Narcissistic Abuse Glossary
You already know what happened. What you’re rebuilding is trust in your own read of it.
This glossary sharpens the language you already have, so your own perception gets to count again.
Not more information. Your own authority, back in your hands.
Browse by category
11 sections · 197 termsWhat Narcissistic Abuse Does to You
The effects of narcissistic abuse on your inner world: fog, self-doubt, shame, dissociation, and trauma bonding. All are adaptations, not defects.
Attachment & Development
Where your patterns around closeness, trust, and abandonment actually came from: the attachment styles and developmental dynamics formed long before the relationship that brought you here.
How to Respond to It
Ways to protect your attention, body, time, and reality and stop feeding the pattern: boundaries, the no-contact rule, and more.
How to Recover
What starts to come back as shame loosens: self-trust, legitimate needs, healthy entitlement, and safe vulnerability after narcissistic abuse.
Deep Dive Topics
Long-form, survivor-first guides that take one pattern all the way down: why it happens, why it held you, and what helps.
Core Narcissistic Dynamics
Projection, introjection, shame, self-trust, identity: the deeper mechanisms beneath narcissistic abuse.
Narcissistic Abuse Tactics: One on One
Direct relational tactics: gaslighting, reactive abuse, blame-shifting, invalidation, and the abuse cycle.
Narcissistic Abuse Tactics: Social
Group and social manipulation: triangulation, flying monkeys, smear campaigns, and social exclusion.
Family Dynamics
The roles a narcissistic family assigns (scapegoat, golden child, enablers) and how they shape identity long into adulthood.
Understanding Narcissism
The traits, states, and diagnostic terms behind narcissistic behavior: grandiosity, supply, injury, rage, collapse, the false self, and the cycle they drive.
Types of Narcissists
Educational descriptions of narcissistic presentations, with emphasis on survivor impact, not subtype obsession.
Historical Conceptions of Narcissism
From myth and psychoanalysis to object relations, attachment theory, trauma perspectives, and modern discourse.
You have no burden of proof.
You don’t have to “know” someone is “a narcissist,” or prove what happened to you, to deserve clarity and support. Trust your gut as best you can. These words are just a way to make the confusing feel a little more nameable.
Jim McGee
What this work is
If this is more than information for you.
You may be highly informed about narcissistic abuse, scapegoating, CPTSD, and relational trauma, and still feel organized around shame, guilt, fear, self-doubt, or the sense that something is wrong with you.
Insight alone does not tell the nervous system it’s safe. Understanding what happened is not the same as no longer living from it.
NARM-informed coaching is a slow, relational, client-led space for the part of recovery that comes after understanding. Old protections can stand down. Shame-based identifications can dissolve. The true self that was always there can come forward again.
Schedule a Free ConversationPrivate NARM-informed coaching. Not licensed psychotherapy or crisis care.