Male Survivors of Narcissistic Abuse: What the Research Actually Shows

This article is written for men who have experienced coercive control — from partners, parents, family members, peers, or employers.

Not as a footnote to someone else’s experience. Not with constant caveats about whether men can be victims. Directly for you, with the same depth, seriousness, and recognition that every survivor of coercive psychological abuse deserves.

Your pain is real. The injury it caused is real. And recovery is available to you fully — not as an adaptation of a model built for someone else, but on its own terms.

This article examines what the research shows about men harmed by narcissistic abuse, why that harm is so often overlooked, how it can present differently in men than many traditional frameworks were designed to detect, and what meaningful recovery actually looks like.

It is grounded in peer-reviewed research published between 2016 and 2026, documented legal cases, and years of direct practitioner work with survivors of coercive trauma.

Male Survivors Exist — and Are Documented in Law

The most important thing to establish before anything else is this: male survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control are real, documented in the research, and documented in law.

In May 2024, Sarah Rigby of Winsford was sentenced at Chester Crown Court after pleading guilty to systematically and repeatedly controlling and abusing her male partner over many months. The abuse she subjected him to included isolating him from his family, controlling what he was allowed to eat, refusing him use of the toilet in their shared home, conducting surveillance over him around the clock, assaulting him, and sustaining months of degrading verbal humiliation. He eventually found the courage to report her to the police. She was convicted and sentenced to 20 months imprisonment, suspended, with a five-year restraining order. The Crown Prosecutor described his experience plainly: her treatment of him was coercive, controlling, and criminal.¹

This is not an isolated case. Women have been prosecuted and convicted of coercive control offenses against male partners across multiple jurisdictions. Conviction data from England and Wales shows 21 women were convicted of controlling or coercive behavior in the year ending December 2024.² These cases represent a minority within a broader gendered pattern — coercive control is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women, and the research is consistent on this — but they are a genuine, legally confirmed, and significantly underserved population.³

Research on male intimate partner victimization confirms the scale. A 2025 review found that 44% of men in the studies examined experienced psychological violence from intimate partners across a large multi-study sample.⁴ Male survivors are underrepresented in clinical services and in research — not because their experience is rare, but because the barriers between a male survivor and recognition of his experience are among the highest of any group in this landscape.

Three Populations: Understanding Who Is Affected

Male survivors of narcissistic abuse are not a single, homogeneous population. The clinical picture is most accurately understood across three distinct groups, each with their own specific injury, specific barriers, and specific recovery needs.

1. Boys who grew up inside coercive households. Dr. Evan Stark’s research on the coercive control of children, and Dr. Emma Katz’s peer-reviewed work published in Child Abuse Review, established something foundational: boys and girls who grow up in households where a coercively controlling parent is subjugating the other parent are not bystanders. They are direct victims. They experience the coercive environment in ways that parallel the primary victim’s experience — entrapped, constrained, and systematically deprived of the autonomy and relational safety that healthy development requires (Katz, 2016).⁵ Katz’s research found that perpetrators’ coercive control often prevented children from spending time with extended family, visiting friends’ homes, and engaging in activities outside the household — placing children in isolated, disempowering worlds that constrained their development across emotional, social, educational, and physical domains. The UK Domestic Abuse Act 2021 now formally recognizes children as victims of domestic abuse regardless of whether they are directly present during incidents. Boys raised inside these households carry the developmental imprint of that environment into adulthood. Some internalize the controlling parent’s relational template. Others develop the opposite pattern — the self-erasing, hyper-accommodating presentation that the TENEL™ framework identifies as echoism. Many carry both patterns simultaneously in different relational contexts. For this population, the primary narcissistic injury is developmental, and recovery requires frameworks specifically designed for that layer of harm.
2. Adult men experiencing psychological and relational abuse in intimate partnerships. There is a documented population of adult men who experience sustained psychological abuse, gaslighting, relational cruelty, and controlling behavior from intimate partners. The mechanisms — intermittent reinforcement, reality distortion, isolation, identity erosion — operate the same way in male targets as in any other. The injury they produce is the same. And the recovery work that addresses them is the same. What differs is the landscape in which the abuse occurs and in which recovery takes place: the cultural invisibility of male victimization, the barriers to help-seeking that masculine socialization creates, and the near-total absence of services specifically designed for this population.
3. Adult men experiencing female-perpetrated coercive control. As the conviction data and the Sarah Rigby case confirm, some women do perpetrate coercive control against male partners. This population faces the most severe barriers of any male survivor group: the cultural assumption that men cannot be controlled, the legal and service landscape built primarily around female victimization, and the specific challenge of naming something that most people — including many clinical practitioners — do not expect to hear from a man. These survivors deserve the same quality of specialist support as any survivor of coercive control. The injury is the same. The mechanisms are the same. The recovery is the same.

