It's Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People

by Ramani Durvasula

I use the term antagonistic relational stress to describe what happens to survivors of these relationships, and I prefer to characterize the behavior of the psychologically harmful person in my clients’ lives as antagonistic, which is a broader and less stigmatized term than narcissistic. This is the term I use when teaching other professionals about these patterns, because it captures the breadth of antagonistic behaviors and tactics that we observe in narcissism—manipulation, attention-seeking, exploitativeness, hostility, arrogance—but also in other antagonistic personality styles, such as psychopathy, and positions it as a unique stress that antagonistic relationships evoke. But the narcissistic cat is out of the bag, and the term narcissistic abuse is familiar to most of you, though I will also use the term antagonistic throughout this book to capture the full breadth of these patterns.