The Words That Finally Named What Was Happening to Me: A Glossary of Narcissistic Abuse, Divorce, and Recovery Terms
Ash | Even AfterShare
She found the language and everything changed. This glossary exists for the woman who is still finding it — the one who knows something is wrong but doesn’t have words for it yet. Every term is defined the way a friend who lived it would explain it, not the way a textbook would. Credits are given where terms were coined by specific people. This page is a living document — new terms will be added as the conversation grows.
BIFF
She drafted the message four times. Each version was too long. Too emotional. Too much. She deleted everything and started again — shorter, flatter, containing only the necessary information and nothing he could use. That was BIFF.
What it means: Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm. A communication method developed by Bill Eddy for responding to high-conflict people — particularly in co-parenting and custody situations where direct communication is legally required but emotional engagement makes everything worse. BIFF responses are short, contain only necessary information, avoid inflammatory language, and close the loop rather than invite further argument. She didn’t learn BIFF in a workshop. She learned it at 11pm, drafting responses she would send in the morning after sleeping on them.
Credit: Developed by Bill Eddy, LCSW, Esq. Book: BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People.
Coercive Control
She didn’t realize she had been asking permission until she stopped needing to. Not permission for big things — for small ones. Where she went. Who she saw. How she spent an afternoon. The decisions that seemed practical had added up to a structure she hadn’t seen while she was inside it.
What it means: Coercive control is a pattern of behavior designed to take away someone’s freedom, create dependency, and maintain dominance — not through a single incident but through an accumulation of tactics that add up to a structure of control. It includes isolation from friends and family, financial control, monitoring of movements and communications, emotional abuse, and the use of children as leverage. In many states and countries, coercive control is now recognized as a form of domestic abuse in its own right. The absence of physical violence does not mean the absence of abuse.
If you believe you may be experiencing coercive control, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233 or thehotline.org) offers confidential support.
DARVO
She came to him with a concern. She left the conversation apologizing. She wasn’t sure how it happened. It happened every time.
What it means: DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It is a response pattern used when someone is confronted about harmful behavior. When she raises a concern, he denies it happened. When she persists, he attacks — her memory, her motives, her character. And then he positions himself as the real victim of the conversation. DARVO is effective specifically because it is disorienting. Over time she stops raising concerns because raising them always ends the same way.
Credit: Term coined by Dr. Jennifer Freyd, psychologist and professor, in 1997.
Default Parent
She knew the pediatrician’s name. She knew the teacher’s name. She knew which child couldn’t have dairy and which one needed the blue folder, not the red one. She knew all of this not because she had a better memory — because she was the one who had to.
What it means: The default parent is the one the school calls first. The one who manages the appointments, the permission slips, the schedules, the emotional crises, the logistics of raising children — regardless of whether two parents are technically present in the home. The default parent carries not just the tasks but the noticing of tasks. The anticipating. The remembering. In most families this is one parent. She was that parent before, during, and after the marriage.
Dog Whistling
She stopped being able to explain why she was upset after a pleasant evening out. Everything he said sounded fine to everyone else. She knew it wasn’t. She just couldn’t prove it.
What it means: Coded language or behavior that sends a specific threatening or demeaning message to the target while appearing innocent or neutral to everyone else present. In the context of emotional abuse, dog whistling is the comment at a family dinner that only she understands as a threat. The look across the room. The phrase that sounds benign to an observer but lands as a warning to the person it’s aimed at. It is a form of abuse that is almost impossible to document because it requires context that only the target has.
Fawn Response
She got very good at reading the room before she entered it. She adjusted her tone, her topic, her needs — before he even said a word. She thought this was just being considerate. It was survival.
What it means: A trauma response — alongside fight, flight, and freeze — in which a person instinctively seeks to please, appease, or placate a perceived threat in order to avoid conflict or harm. In relationships with controlling or abusive partners, fawning looks like constantly managing his emotions, preemptively apologizing, shrinking needs to avoid reactions, and agreeing to things that feel wrong in order to keep the peace. It is not weakness. It is what the nervous system learned to do to stay safe.
Credit: The fawn response was introduced by therapist Pete Walker in his work on Complex PTSD.
