signs of a narcissistic abuser — 1 fairly sure investigation

the abuser version is the part of the venn diagram people do not want to draw because then somebody you know shows up inside the circle. somebody i knew showed up inside the circle. i drew it anyway, in pencil first.

i am writing this on a wednesday, at the workstation that pays my electricity, while carla sits through an all-hands rollout on the third floor that was supposed to start at 10:38am and started at 10:51am, which gives me, generously, another forty minutes before the elevator coughs her back. the pencil is real. the venn diagram is on a printer-paper page that i will be folding into my back pocket and forgetting until laundry.

writing this with the second cup of office coffee, which is achievement, even if the achievement is questionable. one ear is on the corridor. the other is on this list.

before the list, the qualifier. the regular kind of gaslighting that began with a relationship that ended in 2019 is one ingredient. the abuser version is that ingredient plus the rest of the recipe. it has more parts. it leaves a longer record. and unlike the textbook entry on what makes a toxic person, in plain language, this one tends not to identify itself in conversation. it identifies itself in your sleep schedule.

PATTERN. NOT. A. TUESDAY.

1. signs of a narcissistic abuser, the disclaimer up front

i am not a doctor. a doctor is a man with a job, a parking spot, and the kind of pension that makes me feel ashamed of my checking account. i write blog posts on a desk i don’t fully own. with that out of the way: this post lists eight signs of a narcissistic abuser that i either lived through or watched somebody i love live through, and i’m putting them in two stacks because that’s how my brain has been organizing the last few months.

stack one is the dodged-call stack. it is the stack of behaviors that, by the time you spot them, have already trained you to not pick up your own phone. stack two is the fridge stack. it is the stack where you stop trusting basic facts about your own kitchen, and your own memory of having put a thing in it.

i borrow from the fridge stack because the fridge in question is mine. it is, as i have written elsewhere, a schrodinger’s fridge — i do not open it because not opening it is the only way the leftovers in there remain, in some technical sense, food. opening it collapses the wave function and ruins my afternoon. the same principle, scaled up, is what an abuser trains you into. you stop opening doors because closed doors are the only doors that don’t betray you.

2. the moms house example, briefly, off-page

the cleanest example i have is not mine. it belongs to someone whose mom’s house, off in another zip code, became the safe phone. when the bad calls came, this person would call the mom’s house first to use up the signal. mom’s house was the buffer. mom never knew. mom was, in her own way, an unwitting firewall.

i mention this only because it is what people who live near a narcissistic abuser do. they construct an entire architecture of buffer calls. they have a buffer call for the morning. they have a buffer call for the evening. they have, on a sunday, a buffer call to a parent that lasts seventeen minutes longer than it should because hanging up means picking up the next thing. nobody on the buffer calls knows they are buffer calls. that is the whole point. the abuse, you will notice, is never on the page. it is always off-page, in the kitchen, in the car, in the silence after the parent says “are you sure you’re okay” and the answer is “yes, i’m just tired”.

3. items 1 to 4, the dodged-call ones — signs of a narcissistic abuser in your phone behavior

this is stack one. these are signs of a narcissistic abuser as they show up in your phone, your contacts list, and the small superstitious rituals you have invented around your ringer.

1. you stop answering numbers you don’t know. at first this is reasonable. at some point it becomes a policy. the policy expands. you stop answering numbers you do know. then you stop answering at all. the voicemail, by my own embarrassing estimate, has been full for eight months. the voicemail is a kind of confession i am not going to read aloud.
2. you have a designated safe contact who is not a person. for me, for a stretch, it was the bank. for somebody i love, it was a parent. the safe contact is the one you can pick up without your stomach moving. notice if your safe contact list is smaller than it was a year ago. that’s the first metric.
3. the man who calls. you know who this is in your own life. his name is different. his number changes. but he calls at 2:14pm on a tuesday and the way you go quiet in the room is the way a small animal goes quiet under a hawk. an abuser teaches you that posture. the abuser is the original hawk. the man who calls is just continuing the lesson.
4. the dodged call at the atm. i once let a phone ring through three full cycles while standing at a cashpoint, holding a card, with the receipt printer warming up next to my elbow. the phone was on the counter. the cashpoint was waiting. the world was waiting. i was waiting. an abuser teaches you that waiting is safer than answering. you do not get that lesson at home with a healthy person. you get it from somebody who has trained the speed of your own pulse.

