Glossary
Terminology.
A working vocabulary for narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, and the patterns of abuse those things produce. Each term has a short summary here and a deeper page underneath. Where the site treats a term at length elsewhere, the deeper page is also cross-linked.
A
B
BIFF
BIFF: Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm — Bill Eddy's framework for written communication with a high-conflict ex, family member, or co-parent. The operating standard for grey-rock written exchanges.
Boundaries
Boundaries: the limits a person sets on what behavior they will accept from others. What the term means in the therapy literature, how it differs from rules and demands, and how it is weaponized in narcissistic dynamics.
C
Cluster B Personality Disorders
Cluster B: the DSM grouping of personality disorders characterized by dramatic, emotional, or erratic patterns — antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic personality disorders. Where the cluster is useful and where it isn't.
Codependency
Codependency: the relational pattern in which one person's identity and self-worth become organized around managing another person's emotional state. The term's origin in addiction recovery and its overlap with the fawn response and trauma bond.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance: the psychological discomfort of holding two contradictory beliefs at once. Why survivors of narcissistic abuse live in chronic dissonance, and how the brain resolves it in ways that often favor the abuser.
Cognitive vs. Affective Empathy
Cognitive empathy (understanding what another person feels) vs. affective empathy (actually feeling it with them). The distinction is central to understanding how narcissists can appear empathetic while lacking the capacity to be moved by another's pain.
Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)
Complex PTSD (C-PTSD): the trauma-response cluster produced by prolonged interpersonal abuse from which escape is difficult. Distinct from classical PTSD; the most common diagnosis among long-term survivors of narcissistic abuse.
Covert Narcissism
Covert (vulnerable) narcissism: the quiet, inward-coded presentation of pathological narcissism. Same engine as the grandiose version, very different surface — and far harder to recognize from inside the relationship.
Custody Evaluator
Custody evaluator: a court-appointed mental-health professional who assesses parents and children in a custody dispute and recommends a parenting arrangement to the court. Training, methodology, and competence vary widely.
D
DARVO
DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The signature confrontational move used by perpetrators of psychological and sexual abuse to escape accountability. Coined by Jennifer Freyd of the University of Oregon.
Deflection
Deflection: a defensive maneuver in which an accusation, criticism, or concern is redirected away from the person it applies to. Closely related to projection, often used in combination with DARVO during confrontations.
Devaluation
Devaluation: the second phase of the narcissistic-abuse cycle, in which idealization tapers, criticism appears, and the relationship slowly shifts from elevation to slow undermining. Often the longest phase.
Discard
Discard: the third phase of the narcissistic-abuse cycle. The relationship ends — often abruptly, frequently with the inversion of the survivor as the abuser. Not always a final break; sometimes a withdrawal followed by hoovering.
Dissociation
Dissociation: a trauma response involving a disruption in the normal integration of memory, identity, emotion, and perception. Common in survivors of long-term abuse and on a spectrum from mild (zoning out) to severe (DID).
E
Ego-syntonic / Ego-dystonic
Ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic: clinical adjectives describing whether a mental pattern is experienced as part of one's identity (syntonic) or as foreign and disturbing (dystonic). Why NPD is generally ego-syntonic, and why that matters for treatment prognosis.
Emotional Incest
Emotional incest (covert incest): a parent's use of a child as an emotional partner, confidant, or surrogate spouse. Not sexual; no less damaging. Common in households with a narcissistic parent.
Empath
Empath, in the clinical-reference sense: a person high in affective empathy, often with a fawn-response patterning, who experiences others' emotional states involuntarily and tends toward one-directional giving. Not a metaphysical category.
Enmeshment
Enmeshment: a family-systems configuration in which boundaries between members are systematically blurred and individual identity is subordinated to the family unit (or to a dominant member's emotional needs).
F
Fawn Response
Fawn response: the trauma response in which the survivor manages threat by appeasement and accommodation rather than by fight, flight, or freeze. Overrepresented in survivors of long covert abuse. Coined by Pete Walker.
Flying Monkeys
Flying monkeys: third parties — friends, family, sometimes the survivor's own children — recruited by the narcissist to deliver pressure, criticism, or surveillance on their behalf. Named after the Wicked Witch's enforcers in The Wizard of Oz.
FOG: Fear, Obligation, Guilt
FOG — Fear, Obligation, and Guilt: the emotional levers most commonly used to control survivors in narcissistic relationships. Coined by Susan Forward in Emotional Blackmail (1997).
Future-faking
Future-faking: vivid, detailed promises about a shared future used to extract present compliance. The promises rarely materialize; new ones replace them when the old ones come due.
G
Gaslighting
Gaslighting: the persistent, deliberate undermining of someone's perception of reality. Named after the 1944 film Gaslight. Distinct from ordinary disagreement; the goal is to make the target doubt their own senses and memory.
Golden Child
Golden child: the role in a narcissistic family system assigned to the child whose wins are treated as the parent's. Paired with the scapegoat role. Both children are damaged; the damage differs.
Grandiose Narcissism
Grandiose narcissism: the overt, openly self-aggrandizing presentation of pathological narcissism. The picture the word usually evokes — exhibitionistic, entitled, contemptuous of others, easy to identify from outside.
Grey Rock
Grey rock: the defensive strategy of becoming as boring as possible in the narcissist's presence. Used when no contact isn't available — co-parenting, shared workplace, family obligation.
Guardian ad Litem (GAL)
Guardian ad litem (GAL): a court-appointed attorney or advocate whose role is to represent a child's best interests in a family-court case. Training varies; recognition of high-conflict and personality-disorder dynamics varies more.
