It really is incredible, as someone who was on this site since 2009, to witness how the "narc abuse isn't real" community has silenced entire groups.
They were entirely silent on this issue, until the very first forum dedicated to helping survivors of narcissistic abuse- r/RaisedByNarcissists- became a popular subreddit in roughly 2013. From that moment on, the #1 goal of this community became silencing abuse victims by any means possible, and when that didn't work, it became manipulating the conversation to reframe themselves as the victims, not perpetrators, of abuse.
First, it was simple run-of-the-mill abuse minimization, denialism, and apologism aimed at posters. "You called your own mother (who beat you) a cunt in your post? You clearly aren't innocent." "You sound like a difficult child, I would have been tempted to hit you too." Things like that. These comments got very quickly removed, and moderation tightened enough that soon the abuser community realized infiltrating the sub directly was pointless.
So then they looked to other places their propaganda could gain a foothold- and of course Tumblr, famed as a site to give a voice to the voiceless, was the prime target. So then, in a few waves, with varying degrees of success, they tried some new tactics.
First was attacking the idea that any narcissistic traits are bad at all. "You can't say we should try to be nice to people, we can't help being this way." "I can't help it if I think everyone else is shit and I'm the only person alive who isn't a phony." Not coincidentally, this happened during a wave of autism acceptance advocacy, where "don't judge autistic people for misreading social cues" posts were common; the propagandists saw an opportunity to capitalize on these.
Next was pushing the idea that there is no difference between narcissism as a trait and NPD. Every arrogant, greedy bastard is actually someone with NPD, which means they can't help it, so you calling them a narcissist is hurting people with NPD and contributing to the stigma. In other words, they went from "we can't help being mean" to "everyone who is (insert narcissistic trait) has our disorder, so you shouldn't be calling people (insert narcissistic trait) at all."
Next was pushing back on the idea that narcissistic abuse is real, which is a natural escalation. "There is no such thing as a subtype of abuse, all abuse is the same, the only acceptable descriptors are physical, mental, and emotional" was the assertion here. While the accusations of ableism had been present from the start, around this time is when you could really see it start to get weaponized, to the point that just mentioning one was abused by a parent with NPD was enough to get accused; "why do you need to mention s/he had NPD unless you're trying to paint us all as abusers? Ableist POS!"
Also note: as the culture of Tumblr shifted to allowing more casually violent speech, death threats and suicide bait towards "ableists" became more acceptable as a result, and the abuse apologism increased exponentially.
This phase also continued to push the two previous claims. You can't call people a narcissist as an adjective, because that harms people with NPD. Similarly, you can't have an aversion to those traits, because that harms people with NPD, who just can't help being this way; this makes you ableist, and means, retroactively, that you deserved the abuse. Claims that "narcissistic abuse is actually just reactive abuse* caused by people being ableist to PWNPD" spiked, especially towards people who were children when they were abused by their parents with NPD.
*A form of abuse wherein an abuser will push their victim well past the breaking point to make their victim snap, then claim the victim is the real abuser; I'm sure that after reading this sentence alone you can see how easily coopted it is by abusers who claim their partner/child was actually the abuser and putting them in just this situation.
It had come full circle: a group of people who had been abused as children in a particular pattern were now being told they should have been abused, on the basis of their reaction to trauma offending people who don't like the term for that abuse. People with NPD were using the victimization of people discussing narcissistic abuse as a tool to further abuse them and attempt to subdue them. They had become another group of abusers.
This wasn't the end, though, as the claims continued to evolve to include the infamous, "actually, NPD is a trauma disorder," a claim that would subsequently be used (as with every other claim in this timeline) only to erase and downplay the abuse that RBN community had endured. Now, it wasn't enough to just claim that they "couldn't help it" and that their critics were ableist, but they had to also add the claim that not only had they too faced abuse, they had faced even worse abuse! Such abuse, in fact, that no matter what abuse was inflicted on an RBN community member, it would never be as bad as what this PWNPD had received. No matter how badly they abused someone, they would always be a bigger victim, and in turn, any victim who spoke about their experience of victimization was victimizing them, was being ableist, deserved their abuse, and deserved to have their trauma weaponized against them.
If you step off of Tumblr, everyone outside of a few pockets of enablers of narcissistic abuse knows that narcissistic abuse is real. Psychological experts, victims and advocates all know it. It's only Tumblr that has been so captured by this propaganda.
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