Feedback needed on the use of the term "Narcissistic Abuse"

Tagging Community Leaders for their Insights,
@azuladragon34 @competentParadise6344 @insightfulSalamander4097 @QuietMagic @Lou73 @FirstLight4762 @StarlitSky4762 @Jish07541 @sereneButton43 @NewPenguin @Tamy4210 @Dancia @sophiasanae

@Xe

Thank you for creating this thread.

Q1. I have not been diagnosed with NPD or a Cluster B Personality Disorder
Q2. I do not think the term "Narcissistic Abuse" should be used formally on 7 Cups

Rationale:

• 1) While this term is sometimes used in psychological literature created for public consumption, I'm not able to find this term being used in scholarly/scientific discussion of abusive relationships within the psychological community.
• 2) The practical effect of this term is that it amplifies false/damaging stereotypes about NPD (i.e. associating abuse with NPD), which is inconsistent with the goal of making this community a safe and supportive place for people with NPD

My suggestions:

• Change the forum name to something like "Psychological Abuse" or "Emotional Abuse" and move it into the Trauma Support community, with their input/approval of course. They currently have forums for "Sexual Assault & Sexual Abuse" and "Child Abuse & Domestic Abuse".
• As mentioned, draft new subcommunity guidelines for stigmatizing language.

@Xe
Q1. Do you have NPD or a Cluster B Personality Disorder?
No
Q2. Should the term "Narcissistic Abuse" be used formally on 7Cups?
I don't think it should be used because it does sound like it's stereotyping people with NPD as abusers.

Q1. I do not have NPD or a cluster b disorder

Q2. I do not believe the term should be used

My suggestions for what to rename the forum "Dealing with Narcissistic Abuse" would be instead "Dealing with Abuse" and not for the prior reasons but more so that many people personality disorders suffer from abuse themselves or their disorders have stemmed from it, so a healthy forum to possibly discuss their experiences and perhaps helpful coping mechanisms to others who have gone through the same things may be helpful.

I am very glad this discussion is being had, seeing as this has been bothering me for a while. Even though I do not have NPD, as someone who also has personality disorders it's nice to stop adding to the stigmatization of one of the most easily targeted ones.

@Xe Interesting issue! Q1. No. Q2. It depends.

My thinking is that in the real world, if you are aware that you have some narcissistic traits, or even a diagnosis, and you are aware that there are people who think of you as abusive, then you'd typically seek help from a specialist in narcissism or personality disorders.

But if you have some kind of relationship with someone who has narcissistic traits, or even a diagnosis, and you are aware that the relationship is abusive, then you'd typically seek help from a relationship specialist or family therapist.

And finally, if you were abused in the past, and now you suffer flashbacks, nightmares, etc., then you'd typically seek help from a trauma specialist.

So it would seem logical to me to have the forum categories work in the same way as categories of clinical practice, providing support in these three cases within Personality Disorders Support, Relationship & Friendship Support, and Trauma Support respectively.

This is not easy, however, because our Trauma Support category seems to conflate past and ongoing trauma, while our Relationship & Friendship Support category seems to evade the reality that some relationships are abusive.

I agree that Struggling with Narcissistic Abuse doesn't belong in Personality Disorders Support, ideally.

The way the categories are organized at present makes it look like it should be in Trauma Support along with support for other types of abuse. But ideally, I think ongoing abuse should not be in Trauma Support at all, because…this is hard to explain…it's like saying the victim of the abuse is the one with the mental health problem. Like, it's gaslighting. But that's a whole other discussion, of course.

I strongly disagree with the observation that "Clinical terms like Narcissist should not be reduced to labels". Clinical terms are intended to be used as labels, they are used as labels throughout 7 Cups, and in any case "Narcissist" is not a clinical term.

There is a question of whether Narcissistic Abuse gets enough genuinely relevant traffic to remain separate, instead of being rolled into Child Abuse & Domestic Abuse, perhaps renamed to be less specific. I wonder where emotional abuse at work, say, should be discussed, regardless of whether the abuser seems narcissistic.

If there is enough traffic to keep it separate, then the term Narcissistic Abuse seems perfectly adequate to me. The words used have their ordinary dictionary meanings, and the term as a whole can easily be found in Wikipedia and elsewhere. I am not convinced that using an ordinary word as a factual description, in the way that ordinary dictionaries define it and DSM-5 uses it, can be sensibly regarded as alienating. I do not see any reason to avoid using the term.

Charlie

I guess I should give my answers too lol
Q1. Do you have NPD or a Cluster B Personality Disorder? Yes, Cluster B
Q2. Should the term "Narcissistic Abuse" be used formally on 7Cups? No

Ever since I have been a listener here, I have struggled with the cognitive dissonance caused by being Cluster B, being viewed as a potential abuser and discussing/listening to people complain about Cluster B individuals as abusers, under the pretense of "Narcissitic Abuse".
At the end of the day we as leaders have to give them room to express themselves as long as they are abiding by the guidelines. When you are hosting alone, you cannot even step away from such difficult conversations, without others chalking it up to your incompetency as a leader.

