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You did not recognize it at the time. The person who is now cold or gone was once the person who looked at you as though no one else existed. You remember the early weeks — the messages, the certainty, the sense of finally being understood. You also remember when it changed, even if you cannot say exactly when. The same person who built you up began to take you apart. Sometimes in front of others, sometimes in private, sometimes with words and sometimes with silence. You may now be at the end of the relationship, or somewhere in the middle, or somewhere after. You are trying to make sense of how something that felt like recognition became something that felt like erasure.
What you lived through has a name and a shape. The shifts were not random and they were not your fault. They followed a pattern that practitioners recognize across thousands of cases. It is a pattern with predictable phases and a predictable mechanism. Naming the pattern does not undo what happened. Yet it does something important. Naming returns to you the recognition that what you experienced was real. The shifts had structure. They happened to you rather than because of you.
The cycle of narcissistic abuse is a repeating pattern with four distinct phases: idealization, devaluation, discard, and re-engagement. Intermittent reinforcement sustains the cycle. Warmth and cruelty alternate unpredictably, producing the neurological attachment known as a trauma bond. Recognition of the phases is the first step in recovery.
To understand how this pattern works—and why it can be so difficult to escape—psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Thomas Franklin, MD shares his clinical perspective. Dr. Franklin is a member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and the American College of Psychiatrists, and serves on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Table of Contents
What is the Cycle of Narcissistic Abuse?
The cycle of narcissistic abuse describes the repeating pattern through which a perpetrator idealizes, devalues, discards, and then attempts to re-engage a target. A 2025 review in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine identified these four phases. The authors named them idealization, devaluation, discard, and re-entering (Ameen et al., 2025).1 They called for greater clinical and research attention to the phenomenon. They noted that public interest in the cycle is substantial. However, peer-reviewed treatment literature remains limited.
Dr. Thomas Franklin, MD is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is a member of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and the American College of Psychiatrists, and serves on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He describes the cycle’s structural arc in the following terms:
“The narcissistic abuse cycle often involves idealization and devaluation, which becomes chronic. Ultimately it leads to discarding the person that has been wrung out and is no longer the new shiny object that made the narcissist feel special in the first place.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
This gap between what survivors experience and what research formally documents has consequences. Many survivors arrive at recovery work having read extensively about narcissistic abuse online. Yet they still feel uncertain about whether what they lived through “counts.” It does. Practitioner experience with severe presentations confirms that the cycle is reproducible across very different relationships. Different countries, different ages, different perpetrator profiles — and yet strikingly similar phases, mechanisms, and consequences.
The cycle is not unique to romantic relationships. It occurs in families, in friendships, in workplaces, and in caregiving relationships. Wherever a person with narcissistic traits holds power over someone whose attachment provides what perpetrators experience as supply, the cycle can take hold.
The Four Phases of the Cycle
The four phases describe the structural arc of the relationship. They do not describe a clean chronological sequence. Once the cycle takes hold, idealization and devaluation often alternate within a single day. The perpetrator can love-bomb in the morning and devalue by evening. What follows is the dominant character of each phase, not a calendar.
Phase One: Idealization
The relationship begins with intensity. The perpetrator presents an idealized version of themselves. They treat the target as though no one else has ever truly mattered. There is rapid emotional escalation, often disguised as recognition: I have never felt this way before. You are different from anyone I have ever known. We were meant to find each other. The perpetrator places the target on a pedestal. They show the target a future that arrives almost fully formed in the perpetrator’s words.
Specific tactics characterize the idealization phase. Love-bombing saturates the target with attention, affection, gifts, and declarations. Mirroring reflects the target’s own values, interests, and aesthetic preferences back at them. This produces the uncanny sense of having met someone who matches them at every point. Future faking constructs plans and promises — children, homes, careers built together — that function as emotional anchors regardless of whether the perpetrator intends to honor them. Fast-tracking compresses the timeline of intimacy. As a result, the target commits before having the information needed to evaluate the commitment.
What the target experiences in this phase is not a deception they failed to detect. Rather, it is the perpetrator’s preferred version of themselves — performed with conviction because, at the level of self-image, the perpetrator believes it. The performance is real to them in the moment. It is also unsustainable.
