This coworker doesn't even have anything directly to do with my boss.  He just happens to work at the same company, in another department that rarely interacts with mine, unless we need some kind of "maintenance" from him.  Anyway, he's someone I  started chatting with here and there, one of the very few people I chat with at a large company.  I know that I've become noticeably antisocial, and that it's become a matter of interest to my bosses.  My main boss by the way is an attorney, and a master at manipulating human emotions and social environments.  Anyway, I started noticing that he AND my boss (who are on casual speaking terms) would compliment me much more than was normal, trying extra hard to flatter me.  Then I noticed he and my boss would make reference to the same kinds of things to me, and around the same time (within hours or days of each other).  Sometimes now, I notice that he does this thing that I KNOW my boss does with me:  to address something I'm doing wrong, or some weird behavior I have, he'll talk about someone else doing this thing, and then ask me what I think or see how I respond to it.  It can be for something as benign as cleaning my fucking desk to something as harmful to my workplace image as smoking pot.  Yes, my boss perceives me as so fragile that he can't even tell me that I need to wipe down my desk.  One thing that fucks me over is that I have this perpetual cognitive busyness, where my brain is pre-occupied with whether or not I am being perceived well (i.e. do I look ok right now, am I making an ugly face, is my body language ok, is my hair ok), so I have fallen for this tactic plenty of times, and didn't realize he was using it on me until later when I was calm and able to reflect on the conversation, then I'd be like "oh ok, he was passive aggressively calling me out for something or trying to see whether or not I smoke pot or have depression or Asperger's.   It's so fucking discouraging, how it highlights how much of an idiot i am.  Cognitive busyness makes me so slow in social situations that I'm incredibly easy to manipulate.  I hate myself for it, but one thing that I hate even more is that I sometimes can't figure out whether I'm right about him and my boss manipulating me, or whether I'm being paranoid.  I for sure know that the more my boss does that weird indirect acknowledgment of my wrongdoing (because he knows i'm fragile), the more I'm certain he's using this guy to get me to talk about myself.  BUT then i think about how there was another guy at my old job who did the same kind of "trying to get me to talk and reveal what makes me so weird" thing with my boss.   I'm losing myself trying to figure out if i'm just so obviously socially awkward that recent managers need to elicit help from coworkers to scheme me into talking about myself and maybe what makes me the way I am OR if i'm just a paranoid mess.  OR both, which is the most unsatisfying conclusion of all.  