Name it to tame it: Why naming the tactics matters
Once you can identify what's happening in a conversation, you can stop reacting to it and start responding with intention.
When you can identify the communication tactics a high-conflict person is using, it's easier to notice the patterns and break the cycle. These definitions aren't meant to diagnose anyone. They're meant to give you language for patterns you may already recognize, so you can stop reacting and start responding to protect your peace.
Gaslighting
A sustained pattern of psychological manipulation that causes you to question your own memory, perception, and reality. One of the most disorienting tactics used in high-conflict and narcissistic relationships.
The Grey Rock Method
A communication strategy where you become as uninteresting and unresponsive as possible to discourage a high-conflict person from targeting you. Useful for low-contact situations where full no-contact isn't possible.
DARVO
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. A defensive tactic where the person being held accountable flips the script — suddenly becoming the victim while you become the aggressor. Common in narcissistic and abusive dynamics.
BIFF
Brief, Informative, Friendly, Firm. A structured communication method designed for high-conflict exchanges — especially co-parenting and legal situations — that keeps your responses short, neutral, and impossible to argue with.
Love Bombing
An overwhelming flood of affection, attention, and flattery used to fast-track intimacy and create emotional dependency. Often the opening phase of a narcissistic or abusive relationship cycle.
Narcissist
Someone who exhibits narcissistic traits so pervasive they significantly affect how they relate to others. Narcissism exists on a spectrum, from everyday self-absorption to clinical Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Narcissistic Abuse
A pattern of emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical harm inflicted by someone with narcissistic traits. Includes gaslighting, love bombing, devaluation, and discard — often cycling repeatedly.
JADE
Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain. The four things you don't need to do when setting a boundary with a high-conflict person. Over-explaining gives them more material to argue with — and you don't need their permission to hold a limit.
Coercive Control
A pattern of behavior that seeks to take away a person's freedom and autonomy — through monitoring, isolation, financial control, threats, and micromanagement. Recognized as a criminal offense in several countries.
Hoovering
A manipulation tactic used to pull someone back into a relationship after distance or no-contact. Named after the Hoover vacuum — the person tries to "suck you back in" through apologies, manufactured crises, guilt-tripping, or love bombing.
Projection
Projection is when someone takes their own feelings, behaviors, or flaws and accuses you of having them instead. If they're lying, they accuse you of lying. It puts you on the defensive for things that are not yours to defend.
Blame Shifting
Blame shifting is when someone redirects responsibility for their own behavior onto you. No matter what happened or who did it, by the end of the conversation it is somehow your fault.
Baiting
Baiting is when someone says or does something deliberately designed to provoke a reaction from you. The goal is not the argument itself — it is your reaction, which then becomes the story instead of their behavior.
Mirroring
Mirroring is when someone reflects your values, interests, and preferences back at you to create a sense of intense connection. In high-conflict relationships it is used to make you feel unusually understood — faster than is real.
Future Faking
Future faking is when someone makes promises about the future they have no intention of keeping. The promises are used to keep you invested, calm you down after a conflict, or prevent you from leaving. They rarely materialize.
Breadcrumbing
Breadcrumbing is when someone gives you just enough attention to keep you engaged without ever fully showing up. The crumbs are not enough to satisfy, but they are enough to keep you hoping.
Triangulation
Triangulation is when a third person is brought into a two-person dynamic to create competition, jealousy, or anxiety. The third person is used as leverage to make you feel insecure or keep you off-balance.
Flying Monkeys
Flying monkeys are people who act on behalf of a high-conflict person to harass, monitor, pressure, or gather information about you. They are often mutual friends or family members recruited into someone else's conflict.
Trauma Bonding
Trauma bonding is a powerful psychological attachment that forms in relationships with cycles of harm and repair. The bond is real, but it is built on the cycle, not on the person actually being safe or trustworthy.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort of holding two contradictory beliefs at once. In high-conflict relationships it often sounds like: I know this is hurting me, but I also believe this person loves me.