For a deeper look at the mechanism of the idealization phase, see my article on the narcissistic bait and switch. That piece examines the transition out of idealization as the defining feature of the cycle.
To learn more, read Narcissistic Mirroring: Psychology, Signs & Recovery.
Phase Two: Devaluation
Then something shifts. The qualities the perpetrator once celebrated become the qualities they criticize. What was attractive intelligence becomes “arrogance.” What was special warmth becomes “neediness.” What they once admired as independence now becomes “selfishness.” Suddenly, the target finds themselves accused of being the person they were told, repeatedly, that they were not.
Devaluation systematically erodes the target’s sense of self. The tactics in this phase include gaslighting, in which the perpetrator denies events the target clearly remembers and treats the target’s perceptions as unreliable. Constant criticism, often delivered as concern or honesty, undermines confidence in small daily decisions. The silent treatment uses sustained withdrawal as a punishment for unspecified offences. Comparison — to ex-partners, to siblings, to colleagues, to strangers — communicates that the target is, in some essential way, falling short. Projection attributes the perpetrator’s own behaviors to the target. As a result, an unfaithful partner accuses the target of infidelity. Likewise, a contemptuous partner accuses the target of contempt.
The target’s response is, predictably, to work harder. To explain better. To apologize pre-emptively. To manage the perpetrator’s emotional states. However, this effort does not produce a return to the idealization phase. The idealization phase was never about who the target was — it was about what the perpetrator needed at that point in the cycle. The target’s exhaustion deepens. Their nervous system, which once registered the warmth of the early relationship, begins to register chronic threat.
“Some of the behaviors present in the devaluation stage include cutting off people from their friends and loved ones, deeply personal attacks, grandiose apologies, and sometimes accelerating substance abuse with the person.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
The mechanism that holds the target inside the cycle during devaluation is intermittent reinforcement. This is the unpredictable alternation of warmth and cruelty. Notably, it produces some of the strongest and most durable attachments known to psychology (Dutton & Painter, 1993).2 Moments of apparent return to idealization, often following devaluation episodes, deepen the bond rather than weakening it. The neurological consequence is the trauma bond. This bond explains why survivors who understand the abuse clearly often still feel attached to the perpetrator.
To learn more, read The Narcissist’s False Self: What It Is & What It Does to You.
The broader pattern in which the cycle operates is coercive control. Evan Stark’s framework, developed in collaboration with the work of Susan Schechter, identifies coercive control as the construction of “mini regimes” of dominance inside intimate relationships (Stark, 2007).3 4 Narcissistic abuse is one specific variant of this broader pattern. The legal recognition of coercive control varies across jurisdictions, as documented in the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index (Wakefield, 2020).5
See also, What Is a Dread Game? Signs, Impact & Recovery.
Phase Three: Discard
Discard is the moment the perpetrator ends the relationship. Alternatively, they may make the relationship’s end inevitable through behavior designed to drive the target to leave. The discard can be sudden and theatrical, with a final argument staged as a justification. It can be slow and corrosive, with the perpetrator withdrawing across weeks or months until the relationship is effectively over. It can be public, conducted through humiliation and exposure. It can be silent, with the perpetrator simply disappearing.
“The discard can be dramatic but more often there is indifference or neglect. They are looking for a new shiny object and keeping you in the wings while they set about this.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
What characterizes the discard phase across these variations is the perpetrator’s loss of investment in the target as a continuing source of supply. Earlier the target functioned as the perpetrator’s mirror, reflecting back the idealized self. Now the perpetrator views the target as evidence of their own failures, as an obstacle, or as a witness to silence. The contempt that surfaces in this phase often shocks the target. The shock comes precisely from how completely the contempt inverts the warmth of the idealization phase.
Discard is frequently accompanied by the smear campaign. In this dynamic, the perpetrator constructs a narrative about the target. The audience may be friends, family, colleagues, or legal systems. The narrative pre-positions the perpetrator as the wronged party. It pre-positions the target as the unstable, dishonest, or unreasonable one. The platform’s dedicated article on the narcissist smear campaign examines this dynamic in depth.
