Narcissistic Abuse Glossary
When you can name it, it loses its grip.
A trauma-informed glossary for making sense of narcissistic abuse, family scapegoating, coercive relational dynamics, and the survival adaptations that often follow.
This isn’t here to help you obsess over labels. It’s here to help you trust your own knowing again. One of the quietest harms of this kind of abuse is how it trains you to doubt yourself — to wonder if you imagined it, exaggerated it, or caused it. Putting plain words to what happened takes that doubt back off your shoulders. You were never too sensitive. You were paying attention.
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6 sections · 78 termsYou 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.
See how the coaching worksPrivate NARM-informed coaching. Not licensed psychotherapy or crisis care.