Brain Fog
Brain fog is the difficulty thinking clearly and trusting your own perceptions that develops after prolonged exposure to high-conflict behavior. It is not a personal failing — it is what chronic stress does to cognition.
Narcissistic Rage
Narcissistic rage is an intense, disproportionate reaction when a narcissistic person feels criticized, rejected, exposed, or ignored. It can be explosive shouting or cold withdrawal — both come from the same wound to their self-image.
Narcissistic Supply
Narcissistic supply is the attention, admiration, or emotional reaction a narcissistic person requires to maintain their sense of self. It can be positive or negative — what matters is the attention itself.
Smear Campaign
A smear campaign is a coordinated effort to damage your reputation and turn your shared network against you. It often begins before or during a separation, designed to control the narrative before you can tell your own story.
Post-Separation Abuse
Post-separation abuse is the continuation or escalation of controlling behavior after a relationship ends. It commonly shows up in co-parenting through children as leverage, litigation as harassment, and continued financial control.
Yellow Rock
Yellow Rock is a communication strategy used when you cannot go fully Grey Rock — most commonly in co-parenting. It adds just enough surface warmth to avoid escalation while still maintaining firm limits and not engaging with manipulation.
Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance is fully acknowledging reality as it is, without fighting it or demanding it be different. It is the shift from why is this person doing this to me to this is who this person is.
Word Salad
Word salad is a communication pattern where someone speaks in a way that sounds coherent but does not actually answer anything. It is a tangle of deflections and topic changes that leaves you exhausted and confused.
Silent Treatment
The silent treatment is the deliberate withdrawal of communication as punishment, control, or emotional leverage. It is different from needing space — it is calculated to produce anxiety and compliance.
Intermittent Reinforcement
Intermittent reinforcement is when reward or warmth is given unpredictably. It produces the strongest psychological attachment of any reinforcement pattern — the same principle behind why gambling is addictive.
Narcissistic Injury
A narcissistic injury is the perceived wound to a narcissistic person's self-image from criticism, rejection, or accountability. A minor slight or a simple no can produce a reaction that seems wildly out of proportion.
Scapegoating
Scapegoating is when one person in a family or group is consistently blamed for problems that belong to the whole system. The scapegoat becomes the identified problem, which lets the real dynamics stay unexamined.
Enmeshment
Enmeshment is when the boundaries between two people are so blurred that individual identity becomes difficult to maintain. Being a separate person — having your own opinions, needs, or relationships — is treated as a threat.
Boundary Testing
Boundary testing is when someone pushes against a limit to see whether it is real or negotiable. The test itself is information-gathering: they are determining whether this limit has consequences or can be crossed.
Extinction Burst
An extinction burst is when a previously-rewarded behavior stops getting a response and the person escalates before stopping. It often shows up as a sudden surge of contact or pressure right after you set firmer limits.
No Contact
No contact is the complete cessation of communication with someone who has been harmful or abusive. Low contact is the same strategy adapted for situations where complete distance is not possible, like co-parenting.
FOG
FOG stands for Fear, Obligation, and Guilt — the three emotional states high-conflict people use most reliably to maintain control. If they can make you afraid, obligated, or guilty, they have leverage over your choices.
Weaponized Incompetence
Weaponized incompetence is when someone pretends to be incapable of doing something they could learn or do — in order to avoid responsibility and shift the task permanently onto you.
Pity Play
A pity play is when someone uses their suffering or victimhood to manipulate your behavior — to gain compliance, avoid accountability, or prevent you from holding a limit. The suffering may be real or exaggerated.
Victimhood Flipping
Victimhood flipping is when the person who caused harm repositions themselves as the real victim. You raise a concern — and suddenly they are the one wronged for raising it, with the original issue buried.
Want to know more about how these tactics work? Check out the Composed reading list.
Composed
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