Glossary of Narcissism to Protect Yourself From Harm

Two types of people have mental health symptoms. One are those who exhibit difficult behaviours due to their narcissistic, unsociable and abusive personality characteristics or traits (as elucidated in this Glossary). The other are their victims who suffer from physical, financial, mental or emotional harm including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Depression caused by such beings. While victims seek out therapy and support out of need, abusers are usually resistant to any interventions and often pretend to be victims themselves.

Narcissism and Antisocial Personality Traits include a large range of behavioural symptoms that you can identify in your own dealings, relationships, or associations with these personality types or in day to day conversations with them. While Narcissists are demarcated by a solid ego and selfishness, Antisocial Personalities in addition include Psychopathy (emotional rigidity), Sadism (being happy if others are sad), and Machiavellian tendencies (exploitative and deceitful), that are less known in media and social media as opposed to Narcissism which is gaining prominence.

An example of such behaviour traits include social apathy regarding the plight of victim animals in animal agriculture industries, and the behaviour of regarding human life as superior while harming other life unnecessarily and arguing against change. Another example is Domestic Abuse in which most victims agree that the abuser’s seem to have gone to the ‘same school’ as they exhibit such common traits and predictable patterns.

While many people exhibit such traits from time to time, some people being disordered are marked by these behaviours to a clinical or sub-clinical level. Such personalities can be unchangeable and the best way to protect yourself usually is to identify them and to stay safely away, unemotional about them, and to go no contact if need be.

Low Moral Compass: Not being able to understand what is good or evil in terms of moral values, kindness, compassion, being decent in behaviour, not hurting or harming others, but instead having own subjective basis or decision making or own set of rules based on convenience.

Limited Empathy: Deeply lacking the capacity to think from someone else’s point of view when needed, but seeing things usually from their own limited perspective and standpoint rather than of the victim, or the one who is likely to suffer or be harmed.

Poor Insight: Not being able to look within themselves or their own thoughts, behaviours, or beliefs in an objective or neutral way in order to discern right from wrong, or good from evil, but instead trying to be superficial in order to dismiss their own negative behaviour.

Minimising: Making their abuse and its effects sound like nothing much happened and the victim is overreacting or being melodramatic or exaggerating something.

Denial: Completely denying their own actions and its impacts on their victims, and lying that they did nothing wrong or that there is no impact of their behaviour.

Cognitive Dissonance: Creating a strong yet false story or fictional narrative, oddly different than reality and selling it to themselves and others repeatedly, so that one is hooked on, overly attached to that core belief and unable to hear anything against it or change their patterns of thinking or behaviour.

Projection: Transferring your own guilt to the victim by projecting your own traits onto them unconsciously, e.g. thinking the victim is at fault, angry, militant, aggressive, lying, and so on.

Delusional Behaviour: To be completely sold to their own story in order to detach completely from truth or reality and to live in a false reality that has no basis in truth.

Pretentious: Behaving more important than they are, puffed up chest or false demeanour and facial expressions, or acting cocky, using slang or accents.

Seductive: Trying to woo you and charm you to trust them, meet them, listen to them, and to be engrossed with their world in order to relate with them.

Oversharing: Starting a relationship by saying too much, being in love too suddenly, or taking things too fast, or getting intimate, over-interested or saying that they are compatible, right at the beginning, or starting at a very positive note to get you drawn in.

Flattery: Appeal to your vanity or ego to make you feel obliged to engage with them. Praising you more than required, such as looks, your generosity, your intelligence, your kindness, or how much they admire you, or respect you, so as to get more out of you and to make you feel rewarded for being more sensitive and giving more time or patience to them.

Sweet Talking: Calming you down by saying sweet words, sugar-coating their intent, or using diplomacy and psychological tactics to convince you that they are nicer than they actually are, e.g. saying honey, sweetie, my lovely, etc., taking you out to a dinner, or treating you well to get what they want.

Cunning Behaviour: Trying to win favours, support, or deals, by luring you into their plans, and striking a negotiation when they are completely undeserving or wrong, especially when the victim is about to stop the association.

Jargons: Impressing others with fancy words, vocabulary, words picked up from the internet or dictionary, so that others think they are very clever and smart as well as brighter than they actually are, for example in a job interview, or a date or meeting.

Deceitful: Lying about their achievements, accomplishments and past background, so as to get a job, promotion, advantage in a social event, relationship, or victory in a battle.

Future Faking: Overpromising what being with them or trusting them will eventually lead to and giving a false dream or expectation of reality when not really meaning the same, so that you get into bed, live with them, or offer them work, finances or any support that they need. Or making false threats or impressions that they are more capable for harm, more well connected and stronger as an enemy than they actually are.

