Narcissistic Abuse Glossary: Narcissist Terms and Meanings
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.
Deep dives
8 long readsBrowse 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.
The terms people look up most
20 of 197Twenty of the narcissistic terms people search for most, each in one line. Every term links to its full entry.
- Gaslighting
- Gaslighting is a sustained campaign to make you doubt your own memory, perception, and sanity, until you stop trusting your mind and start relying on theirs.
- Love Bombing
- Love bombing is an engineered rush of attention, praise, intimacy, gifts, contact, and future promises before trust has had time to grow.
- Hoovering
- Hoovering is manipulative re-contact after you create distance, designed to reopen access without the accountability and sustained change that repair would require.
- Flying Monkeys
- Flying monkeys are the people a manipulator recruits to carry out their agenda: to pass messages, gather information, apply pressure, or enforce their version of events.
- Grey Rock
- When cutting contact isn’t possible, grey rock is the practice of becoming so flat, boring, and unrewarding to deal with that the other person gradually loses interest.
- Medium Chill and Structured Contact
- Structured contact sets the medium, timing, topics and length of contact in advance; medium chill is staying pleasant but superficial and unreactive inside it.
- No Contact
- A protective boundary where you stop direct and indirect contact with a person or system that keeps crossing your limits. It is not a punishment, and it is not a strategy for changing them.
- Trauma Bonding
- Trauma bonding is the powerful attachment that can form toward someone who hurts you, when the same person is the source of both the fear and the relief.
- DARVO
- DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.
- Triangulation
- A tactic in which a third person is brought into a two-person conflict to shift power, create insecurity, and prevent direct resolution.
- The Family Scapegoat
- The family scapegoat is the person assigned to carry the blame for what the family system cannot face in itself.
- Golden Child
- The Golden Child is the person a narcissistic family idealizes because they help carry the family’s image.
- Narcissistic Supply
- Narcissistic supply is the steady stream of attention a narcissist needs from other people to keep the inflated self-image from deflating.
- Narcissistic Injury
- Narcissistic injury is the wound a narcissist takes when something punctures the grandiose self-image: a criticism, a boundary, being ignored, any hint they are not as special or in control as they need to be.
- Word Salad
- Word salad is talk that becomes un-follow-able.
- The Silent Treatment
- The silent treatment is silence used as a punishment.
- Pity Play
- A pity play is the use of suffering as a tactic: distress, whether genuine, exaggerated, or performed, produced just as someone might be held accountable.
- Smear Campaign
- A smear campaign is the deliberate spread of false or twisted information about you, aimed at the people whose opinion of you matters.
- Walking on Eggshells
- Walking on eggshells is what it feels like to live with someone whose reactions you can never quite predict.
- Projection
- Projection is the unconscious move of taking something you cannot bear to see in yourself and seeing it in someone else instead.
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.