Maladaptive ≠ Abusive
Why conflating maladaptive and abusive behaviour does more harm than good, and why we need to stop conflating pathology and abuse.
Trigger Warning: Mentions of abuse (physical, psychological, emotional, sexual), trauma, mental illness, stigma (especially against people diagnosed with personality disorders/labelled ‘narcissistic’ or ‘sociopathic’)
I was trawling the emotional abuse tag on Instagram recently. As a survivor (a term that feels like new shoes that need to be worn in by my tender Achilles), my main reason for perusing this hashtag’s bounty was to find some relatable content on a quiet Saturday night. However, most — if not all of the reels I watched — conflated narcissism and emotional abuse as inextricably linked. I am not unfamiliar with narcissism and personality disorders being conflated with abuse, and have spoken of it often. It is, nonetheless, infuriating, when you attempt to advocate for those bearing the brunt of stigma in terms of psychological care whilst simultaneously seeking community born of those who hold similar traumas to you, and are met with hordes of survivors depicting abusers and narcissists as synonymous entities.
I posted a fairly extended rant in my ‘Abuse’ highlight, because speaking into the void helps me feel concepts more tangibly; within my ramblings on the etymology of narcissism, unpacking of NPD, and renouncement of disorders and abuse being seen and spoken about as generally concordant, I began pondering perceptions of maladaptive and abusive behaviour on a broader scale.
Abuse
Abuse is characterised by deliberate actions of cruelty that cause pain within a victim. This violence can be physical (e.g. hitting, spitting, restraining, biting), psychological (e.g. gaslighting, public or private humiliation, constant criticism, false accusations, blame shifting), emotional (e.g. guilt-tripping, dismissiveness, pushing your buttons, threats, weaponised incompetence, insulting), sexual, (e.g. rape, molestation, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact), or financial (controlling income, inspecting spendings, withholding access to shared assets). Many survivors experience an overlap of these sub-categories, as abuse is rarely linear or succinct in its manifestation or effects.
Abuse of any kind can cause anxiety, disordered sleep, survivor’s guilt, depression, post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, self-harm, and a wreckage of one’s life that extends far beyond the walls of the abusive situation itself. Survivors feel trapped, hopeless, and alone, even after they’ve managed to break free. Sharing one’s story and devouring similar accounts from others can dull the edge of the perpetual anguish that trauma stirs inside of us. Not unlike queerness, everything opens up in terms of relatability, so that even the most far-fetched or seemingly incomprehensible story grants a viewer a chance to see themselves and their pain reflected back at them. In this, there is power in finding a common enemy to smite with reactive rage. Unfortunately, this common enemy often manifests as a ‘narcissist’.
Notes on Narcissism
From what I can gather, ‘narcissistic abuse’ is seen as something equivalent (or identical) to emotional or ‘covert’ abuse in terms of its presentations. Signs of such abuse are controlling behaviour, gaslighting, isolating and creating mistrust within the victim, invasion of privacy, verbal abuse, threats, disregarding boundaries, instilling fear within the victim, excuses, etc. Sound familiar?
Some see narcissistic abuse as a sub-category of emotional abuse. People speak about narcissistic abuse and abusers as vampiric, manipulative, and self-centred in their methodology. There is also talk of innate tendencies to manipulate on account of pathologies of narcissism or sociopathy. What seems to set narcissistic abuse apart from good old-fashioned emotional abuse is the ‘self-centredness’ of the abuser. ‘Hoovering’ is also seen as a hallmark of the unique nature of ‘narcissistic abuse’, and is a tactic with which an abuser sucks a victim back into a cycle (often one of an idealisation/devaluation binary) by way of claiming to have changed, proclaiming their love, begging for help, threatening to harm themselves if left unattended to, and other equally manipulative measures. However, when you look a little closer, you will find that the “unique” hallmarks of narcissistic abuse are just the signs of emotional/covert abuse repackaged for the sake of individuality and ableism. The aforementioned example of ‘hoovering’ is just manipulation with the intent of trapping someone. ‘Smearing’ is the process through which someone defames your reputation, and that falls directly into isolation and control on either side. So is there a difference, or should we abandon the notion of ‘narcissistic abuse’ altogether? Abandonment seems the order of the day.
In some circles, there’s even a name for the specific kind of damage done by ‘narcissists’ to their victims: Narcissistic abuse syndrome, or Post-Narcissist Stress Disorder (PNSD). Symptoms include negative responses to triggers that conjure up intrusive thoughts of the abuse, flashbacks, social withdrawal, disconnection, and hypervigilance. These ‘symptoms’ are virtually identical to those of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), from which many survivors suffer as a result of the tumult and trauma of their relationships with their abusers. You know what else often stems from trauma? Personality disorders and mental illnesses.