False Social Image: Using selfies, makeup, clothing sense, or style, fan following, likes, testimonials, or other techniques, to pretend that they are better than they actually are, or pretending to do things that enhance their social image or lifestyle, when they actually are only gratifying their own ego.

Co-dependency: Making you so dependent on them that you cannot perceive a life or a moment without their support or relationship and cannot stand your own ground.

Isolation: Taking you away from your supporters, family, friends, colleagues, or helpers, physically or emotionally, so that you depend solely on them and are unable to find any emotional, practical, or financial support or help when they abuse you. E.g. telling you that no-one really loves you apart from them, or to split your business partnerships or other significant relationships by making you feel upset with others, or make you move away physically from them.

Alienation: Making others withdraw support towards the actual victim at the crucial moment, and align instead with the abuser, by manipulating others with lies or false impressions, so that the victim has no-one to fall back on. e.g. parental alienation by making children feel more connected emotionally with the narcissistic parent.

Selfishness: It is always about their self gratification and to make them the key person, such as getting their happiness, career success, wishes fulfilled, enjoyment, travel, sexual satisfaction, and so on, not about yours.

Controlling behaviour: Make others their puppets to do what they desire, or for everyone’s life to revolve around their plans.

Narcissistic Supply: To receive something out of someone in order to fulfil own needs or wants, e.g. a vehicle ride, a job offer, romance, children, and then hop on and hop off a relationship or to move on to the next victim, next target, or next destination or goal or adventure in life instead of reflecting on what went wrong and on their own role in it.

I, Me and Myself: Using these words a lot when making plans and discussing things with you or others based on their desire or ego, and overlooking the needs of others.

Ego: It is always about what is in it for them, they are not giving, generous or charitable by nature except when they want to appear good for a hidden purpose.

Give Breadcrumbs: Gifts that do not mean much or are less valuable as a form of abuse, or without much love or special words, or meaning, especially when you are trying to move out or leave or if they abuse you.

Devaluation: To make you feel worthless and insignificant or unloved, and to put you down.

Trauma Bonding: To make you long for their company or crave their time or affection by withdrawing and resuming the relationship.

Humiliation: Degrading you or insulting you by calling you names or ridiculing you with gestures, words, jargons, or abusive behaviour, to make you feel you are stupid.

Gaslighting: Make you feel you are mentally ill, psychotic, or crazy due to your innate behaviour even if they are the ones causing you to be stressed.

Silent Treatment: Not talking to you and cold treatment as a form of punishment.

Self inflation: Making their ego larger than life so as to make them focus on you and to make themselves the centre of drama or attention.

Tantrums and Melodrama: To draw attention, as well as risky behaviour, suicide, sudden outbursts that are well planned.

Covert narcissism: To make you pity them and feel sorry for them and to ask for sympathy as a means of getting attention.

Grandiosity: Making themselves feel more superior by exaggerating facts such as their race, looks, family origins, caste, business, finances, intelligence, certifications, degrees, status, and so on.

Toxicity: Being too positive in a toxic way or too negative or criticising, inappropriately, so as to make you feel unhappy about yourself and your life and make you stressed up.

Narcissistic Rage: Sudden anger when you realize what they have done or seem to gather strength in order to express yourself.

Revenge Tactics: Reacting against you or making allegations and complaints against you if you speak against their abusive behaviour or disclose it or report it. Or using revenge porn, further abuse, fighting at court, or other revenge tactics to get even with you.

Emotional Blackmail: Make you feel obliged to do things their way or the highway, by making you feel as if something really bad could happen otherwise.

Threatening: Lying or actually threatening to do something bad against you or your family members to scare you and make you do what they want, with physical weapons or without.

Intimidation: Acting more superior and aggressive or dangerous in order to make you respect them and obey them and to dominate over you, or terrorise you.

Objectification: You are not treated like a person with your own personality, wishes, and needs, but just as an object, or their property, of some economic or personal value or gainfulness to them. Treating you as a commodity to use, or even throw out when unnecessary, spent, or worn out, rather than as a distinct individual.

Slavery: Using you as a slave who satisfies them or works for them, e.g. providing them sex, food, ego boost, arm candy, meeting needs of their family, working in their office, helping out others in their life, and so on, without any equivalent return to you and often against your true will as an obligation or taking you for granted.

Exploitation: To use you as a means to an end, especially in a Machiavellian way, to gain a benefit out of you or your work without due credit or enough reward to you so that they receive the credit, result or benefit but not you.

Lacking Object Constancy: Not being able to retain a bond or a relationship for a reasonable amount of time, even if one is upset or angry or traumatised temporarily and not giving people another chance or an opportunity to change their behaviour or learn something when possible and appropriate.

Triangulation: Talking about others, so as to make you feel less important or jealous, e.g. family members, an ex, other friends, or colleagues, or someone who have a crush on them, or whom they seem to like.

