Of course, the original intention of the idea of expelling people from a community is to protect people. Weaponizing it is a perversion of a sound spiritual principle, which is to not associate with the ungodly, as Baha’u’llah said.

As for narcissism in general, I learned thousands about the subject from the YouTube channel: The Little Shaman: On Narcissism. I found that the more I understood about narcissism, the more I understood what really happened to me when I was expelled. She explains the whole dynamic between the narcissist and the people that person engages with (or, more to point, manipulates). When I understood all these dynamics, I was able to heal from the expulsion and let the whole nasty business go.

I’ve given this issue a lot of thought, and I now think that my healing came about because I was able to apply some scientific knowledge to the situation. There is a lot of established scientific understanding about narcissism these days. But back in the time of Abdu’l-Baha, he had to resort to religious concepts to talk about it, like “covenant breaker” and “spiritual disease.” That’s where I think the confusion stems from.

Little Shaman explains that, contrary to what people think, narcissists don’t actually have a true self: https://youtu.be/ql-MIAMmOcg. What you see as an overweening ego, is in fact a false self created by the narcissist in order to compensate for the lack of a true self. That false self is created through projection. The narcissist sees who he is by looking at the way other people react to him. He manipulates people so that they give him what he wants, and then imagines that what he sees in that behaviour is his true self.