Lest we forget, the public eye is often informed by clinical perceptions. Psychology’s problematic fave, Sigmund Freud, saw narcissism as a naturally occuring developmental milestone. Egocentrism is the pinnacle of childhood; a child scrapes their knee, runs to their mother, and asks, ‘Mommy, feel how sore it is,’ because their view of the world is the only view they can comprehend.
Both neglect and overindulgence are linked to the development of pathological narcissism. In my mind’s eye, it makes perfect sense that one would herald and guard one’s own perspective and needs above all else if others fail to see its value. However, this kind of tunnel vision has evolved to be seen as inherently ‘evil’ within the eyes of others, when in fact it is more complicated than that. Much more complicated.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), as defined by the DSM V, includes presentations of the need for external validation and intrinsic appraisal in order to regulate the functioning of identity and self-direction, low empathy (or empathy that is only exercised when relevant to oneself), and relationships marked by superficiality or the preoccupation with one’s own gain. Further traits include antagonism, grandiosity, and the need for attention. Some aspects of these traits that could be interpreted as ‘problematic’ (however nefarious that term may be) include condescension, entitlement, dysregulation (often on par with fluctuations in self-esteem), a complicated relationship with empathy, and difficulty engaging in intimacy. The previous DSM included ‘interpersonal exploitation’ in terms of taking advantage of others for personal gain, though this serrated edge has now been subsumed by the comparative sympathy of current criteria.
I am baffled by how narcissism came to be the get-rich-quick scam of survivor narratives and the building of “trauma-informed’ community (however nebulous that term may be). Surely narcissists — those whose defences have roots in traumatic experience — should be welcomed as equals within a community bound together by their wounds, and not trampled by their compatriots in the name of self-empowerment? What is more confusing about this incongruence is the inconsistency of the narrative of its pathology from within these survivor clusters; some attribute narcissism to NPD, others are sympathetic to those diagnosed with NPD and separate them from narcissistic abusers (somewhat antithetically), and others fall somewhere within a host of nooks and crannies.
It is understood that there are two main types of narcissism: grandiose (self-inflated, ‘positive’) and vulnerable (self-effacing, ‘negative’). An example of grandiose narcissism would be a businessman bragging to his co-workers about an important deal, exaggerating his role and perhaps even bending the truth in order to further his sense of superiority. An example of vulnerable narcissism would be a friend entering into a soliloquy on how much she hates herself in order to gain attention from you. Personally, I do not think that either of these extremes warrant their owners as holding a higher propensity for abusive behaviour. They are, however, maladaptive.
Narcissism, whether embedded within the confines of a diagnosable personality disorder or simply an ‘undesirable trait’, is a defence mechanism. As many have said, a ‘healthy dose’ of narcissism is a key to better self-esteem, self-concept, and self motivation. However, there is a point at which the threshold is crossed and it is seen as an icky, overgrown hedge in need of a trim (i.e. total stigmatisation and obliteration). It is seen as an excessive interest in oneself, but self-interest is not code for high self-esteem.
The whole concept of a pathologised tactic through which one is supposed to acquire admiration/attention/love/support is mired in the idea that certain types of people are inherently good, whilst others are inherently bad. This kind of mentality is the reason that people do not believe that:
- people other than men can be abusive
- queer intimate partner violence is just as real and terrible as its straight counterparts
- woman-on-woman rape exists
- abuse can be carried out by people deemed ‘innocent’ by the society in which they exist (e.g. disabled people, feminine-presenting people, etc.)
Trauma babes, I understand your anger. The need for vengeance. The inclination to box people into neat little categories so as to protect yourself and ‘keep the bad man out’. My aim is not to negate your pain and the havoc that abuse has wreaked within your life and the lives of your accomplices within this battle. My aim is to point out that things are more complicated than the poles of good and bad. Maladaptive behaviour should not be conflated with abuse, and vice versa.
‘Like a Damn Sociopath’
Why is it that every person perceived as anything from unreasonable to evil is met with the thwack of psychopathy as an explanation for their every move? When I hear ‘good 4 u’ by Olivia Rodrigo, or ‘Sweet But Psycho’ by Ava Louise, my instinct is to grind my teeth, clench my fists, and refrain from punching a wall due to my rage at how misguided and widespread this narrative is. Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is so misunderstood and so weaponised that I hardly know where to begin when unpacking this phenomenon.
