Simple 2 Step Test To Know If It Was Narcissistic Abuse

Confused about whether a relationship is emotionally abusive, narcissistically abusive, or simply unhealthy? Lets break down a simple grounding test: write down three real incidents that hurt, confused, or betrayed you — then ask yourself, “Would I ever do this to someone I love?”

This conversation explores emotional abuse, narcissistic abuse, entitlement, exploitation, boundaries, codependency, people-pleasing, fawning, trait absorption, and why some people struggle to give themselves permission to leave harmful relationships.

The goal is to help you regain clarity, trust reality again, and recognize when a relationship is built on control, manipulation, or exploitation.

Transcript

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What we need is clarity. What we need is relief. What we need is to become grounded again so that we can know what reality is. And I think it's easy to sort of get lost in the source of the complexity of the subject. And on one level, it is complex. If you're taking it as an academic subject or if you are a licensed clinician, then you need to be looking into the complexities of it. But on the other side, on our side of the fence, we don't really need to. Here is a test for emotional abuse, for narcissistic abuse inside of a relationship. It's a very, very simple one. I'll give you the quick version first so that you can literally pause the video and do it. And I want to show you the power of this test. So in a moment, I'm going to ask you to put to pause the video. And then I want you to write down three incidents with this person that you're thinking of that you've had problems with that you really didn't like, that actually hurt you, that caused you to feel pain, that caused you to feel betrayal or confusion, right? Now, if you're on a train or you're in public and it's not convenient for you to do that, please do still pause the video and then sit there with your fingers and go, incident number one, mumble it out loud, whisper it to yourself if there's people there, incident number two, incident number three. Okay, that's the first part of the test. Done. Now a very, very simple question. Have you or would you do those things to someone? Have you or would you do those things to someone? I know that for people who are not involved or haven't been involved with narcissistic abuse, might think this is a mind-nomingly stupid test and incredibly obvious. But for reasons I'll go into in just a moment, for those of us who tend to find ourselves in cult-like surroundings, pathological surroundings, pathological relationships, cult-like relationships again and again and again, this isn't, we just have, let's call it, a vulnerability or a weakness. There's an area where our thinking doesn't seem to operate at full capacity. And so we need to do things like this. Okay, so back to the test. You wrote down three things that that person did. I didn't ask you to write down how you feel about that or what you think about that. We're not doing philosophy, we're not doing moralization, and we're not even doing anything therapeutic here. What we're doing is simply reporting three things that that person did. It happened. You know for real that it definitely for real, for real, happened in reality. Would you or have you done those things? And if the answer is a resounding no, I have never, nor would I ever do that to anyone, let alone to someone I claimed I loved. And if it's not a romantic relationship, it's if it's a friend, you wouldn't do it to a friend. If it's a family member, you wouldn't do it to a family member. If it's a professional relationship, you wouldn't do it with a business partner or an employee or an employer. You just wouldn't do that. Then can we tick the box that says this is narcissistic abuse? No, not from that. But can we say there is a massive mismatch inside of the relationship? And can we say that effectively this is a form of exploitation and abuse? Yes. To call it narcissistic abuse, we would need to know whether the person has narcissism or not. For that, you can check out the diagnostic criteria for narcissism and you can see how many of those behaviors they tick the box for. But for me personally, it doesn't really matter too much what clinical diagnosis the person gets. And it doesn't matter for you either, because what's happening is people are saying, is my partner a narcissist? Was I the victim of narcissistic abuse? And if we decode that, what that's the words at the front end. If we decode that, what that means is they're asking, is there something wrong, deeply wrong with this person that's coming up again and again and again? It wasn't that they were in a bad mood, it wasn't that they were on drugs, it wasn't that they were grieving. This is just what they do across time and across context. And when we say, is the relationship narcissistically abusive, you're saying, is there something fundamentally wrong inside of the uh uh relationship itself, the system that is the is there something pathological in there? Is there something that's wrong? And if you did this test and you said they did this, they did this, and they did this. I have never, and I would never do that to someone I loved or to a friend, or maybe you'd even say, I'd never do this to anyone, I wouldn't do it to a stranger on the bus. Then we can answer the question, if it's decoded, is this person a narcissist? Is this a narcissistically abusive relationship? If the question is decoded too, is there something fundamentally wrong with this person? Is there something fundamentally wrong with this question? We can answer with a resounding yes. Yes. If they have can because you you named three things because I wanted to make the test quick. If I gave you an hour and some calming music and a nice environment, you probably could write down 30, right? If you were motivated to do