characteristics of narcissistic abuse — i looked into it

characteristics is a soft word for what i am about to describe. i tried softer words first, words like quirks and habits and rough patches, and none of them did the job, so we are stuck with the word the search bar uses.

writing this from a chair the swivel of which has, since 10:14am, lost about twenty degrees of useful turn. it is wednesday. boss is on a call about a vendor i have never heard of. i have, give or take, until lunch.

so. the characteristics of narcissistic abuse. that is the phrase i typed into a tab at 4:18 because a sentence in my head wouldn’t sit down. the characteristics of narcissistic abuse are not, despite what the search results would have you believe, dramatic. they are mostly small. small things, repeated, while a calm voice tells you the small things are normal and you are tired.

characteristics of narcissistic abuse: a pattern of small, repeated behaviors — denial, blame-shifting, calm contradiction, isolation, image control — performed by one person on another over time, while the person performing them insists, often kindly, that nothing is happening. the characteristics are mostly invisible from outside the room. that, in fact, is one of the characteristics.

CALM. IS. NOT. THE. SAME. AS. SAFE.

i need that on the wall before i go anywhere else. it is not in any manual i could quote with a clear conscience, but it is true the way the cold floor is true at 3am — you don’t need a citation, you have feet. some of the characteristics of narcissistic abuse i’m about to list will sound mild on the page. they were not mild in the apartment. they were mild on the page.

the apartment, in memory, with the lamp that hummed

the apartment is gone for me now, in the lease sense, but it is not gone in the other sense. i lived there from a year i won’t pin down to a year i won’t pin down. there was a lamp in the corner that hummed when the heat kicked in. there was a green chair, briefly, that i have written about elsewhere. there was a kitchen with two chairs and one of them was always the wrong one to sit in.

i bring this up because the first characteristic of narcissistic abuse is environmental. the room itself starts to lie. you walk in and the temperature feels off and you don’t know why. the lamp hums and you think, that lamp didn’t hum yesterday. the chair is the wrong chair. the room is fine. the room has not changed. you have been told, gently, eleven times, that you are misremembering, and the misremembering has migrated into the furniture. that is a characteristic. that is, i would argue, the load-bearing one.

the seven characteristics i wrote on a folded receipt

i wrote them down. i wrote them on the back of a receipt for a coffee i bought on tuesday. the receipt is in my wallet. the wallet is, as ever, mostly receipts and a single card. here are the seven, in the order they came out, which is the order they came back to me, which is not the order they happened.

1. the calm denial. the voice does not rise. that is the giveaway. real disagreements have a temperature. patient denial is its own thermostat.
2. the move from event to interpretation. “i didn’t say that” becomes “you took it the wrong way” becomes “this is just how you hear things”. three sentences, three doors, none of them open back to the event.
3. the slow shrinking of your own list of friends. not by demand, never by demand. by mood. by the slight sigh when a name comes up. you, helpfully, stop bringing the names up.
4. the rewritten timeline. things did not happen in the order you remember them. you are reminded of this often, with patience, with tea.
5. the front-room version of you. the way you behave in front of others becomes a separate, slightly funnier you. you don’t notice the seam at first. you do later, when you are alone in a parking lot.
6. the receipts you keep without meaning to. screenshots. a folder on your phone you don’t name. a mental log of dates. healthy people do not run forensics on their own life.
7. the relief, when they leave the room. this is the one i should have read first. it was on the bottom of the receipt, because i wrote it last. it was always the loudest one.

if four or more of these read like a tuesday in your apartment, that is data. it is not the only data, but it is data. you can do what you want with it. i mostly looked at mine and ate some toast.

the call that nobody answers, and what it has to do with this

a phone has been ringing on my apartment line, on and off, for about seven months. the phone is, technically, a phone. the calls are, technically, calls. the man who calls never identifies himself, and i never pick up, and the voicemail box has been full since the month before last. i do not know why he calls. i have a theory. i am not sharing the theory.

i mention it because narcissistic abuse, as a thing, trains you in a specific muscle: the muscle of not picking up. you learn it in the relationship and you keep it after. it generalizes. you stop answering the door. you stop opening the certified envelopes. you start a folder named “evidence” and another, mentally, named “later”. credit cards are a personality trait, i have said in another place — and it is true, but it is also true that not answering the phone is, after a while, also a personality trait. you can blame the man who calls, or you can blame three years in the apartment. i blame, conservatively, both.

the doctor’s office, the blood pressure cuff, the polite paragraph

i went to a doctor about a year and a half ago. this was not the doctor about the thing. this was the doctor about the other thing, the one that turned out to be fine, the one where they put the cuff on you and pump it twice. while she was pumping it the second time, she said, casually, looking at the wall: “is everything okay at home.” that’s how doctors do it. they look at the wall.

