Your Partner's Probably Not a Narcissist - And Here's Why I said it

I posted a video a few weeks ago with that title. It got a lot of attention. Over a thousand link clicks in just a few days, dozens of reshares, and nearly 40 comments — many of them furious.

People told me what I was saying was dangerous for survivors of abuse. For the record: I'm also a survivor. They said I must not know anything about trauma. For the record: I live with the effects of severe trauma every single day, and I teach people how to navigate it as my life's work. A few people said I must be crazy. Interestingly, that's almost word-for-word what the people who harmed me most used to say.

So let me tell you exactly where I'm coming from — because I'm not backing down from this message, and I'm not minimizing anyone's pain. If anything, I'm asking us to take pain more seriously than a label ever could.

Here's the truth:

Over 25 years of working in trauma and relationships, I've watched what happens when we go all the way to the logical extreme of what labels and diagnoses can do to us — in our individual healing, in our relationships, and as a culture.

It starts as relief. Finding words for your experience, language for the struggle — that shift from "something must be fundamentally wrong with me as a person" to "my nervous system has been shaped by real experiences" can change the entire trajectory of someone's life. That matters. I don't take it lightly.

AND — I've watched what happens when we stay there. When the label becomes the destination instead of a doorway.

"Narcissist" becomes shorthand for bad person. Once someone earns that label, we don't have to look at them as a full human being anymore. We don't have to hold complexity. And for the person who's been hurt — the one reaching for that label trying to make sense of their pain — staying inside that story can quietly steal the very freedom they're trying to reclaim.

I want to be careful here, because I know exactly how this next part can get twisted. Someone who has hurt you may read these words and say: "See? Even she says you're part of the problem." That is not what I'm saying. If someone uses this piece to redirect accountability away from their own behavior and onto you, that redirection itself is the problem I'm describing.

This is for you — the one who is exhausted, confused, and still somehow hoping there's a way through. Not for the one who wants a new argument.

The world gets divided into the good and the bad. The sick and the healthy. The abusers and the victims. And in that divided world? The person who was hurt often ends up carrying the weight of the story alone — defined by what was done to them, orbiting forever around the person who hurt them, waiting for a verdict that finally makes it make sense.

That verdict never fully comes. And even when it does — even when everyone agrees you were wronged — it doesn't heal you. Because healing requires more than being right.

Damage is on a spectrum. There is not a single person alive who hasn't hurt someone they were in relationship with. But hurt exists on a spectrum too — and I am not in the business of flattening that spectrum. Some behavior is dangerous. Some patterns are predatory. Some situations require distance, protection, and a clear exit, and if you're in one of those situations, please get the support you need. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. Safety always comes first.

What I work with — in my 8 week CASCADE program, in one on one coaching sessions— are the couples and individuals who are not in that category, but who are in very real pain and don't know how to find their way back. People who love each other and keep wounding each other. People who desperately want connection and keep choosing protection instead. People who have tried everything their self-help books and the internet told them to try and still feel alone in their own marriage.

For those people: the label is not the answer. The label names the wound. Healing the wound is different work — and it's the work I was made to do.

Not excusing. Not minimizing. Not enabling.

Healing.

That's what I do. And if the idea that there might be a way through — not around, not over, but through — resonates with something in you, I'd love to keep talking.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/2b92cb_408d3a09d41040fabde8ec193f23ecc2/720p/mp4/file.mp4