that. I wouldn't make you do that because you'd be in a really bad mood at the end of it. I know I would be, I'd be furious. I'd just be there triggering, uh uh triggering myself into an impotent, uh, impotent rage. But by the end of it, I'd be really not in a good mood. It's like the opposite of writing like a gratitude list or an appreciation list. It's like the the shitty things this person did to me list. So if you said no, I would never do that, then and you're looking for the relief of knowing if there's something really wrong with that person and really, really wrong with the wrong with the relationship, then we can say yes. If you're asking, should I get away from this person, do I have the right to set boundaries with this person? Do I have the right to say enough is enough and walk away from this? And you did the exercise and you said, no, I would never do that to anybody. And you're asking, do I have the right to set boundaries and walk away? Then the answer is a resounding, absolute yes. So that's the test for quote unquote narcissistically abusive relationships. Because we're not clinicians, we don't know whether the person has narcissism or not, and you don't really care. And I get that. What you're looking for is you want to know, is there something fundamentally wrong with this person? So the the question, it goes like this: there's multiple layers of reasoning that I think happens. Is the person a narcissist? Secretly means is there something really, really wrong with them? Secretly means, do I have the right to leave? There's multiple layers of meaning, and it's almost as though we're looking for permission. So what's going on from our side and what's going on from their side? So from our side, whether it's genetics or environment or through epigenetic changes and pressures, it really doesn't matter. It really looks like on our side, there is a cohort of human beings in the human population who has a greater propensity to go along with pathological, boundary-breaking, exploitative patterns of behavior, and they are more open to being exploited. You already know about codependency, a term that was um popularized in the in the 80s in American self-help psychology literature. Some people like that term, some people loathe it. You know about people pleaser syndrome. Most of you will know there is a clinical entity called dependent personality disorder. Many of you are aware of Pete Walker's work, complex post-traumatic stress. It's called a fawn response. There's something. Did you know there's something called, you know, there's traits, there's traits in psychology, like uh agreeableness or um antagonism, disagreeableness or openness to new experience. There's one called absorption, absorption, trait absorption. There is a type of person who has a trait, a type of human who genetics, learning, honestly, doesn't matter. It's an interesting topic of discussion. We don't have the answers yet, so don't care. They're higher in trait absorption, which means that they can have hyper focus on a person or uh an activity or an experience, and they become very absorbed in it. These people are more open to hypnosis, these people tend to be more impressionable, these people are more spiritual, they are more in tune with their intuition, they're more in tune with the signals in their body, they're not that bothered about the difference between reality and fantasy. And I was reading this and I was like, oh dear me, I feel very called out here. I've even said, not on this channel, but on the philosophy channel, multiple times because I thought I sounded clever when I said it, um, there's there's often more truth found in fantasy than in fiction. Oh, that's so let's take it positively. Oh, that's so nice. Uh, people who follow me, you're probably a bit like this. You're maybe more introvert, intuitive type, you're maybe a creative type, you maybe write poetry, you maybe do art, you do music, you act. And and you believe that. You believe, yeah, sometimes the real profound truth of life is found more in metaphor than in hard scientific data. Beautiful, wonderful, great. Negative side. You could be a soccer for a cult, you could be a soccer for a psychopath, you could be a soccer for a narcissist. Because what do we know about the cult and cluster B uh personality uh uh cluster of behaviors? It creates fantasies. It creates fantasies, and those fantasies have payoffs. Those fantasies are alluring from the outside. So you're presented with here's a cult for the enlightenment of humankind, and that's that's the that's the labeling. Come inside this beautiful palace of human liberation, you go inside, and then slowly, slowly across time, you're indoctrinated into a dungeon, into a prison of abuse and exploitation. We are more open to that if we are higher. Obviously, most of you would already know there's trait openness, trait agreeableness that puts you at risk for this kind of thing. But then there's this trait absorption. I look, I found that when I was looking at people who have mystical experiences, which I have had, and ascribe meaning and importance to mystical experiences. Because at the time that I was looking at it, I was like, I don't think it's bad. If you are interested in McGilchrist, uh the master and his emissary and left brain activity and right brain activity, our culture probably has indoctrinated us to become too left brain and it's to our detriment, and we need to reclaim the right brain, which means reclaiming uh the power of dreams, reclaiming the power of the mystical experience. But what if the opposite were true? No, I I believe it is important, but it must be done in a safe and boundried way. That's our side. Creative, intuitive, introverted, high trace openness, high trace agreeableness, high and trace absorption. So we can so when I'm saying absorption, what you you might be thinking, what's what absorbed in what? I'm absorb I take