When you hear the word ‘psychopath’, I’m sure that a terrible figure comes to mind. Ted Bundy. Mao Zedong. Jim Jones. ‘Sociopath’ isn’t that much better from a PR perspective. These words are bound up with violence – whether it be little boys dissecting dead animals or nurses injecting their patients with overdoses non-consensually – and wickedness. Pure evil, even. And I am here to say that it is not that simple, and that these misconceptions do a great disservice to those with traits or diagnoses of ASPD.
The fear of ASPD is terrifying; whenever I feel like riling myself up, I traipse up and down the Pop Psychology section in book shops and peruse titles about being surrounded by sociopaths/psychopaths, how they are right next door, how they are hiding in plain sight. Are we talking about people or are we talking about nuclear warheads?
ASPD is characterised by: ignorance of right and wrong, disregard for others, disobedience of the law and authority, exploiting others for personal gain, being impulsive, having a short fuse, irresponsible actions, indifference to the safety of self and others, recklessness, and no remorse.
Disregard (and the tangential concept of abnormal ‘self-focus’) implies that a lack of natural emotional investment or attentiveness is problematic. Not to say that being disregarded does not enrage or hurt you; however, many people who are aware of such a propensity within themselves are more than capable of measuring their actions of care and concern. Ultimately, the effects of such a trait boils down to the individual.
Remorse is the big thing when looking at ASPD and its stigma, because often, within the eyes of the world at large, responsibility cannot be understood through a purely rational or learned lens. Empathy is not a necessity, nor is its lack unique to psychopathy or sociopathy. It is also not a binaristic thing of ‘either you have it or you don’t’; many people oscillate at various points and in various states in response to their environment. Trauma babes: can you relate? I’m sure that, whilst you may deny it, many of you can. Empathy is a luxury not as easily afforded to people whose emotional palette has been brutalised and exploited, whether that be within the context of abuse or masking or anything else.
All things considered, it would be unfair to say that, as these traits are not immanently abusive, they bring about little to no impact on the world and inhabitants surrounding their manifestation. That is where maladaptation comes into the picture.
Maladaptation
Maladaptation is the inappropriate adjustment to an environment or circumstance. Maladaptive behaviours are indicative of such an adjustment.
An instance of maladaptation would be disordered attachment (please don’t hate me for mentioning attachment), communication, or defence mechanisms.
More specific examples:
- You are incapable of asking for help.
- You struggle to be present when a loved one is in need, and find your mind floating into the stratosphere.
- Sex feels like a mountain that, more often than not, is an insurmountable feat.
- The only way you know how to communicate anger is passive aggression.
- Taking responsibility for your actions is an all-or-nothing game (i.e. either everything is your fault or nothing is your fault).
- Guilt is a feeling that lies well outside your grasp.
- Your default is dissociation.
- You are constantly unsure of who you really are and what you really want.
The list goes on. But I’m sure that when I put it like that, you can relate to the ease of demedicalised language. If I replaced uncertainty of who you are with ‘identity disturbance’ (a key trait of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or the struggle to be present when attempting to care for someone when it does not directly involve your own needs with ‘inflated self-interest’ (a component of Narcissistic Personality Disorder), you would probably distance yourself from such extremity.
Manipulation is neither an anomaly nor a consistently terrible thing. It is par for the course of human experience. This essay is manipulative in that I am attempting to use information in order to make you think in a certain way. So when does it extend to ‘exploitation’? When someone is abnormal and struggles to live up to ‘acceptable (external) standards’?
Encasing maladaptive inclinations within the confines of disorder – further clouding these inclinations in misunderstanding and shame – is unhelpful to all aspects of this equation: the victim, the abuser, and the mental illness utilised as a pawn.
Everyone holds the potential to fall victim to abuse, and/or to victimise someone else. Past abuse, trauma, and low self-esteem inform the proclivity for either role. Of course, there are differentiating factors, but the binary between the abused and the abuser is simply not as clear-cut as we would love to believe. Many survivors see aspects of themselves within their abusers, and I think that it is important to note that it is unlikely that abusive behaviour stems from nowhere. Hurt people hurt people.
Amalgamation and Conflation
Indeed, there is an overlap in terms of a surface-level understanding of maladaptive behaviour and abusive behaviour.
Some instances of self-focused behaviour:
- Hyping yourself up to an audience before a performance when you feel as though your chest is going to cave in on itself.
- Asking your lover to praise you during sex.
- Wanting a friend to hold you as you shake in their arms on account of your self-loathing.
- Skewing a conversation to talk about yourself.
- Only being able to find meaningful processing in conflict.
Who is to say which of these examples is problematic? Or maladaptive? Or even abusive?