Fire Watch Syndrome
She finally started sleeping through the night and realized she hadn’t done that in years. She had been awake, alert, listening. Not because anything was wrong anymore. Because her nervous system hadn’t gotten the message yet that it was safe to rest.
What it means: A state of chronic hypervigilance — being unable to fully rest, particularly at night — that develops after sustained exposure to an unpredictable or threatening environment. Survivors of narcissistic abuse and domestic abuse often describe feeling wired and alert after dark, unable to sleep, because the nervous system learned that nighttime was when danger arrived. The brain’s alarm system stays activated even after the threat is gone. She is safe now. Her nervous system is still catching up.
This appears to be a community-developed term rather than one attributed to a single author.
Flying Monkeys
She started noticing which friends always seemed to know things they shouldn’t. Which family members relayed messages that felt too specific to be coincidence. She realized he was still in the room even when he wasn’t.
What it means: People — often mutual friends, family members, or colleagues — who carry out harassment, information gathering, or manipulation on behalf of a narcissist, sometimes knowingly and sometimes without realizing they are being used. The term comes from the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Flying monkeys may deliver messages, report back on the target’s activities, spread the narcissist’s version of events, or apply social pressure.
Community-coined term widely used in narcissistic abuse recovery spaces.
FOG — Fear, Obligation, Guilt
She thought about leaving constantly. And then she thought about what would happen if she did. And then she thought about what she owed. And then she thought about what that would make her. And then she stayed.
What it means: The three emotional states that keep people stuck in relationships with manipulative or controlling people. Fear — of their reaction, of abandonment, of consequences. Obligation — the sense that she owes them something, that leaving would be a betrayal. Guilt — the feeling that she is responsible for their wellbeing, that leaving makes her the bad person. FOG makes leaving feel impossible even when staying is clearly harmful. Understanding the FOG doesn’t dissolve it immediately. But naming it is how it starts to lift.
Credit: The FOG acronym was coined by Dr. Susan Forward and Donna Frazier in their 1997 book Emotional Blackmail.
Future Faking
She organized her life around things that were coming. The trip. The therapy. The change. The better version of the relationship that was always almost here. She made real decisions based on a future that kept arriving as another promise.
What it means: The practice of making promises about the future with no intention — or no ability — to deliver on them. Future faking is not always conscious. But it is always functional: the promises buy time, restore hope, and keep her invested in a version of the relationship that never fully materializes. Tomorrow was his favorite. She eventually stopped planning around things that were coming and started paying attention to what was actually there.
Gaslighting
She started keeping a notepad by the bed. Not for dreams — for the conversations. She would lie awake afterward reconstructing what had been said, trying to locate the exact moment she had become the problem. She could never find it. She would fall asleep still looking.
What it means: A form of psychological manipulation in which someone consistently challenges another person’s memory, perception, and judgment — causing them to doubt their own reality. Gaslighting can look like denying things that were said, reframing events to make her seem unreasonable, or simply insisting that what she experienced did not happen the way she remembers. Over time it erodes self-trust. Healing after gaslighting is largely the process of learning to say “I remember” instead of “I think I remember.”
The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight.
Grey Rock Method
She learned to answer in ways that gave him nothing to work with. Short. Flat. Factual. She was not being cold. She was being a grey rock — unremarkable, uninteresting, providing nothing that could be used as fuel for the next conflict.
What it means: A communication strategy for managing interactions with high-conflict or manipulative people — particularly when going no contact is not possible. The goal is to become as uninteresting and non-reactive as possible: flat responses, minimal information, no emotional content. In co-parenting situations where communication is legally required, grey rock is often how she protects her peace while staying within the court’s requirements.
Credit: Coined in 2012 by a blogger named Skylar on lovefraud.com.
Guardian ad Litem
She learned to document everything before the visit. Not because she had anything to hide — because she understood that the guardian ad litem’s recommendation would carry weight in a way that her own account alone might not.
What it means: A court-appointed advocate who represents the best interests of a child in custody and family court proceedings, independent of both parents and their attorneys. Their recommendation carries significant weight with judges. Laws and procedures vary by state — consult a family law attorney about your specific situation.