Why Male Survivors Are So Rarely Recognized

The barriers between a male survivor and the recognition of his experience are multiple, compounding, and well documented in the research.

A 2024 systematic review published in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, examining 16 empirical studies on male survivors of domestic and relational violence, identified five consistent barriers to recognition and disclosure: fear of not being believed, the perception that what they experienced does not qualify as abuse, the challenge to masculine identity that disclosure represents, commitment to the relationship or family, and the near-total invisibility of services designed for them.⁶

A 2025 peer-reviewed study captured the timeline at which male survivors most commonly access support in its title: “I thought about killing myself, but a part of me insisted on getting help”.⁷ That is the point — not early recognition, not the moment the pattern became clear, but crisis. For many male survivors, that is when the silence finally breaks.

When men did attempt to disclose, research consistently found they encountered disbelief, gender-based skepticism, and in some cases the assumption that they were the perpetrator rather than the person being harmed.⁸ The cultural expectation that men cannot be abused — that masculine strength precludes victimization — functions as a pre-emptive silencer. The abuser frequently reinforces it directly: “No one will believe you.” That prediction, the research shows, is accurate enough often enough to suppress disclosure entirely.

A 2025 systematic review on men’s mental health and help-seeking identified additional structural barriers: services designed primarily around female presentations, therapeutic modalities built on emotional disclosure practices that conflict with masculine socialization, and the near-universal expectation in clinical settings that a male presenting with relationship difficulties is more likely to be the source of the problem than its target.⁹

The Signs of Narcissistic Abuse in Male Survivors

The signs of narcissistic abuse in male survivors are the same as in any survivor — because the mechanisms are the same. What differs is how those signs present against the backdrop of masculine socialization and the specific ways male distress is shaped and expressed.

• Gaslighting. The systematic, sustained distortion of the target’s perception of events, memory, and emotional responses — produces identical injury regardless of the target’s gender. A male survivor who finds himself constantly questioning his own account of what happened, who has been told repeatedly that his perceptions are unreliable and his emotional responses disproportionate, is experiencing the same perceptual dismantling that gaslighting produces in any target. Male survivors are less likely to name it as gaslighting — because the concept has rarely been presented as something that happens to men — but the experience is the same. Understanding it accurately is the beginning of the perceptual repair that recovery requires. The full account of how gaslighting operates is at narcissisticabuserehab.com/what-is-gaslighting-definition-signs-and-examples/.
• Trauma bonding. The powerful neuro-chemical attachment produced by cycles of threat and intermittent kindness — operates identically regardless of gender. A male survivor who cannot explain why he keeps returning to a relationship that is damaging him, who feels compelled toward someone he knows is harmful, is experiencing the same neurobiological conditioning that produces this bond in any target. This is not weakness or failure of will. It is the predictable outcome of a specific neurological process, documented in the peer-reviewed literature and directly relevant to recovery planning. Read more about the Cycle of Narcissistic Abuse and Intermittent Reinforcement.
• Isolation. Coercive control involves the systematic erosion of the target’s support network. For male targets, this often operates through the specific manipulation of masculine self-reliance: he is encouraged not to burden friends with relationship problems, to handle difficulties internally, to manage the relationship without outside interference. The result — the gradual disappearance of people who might offer external perspective and reality checks — is identical to isolation imposed through explicit prohibition. The mechanism exploits a specifically masculine cultural script, which makes it both more effective and harder to identify as control.
• Physical health symptoms without clear explanation. The stress response system dysregulation produced by sustained psychological abuse presents somatically — in sleep disruption, chronic pain, autoimmune flares, gastrointestinal problems, and immune suppression. Male survivors frequently attribute these symptoms to work stress or general health rather than connecting them to the relational injury that produced them. The connection is not incidental. It is mechanistically direct.¹⁰
• Shame. The most consistent feature of male narcissistic abuse survivors in clinical settings is shame without a framework — the experience of being genuinely and severely affected by something that cannot be categorized, because the categories available were not designed for this experience. The absence of language is itself part of the injury. Accurate naming — through careful clinical work rather than self-diagnosis — is where recovery begins.

