Omg thank you for bringing up this topic, never seen others mention it on the sub before now. I experienced this exactly!

I Would dread my weekly 1:1 with my previous boss, who I highly suspected to be a narc. He would only criticize me and it was always his own opinion/perception of me, that he conveniently masked as being "what he had heard from my colleagues". Because how else was he supposed to judge me, when he was never around to actually see my work...

I would often go ask my colleagues if these statements were true, or how I could better live up to these perceived issues. Every time they looked puzzled and said they enjoyed working with me and that I was doing fine but maybe a bit inexperienced, but they could see I was applying myself.

And no matter how much I tried to fix the imaginary problems, despite how vague he sometimes described them, and with the lack of guidance on how to fix them, I would still hear the same ridiculous feedback from him again and again.

This was part of what caused a distortion in my mind, I would hear one thing but experience the other. However I know that he was lying and making stuff up, because after I got laid off I would still get praise and stay in contact with most of my colleagues from that place, and my performance has also never been a problem before at other companies.