i said yes. i said yes the way you say yes when you have not yet decided which yes you mean. she nodded. she wrote something. she did not press. a doctor. a woman with a job and a wall. i did not, at the time, hear what she had asked. i heard it about four months later, in a parking lot, eating toast in a car. that is how it works. the doctor’s question is a small seed. it goes in the ground in june. it comes up, if it comes up, in october.

i’m telling you this because one of the unsexy characteristics of narcissistic abuse is delay. you don’t know what was happening while it was happening. the diagnosis arrives in the mail four months later, in a parking lot, with toast.

the certified letter, the drawer, the small absurd ritual

my drawer of certified letters has been in service since at least 2022. there are, by my count this morning, seven envelopes in there with the green slip taped to the front and the printed warning that says i am supposed to sign for them. i have signed for none of them. they came when i was at this desk. the post office, very politely, leaves a card. i, very politely, do not call the number on the card. this has been going on for a while.

narcissistic abuse, i’m fairly sure (kernberg said something close to this in a paperback i borrowed and never returned, and a psychologist on a podcast i could not now find said it more cleanly), trains you to handle official paper the same way it trained you to handle the calm voice in the kitchen. you assume the paper is wrong about you. you assume opening it will make it more real. you assume the drawer is, for now, sufficient.

the drawer is not sufficient. the drawer is, as a general rule, never sufficient. but the drawer is what i have, and the drawer is closed, and the drawer is, on a wednesday at 11:01am, not the most pressing item on my list.

the new yoga mat, the new microwave, the small evidence i am still here

i bought a third yoga mat about six weeks ago. the first one is in a closet. the second one is, by my best guess, under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. the third one is unrolled by the window because i had a moment, on a sunday, where i thought, if i unroll it, i will use it. i have not used it. the mat is doing nothing. the mat is doing what mats do.

the microwave on the counter is the seventh i have killed. the seventh, not the seventh in current ownership — the seventh i have personally ended. dave has the list. dave keeps the list because dave finds the list funny and because dave is the kind of person who keeps lists about other people, which is, now that i write it, also a characteristic, but of something else. the volvo guy, who has nothing to do with any of this, drives a car with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. i have a chair, as established earlier in this paragraph, that lost twenty degrees of swivel this morning.

i mention the mat and the microwave because, in the middle of a post about characteristics of narcissistic abuse, the small dumb objects in your apartment are also data. the third yoga mat is a man trying. the seventh microwave is a man trying. the third yoga mat and the seventh microwave are not, on their own, evidence of anything. but together with the drawer of certified letters and the full voicemail and the receipt with seven characteristics on the back of it, they are, possibly, a profile.

the test, the soft kind, the one i should have given earlier

here is what i would tell the version of me who lived in the apartment, if i could find his number, which is, by now, a different number, which i changed.

name one of the seven characteristics. just one. the smallest one. say it out loud, calmly, in the kitchen, while the kettle is doing whatever kettles do. say “i have noticed the lamp hums and i don’t think i misremembered the lamp.” watch what happens in the next thirty seconds.

if there is a pause and a question and an actual response — that is a relationship.

if you are told, calmly, that the lamp does not hum and never has, and possibly that you have been working too hard, and possibly that maybe you should call your mother more — that is the answer. that is the entire test. it is a small test. it works.

i did not run the test for three years. when i finally did, i passed and they failed, and the apartment, eventually, ended. the lamp, in fairness to the lamp, did hum. it was the heat. there was a vent behind it. i checked, after, with a flashlight, alone, like a man checking that the house had been real.

if you want the longer version of the parent topic, i wrote about gaslighting and what my ex insists did not happen, which is the larger room this post lives inside. there is also a separate piece on what people mean when they say “toxic person”, which overlaps with this without being the same thing. and if you want a colder, more clinical-feeling angle, the post on malignant narcissism is sitting next to this on the shelf. for the trait list as a standalone, see narcissist definition and traits. for the question of whether the word “toxic” is even doing any work, see define a toxic person.

if you want the inverted version, where the room itself is doing the lying — the original 1944 source for the verb, with ingrid bergman in the apartment with the dimming lights — there is a film about it. the film is called gaslight (1944). it is the source of the word. i watched it on a sunday. i did not finish the popcorn. the apartment, in the film, is also haunted by a lamp. some things are very old.

the chair has, since the start of this post, lost another five degrees of swivel. i estimate full lockup by friday. the boss is still on the vendor call. the swivel will go before the call does.

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