For most targets, discard is not the end of the cycle. Rather, it is the perpetrator’s strategic withdrawal in preparation for re-engagement on terms more advantageous to the perpetrator. For some, however, discard is final. That variation requires its own treatment, which the next section provides.
To learn about an alternative variation of the narcissistic abuse cycle, read Mortal Discard: Five Terminal Patterns in Coercive Control.
Phase Four: Re-Engagement (Hoovering)
Hoovering is the perpetrator’s attempt to pull the target back into the relationship after the discard. The term comes from the vacuum brand — the perpetrator suctioning the target back into their orbit. Hoovering closes the loop of the cycle and resets it. The perpetrator returns, often with apology, often with declarations of change. They bring the same intensity of attention that defined the original idealization phase. Meanwhile, the target, neurologically conditioned by intermittent reinforcement, is biologically primed to respond to the warmth. As a result, the cycle begins again.
Hoovering takes many forms. Direct contact through calls, messages, or appearances at familiar locations is the most recognisable. Indirect contact via mutual friends, family members, or colleagues delivers the perpetrator’s preferred narrative without their direct involvement. Manufactured crises — a sudden illness, an emergency requiring the target’s help, a claim of suicidal distress — exploit the target’s compassion. In short, they override the boundaries the target has set. Anniversary hoovers arrive on dates with shared meaning, when the target’s defences are typically lowest. Apology hoovers offer admissions of fault calibrated to the target’s specific grievances. Yet these admissions usually come without any genuine change in the underlying patterns.
“People want to think people are at the core their best selves, so when things start going south, someone who has been love-bombed by a narcissistic character presumes that things will get back to that when this isn’t at all the case.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
The function of hoovering is not reconciliation. It is the restoration of the perpetrator’s control. The target who has begun to recover, to rebuild a sense of self outside the relationship, and to recognize the pattern represents a threat to the perpetrator’s preferred reality. Successful hoovering re-establishes the cycle on terms that favor the perpetrator. Typically, this includes a new and more intense idealization phase followed by a faster and more brutal devaluation. Each completed cycle deepens the trauma bond and weakens the target’s capacity to leave again.
The most effective intervention against hoovering is the disciplined practice of the no contact rule. This practice removes the perpetrator’s access to the target across every available channel.
The Cycle Is Not a Clean Sequence
The four-phase model captures the structural arc of the relationship and the characteristic dynamics of each phase. However, it does not capture the lived experience of being inside the cycle. In that experience, idealization and devaluation often alternate within hours. A perpetrator who criticized cruelly in the morning can be tender by evening. A weekend can hold an entire compressed cycle. Across years, the macro-pattern follows the four phases. Across days and weeks, the micro-pattern is far more chaotic.
This is why survivors often describe the relationship as “crazy-making.” It was crazy-making — not because they were going crazy, but because the temporal structure of the abuse made coherent perception almost impossible. By the time the target recognized one phase, the next was already underway. The same partner who told them, that morning, that they were the love of their life would, by evening, accuse them of being the source of every difficulty in the relationship.
Naming this pattern is not a small thing. Survivors who recognize it stop trying to identify what they “did” to cause each shift. The shifts were structural. They followed the perpetrator’s internal weather rather than anything the target said or did.
When the Cycle Does Not Restart: The Mortal Discard Pattern
The standard four-phase cycle assumes the perpetrator’s ongoing interest in the target as a source of supply. Hoovering exists because the perpetrator wants the target back. There is, however, a variation in which the cycle does not loop. In this variant, the discard is final. No hoovering follows. What follows instead is scapegoating, smear campaigning, and — in some cases — the active encouragement of the target’s self-destruction otherwise known as manslaughter by coercive control.
What the Mortal Discard Pattern Looks Like
Practitioner experience with severe and treatment-resistant presentations identifies this variation as the mortal discard pattern. The structural framing is the extraction-complete pattern. In this dynamic, the perpetrator has obtained from the relationship what they came for. The target’s continuing existence as a witness to what was taken is now a liability rather than an asset. The extraction may be financial — a house, a business, an inheritance, a settlement. It may be reputational — a career launched on the target’s network or expertise. Alternatively, it may be social — a position, a community, a child. In each case, the perpetrator’s strategic relationship to the target shifts at the moment of completion. No longer is the target the supply source. Now the target is the witness.
