“The most accurate way to explain it in my view is that the narcissist has studied you in detail like a serial killer would, goes to a lot of effort to build your trust and then betrays you by using all the personal information they have about you to traumatize you to the point where they know it is highly likely to cause a serious mental and emotional collapse that could result in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or feeling suicidal. And that it is achieved by them pretending to care and bond with you and by recruiting others to help covertly abuse you and distort your reality.

Narcissistic abuse is covert warfare to try to bring about your spiritual death implemented by the person who you thought was your greatest ally and supporter (with the help of other people you know who they recruited to help them do it). It is essentially them trying to murder someone but instead of doing it physically, it is done emotionally and psychologically. We tend to underestimate non-physical abuse in our society and it’s about time we started paying attention to the impact it has on our citizens and health services. Of course narcissistic abuse can also involve physical, sexual and other types of abuse as well in addition to emotional abuse but often it is a hidden abuse with no physical scars. This means that the survivor has to deal with the aftermath largely and silently on their own because the narcissist is often highly skilled at covering up the abuse and smearing the victim for it. The aim of narcissistic abuse is to seek control of and break the human spirit of a targeted person through the means of highly orchestrated manipulation, fraud, deception and gaslighting. The subsequent disorientation experienced by the targeted person especially if they are already in a vulnerable state can mean it is easier for the abuser to exploit them. In many ways extreme narcissistic abuse shares some similarities with the strategies employed in human trafficking and other human torture situations yet in most countries, narcissistic abuse isn’t currently able to be prosecuted under the law.

Narcissistic abuse can make survivors feel anxious and deeply mistrustful because during the abuse they may have thought the feeling that someone was out to get them was implausible and by the end of it they realize someone was really out to get them and it was one of the people who they thought cared about them the most. One of the most psychologically damaging impacts are the survivor’s memories of telling the “narcissist” (remember who they did not know was a narcissist at that stage) their past hurts and fears only to later realize that the narcissist collected this information to calculate how to replay it to cause maximum devastation. The knowledge that someone could enter your life and pretend to care about you deeply, build your trust, find out your deepest emotional hurts, recruit others to help abuse you and then replay those traumas to bring you to a point of psychological collapse is harrowing. It can challenge your view of humanity when the people you least expect turn out to be so malicious and malevolent that they would think up how to do something that they hope brings you close to the point of suicide.

Furthermore, they try to prolong the suffering by encouraging others to “blame the victim” and by finding ways to passive aggressively bully them through “hoovers”. On top of that narcissists alternate between either smirking at the destruction and devastation they caused (feeling entitled to abuse others and superior) or they play the victim. Either way, they very often avoid taking ANY responsibility for abusing others and often continue to abuse multiple people secretly up until their own death with minimal consequences or repercussions”. -Anonymous

Survival Diaries

"Covert Warfare"