psychedelics and I am absorbed in the experience and I I I mold it into some mythological, ego-dissolving tale or narrative. I'm absorbed in it. Somebody who's low in trades absorption would be like, yeah, I feel funny, and I'm saying colours. And you can read the reports of people who've taken psychedelics, and some people literally talk that way. Yeah, I could see zigzags on the wall, and I felt weird uh in my chest. The end. They're not drawing anything from it. Absorption here, what's the what's the trip? What's the psychedelic trip? What's the experience? What's the process? It's the it's the fantasy. It's the fantasy itself. You become absorbed in that fantasy. There are other people. I haven't done it because I don't feel like I have a good grip on it, where they talk about the overlap between ADHD, attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, and narcissism, and how people with ADHD may be um vulnerable to narcissistic abuse. And I thought something inside of me, there you go, that's mystical language, that's trait absorption, high openness, high agreeable language, with something inside of me really resonates with this, but I don't know what it is. And this could be it. It could be the capacity for people with ADHD and maybe um autism spectrum disorder to hyperfixate would be the equivalent of somebody with trace absorption going, yes, this intense, colorful, psychedelic, emotionally um impactful experience is deeply meaningful. And I am going to imbue that with even more meaning. So we, um, if you like, uh the the old psychoanalytic language would be fetishized. So something that has no meaning, we give it meaning. Um, we imbue it with libidinous life, uh lost energy. We go, that's important, that's important, that's important, and then it becomes important. Um there's even uh cathexis where you can pour energy, psychic, and I don't mean I mean psychic in the psychoanalytic way, not in the new age way. So psychic being of the mind, not necessarily clairvoyance or something, but just psychic energy, mental energy, mental energy, let me say, into the thing. So that would mean people with ADHD are at risk, then. I'm not I'm not saying, I'm not saying that. I'll let other people who understand ADHD, who understand autism, or have been diagnosed with it, they can speak for themselves. I'm not comfortable talking about that, but I'm saying I'm their next-door neighbor and I can hear them talking and I'm nodding along, going, there could be something to that, and it could be in this area of hyperfixation. It could be this uh trait absorption. We have a pre-existing tendency to ascribe meaning and power to a thing that doesn't have that much meaning and doesn't have that much power, that then is open to being used. And maybe, maybe I'd even go one step further. I'm I'm improvising here, so I'd better be careful. Maybe, tell me what you think about this in the comments. Maybe we're even looking for it. Maybe that trait gives us a hunger for that. We're looking for a cult, maybe a multi-person cult and maybe a cult of one. We're looking for that special experience, we're looking for that non-normal, non-quotidian, non-pedestrian, non-daily life type experience. We want the mystical experience, we want the boundary-breaking experience. Okay. Is any of that in and of itself bad? No. But we are all aware of the stories of yogis and kundalini teachers and and mystics and gurus who just outright sexually abuse and exploit their followers. We are like, that's not news. There's documentaries about it, tons of documentaries about this kind of thing. So it's something to be aware of and literate about. If we all start talking to each other about this, it will, uh, I have to use that horrible term, it will raise awareness, it will maybe elevate our literacy and we'll have more interior content about that subject. So our interiority is built so that when we see it, we recognize it without condemnation. And we'd be able to say, oh, in this moment, my absorption trait is being activated. I want more of that. Huh, that's interesting. I wonder why. This then moves us away, by the way, a little bit from the model that just says, Well, if you were treated badly in your childhood by your parents, then you're going to seek to be treated badly in your relationships as an adult, which I do believe is absolutely true for a significant cohort of people who would say, I've been in a narcissistically abusive relationship, but I don't think it's true for everyone. There's something else that can happen, and this is it. That's our side. A few years ago, um, when we were all much younger, I mentioned that we were going to do it from their side. Let's do that now. I'm checking my time. This is supposed to be 15 minutes long, it's 17 minutes, and I still have a lot to say. Oh well. Sorry. Uh okay, I'll do it, I'll do it more briefly. Let's bring it back to what I said in the beginning. So, this sort of quick test for narcissism as a way of bringing about clarity and feeling more grounded in yourself is really just a way of granting you permission to make a judgment and say, this is not good for me. What's happening on their side? You wrote down three things. And the three things were incidents. You didn't write down how you felt about it, you didn't write down how you think about it, you just wrote down what was said. What's happening from their side? Think about it. Um, say they they lied to you, they stole money from you, they cheated on you, they manipulated you into doing things that you otherwise wouldn't have done, which is one of these things that everybody seems to brush over. And it annoys me because I'm like, no, that's that's I didn't consent then. We should talk in those terms. If you manipulate me into doing something that you know full well I wouldn't have done had you not lied to me about it and manipulated me into it, effectively I'm now doing that