Several distinguishing features characterize the mortal discard pattern. First, the discard is terminal rather than strategic — no return is intended, because no return is needed. Second, the smear campaign intensifies rather than running alongside hoovering, because there is no hoovering to balance it. Third, the perpetrator’s narrative work shifts. Rather than preserving the option of return, it focuses on permanently delegitimizing the target as a credible witness. In many cases the perpetrator continues to control or sabotage the target’s circumstances at a distance. This happens through legal harassment, financial obstruction, professional interference, or the weaponization of children and shared social networks.
The Link Between the Mortal Discard and Femicide
The most serious feature of the mortal discard pattern — and the reason it requires its own treatment — is what some perpetrators do with the target’s psychological state during this period. Across the devaluation phase, the perpetrator cultivates an internalized voice in the target. This voice tells the target that they are worthless, hopeless, and a burden. During mortal discard, the perpetrator may actively encourage the target’s death by suicide. This is not a hypothesis. It is a documented pattern that practitioners working with this population encounter directly. UK law now formally recognizes encouraging or assisting suicide in the context of domestic abuse as a domestic abuse offence under Section 71 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. The legal framework reflects what casework has long shown.6
If you recognize yourself in this pattern, the safety information below applies to you directly. The voice in your head telling you that ending your life would resolve the situation is not your own. Instead, it is the perpetrator’s voice, internalized across the devaluation phase, now operating without their direct presence. Recognizing this voice as externally produced — as the residue of the abuse rather than an accurate account of your worth — is one of the first moves in recovery from the mortal discard pattern. A dedicated article on the pattern is forthcoming. However, the safety section that follows applies regardless.
To learn more about the link between this particular pattern of abuse and femicide, read Mortal Discard: Five Fatal Patterns in Coercive Control.
A Note on Safety
The period immediately following any narcissistic abuse cycle is a period of elevated risk. The mortal discard variation carries the highest risk of all. The danger takes several forms.
First is the risk of return to the perpetrator under hoovering pressure. The neurological pull of the trauma bond is strongest in the weeks following separation. This is the predictable consequence of intermittent reinforcement operating on an attached human nervous system. It is not weakness.
Second is the risk of escalating post-separation abuse. This includes legal harassment, financial interference, smear campaigns, and the weaponization of children. Research on post-separation lethality consistently identifies the months after separation as the highest-risk period in coercively controlling relationships. The risk rises further where the perpetrator has assets or reputation to protect. For a fuller treatment, see the platform’s article on post-separation abuse.
For more information read the Global Femicide Crisis: A Woman Is Killed Every 10 Minutes and my article The Urgent Need for Femicide Legislation.
Third — specific to the mortal discard pattern — is the risk of suicidal ideation that has been externally induced. If you find yourself thinking about ending your life, please understand that this thinking is not a private failure. Rather, it is a recognized feature of the abuse you survived. Reach out now to one of the resources below. You do not need to know exactly what you want to say before you call.
If you are in the United States:
- 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988
- National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 (call) or text START to 88788
If you are in the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland:
- Samaritans — call 116 123, free, 24/7
- National Domestic Abuse Helpline (Refuge) — 0808 2000 247, free, 24/7
If you are outside the US, UK, or Ireland:
- Find A Helpline — verified helplines in over 175 countries
If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. The decision to seek help is yours. Telling someone what is happening is often the move that begins the path out.
How the Cycle Affects the Target
Sustained exposure to the cycle produces predictable injury at the psychological, neurological, and identity levels. Survivors commonly experience anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, sleep disruption, intrusive thoughts, and the specific constellation of symptoms now recognized as Complex PTSD. Many describe a profound loss of access to their own perceptions, preferences, and values. This loss is the result of years of having those perceptions denied, dismissed, or punished.
Severity varies significantly across cases. One factor that increases severity is the presence of additional character pathology in the perpetrator. As Dr. Thomas Franklin observes:
“Often these chaotic, aggressive relationships involve other character pathology, including borderline and sociopathy.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
This clinical observation matters for survivors trying to make sense of why their experience felt particularly extreme. The most severe and treatment-resistant cases practitioners encounter are frequently ones in which narcissistic traits coexist with borderline or antisocial features. These comorbid presentations carry elevated risk. Often they map onto the mortal discard pattern addressed earlier in this article.
