Narcissistic Abuse. Understanding the Cycle and Its Impact
By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
If you are in danger now, call 999. If you want to talk to someone about abuse in a relationship, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is free and open at any time on 0808 2000 247. You do not need a settled name for what is happening before you pick up the phone.
I have written a separate article about the specific tactics that make covert narcissism so hard to spot in the moment, such as guilt used to end a conversation, compliments that double as criticism and the silent treatment used as punishment. This piece is different in shape, though closely related. That one looks at individual moments. This one looks at the arc of the whole relationship, the repeating cycle those moments tend to sit inside, and what that cycle can do to a person over months or years.
It also sits alongside a broader look at why labels like narcissist get reached for too quickly and a piece on what tends to be missed when someone reaches for that label about an ex. Those pieces are about being careful with the word. This one is about taking a real, repeating pattern seriously once you have looked closely enough to see it clearly.
Someone can recognise every individual tactic and still struggle to see the larger shape they have been living inside. The tactics happen in scattered moments, while the cycle only becomes visible when you step back far enough to see a whole relationship's rhythm. That longer view is often the hardest to hold onto while you are still inside it.
One thing to say before going further. Narcissistic abuse is not a formal diagnosis, and you will not find it as an entry in a diagnostic manual. The phrase comes largely from survivor communities and popular writing. That does not make what people describe any less real or painful. It does mean the research is younger and thinner than the volume of writing about it would suggest.
The Cycle in Plain Terms
Most descriptions of this pattern use a handful of stages. Idealisation is the beginning, an early period of intense attention, affection and apparent compatibility that arrives faster and more intensely than in most new relationships. Devaluation follows, a shift towards criticism, coldness and unpredictability, often presented as your fault and not as a change in them. Discard is when the relationship ends, sometimes abruptly and with little explanation. Hoovering, named after the vacuum cleaner, is an attempt to draw you back in afterwards through apologies, renewed affection or a promise that things will be different this time.
None of these stages is unique to this pattern when seen alone. Every relationship has a honeymoon period and harder stretches, and most exes reach out again at some point. In my experience what distinguishes this pattern is the shape of the repetition. The same sequence returns, the warm periods tend to get shorter, the cold periods longer and more corrosive, and each return of affection is just convincing enough to restart the cycle without resolving what came before. A single hard patch followed by real repair looks nothing like this. A hard patch followed by another and another, each deeper than the last, with less and less repair in between, starts to.
A useful if imperfect way to notice the difference is to ask what an apology changes. In a relationship that is not caught in this cycle, an apology is usually followed by a lasting shift in the behaviour that prompted it. In this pattern, an apology or a hoover often brings warmth back for a while with the behaviour itself unchanged. That is frequently the clearest early sign that the cycle is turning again and not that a real resolution has happened.
A recent clinical commentary looked at this cycle directly. Its authors noted that lay sources describe the narcissistic abuse cycle as occurring in many relationships and causing serious psychological harm, while the phenomenon has scant mention in academic literature. They called for researchers to refine its definition and boundaries, and for clinicians to be vigilant about its presence (Ameen et al., 2025). The gap between how often the pattern is described and how little has been formally studied is part of why this article stays with the pattern and does not offer a checklist for diagnosing a particular partner.
Why Leaving Is Harder Than It Looks From the Outside
Warmth and cruelty arriving without a clear pattern does something specific to how people feel about a partner. In my experience it ties a person to the relationship more tightly, not less, because the hope of the warm version returning keeps pulling. This is often called a trauma bond. I use the phrase as a description of what clients tell me and not as an established measured mechanism, and I would be wary of anyone who presents it as settled science.
What I can say with confidence is that staying is not a sign of weakness, poor judgement or not caring enough about yourself to leave. Many of the people I see have stayed because they are empathic, loyal and invested, and a pattern like this can turn those good qualities against them. Wanting to understand and help someone who is clearly in pain is a decent instinct, and it is not a flaw.
This also helps explain something friends and family often find baffling, which is why someone goes back after finally leaving, sometimes more than once. The pull is rarely about the good moments outweighing the bad on some rational calculation. After a long period of loss and relief, the renewed warmth can feel like coming home and not like a risk. Understanding that tends to reduce shame far more than being told to try harder to stay away.
The shame is often one of the heaviest parts of the whole experience. People tell me they feel stupid, weak or complicit for returning, especially after telling friends they were finally done. None of those descriptions fit what I see. Going back to a person who has been your main source of closeness is a very human thing to do, and it says nothing about your worth.
There is also a quieter form of hoovering, distinct from the dramatic kind. It is not always flowers and apologies. Sometimes it is a comment on an old photo, a message that arrives with no explanation, or contact timed for a moment they can guess you will be feeling low, such as a birthday, an anniversary or news travelling through mutual friends. Each one is small enough to explain away on its own and harder to resist all together.
The unpredictability at the centre of this cycle, warmth and cruelty arriving without a clear pattern, does something specific to how a person bonds with their partner.
What the Research Does and Does Not Show
Since the cycle framework itself has a thin evidence base, it helps to look at research on closely related ground. A systematic review and meta analysis of 22 studies and 11,520 participants found a significant but weak positive relationship between narcissistic traits and perpetrating intimate partner violence, with a correlation of .15. The link held for psychological and cyber abuse but not for physical violence, and it was stronger for vulnerable narcissism than for grandiose narcissism. All the measures were self report, which may mean underreporting (Oliver et al., 2024).
