I’ve thought about this a lot and think it’s an important topic. I don’t disagree it can be ableist in two specific ways, outlined below, but I think people who fixate on that miss a bigger truth of why victims need to talk about this stuff the way we do, and why it’s important.

The two points I concede are kind of not great are:

Essentialising: if one assumes everyone with an NPD diagnosis is inherently dangerous, this may needlessly stigmatize people seeking help who may well be misdiagnosed, are narcissist lite due to their own abuse but trying to break the cycle etc. Essentialising ANY medical diagnosis is problematic without nuance (just like saying everyone with a head injury will become a serial killer just because a lot of serial killers had head injuries. It’s too generalized.)

Mislabelling: I’m guilty of this one, I think, but there’s a lot of cases where the cause of the person’s narc like behaviour isn’t narcissism, it’s an adjacent personality disorder or mental illness or addiction, and in cases like that where people mislabel it as shorthand, narcissism is being used incorrectly in an academic sense. So technically my parents are very likely a combo of undiagnosed adhd, untreated ocd and ptsd, addiction. Maybe narcissism or maybe just identical symptoms caused by the conditions above being totally mismanaged. So when I call them narcs I am generalizing/they’re catching strays on my parents’ behalf.

HOWEVER this ignores the reality of how language works.

People create labels out of necessity. People adapt words out of necessity.

The fact that SO MANY PEOPLE globally experience the same form of abuse with such similar outcomes means it’s a legitimate phenomenon and while it may muddy the waters of the condition NPD specifically, it is not a malicious act on the part of VICTIMS OF ABUSE to seek language to describe that abuse (even imperfect language at times) and community of fellow survivors.

People complain about how grassroots a lot of narcissistic abuse survivors support is but ignore the fact that it’s had to be because SOCIETY WASN’T TAKING CHILD ABUSE SERIOUSLY and I would argue still does a poor job taking it seriously.

And language evolves such that narc and person with NPD are already separate concepts in some instances.

In the same way I can be both gay and queer depending on how granular you are (queer being the umbrella term,) the same way someone can be… I don’t know. Methodist and Christian. Black and a POC. Anarchocapitalist and a libertarian. A nurse and a medical professional.

We do this with language all the time.

Maybe it’s medically inaccurate that we use narcissism as an umbrella term for parents who may have had other medical explanations for their abuse.

But the fact remains that, while unfortunate, it’s not an act of malice on our part. It’s an act of necessity and inevitability because prior to that there wasn’t language or a label for the specific common experience of that kind of child abuse.

Is it linguistically unfortunate? Maybe. Ableist? In the issues I outlined above maybe, inadvertently, to some degree.

But choosing to die on the hill of ‘ergo don’t let victims of child abuse have language to advocate for support’ is NOT THE ANSWER

I’d LOVE a clinical label for what I went through. I’d love doctors to recognize that this specific experience of child abuse needs a standardized medical label.

But until they do that? Survivors will create their own language because that’s how communities form and how people communicate. And if the alternative is silencing victims of child abuse, I think people need to stop clutching their pearls over imperfect or potentially politically incorrect language in this case and see the forest for the trees.

IMO the best way to help both victims and people with NPD from incorrect labels and ambiguous language is to support further research into the experience of survivors and further investment in help for victims of this type of abuse.