traits of narcissistic abuse — 5 columns and a bank app

traits, plural, is the academic version of this conversation. abuse, as a noun, is the version that gets stuck in your throat at brunch when somebody asks what you mean. i have used both words at different brunches with mixed results. the brunches did not, after, invite me back.

thursday, 11:23am, between a sprint retro that ran long and a vendor onboarding not yet started. carla is downstairs at the kitchenette refilling a mug she has refilled three times already. one airpod in; the other is on sabbatical in a coat pocket from november.

so the project at this desk, before the vendor people come in with their slide deck, is to write the post about traits of narcissistic abuse as a side-by-side. side-by-side is the only way the word ever stops looking dramatic and starts looking accurate. lists alone read like complaints. tables read like evidence. that is, dishearteningly, mostly a layout difference.

traits of narcissistic abuse: a stable set of behaviors — calm contradiction, scheduled forgetting, image control, weaponized patience, bookkeeping of small slights — performed by one person on another over a long stretch, while the person performing them maintains, with great composure, that nothing unusual is happening. the traits are stable. the harm, told back, becomes a story.

A. TRAIT. IS. NOT. A. MOOD.

i need that on the wall before the columns get drawn, because the laziest version of this conversation collapses every trait into “they were having a bad day”. a bad day is a missed train. a bad day is not a four-year layered system that requires a bank app i no longer open. the line is the duration and the architecture, not the volume.

traits of narcissistic abuse, the working set (and why i settled on five)

the working set, as i wrote it on the back of a deposit slip in the desk drawer, is five. it has been seven, in earlier drafts of my own life. five is what survives when you remove the duplicates and the ones used to cushion the harder ones. here are the five, plain, before the table:

1. calm contradiction. the voice does not rise. that is the giveaway. real disagreements have a temperature; this one runs at room temperature, on purpose.
2. scheduled forgetting. a thing said, agreed, paid for, sent — is now a thing that, in their telling, was never said, never agreed. the forgetting arrives on cue.
3. image control. the public version is a performance. the private version is the bill for it.
4. weaponized patience. they will wait you out. they will smile while they wait. patience, used this way, is a weather system.
5. bookkeeping of small slights. they keep a ledger you cannot see. an offhand sentence from 2018 is produced, intact, in 2022, because it was filed. you, meanwhile, are running on a notepad you keep losing.

column-format below. the column format does a job lists cannot — it makes the comparison concrete, which is how you stop arguing with yourself about whether the word fits. this set overlaps with, but does not duplicate, the slower piece i wrote about the canonical erasure version of all this, where a partner calmly insists the thing you remember did not happen. that piece is the engine of the present one. read it if you have not, then come back to the columns.

the comparative table — traits vs reactions, side by side

two columns, five rows, no commentary in the table itself. commentary after.

the table is, in honest service, the post. one row leaning right-column on a hard week is not narcissistic abuse — that is a hard week. five rows leaning right-column for nine months running, and you have what mike at the bar would call a pattern with a postal code. it has an address. you can mail things to it. or, as in my case, you can stop mailing.

and frankly, while we are inside a kitchen metaphor: a hot take from a smaller corner of the same head — if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. parsley is, structurally, image control on a plate. it does nothing to the dish; it confirms a story about the dish. the right column in the table is full of parsley you ate while telling yourself the dish was fine.

the bank app i don’t open and what it represents here

there is, on my phone, a bank app i have not opened in fifty-one days. the app is fine. the bank is fine. there is, almost certainly, money in the account. the app is not the problem. the not-opening is the trait, made digital.

narcissistic abuse, when it works on you long enough, trains a specific muscle: not opening things. you stop opening certified mail. you stop opening drawers where it piles up. you stop opening the bank app because the bank app became a small theater for the same dynamic — a number that demands a reaction, a thing you can choose, on a thursday, not to face. not-opening is, after a while, a personality trait. it is not a characteristic of money. it is a characteristic of the room you used to live in.

somewhere online, meanwhile, a man in a quarter-zip is selling spot the narcissist in 14 days for $397 — eight thousand followers, one rented yacht for the photographs. he is not going to mention the bank app, because the bank app is not photogenic. that is why the diagnosis is so hard to sell — it lives in small unphotogenic objects you stop opening, not in the seventeen-slide carousel. and the liar inside this dynamic — the kind of liar who lies in a way that survives confrontation — is, in the productivity bro’s economy, the central villain. he is right about that liar and wrong about the address. the trait lives in your bank app. the lie lives in the carousel.

the ex would have a different table, allegedly

i should be honest before this gets too tidy. the ex, who has not been in any of my rooms for years, would, if she read this, build a different table. her left column would have words like emotional, sensitive, untrusting. her right column would have things i did, with footnotes. she had, has, taste in fonts. the table would look correct.

two tables, both formatted, both internally consistent — and only one of them lived, on average, with the lights off, screenshotting receipts at 2am for a folder named “misc”. the table is not the verdict. the table is the question.

i was at the supermarket on saturday. there is an aisle between bread and the freezer where the floor changes texture — tile to a cheaper tile. i was on the seam when somebody two carts away laughed in a way that put me, briefly, in 2018. i stood there for, possibly, twenty seconds. then i bought parsley i did not need, because parsley was the closest thing to my hand. the parsley is now in a glass on my counter. image control, on my own counter, performed by me, on me. this is what the right column does, after years. it stays.

for the boss-shaped version of all this — same traits, different floor, corner office and a calendar invite — i wrote a separate piece about how the same playbook runs in management, with performance plans instead of certified letters. it overlaps with the relational version without being it. its own table.

verdict — the traits are stable, the harm is a story, the table is the post

for the canonical, properly-acted version of all this — the calm voice in the apartment with the dimming lights — there is a film. the wife in it eventually stops believing the lamp. the film is gaslight (1944), with ingrid bergman in the role of the woman who finally stops apologizing to the lamp. some films are very old and still embarrassingly correct.

the vendor people are walking up the stairs. four minutes. the parsley is still on the counter. it will, by sunday, be brown, and i will throw it away, and a smaller version of this whole post will happen in the kitchen and nobody will see it. some posts are private.

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