I am also guilty of this behavior, I have for long been subjected to "Narcissitic Abuse" and I always thought it was a legit term, that I had to condone this term and spread awareness about it. In the recent past, as recent as last week, I was using this term to explain my experiences of abuse and developing scripts to discuss this term.
Infact I was the one who suggested we change the name of the forum "Family and Friend of those with NPD" to "Dealing with Narcissitic Abuse" because the family and friends category only contained abuse stories, I wanted to make it a point that people with NPD are not abusers and we shouldn't assume that all their family members are suffering from abuse, there are also many other positive stories and companionship stories which are probably not shared here. But I was just settling in for the lesser of the two evils, due to my nescience. I only recently discovered that this term is not a valid term and then I researched this topic, to understand if "Narcissitic Abuse" in itself brings anything new to the table in the categories of abuse, turns out it does not. Also it is general knowledge that all types of abuse can be done by anyone and people with mental disorders are most likely to be abused than to be abusers.
I would like to apologize to the Cluster B community here, for any harm I have caused in the past due to my ignorance or insecurities with myself. In the future I will address all things in the forum before implementing them.

We need this guideline to safeguard the interests of our Community Leaders.
It is not easy to assert someone is unintentionally being harmful or excuse ourselves from situations without having the backing of some sort of agreed upon social convention. We need some guidance to safeguard ourselves from mentally damaging experiences while giving support.
We cannot arbitrarily decide ethical conventions in our discussions and scripts either, if we know what is not right, we can avoid it or properly address it in group discussions.

Q1. Do you have NPD or a Cluster B Personality Disorder?
No
Q2. Should the term "Narcissistic Abuse" be used formally on 7Cups?
If individuals want to label abuse as Narcissistic Abuse, I don't have a problem with that. Should 7 cups promote the phrase via a forum section, discussions, etc? I can seegood arguements against it and not much for it.

I think improvements have been made.

I have seen a discussion used more than once using the phrase that made me very uncomfortable. @Xe I attended one that I think you wrote and hosted and it was vastly different. Improvement isn't even what I would call it, as they were approached completely differently.
With the forums I do think Narcissistic Abuse is descriptive for threads that were moved out of the NPD support area, and as the person who split those forum sections, no regrets over that at all. The change to the forum section naming - it does fit a lot better for what the theme of the threads are.

The term narcissist does seem to be used here way more than what I'm used to. It's not really an adjective I would use the way I have seen it done here. 'Narc' was a new one to me, the slang always meant something different to me, I think the first time I have heard it in relationship to narccissism was here.

I did propose an Abuse & Bullying subcommunity. Unfortunately, we no longer have forum sections outside of subcommunities which I think are a bit easier to start with as they don't require the level of support that subcommunities do.
In the past we did have a section for bullying support as a non-subcommunity but it was removed. I think it's lack of success was due to issues with it's change of focus. It switched between cyberbullying, bully on 7 cups and bullying overall. Safety & Knowledge also had an antibullying team going for a bit, and there were multiple forum sections in there related to bullying which were not organized in terms of why there were multiple sections and what went where.

I think if we have Abuse & Bullying together the purpose becomes more clear. Moving the Narcissistic Abuse section over there would be the simpliest way to get the 'Narcaissistic' threads that aren't about supporting those with personality disorders out of the section. More work would be needed to get rid of the section all together and sort threads into sections like Parental Abuse, Abusirve Romantic Relationships, etc. but ultimately would be better ways to sort experiences people have dealt with and are seeking support for IMO. I think people the type of relatinships results in more similarities than the reason for the abusive behaviour. I also think that to a certain extent what already exists here is shaping how some people phrase their forum posts.

When it comes to educational approaches with threads and discussions, I don't know if there's much value to identifying 'narcissists'. When it comes to relationships, recognizing what's healthy vs. what are abusive patterns has more value IMO. In a relatioonship with another recognizing signs of NPD is most beneficial when it comes to supporting that person in them getting the help they need, not to label the abuse in terms of pseudodiagnoses.

My experiences with abuse, personalisty disorders are fairly low. I also don't have the psychology background, so I'm trusting others here on terms like narcissistic abuse and how that fits in to clinical usage. If this was just a discussion on if narcissistic abuse was a valid phrase I would probably just listen. I'm chiming in though because it's not just a discussion without a broader purpose. I have seen and given feedback on related guided discussions, plus very muched agreed when someone pointed out problems with the personality disorders support forums and directly involved myseklf with the organization of thsoe forums.

Running out of time, but there are some issues connected here :
- Avoiding stigma
- Medical advice isn't allowed, it can be easy to cross from listing some diagnostic criteria (or unofficial critieria for a label) and then actually labelling/diagnosing people here, which isn't allowed.

@Xe Thanks for discussing this in such an open way. Some of the changes may not have been perfect but I think this is still going in a good direction.

@Xe

Q1 - Yes I am diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder
Q2 - No I don't think the term 'narcisstic abuse' should be used on 7 cups because it does stigmatise against those that are diagnosed. Abuse is abuse and I think the focus should be on the person who has endured that abuse and not on the abuser and whatever their diagnosis may or may not be. There are some really good points made by others in the comments and I don't think I can add much more.

@Xe, do the new guidelines on using the term "narcissistic abuse" apply for everyone chatroom (i think it should!) And lately I've been seeing the term "BPD abuse" used a lot in chatrooms so I think initiatives are needed on that to. Thank you.