thing without consent because consent includes being informed. I'm not informed. I'm not doing this with informed consent, so I'm not doing this with full consent. I don't consent to this. Subject for another day, maybe. Let's say they lied, let's say they cheated, let's say uh they manipulated you into doing something you otherwise wouldn't want to do. Just for a moment now, use your imagination. Imagine the level, be them for a second, of entitlement you would need to feel to think that that was okay. Imagine the level of entitlement. This really, really helped me, and this is why I'm sharing it with you. Imagine the fucking gall and the audacity to take a person. It's not a perfect person, they're just bumbling their way through life, and you know, they've got problems and they've got issues of their own. Fine, it's a human, so it's a human being. This is human. And I look at them and I go, that's a good target. They want love and they're very interested in me, and they're ready to um pour love into me. Huh. Cool. What can I get from this? Well, if I tell them I'm married, they won't have sex with me, and then they won't be fully connected to me. So I'm gonna withhold the data. This is just an example, it's not from my personal life, honestly. I'm not gonna tell them that I'm married so that they have I could see that they're into me. We're gonna start having a sexual relationship as well. So that their feelings are gonna increase and they'll become even more attached to me. And once they become attached to me, this didn't happen to me. I already told you it didn't happen to me. This isn't real life. It would be so distasteful for me to reveal anecdotes from my real life, and then once they've um well once they've uh invested in me, then I'm gonna tell them. Now, this definitely didn't happen to me, but I imagine it happened to a man who's just like me. And that man was confused and also in love, and so the veil of illusion, of mire, of shared fantasy was already across his eyes. And he was like, Oh, she couldn't tell me. She said that she was afraid to tell me, she said she didn't know how to tell me, she said that the emotions she felt for me were so intense that and he starts making excuses for her. I now step out of that, and you can use any example, like whatever they did, whether they cheated on you, whether they stole money from you, whether they manipulated you into doing something you wanted. And do. And I turn it on its head and I go, Have you ever done that? Me to me, have you ever done that in your life? And I'm like, Well, I've never been married, so no. Have you ever been in a long-term relationship where you're living with somebody and you've got a verbal contract with them that you're gonna stay together and have children and share bank accounts and stuff? Have you ever done that and then cheated? No. Have you ever done that and then not just cheated, but allowed and caused another person to fall in love with you? And I'm like, no. No. Is the point of this exercise to preen morally and go, I would never do that because I am a good person? No, that's not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to create a sort of realization or an enlightenment around an otherwise cloudy issue inside of the heads of people who are like me. Said before, probably intuitive introverti, high trait agreeableness, maybe foreign responders, maybe codependence, maybe high in trait absorption, whatever this thing is when we eventually figure it out. And they will tend to make excuses for the other person that they would never make for themselves. I would never excuse that in myself. I've never stolen money from a girlfriend. I've never uh or a friend or a business partner, I've never lied to somebody in a business relationship to take from them what was not mine. I've never been in a relationship where I say somebody, I want to do this, and they say, Well, I don't want to do that. And so I chip away at them and keep nagging them and pushing them and shaming them until eventually they say yes. No means no. On any subject. Would you like a cup of tea? No. Okay. Next. I don't have the weird antagonistic pathological compulsion in my head, the demons in my brain going, they said no. Make them drink the tea. It's not about tea now. It's a do you want a cup of tea? No, I don't even drink tea. I don't know why I was using this example. Do you want a cup of tea? No. Okay. I'm gonna I'm gonna drink my own tea. I don't need you to drink tea. Again, if you're if you've not experienced this, all of this will sound like mumbo jumbo. There is no way you would have sat through 24 minutes of this. But for those of you who have experienced this, you're probably thinking, oh, poop. Oh dear. We let things happen that we should not let happen. Let's guide the conversation away from is it clinical narcissism? Is it this? Why did I do it? What? Let's get into the mechanics of what really happens in these relationships and then try to find simple grounding ways of being able to go, well, I'm not doing that anymore. If that person did something to you that you would never do, including my stupid tea example, I've watched people do this recently as my own awareness comes up. They weren't even doing it to me. I would, I've never noticed this before in my life. And when I say recently, I mean last month. I watched somebody try and impose their will over another human being over something that had nothing to do with them. And it was as dumb as a cup of tea. And I was watching this play out, and I was like, you just want them to obey you. And I can hear, I think, because try high traits absorption, mystical, I believe I'm psychic, I can hear the demons screaming in your head. There's no demons, these are metaphors. I can hear the demons screaming in your head, going, don't let them say no. You suggested it, make them do it and make them do it now. And the person who was trying