Had I instead arrived at a course on narcissistic abuse, I would have come away with something. A vocabulary. A prescriptive framework. A traumatizing villain and an abused victim. I would have understood myself as a survivor of other people’s pathology — which contains a partial truth — and missed the more difficult and more liberating question entirely: what in me organized around this, and why? The language of narcissistic abuse, applied without that question, does not set a person free. It installs a more certain story in place of a messier and truer one — and leaves a person either braced for the next attack or, without knowing it, already walking toward the same dance with a similar partner.