These are the direct, relational tactics used in private, the things that happen between you and the narcissist, often invisible to everyone else. Understanding them doesn’t mean you have to prove they happened. It means you can stop wondering if you’re the one who’s losing your mind.
Downplaying your achievements, skills, or attributes to elevate their own perceived self-worth by comparison. Derogatory or dismissive comments, excessive criticism, or outright mockery.
This can range from obviously brutal and vicious verbal attacks on your character, to snide remarks, to confusing sideways comments about people with whom you are similar.
Why do they do this?
To maintain the dominance of their subjectivity: they must be right. If you have a different opinion, they see it as a threat. Belittling you discredits you as a valid source of viewpoints that differ from their own.
To maintain control: it reinforces the power dynamic.
To boost self-esteem: with no self-esteem at their core, belittling others helps narcissists feel better about themselves.
Deflection: when faced with criticism or failure, belittlement shifts focus onto someone else’s flaws.
Manipulation: belittlement causes you to feel inferior, insecure, or dependent, creating a cycle where you become more needful of their approval and validation.
Infantilization
One form of belittlement is to talk down to you as if you’re much younger, or less mature, than they are. This allows them to project their own disavowed sense of dependency, making you feel helpless and small.
Examples: “I didn’t sign up to babysit you.” • “Don’t worry your little head about this.” • “Are you sure you can handle that?” • Calling you by a diminutive of your name you don’t use, sarcastically, in front of others.
Infantilization reinforces the narcissist’s superiority and undermines your confidence, which allows for more control over you.
Why your reaction makes sense
If you’ve started second-guessing your own competence — checking and re-checking, bracing before you speak — that’s not who you inherently are. Confidence erodes under steady belittlement the way a coastline does under tide. It says nothing about your actual ability, and it can come back.
The abuser manipulates situations repeatedly to trick the victim into doubting their own memory, perception, and sanity. Distinct from ordinary lying.
Reality distortion: intentional and systematic distortion of reality. Not about white lies to avoid trouble, creating a situation where victims question their own reality by denying things that have happened or creating false scenarios.
“I never said that”: over time, targets come to believe that their own memory, essential to navigating life, is completely unreliable. This makes targets feel helpless.
Manipulation and control: gaslighting is about gaining control and power over someone else’s mind and emotions, making you doubt your own perceptions to the point where you rely entirely on the abuser’s version of reality.
Constant doubt: the victim is in a perpetual state of self-doubt and confusion, feeling like they’re losing their mind.
Ongoing nature: unlike one-off lies, gaslighting is a long-term, targeted strategy aimed at destabilizing, controlling, and manipulating someone.
What gaslighting is NOT
This distinction matters in both directions: it stops you doubting yourself when something really was done to you, and it keeps you from misreading an ordinary hard conversation as abuse.
Not this
Someone simply remembering an event differently than you. A partner disagreeing, even strongly. A one-off lie told to dodge trouble. People can be wrong, defensive, or dishonest without gaslighting you.
What it actually is
A sustained pattern aimed at your grip on reality itself — not winning one argument, but getting you to distrust your own memory and perception until you rely on theirs.
The test isn’t a single moment. It’s the direction things move over time: after a real disagreement you can still trust your own mind; after gaslighting, you can’t.
Common in narcissistic abuse, and distinct from gaslighting in purpose and pattern.
Reasons narcissists lie:
Creation of the ‘false self’: the idealized image they present to the world is created and maintained through lying.
Deception in manipulation: lying to manipulate others’ perceptions or behavior, creating false narratives, lying about others to create division and mistrust.
Avoidance of responsibility: denying or minimizing wrongdoing to maintain their self-image of perfection and superiority.
Control and power: by keeping the victim off-balance and uncertain, the narcissist gains power and influence.
Smear campaigns: spreading false information about someone to damage their reputation and isolate them from support.
In essence, lying is a tool that aids the narcissist’s manipulation, control, and deception, allowing them to maintain their narcissistic supply.
Influencing another person’s decisions, feelings, or behaviors for one’s own advantage by playing with their emotions.
Manipulators often induce emotional instability in their targets, making them easier to control. Emotional manipulators are often adept at disguising their true intentions and can seem very sympathetic and understanding, which makes them more effective.
Manipulation of positive emotions
Often subtle and hard to recognize:
False flattery: excessive compliments to win trust and distract from ulterior motives.
Creation of dependency: making the target feel special, valued, and loved, in a way that makes them depend on the manipulator to feel good about themselves.
Future faking: promises about a shared, prosperous future that are never truly intended to materialize.
Love bombing: showering the target with affection and attention at an overwhelming pace, creating emotional indebtedness.
Reciprocity: doing a big favor to create a feeling of obligation, target feels compelled to grant future requests.
Charm offensive
Some people are authentically charming, and that’s fine. A charm offensive is an elaborate attempt to use charm, flattery, or the appearance of sympathy to win someone over in order to influence them. It becomes a problem when the charmer is insincere and uses these tactics to distract from their real motives, which may be deceitful or self-serving.