Hoovering
She had been gone for three weeks when the messages started. Not hostile ones — the other kind. The ones that reminded her of the beginning. She recognized it eventually. This was not reconciliation. This was the relationship attempting to restore itself.
What it means: The attempt by a narcissist or abusive person to pull a target back into the relationship after a period of distance or separation — like a Hoover vacuum. Hoovering can look like sudden declarations of love, apologies, promises to change, manufactured crises, or threats. It is not a sign that things will be different. It is the pattern reasserting itself.
Community-coined term widely used in narcissistic abuse recovery spaces.
Intermittent Reinforcement
She used to think the good days proved the relationship was worth saving. She eventually understood something different: the good days were the reason the bad ones were survivable. The unpredictability was not a flaw in the relationship. It was the mechanism.
What it means: A conditioning pattern in which rewards are delivered unpredictably — sometimes warmth, sometimes distance or cruelty, never consistently either. Research consistently shows that unpredictable rewards create stronger attachment than consistent ones. This is the mechanism behind slot machines, and it is the mechanism behind relationships where the good periods feel more significant precisely because they are embedded in difficulty. She was not staying because she was weak. She was staying because the neurological pull created by intermittent reinforcement is genuinely powerful.
JADE — Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain
She explained herself carefully. She provided context. She made her case. He disputed it. She eventually realized that more explanation was not going to produce a different outcome. The explanation was the problem — not the quality of it, but the act of providing it at all.
What it means: Four responses to avoid when communicating with a high-conflict or manipulative person: Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain. All four provide material for further conflict. The alternative is not silence — it is brief, factual communication that closes rather than opens.
The JADE acronym is widely used in the narcissistic abuse and high-conflict divorce recovery communities.
Love Bombing
The beginning was overwhelming in a way that felt like finally. The attention. The certainty. The feeling that she had been found. She didn’t know yet that overwhelming and love are not the same thing.
What it means: The practice of overwhelming someone with affection, attention, compliments, and idealization — particularly at the start of a relationship — in a way that creates intense attachment before any concerning patterns have had time to emerge. Love bombing is not love. It is a strategy, whether conscious or not, that establishes a powerful emotional hook. The person from the beginning was real enough to stay for. He just wasn’t willing or able to be that person consistently.
No Contact
She stopped checking her phone for his name. It took longer than she expected to notice that she had stopped. And longer still to notice that she had been holding her breath for years.
What it means: The decision to cease all communication and contact with an abusive, manipulative, or harmful person. No contact is not a punishment. It is not cruelty. It is the recognition that continued contact is causing harm and that distance is necessary for healing. For women who share children, complete no contact is not always possible — parallel parenting and grey rock communication become the practical alternative. No contact isn’t the end of something. It is the beginning.
Parallel Parenting
She stopped thinking of it as failing at co-parenting and started thinking of it as succeeding at something different. Her household ran on her rules. His household ran on his. She stopped trying to manage what happened on his time and started protecting what happened on hers.
What it means: A co-parenting model designed for high-conflict situations where cooperative co-parenting is not possible. In parallel parenting, each parent operates independently in their own household with minimal direct contact between the parents. Communication is typically limited to necessary logistics, conducted through a documented channel such as a co-parenting app, and kept factual and brief. Parallel parenting is not the ideal outcome. It is the functional outcome when the ideal is not available.
Trauma Bond
She finally stopped being ashamed of missing someone who had hurt her. She started understanding why. The missing wasn’t irrational. It was neurological. It was the attachment doing exactly what attachment is designed to do — holding on, even when holding on is the wrong thing.
What it means: A powerful psychological attachment that forms between a victim and an abuser as a result of intermittent cycles of abuse and affection. The trauma bond is not a sign of weakness or poor judgment. It is a predictable neurological response to a specific pattern — intermittent reinforcement creating attachment that is stronger, not weaker, than consistent positive reinforcement would produce. Understanding the trauma bond does not make it dissolve immediately. But it does make it survivable.
Credit: The concept of trauma bonding was developed by Dr. Patrick Carnes in his research on betrayal bonds.