Agitated Depression: The Symptom Most Often Missed

This is the finding most absent from content about male survivors of narcissistic abuse — and the one that most changes how male distress in the aftermath of abusive relationships should be understood and treated.

Depression in men frequently is different from the general understanding of what depression looks like.

Standard diagnostic criteria — developed primarily from female symptom presentations — emphasize internalizing symptoms: sadness, tearfulness, hopelessness, withdrawal, loss of interest. These are the symptoms that get recognized in clinical settings. They are not the symptoms most commonly presented by men.

Research consistently identifies male depression as more likely to present through externalizing symptoms: irritability, anger, aggression, substance use, and risk-taking behavior. Men diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder were found to be twice as likely as women to experience anger attacks during depressive episodes. In a community sample of 499 men, anger correlated with depressive symptoms at r=0.57, with the effect strongest in those who identified with traditional masculine gender norm.¹¹ A 2025 study specifically examining masculine depression confirmed the pattern and called for gender-sensitive reform of diagnostic criteria, noting that current instruments systematically under-detect depression in men whose distress presents through behavioral and externalizing channels.¹²

Critically, men with high externalizing depression profiles — those whose depression presents most visibly as rage and behavioral dysregulation — had the highest rates of suicidal ideation and attempts. Externalizing depression is not a milder presentation. It is a differently lethal one.

For male survivors of narcissistic abuse, this matters specifically. The irritability, the rage that seems disproportionate to those around him, the substance use, the inability to concentrate or function — these may be the presentation of depression and Complex PTSD in a man whose nervous system was organized around sustained psychological threat for months or years. They are not simply character problems to be managed. They are symptoms of an injury that requires clinical attention and treatment alongside the recovery work.

Research on Complex PTSD — formally recognized in ICD-11 in 2022 and the diagnostic framework that most accurately captures what narcissistic abuse and coercive control produce — confirms that the prolonged, chronic nature of psychological abuse is uniquely associated with CPTSD presentations.^{13 14} For male survivors whose depression goes undetected because it does not look like depression, CPTSD goes undetected alongside it. The recovery work then addresses the presenting behavior rather than the underlying injury. It does not reach what it needs to reach.

Understanding that the anger, the numbness, the explosive moments, and the self-destructive behavior may be the expression of a genuine injury rather than evidence of character deficit is often the single most important reframe in recovery for male survivors. It does not excuse any behavior. It locates it accurately — as something that happened to you, that lives in your nervous system, and that responds to specific, targeted recovery work.

The Impact: Four Layers of Injury

Narcissistic abuse and coercive psychological abuse produce injury at four distinct layers, regardless of the survivor’s gender. What the research and experience show about male survivors specifically is that they typically present to specialist support later — with more accumulated injury and more complex presentations — precisely because the barriers to earlier help-seeking are higher.

