonates with you.
With gratitude,
Michael 🤍