Memoirs of the Narcissized
Documenting the Lived Reality of Narcissistic Abuse
Welcome. My name is Terry. I am a survivor. This is my project.
I did not set out to start a project.
I set out to survive.
What happened after that, after the 1,750 mile drive with three changes of clothes and a dog, after I left the front door to my house wide open because I needed him to believe that I would indeed leave everything behind, after the 120 days my brain spent trying to remember who it belonged to, after I stopped being buried alive and started being just alive, is what motivated me.
I needed to understand what happened to me. I needed to know I was not the only one.
What I found when I started looking was not a small, scattered representation of damaged people with bad luck in love.
What I found was a pattern. Identical. Repeating. Crossing every demographic, every geography, every kind of relationship. The same tactics. The same phases. The same aftermath. The same institutions that looked at the wreckage and saw nothing worth documenting.
I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am not a researcher with credentials behind my name.
What I am is a woman who journaled through her own devaluation, flipped back through the pages one day, and saw the frequency she had been too close to recognize before. That moment, that cold, clarifying moment of pattern recognition, is the entire engine of this project.
We are not victims of bad relationships. We are survivors of a predatory pattern that our institutions do not yet have the language, the will or the data to change.
This project provides all three.
Welcome to the Project
A personal note from the project's founder
Your Personal Invitation
Become part of this project.
For the first time, we can give meaning to what we experienced simply by documenting it.
It is our only weapon, not yet forged, for a fight that does not yet exist.
Why This Matters
Memoirs of the Narcissized is a survivor-led anthology project dedicated to documenting the lived experiences of individuals who have endured coercive control expressed through the structure of narcissistic abuse.
This is an important distinction. Narcissism does not automatically equal abuse.
Abuse happens when narcissism combines:
entitlement to control others
lack of empathy
use of manipulation strategies
punishment for autonomy
Together, these elements produce the recognizable cycle of abuse described by survivors across thousands of experiences.
Love Bombing.
Devaluation.
Discard.
Hoover.
Repeat.
By collecting structured personal memoirs, this project seeks to illuminate the pattern, bring clarity to what victims often struggle to describe, and contribute meaningful insight to public understanding, research, and policy discussions surrounding coercive control and narcissistic abuse.
The Power is in the Pattern
The repetition seen in the story collection is not accidental.
The behavioral sequence is not random.
Across relationships, cities, professions, and backgrounds,
survivors describe strikingly similar trajectories.
Coercive Control
This goes way beyond a "bad relationship".
(WHO, 2017). Coercive control is a form of abuse where the main goal is to degrade, isolate, and deprive a person of their rights to physical security, dignity, and respect, which puts the victim in a state of terror and entrapment, and includes tactics such as monitoring movements, social isolation, and restriction of access to financial resources, employment, education, or medical care (Pitman, 2016; Stark, 2007, 2013; Stark & Hester, 2019). For instance, abusers may use tactics involving threats to hurt or kill their victims, their children or pets, or isolating them from family, friends, and support services. Coercive control may also involve economic abuse, by threatening economic security and independence (Postmus et al., 2020), intimate partner stalking (Mechanic et al., 2008), as well as reproductive coercion, such as pregnancy coercion or interference with contraception
Narcissistic abuse includes the kind of abuse caused by individuals who repeatedly engage in patterns of coercive control that cause psychological, emotional, financial, and social harm.
The National Library of Medicine admits that Coercive control is an under researched
type of violence.
Victims Are Silenced
There is not enough data because victims are silenced by shame and fear that comes from threats.
Most survivors never formally report what happened. When they do attempt to explain it, they often cannot describe the full scope of the manipulation because they themselves do not understand it.
As a result, survivors are left to rely largely on their own discoveries, informal support groups, and fragmented conversations. The guidance and understanding they seek is nowhere to be found.
Until now.
Here's A Thought
The definition of the word “serial” is: (of a criminal)
repeatedly committing the same offense and following a characteristic, predictable pattern.
Does this not make the perpetrator of this abuse a
Serial Abuser?
At present, many who engage in these patterns move through communities with complete abandon. They leave innocent people, destroyed, in their wake.
Unfettered, they move on to next one in a manner that can be described as "serial".
Documentation Changes Things
Academic research into narcissistic personality disorder and coercive control exists. It is valuable. It is also slow, underfunded, institutionally siloed, and largely inaccessible to the people who need it most — including the professionals whose daily work puts them in contact with survivors who are desperate to be believed.
Participatory research — the kind where the people most affected by a problem are invited to document and define it — has a long and legitimate history of driving policy change. The history of HIV/AIDS advocacy, the domestic violence movement, the recognition of PTSD as a diagnosable condition — all of these were driven in significant part by the sheer accumulating weight of documented human experience demanding to be taken seriously.
This project stands in that tradition.
We aim to build a body of documented survivor experience large enough, consistent enough, and analytically rigorous enough that the argument for updated recognition, updated protocols, and updated policy becomes impossible to dismiss.
Every submission makes that argument stronger.
Self-care Aware
If you decide to contribute your story to this project, please visit the pages on this site designed to inform you on exactly what to expect. It may not be as simple as you think. The human body, the nervous system in particular, has memory way beyond the brain's. Revisiting the abuse, in any way shape or form, could trigger physical and emotional reactions. We offer advice before starting, suggestions for during, and self-care for after. We know the significance of what we ask.
Before the story
We have created a survey that you can complete prior to documenting your story. Aside from providing much need demographic data, it will act as a prelude to the narration; giving your mind a body a sort of "heads up". The data derived from this survey, will back up the data revealed in the stories. The survey is not connected to your memoir. It simply goes to a data pool for later processing into meaningful reports. The survey data, in no way, diminishes the value of your story. The two support each other.
After the story
Contributors report significant relief:
" It has been years since I last told my story to anyone. I told it here because I do want to help."
"That was a lot easier than I thought it would be."
" Your process made it E Z P Z".
"I was surprised to find, even after all these years, that my story in that way, finally laid it to rest. I felt peace about it like never before."
Your story will become part of published volume. An anthology of Survivor stories.
This site will continue to collect stories for subsequent volumes. As long as people are telling their story, we will publish volumes to include their story.
You can come back to this site to view statistics and progress being made by the project.
There is also a Blog page to highlight the tactics used in coercive control. We do try to keep this blog light humored as the subjects can be quite dark.
And... we are here for you.