On the overlap between coercive control and narcissistic behaviour — and what it helps us to understand
by Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
There’s a word that comes up a lot in spaces where men talk about abusive relationships. Narcissist.
It gets used often — sometimes loosely, sometimes accurately, sometimes as a catch-all for anyone who has behaved badly in a relationship.
I want to write about it carefully. Not because it isn’t relevant — it is — but because the way it’s used matters. There’s a version of ’she’s a narcissist’ that does useful work, and a version that doesn’t. I want to focus on the version that’s actually helpful.
What the word is pointing at
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a clinical diagnosis — a recognised pattern of behaviour that includes an inflated sense of self-importance, a deep need for admiration, an inability to empathise with others, and a tendency to exploit relationships for personal gain. Formal diagnosis requires clinical assessment. Most people who use the word in everyday conversation aren’t talking about a clinical diagnosis.
What they are usually pointing at — and what I find genuinely useful — is a cluster of behaviours that have recognisable patterns. Behaviours that appear consistently across many accounts of coercive and controlling relationships, regardless of diagnosis.
Those patterns include: an intense and overwhelming early phase of attention, affection, and idealisation — sometimes called ’love-bombing’ — that feels unlike anything you’ve experienced before. A gradual withdrawal of that attention once the relationship is established, replaced by criticism, contempt, and unpredictable behaviour. A hypersensitivity to any criticism or challenge, met with disproportionate reactions. A consistent pattern of reframing events so that the other person’s needs and perceptions are always wrong, and the abuser’s are always right. A performance of victimhood when challenged — turning any attempt to raise a concern into evidence that you are the problem.
What makes this pattern so difficult to live inside — and so difficult to leave — is that it exploits the very qualities that made you a good partner in the first place. Patience. Empathy. The willingness to give the benefit of the doubt. The belief that if you try harder, communicate better, be more understanding, things will improve. These are good qualities, but in a relationship with a controlling partner, they become part of the mechanism of the abuse.
Why it was so hard to see at the time
One of the most consistent things men say, looking back at controlling relationships, is: how did I not see it? The patterns seem obvious in retrospect. Why didn’t I recognise them at the time?
Several reasons. The early phase — the love bombing, the intensity, the sense of being chosen and special — creates an attachment that is genuinely powerful. It isn’t fake, on your side. The feelings were real. Which means the subsequent erosion of the relationship operates against a baseline of real love and genuine investment. You’re not just being manipulated by a stranger. You’re trying to hold onto something you genuinely valued.
The ’gaslighting’ — the consistent reframing of events so that your memories are put in doubt and your perceptions are always the ’problem’ — does real damage to your capacity to trust your own judgement. By the time most men in these situations are deep into them, they have genuinely lost confidence in their own assessments of what’s real. When someone has told you for years that your perceptions are wrong, that you’re too sensitive, that you misremember, that it wasn’t like that — you start to wonder if they might be right.
And the cyclical nature of abuse creates its own trap. The relationship isn’t bad all the time. There are good periods — sometimes genuinely good periods — that give hope and provide the motivation to stay. The bad periods feel survivable because the good ones keep coming. Until, gradually, the ratio shifts.
What understanding it does and doesn’t do
I want to be honest about what naming this pattern is useful for — and what it isn’t.
Understanding the pattern is useful for making sense of your own experience. For reducing the self-blame that so many men carry — the sense that if you’d been better, tried harder, communicated differently, the relationship might have worked. It didn’t work because the dynamic was designed not to. Your efforts were being absorbed by a system that couldn’t use them the way you hoped.
Understanding the pattern is also useful for recognising the same dynamics if they appear again — in a future relationship, or in the post-separation period, where the behaviour often continues through different mechanisms.
What it isn’t useful for is diagnosing your ex-partner or assuming the worst about her motivations. People who behave in controlling ways are often themselves the product of significant harm. That doesn’t excuse what was done to you. But understanding that someone’s behaviour has origins — that there is usually a story behind the story — can be part of what allows you to move through the anger rather than staying in it permanently. That’s not forgiveness in the sense of saying it was acceptable. It’s more like understanding in the sense of not needing to hate forever.
The most useful question
The most useful question this understanding opens is not ’what was wrong with her?’ It’s ’what are the things that were taken from me that I need to recover?’
The confidence eroded by years of gaslighting. The ability to trust your own perceptions. The willingness to be vulnerable without fearing it will be weaponised. Your own sense of self that got gradually buried under someone else’s definition of who you were. These are the things that need rebuilding — and naming what happened to them is the starting point.
Mike, founder, SoulForge Community
For more on understanding the psychological impact of coercive control and how to begin addressing it, see the Understanding the Impact of Abuse page in the SoulForge Community Resources section at soulforge.org.uk/resources. For peer support from men who’ve been through similar situations, the community section at soulforge.org.uk/support-recovery-start is a good place to start.
SoulForge Community exists to support men navigating domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system — and the longer work of rebuilding. Visit soulforge.org.uk.