to assert uh uh her will in this case on a younger uh um female human entity, on a younger human female Homo sapien flesh suit, she was trying to assert her will. It was it was for nothing, it was about a totally petty thing. It was presented as an option. Would you like to? And the younger person said, no, thank you. And she would not stop. And I could see on her face that she was doing it smilingly, like, oh, but I really think, but I really think, but inside, you know, they do these uh these memes, the Wojack meme where you'll have like a smiling smug face and they pull the mask, and behind the masks, the person is like sobbing and enraged. It was that. I'm like, oh, you're pretending to be nice, you're pretending to do this from kindness, but you're furious inside. You're furious. You really wanted to say yes. And by the way, in this situation when we're talking about entitlement and exploitation, there was no benefit. It wasn't, in this case, it wasn't about securing power or well, maybe you could say it was about securing power, it wasn't about securing status or access or sex or money or fame or nothing. It was as dumb as a cup of tea, but it was the principle. It was the principle. She really wanted her to do what she wanted her to do. Now, I've mentioned other personality disorders and mental health issues that we don't normally talk about here. Um, I mentioned dependent personality dependent personality dis uh before. Are you aware there's something called obsessive compulsive personality disorder? You should look that up. It's very interesting. We think of obsessive compulsion and we think it's about switching lights on and off 17 times before you can leave the house. That's one element of it. But look at the title. This is one of those personality disorders that's actually well named because many of them are not. This one is well-named. It's obsessive, single-minded, compulsive. There's a compulsion. I must, I must do this. Now, OCPD is often mistaken for NPD because not all of its manifestations, but one of its manifestations can become very, very controlling behavior. And what seems to be happening is the person has a vision inside of their head of how reality should look, including the behaviors of the other flesh suits in their environment, the other human beings in their environment. And if the environment mismatches the fantasy or the idea, they get very upset. They get very, very anxious and very, very distressed and obsessed with it. And the compulsion is to make the environment match the fantasy. Look it up. It's very interesting. I'll finish with this, which I was supposed to finish on 10 minutes ago. When you're looking for evidence of a quote-unquote narcissistically abusive relationship, a narcissistic abuse is not a clinical term. In clinical language, it's emotional abuse. I mean, that makes sense, right? We don't say histrionic abuse, we don't say borderline abuse, we don't say psychopathic abuse. Why are we saying narcissistic abuse? If but if you're look- I I know what you mean. As I said earlier, there's a decoding that needs to go on here. Is there something really wrong with the relationship? Yes. Is there something really wrong with the person who's delivering these patterns of behavior? Yes. And then the thing that goes behind it, can I leave? Yes. You have permission to say that isn't for me and to leave. Consider the two E's, entitlement and exploitation. How entitled would you have to feel to lead someone into loving you, to loving you? Not being sexually attracted to you, not flirting with them a little bit, to falling in love with you. How entitled would you need to feel to do that? To me, that is a level of entitlement I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom. I'd feel so guilty. I'd feel like shit if I successfully did that. I would just feel bad. And I don't like feeling bad. I like feeling good. So it's not for moral reasons I don't do it, it's for purely selfish reasons. I don't like feeling guilty and ashamed. It's uncomfortable, and I like to be comfortable. Think of the entitlement, whatever you experienced, how entitled would that person have to feel to engage in those behaviors? And how much pure exploitation did you see? When we say exploitation, tricking people into doing things they don't want to do to extract value from them. Money, sex, access, power, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, exploitation, con artistry, criminality, theft. You can, it's not illegal uh yet. Um, you can steal people's time, you can steal their love. Maybe it's not a romantic relationship, maybe it's got nothing to do with sex, it could be friendship. You can steal friendship. I mean multiple times people saying to me, Oh, I have a friend, and they pick me up when they need me, and they use me as a sort of an emotional teddy bear dumping ground. They say, Can we have a chat? I go and meet them for two hours. They offload a load of stuff about their own lives. I try and talk back to them about my life. They start yawning and looking bored as soon as the energy uh goes away from them. You know the script now, folks. All of you know the script for this. That's theft. You don't have the right to do that to somebody. It's not. Never mind whether it's kind or empathic or compassionate. It's not fair. That's not effing fair. You can't just use people like that. The clinical language offers us insight. The complex clinical language offers us some insight. It can also become a it's not necessarily always insightful. Sometimes it gets too complicated and it clouds the issue. What we need here are real tools that make people potent, that make people capable, that make them a hard target, that make it so that people who are exploitative cannot get their fangs into them. We need to create tough, wise people who understand themselves and understand others and can protect themselves. That's the ambition.