Actor Anupama Parameswaran recently spoke about recognising her own relationship in someone else’s words. In an interview with Dhanya Varma, she described watching actor Madonna Sebastian talk about narcissistic abuse in an Instagram reel, and said, “My reaction to that was so physical that I started shivering.” That video helped her recognise what was happening in a relationship that had lasted two years and was marked by significant distress, something she hadn’t named as abuse while living through it.
She didn’t identify the person she was referring to, and there is no need to speculate about their identity. What is significant about her account is what happened when she encountered a description of behaviour that resonated with her own experience. She found language for something she had struggled to recognise while she was inside it.
Her experience also raises a larger question at a time when words such as ‘narcissism’, ‘gaslighting’, and ‘love bombing’ have moved from psychiatric and psychological discourse into Instagram reels and breakup texts — what does it mean when people arrive at an understanding of their own experiences through a short video rather than through a clinical assessment?
Narcissism, traits, and the disorder
“Narcissistic abuse” is not a psychiatric diagnosis. As psychiatrist Dr Migita D’Cruz puts it, “This itself is not a clinical term, it’s just a descriptive term” for a pattern of behaviour that can be intentional, targeted at a person’s sense of self, and consistently denied by the person causing the harm.
That intentionality can distinguish such behaviour from ordinary conflict, says psychotherapist and clinical supervisor Shama Shah, who looks for accountability when assessing interpersonal dynamics: “Is there a sense of accountability and remorse involved anywhere in the conversation?”
The pattern becomes narcissistic, says Shama, when a person appears to understand that their behaviour is hurting someone, continues it anyway, and then shifts responsibility back onto the other person: “I haven't done anything, this is all your fault, you are making me do it.”
Psychotherapist Cauviya Madhiyazhagan describes one aspect of this dynamic as “narcissistic supply” — the power a person may derive from causing another person’s distress. “It’s more like a sadism,” she says. “‘In order to get that supply, I have to break you.’”
But Dr Migita adds an important corrective to how the term narcissist is used online. Traits such as entitlement or a desire for admiration are close to universal and not pathological by themselves. It becomes Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), she says, only when those traits are rigid and come at a persistent cost to relationships.
Psychiatry, she notes, has moved away from fixed categories like narcissistic, borderline, and antisocial “because most people are a mix of traits, some healthy, some unhealthy,” as reflected in the DSM-5-TR’s alternative model built around personality-functioning impairments.
Who gets to say the word, and where privacy fits in
Dr Migita suggests that it isn’t appropriate for a friend, a journalist, or a stranger online to declare someone a narcissist, even when the behaviour described is real. “Any kind of diagnosis is consent-based,” she says. “It is not ethical for somebody to diagnose them when they are not seeking it.” There are circumstances, such as some forensic assessments where “public safety is more important than the individual’s privacy”, in which a person's privacy may be weighed differently. But outside that, privacy remains one of the most important ethical considerations at play, she adds.
Naming behaviour, rather than assigning a diagnosis, can be more useful, Dr Migita says. “If you call out a behaviour, and how it makes you feel, that can help both you and the other person. The label by itself is just going to feel like an attack.”
For instance, “He does not take accountability, and it makes me feel unheard” describes an experience and its effect. “He is a narcissist”, however, makes a clinical claim that requires an assessment and consent a social media reel cannot provide.
Why it’s hard to see from the inside
The clinicians describe narcissistic dynamics as subtle and inconsistent, unlike anger issues, which follow a predictable pattern. Cauviya describes a progression in which a person first earns a partner’s trust, then begins withdrawing or exerting control once the attachment is secure, often eroding a partner's independence.
“If you are financially independent, you have a support system. They cannot move you,” she says, describing why controlling a person’s independence can become part of such dynamics.
Some harms can also be too small to name, like a partner who deliberately misplaces a cooker lid every stressful morning. “Can you say that is abuse? You can’t. But what if they are doing that intentionally?” She further adds, "On its own, such an incident may be difficult to classify as abuse. The significance, she says, lies in the intention and the wider pattern in which it occurs."
That is also why the language used around relationships can make recognition difficult. Shama points to a familiar cultural script: “These things happen, just adjust and live.”
For people who have been taught to treat discomfort, disrespect, or unequal relationships as things they simply have to endure, the first step may be recognising that a recurring pattern is causing harm at all.
What happens in therapy?
Having narcissistic traits does not automatically mean a person cannot engage in therapy. But the clinicians say that working with people who show pronounced narcissistic traits can present particular challenges.
Cauviya says some people may struggle to acknowledge their own behaviour in therapy or may attempt to control the therapeutic process. “Even in therapy they don’t give honest answers,” she says. “They use therapy as a tool to manipulate.”
She says she eventually stopped offering couples therapy in cases where one partner displayed pronounced narcissistic traits, after a case she handled became so difficult that the other partner became suicidal.
Such experiences also point to why the question of diagnosis is not merely semantic. If a label becomes the focus of a relationship, it can obscure the more immediate questions: What is happening? Is the person safe? Are they being controlled or isolated? Can they set boundaries without retaliation? And what support do they need?
The internet helps, and complicates, the process
Every clinician interviewed for this piece credits the internet with making mental-health information more accessible. Social media can give people vocabulary for experiences they have struggled to describe, and that vocabulary can sometimes encourage them to seek professional help.
“Thank god for the internet,” Cauviya says, “because then you have people actually coming in for help.”
But that accessibility has a cost, described elsewhere as “pop pathology”: “a false sense of competence when using these labels, which has led to an epidemic of therapy speak.”
The problem is not that people are learning psychological vocabulary. It is what happens when vocabulary is mistaken for diagnosis.
Cauviya says genuine patterns of narcissistic abuse can be difficult to pinpoint precisely because they are often embedded in everyday interactions. That ambiguity can make the language useful to someone trying to understand their experience, while also making it easy to apply too broadly to ordinary relationship conflict.
A partner being selfish, defensive, emotionally unavailable or inconsiderate does not necessarily make them a narcissist. Nor does a difficult relationship automatically constitute narcissistic abuse. What matters is the pattern, its impact, and the presence or absence of behaviours such as manipulation, coercive control, humiliation, isolation or persistent refusal to take responsibility.
Where this leaves the people living through it
The conversation keeps bending back to the same place: the person experiencing the harm, and what might actually help them.
That is what made Anupama Parameswaran’s disclosure land the way it has. The distress she has described, the difficulty recognising it from inside, and the shock of finally seeing it named by someone else, all of it maps onto what clinicians describe here. Saying it publicly, without naming a partner, is itself a kind of service in a culture where “adjust and live” is often the first response to a woman’s complaint.
Her story reflects one of the more useful possibilities of mental-health content online — sometimes, a few minutes of someone else's explanation can give a person the words to stop blaming themselves and start asking different questions about their own life.
But a reel is a starting point, not an endpoint, the clinicians say. It can give someone the language to stop blaming themselves and it can help recognise a pattern. It cannot determine whether another person has a psychiatric disorder, establish the full nature of a relationship from a distance, or map out what recovery actually requires.
Most of this discourse, this piece included, circles back to the person experiencing the behaviour, rather than on diagnosing the person accused of causing it. That’s the right centre of gravity. The task now is making sure it leads somewhere, out of the comments section and into a clinician's office, rather than stopping at the relief of finally having a name for it.