“Narcissistic” abuse refers to a pattern of psychological manipulation and emotional harm, typically perpetrated by individuals with deep projected shame.

The core defining characteristics of this kind of abuse include:

Control and manipulation
The abuser seeks to dominate the target, through tactics such as gaslighting (making the victim question their reality), withholding information, or constantly changing rules and expectations. They often isolate victims from support systems to increase dependency.

Exploitation of empathy
Narcissistic abusers target empathetic individuals and exploit their compassion, using guilt, shame, and emotional manipulation to get their needs met, while disregarding the victim’s wellbeing.

Cycles of idealisation and devaluation
The relationship typically follows a pattern where the abuser initially “love-bombs” with excessive attention and affection, then gradually shifts to criticism, contempt, and emotional withdrawal. This creates confusion and can result in trauma bonding.

Lack of genuine empathy
The abuser shows little authentic concern for the victim’s feelings or experiences, instead viewing them primarily as sources of validation, control, or other benefits. Indeed, the abuser may enjoy the pain and suffering of the target.

Projection and blame-shifting
This abuser will never take accountability for their harmful actions. When confronted, the abuser deflects responsibility by projecting their behaviours onto others (for example, by reversing the offender and victim) or making the victim feel otherwise responsible for the abuse they’re experiencing.

Intermittent reinforcement
Occasional moments of kindness or attention are used to maintain the victim’s hope and attachment, making it difficult to recognise the overall pattern of harm. The resulting difficulty in detaching is sometimes referred to as a trauma-bond: logically for safety, the target should leave, but can’t bear to give up on the attachment, just in case the good parts come back.

Triangulation and smearing
This is a technique where third party enablers may be brought into the relationship dynamic to help with the abuse. The third party may be unaware of their role and may be manipulated also. Or they may be complicit and derive some kind of benefit, such as social currency, or safety, from enabling this person. An abuser may play one romantic partner off another to create jealousy and anxiety. An unhealthy parent may pit siblings against each other. A bully may gather a gang of acolytes to gossip about, exclude or help smear a target. Very often, this architecture has been set up well ahead of the abuse, so that when it does happen, the target’s complaints will not be taken seriously.

Erosion of self-worth
Through constant criticism, comparison to others, and invalidation of feelings, the victim’s confidence and sense of reality become severely damaged over time.

Coercive control
The term “coercive control” has a legal meaning, because it is a crime. It was made a crime in the UK, in Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (SCA 2015). If you think you are the target of coercive control and it is still happening, coming to therapy may put you in danger, if your abuser finds out. If this is you, reach out first to a crisis support team, like Victim Support or the police. Don’t imagine the police won’t listen: they do. I have worked extensively with Victim Support referrals on criminal domestic abuse cases, so I know the police take it seriously.

Distribution
This is an incredibly common pattern of abuse and not limited to one type of relationship or gender dynamic. If you are going through this for the first time, you may feel like you are going crazy, but you’re not. You are not alone.

This pattern can occur in romantic relationships, families, friendships, or workplace and spiritual dynamics. 

People who have been abused in this way can be left vulnerable to further abuse, so it’s really important, if you think this is happening to you, or you think it has happened, to take steps to understand and recognise the pattern so further harm can be avoided.

About you
This isn’t your fault. There is not something fundamentally unloveable about you and no, you didn’t do anything to encourage it. I know this may be hard to accept, because it often feels like you are at fault. But it’s just conditioning. You have been groomed, possibly over a very long time, to feel that you deserved such treatment: but you didn’t. Nobody does. You may even be angry with yourself for allowing yourself to be duped by such a con-artist. I get it. But give me the anger, we can work with that and channel it into the right places.

And if you are a man …
Government statistics compiled by the Mankind Initiative show that one in five (22%) of victims of domestic abuse are male and that, in that cohort, the abuser was reported as female around 80% of the time. However, we also know that fewer men report their abuse and even fewer men present to therapy to work through it, which can really skew both the statistics and public perception.

After working with many male survivors of domestic abuse, through Victim Support, I do know how utterly hopeless it can seem to try and be heard. But I will hear you, I promise. I see survivors of all genders and I meet every person exactly where they are, without bringing a bias into the room.

About your abuser
If you are here, my guess is you have already come into contact with influencer material about “narcissists” on social media. You may even have fallen down various rabbit holes talking about “grandiose,” “malignant” or “covert” narcissists. Here’s some straight talk: abusers can be anyone, anywhere, they don’t have different brains, they’re not a different species. They’re just nasty people. It matters not one jot whether your abuser fits the description for some mental health diagnosis. Firstly, lots of abusers don’t meet the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but they still abuse according to the pattern I’ve described. Secondly, even if they did meet the criteria, they are not going to volunteer themselves for the diagnosis. And lastly, any time you spend wondering about how to categorise your abuser, you’re distracted from what really matters: their behaviour.

The only things it’s really valuable to know about your abuser are:

Shame: They carry unbearable shame. The person who follows this abuse pattern is emotionally very immature and projects onto the target all the shame, contempt, disgust and rage they feel for themselves, because they have never learned to sit with their discomfort and accept themselves and — crucially — because the target reflects back to the abuser all the things they pretend to be, but are not: kind, compassionate, happy, strong, creative, empathic, popular, and so on. This is important to know because it can help you regain your power.

Fear: They have constructed a false self, which is the self they project outwardly to others, outside the abusive relationship. This false self will always be blameless and perfect. Yes, it might be grandiose, but it might equally cast itself as a victim or martyr. It may pretend to be caring and compassionate. The false self may make a big show of being virtuous in public, while you know they are devious and nasty in private. But the abuser fears being unmasked more than anything else. Which also gives you some power.

Because of this, it can be quite dangerous to confront and unmask this kind of abuser.

It’s incredibly common to want to correct the narrative. If that is your plan, and I perfectly understand if it is, you need to be in a place of perfect safety first — which means this abuser no longer has any access to you, to your family, your children, your friends and social network, to your assets and finances and to your workplace and colleagues, because all of these will be potential targets. Even then, an abuser may try to use police or the judiciary service to continue the harrassment and abuse, with false reports or nuisance claims against you, so it’s worth weighing up whether this is the closure you want.

Recovery and next steps
Recovery starts with empathic witnessing: the survivor may have been dismissed, ignored, or blamed for their abuse by enablers. so we begin with a process of witnessing and documenting and describing, giving voice to the actions and the feelings they provoked.

Over time we build up safety in the room and work with boundaries. We will deal with and build a strategy for handling any acute feelings that may arise when we go over these areas, such as anxiety, panic, rage, anger and dissociation. At the same time we work together to rebuild the survivor’s sense of reality and self-worth. In so doing we inevitably identify the source of light that the abuser was attempting to drain … and reignite it. I love watching this part of the work: often the most satisfying closure is to know that in spite of them, in spite of everything they did to you and everything they took from you, they couldn’t stop you from rising to become everything they so envied in you.

Further reading

• Surviving the Narcissist by Margalis Fjelstad
• The Narcissistic Family by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert Pressman
• Nasty People by Jay Carter

Accredited Register

• National Counselling & Psychotherapy Society MNCPS Accred 
• Code of ethics

Professional Associations

• Association of Trauma Informed Counsellors & Psychotherapists

Qualifications & Experience

• Level 5 Professional Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling Practice (Prof Dip Psy C)
• Level 4 Diploma in Counselling Skills and Theory (Dip CST)
• CBT Practitioner Certificate
• IARTT Rewind Trauma Therapy training
• Victim Support volunteer counsellor
• Samaritans listener training
• Enhanced DBS ✅

• Privacy Policy