• The neurological layer. The chronic HPA axis activation produced by sustained threat exposure keeps the body’s stress response system in a state of continuous dysregulation long after the relationship ends. The hypervigilance, the sleep disruption, the inability to feel safe in ordinary circumstances, the physical health deterioration — these are measurable neurological consequences of what was done, not evidence of psychological weakness.
• The perceptual layer. Gaslighting dismantles the most fundamental cognitive capacity a person has: the ability to trust their own perceptions. Its effects persist long after the relationship ends. Male survivors frequently describe a lasting inability to trust their own judgment about people and situations — a wariness that makes new relationships feel either impossible or threatening, and that makes the decision to seek support feel inherently risky.
• The relational layer. The damage to the survivor’s capacity for safe attachment — the hypervigilance in new relationships, the confusion produced by the gap between the early relationship and the later one, the difficulty tolerating the vulnerability that genuine intimacy requires — operates identically regardless of gender. For Adult Children of Narcissists, this layer is more fundamental still, because the earliest template for attachment was itself organized around coercive dynamics. Recovery must reach this layer directly.
• The identity layer. Coercive abuse specifically targets the self — replacing the target’s self-knowledge with dependency on the abuser’s account of who they are. Male survivors frequently describe emerging from abusive relationships without a clear sense of their own preferences, values, or judgment. Not simply because the relationship was damaging, but because it was specifically designed to replace their internal reference point with an external one. Reconstructing the self that exists outside that dynamic is the long work of recovery — and it is available.

Recovery: What It Looks Like

The Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ (CTRM™) — developed from seven years of direct practitioner work with survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive trauma, and reviewed by Dr. Michael Kinsey, PhD, clinical psychologist at the New School for Social Research — applies to male survivors fully and without modification. Its four domains address each layer of the injury directly.

• Pattern Recognition addresses the perceptual layer: developing an accurate account of what happened, understanding the specific mechanisms that were used, and restoring trust in one’s own perceptions after sustained gaslighting. For male survivors, this domain also addresses the cultural layer — the lifetime of messaging that made the injury harder to recognize and name.

• Nervous System Recalibration addresses the neurological layer: building the regulatory capacity that the sustained threat exposure eroded, creating the physiological conditions within which processing, reflection, and genuine connection become possible. This is where the externalizing symptoms — the irritability, the rage, the dysregulation — are addressed at the level of the system that is producing them.

• Identity Reconstruction addresses the identity layer: recovering access to genuine preferences, values, and self-knowledge, and building from those a sense of self that is internally sourced rather than organized around the abuser’s version of who the survivor is.

• Boundary Architecture addresses the relational layer: developing the discernment and specific skills that distinguish safe relationships from unsafe ones — a distinction that the abuse was specifically designed to make impossible to access.

For Adult Children of Narcissists — men whose primary narcissistic injury is developmental — the TENEL™ framework addresses the four dimensions of that specific injury: the Self-Structure, the Nervous System, the Introject, and the Attachment Pattern and Repetition Compulsion. Both frameworks have been reviewed by Dr. Michael Kinsey, PhD.

Learn about the recovery pathway for Adult Children of Narcissists and the full recovery framework for coercive trauma. The coaching options are at narcissisticabuserehab.com/narcissistic-abuse-recovery-coaching/.

If you would like to speak directly about whether specialist recovery coaching is relevant to your situation, book a free 15-minute consultation.

Crisis Support and Specialist Resources

If you are in crisis right now

• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US) — Call or text 988
• Crisis Text Line (US) — Text HOME to 741741
• Samaritans (UK) — Call 116 123 (available 24/7)
• Lifeline (Australia) — Call 13 11 14
• Samaritans (Ireland) — Call 116 123

If you are a male survivor of domestic abuse or coercive control

• National Domestic Violence Hotline (US) — 1-800-799-7233
  thehotline.org
• ManKind Initiative (UK) — 01823 334244
  mankind.org.uk
• Men’s Aid Ireland — 01 554 3811
  mensaid.ie
• 1800RESPECT (Australia) — 1800 737 732
  1800respect.org.au

If you are a male survivor of sexual abuse

• 1in6 (US) — Anonymous online chat and support resources
  1in6.org
• RAINN (US) — 1-800-656-4673
  rainn.org