I think that the key is to consider intention and context. I know that actions speak louder than words, but there is often an intangible nuance that intention brings to the analysis of an action.
There are, of course, grey areas in that hurt is hurt, irrespective of whether someone ‘meant to’ cause it or not. What I can say though is that abuse is a pattern. It is not an occasional slip-up. Furthermore, it is the intention to control, to project your own pain onto someone, to allow your desires and impulses to overshadow every aspect of their lives. Maladaptation is different in that it is less symbiotically systemic, arguably more self-focused, and somewhat more nebulous in terms of understanding its role and impact outside of the binary of what is abuse and what is not.
For example, if someone is caught in a cycle of self-loathing and expects you to save them, maladaptation is certainly present. The moment that ‘abusive’ becomes an apt descriptor could be when they continuously shift the blame onto you for no apparent reason. If your lover is saying ‘Oh my gosh, I suck, I hate myself, I never do anything right,’ purely because of low self-esteem and a need for external validation, that is very different from, ‘I hate myself because you don’t love me and you hate me and you don’t care about me and you never consider x or y,’ when in fact you are working around the clock to ensure that they are validated and safe in this regard, and communicating your feelings clearly and transparently. There is a grey area, of course; if someone genuinely feels self-hatred because they think that you are going to abandon them or that you hate them, then it would not necessarily be abusive to say these things. But when they are weaponised – when they are seemingly unaware of the impact of their low self-esteem and purely blame you and your action/inaction for their perceptions of themselves – and this happens constantly, this kind of ‘manipulation’ is abusive. It is abusive in that it is aimed at making you feel bad about yourself and is often pursued with the intention of roping you into an unhealthy dynamic from which you may find it difficult to disentangle yourself once things escalate (and they will, and they do).
Similarly, if someone is hurting themselves on account of trauma or another issue, this is indeed maladaptive. BUT, if they systemically blame that behaviour on you not supporting them (when you have been supporting them) or make you feel as though you are walking on eggshells lest you ‘set them off’, this shifts into destructive territory.
Maladaptive behaviour may be linked to a pathology, whether it be a Cluster B personality disorder, depression, or a trauma response. That being said, its imposition is not quite the same as an imposition of abuse.
To reiterate the age-old first-year proverb, correlation does not equal causation. In this case, pathology, whilst important to understand in terms of an individual’s behaviour, is not a direct line that determines expressed abusive behaviour. And it is important to note that cases are individual, and that generalisation of abuse as an experience tied up with disorders is unfair and untrue. In this regard, tendency and propensity are not the same as someone’s reality. If someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) breaks up with their partner so as to reclaim the upper hand and assuage their fear of abandonment, or someone with NPD needs validation from those closest to them, that does not mean that they are innately terrible and doomed to terrorise their loved ones as unassuming victims. Maladaptive? Yes. Abusive? No.
Closing Thoughts, and Moving Forward
This issue of conflation and the uninformed semantic divide (read: ‘Narcissistic abuse’ as a concept) is pervasive. Some therapists perpetuate this narrative. Sects of survivors found communities and connections upon the dismissal of narcissism or sociopathy as worthy of consideration, as well as the understanding of those who exhibit such traits as evil or inherently abusive in direct correlation to their highly stigmatised pathologies.
It cannot be that the go-to processing technique is to take up entomology and encase disordered people behind sheets of glass for public consumption and judgement. Human beings are complex, imperfect, brilliantly grotesque creatures, and it is unjust to pin the blame of a systemic problem on a group of people who are just as vulnerable as you, as a survivor — if not more so.
This is a symptom of a larger problem: our pathological need to categorise and medicalise everything and everyone who teeters on the brink of abnormality means that we cannot see the bridges that could be built. At the end of the day, abuse is abuse. We should aim to abolish the discursive specifics and be there for each other in any way we can. Within this, we are re-centring the stories of survivors, and we can work to ensure that hurt people do not hurt people quite so very much. Because, yes, by conflating maladaptive tendencies with abuse, we are hurting people. And by calling people struggling with certain defences and disorders ‘abusers’ purely based on their pathology, we are hurting people.
Resources
I think that accessing resources from people who are informed by lived experience is the best option when attempting to sift through the detritus of google searches of stigmatised disorders.
Some recommendations:
@empathywhomst and @psychopathicnarc on Instagram both make brilliant infographics about various personality disorders and the spectrum of experiences that exist within such frameworks.
Devon Price writes about this on their Instagram, Twitter, and on Medium (I highly recommend their piece entitled ‘Sympathy for the Narcissist’).
If anyone else has any other recommendations, comment them below ! We love nuance.
This post was also published on Patreon.