Divide and Conquer: Spreading discord within home, group, family, or colleagues, so that people are unable to resonate with a common purpose and the seeds of conflict are sown in order to harm certain victims who are progressively isolated and targeted slyly.

Enablers: Those who allow narcissists to continue their behaviour by being apologists, and not saying much against them in a clear enough way, to avoid conflict or even placate them, or at times side with them, thereby absorbing their behaviours and letting abuse go on unperturbed. Not being violent themselves but also not taking a stand against violence. At times engaging with them and being peace-able or trying to make victims achieve a compromise against what is good for them.

Passive Aggression: Tactics to devalue a victim without physical or overt violence by making sly remarks, facial gestures, inappropriate jokes, making a dig, or having a slight go at them in a wrong way.

Minions: Try to use others to carry out their agenda, to talk against you or gang up against you and pull you down or to speak their words with full faith in them, such as fan club or those used for goodwill or even paid.

Flying Monkeys: Sending others to warn you, threaten you or harm you, to do their bidding.

Scapegoating: Treating one child or family member as less important than other, emotional neglect, as opposed to the Golden boy or girl who is valued and appreciated.

Parentification: To make a child feel more responsible than they are capable of such as making them work, be your assistant, making them do things for you or care for you, and giving you attention and services, sex, food, company, or anything that an adult is expected to do, such as a spouse, especially when in conflict with a spouse.

Reverse Blaming and Shaming of Victim: Suddenly becoming the victim themselves to get pity of others and to blame the actual victim of narcissism behaviour or any abuse.

Smear Campaign: To spread false stories and lies about you and make you feel as if you are the bad person, on social media, in social circles, among friends, family, relatives, media and so on.

Manipulation: Using lies to distort truth and to make others see their point of view with well orchestrated efforts to get everyone to support them.

Ghosting: Suddenly disappearing on you without any fault of yours to make you feel unwanted or confused and to keep you looking for them.

Hoovering: Trying to stop the victim from sliding away by sucking them back into the argument, making them feel like they are special, making them feel listened to or giving a false impression that things will change in a more positive direction henceforth.

False Tears: Crocodile tears to make you feel guilty and to make you feel like you must love them and feel really sorry to them.

Acting: Practicing what to say in front of the mirror, repeating dialogues of imagined conversations in the mind, preparing well for putting on a show, or behaving like a character from a fictional story or movie.

Selective Listening: Not focusing on what you are really saying but only on what they would use in their own arguments or agendas, especially against you.

Love Bombing: Rewarding you when they want to by showering you with affection, presents, hugs, sexual intimacy, kisses, etc., out of the blue.

Entitlement: Wrongly believing they own you or are supposed to get something out of you or the relationship, whether emotional, sexual, financial, comfort, service, or otherwise.

Idealization: Making a false expectation of what they want from your association or relationship ideally, so that you feel as if you may not be good enough unless you live up-to their unreasonable or unrealistic standards.

Self Deprecation or Self Criticism: Making themselves sound very humble and gentle, or well behaved by cleverly using self deprecating terms or by criticising themselves covertly, to make you praise them as a form of reverse psychology tactic.

Wearing Out: Making you feel so tired, sleep deprived, exhausted, fed up, and stressed that you have no capacity to fight anymore and simply accept defeat or give in to your circumstances.

Confuse, Distract, Bewilder: To draw attention away from their own behaviour they would confuse others by saying something completely unrelated, or distract attention to a joke, or point out towards superficial or minor issues to make everyone go on a wild goose chase.

False Apology: Saying sorry in a way that put the victim as the faulty person indirectly, for example, ‘sorry that you lack empathy’, or ‘sorry that you are not emotionally available to me’, ‘sorry that you do not know what you are losing’.

Physical Violence: Making you fear them using physical hitting, injury, slapping, beating, strangulation, pushing, pulling, shaking, or any other physically hurtful behaviour with or without physical injury.

Sadism: Making others feel hurt physically or emotionally, or cause trauma, or make someone cry, to feel better about yourself, to feel more powerful, grandiose, capable of harm, or to enjoy the sense of inflicting pain or sorrow on others.

Masochism: Hurting themselves or attempting suicide, deliberately in order to feel more deserving of love, sympathy, pity, reward, affection, or for any other reason.

Coercion: Making you feel talked into something you actually did not want to do but were instigated or commanded into doing, or being obliged to co-operate for fear of letting someone down, or making them insecure, hurt, or unwanted, including being coerced into doing something illegal or immoral.

Sexual Violence: Sexual manipulation by making you drugged or secluded, sexual control or coercion by making you respond in-spite of not actually wanting it, sexual cheating or adultery, sexual intimidation by showing body parts or images forcibly or weapons, forced penetration or rape, sexual harassment by sexting or repeatedly asking for sex or intimacy till you are fed up or give in.