• Male Survivors Partnership (UK) — malesurvivor.co.uk

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Crown Prosecution Service Mersey-Cheshire. (2024, May 24). Woman sentenced for systematically abusing and controlling boyfriend. https://www.cps.gov.uk/mersey-cheshire/news/woman-sentenced-systematically-abusing-and-controlling-boyfriend ↩︎
2. Office for National Statistics. (2025). Domestic abuse in England and Wales overview: Year ending March 2025.https://www.ons.gov.uk/ ↩︎
3. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
4. Landa-Blanco, M., & Mejía Sánchez, R. (2025). Breaking the cycle: Addressing barriers to help-seeking and mental health impacts for male victims of intimate partner violence. Frontiers in Public Health, 13, 1565284. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1565284 ↩︎
5. Katz, E. (2016). Beyond the physical incident model: How children living with domestic violence are harmed by and resist regimes of coercive control. Child Abuse Review, 25(1), 46–59. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.2422 ↩︎
6. McLeod, D. A., Ozturk, B., Butler-King, R. L., & Peek, H. (2024). Male survivors of domestic violence, challenges in cultural response, and impact on identity and help-seeking behaviors: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231177318 ↩︎
7. Lysova, A., & Dim, E. E. (2025). “I thought about killing myself, but a part of me insisted on getting help”: Coping experiences of male survivors of intimate partner violence. Journal of Family Violence. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-025-01847-8 ↩︎
8. Landa-Blanco & Mejía Sánchez. 2025. ↩︎
9. Mokhwelepa, L. W., & Sumbane, G. O. (2025). Men’s mental health matters: The impact of traditional masculinity norms on men’s willingness to seek mental health support — a systematic review. American Journal of Men’s Health, 19. https://doi.org/10.1177/15579883251321670 ↩︎
10. van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking. ↩︎
11. Oliffe, J. L., Rossnagel, E., Bottorff, J. L., Chambers, S. K., Caperchione, C., & Rice, S. M. (2020). Profiles of depressive symptoms and anger in men. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 581765. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7719778/ ↩︎
12. PMC. (2025). The emotional reinforcement mechanism of and phased intervention strategies for social media addiction. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12108933/  ↩︎
13. Maercker, A., Cloitre, M., Bachem, R., Schlumpf, Y. R., Khoury, B., Hitchcock, C., & Bohus, M. (2022). Complex post-traumatic stress disorder. The Lancet, 400(10345), 60–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00821-2 ↩︎
14. World Health Organization. (2022). International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11). https://icd.who.int/ ↩︎

Manya Wakefield

Website |  + postsBio ⮌

Manya Wakefield is a narcissistic abuse recovery coach, coercive trauma specialist, and the developer of the Coercive Trauma Recovery Method™ and TENEL™ (Traumatic Exposure to Narcissism in Early Life) — proprietary recovery frameworks built from seven years of direct professional work with survivors of coercive control, narcissistic abuse, and Adult Children of Narcissists. Both frameworks have been reviewed by Dr. Michael Kinsey, PhD, clinical psychologist, New School for Social Research. She is the founder of Narcissistic Abuse Rehab, a global social impact platform launched in 2019 to support survivors through evidence-based recovery frameworks. Manya is the author of Are You In An Emotionally Abusive Relationship (2019), a resource used in domestic violence recovery groups worldwide. Her original research contributions include the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index (2020) — the first systematic index of its kind on the web — and the Global Femicide Legislation Index (2026), comprehensive legal references used by advocates, legal professionals, and policymakers internationally, cited in peer-reviewed publications including the Southern Illinois University Law Journal, Palgrave Macmillan, and the University of Agder. Her expertise has been featured in Newsweek, Elle, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, Parade, and YourTango. She hosts the Narcissistic Abuse Rehab Podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. All content on this site reflects Manya's direct professional experience working with survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control, her published research, and her ongoing advocacy work.

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