Tag: Defining Narcissistic Abuse

Can a narcissist love us? It’s easy to become obsessed with that question.  Out of all the questions we have, isn’t that one of the critical questions about narcissists that we want to try to answer? [Read Do Narcissists Know They’re Narcissists? And Other Questions] There’s a kernel inside that question of whether narcissists can love that feels connected to almost every other question we have about the relationship.  If we could crack this question about narcissists and love, it seems as if everything else we don’t understand might fall into place. [Read Closure 7 Reasons Why Narcissists Won’t Give...

“You don’t own my body. You don’t own me.” When bachelorette Hannah Brown said those words to Luke Parker on the ABC series The Bachelorette this season, we knew things were flying off the rails. But it was what he said in response that warned us this wasn’t just the usual reality show drama–the relationship was heading into dangerous territory.   In the episode, Hannah had recently been on a date with one of the other men on the show in Riga, Latvia, during which the two of them had gone bungee jumping naked. When Luke heard about the date, he...

Narcissistic abuse in relationships is notoriously difficult to define. Because narcissists may engage in physical, sexual and financial abuse, victims may spend years recovering or rebuilding their lives psychologically at the same time they must also learn new ways to support themselves or save money after they have lost everything.   What is it about narcissistic abuse that sets it apart from the other forms of abuse? Why bother to carve out a separate space for it at all? Narcissists are cruel. Narcissists can belittle, name-call, and shame. They fluctuate between “honeymoon periods” and “abusive periods.” They are often controlling and...

Describing what narcissistic cruelty looks like is extremely difficult because it’s hard to explain exactly what it is in one or two sentences. In contrast…  We all have a shared definition of physical abuse that says something about the intentional infliction of bodily harm on someone for the purposes of controlling them. We also have shared definitions of psychological and emotional abuse. Some people separate the two types of abuse and some people don’t. Either way, both definitions basically revolve around acts of verbal aggression or non-physical hostility that result over time in the loss of self-esteem or ability to trust...