Emotional blackmail (FOG)
A powerful form of emotional manipulation in which people close to us threaten, directly or indirectly, to punish us if we don’t do what they want. The three components are Fear, Obligation, and Guilt.
Fear: threatening to end relationships, ruin your reputation, or otherwise hurt you if they don’t get their way. Intimidating to make themselves larger in your mind, creating a desire for appeasement.
Obligation: making victims feel like they owe something, because of a past favor, a sense of duty, or societal expectations.
Guilt: invoking guilt to manipulate, making victims feel guilty for causing imagined distress or not living up to certain expectations.
The cycle: demand → resistance → pressure → compliance. The pattern is reinforced as the blackmailer learns it works and victims get used to giving in.
Narcissists run this two-step playbook, often in private, to get you to think you’re the crazy one. They may also create this drama in front of family, friends, and even therapists.
Step 1: Baiting and provocation
The narcissist has a keen sense of your vulnerabilities and buttons. They purposefully press them to provoke an emotional response, offensive comments, criticism, infantilization, actions designed to trigger insecurities. Overt or subtle provocative behavior will, over time, elicit an angry response from anybody.
Step 2: The reaction
The target eventually lashes out in frustration or anger, which has usually been repressed, so it comes out in a pent-up, forceful way, perhaps “inappropriately” so on the surface, without context. Whatever your reaction, if you respond with any emotional intensity, you have just given them narcissistic supply.
The abuse
The narcissist then focuses all attention on your reaction. They state or imply that your reaction is evidence that you are the actual abuser, shifting blame and responsibility. They might even whip up some tears to evoke sympathy in onlookers.
Now you doubt yourself and feel guilty and confused about your reactions. They are abusing you for having a normal reaction to abuse.
Why your reaction makes sense
A dysregulated reaction is not the same thing as being the abuser. It may be evidence that the nervous system was pushed beyond capacity. The compulsion to prove your innocence afterwards often comes from having your reality reversed repeatedly.
Sometimes this goes in the sequence described above, especially in romantic relationships. Or you might cycle between idealization and devaluation for an indefinite period of time — perhaps for the entirety of the relationship.
Idealization phase
The first stage in the narcissistic abuse cycle. The narcissist puts their target on a pedestal, showering them with affection and praise. Narcissists you only see once in a while may do this also, going on a “charm offensive.”
They are incredibly charming and attentive, moving the relationship forward rapidly. The goal is to win the victim’s trust and make them dependent on the narcissist’s affirmation and presence. They also gain information about your vulnerabilities and embarrassing things, which they exploit later for devaluation and smear campaign purposes.
Intense admiration: the narcissist showers their target with compliments, flattery, intense attention, and expressions of deep connection. You feel like you’ve met the perfect partner.
Love bombing: the relationship progresses quickly, and the narcissist expresses strong feelings of love early. This is overwhelming and causes the victim to become emotionally dependent.
Future faking: the narcissist talks about the future with the victim, painting a near-perfect life together. This deepens the victim’s emotional investment in the relationship.
Narcissistic mirroring: a conscious counterfeit of actual mirroring (which happens naturally and unconsciously among non-manipulative people with empathy). The narcissist imitates or mirrors the likes, dislikes, behaviors, and speech patterns of their target — employed to gain trust and build rapport for future manipulation.
Devaluation phase
The second stage, where the narcissist starts to devalue their victim after idealization. Here’s what to expect:
Withholding affection: withdrawing love, affection, or attention as punishment. Confusing and hurtful for the victim, especially after the intense affection of the idealization phase.
Projection: of the narcissist’s own negative traits, behaviors, or feelings onto the victim. Accusations of behaviors that they themselves are guilty of.
Criticism and belittlement: criticizing the victim for things they previously admired or found endearing. Belittlement, mocking, or sarcasm aimed at eroding the victim’s self-esteem.
Gaslighting: making the victim question their own reality or sanity. Denying things that have happened or insisting that the victim is “misremembering.”
Manipulation and control: often of every aspect of the victim’s life — via emotional manipulation, financial control, or isolation from friends and family.
Silent treatment: punishing the victim by ignoring them, refusing to communicate, or giving them the cold shoulder for an extended period.
Discard phase
The narcissist ends the relationship abruptly or moves on, often before the victim realizes what has happened. The narcissist may have been preparing for this by lining up a new source of supply.
Sudden withdrawal: the narcissist may suddenly cut off all contact, leaving the victim feeling abandoned, confused, and devastated.
New supply: the narcissist often has a new person waiting in the wings — a “new supply” who provides the admiration and attention the narcissist craves.
Demonization: the narcissist may smear the victim’s reputation while portraying themselves as the wronged party.
Reverse discard: sometimes the victim ends the relationship first, which narcissists experience as a severe narcissistic injury and may react to with intense rage or pursuit.
Hoovering
Named after the Hoover vacuum cleaner — because the narcissist tries to suck the victim back in. This can happen after a discard, or during the relationship to prevent the victim from leaving.
Love bombing again: the narcissist may return with an intense display of affection, promises of change, and declarations of love — mirroring the original idealization phase.
Guilt and sympathy plays: making the victim feel guilty for leaving, or eliciting sympathy by claiming to be suffering without them.