4. items 5 to 8, the schrodinger-fridge ones — signs of a narcissistic abuser in your kitchen

this is stack two. these are signs of a narcissistic abuser as they show up in your kitchen, your refrigerator, your bathroom, and your own handwriting on a sticky note from the previous tuesday. the kitchen, like the phone, is a place an abuser quietly redecorates. you do not see it. you live in it.

5. you stop opening the fridge. not because there is a snake in there. because there is, possibly, a yogurt with an opinion. you tell yourself the schrodinger’s fridge is funny. it is funny in the same way the unopened mail pile is funny. it is funny because it is also a coping device. an abuser does not need to be in your kitchen to redesign your relationship with food storage. they redesigned you. you took the redesign with you when you moved out.
6. you stop opening the bank app. the bank app i don’t open is its own quiet symptom. the abuser’s most efficient long-game is to make you afraid of any app that gives you bad news, which is most apps. you start checking the closed app icon for a red dot, decide the dot is a problem you’ll deal with on monday, and then it’s wednesday. financial avoidance, in my limited and self-administered experience, is often a downstream behavior. it lives next door to the longer field guide to toxic people in everyday rooms on the same shelf in the brain.
7. you start agreeing with claims that are factually incorrect. a small one: somebody at work tells you the toilet paper roll goes over. you say, mildly, sure. the truth, of course, is that the toilet paper roll goes UNDER. over is for monsters. and yet, you say “sure”, because you have been trained to give up the small wins, because giving up the small wins is what kept you safe in a previous room. an abuser made the small wins expensive. you are still paying that bill in a kitchen that has nothing to do with them.
8. you keep a folder, on a phone, with screenshots in it. you do not know exactly what it is for. it is named something innocuous like “stuff” or “ref” or, in my case, “evidence”, because i was being clever. the folder is the receipt drawer of a relationship. it is also the most reliable diagnostic on this list. if you have one of these, somebody trained you to expect that your version of events would be challenged. that is not a thing healthy partners do. that’s a tally. tallies belong to an honest dictionary entry on the word moron, used freely in this post, but the word moron, said freely, is at least kind. an abuser is calmer than a moron and more dangerous because the calm is the disguise.

worth saying plainly outside the list: an abuser is, on certain weeks, easier to mistake for the calm in the room. the broader cousin post on the noun moron in plain english handles the loud version. moron is loud and useless. an abuser is quiet and useful, in the worst sense.

somewhere on a podcast a man at the bar named mike was listening to, the host said something close to: “the abuser does not ask you to remember less. the abuser asks you to remember differently.” mike has a system for taxes. mike has not filed since 2019. but mike, on this point, was nodding the way you nod at a long british series about brothers in arms when the show finally names the thing you have been trying to name for an hour.

5. closing pulpit — the signs are recognizable, the abuse is concrete

a colleague drifted past with a coffee and looked at my screen. i alt-tabbed to a spreadsheet that has been open since march. the spreadsheet, in fairness, looks like work because nobody understands what a spreadsheet is for at a glance. carla is still upstairs.

the unopened mail pile, by the desk leg, is at a thirteen-degree lean. one envelope, near the top, is red. one is from a bank i no longer use. one is, almost certainly, addressed to a previous tenant who, by now, drives a volvo with seats that adjust in fourteen ways. the man who calls has not called yet today. that’s not optimism. that’s just statistics.

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