That is a more modest picture than popular content often paints. Narcissistic traits are one small piece of why some people hurt their partners, and most people with narcissistic traits are not abusive. For you, the practical point is that you do not need anyone to meet a personality profile before what you experienced counts. Behaviour that frightens, controls or diminishes you deserves to be taken seriously whatever label ends up fitting best.
The harm itself is better documented than the label. A systematic review and meta analysis of 194 studies found that psychological violence from a partner had strong associations with post traumatic stress, depression and anxiety, with the strongest link to post traumatic stress. The authors rated their certainty in the estimates as low and called for more research (Dokkedahl et al., 2022). So the evidence is not about a fashionable label. It points to a long recognised truth, that being repeatedly belittled, controlled or destabilised by someone close to you can leave real marks on mental health.
This overlaps substantially with the wider territory of emotional abuse, and the two are not always separate in practice. If you are wondering whether what you are living with is control and not ordinary conflict, this article on coercive control and conflict may help you tell them apart.
It Can Happen in Any Relationship
This pattern is not confined to one gender, one type of relationship or one sexual orientation. Popular writing often defaults to a single configuration, and that can leave people whose experience does not match it doubting whether what they went through counts. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans people, people in consensually non monogamous relationships and men who have been hurt by a partner all describe the same alternating warmth and devaluation. The cycle does not depend on the genders or structure of the people involved, and it deserves to be recognised wherever it appears.
Specialist services exist if you would feel more understood by them, including Galop for LGBTQ+ people and the Men's Advice Line for men. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 is open to everyone.
A further complication comes up often enough to name. Someone caught in this pattern may sometimes behave badly themselves, out of exhaustion, fear or the disorientation of living inside something unpredictable for a long time. That does not make two people equally responsible for the pattern. When one person is being worn down and the other is doing the wearing, shouting back or withdrawing is an understandable response and not a cause. Recovery can still be helped by looking carefully at your own reactions, not to share out blame evenly but because understanding them helps with what comes next.
What Tends to Help
Naming the cycle is often a useful first step. A label does not fix anything on its own, but it can replace a confusing, self blaming question such as why do I keep getting this wrong with a structural one, which is that this is a pattern with a shape and the shape is not your fault. That shift alone tends to ease some of the self doubt built up over a long time inside this dynamic.
Beyond that, the work usually involves rebuilding trust in your own perception, since that is often what has been most undermined. This tends to move faster with company than alone, whether that is a therapist, a trusted friend who can reflect back what they see, or both. Isolation is common in these relationships, sometimes as a direct result of the dynamic, so reconnecting with outside perspectives is part of the work and not an optional extra.
A few practical things often help in the early stages.
Keep a private record of what happens, with dates, in a place the other person cannot get to. It helps when memory has been questioned.
Tell one person you trust what is going on, even if only in part.
Notice how your body feels around contact, such as dread when a message arrives, and take that seriously as information.
Decide in advance what you will do if a hoover arrives, such as waiting a day before replying or showing the message to a friend.
If you are thinking of leaving, talk through safety first. Leaving can be a higher risk time, and the Helpline can help you plan.
Recovery rarely moves in a straight line, and setbacks do not erase earlier progress. Slipping back into contact after a hoover, or doubting whether it was as bad as it felt, is not evidence that nothing has changed. It is a common part of untangling from a bond that was hard to leave. Treating a setback as proof of failure adds another layer of self blame to a pattern that was never about anything you did wrong.
How Therapy Can Help
A first session is not about deciding whether a particular partner or ex meets a clinical threshold. It is about walking through the pattern as you have lived it, what the good periods looked like, what tended to trigger a shift, and what has kept you returning to or staying in the relationship even when part of you could see its shape clearly.
Where the pattern is a settled, repeating one, the work moves at the pace of your own safety and readiness, including practical safety planning where that is relevant, and not towards a fixed timeline. Where it turns out to be more mixed, a real difficulty with some genuine repair and change in it, that is useful to know too and calls for a different, more collaborative kind of work. Either way the aim is not to arrive at the correct label. It is to leave with a clearer and steadier sense of your own experience than the one you arrived with.
This work sometimes happens while the relationship continues and is being looked at with care, and sometimes it is about the aftermath of one that has ended, including the confusing pull back towards it that can last well after the last contact. Both are common reasons to start, and neither is more legitimate than the other. Therapy is not couples work in these situations, and if abuse is part of the picture I would work with you individually, because joint sessions can put the person being hurt at risk.
If now feels like the right time to talk this through with a therapist, I offer a free 30 minute consultation in person in London or online.
If anything you have read here feels urgent or unsafe, please do not wait for that conversation. Call 999 in an emergency, or ring the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247, or speak to your GP. You do not need a settled name for what is happening before you reach out.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist working in person across central London, from rooms in Pimlico, Kensington, and Angel. He works with couples, individuals, and polycules on relationship issues including jealousy, affairs and betrayals, sex problems, and considered separation. His practice is integrative, sex-positive, and affirming of all relationship structures and identities.
References
Ameen, S., Chandran, S., Chatterjee, R., Chatterjee, S., & Sarkhel, S. (2025). Narcissistic abuse cycle deserves clinical and research attention. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/02537176251406477
Dokkedahl, S. B., Kirubakaran, R., Bech Hansen, D., Kristensen, T. R., & Elklit, A. (2022). The psychological subtype of intimate partner violence and its effect on mental health: A systematic review with meta analyses. Systematic Reviews, 11, Article 163. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-022-02025-z
Oliver, E., Coates, A., Bennett, J. M., & Willis, M. L. (2024). Narcissism and intimate partner violence: A systematic review and meta analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(3), 1871 to 1884. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231196115