The trauma bond is the single most disorienting consequence of the cycle. The term comes from Patrick Carnes’s research on betrayal bonds (Carnes, 1997).7 Targets who understand clearly that the relationship was harmful often still find themselves missing the perpetrator, fantasizing about reconciliation, or returning. This is not weakness, not stupidity, not lack of insight. Instead, it is the neurological consequence of intermittent reinforcement from an attachment figure. The rational mind does not hold the bond. Rather, the nervous system holds it. As a result, it requires nervous system work to release.
“Most people that get drawn into this had a narcissistic parent such that this sort of behavior feels loving and normative. Others meet the narcissistic person when they are at a low point for some reason, and the initial idealization lifts their self-esteem at a vulnerable moment and is quite seductive.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
Recovery is possible. The same neuroplastic mechanism that allowed the cycle to install threat responses also supports the installation of safety. The work is structured, it takes time, and it does not move in a straight line. The platform’s article on the stages of narcissistic abuse recovery maps what the process actually looks like from inside.
Breaking the Cycle
Breaking the cycle requires interrupting the mechanism that sustains it. Three interventions are central.
No contact, or the most complete contact reduction possible, removes the perpetrator’s access to the target across every available channel — calls, messages, social media, mutual friends, shared accounts, in-person proximity. Sometimes shared children, shared finances, or shared legal entanglements make full no contact impossible. In those cases, structured low contact through written communication only — ideally via a co-parenting platform that creates a documented record — serves a similar function with less protection. The platform’s guide to co-parenting with a narcissist addresses the specific challenges of this situation.
“It’s very difficult to break free from the cycle of narcissistic abuse, especially for people who saw this kind of relationship as children. It just feels so normal to them. Gently getting people to see reality rather than the fantasy that was the early phase of the relationship is often helpful. Getting the person away on a trip can help give them some distance and perspective.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
Specialist support can be empowering. Generic talk therapy often produces partial results for survivors of narcissistic abuse. This is because the injury operates at a neurological and identity level that insight-based approaches do not fully reach. Practitioners trained in coercive trauma — including those working with the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ (CTRM™) — address the four layers of injury directly. Specifically, they work with pattern recognition, nervous system recalibration, identity reconstruction, and boundary architecture. Furthermore, they address these in the sequence required for genuine recovery rather than partial improvement.
Time is non-negotiable. The nervous system that was conditioned by years inside the cycle does not de-condition in weeks. Recovery happens in stages, with regressions that are predictable and not signs of failure. Survivors who understand the structure of recovery experience the difficult days as the predictable difficulty of a particular stage. They no longer treat those days as evidence that something is permanently wrong with them.
“Judge people by their actions, not their words. Things are what they are. Excuses are just that, especially for behavior that is chronic or repeated. If he treats you badly over and over, he’s a bad guy and you misjudged him. It happens. Seeing and accepting this earlier leads to much less heartache.”
Dr. Thomas Franklin
What This Platform Offers
If you recognize yourself in what you have read, you are not alone and you are not without options. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab provides specialist recovery support for survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control. This includes survivors of mortal discard situations and those facing severe post-separation abuse. The Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ was developed specifically for the injury this cycle produces — not adapted from frameworks designed for other forms of trauma.
A free 15-minute consultation is the first step. The call is judgment-free and designed to help you understand what kind of support fits your situation. If specialist recovery coaching is the right fit, you can learn more about the coaching program.
Related Links
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions
The cycle has no fixed duration. A single cycle can compress into hours or extend across years. Its length depends on the perpetrator’s circumstances, the target’s responses, and the specific dynamics of the relationship. What is consistent is the structural arc: idealization, devaluation, discard, and either hoovering or mortal discard. Most targets experience many complete cycles within a single relationship.