Threats: some narcissists use threats — of self-harm, of taking the children, of destroying the victim’s reputation — to prevent the victim from leaving or to lure them back.
Intermittent contact: reaching out sporadically — a text, a like on social media, running into them “accidentally” — to keep the victim emotionally tethered.
Why this cycle is so hard to leave
The idealization phase creates a powerful emotional blueprint — a memory of how good it felt — that the victim spends the rest of the relationship trying to return to. Combined with trauma bonding and intermittent reinforcement, this makes the abuse cycle one of the most psychologically sophisticated traps in human relationships. Understanding it is the beginning of breaking free from it.
Also known as playing the victim. Acting as perpetrators while portraying themselves as victims.
Manipulation: skillfully twisting situations to make it appear as if they’ve been wronged, even while causing harm, allowing avoidance of responsibility and maintenance of control.
Seeking sympathy: gaining attention and sympathy, justifying their actions, and making others feel guilty for not supporting them.
Maintaining superiority: by making you feel inferior and wrong, they boost their own ego.
Deflection: deflecting blame while projecting their own negative traits onto you, shifting attention away from their behavior.
Control: keeps victims in a perpetual state of guilt and confusion.
Narcissistic supply: playing the victim elicits attention, validation, and even admiration, the martyr mask.
This is daily fare if you’re in a relationship with a narcissist, they can’t even see you for who you are, so you’re going to be neglected.
Emotional neglect: not acknowledging, validating, or ignoring your needs and feelings, making you feel unseen and unheard.
Physical neglect: not taking care of basic needs such as food, shelter, or safety. In extreme cases, deprivation of medical care.
Neglect of responsibilities: shirking responsibilities that don’t serve their interests, leaving their partners to carry the burden.
Neglect of personal boundaries: disregarding your personal space, privacy, and boundaries, a fundamental lack of respect for your autonomy.
Neglect to show empathy: very painful, they fail to understand or recognize the emotional pain they cause, which can lead to a deep sense of loneliness.
Why your reaction makes sense
The particular loneliness of being neglected by someone who is right there is real, and it is not you being “too needy.” Wanting to be seen, responded to, and cared about isn’t excessive — it’s the baseline of what a relationship is supposed to provide. Going without it for a long time leaves a mark, and noticing that mark is healthy, not weak.
Intentionally denying or limiting communication, affection, or key resources to manipulate and control. Done to provoke feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, and fear.
Emotional withholding: refusing to share feelings or engage emotionally, leaving you unsupported and alone.
Information withholding: deliberately keeping important information from you to maintain control or create uncertainty.
Affection withholding: using affection as a weapon, giving or withholding it to punish, reward, or manipulate.
Financial withholding: controlling all finances and restricting access to money, making it difficult for you to leave.
Why your reaction makes sense
If you found yourself working harder and harder to earn back warmth that used to be freely given, that’s the trap working as designed — not a sign you did something to deserve the cold. When affection becomes a reward that gets switched off, trying to win it back is the natural human response. The exhaustion you feel is the cost of that, and it’s legitimate.
Speech that is nonsensical, disorganized, or confusing. When narcissists use this tactic, their words are essentially irrelevant to the topic at hand, they’re merely speaking a lot in order to invalidate you, trigger you, get you upset, and get you off track.
Deflection and projection: when confronted, they respond with a disjointed barrage of unrelated accusations, aiming to put you on the defensive. Before you can react to one claim, they’ve moved on to another. Pro tip: listen with a blank face, ignore the diversions, and repeat your original question.
Circular conversations: you seemingly resolve an issue, only for it to be brought up again with no acknowledgment of past resolution. They contradict themselves and repeat the same disproven arguments. Then they may have the gall to say “I feel like I’m going in circles with you”, making you feel crazy and burdensome.
Diversion: to avoid a direct question, they respond with an irrelevant story, drawing you into a convoluted tangent and away from your original concern.
Word salad gives you a headache. You may find yourself ruminating for days about the empty words they spewed, spending precious emotional and mental energy for no good purpose.
Your instinct may be to defend yourself and find a fair solution. Eventually, you realize: there is no making sense of Word Salad. You’re taking all the responsibility and doing all the work.
Why your reaction makes sense
Lying awake re-running a conversation that never made sense isn’t a failure of intelligence — it’s a smart mind doing exactly what it’s built to do: searching for the logic that would make things add up. The reason you can’t find it is that it was never there. Putting the puzzle down is allowed, and it’s often the only way to win.
I came to this work through my own recovery from CPTSD, which I continue to navigate. I have training and years of coaching experience in the NeuroAffective Relational Model. That, plus 5 years facilitating a private support group for 500 survivors of narcissistic abuse, is what I bring to the room.
You can name every tactic and still not trust yourself.
Recognizing gaslighting doesn’t end the internal loop of self-doubt. You may know exactly what was done, and still find yourself minimizing it, second-guessing your memory, or wondering if you were the problem.
That loop runs below the level of thought. That’s where the work is.
NARM-informed coaching is a slow, relational space for the part of recovery that insight alone can’t reach.