H
High-Conflict Personality
High-conflict personality: Bill Eddy's practical framework for the personality patterns that consistently produce escalating conflict — particularly in legal, family-court, and workplace contexts. Adjacent to but distinct from Cluster B personality disorders.
Hoovering
Hoovering: attempts to draw the survivor back into the relationship after a withdrawal, breakup, or no-contact period. Named after the vacuum brand. Often arrives months after the discard.
I
Idealization
Idealization: the first phase of the narcissistic-abuse cycle. A flood of attention, intensity, declarations, and accelerated intimacy. Sometimes called love bombing in the original-attraction context.
Identified Patient
Identified patient: the family-systems term for the member of a dysfunctional family who carries the visible symptoms — the \"designated sick one\" — while the actual pathology lives elsewhere in the system. Often the scapegoat.
Intermittent Reinforcement
Intermittent reinforcement: the conditioning schedule in which rewards are delivered unpredictably. Among the most behaviorally addictive schedules known. The neurochemical foundation of trauma bonding.
L
Limited Contact
Limited contact (LC): the harm-reduction strategy of narrowing interactions with a narcissist to a minimum rather than going full no-contact. Sometimes the right choice; sometimes a way station to full no-contact.
Love Bombing
Love bombing: early-relationship flooding of attention, gifts, intensity, and declarations of certainty. Designed to attach the target faster than ordinary intimacy would allow. The functional name for idealization at first meeting.
M
Malignant Narcissism
Malignant narcissism: NPD plus antisocial features, paranoid traits, and ego-syntonic aggression. A term coined by Erich Fromm (1964) and developed clinically by Otto Kernberg. Can occur in either grandiose or covert form.
Maternal Presumption
Maternal presumption: the legal-cultural default that mothers are presumed to be the primary caregiver in custody disputes. Formally eliminated in most American jurisdictions; persistent in practice. Why it matters for male survivors.
Mirroring
Mirroring: the narcissist's accurate, accelerated reflecting-back of the target's values, interests, language, and aesthetic during the idealization phase. The mechanism behind why love-bombing feels like finally being seen.
N
Narcissistic Collapse
Narcissistic collapse: the temporary breakdown of the narcissist's self-image and defenses, usually triggered by a significant injury — public failure, exposure, abandonment. Can produce depression, suicidality, or rage.
Narcissistic Injury
Narcissistic injury: a wound to the narcissist's self-image triggered by criticism, defeat, exposure, or any event that contradicts the grandiose self-concept. The precipitating event for narcissistic rage and collapse.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD): the DSM-5-TR diagnosis defined by a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy. The threshold is much higher than the everyday use of the word implies.
Narcissistic Rage
Narcissistic rage: the acute, disproportionate aggressive response to a perceived narcissistic injury. Heinz Kohut's term. Most often seen in grandiose presentations; covert narcissists express it differently.
Narcissistic Supply
Narcissistic supply: the continuous flow of attention, admiration, sympathy, fear, or other emotional input that pathological narcissists require from the people around them. The currency varies (admiration in grandiose, pity in covert); the function is the same.
No Contact
No contact: the complete cessation of communication and exposure to a narcissistic abuser. The most reliable recovery strategy where it can be sustained. The neurobiological reasoning behind it and what it requires.
O
P
Parental Alienation
Parental alienation: the systematic turning of children against the targeted parent, often delivered through a thousand small interventions rather than a single dramatic one. Most aggressive after separations.
Parentification
Parentification: a configuration in which a child is required to function as the emotional or practical caregiver of a parent. Common in households with a narcissistic parent; damaging to development and often correlates with C-PTSD in adulthood.
Pathological Lying
Pathological lying: a sustained pattern of dishonesty disconnected from strategic benefit. Common in pathological narcissism and antisocial personality. Differs from situational lying in that the deception is reflexive rather than purposeful.
Projection
Projection: the defense mechanism in which one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or behaviors are attributed to someone else. Common in narcissistic confrontation; the accusations leveled often describe the accuser more accurately than the accused.
Projective Identification
Projective identification: a more elaborate defense than ordinary projection, in which the target is pressured into actually experiencing or enacting the projected quality. Coined by Melanie Klein; central to object relations theory.
R
S
Scapegoat
Scapegoat: the role assigned, in a narcissistic family system, to the child onto whom the parent's projected inadequacy and shame are placed. The other side of the golden child role. The damage is severe and durable.
Smear Campaign
Smear campaign: the slow, distributed reputation work conducted by a narcissist in the survivor's absence — often over years — so that when an open break comes, the audience has already been primed to side against the survivor.
Splitting
Splitting: the psychological defense mechanism in which a person cannot hold mixed feelings about another and instead alternates between all-good and all-bad views. Foundational in Otto Kernberg's framework for severe personality disorders.
Stonewalling
Stonewalling: the refusal to engage with another person's communication — silent treatment, walking away, blank-faced non-response. One of John Gottman's \"Four Horsemen\" of relationship destruction.
T
Trauma Bond
Trauma bond: the neurobiological attachment that develops between a survivor and an abuser whose behavior follows an intermittent-reinforcement pattern. Resembles addiction more than affection.
Triangulation
Triangulation: the systematic drawing-in of third parties into a two-person relationship to destabilize and control. Originally a family-systems concept; one of the most damaging tactics in narcissistic dynamics.
True Self / False Self
True self vs. false self: D. W. Winnicott's distinction between the authentic self and the protective compliant surface developed in response to a non-attuned caregiver. Foundational to understanding narcissistic structure.