Both, and the distinction matters less than survivors often assume. Some perpetrators deploy the cycle with clear strategic awareness. Others repeat patterns they themselves were exposed to in childhood, without recognizing the harm they cause. Either way, the cycle operates the same way on the target’s nervous system regardless of the perpetrator’s level of awareness. Recovery does not require resolving the question of intent.
The research on narcissistic personality disorder consistently identifies it as among the most treatment-resistant of the personality disorders. The features that define it — low empathy, ego-syntonic patterns, the compulsive pursuit of supply — are precisely the features that interfere with the sustained motivation and capacity for self-examination that genuine therapeutic change requires. Some individuals with narcissistic traits do change. Most do not. Survivors are well-served by planning for the more likely outcome.
What you are experiencing is the trauma bond — the neurological attachment produced by intermittent reinforcement from an attachment figure. Knowing that the relationship was harmful does not dissolve the bond. The rational mind does not hold the bond. Rather, the nervous system holds it, and it requires nervous system work to release. Missing the perpetrator is not a sign that the relationship was good. Instead, it is a predictable feature of having been conditioned by the cycle.
Reconciliation involves acknowledgement of harm, sustained behavior change, and the rebuilding of trust over time on terms that protect the previously harmed party. Hoovering involves the appearance of these things — apologies, declarations, gestures — calibrated to restore the perpetrator’s access to the target. Importantly, the structural difference is that hoovering does not require, and rarely produces, change in the underlying pattern. The same cycle resumes, typically with greater intensity.
The cycle has identifiable features that ordinary relationship difficulties do not. Idealization is structurally unlike normal early-relationship intensity. It includes the systematic mirroring of the target’s identity and the construction of a future before there is enough information to construct it on. Devaluation includes specific tactics — gaslighting, projection, sustained silent treatments — that do not characterize ordinary conflict. Furthermore, the cycle’s repetition, the trauma bond, and the disorientation of the target are diagnostic. If you read this article and recognized your relationship in it, that recognition is informative.
Recovery requires the interruption of contact wherever possible, specialist support that understands coercive trauma as a distinct category of injury, and time. Recovery also requires the systematic addressing of the four layers of injury. These are: pattern recognition (so the target can identify what happened), nervous system recalibration (so the conditioned threat responses can resolve), identity reconstruction (so the self that was eroded can be rebuilt), and boundary architecture (so the next relationships can be different). These are the four domains of the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™. The platform’s article on healing strategies for narcissistic abuse addresses each in depth.
How Narcissistic Abuse Rehab Can Help
If you or a loved one is ready to break free from a toxic relationship and reclaim your life, Narcissistic Abuse Rehab is here to kick start your recovery journey. I developed the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ from seven years of direct professional work with survivors of coercive control and narcissistic abuse. The method is built on the recognition that coercive trauma is a specific category of injury — distinct in its neurological signature, its dismantling of identity, and what genuine recovery from it requires — and that survivors need a framework designed for that specific injury, not a generic approach adapted from it. I also offer expert coaching on how to prove coercive control in court. Book a free 15 minute consultation to learn more.
How to Cite This Page
Wakefield, Manya. (2023). The Cycle of Narcissistic Abuse. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. Retrieved from https://www.narcissisticabuserehab.com/cycle-of-narcissistic-abuse on [Date].
Academic Citation
This article was cited as a source in the following peer-reviewed research paper(s):
- Das, Sushavan & Ghosh, Ananya. (2025). Behind the Mask: Narcissistic Abuse and the Silent Crisis of Domestic Violence. International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews. 12. 440-472.
If you have cited this article in your academic work and would like to be included on this page, please contact us with a link to your publication.
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. https://doi.org/10.1177/02537176251406477 ↩︎
- Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). The battered woman syndrome: Effects of severity and intermittency of abuse. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 63(4), 614–622. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079474 ↩︎
- Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
- Schechter, S. (1982). Women and Male Violence: The Vision and Struggles of the Battered Women’s Movement. South End Press. ↩︎
- Wakefield, M. (2020). The Global Coercive Control Legislation Index. Narcissistic Abuse Rehab. ↩︎
- Domestic Abuse Act 2021, Section 71. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2021/17/section/71 ↩︎
- Carnes, P. (1997). The betrayal bond: Breaking free of exploitive relationships. Health Communications. ↩︎